Video game expert weighs in on Schilling fiasco
I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to add to the pile of criticism accumulating around Curt Schilling, but it would seem more useful to get a few thoughts from someone who actually knows a lot about video games and that industry. So as I've done a handful of times previously, I've asked Stephen Heaslip - "Blue" of the popular gamer site Blue's News - for his take. Read more
Watch a man open a beer bottle with a chainsaw
Because he can ... and it's awesome, that's why.
Before watching, you are probably asking yourself: How exactly might this work? Does he cut off the top? That seems unlikely - not to mention incredibly dangerous -- but ... watch:
I didn't see that coming.
History's first prank phone call was way back in ... 1884?
Unless it turns out that Alexander Graham Bell didn't really want to see Watson - that he was just goofing on the guy - then the first documented prank phone call would appear to have occurred about eight years after that famous 1876 exchange ... and at the expense of an undertaker in Providence, R.I. Read more
Read this post or the Internet will explode
Sometimes the media gets blamed because it really is the media's fault.
Salon chronicles an excellent example here with a story about how this July 9 has come to be known in some quarters as "Internet Doomsday."
From the Salon story: Read more
Don't count on an iPhone 5 announcement June 11
A key tenet of Apple rumormongering is that Apple history repeats itself repeatedly: If Apple has done X, Y and 42 so much as twice consecutively, pundits posit that Apple will do X, Y and 42 a third time. Read more
Kickstarter lapse leaves 70,000 project ideas exposed
Crowd-funding website Kickstarter is taking a kick in the public-relations pants today after a revelation by the Wall Street Journal that roughly 70,000 yet-to-be-launched project ideas had been left exposed for more than two weeks. Read more
Here's another problem with 'off the record'
Since most people would rather watch sausage being made than read about "the rules" of the journalism business, you are free to head for your nearest sausage factory. (This turned out longer than I thought it would, too.)
Still with us?
OK, here's a question: Would you consider yourself bound by the terms of a business proposition even though you've yet to agree to those terms? How about before you've even heard the terms?
Of course not, you say? Read more
Which one is not like the others?
So this afternoon I find myself looking at Google Books - which many a time has proven to be a treasure trove of pre-Internet published materials - and this line-up of "Classics" and "Magazines" catches my eye.
The picture may be a bit difficult to read, so we have: Read more
How Jobs-as-FDR film was made... and Chaplin 'cameo' wasn't
Rather than use a voice impressionist, Steve Jobs insisted on delivering his FDR speech himself in a long-lost Apple film called "1944," which was posted here last week and has since gone viral to generally cheery reviews ... with the notable exception being jeers for Jobs' attempt to sound like FDR. Read more
Yahoo's resume-padding CEO mocked via resume padding
As the Yahoo board of directors deals with its latest executive crisis - a resume-padding allegation that appears credible against new CEO Scott Thompson - blogger-turned-venture-capitalist Michael Arrington decided to poke fun at the mess by claiming Thompson's job as his own ... on LinkedIn.
Here's a picture of Arrington's doctored profile page:
Was Jobs-as-FDR clip filmed in Bizarro-Land?
Having started in the news business about the same time that The Two Steves started Apple, I was almost certain that yesterday’s posting here of film footage of Steve Jobs portraying FDR for an in-house Apple flick back in 1984 was destined to go viral. Read more
EXCLUSIVE: Watch Steve Jobs play FDR in Apple's long-lost takeoff on famous '1984' Macintosh TV commercial
If all you want to see is Steve Jobs playfully portraying Franklin Delano Roosevelt - right down to the cigarette holder - here's that short clip before we get to the longer version of the film that it's taken from and an explanation: Read more
'Hilarious Unix admin tools'
We're not talking about the kind of funny that starts off with three Unix administrators walking into a bar. Were that the case I might be able to explain why Brendan Gregg's collection of "freeware tools" is so amusing - no, make that so "hilarious" - that it landed on the front page of Reddit yesterday with the headline that I borrowed above. Read more
When spying on your workers, don't brag about it in public
In the headline of a post today, analyst and blogger Richi Jennings poses this question: "Should you warn employees you're geo-tracking them?"
Now before you say - "Of course you should warn them" -- know that Jennings is asking because he heard the question answered differently when posed to a government IT manager at a conference in London: Read more
When touring the Large Hadron Collider, stay with your group
Ever wonder what really happens inside the Large Hadron Collider? This amusing animation from Oxford Sparks offers a clue, although the audio too realistically recreates the frustration of trying to understand a muffled public address system (fortunately, it's funny even without the sound):
Look how YouTube has grown in only 7 years
These numbers get bandied about in news stories frequently, but I thought this list of YouTube traffic stats was worth posting in its entirety today, which marks the seventh anniversary of the service's first video upload (as noted on Mashable): Read more
NameCheap passes GoDaddy in one Google search race
The search-engine and domain-name crowds are chewing over a tasty tidbit of industry news this afternoon, namely that the registrar NameCheap has vaulted ahead of market leader GoDaddy by one potentially telltale measure: Google search results on the phrase "domain name." Read more
Moon-landing-was-a-hoax crowd will love this NASA video
Don't get me wrong: NASA didn't do anything underhanded here; in fact, this video showing a "visualization" of the first time humans photographed the Earth rising over the moon is really cool.
But some people are going to get the wrong idea. Watch:
What's to misunderstand? Read more
Millionaire tweaks Apple's might-have-been billionaire
Professional golfer Rory McIlroy - 22 years old and one of my personal favorites -- is ranked number one in the world, has earned many millions of dollars in prize money, and an untold many millions more from product endorsements.
He's one rich dude.
Yet a couple of days ago McIlroy couldn't resist taking to Twitter to tweak a guy who in a sense bypassed a chance to be even richer:
The 50 best ‘bragging rights’ claimed on Google+
Who says they're the 50 best? Only me. And while they're skewed toward those in my Google+ circles (techies, media types) and those in theirs (civilians, a couple of celebs), I have compiled this list over the past few months by looking at many hundreds of Google+ profiles, which in addition to containing standard biographical info invite users to claim "bragging rights." Read more
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