Has the One Laptop Per Child non-profit organization sold its noble cause (and consequently, its soul) to The Devil? The group announced that their XO laptops can now run a modified version of Windoze in addition to the standard Sugar GUI, which is based off Linux. For an additional $10 of course.
What I have to wonder is: will 256MB of RAM and a 1GB flash drive be enough to handle the additional resource requirements? And will they also have to put on Internet Exploder? God, I hope not; Windoze is bad enough.

Last night the Official Roommate worked on a friend’s PC luggable. It was not just a laptop, it had a built-in keypad, which made it luggable! But I digress.
Anyway, he said there were 135 virii and 21 spywares which had infected the darn thing and the scan took just under an hour and a half to complete. So of course he did a complete wipe and reinstall. The final report was supposedly ten pages long; I looked at it, and it was ten pages due to spreadsheet formatting. Still, it was bad enough. I sure hope the owner of this luggable did some type of backup, otherwise, they’re hosed.
Even the Official Roommate was tearing his hairs out over this one. Careful, you don’t want to go bald before it is time.

More apologies to Stephen Sondheim, Judy Collins, and all amorous couples:

Not from a bitch,
More than a pair.
Superior drug-sniffing dogs
They do declare.
But where are the clones?
Quick, send in the clones.
Don’t bother...they’re here.

It’s not what you think.
If you’ve noticed a change of typeface in the headings and sections on this blog (and of course, can’t miss the banner!), there’s a good reason for this. A very interesting article showed up over at the Los Angeles Saddam Times about the three campaigns’ typefaces and how people relate to them:

Typefaces with big round O’s and tails are considered more friendly, whereas linear fonts evoke overtones of “rigidity, technology and coldness,” according to British psychologist Dr. Aric Sigman who published a 2001 study, “The Psychology of Fonts.”
With artistic flourishes such as a tail on a lowercase “a,” serif styles “conjure images of trustworthiness,” whereas uncluttered sans serif styles “carry less emotional baggage,” he says.

It turns out Clinton’s main typeface is New Baskerville; Obama’s is Gotham (with his logo rendered in Requiem), and McCain’s is Optima, which turns out to be very significant in that Optima is the typeface used on the Vietnam Memorial, and it makes perfect sense, given his military service. The article is indeed interesting to consume.

Talk about nostalgia! When most countries die, they lose their top-level domain. Not so with the Soviet Union; their .su domain still exists...and registrations have gone up 45% in the last year alone.
Sure enough, it’s ripe ground for cybersquatting:

Vladimir Khramov, a network administrator from Moscow, said he bought “microsoft.su” last year simply to acquire an easy-to-remember ending for his e-mail address.
While Khramov insists he “did not buy it for reselling,” others are out to make a quick ruble. Yan Balayan registered a number of high-profile addresses, including “ussr.su,” “stalin.su” and “kgb.su”—he’s asking for $30,000 each, but stands ready to haggle.

I’ll bet Comrades Marx and Ulianov are spinning in their graves...at very high RPM mind you.

I’ll bet you’re wondering how something so geeky as an atom smasher can have some bulls**t story about it. Well allow me to tell you. It becomes bulls**t when some Hawaiian nut (NO, not a macadamia) sues the Feds, CERN and the National Science Foundation for their participation in a European project which, he says, could end up destroying the world! I have no idea what this guy is smoking, and I won’t be asking for this stuff any time soon.
Therefore, in the spirit of Charles, click the sound file for a dramatic reading of the headline.

I remember reading Mechanix Illustrated when I was a kid...ooohing and aaahing at the articles dealing with future technology. Here’s a peek at Life in the year 2008...as envisioned in November 1968.
Imagine that.

As much as I dislike Microsoft, they have the right to compete on the worldwide market as much as anyone else. Of course, the European Union doesn’t think so. Perhaps WriterMom has the right idea as to the operating system the EU should be forced to use:

Wow. Truly a Vile Interface Sure To Agonize!

The Official Roommate hit me with this, from a mailing:

Someone call the APC advertising department....

While I was poking around at this hour on one of my friend’s Facebook site (I have to admit, Facebook is a little bit more mature than MySpace, although it still has some sophomoric stuff on it, such as Werewolf Fighting..."See you next Tuesday"), I found this ad in a sidebar.
Now who in their right mind would blow $250 on Vista? Granted it’s the Ultimate Edition, but dang, Mac OS upgrades go for half that!

It’s been proven time and again that wartime brings forth mighty technological advances which ultimately disseminate down to peaceful applications. Next on the list is one which has been part of science fiction for a long time...the railgun:

The system, when fully developed, would send an electric current along parallel rails to shoot a shell more than 200 nautical miles, or 230 miles, at seven times the speed of sound and within five meters of the target. Conventional guns, by contrast, rely on chemical powders to launch projectiles.

You know what they say: Necessity is the Mother of Invention.

Now check this out:

Wouldn’t it be a blast if people actually found these and returned them to their “home,” namely, the University of Tokyo?

I’ve always admired Hewlett-Packard calculators. In my earliest college days at DeVry, there was a “friendly” rivalry between HP and “Texas Ignorance”; at various times in my life I’ve owned two of them: an HP-41C and later on, an HP-28S, which really pissed off my stats prof in 1991. So I decided to go back to my earliest geek roots to prepare for the future:

The reason I got this: I signed up for an investor development program at my place of employment. Last week I took a pre-assessment test, which I found out yesterday that I passed. I had one phone interview with a recruiter which went well, and another is scheduled for tomorrow. I want to obtain a Series 7 License and if I can get into this program (which I should know, one way or the other, in the next couple of days), my employer will sponsor me for the test. But I will have to put in some serious study time outside of work: 120 hours’ worth.
I’m serious. I want this.

For the last two generations, there were, and still are, Tupperware parties raging across the United States. And we won’t discuss the sex toy parties here; now the latest rage is this:

Why yes, it’s a Taser party in the comfort of your very own home, and the concept originated right here in Arizona. Amnesty International’s already whining about women empowering themselves with these weapons:

Mona Cadena, Amnesty International’s Western Regional director, says there are already reports of domestic violence using Tasers and other energy weapons.
“Of course, we want to stop violence against women like Dana’s saying,” she says. ”BUT [This means “Ignore everthing which was said BEFORE the ‘But’ - Ed."] we also want to ensure that Tasers don’t end up causing it too.”

Anthropomorphizing the Tasers, just like guns, is the liberal modus operandi to ensure disarmament of the populace. Well I got two words for ya, AI, and the second word is ‘you.’

I don’t get it. Why won’t Microsoft learn how NOT to release stuff like this in it?

SEATTLE—Microsoft Corp.’s Excel 2007 spreadsheet program is going to have to relearn part of its multiplication table.
In a blog post, Microsoft employee David Gainer said that when computer users tried to get Excel 2007 to multiply some pairs of numbers and the result was 65,535, Excel would incorrectly display 100,000 as the answer.
Gainer said Excel makes mistakes multiplying 77.1 by 850, 10.2 by 6,425 and 20.4 by 3,212.5, but the program appears to be able to handle 16,383.75 times 4.
“Further testing showed a similar phenomenon with 65,536 as well,” Gainer wrote Tuesday.

This is one more reason why I’m glad to be using Numbers. Hence the Numbers icon.