Shameless Words from Shameless Geeks

In one of the largest displays of cowardice yet, Radio Shack management decided to conduct a major layoff via email. There are some things that should be handled in person. Layoffs would be at the top of that list.

I worked part-time for the shack years ago. I was impressed by how successful a group of clueless managers could be. Well, it looks like the successful part has changed, but not the clueless part.

There is a lot of buzz out there about Spiralfrog and their free ad-sponsored download service scheduled to come online by Christmas. I wouldn’t have considered this a serious possibility if it hadn’t been for the fact that it is backed by Vivendi, one of the big boys in the music biz.

There is lots of opinion on both sides of this story about whether it is good for music or not. For my part, I think it’s just a sign that the digital world is finally catching up with reality. If you look at it, this is nothing more than good, old-fashioned radio. One major difference: you won’t have some wiseass DJ slinging inane humor in your direction.

Details of the project are still somewhat sketchy, so I’m not sure how they intend to monetize the downloads. It does, however, look like it is a least a step in the right direction.

FiringSquad.com has a link to Amazon’s Vista pre-order page. According to both of these sources, the release date is January 30, 2007.

According to FiringSquad, this information shouldn’t be considered accurate. It wouldn’t be the first time that Amazon allowed you to pre-order vaporware, so I would tend to agree with them.

In a world of stupid contests (otherwise know as reality shows), here’s one that actually makes sense. the Mobile Phone Throwing Championship was held in Finland this weekend and was won by a man who managed to throw his communicator 292 feet. Thats impressive for raw distance, but I’d much rather see a contest that involves throwing the phone against a cinder block wall. The winner would either be the person who shattered the phone into the most pieces, or the one who made the pieces bounce the farthest from the wall.

Today, Pluto was stripped of it’s status as the ninth planet in the solar system and was demoted to a “dwarf planet". This was in response to a push to add three more small heavenly bodies to the list. Scientists opted to cut back to 8, rather than increase to 12.

No comment yet from Mickey’s dog about what he plans to do about the demotion… except that he’s going to Disney World.

It looks like Dell isn’t the only company with laptop battery problems. Apple has announced a recall of 1.8 million laptop batteries sold from 2003 through this year. Sony claims that this will be the last recall of its crotch cooking devices. Imagine what it would feel like if one of them exploded on your lap. OUCH!

Well, we don’t yet know who will build them, but NASA has chosen the name Orion for it’s new series of spaceships designed to take men back to the moon.

That’s all very nice, but I suspect this program won’t survive into the next administration. Despite the fact that the space program of the 60’s helped give us a HUGE technological jump over the rest of the world, too may people see space travel as an expensive white elephant.

As for my opinion… I think that the space program should be a high priority until we are able to colonize other planets. The fact that we are currently trapped on this planet is the biggest single point of failure that could spell the end of the human race. How’s that for the long-term macro view?

Well, this bit of information may be a little late, but I still need to say it… Whatever you do, Don’t expect to play Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends in multiplayer mode. We have now attempted to play the game at two different LAN parties, but have come away unhappy from both.

The game itself is beautiful, has an interesting array of characters, and plays pretty well (so far) in single player mode. However, we have tried twice to attach 7 players to the same game, and failed miserably both times. The worst part is that there is no rhyme or reason to the troubles. Someone will create a game, 5 of 7 players can join, but the other 2 can’t. Start another game, whether from the same server or a different one, and you might get a 3 or 4 who can join, including the 2 who couldn’t join the first game. It seems as though it it doesn’t matter who starts the game, it is random chance that determines who can join.

This is the second Big Huge game from Microsoft that has given us troubles. Rise of Nations has trouble crashing on some systems in the middle of a multi player game. One would think that a company as big as Microsoft could make a more stable game than someone like Blizzard. I guess the new adage should be: the bigger they are, the harder they crash.

The Internet sensation Snakes on a Plane hits theaters today. Do your self a favor and go see it. While you are at it, wear our new brand new 42 shirt and watch all the geeks in audience shout 7 times 9.

William Shatner is trying to stir up new interest in the Star Trek franchise by voicing his old Captain Kirk character for a bunch of new video games. Shatner probably doesn’t need the money this time around, so you gotta believe he’s doing it for the fans. Unfortunately, it will be a lot more difficult without Scotty.

Intel is making the very welcome move of open-sourcing the GMA 3000 video drivers for Linux. This goes completely against the standard graphics OEM convention of excessive paranoid secrecy about their video drivers. Hopefully, it will allow the Linux community to tune and tweak the drivers for the benefit of all.

Unfortunately, graphics chip makers usually keep their drivers extremely secret. The claim is that they do so to protect the chip design. Most of us know that this is a bogus excuse, and that the real reason is so that nobody will see the “optimizations” (read as “cheats") that they put in for specific games and benchmarks. They certainly have the right to keep their trade secrets… even if they are dishonest about why. I just wish that they would release the drivers to the Open Source community and let their hardware stand on it’s own merits. Then again… maybe that’s what they are really afraid of.

Spanish police have arrested 4 Frenchmen for jumping in front of moving vehicles so that they could publish their reactions on the web. What were they doing, writing a paper for Roadkill University? These guys would make really good test subjects for the anti-stupid pill. I’d try nominating them for Darwin Awards, but those are only posthumous.

You know that Microsoft update that you got on patch Tuesday? Well, you would be well advised to install it ASAP. This patch plugs 12 vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to take over your machine. This one looks like it is more serious that the “average” batch of critical patches. One of the flaws allows the attacker to compromise the system without any interaction from a user at all. If you think I’m being a little paranoid, check this out: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued an alert about this nasty Windows bug.

According to Anand, ATI is making major price cuts to it’s X1900 line in preparation for the release of the X1950 later this month. This is, of course, good news for gamers. It actually may push me into getting a new video card for the old 3800+ system. It also makes me wonder what Nvidia’s response will be.

Well here’s something you don’t see every day. Researchers are testing an anti-stupid pill on mice and fruit flies. We all know of someone who could use a massive dose of these things. If they were ever actually released, they would have to be kept away from middle management.

BTW… if you were looking for something that would do the reverse and actually cause stupidity, there is no need for research. It’s called Tequila.

Here’s a story about a a girl in the UK who got fired via IM. One has to wonder if this would be official notice in the US. In either case, it was rude.

I have to admit that I once quit a job via IM. It wasn’t one of my best moments, but at least I had the decency to go in the next morning and officially tell my boss that I quit. If anyone else was thinking of quitting via IM, I would advise against it. You just end up creating bad feelings. It’s something that I never intend to repeat.

It’s pretty obvious that a manager who fires someone via IM is going to look bad too. There is a certain honesty to the face-to-face approach that is necessary at such a traumatic event.

So, I guess everyone has seen the Apple commercials that make claims about OS X security. I believe one even claims that there has never been a Mac virus. Will they kindly have those two guys (you know, Justin Long and the Bill Gates look-alike) come back on and explain why Apple just fixed 26 Mac OS X flaws, many of them considered critical, if Mac OS doesn’t have vulnerabilities?

Maybe there was some sort of legal trickery in the way they worded it, but I believe everyone heard a claim that they aren’t vulnerable. I believe that they need to straighten this out if they want their credibility back.

The Wizzards of Redmond are getting cozy with the other dark side of software. Microsoft is challenging hackers to break Vista by giving them a recent release build. I’m of two minds about the whole thing.

On one side, I think that Microsoft is doing us all a service by getting the most dangerous users out of the way first. Theoretically, if these guys can’t hack Vista, it is secure enough for the average user. They would also be the folks most likely to find hidden flaws.

On the other side, I’m skeptical about whether these hackers will actually inform Microsoft of any flaws they find. My fear is that there wil be hundreds of zero-day exploits released on the same day that Vista is. Of course, there are other ways to get a pre-release version of Vista, so maybe the version given out at Black Hat won’t make much difference.

The only thing I can say for sure is that they are taking a BIG risk.

As long as Blizzard keeps releasing new StarCraft patches I’ll keep on downloading them. The new 1.14 patch is mostly a fix for cheats, but adds a few new features to the in-game chat facilities.

For some reason, this games never seems to get old. A few of my LAN party friends have been playing this game since the day it came out, and we still play one or two rounds at the end of every LAN party. A good game never gets boring.

We’ve all seen the Vonage ad with the kid breaking a sliding glass door with his baseball back swing. It looks a lot like recent news for Vonage stock holders. All I can think of to say about their recent IPO is:

People do stupid things! dootdoo dootdootdoo!