Click the image to see it at full size.
Scan courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
Wow, did RAM cost a lot back when S-100 Bus-based computers were big stuff.
As a point of comparison, consider today’s featured deal at NewEgg.com: 2 Gigs of RAM for $144.00. That’s more than 30,000 times the storage space for about one-tenth the price. The deal gets better if you expend the effort to mail in the form for the $50.00 rebate.
Before I get carried away with news about Google Gears, Jobs and Gates at D5 and Palm’s why-the-Hell-did-they-make-that device, I thought I’d open with this little bit of news that shouldn’t be forgotten amidst all the current news noise.
It looks as though Robert “Spam King” Soloway is one step closer to becoming a Pruno connoisseur.
SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – US prosecutors said they captured on Wednesday a nefarious Internet marketer responsible so much junk e-mail they called him “Spam King.”
ADVERTISEMENTRobert Soloway, 27, was arrested in Seattle, Washington, a week after being indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of identity theft, money laundering, and mail, wire, and e-mail fraud.
Soloway is accused of using “botnets,” networks of computers, to disguise where e-mail originated and of forging return addresses of real people or businesses that wound up blamed for unwanted mailings.
If convicted as charged, Soloway will face a maximum sentence of more than 65 years in prison and a fine of 250,000 dollars.
Spamhaus has more details about Soloway’s career as a spammer:
Soloway has been a long term nuisance on the internet. He has been sending enormous amounts of spam for years, filling mailboxes and mail servers with unsolicited and unwanted junk email. In addition, he has fraudulently marketed his spam services to others as legitimate ‘opt-in’ services when they were anything but that, duping innocent users and then failing to provide promised customer support or refunds. Because Soloway spammed through hijacked computers and open proxies, he has repeatedly violated both the Computer Abuse and Fraud Act of 1984 and the CAN-SPAM law of 2003.
Soloway first appeared in the Spamhaus Block List (SBL) in 2001. In 2003, he was listed on Spamhaus’s Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO), a list of the world’s “worst of the worst” criminal spammers. Spamhaus spamtraps continued to receive spam solicitations from Soloway advertising his services through the weekend before today’s indictment.
Soloway’s violations of the U.S. CAN-SPAM law and various state anti-spam laws resulted in his being sued successfully by a number of plaintiffs, including Microsoft Corporation and Robert Braver, owner of an Oklahoma-based ISP. Both Microsoft and Braver received damage awards of millions of dollars. Soloway never paid these awards, claiming that he lived off of the proceeds of a family trust and was therefore “judgement-proof.” In September 2005 in Oklahoma City, after Soloway had fired his lawyers and then failed to appear to represent himself in court, U.S. District Judge Ralph G. Thompson issued a permanent injunction against Soloway, forbidding him to continue sending spam that violated the CAN-SPAM act. Soloway ignored this injunction as well and continued to spam.
For the incredibly curious (or if you’re one of those people who’s seen every episode of every variant of Law & Order), here’s a link to a PDF of Soloway’s Arrest Warrant.
I was 12 when the 80’s began and 22 when they ended, so the music of that decade is pretty much seared into my consciousness. Hence my jumping for joy when I found out that a new Guitar Hero game featuring 80s rock is due on July 17th. Here are the tracks known to be included with the game:
As far as I can tell, it’s a PlayStation 2 exclusive. Since I am the owner of a PS2 (a Christmas present from my lovely and very understanding wife), I am left with one complaint: Where the Hell is the AC/DC?!
Party at my house on July 17th!
In all the hubbub about the D: All Things Digital conference, you may not be aware that the Mesh conference is taking place today and tomorrow in Toronto at the MaRS Centre, pictured below:
Mesh is Canada’s premier web conference and features some big names for its keynote speakers. This morning, Mathew Ingram had a “fireside chat” with Michael Arrington, and tomorrow Stuart McDonald will do the same with Richard Edelman.
It looks as though the conference has already had its share of interesting moments. During his keynote, when Arrington spotted Ted Murphy, CEO of PayPerPost, he pointed him out and called him “the most evil person in the room”. I’m certain that the stuffed shirts at D5 (the popular shorthand for the D: All Things Digital conference) are too WSJ-run-event genteel to get into discussions this colourful.
There were a very limited number of tickets to the Mesh conference, so many people — your truly included — missed out as they sold out rather quickly. For those of you who still want to get in on the networking action at Mesh, thereare a couple of options:
Yesterday, I wrote about how the “cyberwar” in Estonia seemed rather different from the way William Gibson depicted cyberattacks in his “Sprawl series” novels, most notably Neuromancer. I thought that as long as I was comparing speculations of what future tech would be like against how the future actually turned out, I should tie it in with the hot news of the moment, Microsoft Surface.
In case you haven’t seen the promo videos for Surface yet, I’ve posted them below. Here’s the first one: Microsoft Surface – The Magic:
Thos one’s called: Microsoft Surface – The Power:
And finally, Microsoft Surface – The Possibilities:
I mentioned Sun’s Starfire project in my post about Surface, but thought it deserved a front-and-centre mention. Starfire wasn’t a project to develop an actual platform, but to develop concepts that would eventually find their way into future platforms when the technology made it possible and show them in a video. The video is available online in MPEG-4 format, but you’d better have a good connection: it’s 270 megs in size:
Click the image above to view the Starfire video.
If the Starfire video gives you a sense of deja vu, it’s probably because you’ve seen Apple’s Knowledge Navigator concept video, shown below:
If the Starfire and Knowledge Navigator videos bear similarities to each other, they should; Apple UI guru Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini helped create both.
I’m going to post some notes on some of the concepts in the Starfire video that appear to have come to fruition with Surface as well as my notes on what they thought 2004 would be like back in 1992.
Somebody had to say it about Microsoft Surface; I just thought it might as well be me.
Microsoft’s Midnight Surprise? It’s Microsoft Surface, a large-area screen-and-multi-touch-surface computer. Here are some places to get started:
It’s pretty nifty technology, the sort of which we’d been waiting for since Bruce Tognazzini showed the world (okay, maybe not the world, but a couple of really interested people at Sun and whoever bought Tog on Software Design) his “Starfire Project” concept back in 1992, in which he showed a theoretical multi-touch surface computer hooked to a global network in the far-off year of 2004.
That’s all I’m writing for now; this Global Nerd’s gotta go beddy-bye.