This is pretty corny, but funny…
Clad in body armor and armed with his trusty sword, an animated Michael Dell leads down-trodden customers from Proprietaryville to the bliss of Global Standardopolis. Joining him on this musical journey are EMC’s Joe Tucci, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, AMD’s Hector Ruiz and Intel’s Paul Otellini. Can our band of heroes defeat the evil “Big Iron” dragon and lead their customers to the Global Standardopolis? This video opened Dell’s keynote address at Oracle Open World.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4339465841627230401

swfobject.embedSWF(“http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=4339465841627230401″, “vvq-142-googlevideo-1″, “400″, “326″, “10″, vvqexpressinstall, { “wmode”: “opaque”, “allowfullscreen”: “true”, “allowscriptaccess”: …

via engadget:
We’ve alway known of Apple’s hopes to wean the masses off of their Windows peecees through the elegance of the iPod, but we’re afraid they’ve taken things a bit too far this time. According to Apple, less than one percent of their 5.5G iPod shipments made after September 12th have a little present in the form of the RavMonE.exe virus, which propagates via mass storage devices, and purportedly had infected a PC at the manufacturer where the iPods were produced. Apple has received 25 or so reports of …

Kevin Poulsen of Wired has a great article that shows the result of a PERL script he created to cross reference MySpace profiles with the National Sex Offender Public Registry. He’s idetified over 700 known sex offenders already and assisted in one arrest. Just another example how free software (PERL) can enhance and protect our lives.
In May, I began an automated search of MySpace’s membership rolls for 385,932 registered sex offenders in 46 states, mined from the Department of Justice’s National Sex Offender Registry website — a gateway to the …

I enjoy catching the amusing downtime messages these “Web 2.0″ sites come up with. last.fm is having a few problems:

and…

Dracos over at Dragon Steel Mods has a quick blurb up about his Maxtor hard drive that burst into flames, killing a small family… Okay, the small family part was made up but it sounded good.
I have a theory as to why it happend, Maxtor is teh suck!!11!!
Get a hard drive with a warranty man, Seagate totally pwnz!!! OMG!!11!!!! LOL!1!!! Maybe he was overclocking his HDD!!!!111!!!!ONE
Not sure why I felt the need to OMG, LOL and pwn, but it just felt right. Not as impressive as the exlpoding AMD Duron, …

Whoops! YouTube looks like they are a little more popular that they have expected to be. Unknown as to what the issue is just yet, but enjoy this little graphic they worked up explaining their site. Whatever happened to graceful errors? Redundant systems? I’ll update if I get any more information.
UPDATE: Funny text hidden in the source (right-click | view | source):
You have reached YouTube, the premier digital video repository on the Internet. We are currently working on the site.

We’ll be back soon…

UPDATE: No, we haven’t been hacked. Get a …

(via: digg) EFF has a post on the Convention on Cybercrime treaty that is up for vote in the Senate in the next two days. This treaty basically states that the US has to not only enforce it’s own poorly written “cybercrime” laws, but those of other countries. For instance, China regulary censors their citizens from writing anything derogatory or negative about China or anything relating to it. Most of those people have established blogs and use message boards outside of the country (usually the US) to be able to …

Now this is pretty slick (via newsvine):
With Typhoon Kaemi roaring toward China’s crowded southeast, Dr. Yang was sealing his apartment windows against the pounding rain when his cell phone buzzed to life.
“Typhoon forecast to make land this evening,” said the message sent to millions of mobile phones in the coastal city of Jinjiang and surrounding Fujian province. “Please attend to preparations.”
Once the domain of gossipy teenagers, text messages have become a key tool for Chinese authorities during this year’s unusually powerful typhoon season.
Nearly one-third of China’s 1.3 billion people has …

Finally, someone has done this. I can’t believe it’s taken this long, but hey I won’t complain. And where else would you find something like this but Think Geek.
And at $34.99 I’d lose money if I didn’t order it now! Only thing is, they don’t mention the amperage for it, but I’d probably just use it for my laptop which doesn’t take too much power anyway.

Today HP fired Alan Kay, you might not know Alan but he can be credited with the reason we have a mouse, a GUI, Object Oriented Programming Languages, laptop computers, and much more… This has to be the worst decision ever made by HP/Compaq, the second worst was scrapping the Alpha processors. I’m sure it won’t be hard for him to find work, if he even wants to.
I love how Good Morning Silicon Valley puts it: “HP converting storied garage into recycling center”
This via slashdot.org:
An anonymous reader writes …