Category: Uncategorized

They work! They work! Many thanks to the WPvideo plugin.

Cisco Systems announced the acquisition today. WebEx, the original online collabrative tool, posted sales of $380 million with profit of around $47 million (according to Om). How in the hell is a company with $380 million in sales worth nearly ten times that at sale?

A little anecdote for Cisco; I recently participated in an evaluation of your new acquisition. I know other people have done the same in our larger orginization. You weren’t even in the running. Lack of bundled VoIP, a typical market leader’s sales pitch, and stiff competition combined with out of market pricing.. what a winning combination.

I seriously hope Cisco has some major initiatives planned for WebEx properties. There are far better products out there for considerably less money. I would think for $3.2 billion, Cisco could have built, from the ground up, a better competitive product. I sure hope this isn’t Cisco’s Skype.

Randomly surfing tonight and ran across The Skeptic Report. Among the many interesting questions posed on the site was this one:

Gonorrhea
It is a strictly human disease. Did the Good Lord bestow the gift of gonorrhea on Adam, or was it Eve? Who carried it onto the Ark? Why would God instruct Noah to carry any disease organisms or parasites onto the Ark? One of Noah’s family had to have been infected, but they were the only people worthy enough to be saved on the whole Earth. Which one had the clap? Why would He create anything so nasty anyway?

Well isn’t that an nasty little problem. You can read many other niggling little issues with The Flood story here. Of course, the whole thing could be explained away by allowing that the Noah story was a rip-off amalgamation of many near east flood stories. But that raises nasty questions about the origins of Christianity.

Nah, it’s just easier to dismiss all that troublesome history by claiming Christianity really existed before it ever came into being.

I asked once, I’m asking again. After blackballing Kotaku, making Slashdot, Gizmodo, and half the tech blogs in North America, Sony relented and let Kotaku back into the fold. Oh, and basically confirmed the rumor that Kotaku had reported on.

This is the latest in a series of missteps by Sony. First, Sony Entertainment President Jack Tretton issued a “bounty” on any PS3s in the wild to the tune of $1200 per unit. Penny Arcade responded with a $13,200 per hour comic. Then, based on a disastrous presentation at E3 (actual sentence pairing: “Based on actual Japanese history. So here’s this Giant Enemy Crab.”), entrepreneurial webbies have remixed the speech into, well, stuff like this.

Since we now know that Sony execs actually can read, and tend to read people that write about them, you’d think they’d have been given a clue when vids like this show up on YouTube. Alas, it is not to be so.

I’ve sworn off Sony products. I’ve owned a Vaio, a DVD player, a PlayStation, and a camera. PlayStation was solid. The Vaio had it’s issues at the end; I sold it after getting too frustrated rebuilding it every 2 months. The camera we bought for our vacation crapped out within six months of purchase. The DVD player, after one year of use, would skip at exactly 1:12 into any movie. I refuse to spend $600 on a gaming console.

How many more people like me are they creating every day? Makes you wonder how long they have.

Exhibit 1:

http://www.leenks.com/link488.htm

As the digg user SanTe (provider of the link) said, “Your move.”

Consumerist.com has been reporting for the past few days that CompUSA will be closing 100 of their 229 stores nationwide. While hopes of fire sales have been dashed by tipsters, no one knew which stores would be closing. Well, today it appears that CompUSA’s website has revealed the stores that are closing by omission. If your local store isn’t on this list (and Ann Arbor isn’t), it’s going to be closing.

Too bad, I like CompUSA. They may not have had the best prices on some stuff, but they usually had better selection on DIY parts and peripherals than Best Buy. Oh, and actual Apple products to drool over without going to Livonia.

[via Consumerist]

From Toothpaste For Dinner blog

Everything in Second Life seems to be coated in a preteen’s understanding of sex. It was very titty-booby pee-pee doo-doo. From the fantasy asses to the cyber-ruins surrounding Freebie Warehouse, there really was nothing but clumsy cybersex. I wandered through this wasteland for a while, until I finally came to a normal-looking store, with windows, and people inside, so I went in.

The store sold penises, and penis avatars. I didn’t actually get to see what they looked like, because I didn’t have any fake money to spend (and I wasn’t really interested in chipping in twenty bucks to these cats’ weird sex trip.) A pet penis, which would follow you around and “come on command” (I’m guessing you have to right-click and load a script and wait thirty seconds is what they mean by “command”) was 100 fakebucks, which converted to US$0.68.

Where’s my credit card?!?

Is there such a phobia? A fear of somehow outing yourself as a geek, nerd, or dweeb simply by getting a joke?

Also, I realize the whole “i’m in ur ___ doing somethin’ to your ___” meme is old, but damnit, cats are funny. (They have to be, or I’d strangle mine.)

That said, this combines both of those sentences in one, hilarious image.

(A click embiggens us all)

By the by, if you’d like to see almost every one of those cats pictures (and then some), go here.

Ack, this was my life not that long ago…

Neatorama » Blog Archive » Middle Ages Tech Support.

Vista Install Problems? – Shred The Disc

Check out Anthony from the Opie & Anthony Show as he reacts to his experience with upgrading to Windows Vista.

Apple would like to thank Microsoft, Anthony, and half the Internet for this new market share. Not to sound like a fanboy, but I predict that Apple will have 35% market share and one major corporation will very publically and very angrily switch their entire desktop IT infrastructure over to Macs by the end of the year.

My XP box will hold me just fine for the time being, although my next computer is in question. However, Microsoft is managing this disaster of a release the wrong way. When XP came out, the Internet was big, but it wasn’t ubiquatous; Microsoft was able to manage the message much better through the mainstream media.

But with Vista’s release, the Internet is everywhere. Hell, you can get online from your kitchen. Every misstep, every botched install, every stupid bug is being detailed for the entire world to see on YouTube, hear about on podcasts, or virtually experience via any number of blogs. I’m not saying the program had to be perfect; it’s software, that’s not realistic. But, seriously, respond. Don’t run around telling people that Windows Vista isn’t exploitable. After 5 years, Microsoft should have planned seriously and purposefully for the PR nightmare that was going to ensue when problems started surfacing; coddle some celebrities, toss a few free concillatory licenses to B- or C-level bloggers, something.

The deployment of a piece of software that, by one paper’s calculations cost upwards of $10 billion to develop, should have been far more appealing and better managed. Yes, you have launch parties. Yes, you do the stump speeches and talk shows. But you also prep your market for what is likely to be a bumpy upgrade. You tell people, “hey, this is a very new way of using Windows, you’re going to have some problems. By the way, here’s a workaround for your issue.” You prevent middle-tier celebrities from shredding your product on YouTube.

As the Seattle Times said, this could be the last of its kind.