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Bill Gates Will Pay You Money!

You know those chain emails that say Microsoft or AOL or Intel (or all three) are testing some sort of new email tracking technology and will pay you money for every person you forward the email to? If you’ve been using email for any length of time, you’ve probably seen it once or twice (or more times) and/or some variations of it. Well, you probably know it’s fake and now you can learn the history behind it. Pretty interesting… they track it all the way back to the originator. It is now considered the most active chain email of all time.

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Living Fossils

Due to the gradual warming and melting of the ice covering most of the Arctic Ocean, researchers are hurrying to explore the icey waters as quickly as possible. In one especially remote isolated segment of water called the Canada Basin, they expect to find creatures that have not interacted with the rest of the world’s oceans for millions of years. Wow!

Categories
toys

Convergence Devices

The number of convergence devices on the market continues to grow. For the time being, I’m defining convergence devices as anything that aims to bridge the gap between digital content stored on the computer and the entertainment system in the living room. Tivo’s Home Media Option is one such thing, though that’s actually an update to the regular series 2 Tivos rather than a new device. Here’s a device that does video and more formats of audio than the Tivo. That one joins this one from El Gato, the people who also make a Tivo-like product for the Mac that combines software with a firewire or usb device, as well as this one and this software for the ps2.

UPDATE: I found another one called Homepod.

UPDATE2: Yet another: Rokulabs.

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John Kerry’s Daughter

John Kerry appears to have a very talented daughter. She is a film director and is pictured at the Cannes film festival.

UPDATE: I changed the link since the Yahoo one expired.

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First Linux Desktop to Run Windows Apps at Full Speed

Element Computers has unveiled their own version of Linux called ION which has a mechanism for running Windows apps at full speed. It is pre-installed on all of their laptops and desktops and the only way to get ION is to buy one of their computers. It also allows copy and paste between Linux and Windows apps (more complicated than you might think) and takes some other steps to integrate the two. Seems pretty neat for organizations that want to start the transition but can’t leave behind any of their Windows apps. It’d be better to have native Linux versions of course, but that’s not going to be happening anytime soon (sorry if that bursts any bubbles).

Categories
musings

So, about that newish Metallica album

I was a metal guy in high school. A hessian, a hesher, a load, a metalhead, whatever. Metallica wasn’t my favorite band, but they were pretty much always my second favorite. They were the band that everyone into any sort of guitar-music remotely aggressive in nature was into. I’m pretty much preaching to the choir here, because if you listened to Metallica back then (late 80’s, early 90’s) you know what I’m talking about and if you didn’t you probably won’t ever know.

Metallica has basically sucked for the past few albums. The black album (titled simply Metallica, the one after …And Justice for All) was the end of anything listenable from them. I don’t know what happened, but I was pretty much personally offended when it did happen. They turned into an everyday crappy rock band. Their latest album, St. Anger, was supposed to be a bit of a return to the ‘old’ Metallica… harder and rawer. I applauded the effort but didn’t really feel the need to check it out. Then I read an article about the production of the album in Sound on Sound magazine and it sounded like they went through and interesting process to create it. That intrigued me enough to give it a listen. On first listen… It’s definitely harder and rawer than their past several crap albums… but there’s still something completely missing from it. It just doesn’t have that thing in it that was what Metallica was all about. Listening to Master of Puppets again tonight completely confirmed it. They used to have something really going on… and they lost it somewhere along the way. I’m going to give the St. Anger songs some more listens, but I’m not real optimistic about it growing on me.

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First Non-Governmental Manned Trip to Outer-Space

A ship called SpaceShipOne built by Aviation Pioneer Burt Rutan has successfully flown to an altitude of about 100 km, leaving the Earth’s atmosphere. This is the first such launch as 25 companies vie for the $10M X-Prize. Commercial voyages into space are almost definitely going to become a semi-regular thing within my lifetime.

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outside

THe EFF’s Doctorow on Why DRM is BAD

I’m of the opinion that the major music labels are some of the dumbest and greediest companies on the planet, and DRM is the only thing they’re going to ‘trust’ for the time-being, but in the long-run, DRM is clearly bad for me, and Cory Doctorow explains why it’s all-around bad for every person and company involved. It’s a good read if you think about this stuff at all.

Categories
musings

Sneak Preview of new Submodern Album

Art and I are still working hard (well, most of the time) on getting our album done. To appease the roaring hunger you all have for some new music, we’ve put up a few songs on our site. Go check them out and help us name them! We’ve been too busy working on the music to come up with names.

Categories
musings

History of Barbie

A friend sent a link to a history of the Barbie doll. Barbie was the first ‘adult’ doll widely sold in the US. Previously, all dolls had been in the ‘baby’ format. The social and cultural impact the Barbie doll has had on the United States is quite significant and it’s fun to find out where that all originated. It’s fun to know that the first Barbie doll was based on a “gold-digging character from a ‘racy’ comic strip”.