Global Nerdy

(In case you're not familiar with what happened to James Kim and his family, see this entry on my personal blog.)

That's the news according to CNET and the JamesAndKati.com site. We at Global Nerdy deepest condolences to the Kims and their family and friends.

Their families have spent a lot of money on the rescue effort, and there's the matter of a funeral and helping Kati and the kids back on their feet. If you've got a little money (and some Christmas spirit) to spare, please consider making a donation at the JamesAndKati.com site.

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Making fun of AdSense is a little like shooting fish in a barrel sometimes. In this case, Joey posts an item that basically says that AT&T was smart enough to predict a bunch of net-centric innovations, but too incompetent to actually make any products or services that actually delivered on the vision. While we're saying that AT&T can't find it's ass with both hands, Google shoehorns an AT&T skyscraper alongside the article.

Granted, it's for the "New AT&T." Wait, actually it's for "The new at&t." In either case, that's probably a good thing—the old AT&T made a bunch of promises it couldn't keep.

Tags: AdSense, AT&T

[via Andrew Sullivan] Here's a blast from the past: a montage of those “You Will” ads from AT&T from 1993…

Although the current forms look a little different from those in the ads, I think that all of the then-futuristic innovations featured in the ads became reality. In fact, I'd bet that the Global Nerdy readership's used at least two-thirds of them by now. (Of course, you could attend in-person meetings in your bare feet at a number of start-ups during the bubble.)

Here's the kicker: aside from providing pieces of the network and giving birth to UNIX twenty years prior to those ads, none of those innovations actually came from AT&T.

The bit about sending a fax from the beach — as opposed to email — made me smirk. Every time someone requires me to fax something to them, I have a little internal reaction similar to Ray's from the webcomic Achewood:

Click the picture to read the full comic.

Links:

• To the video on YouTube
• To Andrew Sullivan's article

Way back in my days at Crazy Go Nuts University, I had a couple of friends whose study programs were at the intersections of computer science and sociology. Had I not been a starving student, I'd have probably given them gifts such as a subscription to the then-new (and cutting edge) Wired magazine, or perhaps one of the then-hot books on the social and cultural implications of virtual reality or hypertext.

What would I get them now? That's easy. A copy of The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto: Critical Essays, a collection of academic papers ruminating on Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto of series of games.

“It is tempting,” goes one of the book's essays, “given the degree to which this world is fleshed out, to consider GTA:SA in the light of Jean Baudrillard's concepts of the hyperreal and the simulacrum…” You'll find other excerpts from the book in the Tech Digest titled Top 10 things you never knew about Grand Theft Auto (because you're not brainy enough) such as:

In both the demonization and celebration of the virtual reality offered through the GTA series, the horror and praise resulting from suburban bodies entering the otherwise impenetrable (segregated) world of gangstas, thugs, hip-hop, and ghettos, and the surrounding discourse of reception, dominant understandings of race, hegemonic rationalization (explanations) of contemporary social inequality, and the advisable methods (policies) needed to address current issues become visible.

and

The Hot Coffee patch makes sexual encounters in the game much more explicit but not any more sensual. Reduced to the stilted rock of the 'joystick', sex is quite literally mechanized. The result of the abrupt breaks with everydayness precipitated by the mechanical nude image is a 'step outside the everyday without actually leaving it: it shocks, it seems brutal, and yet this effect is superficial, pure appearance, leading us back toward the secret of the everyday – dissatisfaction.

Nope, no facile explanations like “blastin' chumps and jackin' cars is fun” here. If you've got a friend or family member with an interest in videogames who's taking life deferral — er, I mean graduate — studies, this might be the gift for him or her.

Links:

• to The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto: Critical Essays on Amazon.com
• to the Tech Digest piece on the book

Over at the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, there's an article about a device proposed by Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli that sounds like it would be the 16th century equivalent of tabbed browsing:

A beautiful and ingenious machine, which is very useful and convenient to every person who takes pleasure in study, especially those who are suffering from indisposition or are subject to gout: for with this sort of machine a man can see and read a great quantity of books, without moving his place: besides, it has this fine convenience, which is, of occupying a little space in the place where it is set, as any person of understanding can appreciate from the drawing.

According to the article, the machine makes an appearance in the movies: Richard Lester’s 1973 version of The Three Musketeers.

Who knew they had ADD back then?

[Cross-posted to the Tucows Blog]

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After years of reasonable interoperability and compatibility, Microsoft has released Office 2007, which uses very different file formats:

• Word documents are now .docx files
• Excel documents are now .xlsx files
• PowerPoint documents are now .pptx files

The “X” at the end of these filename extensions stands for “Microsoft Office Open XML Formats”, but they're not terribly open — for starters, they're not stored as plain text XML, but in some proprietary binary format.

If you're running Office 2003 for Windows, you can download a compatibility pack that makes it possible to open Office 2007 docs. The Mac Business Unit of Microsoft has promised some kind of conversion utility, but there's no word on when that will see release. Over at Tucows, we're still on Office 2000 for Windows and Office for Mac, and I suspect a number of businesses are in similar situations.

Given that there are fewer and fewer reasons to upgrade — c'mon, how much more can you pack into a word processor? — I can't imagine business making the switch until absolutely necessary.

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Zune: #5 with a bullet (in the head): "Microsoft Corp.'s Zune device dropped to fifth place from second in the U.S. market for digital media players in its second week in stores, market researcher NPD Group Inc. said. Zune captured 2.1 percent of the market in the week ended Nov. 25, said Stephen Baker, an analyst at Port Washington, New York-based NPD, in an interview today. Baker said Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod remained the leader, with 39.4 percent that week, based on units sold."

Tags: Zune, iPod, Apple, Microsoft