ptorrone writes “MAKE magazine has published an in-depth look at what the recent acquisition of Instructables by Autodesk means for makers and the DIY movement. MAKE suggests it wasn’t about getting the millions of members or projects at Instructables or upselling Autodesk tools. Instead, the acquisition was more about creating many Instructable-like communities around Autodesk’s new free and trial tools including their 3D printing site and service, (more…)

Apparently not all Thunderbolt ports are created equally. Anadtech discovered that the Thunderbolt chip within the latest MacBook Air is not the same found in the current MacBook Pro. The Air’s version packs less power and throughput resulting in less abilities. Hope you weren’t planning on hooking up two of those new fancy Thunderbolt Displays.

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dkd903 writes “Roberta Nilerud of Canonical has announced that their cloud storage service – Ubuntu One – has hit the one million users mark. Ubuntu One is a cloud storage service from Canonical that is very tightly integrated into Ubuntu. Although Ubuntu One is installed by default in Ubuntu, it is also available on Windows and Android.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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A recent study conducted by vets at the University of Georgia showed that more than half of pets in the U.S. are overweight. Specifically, 53% of cats are hefty, and 55% of dogs qualify as obese.

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A few weeks in, the honeymoon period is over for Google+ and it seems like some people are already losing interest. Yes, the backlash has already begun. But is Google+ going to fail? In a word: No+.

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Worf Maugg writes with this excerpt from Wired:
“Researchers at U.C. Berkeley have discovered that some of the net’s most popular sites are using a tracking service that can’t be evaded — even when users block cookies, turn off storage in Flash, or use browsers’ ‘incognito’ functions. The service, called KISSmetrics, is used by sites to track the number of visitors, what the visitors do on the site, and where they come to the site from — (more…)

1sockchuck writes “Low-power many-core processors are gaining traction st some of the largest web sites. Facebook recently test-drove servers using Tilera processors, which provided three times the performance-per-watt of x86 servers when running key-value store applications like memcached. Meanwhile, Mozilla has begun using SeaMicro servers powered by Intel Atom processors, which were brought online for the launch of Firefox 4. Both Tilera and SeaMicro (more…)

Security researcher Charlie Miller has found a way to hack the “smart” batteries in Apple’s laptops, which could result in a non-functioning—or worse, exploding—battery. The hack was made possible because of a simple security blunder at Apple, and Miller detailed to Ars how he stumbled upon it in the first place.

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It’s the 10th anniversary of Final Fantasy X (in Japan)! In today’s Launch Date column, we look at the history of Square’s famous RPG, the hype surrounding it, and how FFX helped the PS2 overtake the Nintendo 64.

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CWmike writes “U.S. Marine Corps Gen. James ‘Hoss’ Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was sharply critical Tuesday of the the department is pretty much in the Stone Age as far as IT is concerned,’ Cartwright said. He cited problems with proprietary systems that aren’t connected to anything else and are unable to quickly adapt to changing needs. ‘We have huge numbers of data links that move data between proprietary platforms — (more…)