Microsoft:
Xbox 360 Registers Biggest Black Friday in Its History  —  Xbox 360 consoles and games sell at record levels; outsells PlayStation 3 by three-to-one ratio.  —  Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system kicked off the holidays with record-breaking console sales …

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Optibike's OB1 hybrid electric mountain bike: yours for a cool $13,000 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Author : Paul Bort

Telic didn’t know what to do next. The barn was gone. Not gone with splinters everywhere, hinting that there was once a barn. This was gone like it had been edited out. Nothing left but dirt.

The sun was setting, and the cows were wandering back, the first few lowing in confusion.

It wasn’t a big farm. A few dozen cows, twice as many chickens, and a family of German Shepherds who maintained order. Now it was an even smaller farm, lacking what had been its largest building.

He turned to look at the farmhouse, hoping it was still there, and secretly fearing it would not be. Reassured by its lack of absence, a memory clicked, and he remembered his grandfather telling stories about the war. Everyone called it the “Reality War”, because calling it “World War Five” or “Interplanetary War One” didn’t quite cover it.

Yes, it had affected everyone on Earth, plus the lunar and martian colonies. But it wasn’t a war of tanks and missles. It was a war of technology. Computer virii seemed harmless enough until 2,000 people died when the life support on their dome on Mare Crisium went spastic. Half of them cooked, the other half froze. Once the temperatures reached either 50C or -50C, the system lowered the air pressure to 50 Pascals.

Then came the nanotech. Microscopic, general-purpose assemblers. Powered by low-dose microwaves, they were like a miracle. They worked better as air pressure decreased, so the first big use was going to be expanding our presence on Mars.

200 cubic meters of them were packed onto a rocket. During the count down, an alarm sounded. An access hatch at the top of the payload area was open. At the same time, a TV satellite started transmitting power and instructions to the nanobots. In hours, the entire launch facility was gone.

The war had begun. No one knew (or at least no one said) who was behind each attack. For all the news said, it could be rival internet gangs.

The war ended a few years later with millions of casualties and a newfound respect for computer security experts. The UN unanimously agreed that using software to kill people was just as offensive as using nuclear weapons. There would be no forgiveness for next time.

Despite the difficulty in determining who had launched which attacks throughout the war, this somehow worked. Life got back to normal.

Some people wanted to get away from technology, including Telic’s grandfather. He had been an accountant all his life, and was hired by the US government as part of a team that generated economic forecasts for various attack scenarios. By the time the war was over, he was tired of seeing the damage done, even if it was mostly on paper.

So he bought this farm in Northern California and settled down.

Recalling the history brought clarity, and Telic knew what his next step should be. Slowly walking back to the house, he plugged in and fired up the old hardened laptop his grandfather had left in a box marked “Justin Case”. No one named Justin had come by looking for it, so like many things in disused corners of a farmhouse, it sat there until needed.

The laptop finished booting, and one of the folders on the desktop was named “nano”. After a few minutes of reading, Telic knew a lot more about the war. Which side he was on, and where he was headed with a small package and an old microwave oven.

 

 

uTest, the crowdsourcing QA startup that lets companies rely on external developers to help them identify bugs, has closed a $5 million Series B funding round led by Longworth Venture Partners and Egan-Managed Capital, along with existing investors Mesco Ltd. and Massachusetts Technology Development Corp. The new round brings the startup’s total funding to around $7.8 million after a $2.3 million Series A round last year and some early seed funding.

The site offers customers a web based platform and tools for monitoring testing and QA cycles, which are available to them free of charge (they only pay for the testing completed by the crowdsourced community). Community members are paid depending on the number and type of bugs they find, and the marketprice for bug finds fluctuates depending on the number of bugs left to find, the demand for testers, and other criteria. Since launching in Febuary, the uTest community has grown to 11,000 users.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Layoffs have become the dominant story as we near the end of 2008. After writing about the cold economic realities for companies that have had to cut staff, we wanted to find out what it was like for the people who are now unemployed. Just how bad is it out there for new media folks looking for work? We talked with three people at different stages of their job search to see what, exactly, they’re up against.

Sarah Lane was with Revision3 for a year and a half before being laid off at the end of October. While she did a lot at the company, she was best known as the host of popSiren. I spoke with her just a couple weeks after she had been let go.

“It’s great to be unemployed sit in my pajamas for like five minutes,” Lane said. The problem she encountered is that even though there are companies interested in her, there’s just a tremendous amount of uncertainty in the market right now. “Some people have said ‘If I could guarantee that you had a job in a year I’d hire you,’” said Lane. Problem is, those companies can’t guarantee anything right now.

In addition to the lack of jobs, there’s an increase in competition for those jobs. “It’s not just that I’m out of work, there’s a lot of me out of work,” said Lane. In the meantime, she’s taken some freelance work doing consulting and even some video hosting (she won’t say for whom) that will pay the bills and keep her busy through February.

The geek culture web video series EPIC-FU suffered collateral damage as a result of Revision3’s belt-tightening at the end of October. Smashface Productions, which produced EPIC-FU, itself had to let go of an editor and two producers. Among them was Rick Rey, who emailed me his thoughts on looking for new media work a couple weeks ago.

“After I was laid off as Producer of EPIC-FU, I was fortunate enough to quickly pick up some freelance work - affording me the luxury of not rushing into another full-time gig,” he wrote. “It’s not what I want to be doing career-wise, but it pays the bills and it gives me the freedom to be picky about my next move in the new media space.” Some of that freelance work includes writing for EPIC-FU.

Rey said he was weighing his options, which include working for an established network, or even seeking funding for his own projects, but that the idea of going back to a smaller new media startup wasn’t too enticing. “There’s also a few funded new media houses in the LA area that could use an experienced hand, but given the state of the space I’m not confident a horizontal move like that is the most prudent course of action. I don’t want to end up in the same situation 6 months from now,” wrote Rey.

When we checked back in with Rey, he said he’s still freelancing and doesn’t anticipate any new opportunities until after the holidays. And as you’d expect, the time between now and the end of the year is a slow one for companies — a slowdown John Halecky was trying to beat.

Halecky is in a bit of a different position than either Lane or Rey. He was laid off from his position as director of web content and editorial at ReelzChannel back in July. At the time, he figured he’d take his severance, take July and August off, and the start his job search in earnest in September — which is right when the economy went to pot.

Halecky has been actively looking for work since September, searching job board postings and networking through services like LinkedIn, but everywhere he applies, companies say they are on a hiring freeze. He’ll go in for interviews for jobs posted online only to be told that the position will be filled at some point — the company just doesn’t know when.

Thanksgiving was a big deadline for Halecky in his job search. “No one hires between Thanksgiving and the end of the year,” said Halecky. “Nothing will come about until the fiscal budget for 2009.” But when we spoke to him today, Halecky said that he’s still out looking for his next job.

Though it all sounds dire, the one thing all three people I spoke to had was optimism. No one wanted to just take a job to be employed — all three of them were willing to wait for the right opportunity and believed that opportunity would come.

Are you looking for work? What have you found in your search? Leave a comment and let us know.

You know steampunk has gone mainstream when it seeps into academic institutions... I recently was given a steampunk assignment in one of my sculpture/metalworking classes, so I modded a vintage Kenmore sewing machine with some spare parts from Phoenix's favorite junk shop, Apache Reclamation. The propellers on the drive wheel and thread spool spin when the machine is running.

This piece as well as many, many others will be on display at First Studio in downtown Phoenix this friday, December 5 as part of a steampunk show put on by Arizona State University.

ASU's evening of Steampunk
Friday, December 5, 6-10pm (part of the First Friday art walk)
First Studio
631 N. 1st Ave. Phoenix

Ryan Naraine / Zero Day:
Apple: Mac users should run multiple anti-virus  —  One of Apple's better Mac vs PC ads features a strong message that Windows computers are a magnet for viruses (malware) but Macs are automatically protected.  As PC “ah-choos” his way through an infection, Mac offers a tissue and smugly infers …