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Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
You probably saw Google’s Halloween logo today:
But you may not have noticed that Google made another change for Halloween. Check out Google’s robots.txt file today:
That’s right. Zombies are disallowed from accessing /brains on Google today. You can never be too safe! 
Hat-tip to Google Blogoscoped spotting it first and to Search Engine Land for a round-up of Halloween logos.
The latest Futurama movie, Bender’s Game, is released in a few days and as usual it’s already on BitTorrent. However, Matt Groening has included a nice extra on the DVD - a pretty amusing parody on one of the classic anti-piracy messages.
Anyone who watched The Simpsons Movie will have noticed Bart in the intro chalking his famous blackboard with the words “I will not illegally download this movie”. Matt Groening seems to appreciate the comedy anti-piracy message as his latest movie, ‘Futurama: Bender’s Game‘, also includes some mockery of file-sharers or, on closer inspection, possibly some encouragement. Whatever the intention, it is pretty funny.
The movie, the third in the Futurama series and due for release in a few days time, has already leaked to BitTorrent. This is nothing new, but hidden away in the DVD extras is a parody of the infamous movie industry anti-piracy ad, which was previously parodied by the IT Crowd.
Entitled ‘Downloading Often Is Terrible’ or D.O. I.T for short, the animated advert follows the familiar “You wouldn’t steal…” structure, but with more unusual content. Whatever the ad suggests that Bender wouldn’t steal or do, is followed up by Bender doing just that, starting with “You wouldn’t steal a spaceship”, which of course, Bender would, along with lots of other amusing things.
Although Bender is stealing physical objects in his 2D animated world, lots of people disagree with the use of the word ’steal’ to describe the act of copyright infringement. Australian lawyer Brendan Scott certainly doesn’t believe it. When someone downloads movies or music illegally, they make a copy, he argues. The original is still there, and legally speaking nothing is stolen. Scott concludes: “To use the infringement-as-stealing meme demonstrates something of a lack of respect for language and consequently a lack of respect for the people to whom you are speaking.”
But maybe Bender himself provides the truth. The copyright lobbies often paint the fight against piracy as a “matter of life and death” so it seems fitting to utilize the phrase to illustrate the chasm between stealing and copying. Having watched the clip and noted the final stolen item produced from Bender’s chest, I immediately thought about where that came from, the state of the gentleman in question, and where I could find him for a chat.
Because if anyone in the world knows the difference between copying and stealing, it’s got to be him. Or Lucy Liu’s milliner. Enjoy the clip.
If you go back 3 months on YouTube, it appears that even this parody got leaked ahead of time. Cammed too, you couldn’t make it up.
Post from: TorrentFreak
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Dharmendra S. Modha quotes Google co-founder Larry Page saying that he evaluates projects on a simple binary metric: “whether, if successful, it can change the world?”
[Thanks Siggi!]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Larry Page On Evaluating Projects | Comments]
You may not know it, but you probably have an OpenID. If you have a Yahoo account, you have an OpenID. If you have a Windows Live account, you will soon have an OpenID. And today, if you have a Google e-mail account, you can also start using your Gmail address as an OpenID.
By joining the OpenID movement, Google completes the trifecta and adds all of its Gmail users to the hundreds of millions of Yahoo and Windows Live accounts that can also be used as a single login for any Website that accepts OpenID. While Google is more than happy to become an issuer of OpenIDs, what is not so clear is whether it will accept other OpenIDs for people who want to sign up for Google services.
Google appears to be an OpenID “provider,” not a “relying party.” In other words, you cannot sign into Google with your Yahoo account. But this still helps the OpenID movement as a whole because it gives smaller sites more incentive to join as “relying parties.” Among the first sites to accept Gmail accounts for sign in are Zoho and Plaxo.
AOL and MySpace are expected to jump aboard as OpenID providers as well. The only big holdout appears to be Facebook, which has its own competing Facebook Connect program. But even Facebook might eventually join the OpenID fold. (Its partners seem slightly less than enthusiastic about deploying Facebook Connect).
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CTL is a flexible distributed control dispatching framework that enables you to break management processes into reusable control modules and execute them in distributed fashion over the network.
From their website:
CTL is a flexible distributed control dispatching framework that enables you to break management processes into reusable control modules and execute them in distributed fashion over the network.
What does CTL do?
CTL helps you leverage your current scripts and tools to easily automate any kind of distributed systems management or application provisioning task. Its good for simplifiying large-scale scripting efforts or as another tool in your toolbox that helps you speed through your daily mix of ad-hoc administration tasks.
What are CTL's features?
CTL has many features, but the general highlights are:
* Execute sophisticated procedures in distributed environments - Aren't you tired of writing and then endlessly modifying scripts that loop over nodes and invoke remote actions? CTL dispatches actions to remote controllers with network transparency (over SSH), parallelism, and error handling already built in.
* Comes with pre-built utilities - CTL comes with pre-built utilities so you don't have to script actions like file distribution or process and port checking.
* Define your own automation using the tools/languages you already know - New controller modules are defined in XML and your scripting can be done in multiple scripting languages (
It's powerful text process features and amazing library support made it an early favorite language choice for website designers. Other languages like PHP, Java, and .Net have since become more popular, but it still is favorite of many.
http://www.perl.com/">
It's powerful text process features and amazing library support made it an early favorite language choice for website designers. Other languages like PHP, Java, and .Net have since become more popular, but it still is favorite of many.
http://www.perl.com/">Perl
, Python, etc.), *nix shell, Windows batch, and/or Ant.Java is very popular on the server side because it is free, relatively high performing. has a large number of useful libraries, and great development tools. Websites build using Java generally use application servers and are accessed using servelets.
http://www.java.com/en/">
Java is very popular on the server side because it is free, relatively high performing. has a large number of useful libraries, and great development tools. Websites build using Java generally use application servers and are accessed using servelets.
http://www.java.com/en/">Java
-based, works on *nix and Windows.
Google is adding more sidebar options to Gmail. Now you can add gadgets on the side that show your appointments from Google Calendar and your last five documents in Google Docs. In the calendar gadget, you can see any calendar you subscribe to and add events directly from Gmail. The Docs gadget gives you a few different view options (only spreadsheets, only presentations, or only documents previously opened by you).
Gmail Labs is also releasing another experimental option that lets you cut and paste the URL of any Google gadget and turns it into a sidebar item. So if you don’t like iGoogle’s new wider look, you can squeeze those gadgets into the sidebar of Gmail.
I personally would prefer to have them in Gmail (because I am constantly in that app), but with the option of expanding them into more screen real estate when necessary.
These gadgets are new entry points into Google’s other apps. I’d expect to see more cross-fertilization like this in the future as Google finds new ways to tie its apps together in deeper and more intuitive ways.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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November 03, 2008 05:00 PM
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