Gadgetopia

Michael Dell's House: We've talked about Bill Gates house before, but here are some pictures of Michael Dell's. Here's an overhead show.

Jackson Web Site Unites, Divides Legal Profession: Michael Jackson set up a Web site to counter child molestation charges. Now the prosecutor's office has done the same. There's an interesting debate on the effectiveness and appropriateness of this. Some legal experts said that posting documents detailing the criminal charges against ...

Stepping up to a giant: A very interesting interview with Michael Robertson, CEO of Lindows. I didn't know that he was the force behind MP3.com. It's interesting that he chose to do Lindows rather than just retire of the sale of that company. "...it goes back to the fact there ...

Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Computer, has gone on record saying that he'd sell Dell hardware loaded with OS X, if he could. If Apple decides to open the Mac OS to others, we would be happy to offer it to our customers, Fortune writer David Kirkpatrick has asked several ...

Welcome to Save Disney: Web spin is all the rage these days. Martha Stewart started it with a site to refute the charges against her. Michael Jackson recently did the same. Now a Disney heir and an ex-Disney board member have set up a site solely to attack Michael Eisner ...

20 Year Archive on Google Groups: Here's an oldie but a goodie that I stumbled on again today. Google mined its Usenet archive for the first mention of various events and pop culture icons. For instance, the first mention of Michael Jordan was dated to February 1993 by some guy ...

Michael Robertson (the guy from MP3.com, Linspire, and now SIPPhone) writes up "Michael's Minute" a few times a month, which is sort of a letter to customers that's often informative, but usually relates to MS-vs-Linux type issues. This week, though, he wrote a thinker of a piece on how far ...

Apple Surpasses Dell's Market Value Nine years after Michael Dell said he'd shut down Apple and give the money to the shareholders, Apple has passed Dell in market value, at $72,132,428,843 compared to Dell's $71,970,702,760.

Lindows.com - Michael's Minutes: Name Change: Lindows is changing their name because they're sick of getting sued. This is the right way to go. Far be it for me to defend Redmond, but the name was an obvious attempt to capitalize on Microsoft's market recognition. Besides, if your product is ...

Dell Patents "Reboot and See If That Fixes It" Tech Support Process: Funny, but shouldn't Microsoft be patenting this one? "Dell announced that they had been granted a patent for the 'reboot and see if that fixes it' technical support process, which they pioneered. 'We're really taking our cue from ...

Jet fighter downs Schu: Hats off to people who are willing to waste massive amounts of taxpayer money to do geeky stuff like this. An Italian Air Force fighter jet defeated Michael Schumacher's Ferrari 2-1 today in three races down a military airport's rain-soaked runways. Schumacher's Ferrari F2003-GA proved to ...

It's floating around the blog-world today that Dell is shipping Firefox pre-installed on all its machines in the U.K. If so, that's deceptively huge news. Blake Ross from the Firefox group has confirmed this. Now if they would only make it the default browser.... Bill Gates must be seriously hating ...

Private spacecraft makes historic launch: SpaceShipOne is in the air as I write this, trying to become the first private, manned vehicle in space. I wish them every success toward this goal. Thousands gathered in the Mojave Desert to watch the launch of SpaceShipOne, the first private manned space flight. ...

Oklahoma Full Auto Shoot: Here s a five-minute video of a full auto shoot somewhere in Oklahoma where folks take their machine guns and just go nuts. Included is the heart-warming footage capped above, where a girl no more than six-years-old spits hot death downrange with her daddy s machine gun. You ll ...

Michael Chaney's Personal Web Page at Doublewide: Since Microsoft apparently forgot to renew the hotmail.co.uk domain, to disastrous consequences, I think it's only fitting that we look back on the time they forgot to review hotmail.com back in 1999. Here's the story from the guy who fixed that problem with ...

Companies lining up for state's huge laptop order: And they're all going to be wireless-capable, too. "Michigan is getting ready to place a technology order that just may be the biggest single purchase of computers ever ‐ 130,000 laptops, enough to give one to every sixth-grade student in the state. ...

Movies of Software: On the heels of Jon Udell's Wikipedia screencast, I got to wondering how to make my own. I found this O'Reilly article by...Jon Udell, where he talks about the concept of screencasts, and links to several examples. In the software world, we spend a lot of time ...

I've been reading a lot lately about the rise and fall of ArsDigita. This company grew from five people in the late nineties to 240 people in five offices doing $20 million in revenue by 2001. They did high-end Web development, and open-sourced the ArsDigita Community System (www.openacs.org). Somewhere along ...

Gates still the richest, but Google guys moving up: Once again, I am not on the list. But, once again, it's dominated by geeks. Bill Gates, Microsoft's co-founder and chairman, was the nation's wealthiest person for the 11th straight year with a net worth of $51 billion [...] Perhaps more ...

Lindows.com - Michael's Minutes: Apparently somone found a FrontPage meta tag on one of the pages on the Lindows site, and they contacted the company about it. This announcement was made shortly after. "...we're kicking off Nvu (pronounced N-view). This product will bring to Linux a solid WYSIWYG HTML editor ...

Celebrities let their Web sites do the talking: This has been kind of an interesting trend. The Internet can remove a lot of the layers between star and fan. Britney Spears confided that she was taking a break after years of being pushed by "advisers." Melissa Etheridge spoke candidly about ...

Trial begins for Phillies fan accused of e-mail hacking: Being a crazy sports fan is okay. Spoofing the email address of area sportwriters and spamming thousands of people in the metro area, apparently, is not. But yesterday, Carlson sat alone in a federal courtroom in Philadelphia, the accused boo-bird who ...

Meet the Life Hackers: Here is scientific proof that bigger computer screens make you more productive. The stats are buried in another article about general productivity (I think -- I didn't read all of it). On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - ...

World wants more say in control of World Wide Web: Here's a good summary of the whole "who controls the Internet" issue that's making noise. Did you know it started with porn? More specifically, with the approval of the proposed ".xxx" TLD: It wasn't a moral judgment. ICANN's job ...

Lawmaker: E-mails show Brown 'out of touch' during Katrina: If you're a government employee, watch what you send in an email, because all of it may get regurgitated very publicly. Emails sent by former FEMA chief Michael Brown around the time Katrina beat up on New Orleans have been published. ...

Here is a fantastic article by Michael Bacarella about how to build secure software. In it, Bacarella expresses his anger at the crappy software some people write and presents a laundry list at how to write better systems. To wit: "The user is pure evil. All data entered into an ...

Wired 11.07: Slammed!: Here's the story that Wired took some heat about. The first page is a harrowing look at the spead of the SQL Slammer virus written in a style that would make Michael Crichton proud. The second page tells you how it works. "By 12:45 am, huge sections ...

Apple introduces dual-boot software Seems Apple wasn't too worried about folks hacking their new Intel Macs to boot windows. They've been working on a solution themselves and it appears to be much more polished than anything a guy who never sees the sun could ever hope to create. Apple today ...

Schools ask parents to pay up before kids log on: Fullerton wants all their kids to have laptops. And they want all the parents to pay for them, The public school system in this quiet city 27 miles southeast of Los Angeles is pushing the frontiers of computer technology in ...

SIPphone - Call worldwide over your broadband Internet connection with any phone: This is a new IP telephony service started by Michael Roberston, the guy behind Lindows and MP3.com (he's not a magnet for controversy or anything...). SIPphone makes it possible for people to send and receive free calls worldwide. ...

The Zombine Hunters: This article is scary. Crackers tried to get this company to pay $10,000 in protection money. The company refused, and it now costs them a half-million a year just to stay online. A brutal story. Michael Alculumbre's first communication from the extortionists arrived on a Thursday evening ...

Whatever Will Be Will Be Free on the Internet: I ve always had two universal truths about music swapping: It s illegal. The music industry better figure out a way to live with it, because there s no way to stop it. You can t stick toothpaste back in the tube. Close one music ...

I suppose that FCC blogging regulations require us to muse on Google Talk for a bit. For folks that have been using IM since ICQ was king (like me, and I'm betting most of you), the Google Talk client itself looks pretty poor. It's missing features that AIM and ICQ ...

Michelin tells teams not to race U.S. Grand Prix: Michelin, who supplied tires for 14 Forumla One teams in this weekend's U.S. Grand Prix, announced after qualifying that their tires were not safe on the final turn at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Problem: In Formula One, you're not allowed to change ...

Alex Salkever of Business Week has written an open letter to Apple's Steve Jobs in a recent column that provides some interesting perspectives on where Apple should go next in terms of its computer business. Most of his points are awfully hard to argue with. You've been to Target, right? ...

Interview with George Clooney - On Career, Sex And Politics: Ever wonder what stars think about all the stuff written about them on the Internet? Well, this is one of the most simply inventive things I ve seen in a while: Esquire sat George Clooney down to surf the Web about ...

Let me play industry analyst for a second and explain why I think computer manufacturers are in deep kimshee: Hardware has vastly out-paced software. Besides gaming, there's no compelling reason to upgrade your computer. I'm still running on a 1GHz/384MB machine I had built for me two years ago. I ...

They say everyone has a dark side. I found mine a few weeks ago. It turns out that it s only about three inches of pedal travel away. You see, the latest Corvette has massive block of power sitting directly under your right foot. Push it down hard, and a ...