Janella Spears wiped out her husband’s retirement account, remortgaged their paid-for house, and took out a lien against the family car in an attempt to cash in on the deal. A undercover officer involved with the investigation called it the worst example of the scam he’s ever seen. Thoughtfully, Spears has gone public with her story as a warning to others not to fall victim.

Via: Slashdot

Google Earth is extending its satellite perspective to paint a picture of what the ancient city of Rome looked like nearly two millennia ago.

While satellites weren’t around to give us a bird’s eye view of the city in 320 A.D., Google’s “Ancient Rome 3-D” offers a 3D simulation of the ancient city at the height of its power. The new layer for the tool allows virtual time-traveling tourists to fly around the city and zoom in to explore ancient structures as they likely looked at the time, including the Colosseum, the Forum, and the Circus Maximus. Pop-up windows offer historical information.

The project, which was unveiled Wednesday, is the first ancient city to be incorporated into Google Earth and was developed in collaboration with researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Virginia.

The computer graphics are based on the Plastico di Roma Antica, a plaster model that was created by Italian architect Italo Gismondi and finished three years before his death in 1974. (The model can be viewed at the city’s Museo della Civilta Romana.)

The digitization project began in 1997 and took 10 years to complete. It then took 15 people the better part of a year to transfer the project to the Web.

And apparently, they got it right.

Advanced Micro Devices has started selling the new generation of its Opteron quad core processors for servers, AMD announced on Wednesday, nearly one year after Intel launched its own 45 nanometer chip.

After a troubled launch of its earlier Barcelona chip, AMD waited until the new chip, called “Shanghai,” was actually in distribution to make its formal announcement.

The chip is called quad core because each core operates as an independent computing device on the same chip. The size historically refers to the smallest feature on a chip.

The Shanghai chip has high energy efficiency, AMD says. For example, it automatically turns off some parts of the chip when they are not in use, even for short periods of time, the company said.

The Shanghai is designed to work well with so-called virtualization, in which space is saved on servers by running separate “virtual” machines across drives, instead of requiring separate drives for each machine.

AMD said that two versions of the chip are available now, with enhanced versions available in early January.

YouTube will venture into webcasting later this month, in an effort to take the video sharing Web site’s popularity to a new level by showcasing the talent behind its most viewed videos.

The site, owned by search giant Google Inc., has matured from Web start-up and video fad to a site with loyal fans. But as any good TV industry executive will say, it needs to begin producing new and fresh content to keep its audience.

So, on November 22 in San Francisco, it is launching “YouTube Live,” a show featuring well-known stars such as rapper Will.i.Am and singer Katy Perry and YouTube sensations like 20-year-old Esmee Denters, who posted video of herself covering popular songs and became a star on the World Wide Web.

YouTube executives said the show will feature performers who are popular with the site’s users, a community that has already held unofficial events and whom the company wants to reach by streaming a live show for the first time.