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For sale on eBay, one life-size statue from Mars Attacks. I am not suggesting that anyone buy it, particularly with the starting price being as high as it is. If you are a fan of uber-expensive kitsch and you think that Tim Burton is the hottest thing since sliced bread, then perhaps you might want to make the foot soldier your own. Otherwise, join with me in silent mockery, as this “one of a kind” statue has attracted zero bids.

I don’t know anyone that was much of a fan of Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks. It just didn’t do it for me and I am assuming that a lot of other people felt the same way. Personally, I blame this atrocity, but there are others, including this one. I don’t think anyone has ever forgiven him for thinking that Michael Keaton would make a good Batman.

The statue appears to be very good quality, according to the blurb on eBay:

Here, carefully and expertly crafted with the highest quality and workmanship you will find, is a professionally-made life-size statue of a foot soldier from Mars Attacks. This statue is screen accurate from its boots to the evil sneaky look it’s face. This is from a private collection and was displayed in a smoke-free environment. This piece is fully assembled and painted and is a perfect addition to any SCI-FI art collection. - The figure stands at 5′3″ - The head is made out of resin and is hand painted - The body is made out of a plastic armature with a spandex plush spacesuit. -The fingers and arms flex, so they are pose-able - All other parts on the spacesuit are rubberized spandex with plastic and metal parts. - The gun is made of plastic, wood, and metal parts - The head and the gun are removable - Stands firmly on a sandy textured base - The fluorescent orange skeleton is made of resin and is removable - The backpack is made of plastic and is removal with a Velcro attachment.

Starting from $3,600, my guess is that the first bid will get it.

The Domesday book is the oldest and most famous public record in Britain, based on 13,418 settlements in 1086, and it is now available free online thanks to a three year project by Prog John Palmer and his son, Matt from Hull, England.

900 years old, the parchment papers show that the value of property in the UK in 1085 was £75,000 (£1 trillion at todays prices), and is widely accepted as one of the most influential sources of medieval history. The project to convert it for the internet took three years, but dates back to 1980 when he was looking at a teaching project, but at the time computers weren’t powerful enough for the job.

The Domesday Book is available online at http://www.esds.ac.uk/findingdata and can be displayed as maps, tables or text from the original Latin text.

Via [Telegraph]

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King 5 has a nice little video, giving us a brief look into one of the fifty-two hubs that Netflix has nationwide. This location is the Northwest hub and it is just south of Tacoma, Washington. They have 40 employees and can process 110,000 movies per day.

At least one employee is averaging around 950 per hour (which is around 18,000 per week), while the company standard is around 650 per hour. Lets hope she gets a nice bonus every so often.

Employees are up at least every other hour for scheduled exercise breaks where they move around and stretch to avoid cramps and stiff bodies. It was also mentioned that the employees enjoy a free Netflix membership as a perk of the job.

Read [King 5] Via [Hacking Netflix]

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Posted Feb 16th 2008 7:14PM by Darren Murph
Filed under: Desktops, Gaming
Tired of lookin’ at that stock motherboard that supports Intel’s latest and greatest gaming platform? Yeah, us too, so we’re fairly stoked that HotHardware has rounded up a few snapshots of Asus’ upcoming Z7S WS. Said mobo will reportedly feature “dual LGA771 sockets that support Intel Xeon 5000, 5100, and 5300 series processors of both the dual and quad-core varieties.” Additionally, you’ll find a pair of gigabit Ethernet jacks, a plethora of expansion slots, six DDR2 DIMM slots and support for 1600MHz / 1333MHz / 1066MHz / 800MHz front side bus speeds. Go on, tag the read link for a few more looks and even more technobabble.

Posted Feb 16th 2008 4:31PM by Darren Murph
Filed under: Robots
Forget controlling your dreams — after all, isn’t the idea of having a mechanical buddy act out whatever your off-kilter brain thought up last night much more appealing? In an interesting endeavor, Fernando Orellana and Brendan Burns have teamed up to design a humanoid that actually takes sophisticated dream interpretation results (garnered by analyzing data from a variety of sensors) and acts out whatever was going on in one’s mind. Quite frankly, we’re not even sure we’d like to remember some of those overnight journeys — let alone see some bot play it back — but if you glanced this headline and immediately crossed your fingers for a video, head on past the jump to get just that.

AT&T Tilt users have a little update waiting for them in the form of a ROM update. The update seems like one you may want to grab, as it offers enhanced Bluetooth performance, enables DTMF tones for the slide-out QWERTY keyboard, improves overall device performance and stability and includes the Microsoft Adaptation Kit Update (AKU) 0.4.4. Sadly this update does not include anything to correct the recent video driver issues, that update is still rumored to be coming in March.

Read [HTC] Download [Update] Via [Mobility Site]

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