Militant Geek Custom Shirts

Ah, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The struggle for civil rights and the ultimate triumphant of peaceful protest over bigotry is something we can all drink to, geek or not. Given that the assembled team or monkeys and I are still working through our post-Martin malaise here’s the important stuff from last week that just didn’t quite warrant its own post.

• A little company out of California announced a new cellphone, or something.
• Actually, futher examining the iPhone exposes Apple’s business model for what it is: a roach motel where: “customers check in, but they can’t check out”. From Boing Boing, Illustration by Christophe Vorlet
• But if your business model is based on customer lock in how do you keep the word from spreading? Why, bullying bloggers, of course. As Geek & Poke deliciously declare “Someday you’ll have to decide: Do you want freedom of the press or this really cool phone?”
• Just to remind people that things non-Apple related still do happen we thought we’d let you know that Napster bought AOL music. We also thought we’d let you know that an AOL music service with an awesome factor of 0 times anything is still zero.
• The news about Vista just keeps getting better:
  

  if your computer detects erroneous data in its registers, or voltage fluctuations (both of which are typical of PCs whose parts have been manufactured by dozens of companies), it will restart major subsystems, hanging up while it flushes all your data — just in case those errors were part of a hack-attack on the system.

  Meanwhile John Carmack, quasi-famous game developer (Quake, Doom), rocketeer, and quote machine says that Vista leaves him cold:

  Nothing is going to help a new game by going to a new operating system. There were some clear wins going from Windows 95 to Windows XP for games, but there really aren’t any for Vista… They’re really grasping at straws for reasons to upgrade the operating system. I suspect I could run XP for a great many more years without having a problem with it.

• The Pirate Bay, a legion of swiss hackers who thumb their nose at copyright and have become a political party, are looking to buy an Island. They’re raising money for Sealand, a decrypt platform and pseudo sovereign nation six miles off the coast of the U.K. The owners are asking nearly $1 billion for a WWII concrete slab that was largely damaged last June in a fire. They’ve raised $15,000 so far and have started negotiations. Pr0n fiends the world over begin giggling uncontrollably.
• eBay buys StubHub, a ticket reselling site, for $310 million. eBay already had a ticket marketplace but I guess they have aspirations of Yahoo like redundancies.
• Sprint is laying off 5,000 people. Even over a phone the sound of sudden anxiety was as clear as a pin drop.
• MyBlogLog, a five person distributed operation, is sold to Yahoo for $10 million. The founders promise to spend their new windfall on a classier set of pajamas to wear to work.
• Second Life’s client software goes open source. Which might be cool if it was anything other than Second Life. As Valleywag says ‘Unless you’re a sexual deviant, its as boring as hell’.