Cody Taylor

From their automated phone-support systems to their missed service appointments to their penchant for nickeling and diming us to death, service providers seem have an inexhaustable supply of habits that get our blood pressure up.

One of the oldest building materials known to humankind, bricks have great thermal mass and last almost forever. But laying them takes skill, and complex forms and shapes are hard to design and build.

Facebook has confirmed my earlier suspicion that it has disabled two of the five Holocaust denial groups whose presence has caused much controversy over the past week, following attorney Brian Cuban’s consistent pressure for the groups’ removal.

Those hunting for the latest episodes of Lost, Heroes and Prison Break on Mininova may have already noticed that they are hard to find. With the recently implemented copyright filter, many of the popular TV-show releases and blockbuster movies have been removed and put on a ban list.

Hugh Pickens writes “In a surprise corporate move, after Rackable Systems received bankruptcy court approval on April 30 to close its purchase of SGI, the company announced on Monday that the deal had closed and that the combined company would be called SGI — short for Silicon Graphics International instead of the original Silicon Graphics Inc. The revival of the SGI brand will certainly please people in Silicon Valley with a historical bent, as SGI has been one of the area’s true icons. However, some consider this a curious turn of events, considering that Rackable has come to represent the new guard in the server market, while SGI has struggled for years. Executives hope the name change will help it expand its business overseas, where SGI is a better-known brand. The new SGI will also continue to develop and support the high-performance computing systems that Silicon Graphics was known for, says Rackable’s president and CEO. ‘There should be no disruption to Silicon Graphics customers.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DJRumpy writes in to alert us that Apple’s new OS, Snow Leopard, is apparently nearing completion. “Apple this past weekend distributed a new beta of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard that altered the programming methods used to optimize code for multi-core Macs, telling developers they were the last programming-oriented changes planned ahead of the software’s release. …`Apple is said to have informed recipients of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard build 10A354 that it has simplified the`… APIs for working with Grand Central, a new architecture that makes it easier for developers to take advantage of Macs with multiple processing cores. This technology works by breaking complex tasks into smaller blocks, which are then`… dispatched efficiently to a Mac’s available cores for faster processing.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fireworks exploded last week as the government’s four days of hearings on possible DMCA exemptions wrapped up. Rightsholders “insult us by treating us as potential infringers who can’t be trusted to use a technology any 12-year old can download from the Internet,” said one lawyer.