[H]ard|OCP

One Third of UK Office Workers Surf Porn at Work, Survey Finds

Wow, you guys over the pond in the UK are ballsy when it comes to your work PC, if the findings in this PC Advisor article are any indicator. Ok, we’ve all done the “reply to all” mistake at least once in our professional careers but a full 1/3 of those surveyed admit to watching porn on their work PC. :eek:

"A real crossover in the digital realm between personal and professional lives means staff are increasingly relaxed in their use of workplace email and internet," said David Stanley, UK managing director at Proofpoint.

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Windows SP Blocker Expires Soon

Quick heads up for the sysadmins out there. Microsoft’s Windows Service Pack Blocker Toolkit is going to expire for Vista SP1 and XP SP3 soon. Stop surfing the FS/FT forum and finish your compatibility testing or figure out another way to stop the service packs.

This code temporarily prevents the installation of a service pack through Windows Update, typically for one year after general availability of the service pack. The expiration date for the Service Pack Blocker Tool for Windows Vista SP1 isApril 28, 2009; for Windows XP SP3 the tool expires May 19, 2009.

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Microhoo – An Alternate History Tale of the Microsoft-Yahoo Merger

Can you believe it’s already been a year on Sunday Feb. 1 since Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told the world that MS wanted to buy Yahoo? CNET had some fun gazing through the looking glass of alternate history and came up with a chain of events that are interesting, especially if you’re a “what if?” kind of person like I am.

But what if Yang had gotten up on the other side of the bed one day a year ago and led his company to accept the offer? It's impossible to know what would have happened, of course. ...So let's suppose that Yahoo agreed to Microsoft's acquisition offer after bargaining Microsoft up a notch on the price tag to, say, $31 per share from the original $29.

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Breaking Down the Cost to Print and Deliver the NYT

SAI crunched the Q3 2008 numbers for the New York Times and came up with some startling discoveries. Follow the jump for their breakdown. That’s some expensive fish wrap!

Not that it's anything we think the New York Times Company should do, but we thought it was worth pointing out that it costs the Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead.

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Windows 7 Beta Taking Unusual Development Route

ComputerWorld reports that Microsoft is taking an unusual (for them) path in bringing Windows 7 to the masses. They’re moving straight from the single beta release that was made available in January to a release candidate. Is this acceleration of the development process another admission to Vista’s shortcomings or a preview of the more agile schedule MS would like to use?

Microsoft usually runs its operating systems through multiple betas and multiple release candidates. It delivered two betas and two release candidates for Windows Vista, for example, during that operating system's trouble-plagued development. But Microsoft has been adamant about speeding up the development process.

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[H]ardware Roundup

Cases

Antec Skeleton @ Xbit

Silverstone Raven RV01 @ 3GM

Lian Li TYR PC-X500 @ TechReport

Misc.

DirectX 11 preview @ Anandtech

NVIDIA PhysX software updated @ Official Site

Power Supply

Tagan TG680-U33II SuperRock 680W @ B3D

Enermax Liberty ECO 500W @ HardwareSecrets

Storage

Thecus N4100PRO NAS server @ LegitReviews

Seagate 7200.11 woes editorial @ VH

Video Game Link in Shooting Dismissed by Police Investigators

The suspect in a shooting murder in Oregon was linked to playing “violent video games” but the detectives investigating the case aren’t focusing on it as a factor. In a comedic turn of events, good ol’ Jack Thompson even tries to horn in on the case. Dude just won’t quit even after being disbarred.

The Oregonian prompted controversy on Monday, January 26, when it reported that "one of the things that bought Ayala joy" was playing violent videogames. Slater said a copy of the videogame Grand Theft Auto III was found at Ayala's apartment, but said police were not pursuing a link between videogames and the shooting. "There were a lot of videogames in the apartment," said Slater. "Of a wide variety of the kind you might find in any 24-year-old's apartment."

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Intel Cancels Havendale and Auburndale Fusion Processors

This blogger reports that Intel has canceled the 45nm dual-core Fusion processors codenamed Auburndale and Havendale. Is this the end of the Fusion GPU/CPU concept? Hardly.

Intel is going to replace Auburndale/Havendale with their 32nm die-shrink, known as Arandale. Arandale was originally supposed to debut for Back to School season 2010, alongside 32nm quad-core and sexa-core Westmere processors (Core i7 die-shrinks). But now, Arandale core has been brought forward by six months to Q1′2010.

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Micromotors Can Swim in Bloodstream, Assist Surgeons

Researchers in Australia are working on a “micromotor” that’s only 250 micrometers wide, which is about 2.5 times the width of a human hair. They hope to mount sensors and cameras on the tiny flagellating device to assist in delicate and minimally-invasive surgical procedures. Neato.

"Serious damage during minimally invasive surgery is however not always avoidable and surgeons are often limited by the width of a catheter tube for example, which in serious cases, can fatally puncture narrow arteries," Professor Friend said.

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Fifteen Minutes of Infamy: Google’s Epic Fail

While you were sleeping in this morning, Google decided to break the internet for about 15 minutes. TechCrunch (along with most other blogs that are active this morning) has screencaps that show how every site was flagged as malware in the search engine. Whoops!

EDIT: Here's the official response from the Search Engine VP. I quoted a bit of it below. You can carry on with your digital lives, netizens.

We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs.

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BART Finalizes 20-Year WiFi Agreement

If you have access to the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) in CA, here’s another reason why you should take the train instead of drive. BART has finalized an agreement with WiFi Rail to install and provide WiFi connectivity on all BART commuter trains. Now you can cut out early and stay connected while commuting home to San Jose, Mr. 2-hour-train-ride.

Service on BART is scheduled to begin on selected segments during 2009. Four downtown San Francisco stations and some segments of the tunnels are already fully functional, and have been providing premium service free to subscribers for the past year… The WiFi Rail deployment in the BART system will become the largest high bandwidth mobile Internet LAN in the United States. Completion of network construction is planned for the end of 2010.

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Yahoo Briefcase to Shut Down March 30

Remember Yahoo’s Briefcase online storage service? Well, if you put some stuff there back in the days of yore, you’ll want to go retrieve it because the service is shutting down on 3/30. After that day, all accounts will be closed and the files deleted. Hey, 30 MB was a big deal 10 years ago.

Yahoo is discontinuing Briefcase because users outgrew it, Yahoo said in a statement. Other services, such as Yahoo Mail and Flickr, offer far greater storage capacity, and the use of Briefcase has fallen in recent years, the company said.

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