Google Steam

Google may have Valve in their sights.

Samsung in Hostile Takeover Bid of Sandisk

Samsung, the massive quasi-state-owned Korean conglomerate known in the west for its LCD's and cell phones (one of their lesser known offerings pictured here), has made a hostile takeover bid for Sandisk at $26 a share, which is quite a premium.

Samsung's been making moves on the smaller firm for some time now, and the answer has been a consistent 'no.' Guess they got sick of playing nice. Word down the grapevine is that compared to previous similar situations, it's likely that this deal will start out on the hostile path, but some loose pockets on Samsung's part may well make things consentual. The big hurtle will be regulators, but the fact that Samsung is behaving so aggressively at this point indicates that they are determined to engulf Sandisk, or in the very least, make any rival acquisitions that much more costly.

Sandisk seems doomed at this point. One interesting point is that this move by Samsung may escalate its faceoff with Intel, which has a demonstrated record of backing DRAM companies with cash against the Korean firm.

Sandisk makes...stuff. USB keys, hard drives, etc., is all that really comes to mind. They're all about the semis. Their one brand name that I remember for some reason is a tacky budget MP3 player called the Sandisk Sansa.

Guess that makes Samsung Littlefinger GET IT?!!?1

Spore

Why I won't get bored with this game.  Meet Brian, the only one of my creations to get commented on my godamn myspore page which I just now realize existed.

He wants you to use his big green mouth as a human toilet.

BOOM goes Lehman

Lehman Bros.' holding company has filed for bankruptcy.

The whole street is on damage control lest they are crushed by the giant's corpse. Merrill Lynch is getting bailed by Bank of America, for one.

I am sooo glad I didn't have my shit together when I did those interviews last year.

Googlebot pranks stock market

Notice anything funny about this chart?

At about 10:45AM on Monday Google listed an article about how UAL had just filed for bankruptcy. This news was automatically picked up by services that piggyback on Google and was propagated all over the web where it was then picked up by automated stock-trading systems. The stock price fell by 75% in a matter of minutes.

The thing is, the announcement was six years old. Google discovered a copy with no date on it, apparently because it appeared on some generic "recent popular links" list, and threw it into the news hopper anyway. Over a billion dollars of value temporarily disappeared before NASDAQ hit the emergency brake.

Google=the singularity

Putin Saves TV Crew from Siberian Tiger

I was somewhat disappointed to find out that he had actually used a tranquilizer gun to do it. Perhaps it speaks to the man that I, and I'm sure many others, clicked on the link expecting him to have done it with his bare hands.

Then again, blasting a pouncing tiger when no one else even saw it coming is probably harder than point and click, in the first place.

Too bad he's got such a bad rep in this hemisphere, because, you know, it's his fault that that wonderfully weak, poor and corrupt plutocratic freedom-loving Russia of days yore has been replaced by a country that can do more than wank and cry when their interests are sliding down the shitter.

Will Wright's PEE: The Count Down

Spore's out in the wild in a little more than a day.  Gamespot has given it a rather underwhelming 8/10.  Gaming jesus it ain't, but I will probably end up shelling out some lunch money just to see what the fuss is about, that, and penis monsters.

Btw, the title refers to this Penny Arcade comic, which, quite frankly, is spot on.

I'm personally waiting on Fallout 3 and Fable 2, which will be the final catalyst for my acquisition of a 360.

Musical Tastes Reflect Personality?

Could one of you science types take a look at this? The fact that it ends up reading something like a horoscope seems invalid to me for some reason, but I do like the fact that Reggae and Indie are the only two musical tastes associated with the "not hard working" trait.

Oh wait, they spelled "not hard working" 3 different ways: as two separate words, a compound word, and hyphenated. You're special BBC!

Christ. The study also lost my respect when I realized they lumped rock and heavy metal together...

Food For Thought

Not meant to be taken very seriously, obvii, but rather amusing nonetheless. For my fellows here, you may find the placement of the top three states particularly interesting.

Something else I noticed, is that most states seem to have an average below average IQ, which really doesn't make sense at all, unless you take into account population density.

Shiny Poo

Some sketches are up of Apple's next outting of music players.

The key terms here seem to be "thicker" and "longer."

Plus I'm Hungry for BS

Every year, someone falls to their death at one of the few nice nature places in Illinois, called Starved Rock. I haven't been there in years, nor is it that beautiful , but our annual falltook place the other day, with fatal results.

And now the person's family is demanding that the state put up more signs saying "DON'T LEAVE THE PATH AND STAY AWAY FROM THE LEDGE BECAUSE YOU MIGHT FALL PRETTY DAMN FAR" and even erect barriers, blocking out any chance of an unobstructed view or the general enjoyment of nature. Do they need to put up the suicide guard fences along the Grand Canyon? Come on...

Elephant cured of addiction

I've always said that Elephants make terrible alcoholics since they always remember, they drink to forget pretty poorly.

Some assholes decided that heroin might be better for an elephant. With maybe 25,000 elephants left, this is tragic.

Chrome First Impressions

EDIT: What a POS. For some reason, Chrome will not let me navigate the internet and is acting like the internet is down, when switching to firefox I have no problem reaching the exact same page. I have been getting zip done this morning because I thought I had no internet. I'm uninstalling Chrome and will check back in 6 months.

Freaking hippies.

So its firefox, but they have cleverly minimized the amount of space toolbars take up, which was one of my biggest beefs with FF. They've also rounded all the edges, which seems to easily confuse people into believing it is futuristic.

I haven't seen the marked improvements in response time, but we've been shedding packets like crazy here at work today for some reason, so the problem could certainly be on my end. Google maps doesn't respond any faster, and perhaps seems a bit slower.

I'll post again in a week to be fair, I like FF3 and have it pretty tweaked, but I do believe that people will flock to the google bandwagon quickly enough that all of my beloved plugins will be ported in a month or less and then I will have a browser that runs faster than FF and allows me to see more of the screen, ultimately winning me over.

This is a good step 1 for google to the browser OS in the future.

Edit: I would also like to add a few more things I like. The main url of the website appears in darker text than the rest of the html up top, making it clear that I am at blogger.com, not http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=2218358490107332542&postID=1288895734450479110 which is kinda nice.

Also, the recently closed tabs thing is cool.

However, one thing FREAKING ME OUT is that when I open a new window, it DOES NOT OPEN MAXIMIZED. There is no way to fix this in the settings, unlike Lance's beef about the pop up blocker pop up. For those of us who prefer multi-window browsing to multi-tab, this is very annoying.

Chrome as Well

I figured this is big enough to warrant multiple opinions, anyway:

Update: Holy SHIT the popup blocker is annoying.  It spawns this window at the bottom that, for the life of me I haven't figured out how to automatically close.  That's right, folks, the popup blocker spawns a popup.  It doesn't just go away after a while, either, but lingers, accumulating disgustingly at the bottom of the screen like some ersatz taskbar.  WTF.

 

Edit: Looks like I missed the option under web content, which is funny because I actually dug into the gears settings to find it.  I guess that allows me to sidestep the issue of getting bombarded by overlapping windows if I want to know when something's been blocked.  So basically we have a choice of Google silently executing potentially innocent popups without us ever knowing (such popups are very common for office web-apps), or having to manually close malicious popup notifications, sort of defeating the point of the whole endeavor.  Godamnit, even IE has a more space-saving way of notifying me.

Also, the maximized window prevents me from getting to my taskbar, which I have set to autohide. Many question the utility of the oft-broke autohide in the first place, but anyone running an Xx768 resolution and forces all full screen apps into windows would probably disagree.  Hopefully, these gripes are minor and will be rectified soon enough.

I am noticing better load times.  Significantly better in some cases.  Edit/Update: This is an understatement.  I can burn through fresh doc loads using the forward/back keys, loading fresh copies every time, faster than anything I've experienced before.

Killing the extra search bar has been long overdue; I'm glad they did it.

Excellent use of screen real estate; I run my box sitting across a coffee table with an LCD TV, and it really presents a tradeoff between space and readability; which this seems to handle marginally better than FF3.  Zoom, unfortunatley, only resizes text and not images and certain layout panels, which can completely wreck the layout of a page and make it even more difficult to read than before.  Yeah, most people probably don't even know about the zoom function on any browser, but I live and die by it...and if I zoom in on a page, I'd appreciate it if the whole thing was magnified, and not just the text.  If they can't fix this or at least give us the option to fix it ourselves, than unfortunatley, it's a no-go.

Haven't really tried the incognito feature yet.  It's a nice touch, but I suspect that anyone who would regularly make use of this type of feature has already streamlined a process of doing so in their old browser (heh).  There are FF3 plugins that perform similar tasks, though probably not as effectively.  Considering MS has something very similar to this in the works, Firefox will probably follow suit with something built in and this will not be a killer feature at all.

Update: I must have a hearty LOL at something I noticed with Incognito; namely all of the Google ads are for criminal record searches and PI's for hire.  Talk about preconceived notions.

More peeves concern the fact that all the nice addons for FF3 are obviously absent here.  I don't have my stumbleupon bar, my fire fm, and more importantly, adblock and my tweak for tab cycling.  It's infuriating how these open source browsers continually ignore the superiority of the windows/opera alt-tab cycling style in favor of one that is just plain annoying; it effectively caps how many tabs you can conveniently surf between without going for annoying extra keystrokes or the mouse.

Unless they go all out with addons, I don't see myself converting anytime soon.   But hell, if they can make a stumbleupon bar for opera, this will be a not brainer.  

I'm also worried about the fact that Google's tendency to collect usage stats for ad targetting is going to limit the extent to which Chrome will support an ad-free, as-private-as-you-want environment a la Firefox.  It may be consentual, but would saying no possibly limit the featureset that would put it above its peers?  I know I would lose %75 of my Google Desktop's utility if I disabled indexing and usage stats, and that's just not acceptable.  To be sure, I don't see any browser features that would require this sort of disclosure, but you never know what they might pull out their asses, and if it turns out to be pure gold, I don't want to miss out because I am reluctant to open yet another facet of my usage to google.

I haven't spoken much about the actual guts of the technology, because I don't know enough yet to comment on it, but everything I've read seems to point to a much more efficient, not to mention safer way to handle browsing potentially dangerous sites.  Still, if they can't rectify certain issues with the interface and get the ball rolling on extensions, this might well end up being to Firefox what Cul or whatever the name was was to Goog.

In a world where Don LaFontaine's golden voice no longer graces the silver screen...

Pardon the multitude of cliches in the headline. But LaFontaine, whose voice was the best part of many movie trailers for many, many years, has indeed passed on. He doesn't quite merit a TSE "In Memoriam" of the kind we gave Isaac Hayes and Bob Dunne, but it's still a sad day for Hollywood and for America.

RIP, Mr. LaFontaine.

Vive la Résistance

Psystar, a small vendor that sells the third party "Open Computer" formerly known as OpenMac computer that runs apple's OSs, is hitting back after being taken to court by the fruit for licensing violations. They don't deny violation of license restrictions by putting OS X and its diaspora on non-apple machines, but instead contend that the forced packaging of hardware and software in Macs, combined with the premium Apple charges for said computers, constitutes a monopoly. Machines that run Windows, they argue, and for that matter all other OSs currently on the market, do not constitute a credible source of competition for the Apple hardware market due to rabid Mac OS fanboiism.

IMHO, though it's a long shot, if these guys succeed in putting a crack in Apple's totalitarian Mac strategy, it would be the third best thing to happen to the company.

The second would be if Bloomberg magically made everything it publishes come true, and the first, of course, would be a cruise missile.

Google Browser Announced

Google is coming out with its very own open source web browser, Chrome. It's entering the now-infamous Google style open beta within hours.

Edit: Now available: http://www.google.com/chrome