Topics on businesses, good and bad.
I certainly hope that these were intended as a gag gift. Most guys go out of their way not to walk around with that kind of silhouette, outside of a bedroom. The only person that I can remotely imagine that a guy might want to impress that way is a potential sex partner. And in …
Continue reading ‘“Groin stretches: Marks & Spencer makes men ‘2 sizes bigger’”’ »
I’ve always thought that computers could do more to protect themselves from theft. Even something as simple as full drive encryption, built into all hard drives, would at least prevent any thief from getting the data on a machine (and the data is usually worth far more than the machine itself). Apparently someone at Intel …
Continue reading ‘“Intel slips anti-theft tech into hardware to deter thieves”’ »
Our cell phone company has just started adding a $2 charge for any customer that still receives a mailed bill. They’re promising to donate an additional $2 to a charity for any customer that goes paperless, too. I expected this sort of thing to happen years ago. Companies have been touting paperless billing for more …
Continue reading ‘Companies Finally Charging Extra for Paper Billing’ »
What is it with companies these days? I just got an e-mail from a company I once did business with. They want me to spend “fifteen to twenty minutes” filling out an online survey, and in exchange they’re offering a chance to win a $10 Amazon gift certificate. A chance?! If they were offering me …
It should have become obvious to people when the north-eastern US power outage happened a few years ago: malware is dangerous. The computer world is riddled with flaws that make it possible for a kid playing around on the computer in his bedroom (or more recently, a programmer writing a Trojan intended to steal money …
Continue reading ‘“Trojan-ridden warning system implicated in Spanair crash”’ »
The record labels have been making a big stink for at least a decade about how file-sharing is driving artists to the poorhouse, but I’ve always been skeptical of that. The most popular ones might be suffering — maybe — but the vast majority of artists (I know a few) could only benefit from more …
Continue reading ‘“Artists Make More Money in File-Sharing Age Than Before It”’ »
I always loved the comic “The Far Side”, as did GoddessJ and most of Western civilization. It was a sad day when Gary Larson retired from writing it. But this very humorously-written article on doing business the Far Side way brings back some very fond memories, and the article itself has more than a few …
Continue reading ‘“6 Tricks for Doing Business on The Far Side”’ »
I’ve often wondered why some people can’t just use plain English. I understand that there are some specialized terms in every occupation, but making up whole new words when existing words will do? Or using flowery and obfuscating phrases instead of well-known ones that mean the same thing? So far as I can tell, the …
Continue reading ‘“Unsuck It Translates Awful Corporate Speak into Plain English”’ »
I can’t believe that someone had the gall to do this. My systems are safe enough, because I use long random strings that I’ve been able to memorize, but most of the WiFi networks of my friends and associates — the ones I’ve been given the passwords for — would fall to it quickly. I …
Continue reading ‘“WPA Cracker cracks WiFi passwords in the cloud”’ »
Sorry, but I just don’t trust the movie industry to do something like this. It sounds good, and it would be welcome, but think about it… the movie industry made a killing on the VHS-to-DVD format change, just as the music industry did on the cassette-to-CD change, and the 8-track-and-LP-to-cassette change before it. Maybe the …
Continue reading ‘“Ultraviolet Movie Locker Aims to Solve the Movie Industry’s Digital Mess”’ »