When the repair company charged four times the agreed-upon price to fix a huge dent in the stern, Hardberger said, the owner refused to pay. Port officials then denied the vessel a clearance to leave.

Hardberger and the ship's agent got permission to move the ship to a port anchorage under the ruse that she needed refueling. The new location would make it possible for a crew to reach the vessel by launch.

Then, with everything in place, Hardberger waited for the weekend of Greek Easter, a religious festival marked by rich pageantry and widespread celebration.

To help the coast guard enjoy the event, Hardberger arranged for the ship agent to drop off several cases of ouzo at the station, which overlooked the port.

At 2 a.m. on a Sunday, a crew boarded the unattended freighter and sailed it out of the harbor unnoticed.

Hardberger, who coordinated the operation from shore, sat in a seaman's bar in Piraeus with friends, including the ship's agent. In the ancient port, they toasted their success with vodka.

This repo man drives off with ocean freighters

I don't play games. I don't have time for more than the occasional Java monopoly and 10 minutes a day of Cyber Nations. That being said, I fantasize about a life with enough free time to play games for hours and when this thing comes out... I really, really wanna play it.

You get to be a cop or a robber, and then play against the other team in a massive online first person shooter/grand theft auto adventure game.

www.apb.com

Shown here - and ONLY here - for the first time online is the amazing video from the helmet camera of British skydiver Michael Holmes.

It shows him plummeting 12,000ft to earth after both his parachutes failed, saying goodbye to the world... and hitting the ground with a sickening thud at 80mph.

Michael's friend, who jumped from the same plane, also filmed the whole event. He found his pal bleeding and unconscious - but alive.

World exclusive skydiver video... watch the incredible footage here! | the Daily Mail

At the precinct, Previtera discovered that in addition to the initial misdemeanor, he’d been charged with two felonies: "false report of location of explosives" and a "hoax device."

"This was supposed to be more symbolic than anything," says Previtera, who never imagined they’d nab him for a false bomb threat. "I never wanted to scare anyone into thinking I had a bomb. I just wanted to make people think about international affairs." He adds, "I never uttered the word bomb or explosive."

There's a bomb, where's a bomb, everywhere's a bomb, bomb!

Boston has a history of abusing 'bomb hoax' charges for political reasons

Verbage snatched from IMDB:

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Just saw this on Film Four tonight (UK TV chanel)... very interesting, but 50 minutes isn't even near long enough if you've read Paul Sammon's excellent "Future Noir: the Making of Blade Runner". Interviews with everybody involved except Harrison Ford and Sean Young of course, who hated each other's guts during the making of the film. We even see Philip K. Dick before he died - what a paranoid bloke he was! And even, for the first time ever, a look at the deleted scene where Deckard visits Holden in hospital. If you look you'll see the set for that scene was from Alien.

It's amazing visiting the buildings Ridley Scott used to make his future vision of Los Angeles. In the daytime they look NOTHING like Scott's sets, particularly the Bradbury Building in L.A., used for the final battle... when you see the before and after shots it really brings home what a genius of visual style Scott is.

Most shocking is that whilst all of the people have obviously aged in the last 20 years, Joe Turkel (Eldon Tyrell) hasn't aged a day! Hmmmm...

For anyone that hasn't read Paul Sammon's book, you'll be amazed at the problems encountered making this film, a true up-hill struggle. But Blade Runner still remains one of the best American movies of all time.

Ridley Scott admits this is one of his best films, and millions of cult fans worldwide agree. A true original...

On The Edge Of Blade Runner

After these simple tests, I next performed a check of PBXT’s performance by using my favorite graphical benchmarking tool – Quest’s Benchmark Factory. Whenever I need to personally test a new or enhanced storage engine, I use this tool because it easily lets me put the MySQL database through its paces with minimal effort on my part.

I did a simple scaleable benchmark test, which tests CPU, read, insert, and update-intensive loads, along with a mixed workload at the end. My test machine was a small single-CPU Linux box running Fedora Core along with the MySQL 5.1.15 beta. For a comparison, I ran the same tests against InnoDB. As you can see below, PBXT held up pretty nicely:

MySQL AB :: A Look at the PBXT Storage Engine

We (PAE - Performance Engineering) recently completed a study to understand database performance with ZFS. Read on more details and recommendations. You can also read Roch's blog on the same study

Databases stress the filesystem in unique ways. Depending on the workload and configuration, you can have thousands of IO operations per second. The size of these IO is usually small (database block size). All the writes are synchronized writes. Reads can be random or sequential. Some writes are also more critical than others. Depending on the configuration, Reads are cached by the database program or the filesystem (if supported/requested). In many cases where filesystems are used, the IO is spread over a few files. This causes the single writer lock to be very hot under certain configurations like Buffered UFS.

Neelakanth Nadgir's blog : ZFS and OLTP

Creates a loading image, however you want it to look, an animated GIF for use in your applications. Neat!

Ajaxload - Ajax loading gif generator

(Verified using MySQL 4.1, assumed for other MySQL versions, given that this is a platform architecture issue.) When using the InnoDB storage engine on Solaris 10 for x86_64 architecture (AMD Opteron), it is important to to mount any filesystems used for storing InnoDB-related files using the forcedirectio option. (The default on Solaris 10/x86_64 is not to use this filesystem mounting option.) Failing to use forcedirectio will cause a serious degradation of InnoDB's speed and performance on this platform.

MySQL InnoDB and Solaris/Opteron forcedirectio (Performance Tuning Tips)

When using the InnoDB storage engine on Solaris 10 for x86_64 architecture (AMD Opteron), it is important to mount any filesystems used for storing InnoDB-related files using the forcedirectio option. (The default on Solaris 10/x86_64 is not to use this option.) Failure to use forcedirectio causes a serious degradation of InnoDB's speed and performance on this platform.

InnoDB tuning issues on ZFS...

MySQL AB :: MySQL 5.0 Reference Manual :: 14.2.11 InnoDB Performance Tuning Tips