May Contain Nuts

Our office just got a penis enlargement spam message.

Through our FAX MACHINE.

I kid you not.  I’m going to see if I can abscond with it at lunch and scan it for the sake of posterity.  And humor.  Mostly humor.

For some unknown reason I have actually reloaded this site no less than a half-dozen times today after discovering it through Engadget.  I find myself simultaneously frustrated and relieved that the site’s status hasn’t changed in 4 hours.

As was suggested by a co-worker, they really need some sort of notification service you can sign up for in the event that it ever does change.  Given that the LHC has someone familiar with such scenarios on-staff, I’m somewhat more conerned than I might be otherwise.

(I jest)

This made me chuckle… it’s a bit dated, but then I haven’t had much time to do much reading lately.  Work deadlines suck (the life out of me).  Anyway, on with the funny.

They tell us it’s the iWay or the highway. We think that’s a sad message. Software out there is made to be compatible with your whole life.

- Brad Brooks, VP of Vista Marketing (on Apple’s “Get a Mac” ads)

The most amusing part of this is that the current screensaver du-jour on all of the retail Mac boxes I’ve seen (at least at the Mac shop in the local Best Buy, because Spokane isn’t important enough to have its own Apple store) - as well as the marketing lingo on the Get a Mac page on Apple’s website - touts the Mac as being the most compatible machine you can buy.  The fact that Microsoft, which can’t even build a completely-compatible version of Office for the Mac, is the company saying it is just icing on the cake, really.  With the exception of a .NET IDE, a version of Windows Media Player for the Mac capable of supporting WMP9 DRM (both Microsoft products, surprise surprise) and 3ds MAX, there isn’t a single application or file format that I need to use that the Mac can’t handle, and the only time I’ve run into a software incompatibility running the other direction is using Pages to build The Archiver, because obviously Pages doesn’t run in Windows (much to Narym’s regular chagrin).  Of course, Microsoft Publisher doesn’t run on the Mac either, so there’s a little bit of anti-cross-platform love from both sides in the document design/layout field (and don’t even begin to tell me I could do The Archiver in Word… I’ll kill you :P).

Really, the only category that the Mac is currently lacking in is games, which is pretty much the last bastion of the “there’s no software for the Mac” mythmongers.  Fortunately, with the exception of Sam & Max (and the Mac versions of Manhole, Myst, Riven, and Exile, all of which are all basically unplayable on modern Macs, and I personally think it’s deplorable that UbiSoft is still selling the 10th Anniversary collection for the platform without doing any sort of work to make it compatible with Leopard or systems with Intel-based processors), every game I want to play is either available on a console or has a Mac version, so that doesn’t really bother me (plus, I’ve got a Dell attached to the TV for this purpose… and watching Hulu).  Heck, I can actually play realMYST on my Mac, which is something Vista has made virtually impossible without GameTap.

Evidently, for just $100,000 (or more), we could register the .dni domain name.

Or maybe .myst; I’ll take either ;).

Can’t say anything registered as .dni or .myst would be even remotely as clever as Marten’s Rel.to, but what’re ya gonna do?

This is the most brilliant thing I think I’ve seen all year…

‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing ‘Warcraft’

Reading the Terms & Conditions on the Myst Online website, as linked to by the DRC’s Eder Tsogahl Stained Glass Project, I came across this odd little gem:

Any notes, messages, e-mails, billboard postings, ideas, suggestions, concepts or other material submitted will become the property of GameTap throughout the universe and GameTap shall be entitled to use the material for any type of use forever including in any media whether now known or hereafter devised.

The universe? Seriously? I mean, dude, I know we’re supposed to be back on the Moon by 2020, but the universe? Do we have forum members secretly posting from the other side of the Lagoon Nebula (in fairness, moiety is from Alpha Centauri, which looks suspiciously like either Belgium or Boston, depending on the magnification and atmospheric interference… ;))? Does the Battlestar Galactica have a GameTap user we don’t know about? That seems a tad extreme.

Has been installed in our apartment in Spokane.

(for those out of the loop on this joke, Oscelot and I finally have an internet connection… and Comcast has foolishly provided us with a switch on the router to turn the internet on and off (seriously, that’s what the button says, “Internet On/Off”…).

I am so tired… I just spent the last 7+ hours working on getting caught up on everything I’ve missed in almost two months of Library-only internet access, which sucks for things like comic reading, arts-watching, podcast-listening, and Battlestar-watching (I get it from iTunes, and I have withdraw SO BAD it’s not even funny…). It barely functions for things like Archiver management and keeping tabs on forums.

So I have 5 episodes of Battlestar Galactica to watch, plus about 15 hours of podcasts to catch up on between Filmspotting and Mac OS Ken (which is a daily Apple news ‘cast, but I’ve been offline, and so have missed the fun non-iPhone tidbits… plus, Ken Ray is just a blast to listen to most days. Plus I have 3 TCT ‘casts to at least peruse, plus ShortWave updates, plus I haven’t even looked at the Uru Live forums since January… I already spent about 6 hours with Oscelot playing the 2 episodes of Sam & Max that came out while we were offline (hooray GameTap!), plus another 5 hours cleaning up my watchlists on various art-related sites (and that’s still not done). Plus I spent 2 hours watching the MacWorld keynote, because I enjoy these sorts of things.

But now, it’s almost time for Oscy’s alarm clock to go off, so I’m going to head off to bed. More posts tomorrow when I finally drag myself awake again. Specifically, I have something I think Chucker may well be interested in… if only so he can re-write it to be more awesome ;).

I have Apple’s hot news feed bookmarked in Safari, because they put their OS X Pro Tips in there once every week or so. Usually the rest of the stuff that gets dumped into the feed is just links to featurettes on how people and companies use Apple’s products, or product announcements that I really don’t need to read because I have no money ;).

Today, though, Apple announced they were providing a 30-day trial of Aperture. Because I was curious if this trial prohibited the use of said product commercially (i.e., since you haven’t paid for it yet, you can’t turn a profit off of it), I read through the terms of use for the trial. Inside, I found a couple of amusing little statements that seem to have been taken from a boiler-plate Apple EULA (and even then, it’s still kind of funny…):

THE APPLE SOFTWARE IS NOT INTENDED FOR USE IN THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL SYSTEMS, LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES OR OTHER EQUIPMENT IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF THE APPLE SOFTWARE COULD LEAD TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE.

You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.

I also found a nice little note on the extent of the grant of license:

This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on one Apple-labeled desktop computer and one Apple-labeled laptop computer so long as both computers are owned and used by you.

Finally, someone who realizes that people own more than one computer these days!

Found this on SciFi’s Battlestar Galactica site. Talk about your targeted advertising… perhaps one of the most clever and actually humorous ads Microsoft has done in a while, if ever.

Courtesy of amon-re’s blog, A description of the Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications application on Microsoft’s website states that Windows XP will present nag screens, show balloon tooltips in the taskbar, and lock the desktop of a system whose copy of XP fails the Genuine Advantage validation procedure. Microsoft goes on to say that one can view notifications using Add/Remove Programs, but that you cannot remove the notifications using said tool (which begs the question of why the hell they’re listed in Add/Remove programs…).

Finally, the page states that Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications will be deployed using Automatic Updates.

So, let me get this one straight… Microsoft is presenting pirates with nag screens, locked desktops, and notifications that their copy is pirated (or, to use Microsoft’s terminology, that they “may be the subject of software counterfeiting”) using a service which every Windows pirate on the planet knows not to use.

A brilliant plan.