AT&T forces new BlackBerry phone to be stunted so as to not outshine iPhone

http://blackberrycool.com/2007/08/16/005386/
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/18/1913246

The new phone has GPS capability, and AT&T doesn't want it to seem more cool than the iPhone. Never mind that the iPhone is not suitable for corporate use, whereas the BlackBerry is, never mind that you have a weird text messaging paradigm vs BlackBerry's qwerty keyboard. Never mind that AT&T will lose a lot of corporate business when their customers realize what they've done and that Verizon will be happy to be their BlackBerry service provider, complete with GPS functionality.

Myself, I'm not a fan of the BlackBerry. I thought that I was going to get one at work, and now that I've found out that it's strictly a messaging device, I'm not sure that I want one. I need a device that I can remotely administer my servers if I have to, and though I might be able to cobble together some sort of system where I could email SQL commands to my servers and they would send the results back the same way, I think I'd rather have a WinCE device that allows interaction with my servers at the GUI administrator level.

PC Magazine editor-in-chief gives up on Vista

Hmmm. You'd think that an EIC would be good enough a geek, or have access to good enough geeks, to keep a system running well.

Any editorial that can cleverly use a quote from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation is a good one IMHO.

http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=213291,00.asp

Nuke plant shuts down because the river that cools it is too hot!

The Tennessee Valley Authority plant shut down a reactor because the river has averaged 90 degrees for a 24-hour period.

Bummer.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/energy/5061439.html

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/18/131226

One of the Slashdot responses was interesting:

"A little noted fact of the cold war is that a very large amount of the US total electrical generation capacity is in the TVA region (Tennessee River - Dependent) The loss of this reactor is serious as the whole USA has no reserve capacity at peak load and with the heat wave over the East USA this is a critical loss. If it were the only reactor in danger this might be of no concern. The US TVA operates 5 big reactors and numerous coal fired plants all of which have the Tennessee River at thermal capacity to cool them and the river is dropping daily.

If heavy sustained rain does not fall on the Tennessee River Valley over the next 3 to 4 months an event which is historically unlikely, the loss of something close to 15 times the Browns Ferry reactor in capacity is likely to hit the USA. There is nothing to pick up the load. The loss of this one reactor is nearly equal to all the wind energy the USA generates. This loss threatens the operations of every one of the 48 US States. With the possible loses in Alabama Power pools and their reactors etc as well as Georgia Power, this poses the very real risk of cutting the energy supply of the USA by a very large fraction. As I write the North Alabama region is short 60 inches of rain over the past 18 months. The US TVA has been drawing down storage for 5 years now. There is no reserve and little prospect of one for some years to come.

I had warning of this imminent event when the City of Huntsville requested from TVA more water for its treatment plant and was turned down for supply. I knew then that the supply was gone."

Coffee Swilling Beaver!

http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2007081527618.gif

Heh.

Class action law suit started against RIAA et al!

It accuses the defendants of illegal lawsuits, shoddy investigations, harassment, etc. Should be a lot of fun to watch as it moves forward, after all, what are lawsuit junkies going to watch now that SCO vs IBM etc. is dying down.

http://www.p2pnet.net/story/13077

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/17/1728225

Have you heard of the people search engine called Spock?

You might want to look up your name on it. They stealthily got a bunch of MySpace users to fill out a sniglets-like app and it then used their responses to populate profiles on their search engine.

Frighteningly, it had a lot of entries for my name, none of them me. But the first response was someone in Phoenix that had some scary associations with my past, none of which actually connected to me: this guy is a car painter apparently.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/news/2007/08/spock_reputation

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum's program book

A community theatre group put on the play, we saw the final performance last night. I was reading the program book and came across this wonderful line:

(actor) "has been a native of Alamogordo for the last 11 years." He was kinda tall and had a very good singing voice for someone that young, I think it was probably steroid use. Apparently the players wrote their own bios, equally apparently no one proofed them.

I DID IT!

I just completed my semi-resolution! Back on January 10, I stated my quest to listen to my entire music library, literally from A to Z!

And tonight I just finished with Zydeco from Cirque Du Soliel's Quidam album!

That's approximately 5500 songs representing 15.4 days (over 900 hours) of continuous listening. Needless to say, it has not been continuous! And the list hasn't been exactly strictly alphabetical: a few new albums have been acquired or found while cleaning and mixed in. That also excludes most music longer than 10 minutes and most duplicates from collection or greatest hits albums, though it does not exclude live performance dupes. I just wish that I'd been able to do it on one PC: I started on my Thinkpad, but it developed problems and had to have the OS reinstalled, which, of course, wiped the iTunes playlists. Rebuilding the list wasn't difficult, but it does mean that my Mac only shows me listening to 3300 songs since 4/25 when my lovely and never sufficiently praised wife bought me my 13" MacBook. That user account was transferred to my current laptop, 15" MacBook Pro, about a month ago and the history is complete from that point further.

So if someone asks me where I was at 9:13PM on September 19, 2007, I can tell them that I don't have a clue, but I was listening to Jethro Tull's "And the Mouse Police Never Sleeps".