Author: Serkadis

Rita will no longer be “rockin’” on Lifetime. The Network for Women has cancelled Rita Rocks — a quirky comedy featuring Nicole Sullivan — after two seasons, The Hollywood Reporter said Monday.

Rita, which starred the Mad TV alum as a mom who launches her own garage band, premiered to solid ratings in Oct. 2008, with 1 million viewers tuning in for the show’s debut episode. It was Lifetime’s first original comedy series in over 10 years. However, ratings fell significantly in its second season, with the Oct. 13 season finale attracting just 489,000 viewers, according to Futon Critic.

Bavaria, Germany | Unique Collections

King Ludwig I of Bavaria had a thing for the ladies, and he filled a hall at Schloss Nymphenburg, the summer palace near Munich, with portraits of his favorites.

Ludwig I (grandfather to “Mad King” Ludwig II, builder of Neuschwanstein Castle, who was born at Nymphenburg Palace) was a passionate admirer of classical beauty. Not so hard on the eyes himself, he passed his time collecting Greek and Roman statuary, designing neo-classical buildings around Bavaria, and collecting classically beautiful women. He was married to the fetching Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen at the age of 24 in October, 1810 in a wedding which set the president for Octoberfest celebrations ever since.

There are 36 portraits of young women in the king’s special collection in the Southern pavilion. Most of the paintings in the gallery were created by the court portraitist Joseph Karl Steiler, with a few additions by Friedrich Durck. They include local beauties like Helene Sedlmayr, whom the king happened to meet when she came to the palace to deliver some toys the queen had ordered for the children, and became known as the “Schöne Münchenerin”, setting the standard of loveliness for Munich girls for a generation.

Lola Montez, the mistress that cost him his crown, is less innocent.

Born Eliza Gilbert in Ireland, by the time she met Ludwig in Munich at age 25, Lola Montez had already been shuttled around family in India, England, and Scotland, scandalized London with her “Spanish dance” burlesque, been married and divorced, and hooked up with both Franz Liszt and Alexander Dumas in Paris. She was known for her darkly glamorous looks and her feisty temperament, alternately described as violently obstinate or merely mischievous – possibly depending on whether the speaker was sleeping with her at the time.

She met Ludwig in 1846 and they quickly became a couple to the general displeasure of his family and country, particularly when he made her “Countess of Landsfeld”. He abdicated the crown in 1848 as riots broke out in Munich, at least partially because of his unpopular and public affair. Afterward he attempted (unsuccessfully) to follow Lola out of the country. She came out of the scandal none the worse for wear, however, and was married again shortly thereafter. She went on to stir things up elsewhere in Europe, then in Australia, San Francisco, and New York City, where she died in 1860.

Another less-famous woman of derring-do who graces the walls of the Schönheitengalarieis is the English adventuress Jane Digby, a striking blonde beauty, daughter of a daring sea captain, and friend of Sir Richard Burton. She not only took up with Ludwig I, she later had an affair with his son, King Otto of Greece. After other assorted affairs and marriages, she set off for the Middle East, she eventually settled in Damascus with a dashing sheikh half her age.

On a more tender note, another notable entry is another mistress, the Florentine Marianna Marquesa Florenzi, a gifted and intelligent women known for her translations of European philosophical works into Italian who was the king’s lover, friend, and confidant for some forty years. Some 4,500 letters passed between the two of them survive to this day.

Electronic Arts said today that it expects its quarterly and fiscal year revenues and earnings to be below its previous financial guidance.

That much was known, since EA is laying off 1,500 people. But the surprise is that EA was also somewhat pessimistic about the year that ends March 31, 2011.

Eric Brown, chief financial officer of EA, said in a conference call that the company’s fiscal third quarter ended Dec. 31 will be short of internal expectations and consensus estimates because of a soft December for EA in Europe and a shift to lower-margin distribution titles in North America. Overall, Brown said the overall packaged good sector is likely to be flat or down in the fiscal year that ends March 31, 2011. The latter prediction surprised some analysts on the call.

EA said sell-through and reorders were below expectations. Digital games, such as online-based titles, were above expectations but not enough to make up for a shortfall in Europe in packaged good sales. EA now expects non-GAAP results of $1.33 billion to $1.35 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of 29 cents to 33 cents. The shift from packaged goods sold at retail to digital games played online has been very fast and dynamic, said John Riccitiello, chief executive of EA, on the conference call.

“What we have is a two-year turnaround that is taking longer” because of the dynamism in the sector, Riccitiello added.

He acknowledged that EA’s forecasts were so far off in 2009 that the company is planning for a more conservative view of the overall sector. Riccitiello said EA has a massively multiplayer online game planned for the spring of 2011 that should make a big difference in its earnings, but EA is excluding that revenue from its FY11 plan for now.

For the fiscal year, EA expects non-GAAP results of $4.125 billion to $4.2 billion in revenue and EPS of 40 cents to 50 cents a share. In the current fourth fiscal quarter, EA is launching Mass Effect 2, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Dante’s Inferno, Army of Two: The 40th Day, and Command and Conquer 4.

Riccitiello said the rest of the year will include a “great new version of Medal of Honor,” a “revitalized” Need For Speed in fiscal 2011, “The Sims on console, Dead Space 2, FIFA in a World Cup year” and Crysis.

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Depois de quase 1 ano e meio de embarques de veículos chineses da Hafei Motor (modelo Towner) e da Jinbei Automobile (Topic) por meio de contêineres, a CN Auto recebeu no dia 29 de dezembro último o seu primeiro embarque de 840 unidades pelo sistema roll-on roll-off (ro-ro), em navio sulcoreano que passou pelo porto de Dalian, na China, contratado pela importadora brasileira.

Nos últimos 4 anos, quando chegaram os primeiros veículos chineses ao Brasil, todos os embarques aconteceram por meio de contêineres, por falta de volume. A partir de agora, no entanto, a exemplo do que ocorreu com os veículos sulcoreanos no início dos anos 90, os volumes de produtos procedentes da China passam a ser interessantes aos armadores internacionais.

“Além do fator frete, o sistema roll-on roll-off é mais seguro em relação a possíveis avarias, típicas em transporte marítimo por contêineres”, afirma Humberto Gandolpho Filho, diretor comercial da CN Auto. “Com o objetivo de viabilizar ainda mais a entrada de carros chineses no mercado brasileiro, já iniciamos negociações com outras importadoras no sentido de firmar o transporte marítimo por ro-ro”, enfatiza Gandolpho.

Fonte: Textofinal

We’ve discussed in the past how the record labels have this habit of “negotiating through lawsuits,” in that they will often sue an innovative music startup, even as they’re negotiating licensing deals with them, just to get the upperhand in the negotiation. It’s happened with countless music startups — and it’s one of the main reasons so few survive. They’re overly burdened with ridiculous costs from the beginning. We already saw that EMI used this strategy with Grooveshark, in forcing it into a licensing deal, and apparently Universal Music decided it could do the same thing. It’s now suing Grooveshark as well — even though Grooveshark insists it pays all the appropriate licenses. Of course, the end result of all this is that it gives Grooveshark more publicity, but may make it more difficult for the company to survive.

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Taylor Kitsch is leaving Friday Night Lights (FNL).

The 28-year-old heartthrob will not reprise his role when the cult football drama airs its fifth — and likely final — season later this year, TV Guide’s William Keck divulged on Monday.

Kitsch is exiting the show to focus on his burgeoning film career, producers say. Kitsch has been cast in the sci-fi fantasy film John Carter of Mars, which is set to start shooting this month. He is also attached to co-star in the apartheid drama The Bang Bang Club. Lights producers wanted to ensure that Kitsch could focus on both films, so it’s unclear how much time he’ll have left for FNL.

“Because this was a big opportunity for him, we wanted to let him do that,” said Friday Night Lights producer Jason Katims. “We’ll stay in close contact with production and try to get him for as many episodes as possible,” he added.

Friday Night Lights current airs on DirecTV.

Filed under: Concept Cars, Detroit Auto Show, Performance, Hatchback, Chevrolet

We lost track of the number of times the Chevrolet Aveo RS concept was dubbed a “euro hot hatch” during The Bowtie brand’s press conference, and judging by the number of times the word “tuner” was used, Chevy’s desperate to rebrand its econobox.

The other reoccurring word: “Concept.” This isn’t the next Aveo – at least not yet. We expect a more pedestrian, near production version of the RS to be unveiled in the very near future (Geneva?), guaranteed to ditch its lighted brake cooling ducts, 19-inch wheels, slotted rotors and center-mounted dual exhausts. Even the C-pillar’s awkwardly integrated door handles aren’t likely to make it to production, but we hope the black-on-black interior, contrasting blue stitching and “motorcycle-inspired” dash all get the green light.

The drivetrain is destined to carry over unchanged, with the Cruze‘s turbocharged 1.4-liter four cylinder sending 138 horsepower and 148 pound-feet of torque to a six-speed manual transmission. All of this will surely improve the breed, but it leaves us wondering something…

Jim Campbell, Chevy’s general manager, announced that production of the Chevrolet Spark for the U.S. will begin late next year. With the Spark supposedly on the way, how does GM plan to market two economical runabouts in a market that’s remained luke warm to the original Aveo? We’ll find out next year.

Live photos by Drew Phillips / Copyright (C)2010 Weblogs, Inc.

Continue reading Detroit 2010: Chevrolet Aveo RS concept answers one question, poses another [w/video]

Detroit 2010: Chevrolet Aveo RS concept answers one question, poses another [w/video] originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 11 Jan 2010 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Earlier today, The Rumpus published a very revealing interview with someone claiming to be a Facebook employee. The interview covers a variety of subjects, including privacy restrictions at the world’s largest social network and some of the technological hurdles the site has to deal with. The biggest revelations? That Facebook collects more data about your habits than you may realize, and that there was once a ‘master password’ that would grant employees access to anyone’s Facebook profile — a password that some employees abused.

The interview wasn’t authorized by Facebook, and there are many who are doubting its authenticity. We’ve heard some rumors that the interview is legit, and The Rumpus’ editor stands behind it. For what it’s worth, much of it rings true to me — none of the ‘facts’ revealed are surprising or difficult to believe. Here are some of the highlights:

• Facebook is recording data on everything you do on the site. Everything. And not just the messages you’ve written and received either: it knows how many times you’ve clicked on your friend’s profile, which photos you’ve viewed, and more. Using this data it can establish who your best friends are, which helps it generate interesting stories in your News Feed. According to the interview, this data has recently been used to streamline search (your best friends show up first as your type in your query, rather than an alphabetical list).
• There was a master password that granted Facebook employees access to any account, if they knew it. The interviewee describes a password that would allow a Facebook employee to view anyone’s profile simply by typing in their unique user ID and the password (the password itself was a variation on ‘Chuck Norris’). This password was used primarily for engineering purposes, but other employees could find it “if they knew where to look”. To use the password, you would have to be accessing Facebook from the company’s ISP (in other words, there was no risk of it leaking to the web at large). The employee says that this power has been abused on at least two occasions, explaining that she is aware of two relating firings.
• The employee says that even the use of a master password is unneeded if you’re looking to access private data, because employees can simply query the database:
  

  See, the thing is — and I don’t know how much you know about it — it’s all stored in a database on the backend. Literally everything. Your messages are stored in a database, whether deleted or not. So we can just query the database, and easily look at it without every logging into your account. That’s what most people don’t understand.

• Finally, while the interviewee says the ‘master password’ has been deprecated, employees can still access your profile through a special tool, but they need to provide a reason for why they’re doing it. If they get audited down the line and fail to provide an explanation, they can be fired.

The rest of the interview is well worth reading. It covers Facebook’s international expansion, the efforts of one developer to create ‘Hyper-PHP”, and more.

Could the whole interview be a hoax? Sure. The interviewee apparently got some of their stats wrong, but frankly I doubt many Facebook employees can spout off the site’s membership and data storage figures off the top of their head. Here’s the statement Facebook gave us:

“This piece contains the kind of inaccuracies and misrepresentations you would expect from something sourced “anonymously”, and we’ll leave it at that.”

Reading between the lines, if Facebook was able flatly deny the claims made in the interview I suspect they would have. Instead it is trying to undermine the credibility of the article without pointing out any facts that were incorrect. And even if the interview itself is fake, I still think much of what was discussed rings true.

I’ve heard multiple times that Facebook employees can access your profile for security reasons, and they face the threat of being fired should they abuse that privilege. And it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the restrictions around these tools were much laxer a few years ago. These ‘Big Brother’ tools are very common at the social sites around the web, so Facebook would hardly be an anomaly in this case.

One final note: if the interview is legitimate, I suspect many of the facts were fabricated to conceal the identity of the interviewee. The article’s author, Phil Wong, has apparently only contributed a single post to The Rumpus (he may well not exist). The article says that Wong visited Facebook headquarters, which means that the company would certainly have a record of who he was there to visit, which would likely reveal the source’s identity. If the interview ever took place, Wong has either done a bad job covering his tracks or some of these details have been made up.

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

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Every day I troll SEC Form D Filings to discover new startups, fundings and investments. I put everything I find into CrunchBase. For everyone else I give you the daily digest, a quick hit of the latest and greatest SEC Form D filings in the TechCrunch sphere:

Nicira – Virtual Data Center Control Software
TopTenREVIEWS – Product Research and Reviews
Tangerine Solar – Community Solar Power Project
Powered – Social Media and Marketing

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Imagine this. You get to the airport, get your boarding pass, wait in line for security, and just when you’re about through, a polite man comes over to you and asks if you could come aside for a moment. But instead of ushering you to a white room and telling you to assume the position, he merely observes you closely and then asks you to take an aspirin. You see, the infra-red cameras have detected a slight fever. Yes, only in Japan.

Japan is very concerned for its citizens’ safety; but instead of concocting ineffective security measures, they are enforcing preventative care in that playplace of infection, the airport. I suppose it’s a bit of an invasion of privacy, but no more than x-raying your bags or getting millimeter wave pictures of your junk. They have infra-red cameras set up to pick out people who may be a little hotter than normal, and in extreme cases where an fever actually seems present, they may actually escort you to a hospital to be treated.

It’s an interesting idea to extrapolate to other devices: imagine if computers had low-res IR cameras that would detect a high temperature and advise you to medicate? Or a larger camera mounted in a nursery or children’s ward, which could easily monitor temperature without constant probing with thermometers?

Weird stuff, but pretty cool as well.

[via Laughing Squid]

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Actress Jane Lynch, best known as Adidas-lovin’ coach Sue Sylvester on TV’s Glee, has blasted President Barack Obama, branding the nation’s leader “a huge disappointment” for his policies — or lack thereof — on gay rights issues

.

In a chat with London’s The Guardian last week, the star spoke out against the Proposition 8 amendment, which banned gay marriage in California. Jane complains that the clause is unconstitutional because the majority should not have the right to vote on the lives of the minority.

“Shouldn’t there be safeguards against the majority voting on the rights of a minority? If people voted on civil rights in the ’60s, it would have never happened. It took somebody like (U.S. President) Lyndon Johnson going, ‘F all of you! I’m going to do this.’ Obama won’t do it. He’s a huge disappointment to me,” Lynch scoffed.

Last week, President Obama appointed a transsexual to senior position at the Department of Commerce.

Does your phone have security flaws? DROID does. Sorry, we couldn’t resist. It looks like a flaw found in the Android 2.0.1 code will allow a user to bypass the lock screen on your beloved Motorola DROID. Now, someone can’t just walk over to your DROID and pop the lock, there is one, fairly large, prerequisite that needs to be fulfilled… your phone needs to be ringing. While your DROID is locked and ringing pressing the “back” key will cause your DROID to present you with the home screen, and from there, you have full access to the phone. Google has stated, “We are aware of the issue and we’re working to deliver a fix to Motorola DROIDs shortly.”

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I’ve heard of people making claims about “electromagnetic allergies,” but so far, no one has been able to prove that this is an actual, physical ailment. Still, Santa Fe resident Arthur Firstenberg was forced into homelessness by his neighbor’s gadgets.

In fact, Firstenberg is suing his neighbor for refusing to turn off their cellphone, wifi, computers and other electronics:

Firstenberg “cannot stay in a hotel, because hotels and motels all employ wi-fi connections, which trigger a severe illness,” says the request for a preliminary injunction. “If (Firstenberg) cannot obtain preliminary relief, he will be forced to continue to sleep in his car, enduring winter cold and discomfort, until this case can be heard.” The case has been assigned to state District Judge Daniel Sanchez, who has yet to set a hearing.

I’m not saying that this guy isn’t suffering and that wifi allergies aren’t real (I’m only insinuating that it isn’t real—big difference), but it’s some bullshit to tell a neighbor that they can’t have any electronics working in their own home. Wear a tinfoil hat or get some damn electromagnetic field-blocking paint. [TMC via DSL Reports Image via Flickr]

The FCC  has recently passed another unknown  Motorola phone with T-Mobile AWS 3G bands ( 1700/2100 ). Is this possibly the Sholes Tablet?  I sure hope so! The specs to the phone includes:

• Quadband GSM/EDGE 850, 900, 1800 and 1900
• HSDPA/HSUPA up to 10.2 Mbps
• Standalone GPS
• Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR
• WiFi b/g
• Battery model BP6X / SNN5843A / 1390 mAH

Any ideas on what this could be?

Source: FCC via BoyGeniusReport

Filed under: Found Footage, iPhone

What other recent TV show (Big Bang Theory aside) has given geeks as much cred as Chuck? The hourlong spy-dramedy returned with first-run episodes this week, but promptly threw a wet blanket on our enjoyment by… well, just look. No matter what Andy Ihnatko’s experiments demonstrated, I don’t think a pile of white rice is going to fix this.

Past episodes of Chuck have featured an all-knowing classic Mac, a thinly veiled dig at our favorite iCEO and a weaponized G5 tower, much to our delight. We’ve been loyal fans, NBC, but we must protest the wanton cruelty shown to an innocent smartphone in this scene: it’s brutal, it’s damp, and it will not stand.

TUAWFound Footage: That sinking, gonna-need-a-new-phone feeling originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 11 Jan 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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