Forrester Research has unleashed a bit of ire from Microsoft Nasdaq: MSFT Free Trial. Security Software As A Service From Webroot. Latest News about Microsoft with an analyst report suggesting large corporations might do well to sit out the Vista era of Windows.

Analyst Thomas Mendel s July 23 report on enterprise Rackspace now offers green hosting solutions at the same cost without sacrificing performance. Make the eco-friendly choice. trends contained a brief mention of Vista, comparing it to New Coke -- Coca-Cola s NYSE: KO Latest News about Coca-Cola disastrous reformulation of its NAMEsake product in 1985. Public outcry forced the company to backtrack and reintroduce the old drink.

Here s a tip, Mendel wrote. Consider following the lead of Microsoft s most important partner Intel and re-evaluating the case for Vista.

Only 8.8 percent of enterprise computers were running Vista as of June, up from 6.2 percent in January, according to the report. XP was the most prevalent OS, running on 87.1 percent of the 50,000 desktops included in the survey.

If it aint broke dont fix it, or atleast dont replace it with just more issues....

MS Blasts Forrester's Sensational Anti-Vista Report

About a week ago, Phil T. & I finished and released our first video! Its called Citizen Engineer. We finally fixed a lingering audio codec problem and so I invite you to watch it.

Citizen Engineer is an online video series about OPEN source hardware,
electronics, art and hacking by Limor Ladyada Fried of Adafruit
Industries & Phillip pt Torrone of MAKE magazine. The first video
debuts at “The Last HOPE” conference in New York City.

Volume 01 - Phones: SIM card & payphone hacking
Learn how a SIM card works the small card inside GSM cell phones
make a SIM card reader, view deleted messages, phone book entries and
clone/crack a SIM card.

Modify a “retired” payphone so it can be used as a home telephone and
for VoIP Skype . Then learn how to modify the hacked payphone so it
accepts quarters - and lastly, use a Redbox to make “free phone” calls
from the modified coin-accepting payphone.

Basically its me messing around with electronics. I liked making these videos because I got to play around more than I normally do. Not having to design a ‘payphone kit’ means more time spent learning all about payphones. I’m already planning the next video :

Good video! Check it out...

Citizen Engineer Vol. 1 : Phones... SIM card & payphone hacking

When I was a kid my parents got this six-LP set of science-themed folk songs for my sister and me. They were produced in the late 1950s / early 1960s by Hy Zaret and Lou Singer. Zaret s main claim to fame is writing the lyrics to the classic Unchained >Melody for the 1955 movie Unchained , later recorded by the Righteous Brothers and more recently used in Ghost . Three of the albums the best three in my opinion were performed by Tom Glazer, semi-famous 1940s folk musician and somewhat of a lyricist himself he wrote On Top of Spaghetti .

The Singing Science lyrics were very Atomic Age, while the tunes were generally riffs on popular or genre music of the time. We played them incessantly.

In February 1998 I found the LPs in my parents basement. I cleaned them up, played them one last time on an old turntable, and burned them onto a set of three CD-R discs. In December 1999 I read the songs back off the CDs and encoded them into MP3, so now you can hear them on the web. They are available at either 32 Kbps about half a megabyte each or 160 Kbps about two megabytes each . The higher-quality MP3 versions were encoded by Ron Hipschman.

OMFG! These are great... Science Anyone?

Singing Science Records....

Tuesday, 22 July 2008

Our press release is up regarding Free Part Day on August 6, 2008.

Some details:

* We will have two stock materials/thicknesses available for making your part on Free Part Day: waterjet cut aluminum 6061 1/8 (0.125) inches thick and laser cut acrylic plastic, 0.118 inches thick.
* There is a limit of one design (DXF/PNG/GIF or Big Blue Saw Designer file) per customer.
* Designs are limited in size to 9" x 9".
* We reserve the right to reject designs that are too complex or can't be made on the waterjet or the laser.
* You must pay the packaging and shipping costs.
* All orders must be completed through the online ordering process.

Start designing your parts now!

This is cool... I think I am going to order a custom fin for a water ski!

Big Blue Saw Free Part Day!

SYDNEY (Reuters) - An Australian man's dare went horribly wrong when he tried to play chicken with cars on a freeway wearing only his underwear. The 18 year old was critically injured after being hit by a four-wheel drive on a freeway in the southern city of Melbourne in the early hours of Wednesday, police said in a statement.

"Police are dismayed at the utter stupidity of a man who decided to play chicken on the Tullamarine Freeway," the statement said.

"It was lucky nobody was killed as a result and police couldn't believe anybody would be foolish enough to take such grave risks with their personal safety and that of other road users." The driver and passenger in the car were unhurt, though the vehicle was a write-off

Who the hell is this guy... Worth the ticket to fly there so I can finish where "un-natural" selection did not succeed...

Underwear chicken dare puts man in hospital

A second Federal Communications Commission Democrat voted against Sirius Satellite Radio Inc.'s plan to buy XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc., leaving the merger's fate to the sole undecided Republican.

Democrat Jonathan Adelstein, who voted against the $3.5 billion merger today, said in an e-mailed statement that the combination would create ``a monopoly with window dressing.'' Fellow Democrat Michael Copps already voted no.

Two Republican commissioners, Chairman Kevin Martin and Robert McDowell, have backed the merger, leaving the outcome to the agency's fifth member, Deborah Taylor Tate, a Republican who has yet to vote. A telephone call to her office wasn't returned. Reuters reported Tate is nearing a ``yes'' vote, without saying where it got the information.

``Commissioner Adelstein would only cast a dissenting vote once it was fairly clear that Commissioner Tate would support the deal,'' Paul Gallant, a former FCC official and Washington- based analyst with Stanford Washington Research Group, said in an interview. He continues to predict approval.

Commissioners, who face no deadline for a decision, vote electronically at the time of their choosing.

Traditional radio companies led by the National Association of Broadcasters oppose the merger, saying it will create a harmful monopoly. Sirius and XM, the only two pay-radio companies, told regulators their union would bring consumers more programming at a lower cost.

``a monopoly with window dressing?'' These are pay services... I don't understand what the squib is all about!

XMrius/SiriXM.... FCC Quibs on Vote..

Apparently alarmed about the ongoing decline in their page views and associated ad revenue, the folks at Tom’s Hardware posted an inflammatory article about The SSD Power Consumption Hoax several days ago. It got picked up just about everywhere in the technosphere; one of the latecomers was good old Robin Harris, who immediately used its faulty conclusions to repeat his and his clients’ related message in Notebooks SSDs are dead.

So lets see, when did "the folks at Tom’s Hardware" become experts at everything?

Read on....

Modern Jackass: SSD Power Consumption (SSD is Dead???)

Michael Savage, the incendiary radio host who last week characterized nearly every child with autism as “a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out,” said in a telephone interview on Monday that he stood by his remarks and had no intention of apologizing to those advocates and parents who have called for his firing over the matter.

Now main stream media as we know likes to speak before they think. And I think this is the case... should he be fired, NO, thats why we have the freedom to speak our minds... but I think the war on stupidity is far from over...

Late Monday afternoon, Aflac, the insurance company, announced it was withdrawing all advertising from Mr. Savage's show. "We understand that radio hosts pick on any number of targets," Laura Kane, a company spokeswoman, said in a statement, before adding that Aflac considered "his recent comments about autistic children to be both inappropriate and insensitive.”

So now he has lost $$$ for his show and I am 100% positive someone else will pick up the slack... But I really think that it is funny that misinformed people get paid to say anything about everything... Kind of makes me want to start a magazine called, "Modern Jackass," and Mr. Savage would be on the August Ed....

:P

Modern Jackass: Savage Stands by Autism Remarks

Full time job has me offline and school starting is a blast...

Nick & Tom give me an update, and let me know when you stop by the 'ville.

Gone, Gone, Gone

If you had to choose, would you rather Twitter get its act together on uptime issues, or mediate all the disputes that arise between members of the community at large?

Based on the buzz in the blogosphere the last several days, I’m getting some severely mixed signals. On the one hand, you have folks saying that all their new venture capital should be devoted purely to making themselves stable. On the other hand, you have this whole cadre of folks that have cropped up in the last several hours behind the banner of Ariel Waldman essentially saying that Twitter should focus on community building and legalese.

In case you’ve missed the tempest in the teacup, the latest uproar over Twitter has surprisingly very little to do with uptime, and everything to do with the use of a number of four-letter words in connection to a blogger. Ariel Waldman, who’s resume includes workplaces like Suicide Girls, Engadget, Pownce and AdRants, has had something of a problem with a fellow Twitterer engaging in abusive behavior over Twitter:

“In June 2007, I unfortunately found myself on the receiving end of multiple accounts of harassment from a user on Twitter. When the user started using my full name in their harassing tweets, I reported the harassment as a form of cyberbullying to Twitter’s community manager.

Ariel Waldman’s War on Twitter...