TommyLog

A few weeks ago, when we had our story about Christmas lights causing problems with broadband connections, apparently Alek Komarnitsky stopped by here at Techdirt to tell everyone in the comments that he had set up his 17,000 Christmas lights so they could be turned on and off via the web. I had forgotten about this until earlier this morning when a friend instant messaged me to tell me he’s become addicted to the site and had been turning the lights on and off regularly. Well, it turns out my friend was taken in by a practical joke. The lights were real but the web-cam and web-based control were a hoax that’s now getting a bit of press attention. What’s interesting, though, is that from the details it sounds like the hoax was more technically complicated than actually setting up a system to really do what he claimed it would do. Still, it’s somewhat amazing that no one figured it out until now.

Originally from Techdirt

There are plenty of stories going around from this past weekend about the astounding number of flights canceled due to computer and staffing problems. While US Air got plenty of headlines for their staffing issues (baggage handlers calling in sick at record rates leading to planes that were simply filled with excess lost baggage), the more interesting story appears to be Delta’s subsidiary Comair. Lots of articles are talking about the 1,100 flights on Christmas day due to their computer system getting knocked out, but there’s very little info on the actual cause of the problem. There’s just the fact that no one can explain why there was no backup system, and that the computer crash was caused by the system being overwhelmed after weather problems required many flights to be canceled and crew to be reassigned. In other words, a lot of users were trying to figure out how to reassign flight crews to different flights, and all that activity made the system lie down and go to sleep. You would think that anyone building systems this important would have backups in place and build things in a way that would make them unlikely to crash, but this is hardly the first time things of this nature have happened.

Originally from Techdirt

This may not be worth the trouble.

If you do it, you’re gonna have to answer to the Coca Cola Company.

Originally from //plasticbugs.com”>plastic bugs

Structured Solutions II (what happened to the Structured Solutions I?) is pitching some sort of human-powered snow
removal contraption called the Whovel that is supposed to make it easier and less heart-attacky to shovel snow off of
your driveway or sidewalk. Nice, but we’ll only be properly impressed once someone’s hooked one of these up to a
weatherized Segway.

[Via Core77]

Originally posted by Peter Rojas from Engadget

Looks like Apple’s big squeeze (that’d be IBM, who makes their chips) wants to start enabling virtualization on
their processor line, which would, in turn, allow multiple simultaneous OSes to be run on a single computer. Now, don’t
get your panties in a wad; they still all have to be PowerPC compatible OSes (i.e. OSX, YellowDog Linux, etc.) but it’s
at least a little reassuring to know that Apple intends to compete with those pesky x86 chipmakers on a number of
levels in 2005. No comments yet made aboutthe dual-core stuff, though.

Originally posted by Ryan Block from Engadget