New tool filters your drunken, late-night emails [Great Moments In Pr] (1)
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Mail Goggles is a Google-built version of a feature email users have joked about for decades: It makes you stop, think and pass a sobriety test before sending messages after a certain hour or on weekends. The name is a pun on Beer Goggles — but it gets the logic backwards. Somebody must have been drunk. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch worries Mail Goggles is a hoax — fair enough, since Google developer Jon Perlow didn't ...
McCain eyes Whitman, Chambers for Treasury [Politics] (1)
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If John McCain gets into the White House, he probably won't ask Treasury secretary Henry Paulson to stay. "I think it would be someone that Americans would recognize that would inspire trust and confidence. There's people like John Chambers, there's people like Meg Whitman, there's people like Warren Buffett," McCain told Reuters. Two of those three might consider the job a step up. (Photos by AP/Dharapak, AP/Paul Sakuma)
Obviously fake Tina Fey Twitter account annoys Internet [We Read Twitter So You Don't Have To] (1)
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This can't be real, can it? Since last week, a sporadically updated Tina Fey account on Twitter has seen more action, with more-frequent messages emanating from the supposed 30 Rock star and Saturday Night Live veteran. But whoever's updating it is far from clever enough to imitate Tina Fey. Unless this is actually Fey doing a bad impression of herself, thereby demonstrating how moronic most Twitter's users seem in the 140-character format the microblogging service ...
eBay buys Bill Me Later, lays off 1,000-plus employees [Layoffs] (1)
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News reports confirm the rumors we heard over the weekend about eBay's layoffs. Details are scant, but our sources say some departments are losing as much as 22 percent of their staffing. Development managers have been told to expect to lose 1,700 "train seats" next year. That's programmer lingo for weeks of developers' time; one train seat is three weeks. Do the math: That means at least 100 programmers are losing their jobs in the ...
Michael Arrington wants you to read about MySpace Music, not his love life [Conflicts Of Interest] (1)
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If you didn't believe our report that TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington is in bed with MySpace's top flack, Dani Dudeck, read the obsessive startup blogger's latest story on MySpace Music, which claims that MySpace has "streamed" 1 billion songs. Considering that most MySpace profiles are set to start playing a song, whether you like it or not, as soon as you visit them, that's not that impressive. Arrington leads his story by comparing MySpace streams ...
Is Ask.com feeling lucky? [Search] (1)
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Ask.com's latest revamp, unveiled by CEO Jim Safka to the New York Times, attempts to dive deeper into the Web, pulling "structured data," a fashionable buzzword, from sources like TV listings and health databases. Give Barry Diller's scrappy search engine, owned by his IAC conglomerate, this much: When at first it doesn't succeed, it tries, tries, tries again. But you can't blame the market, or users, for finding all this trying, well, trying. Safka's example ...
eBay layoffs coming Monday? [Rumormonger] (4)
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2 days, 22 hours
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I've long wondered why a largely-automated site like eBay needs to employ 15,000 people. Soon it might not. In September, research firm Wedge Partners said eBay needed to cut 10 percent of its workforce. Now an employee tipster tells us such "big deep cuts" may come as early as Monday. Our unverified source reports that "marketing and product" and " all of the horizontal support is at risk." If the axe doesn't drop Monday, it ...
Marissa Mayer Chrome-plates the Nasdaq [Google Chrome] (2)
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If you don't believe Google should buy a few 30-second TV spots to hawk its Chrome browser, watch Google's VP of Search Products and User Experience try to explain Chrome to the semitechnical viewers at CNBC. The whole thing falls apart into a meandering talk about faster JavaScript rendering, overlaid with a chart of Google's waffling stock price — the real reason Mayer is on CNBC. I doubt investors changed their GOOG valuations based on ...
Ad targeting shoots CNN inside foreclosure article [Meltdowns] (2)
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Matching advertisement to the contents of a website is financial nirvana, right? Wrong. Computers keep getting the ads wrong, with results that would be hilarious were they not so offensive. Yes, an article about foreclosures might be read eagerly by people who want to refinance their mortgage. But a mortgage ad next to a story about a woman who shot herself while being dragged out of her foreclosed home by sheriffs' deputies? Click the image ...
Facebook founder's goodbye email hints at business-focused startup [Dustin Moskovitz] (2)
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4 days, 4 hours
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When he announced his cofounder and college roommate Dustin Moskovitz's departure from Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn't say what he would be up to. But in a separate email leaked to Valleywag, Moskovitz hints at his plan: With fellow engineer Justin Rosenstein, who's also leaving the company, he hopes to create tools like the ones he built at Facebook to run its internal operations, and market them to all sorts of companies. Here's his note ...
Death of the database [100-word Version] (8)
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4 days, 4 hours
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PBS pundit Robert X. Cringely says he realized at last week's MIT Technology Review conference that cloud computing means, in short, "No database." Cringely sees it as the end of Oracle's dominance of information technology. I expect Oracle Cloud any day now. Here's a summary of Cringely's long article, plus the joke about Ellison's sex life, minus Cringely's references to himself: Thanks in part to Larry Ellison's hard work and rapacious libido, databases are to ...
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Nate said:
Video killed the radio star - concurrent web applications killed the relational atabase?
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aaron said:
What does Bob think we store shit on in the cloud!?!?!? Dumbass.
Armored car robber uses Craiglist to create a decoy [Craigslist] (8)
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More than a dozen workers seeking $28.50 an hour for a job advertised on Craiglist showed up at a designated site in Monroe, Washington. Most wore, as requested, a "yellow vest, safety goggles, a respirator mask… and, if possible, a blue shirt." They didn't realize they were set up as decoys to confuse police, by a similarly dressed robber who pepper-sprayed an armored car guard at a nearby bank. The robber grabbed a bag of ...
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Justin said:
Wow. Just...Wow.
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ReducedHackers said:
In later news Hollywood execs seek the criminal in order to purchase the rights to use this plan in the next Harrison Ford movie.
Why we couldn't stop reading Melissa Gira Grant [Housekeeping] (1)
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4 days, 7 hours
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Go ahead, call Melissa Gira Grant a "hooker." From the first, she hooked Valleywag readers with her provocative insights into how sex, money, and technology collided. We first hired her to write a column on the sex trade, and she became a sought-after expert when the Eliot Spitzer-Ashley Dupré scandal exploded on the Web. But her talents soon overflowed the confines of that narrow subject. What's next for Melissa? She's in the market for a ...
Voting machine report buried by voting machine maker [Hack The Vote] (2)
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4 days, 8 hours
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Princeton professor Andrew Appel performed a source-code analysis of Sequoia Voting Systems' AVC Advantage e-voting machines, and wrote up a report on their security and accuracy. Now, he says, a New Jersey Superior Court judge has ordered him not to release his report or talk about it. Appel blogs that "the attorney for Sequoia grossly mischaracterized our report," but he won't spell out how. Well, at least we know it wasn't good news. (Photo by ...
Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, star engineer quit [Exits] (3)
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CEO Mark Zuckerberg has just informed Facebook's staff that his long-restive cofounder, Dustin Moskovitz, is leaving the company. Adding to the blow: Moskovitz, left, is taking with him Justin Rosenstein, right, a top engineer who was one of the first employees Facebook poached from Google as it began its tumultuous rise in 2007. The two are starting a new company together. Rosenstein wrote a much-circulated email to friends explaining why he'd left Google, with the ...
Valleywag cuts 60 percent of staff [Layoffs] (14)
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4 days, 11 hours
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We would never sugarcoat someone else's layoffs. Why ours? Gawker Media, our publisher, has told me to cut Valleywag's costs, in anticipation of an advertising recession. In response, I have laid off associate editors Nicholas Carlson and Jackson West and reporter Melissa Gira Grant. They have all been doing excellent work, breaking stories and needling Silicon Valley. But our ultimate boss, Nick Denton, has decided he can't afford them. Paul Boutin and I will continue ...
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C Yohman said:
Don't worry Muerl. Join me in force, as we bailout America. Through a bipartisan effort, we can save the media, fascists, socialists, Joe Six Pack, Charlie College Elite. Yes can serve America.
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Moah said:
wow. They are so brutally honest about everything. Not sure if mentioning who is laid off is a bit too much.
Hong Kong's unlocked iPhones explained [Apple Users Held Hostage] (2)
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"Hong Kong is now the one and only country in the world where you can buy an unlocked contract-free iPhone directly from the online Apple Store," writes John Gruber, aka Daring Fireball. He goes on to answer my plea for an explanation of Apple's motives. You can read his full-length post, or my 100-word edit: Keep in mind that there is a difference between unlocked and contract-free. Countries where you can buy iPhone 3Gs both ...
Superinvestor Ron Conway suffers confidence crisis [Venture Capital] (2)
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Venture capitalists' "confidence" is at its lowest level since the University of San Francisco began a survey of startup investors in 2004. Sharing the pessimism, angel investor Ron Conway told Silicon Alley Insider that, given current economic conditions, wantrepreneurs should "keep their day job." If they can't find enough funding to get a year's worth of cash in the bank " then they’re not meant to start that company right now," says Conway. "If you ...
Apple stock has heart attack [Steve Jobs] (4)
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Why did Apple shares crater and then rebound this morning? A false report, posted on CNN, that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had a heart attack. Apple PR chief Katie Cotton has denied it. Why that's not as reassuring as it should be: Cotton shredded her credibility on Jobs's health when she tried to spin a serious illness as a "common bug" earlier this year.
