Militant Geek Custom Shirts

True screenshot of a GTalk IM:

Hmmm…. I just realized that the Militant Geek TShirt shop doesn’t have any good AOL zingers. Going to have to do something about that.

Ah, its Wednesday - that day were we longingly look at the calendar and begin the internal “I think I can, I think I can”. To help enliven you midweek longing we thought we’d pass on the exceptional collection of Geek Office Slang. An excerpt:

CGI Joe: A hard-core CGI script programmer with all the social skills and charisma of a plastic action figure.

Chainsaw Consultant: An outside expert brought in to reduce the employee head count, leaving the top brass with clean hands.

Chip Jewelry: Old computers destined to be scrapped or turned into decoration. “I paid three grand for that Mac and now it’s nothing but chip jewelry.”

Chips and Salsa: Chips = hardware, salsa = software. “First we gotta figure out if the problem’s in your chips or your salsa.”

CLM (Career Limiting Move)- Used by microserfs to describe an ill- advised activity. “Trashing your boss while he or she is within earshot is a serious CLM.”

Cobweb: A WWW site that never changes.

Got any of your own terms that should be on the list?

Sure you could make a mistake and blow $600 on PlayStation 3 this holiday season. However, that amount of moola isn’t even close to what was spent in some of the worse tech spending sprees of all time. Don Dodge, a member of Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team, highlights the Top Ten Worst Tech Spending Sprees of all Time - a sample:

8. Overture - Acquired by Yahoo for $1.6B in October 2003. Yahoo has spent the last year of so building “Panama” which will replace most of the Overture technology. There is some value left in Overture…but not much.

7. AltaVista - CMGI acquired a controlling stake in AltaVista from Compaq Computer for $2.3 Billion in June 1999. Later acquired by Overture for $140M.

6. GeoCities - acquired by Yahoo! in May 1999 for $3.56 billion

5. Netscape - acquired by AOL in November 1998 for $4.2 billion.

4. Broadcast.com - acquired by Yahoo! in July 1999 for $5.7 billion.

Hmmmm…. Yahoo does appear to have bought a whole lot. Perhaps there might be redundancies there?

Oddly enough, there isn’t a single mention of a Microsoft acquisition on the list. Is that because Microsoft has been incredibly shrewd with its purchases? Is this revisionist history? Or is Microsoft just content to blow it’s money in it’s own unique way?

Democracy, a software project of the Participatory Culture Foundation, has just released a shiny new version of its ’social’ video player. Windows users should see significant speed increases and a reduction of memory footprint.

You can pick up the player from www.getdemocracy.com .

We try to cut to the quick when a quip is quality. But when somebody else says it better, as Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun-Times does, we respectfully ape his best shtick:

The Zune is a complete, humiliating failure. Toshiba’s Gigabeat player, for example, is far more versatile, it has none of the Zune’s limitations, and Amazon sells the 30-gig model for 40 bucks less.

Throw in the Zune’s tail-wagging relationship with music publishers, and it almost becomes important that you encourage people not to buy one.

The iPod owns 85 percent of the market because it deserves to. Apple consistently makes decisions that benefit the company, the users and the media publishers — and they continue to innovatively expand the device’s capabilities without sacrificing its simplicity.

Companies such as Toshiba and Sandisk (with its wonderful Nano-like Sansa e200 series) compete effectively with the iPod by asking themselves, “What are the things that users want and Apple refuses to provide?”

Microsoft’s colossal blunder was to knock the user out of that question and put the music industry in its place.

Result: The Zune will be dead and gone within six months. Good riddance.

ZdNet, while not going so far as to declare an expiration date, does insist that the Zune will be the ‘New Coke’ of consumer electronics. They also correctly point out:

It comes in brown. Brown! It’s fatter, it’s heavier, it looks like a lump of robot poo from a big, fat, heavy robot. Do you want robo-poo in your pocket? From a fat robot? Exactly.

Well…. actually… no, I guess I can’t think of a situation where that would be appealing.

The militant geek is currently recovering from the toxic quantities of marsh-mellowed yams consumed yesterday. In lei of a real post, here’s the news, views, and innuendo clogging up his bookmarks (if not his colon):

• CBS likes YouTube… I mean it really likes YouTube. It wants to have little YouTube babies.
• Novell signs Linux agreement with Microsoft, Microsoft states that only Novell Linux users are free from impending lawsuits, and Novell realizes that its been duped. In related news, 99.9% of the population wonders ‘What’s Novell?’
• Controversial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis leaves AOL citing the resignation of “the only business mentor he’s ever had”. Valleywag posts provocative info showing it was probably a move of convenience after botching the Digg-clone known as Netscape. In related news, 99.9% of the populations asks ‘Isn’t Netscape a browser?’
• Playstation gamers were promised 100% backwards compatibility with their PS3s (the thing is a cheap supercomputer, after all). The reality is very different. When gamers who are shelling out the $599 for a new device complain a Sony VP responds that “I would like my car to fly and make me breakfast, but that’s an unrealistic expectation.” Oh Snap!
• CNet posts a list of ‘Top Ten Girl Geeks’ and then goes on to list Paris Hilton, Daryl Hannah, and Lisa Simpson. To all those imaginary cartoon females considering a career in science and mathematics all I can say is “You Go Girl!” Most misogynistic list, ever!
• Your Mom is Rated E for Everyone – or so a TShirt told me. The people responsible for the game label parodied flip out and threaten to sue everyone involved. When reminded of something called the 1^st amendment they turn around and apologize.

Whew, what a week! Have a geek-filled weekend and we’ll meet you back here Monday.

When the purchase of a new consumer electronic device is justified on grounds that “It’s a cheap supercomputer” that may be a sign its a tad expensive. Given that the ‘real’ model starts at $599, games easily reach $60, and extra controllers can be $50 you’ve got a genuine money vaccum for the gamer fanboy in your life.

So where is this money going? Not to corporate overlords: even Sony is taking a bath on every sale - estimates put the pinch near $240 PER UNIT! Somebody at Sony better be getting a stocking full of red ink this Christmas! The Playstation 3 isn’t just a consumer electronics device - it’s an economic readjuster! And you thought that giant sucking sound was just promised features and energy responsibility disappearing.

Such trespasses could not go on longer without creation of a new Tee for the store. In honor of Sony’s latest blunder, we’ve released the commemorative “PayStation 3″ T-Shirt. Prices start at $15.99 - or 2.7% the price of its inspiration.

Possibly some of the most brilliant (and thorough) corporate lampooning I’ve seen in a long time goes to the Microsoft Firefox Parody site. Come for the obvious skewering (’Opening 30 of your favorite Microsoft sites has never been easier’) and stay for the subtle (’advanced marginal manipulation’). Clicking through the site the sheer tonnage of work that went into the ruse becomes apparent.

However, given the professionalism present I still can’t bring myself to download their executable. If anybody does, post what happens here and we’ll dub thee ‘big cahones’.

Or at least so sayest Bill O’Reilly, perennial blow hard and self aggrandizement magnet. In a typical hallucinatory screed brought about by the excess of hot air, the Fox commentator rallied against the borg… at least the coming of it.

Basically what you have is a large portion of the population, mostly younger people under the age of 45, who don’t deal with reality - ever. So they don’t know what day it is; they don’t know temperature it is; they don’t know what their neighbor looks like. They don’t know anything… because they are constantly diverted by a machine.

The source of this vile escapism - the PS3!

The newest thing is the PlayStation 3. Now this is a machine that allows you to play games in hi-def and all this other stuff… It’s the newest state of the art system from Sony…. It has a video game console, plays DVDs, connects you to the Internet, tells you how handsome you are. It’s six-hundred bucks. Now people lined up for hours to get this thing. Hours!

Hacktivist Geek Pride T-Shirts in the Militant Geek Tee Shop - Starting at $15.99

Hours! Hours he sayest! But Bill, what should the youth of America be doing instead?

If this is your primary focus in life - the machines… it’s going to have a staggeringly negative effect, all of this, for America… did you ever talk to these computer geeks? I mean, can you carry on a conversation with them? …I really fear for the United States because, believe me, the jihadists? They’re not playing the video games. They’re killing real people over there.

Sounds like somebody is still pissy that they couldn’t find all the stars in Mario 64…. Anywhoo, remember kids: if you play with your Wii, the terrorists will win.

Coverage via the Game Politics blog and CNet’s Gadget Blog.

Yawnn! - Yahoo! Parody T-Shirts in the Militant Geek Tee Shop - Starting at $19.99

Over the weekend it seemed that any pundit with an inkling of ambition was talking about Yahoo’s “Peanut Butter” memo. We at the Militant Geek custom TShirt shop, who are only occasionally ambitious, let it slide until Monday.

Written by a Yahoo Senior V.P., Brad Garlinghouse, the peanut butter memo is the stinging call to arms that we’ve been arguing is long overdue.

I believe we must embrace our problems and challenges and that we must take decisive action. We have the opportunity - in fact the invitation - to send a strong, clear and powerful message to our shareholders and Wall Street, to our advertisers and our partners, to our employees (both current and future), and to our users. They are all begging for a signal that we recognize and understand our problems, and that we are charting a course for fundamental change

Apparently laser-beam time capsules were not enough signal for Brad. But where’s the peanut butter he referred to? Make with the metaphor!

We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything — to everyone. We’ve known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course. We are separated into silos that far too frequently don’t talk to each other. And when we do talk, it isn’t to collaborate on a clearly focused strategy, but rather to argue and fight about ownership, strategies and tactics.

Our inclination and proclivity to repeatedly hire leaders from outside the company results in disparate visions of what winning looks like — rather than a leadership team rallying around a single cohesive strategy.

I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.

I hate peanut butter. We all should.

Awww, Brad - don’t be a hater!

In other Yahoo! news… they bought some more companies that are kind of like the companies they already have. Big kudos go out to Bix, MyBlogLog, and Kenet Works for being the latest nuts to be smoothed over into that big peanut butter sandwich now known as Yahoo! With leaked internal documents like this who needs critics?

You can read the full memo on Paul Kedrosky’s blog.