Communities launch creative campaigns to catch Google's eye -- and its megafast fiber-optic network.

—  PC World — 

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What's more entertaining than the sight of civic leaders fawning all over Google for a little high-speed action? In recent weeks, cities across the U.S. have staged some fairly bizarre antics to convince Google to build its proposed 1-gigabit fiber-optic network in their area. The search giant will make its decision by the end of 2010.

Naturally, when the competition is this fierce -- at least 600 communities are vying for the fiber network -- you've got to stand out. And acting a little kooky is one way to show Google you care, even if you come across as, well, a little desperate. Here are five particularly nutty publicity stunts:

We first saw SUSE Studio in beta at VMWorld in 2008, a skunkworks tool for building SUSE instances. It's come a long way since then.

Watch a slideshow of what we loved and hated about SUSE Studio

Today, Novell's SUSE Studio is a Web-based virtual appliance/ISO image creator using SUSE Linux. It has no parallels that we can find for building operating systems instances.

Novell supplies Studio users with a 15GB online playground to make instances. You're not limited to just CD/DVD results, and you can see the work you've done online — then download it or even execute it online.

Once built, operating system combinations can be output as ISO images, virtual machine images for VMware, or other forms of the combos you build of the actual SUSE servers. The provisioning capabilities of Studio are profound.

Even though Newsweek declared the recession over last July, tens of thousands of IT professionals are still out of work . They're among the 14.9 million people now unemployed, of which the number of long-term unemployed -- those jobless for over 27 weeks -- was 6.1 million in February.

The good news: The unemployment rate dropped to 9.7% in January, down from 10%, and stayed at that level for February . But that's little comfort to technology workers who are pounding the pavement looking for work.

Technology workers, especially older professionals, are increasingly re-evaluating their options. They're wondering if they should beef up their skills, jump to a new specialty or even leave IT altogether. And in all of those cases, they're weighing the risk of taking on debt to finance continuing education versus plowing ahead with their current skill sets.

Reacts to Pwn2Own hacks that bypassed DEP, ASLR; Says the measures are still effective

Just days after a pair of researchers outwitted major Windows 7 defenses to exploit Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox, Microsoft said the measures aren't meant to "prevent every attack forever."

At the same time, it defended the security measures, saying they remained an effective way to hinder exploits.

Pete LePage, a product manager with IE's developer division, stood up for DEP (data execution) and ASLR (address space layout randomization), the security features that two hackers sidestepped to win $10,000 each at the high-profile Pwn2Own hacking contest last Wednesday.

The environmental group says that Dell may not meet 2011 deadline for phasing out harmful chemicals

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Greenpeace held protests outside the offices of Dell in Bangalore, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen on Monday, to demand firmer commitments from the company that it will phase out harmful chemicals from its products by 2011.

Officials at Greenpeace said that the environmental group planned the action ahead of a meeting on Monday at Dell headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, at which Michael Dell, the company's CEO, is scheduled to discuss the phasing out of the harmful chemicals.

"Michael Dell drop the toxics" was a key slogan at the protests in Bangalore.