Month: April 2003

I will never forgive Fox Network for cancelling The Family Guy; I just hope they don’t do the same to Andy Richter Saves The Universe. Much as it pains me to say it, The Family Guy is usually funnier than The Simpsons, perhaps with the exception of several of the early, “classic” seasons IMNSHO. The hilarious pop culture flashbacks and references alone make the show, but the characters and plots never fail to have me rolling on the floor in laughter. So it is with great pleasure that I report to you that The Cartoon Network will start airing The Family Guy on its Adult Swim Schedule starting April 20th. In addition, on April 15th, The Family Guy DVD of seasons 1 and 2 will be released; mine is already on order. And just to round out your Family Guy experience, here are some web sites for your viewing enjoyment. Tune in to the show, check out the sites, and/or buy the DVD if you haven’t experienced the show; you won’t regret it. 🙂

In other M$ assimilation news, Micro$oft director of marketing recently said, “We do view Google more and more as a competitor. We believe that we can provide consumers with a better product and a better user experience. That’s something that we’re actively looking at doing.” This is just ludicrous. Google is the best search engine out there, although I imagine that I don’t need to tell that to most of you. Because Google has actually come up with a product that is technologically superior and profitable, Micro$oft has decided that it will extend its monopolistic pseudopods towards it in an attempt to envelop, dominate, and eventually suck the life out of the search engine market like it does with everything else it conquers. Well, I’ve got a message for M$: there’s a reason why a Google search for “worst search engine” returns MSN as the first result. That’s right, you suck and you should leave things well enough alone.

In other M$ assimilation news, Micro$oft director of marketing recently said, “We do view Google more and more as a competitor. We believe that we can provide consumers with a better product and a better user experience. That’s something that we’re actively looking at doing.” This is just ludicrous. Google is the best search engine out there, although I imagine that I don’t need to tell that to most of you. Because Google has actually come up with a product that is technologically superior and profitable, Micro$oft has decided that it will extend its monopolistic pseudopods towards it in an attempt to envelop, dominate, and eventually suck the life out of the search engine market like it does with everything else it conquers. Well, I’ve got a message for M$: there’s a reason why a Google search for “worst search engine” returns MSN as the first result. That’s right, you suck and you should leave things well enough alone.

Slashdot reports that “Micro$oft announced it is bringing Windows Media 9 to 177 screens in Landmark Theaters.” An appropriate slew of crashing movies and blue screen comments is present in the discussion, as are many questions about why the hell this is even necessary. Oh yeah, I know the answer. As the image I borrowed from Slashdot points out, Bill Gates and M$ really is like Star Trek’s Borg, assimilating everything in its path with the goal of having complete control over everything. Why the Supreme Court didn’t put a stop to this years ago is beyond me…

Slashdot reports that “Micro$oft announced it is bringing Windows Media 9 to 177 screens in Landmark Theaters.” An appropriate slew of crashing movies and blue screen comments is present in the discussion, as are many questions about why the hell this is even necessary. Oh yeah, I know the answer. As the image I borrowed from Slashdot points out, Bill Gates and M$ really is like Star Trek’s Borg, assimilating everything in its path with the goal of having complete control over everything. Why the Supreme Court didn’t put a stop to this years ago is beyond me…

On the heels of it’s latest alpha release (1.4), Mozilla has announced a major change in its development roadmap, deciding to replace the Mozilla suite of applications with the “soon-to-be-renamed stand-alone Phoenix browser and the Thunderbird mail and newsgroups client (also known as Minotaur).”

Although this could confuse prospective new users of Mozilla, I see this as a good thing. Despite its success as a more-than-viable open source competitor to Micro$oft’s monopoly, the Mozilla project has been accused of trying to cram too much into the application, bloating what was once a streamlined browser. I’ve already tried Phoenix, and it seems to load much faster, and I can see that its memory footprint is much smaller. Minotaur is still in very early alpha release but builds on the current Mozilla mail client. Although there is something to be said for an integrated suite of applications, it forces everyone to deal with the bugs and bloat of a large suite. Right now I use Eudora for my e-mail needs, so Phoenix is really a better solution than Mozilla for me if all I want is the browser portion. However, I’m keeping an eye on Minotaur to see if it’s worth switching to; its Bayesian Spam filter alone could be worth the switch. Like I said, I hope this doesn’t confuse Mozilla’s image, because I think that this development will help stabilize Mozilla in the long run.

On the heels of it’s latest alpha release (1.4), Mozilla has announced a major change in its development roadmap, deciding to replace the Mozilla suite of applications with the “soon-to-be-renamed stand-alone Phoenix browser and the Thunderbird mail and newsgroups client (also known as Minotaur).”

Although this could confuse prospective new users of Mozilla, I see this as a good thing. Despite its success as a more-than-viable open source competitor to Micro$oft’s monopoly, the Mozilla project has been accused of trying to cram too much into the application, bloating what was once a streamlined browser. I’ve already tried Phoenix, and it seems to load much faster, and I can see that its memory footprint is much smaller. Minotaur is still in very early alpha release but builds on the current Mozilla mail client. Although there is something to be said for an integrated suite of applications, it forces everyone to deal with the bugs and bloat of a large suite. Right now I use Eudora for my e-mail needs, so Phoenix is really a better solution than Mozilla for me if all I want is the browser portion. However, I’m keeping an eye on Minotaur to see if it’s worth switching to; its Bayesian Spam filter alone could be worth the switch. Like I said, I hope this doesn’t confuse Mozilla’s image, because I think that this development will help stabilize Mozilla in the long run.

Sorry; I couldn’t resist. 🙂

Sorry; I couldn’t resist. 🙂

If you have e-mail, chances are that you have received some sort of e-mail from Nigerian scam artists (or several other countries, actually) trying to tempt you with large amounts of money in exchange for your help laundering it. Of course, to facilitate the receipt of your sizable share of the money, they keep extracting more and more money out of you until finally it’s obviously a hoax, but somehow a surprising number of people have been taken by this scheme. I’ve kept some of these in my “miscellaneous” inbox just for fun, but one person has taken it a step further. Visit Brad Christensen’s exhibit of hilarious correspondences with various scam artists; I only wish I had the wit and patience to do something similar…