Residents in the area are advised to unplug all sensitive electronic equipment in case the power-lines snap.

A PG&E contractor has stated that the powerlines downed around 1300 Monument Blvd are the property of a phone company (did not mention which) and that the cable support was improperly installed.

Here are some pictures and a video:

To summarize what the video says, Battle.net will be just like steam, with a friends list and invites. Your achievements will be new avatar pictures, how cool!!!! (not. unless you like pokemans). And you’ll pretty much need to be online, even if you are playing single player; the reasoning for this is that your stats and saved games will be stored with battle.net, that you’ll be able to talk with your firendslist, and that whatever points you earn will go toward a new avatar (basically a 128×128 gif).

In the past, Battle.net was presented as a multiplayer option off to the side, off of the main menu of Blizzard Entertainment titles. That is all changing. With the new Battle.net experience, the service and the game are now interwoven into one experience. Whether you are in single-player or multiplayer StarCraft II, you are always connected, and enjoy a bevy of new and enhanced functionality.

Battle.net and StarCraft II are designed to be seamlessly connected. That means even if you’re playing solo you will still view the latest news, receive game and content updates, and be able to see your friends’ status and chat with them. But this new interconnectivity between the game and the service goes even deeper than that. Now, each player will create a StarCraft II Battle.net character. This character serves as your single persistent identity across the service. Everything you do in the game — win/loss record, achievements, unlockable rewards, friends list, and more — will be saved to your character profile for you and your friends to see. Even your save game progress in the campaign can be synched to Battle.net. Say you upgrade your computer and re-install the game; once you connect to Battle.net, you can continue the campaign right where you left off. This is especially useful if you play on more than one computer, because all your data will be carried over for you via Battle.net.

Protocol: XMPP

Username: Your Facebook Vanity Name
Domain: chat.facebook.com
Jabber ID: vanityname@chat.facebook.com
Password: <Facebook password>

Connect port: 5222
Connect server: chat.facebook.com
Use SSL/TLS: no
Allow Plaintext Authentication: no

So if you are setting it up for Pidgin, your settings should look something like this:

If you are still having trouble, check out the official support page.

Tickets are avaiable at $50, and $60 walk-in. You can volunteer or buy a ticket.

We’ll be covering the event live, and keeping an extra eye out for anyone trying to sniff our packets. If anyone wants to join us, drop a line below.

MICROSOFT.WINDOWS.7.POST-RTM.7700.X64.RETAIL.ENGLISH.DVD-WZT

FILE: 7700.0.100122-1900_x64fre_client_en-us-GRMCXFRE_EN_DVD.iso

SIZE: 3,231,166,464 byte

SHA1: C0CB719B781D49B39D8CC93A27F990A366B8E4C7

MD5: EBEB8AEC73339536564D26DB584A9474

CRC: B3F323D6

On January 30th a supposed leaked Microsoft roadmap made its way to the internet suggesting that Windows 2008 is geared for a 2011 launch.

Neowin’s Tom Warren has speculated that the jump from 7600 to 7700 may suggest some kind of early milestone towards the Windows 8 alpha and beta stage.

UPDATE 1/7/2010: It appears as though Technorati is inching forth, but the backlog which they are developing far outweighs the amount of blogs being approved.

UPDATE 1/7/2010: An employee, Phillip Winn, who is a senior web developer has taken up a PR stance and resumed replying to the thread. It appears as though Technorati is inching forth, but the backlog which they are developing far outweighs the amount of blogs being approved.

Technorati has been an authorative and integral part of the blogosphere, positioning itself as a benchmark and indexed search engine for blogs in the start of the Web 2.0 boom. This was then, however, and how fast things change…

In October to November of 2009 a peculiar problem arose, the real-time search engine of Technorati was no longer indexing new blogs. According to some wizardly mathemagic a new blog is created every second and Technorati, as a search engine, is not indexing any of the 26,000,000+ new blogs which were created in the past 2+ months, according to math.

But Technorati’s inactivity does not end here, a brief look over Get Satisfaction, Technorati’s official support forum, shows an utter lack of support resolution. Technorati employees are no longer offering support or resolutions. A thread, created by an employee in early November, claims that Technorati is hard at work “drastically speed[ing] up the blog claim review process”, DW provides further analysis. Fair enough; however, after my detective analysis I noticed that the last post from both employees comes on November 25th, the one year anniversary of 2008 Technorati layoffs, where their high performers were replaced by lower paid and lower skilled workers. No posts were made after the 25th.

A review of their official blog quickly sets off new alarms, the last update was on 10/21/09, something about manually sifting out all the Acai berry and make money at home crap from their entire index while working on a brand new clean data set. Prior to this date the format seems to be two posts per month, after this date there are no posts.

Lets leave their domain for a second, and look at Technorati from a 3rd perspective…

Traffic Trends.

Checking Google Trends shows an obvious decline, with some empty blocks. I downloaded the CVS and removed Jun 29, 2008 to Feb 15, 2009 as it would upset the graph. I put the data into a scatterplot and added a trend line, which forecasts Technorati’s coming demise.

Now, if we move from Google’s trendlines and check out Alexa’s more detailed stats (alexa only tracks users who have the Alexa tracking cookie, afaik). Technorati’s search volume, visitor count, and total reach is dropping faster than the 911 stock market.

So what does all this mean?

Technorati is on life-support, its pre-built scripts and algorithms are able to pull content from other sites and generate a dynamic page without human input. Search engines supposedly place higher value on websites listed on Technorati, which is terrible. Technology strategists at Tequinox have written Technorati an open letter warning of impending doom if they choose to continue these fraudulent lending business practices.

If you want to take action, DIGG THIS STORY, the more people see it the more pressure there is on Technorati to take action.

I will go ahead and point to the obvious; if you want an unclogged network do not force iPhone users to stick with it. You can’t have two things at once, pick priorities; though it seems AT&T intends to nibble what it cannot eat, and keep it on a 2 year contract of sub-par service and coverage.

Operation Chokehold, purpose and reasoning: Proposed by Dan Lyons Operation Chokehold will attempt to take down, or at least cripple, the AT&T data network. Keep in mind, voice services will remain operational, so the 70-something percent of cell phone users AT&T owns will remain able to make calls.

On Friday, December 18, at noon Pacific time (GTM -8), we will attempt to overwhelm the AT&T data network and bring it to its knees. The goal is to have every smartphone user turn on a data intensive app and run that app for one solid hour. Send the message to AT&T that we are sick of their substandard network and sick of their abusive comments. The idea is we’ll create a digital flash mob. We’re calling it in Operation Chokehold. Join us and speak truth to power!

Some things to keep in mind:

• Remember to turn OFF your Wi-Fi during that hour. There would be NO point browsing YouTube in the office or home and using your Wi-Fi without knowing.
• If you have enough upstream bandwidth at home try using Orb or AirVideo or a similar app to stream a movie for an hour. If not, try MediaFly which will let you download mostly the same video podcasts as your iTunes app without a 10mb limit.

More sources of discussion on the subject may be found at neowin, fakestevejobs, Gizmodo. I will keep this page updated with latest developments.

UPDATE:

• 12/18/09): Patch Released:

Apparently missing the point, or facing an improbable time frame, pandemic has released the patch which still requires it to run under a single core…

If you are using Windows 7 you have to do this:

1.) Boot the game.
2.) Wait for the main menu to load, then press Ctrl-Alt-Delete.
3.) Select Start Task Manager.
4.) If the game is visible, press Alt-Tab, otherwise continue to the next step.
5.) Inside the Task Manager, go to the Processes tab.
6.) Find Saboteur.exe, right-click it, and select Set Affinity…
7.) De-select CPU 2 and CPU 3.
8.) Click OK.

In any case, grab the patch here, be sure to get the latest latest ATI drivers here,

• (12/11/09): Real patch is now in internal testing.

We are currently digging into the issue at hand & are working as fast as possible to find a solution. In some of our tests we have found one workaround that seems to allow users to run the game. Some have posted adjusting the affinity process via “Task Manager” but our fix truly puts the system in a 1 core mode and will allow you to run the game. Overall this is not a final fix, nor a perfectly stable fix, but it will allow you to run the game. This work around is entirely base upon CPU processing power & will possibly only work for certain systems.

Steps to turn off cores: (For Windows 7)
1.) Open MSCONFIG (You can open it by entering MSCONFIG in the search bar)
2.) Select the “Boot” tab
3.) Click on “Advanced Options”
4.) Check “Number of Processors”
5.) Select “1” from dropdown menu
6.) Click “Apply”
7.) Restart machine

Steps to turn off cores: (For Windows Vista)
1.) Open MSCONFIG – Start> Run > Type MSCONFIG
2.) Select the “BOOT.INI” tab
3.) Click on “Advanced Options…”
4.) Select the check box for /NUMPROC= set it to 1 & click “OK”
5.) Click “Apply”
6.) Restart machine

Thanks, GameGuru

Opinion: EA’s business strategy seems to depend on pushing release dates. Game developers don’t have the time they need to smooth out bugs and finish testing, and consumers are paying for it by buying an incomplete product.

If you signed up for YouTube prior to Google’s acquisition you may be displeased to see that you are no longer allowed to use your YouTube account independent of your email. The change merges your YouTube account with whatever email was associated with it at the time.

The qualifying conditions are as follows:

• You’ve signed up for their original YouTube account before May 2009.
• You’ve joined your YouTube and Google Accounts together.
• You’re still signing in with your original YouTube password.

It has long been apparent that YouTube is not generating anywhere near its $1.6 billion price, with additional server and employee upkeep costs.

Apparently Google figures they can make money by linking your email with your YouTube habits, and, dare I say, build a psychological profile. Maybe it will have something to do with the ads in Gmail, or the suggested videos on YouTube; or maybe Google plans to take over the world.

Stay tuned for further developments on the situation.

• Google FAQ

This week The Pirate Bay confirmed it would shut down its tracker for good, instead encouraging the use of DHT, PEX and magnet links. This move confounded many BitTorrent enthusiasts, who although wishing to adapt, were confronted with hard to grasp terminology and technology. Time for some explaining.

The Pirate Bay’s recent confirmation that they had closed down their tracker since DHT and Peer Exchange have matured enough to take over, was coupled with the news that they had added Magnet links to the site. This news has achieved its aim of stimulating discussion, but has also revealed that there is much confusion over how these technologies work.

The key thing to understand is that nobody is being forced to use Magnet links or trackerless torrents. While these long-standing technologies may prove to be the future, they will co-exist with tracker-enabled torrenting for quite some time. For now, nobody will be forced to immediately change their existing downloading habits, although it may be wise to switch to a BitTorrent client that is compatible with these technologies.

In an attempt to clear some of the mystique surrounding DHT, PEX and Magnet links we will walk through all three briefly, hoping to assure those who’ve become confused earlier this week.

DHT and PEX working in utorrent

DHT

Using DHT instead of trackers is one of the things The Pirate Bay is now trying to encourage, and torrent downloads that rely solely on this technology are often referred to as “trackerless torrents.” DHT is used to find the IP addresses of peers, mostly in addition to a tracker. It is enabled by default in clients such as uTorrent and Vuze and millions of people are already using it without knowing.

DHT’s function is to find peers who are downloading the same files, but without communicating with a central BitTorrent tracker such as that previously operated by The Pirate Bay.

DHT is by no means a new technology. A version debuted in the BitTorrent client Azureus in May 2005 and an alternative but incompatible version was added to Mainline BitTorrent a month later. There is, however, a plugin available for Azureus Vuze which allows it access to the Mainline DHT network used by uTorrent and other clients.

Peer Exchange (”PEX”)

Peer Exchange is yet another means of finding IP addresses. Rather than acting like a tracker, it leverages the knowledge of peers you are connected to, by asking them in turn for the addresses of peers they are connected to. Although it requires a “kick start”, PEX will often uncover more genuine peers than DHT or a tracker.

Magnet links

Traditionally, .torrent files are downloaded from torrent sites. A torrent client then calculates a torrent hash (a kind of fingerprint) based on the files it relates to, and seeks the addresses of peers from a tracker (or the DHT network) before connecting to those peers and downloading the desired content.

Sites can save on bandwidth by calculating torrent hashes themselves and allowing them to be downloaded instead of .torrent files. Given the torrent hash – passed as a parameter within a Magnet link – clients immediately seek the addresses of peers and connect to them to download first the torrent file, and then the desired content.

It is worth noting that BitTorrent can not ditch the .torrent format entirely and rely solely on Magnet links. The .torrent files hold crucial information that is needed to start the downloading process, and this information has to be available in the swarm.

Pirate Bay links cf. Mininova links: When the Magnet link specification first came out, in January last year it called for a particular format (”base32 encoded”). The links that EZTV, Mininova and ShareReactor have displayed for some time all conform to that original specification. In May of last year the specification was changed, in favor of “hex encoding”, and that is the format of the links being displayed by The Pirate Bay. Torrent clients should accept either format.

Compatible Clients

All the main torrent clients: uTorrent 1.8.5, Vuze 4.3.0.2, BitTorrent 6.3, BitComet 1.16, and Transmission 1.76 (and others) support Peer Exchange and DHT (via a plugin in the case of Vuze). Neither BitComet nor Transmission yet support Magnet links but Transmission is planning to include Magnet link support in the upcoming 1.8 release. Bearing in mind that no site, including The Pirate Bay, has yet abandoned support for traditional torrent files, there is plenty of time for support to be added.

We hope that this article has cleared some of the smoke that was generated by The Pirate Bay’s announcements earlier this week. There is no need to panic, cry or be angry, and it’s not a problem if you’re still confused after reading this article. Torrents will still be available and aside from some extra downloading options thanks to sites that add Magnet links, nothing drastic will change in the near future.

This article was originally published on TorrentFreak by a contribution from user Adapa
via LifeHacker