Wired asked the folks at the Ig Nobel awards to draw up a list of the century’s most spectacular failures. The most interesting one is Mariner 1: a single punctuation mistake in a single line of code caused the beast to miss Venus and end up in the Atlantic Ocean. Rumors continue to fly hot and heavy on the internet about what the recovered Apple will announce later this week at MacWorld. The re-introduction of dual-processor boxes, the advent of a smaller lighter powerbook and another tweaking of the company’s logo and image seem likely. What slips under the radar is the coming wave of third-party PPC motherboards. They won’t run the Mac OS –for now– but they will run other OSes, such as LinuxPPC. IBM’s reference board is coming soon. If you want to generate some serious heat, the Synergy Quad G4 board seems a good candidate. YIkes. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

We’ve entered the new century with few hitches. A monitoring system acted up here, a clock failed there and 1000 slot machines went ca-booey. Hmmm… this might actually be progress. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

The Y2K Bug is probably going to be anti-climactic stateside. Internationally it may be a little hairier. But, it’s time for a little humor on the topic, so go check out that link. In related news, God is reported to have delayed the Apocolypse due to computer problems. Australia, China and much of Asia entered the new millenium this morning –according to US clocks. Europe will begin entering the new Millenium at 3pm Central Time. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

Y2K got you worried? Put it off till the last minute? Or do you just need an excuse to not get tortured by someone’s cooking once again? We’ve run across buckets of Y2K-related information. Windows: Microsoft, University of Virginia, Wayne State University and CNN. The Mac OS and Mac software is mostly free of Y2K issues, but there are a couple of resources available: Macintouch and Macnologist. Linux and the other *nixes should be fairly immune also. Check out: Planet IT and Linux.org and Ohio State University. Looking for a some fun distraction over the holidays. I'm going to check out Galaxy Quest. That they convinced Sigourney Weaver to bleach her hair should be enough to get you into the theater. And the reviews make it sound even better. Check out reviews at Wired, Film Critic and AICN. Roger Ebert is supposed to be reviewing the movie tonight. Now, if you take Science Fiction so seriously that you start fights when someone laughs at your Spock ears, you'll also want to skip this review of something that is high on my list of the stupiest moments in television: the cheezy 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special. The review is funny and a telling reminder that no amount of money will make people forget big name blunders broadcast during primetime. But, you might like Starlite. For a small fee, they'll beam your Millenial greatings into space. I want to phone E.T.'s home. It you don’t think that the world wide web has … Continue reading 1999-12-23 →

Dallas has an incredible knack for not having a white Christmas. It gets cold, perhaps icy but snow always waits till January to show up. I'm tired of brown Christmases. Know someone who does rain dances? We're looking for a lot of someone's to do snow dances for Dallas. We'll get around to having a little fun with the holiday silliness later. But, till then we've got some helpful holiday sites. Holiday Recipes will also help you with metric conversion charts, food dictionaries, turkey hotline numbers and more. If you’ve still got shopping to do, but have the irresistable need to nickle 'em down then check out Next Tag. On the other hand –we may end up with six or eight of those– if you need to give to complete strangers or just want a laugh, check out The Brad Wolf Christmas Project. We went and dug up more Rubik's Cube stuff. If you want your own Rubik's cube on your very own website, there's Rubik Unbound. There are any number of sites that provide solutions: Philip Marshall, Mark Jeays and Matthew Monroe. There's also the official Rubik’s Cube site which has buckets of stuff including a A list of place where you can buy. If you’re still not rubiked out, this place and that place have oodles and buckets of links. And a tip-o-the-hat to the US Postal Service. They get a lot of grief that they don’t really deserve. We shipped out some promotional posters Saturday via Priority … Continue reading 1999-12-22 →

If you’re into man's slow creep toward the stars, check out Encyclopedia Astronautica. While you’re there, check out what's got to be the most complete list of cancelled flights available anywhere. It has a sad weird irony to it. Desmond Llewelyn, who played Q in all but two of the Bond movies, died in a head-on car crash yesterday. He was the only person to act across from every Bond in the series. There's more coverage over at the BBC. In what has to be a record for time from IPO to first stock split, Linux distributor Red Hat announced a two for one stock split. And it's monday and time for the Hopelessly Complete Waste of Time. This week is a double-feature. In one corner, we've got 100 Trillion Haiku generating 17 syllables of word play on the fly. In the other corner, we’ve got the Rubik’s Cube Java Applet beating the stuffing out of your tired old cube with the color worn down on the corners. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

Linux is the big news in the stock market, with two distributors of the operating system going through IPOs and seeing huge rises in stock prices. But some other interesting things have hit the radar. Looking back two years, Apple Computer hit an all-time low of 12 and some change. Last week it peaked at an all-time high of 118. Ah, yes. The joy of hindsight. Looking forward, 3Com’s spin-off of Palm is about to happen. Palm has filed for an IPO with federal regulators. The offering will probably happen in February. The timing is interesting. A number of manufacturers have dropped devices with the competing Windows CE. And next year should see some cool new gadgets running the Palm OS. And a big raspberry to Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk. He's the strongest voice for taxing internet sales on a congressional advisory commission on the topic. We're all for everyone contributing their fair share, but the vast majority of internet businesses loose money. Does that mean that those who sell on the internet can claim a subsidy from the city of Dallas? Of course, this is the same city that assesses property taxes on simply owning an automobile. The U.S. is a frightening foe. A nuclear arsenal large enough to obliterate all life on earth. Conventional forces that have lost one war since who remembers when. One wonders what can really threaten this beast. Well, U.S. officials are begging crackers to lay off while we stumble into the new millenium. … Continue reading 1999-12-15 →

Want to let the world watch you or your fishtank and all hours of the day and night? You’re looking to create a webcam. Someone’s actually put together a cookbook. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

Looking for the gift for someone who really has everything. How about a Surplus Soviet Submarine? In June, the Australian Broadcasting Authority was given the autority to censor web content. If too many people complain about something you’ve put on your website, the ABA has the authority to force you to pull it. Of course, the ABA is a government agency, leaving the situation open to abuse and scapegoating for political purposes. They’ve already received at least one significant complaint: their website has been defaced. It's monday, time for the hopelessly complete waste of time. Which means something juvenile, amusing, vaguely adult-oriented, preferably with a lard-keg full of parody. Well, what fits the bill better than advertising. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

If you're following the Texas Poet Laureate NOW! effort,they've now got t-shirts, coffee-mugs and mouse pads available to raise money for the cause. If you’re interested in seeing those goodies for some of other hosted sites, let us know and we'll see if we can talk them into it. Along similar lines, if you’re in a free software project, there’s a website that sells t-shirts, hats and other goodies to raise money for free software project. CopyLeft has donated well over $50,000 dollars to about a dozen free software projects over the last year from the sales of various goodies. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook