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| Notice: GeekPress is back up and running, thanks to Paul! It's still a not-so-serious tech news blog, but the format is significantly looser. Diana, having given up programming for philosophy, has her own philosophical blog NoodleFood. More of her work can be found at DianaHsieh.com. |
| Microsoft looks attractive to ex-employees |
| 12:00:43 am mst / 19 January 2001 found by paul / filed in business / source NY Times 64 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| Many former MS employees who left to join internet startups are returning to the "mother ship" in the aftermath of the dotcom downturn. One such returnee was Marc McDonald, who had been "issued badge number 00001 in 1976 when the company was known as Micro-Soft and based in Albuquerque", and who came back after his company was bought out by MS. |
| Some of the reasons they gave for returning sounded good, but there's a very thin line between reasons and rationalizations. |
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| Lego Porn |
| 1:08:08 am mst / 19 January 2001 found by paul / filed in culture / source Salon 413 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| Salon magazine pointed us towards this site featuring Lego pornography. |
| Warning: Some of these are surprisingly disgusting given that they're just a bunch of Legos! |
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| Voters capable of understanding political satire |
| 8:18:36 am mst / 19 January 2001 found by paul / filed in politics / source Wired 28 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| In 1999, President Clinton signed a law demanding that the Commerce Department investigate whether political satire websites like gwbush.com or hillary200.org confuse the voters or "disrupt the electoral process". Their report released yesterday concluded that there's no need for any laws regulating websites using the candidates' names. |
| Finally, a government agency that doesn't automatically assume that citizens are morons. |
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| Copy protection on Whistler easily cracked |
| 9:24:11 am mst / 19 January 2001 found by paul / filed in software / source Register 241 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| It's a very simple regedit hack. Click through to read the details. |
| The article also makes the following wise observation on human nature, "[T]he greater the inconvenience for the user that comes with anti-piracy measures, the more likely the users are going to feel morally justified in ripping the protection off. Whistler protection sounds like one of Microsoft's most inconvenient methods ever, so go figure." |
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| More transforming robots |
| 11:42:48 am mst / 19 January 2001 found by paul / filed in robotics / source BBC News 55 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| A research group at Darmouth is working on modular self-configuring "molecular robots" that can combine together and morph into the optimal shape to perform a desired job. The eventual goal is to develop infinitely flexible "radically deformable" microscopic robot clusters. |
| Sounds very similar to the Smart Dust project at UC Berkeley. |
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| Evil Indeed |
| 6:20:46 pm mst / 19 January 2001 found by diana / filed in games / source Misc 239 hits / 1 comment / 0 e-mails |
| A few days ago, BBspot posted a link titled "Evil Evil Evil" to this addictive puzzle game. It's not the usual sort of GeekPress posting, but Paul and I thought that we ought to spread around some of the anti-productivity it has brought us! |
| read 1 comment |
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| Blackberry reviewed |
| 7:26:31 pm mst / 19 January 2001 found by paul / filed in handhelds / source ZDNet 81 hits / 0 comments / 0 e-mails |
| Jesse Berst reviews the Blackberry wireless e-mail/pager. He does a good job summarizing the pros and cons. |
| It's definitely not for everybody, but the people who I know who use them swear by it. |
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