![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
YouTube CEO Chad Hurley spoke at an address for a startup dinner and spoke about how YouTube started. It’s about 30 mins long and the audio isn’t great but it’s an interesting look into YouTube’s humble beginnings. NewTeeVee.com has notes that help detail some of the salient points if you can’t understand some of the audio.
We’ve already talked about Diablo 3 here.
Game release list for week of 6/29 @ Shacknews
Space Siege for PC preview @ GameSpy
Civilization IV: Colonization for PC preview @ Gamespot
Lord of the Rings Conquest for PS3 preview @ CVG
Weekly review of patches and demos @ Gaming Today
Zappos.com, an online retailer known for shoes, has finished installing an army of autonomous orange robots to help fill orders more quickly. The Kiva Mobile Fulfillment System will bring the ordered items to workers, rather than having the workers run around the floor with carts. I’d love to see a video of these things at work.
Retail items are kept in crates or moveable shelves, which Kiva calls pods, instead of on conventional warehouse shelves. Once you place your order, a robot is notified by a Kiva server over a Wi-Fi network. It then autonomously drives around the warehouse, picking up the pods containing your items and stacking them as part of its load.
SecureMac reports that a Trojan horse dubbed “AppleScript.THT” has been seen at malware-distribution sites. This virus takes advantage of a vulnerability in Tiger’s and Leopard’s Remote Management component, ARDAgent.
Like any Trojan horse, AppleScript.THT does not spread on its own but relies on user actions, such as downloading and launching, to infect a machine. Trojans can also be silently introduced on a computer if it's injected after a successful attack using another vulnerability, such as a browser bug.
In case you didn’t have enough Star Wars stuff in your computer area, here’s a couple more. Akihabara News has a hands-on demo video with the Darth Vader USB hub that lights up, breathes, and moves its head when you have a device plugged in. They also have some pics of the R2D2 USB hub.
Cooling
Thermalright True Black 120 CPU cooler @ OCIA
Zerotherm Zen FZ120 CPU cooler @ Bjorn3D
Memory
Kingston HyperX DDR3 PC3-13000/14400 2GB kits @ VR-Zone
G.SKILL DDR2 PC2-8800 4GB kit @ 3GM
Power Supplies
Zalman ZM850-HP and ZM1000-HP @ AnandTech
Kingwin ABT-1000MA1S @ Virtual-Hideout
Motherboards
MSI P7N2 Diamond 790i @ TweakTown
Gigabyte GA-EP31-DS3L @ Hardware Secrets
Misc.
NVIDIA’s PhysX: performance & status report @ TechGage
HighPoint RocketRAID 3120 PCI-E SATA RAID controller @ ExtremeTech
And for those of you in California who need a hands-free device due to the new law on 7/1:
Bluetooth hands-free device roundup @ MaximumPC
Favorite Bluetooth headsets @ PCMagazine
Just a week after Firefox 3.0’s final release, Mozilla is already making plans for the first fast-track update, with much shorter development timelines. According to a draft schedule discussed on Tuesday, the 3.1 developer preview (alpha) will be ready by July and move to beta in August. Final code delivery would take place in Q4 08 or Q1 09.
In the meeting notes published online Tuesday, Mozilla listed some of the improvements it hopes to slot into Firefox 3.1, including changes to the revamped bookmarking that debuted in 3.0 and modifications to the new amped-up location bar. Several of the proposed changes, however, rely on improvements to the Gecko engine that underpins Firefox, as well as other applications…
I’ve heard of people grinding all sorts of things down, including hard drives. This is the first I’ve heard of taking a dead hard drive and turning it into a functional tool. Maybe you can take your new HDD grinder and grind down other hard drives you have laying around. It’ll be techno-cannibalism at its finest! 
Odds are you have a pile of dead hard drives lying around. Utilizing the RPM of the hard drive platter, you can create a grinder or even a sander out of a bad drive. Basically, crack it open, glue on a sanding disc (or grinding disc) , and plug it in.
A 19-year-old hacker, Jason Michael Milmont, has agreed to plead guilty in a plea agreement with federal prosecutors in Los Angeles. He is accused of being the mastermind behind a 15,000-computer-strong botnet that was used to hack the personal data from thousands of victims. A federal cybercrime official called this the nation’s first botnet attack that used P2P software as the infection point.
According to the plea agreement, the [Nugache] worm was installed in various ways. The first incarnation of infections came from a website Milmont created that offered free installation of Limewire, the popular peer-to-peer file sharing program. He embedded that software downloads with his malware.
Microsoft has a project codenamed “Fiji,” which is rumored to be the next version of Windows Media Center. The Fiji government has taken offense to this codename, thinking that MS plans to profit off their country’s name. The Fijian attorney-general fired off a letter to MS to seek an “amicable resolution.”
Attorney General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum told Fijilive his country wants an amicable resolution about the use of the name for Microsoft's commercial gain.
A school in Japan is using the Nintendo DS as a tool to help students learn and improve their retention in English instruction. The one-year trial period, which began in May, is showing encouraging results as students and teachers report better concentration and having fun with normally mundane skills such as spelling. In 2000, Japan launched reforms to foster a more relaxed learning environment and reduced learning by rote which has enabled creative programs such as this one to be possible.
But the school's vice principal says stylus lines are clear. "No unessential item is allowed at school," said Tatsumi, adding playing cards and mobile phones to those off-limits. "When English class ends, students cannot play DS games outside and all consoles and software are collected."
Sony’s Computer Entertainment president Kazuo Hirai announced that they will expand the abilities of the PlayStation 3 by launching “Life with PlayStation,” a news and weather service, and a media download service for movies, music, and TV programs. Sony has always maintained that the PS3 is more than a game console and this appears to be another step in the “entertainment hub” direction.
[Analyst Michael] Gartenberg described this approach as resembling a Trojan horse, because people are currently buying the consoles to play games, not to watch movies or news. Even once a console is in the house, he noted, normal behavior patterns "are not to flip on the PlayStation to check the weather."
