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Sound During Sleep Fixes Learning

That’s right - take a nap after a mental workout.

Embarrassing security leaks prompt bill to clamp down on government P2P use

Idiotic legislation brought to you by the idiots themselves…

Accidental discovery of ‘female Viagra‘

And damn if it isn’t an antidepressant that doesn’t antidepress! We need this stuff dumped into the drinking water NOW!

Brainwashed

Britain did it in WWII.

NYC Tavern Offering 100 Proof Vodka Turkey

Will you fall over before you get sleepy?

U.S. Customs Agents Arrest Man With 15 Lizards Strapped To Body

That’s the weirdest fetish I’ve heard of.  Today.

Saudi Clerics Told to Keep Sermons Short

Catholics too.  Yeah, sure it’s about H1N1….

An Arkansas police officer used a Taser on a 10-year-old girl because of her unruly behavior. The officer was given permission by the girl’s mother, but the girl’s father is outraged.

Where do I start.. the mother… the cop… ??

Obama says boosting jobs is a top priority

Right after he and his cronies get done looting what’s left of the country.

Are Minorities Getting Enough Out of the Stimulus?

I dunno about you but I’m not getting shit out of the alleged stimulus.

Army Works to Stem Tide of Suicides Among Troops

I’ve got a wild idea that just might work: BRING THEM HOME.

Should Bishops Ask Officials to Skip Communion Over Abortion?

If your religion is going to interfere, please resign.

Poll: More Americans Attribute Biblical Passage to Obama Than to Bible

We. Are. Doomed.

Our Readers’ Smart Tips to Stop Teens From Texting While Driving

Cut off their fingers.  Adults too.

Former Firefighter Dying of Cancer Makes Plea to Congress to Pass 9/11 Bill

Lying sack of dung Christie Whitman stated that health wouldn’t be impacted by dust.

William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’ Read by Porn Star

A rather talented one at that.

Government Watchdog Can’t Verify Stimulus Job Stats

Your money at work.

Barack Obama Has Shares in Baxter Pharma

Yes, your president is making money on swine flu vaccine.  IMPEACH HIM.

IMF Warns of Revolution if Another Round of Bailouts are Handed Out

Not here.. they’d have to stop watching football long enough to do something.

Recently it seems like Google has put a lot of work into seeing Google go local. And this is a good thing. But in this tough economy, the single biggest thing that needs to happen is helping out small businesses while saving their patrons money. Google might have something for that.

Today I learned that Google is looking to integrate coupons, local ones, into their maps. And while this is great news, I was dismayed to learn that this functionality is both a ways off and potentially will not be available be hidden for iPhone users.

Still, there is something to be said about making this kind of thing available from a long term perspective. I am remain a bit fuzzy on how redemption is to work out, but I am sure Google has plans for this as well.

Before I jump on the Murdoch is a fool bandwagon, let’s think about something for a minute. First off, my gut tells me that much of the News Corp. content is on par for the same audience tempted to use Bing and other Microsoft products besides merely Windows.

Secondly, I honestly don’t think either Google or News Corp. is going to miss out much with one another should News Corp. opt to take advantage of Microsoft’s exclusive offer. Frankly, this deal is not going to do much for either company.

In Microsoft’s eyes, this is merely one opportunity to stick it to Google in some fashion. What is uniquely sad is that Microsoft honestly believes that this offering will have any “real” affect on Google in any way. Sadly, based on their revenue, it’s will not matter.

One might not think it to be such a grand idea for Google to get into the real estate business at this point. However considering they are merely offering listings for houses available in their maps site, it actually makes a lot of sense.

I don’t have to tell most of you out there that this move does wonders to boost the visual perspective for any featured real estate. And at the same time, I doubt that any real estate agents are struggling too hard with it either.

Adding further value to this, is the option that Google users can also search for things nearby. Such as grocery shopping, schools, parks, etc. This alone, makes the real estate offering from Google a very big deal in a seriously wounded market place.

Walmart has some computer bargains for the people who get up at the crack of dawn this Black Friday, November 27, 2009. Some of the bargains are:

eMachines 15.6″ eME627-5279 Laptop PC with AMD Athlon 64 Processor for $198.00 click here

HP 15.6″ Pavilion G60-519WM Laptop PC with Intel Celeron Processor 900 & Windows 7 Home Premium for $298.00 click here

Acer Blue 17.3″ Aspire AS7535-5020 Laptop PC with AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor QL-65 & Windows 7 for $498 click here

Hurry. Supplies are limited. Sale begin at 5:00am. Yawn!

Comments welcome.

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a little tired of hearing Republicans act self-righteous about this health care bill. Of course it’s a terrible bill that will increase government and taxes and make our health care worse — but let’s take a short trip down memory lane.

In November 2003, almost all Republican senators voted to pass the “Prescription Drug and Medicare Improvement Act of 2003.” That was the horrible humongous Medicare expansion that ended up costing about $1.2 trillion. It was a huge federal intrusion into health care. Republican darlings like Kay Bailey Hutchison and James Inhofe were among those who voted for it.

Click here to see that vote:
http://announce.lp.org/t/21120/51664/489/0/

Now Republicans are saying they oppose government expansion into health care. What a joke. A few years ago they thought it was the greatest thing in the world. Messages being sent out by the Republican National Committee are telling people that the current bill is bad because it will “cut Medicare”!

There’s only one party that really opposes government health care, and that’s the Libertarian Party. We’ve always been against it, and we’ll always be against it. But that doesn’t mean we want to force your health care into the hands of big insurance companies or big pharmaceutical companies, or subject it to the monopolizing effects of today’s licensing laws.

As our platform states, “We favor restoring and reviving a free market health care system. We recognize the freedom of individuals to determine the level of health insurance they want, the level of health care they want, the care providers they want, the medicines and treatments they will use and all other aspects of their medical care, including end-of-life decisions.”

Thanks to everyone who called your Congressman a few weeks ago. The bill still got passed by the House, but maybe it will be weakened or killed in the Senate. I certainly hope so.

Sincerely,
Wes Benedict
Executive Director
Libertarian National Committee

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Over at the AVG blot they are reporting on a new worm that is making the rounds on Facebook, including a picture of what triggers the bug. AVG advises anyone who sees the below picture, to not click on the button.

They also state the following information on their blog:

Like so many past worms, this one uses a suggestive come-on to lure the unsuspecting into clicking a link, and after some behind-the-scenes shenanigans, it posts a link to the same lure page on the victim’s Facebook wall, if the click-happy victim is currently logged into Facebook.

I won’t go into the details on how the worm works. You can read more on this on the AVG blog site. But be careful out there if you are a facebook user.

Comments welcome.

Source

Once upon a time Dell was the darling of the computer industry. They were #1 in sales and their technical support was rated #1 as well. But times changed and slowly the company lost market share to HP and others. When their technical support went to India consumer complaints were loud and clear. So several years ago Michael Dell took back over the company and it looked like Dell would recover. But unfortunately it appears the company is still struggling trying to stop their slide in ranking.

According to one news article it states that:

Investors punished computer maker Dell Inc. last Friday, sending its shares down almost 10 percent, as the company’s third-quarter earnings, revenues, and results came in below expectations.

The world’s No. 3 computer maker also lost market share to its rivals, a disappointing sign to analysts that it may be losing ground to its competitors as the computer and IT market shows signs of a rebound. The company lost market share to Hewlett-Packard Co., Acer Inc., and Apple Inc.

Consumers have resumed buying computers over the last few months, spurred by back-to-school sales, a recovering economy, and the upcoming holiday shopping season. But consumers have largely avoided Dell, instead snapping up HP laptops, Acer netbooks, and Apple computers—a trend that some analysts attribute to Dell’s staid and sometimes-uninspiring products.

The pricing of Dell systems appear to be competitive with other companies, so price doesn’t seem to be an issue. I believe that the reason for Dells decline is in consumer confidence. Dell is kind of like the American car companies. They may have lost sight on what makes any consumer loyal to a brand. Beside price is the quality of the product and the technical support one receives.

In an age where most everyone is on the Internet, rumors, complaints and consumer reviews are flashed around the world in an instance. So when consumers complained about Dell, the world listened and may still be listening.

What do you think?

Comments welcome.

Source

So much is changing these days in computers. It has been that way for years, however, the pace has accelerated, and things we never thought would happen have happened.

Ten years ago who, other than chip designers, thought we would see so many multicore processors? We have multicore processors in children’s toys! The Cell processor in the PS3 is a multicore design.

Of course now we have graphics cards that consume more power than the CPU, as computing has become so graphics intensive. I’m not sure anyone saw that one, because I think most thought the CPU and GPU power requirements would follow a parallel path.

Speaking of parallel paths, a former editor of Byte magazine (my all time favorite, in case anyone cares) speaks of parallel processing being the next big thing. It is happening now; we can see it. It is not the same sort of statement such as the one 15 years ago when a few proclaimed that RISC processing would take over the world, and the x86 CISC architecture would be left in the dust. (Well, it might happen now, but it will be happening on a GPGPU, not a ’standard’ CPU in the way it was once predicted.)

After decades of fitful progress, parallel processing is suddenly hot and will soon be commonplace on ordinary PCs. For applications rich in data-level parallelism, performance is soaring by leaps and bounds.

• This is not the type of computing the average user does. It might happen when parallel processors become more common, and compilers are written to take advantage of it.

Multicore CPUs from Intel and AMD are all good, but the game-changers are the next-gen GPUs from Nvidia and AMD/ATI. These chips are evolving from highly specialized 3D-graphics processors for games into broader computing engines for nongame software. Nvidia is leading the charge with a new GPU architecture that, for the first time, supports general-purpose computing as strongly as it supports graphics.

• Again, the hardware power is there, but the software is behind the curve. This is the problem. No one, other than scientists are really excited about this just yet.

Nvidia’s new Fermi GPUs will support error-correction codes (ECC), one terabyte of memory, concurrent kernels, and faster double-precision floating-point math. These features are largely unnecessary for 3D graphics but vital for high-performance general-purpose computing. (In fact, ECC slows down graphics processing, which is why it can be disabled in Fermi chips sold for the consumer market.)

With Nvidia’s CUDA development tools, programmers are accelerating some tedious media-processing tasks, such as video transcoding. CUDA uses the GPU’s programmable 3D-graphics shaders as massively parallel processor cores, delivering performance that today’s PC processors can’t match. In addition, GPUs are finding new applications in scientific computing, financial analysis, medical imaging, energy exploration, and engineering.

Other developments are equally exciting. Microsoft’s DirectCompute brings a parallel-processing API to millions of mainstream PCs running Vista and Windows 7. The new OpenCL standard makes parallel programming easier and less proprietary. Apple’s Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) supports OpenCL and Apple’s Grand Central Dispatch technology (now open source), allowing programmers to distribute workloads across multicore CPUs and GPUs.

• Someday, the CPU will be the master processor, not the most powerful, but the most important one, as it will choreograph the workings of the other processors in a machine.

Intel is busy, too. With its own new GPU (Larrabee) on the way, Intel has acquired two small companies specializing in software tools for parallel programming—RapidMind and Cilk Arts. RapidMind is especially cool, because its software bridges GPUs, multicore x86 processors, and even IBM’s Cell Broadband Engine.

Parallel processing is spreading to the masses, and parallel-programming tools are catching up with parallel-processing hardware. When these trend lines finally converge, we’ll wonder why it took so long.

It’s coming, but it will be some time, primarily because so many still say there is no need for the average consumer. When someone figures out that we will use whatever amount of computing power we can get hold of, the applications will come, and the hardware will follow.

Think of the things that Joe Average can do now. My mother never had a clue when she was growing up that people would be able to essentially become their own publishers. There was no clue that information would be available on a giant connection of computers worldwide, or that it would be, for the most part, free.

People will soon be able to build things for personal usage as easily as they print things from a printer today – this technology is already available, but very expensive, soon, kids will be “printing” their own toys, from plans in a book, or moms will be “printing” the latest fashions, for that party held that evening.

The complex computations needed for these things will be done with parallel processing, and it will seem as natural as dialing a cell phone does now.

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•

I will provide my thoughts on the article with the following:

1. There are only three reasons why one “needs” Windows. Specialized peripherals, Windows gaming, legacy/enterprise required software.
2. Properly setup and managed, it has been proven over and over that countries outside of the US bubble have been using Linux on the desktop in schools, governments and at home for years.
3. The US market disliked the offerings of Linux they were presented due to the sellers doing an AWFUL job across the board. No documentation outlining the differences, lacking clarification as to how software works vs how it works with Windows, the list goes on. The sellers failed, not the platform. Big difference, folks.
4. Most of the early PCs bundled with Linux on were using substandard hardware. Hence, them running SLOWER than XP.
5. When something goes wrong, there rarely a Linux guru in town to call on in most instances. Windows has an army of techs in any town of any size. Do the math.

I will however, agree that there remains a HUGE problem with coordination between hardware manufacturers and Linux distributions. But again, the Linux sellers could have eased this pain as follows.

1. Documentation with a list of working peripherals. Big box stores do not feature hardware with the “compatible with Linux” logo on it even though it does exist elsewhere. It’s not pretty, but it is needed and doable via the existing CUPS and SANE databases. Maybe interacting with a saleman with access to the database? Imagine, people talking to people to match up peripherals - the horror!
2. No one installs their own OS outside of power users/Admins/hobbyists. Buy pre-installed, problem solved.
3. Target an audience that wants it. In marketing speak, it’s called qualifying the customers! Duh! Many people just want to do the basics. Even those who want a bit more  from their computers will find the software they need to make this happen. This does not mean that Linux is right for everyone mind you, my wife is a Mac nut. But I work with regular people everyday that I have switched over. Half of them think it’s a new Windows release - they have no idea. Some of them are using GIMP and designing websites with FoSS software. Yet magically, even with the more advanced needs, they’re quite happy with the experience. Sheer madness I tell you!

Properly managed (I earlier acknowledged this shortcoming)…it’s ready for many segments of people. But pundits are too shortsighted to mention that. Guess it’s not important for them to offer the complete picture?

I do agree however, that Google or someone out there needs to step up to address the stuff above. Sorry, but the South African company behind Ubuntu may do well with development, but their marketing is frankly a bit frightening. I really don’t want to do things with Ubuntu short of running my computer, thanks.

Yet another promising project rocking the latest in file sharing. Seems to work well on my LAN, I expect the same except that I had some issues with miniupnpc in the background. Apparently BaShare was not able to work with my network setup. Turned out that even though it does have an effective, be it slow (it grays out for a minute) uPnP tool, one must still open up the ports on their IPTables. I use gUFW, so this was easy enough.

From a practical standpoint, I can see this being very useful. Considering how much down time I have seen personally, as have others I collaborate with using Ubuntu One, this is a great collaboration utility for file sharing.

Assuming you able to get it working with uPnP or are willing to use the ports provided, I see BaShare being a very handy collaboration tool over time. Still think it needs a bit of documentation as most people will have no idea how to get it working with IPTables, but outside of this, it appears to work nicely for me.

Honestly have some mixed feelings about GnoMenu’s current release. The idea, is awesome. And assuming this is a very beta product, it works fairly well on Ubuntu 9.10. However it is clearly not finished as the only theme that really works as it should, is the XP theme.

When selecting menu themes, I found that many application categories were showing up, but once clicked merely opted up a random app from within its own category. Not very helpful.

Frustration aside, once this project has a bit of time to grow, I think many people will be able to find it really useful. Just one thing missing - its called documentation! Seriously, help with a project and by George, we document everything clearly while even providing forums. It’s be nice had I known that this was to be added via the add to panel function rather having to figure this out myself. Just saying.

On the ZDNet website, Microsoft reporter extraordinaire Mary-Jo Foley has a few items about the replacement for Microsoft Works, called Office Starter 2010.

Microsoft Works was a small suite of programs that was not perfect, but it was usually free with many computers, and continuing in that tradition, Office Starter 2010 will be part of a computer purchase also. However, Works could be bought by the end user, which the Office Starter edition will not be. Office Starter will be ad supported, and I wonder how annoying that will be for users, especially those who are on less than stellar internet connections. Waiting for an ad to finish because of a slow connection, while trying to do something with the machine such as save the file would really not be fun.

More information is coming in from various testers regarding the Office Starter 2010 build that Microsoft released to a group of selected testers late last week.

Office Starter 2010 is the Microsoft-designated replacement for its Microsoft Works product. Starter will be a low-end, free (but ad-supported) bundle of Word and Excel.

One (of many) criticisms of Works was that it didn’t support all the same file types as Microsoft Office did, making Works only somewhat compatible with Office. It looks like that same limitation will be present in Office Starter, based on a frequently-asked questions document from Microsoft that one tester forwarded to me. From that FAQ document:

Q: There is a file I can open in Excel or Word that I cannot open in Excel Starter or Word Starter, why?

A: Excel Starter and Word Starter do not support exactly the same file sets.  The following file types cannot be opened in Office Starter: .xla, .xlam, .dsn, .mde, .accde, .odc, and .udl.

Also, add-ins and macros are only marginally supported in Office Starter 2010. According to Microsoft, Office Starter does not support add-ins and will not load them. From the FAQ:

I think this will be very bad for any company or individual trying to use Office Starter 2010 on their netbook, either because of cost or drive space requirements of a full Office 2010 version. Having something that works on the desktop in the office, and not in the netbook on the road would be very frustrating. I imagine the travelling salesman here, trying to show a prospective buyer something that works fine before the trip, but is a total dud on the crippled version of Office Starter.

Microsoft is really shafting the customer here twice. Once by making him wait and wade through ads, and the second time by delivering a crippled product after making the ads a part of this. Do one or the other, not both.

Q: Files have macros, but they cannot be run in Excel Starter or Word Starter, why?

A: Office Starter does not support the creation, editing, or running of macros. However, if a document with a macro is opened in Starter, the macro remains as part of the file.

Another often-glossed-over point regarding Office Starter is how it will be made available. It will be an OEM-only product and not available for download. Again, from the Microsoft FAQ:

Q: How will I be able to get the released version of Office Starter?

A: Office Starter will only be available as pre-loaded software on select new PCs pre-loaded with the Office suites.

As testers noted last week, there’s a new Office-to-Go feature in the Office Starter product that allows users to take their Starter copies (and associated documents) with them on a USB drive. But that feature only works on Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows 7 machines. Since Starter is an OEM-only product that will be preloaded on new PCs, it makes sense it won’t work on XP machines, as OEMs are phasing out XP support (the last bastion for XP — netbooks — won’t be supported after next spring).

What do you think of these Office Starter 2010 limitations? Are any of them onerous enough to make Starter a non-starter?

I don’t live and die by Office, but those I know who do, first don’t like Office 2007, and I’m thinking that Office 2010 will be less a plus as it moves away from the Office 2003 methods more.

Also, each revision of Open Office gets more and more close to closing the gap with Office for everyday jobs. It is free, lightweight, and has no cost or ad-viewing limitations. It’s macros, though not as sophisticated as the ones for Office from Microsoft, do work, and the difference in annoyance between ads and no ads will make a huge difference in the day-to-day usage of the product.

Higher powered netbooks (can you say ION?) and notebooks, as well as desktops where monetary resources are not tight, will either get a full version of Office, or use something else.

Where does that leave Office Starter 2010? The people who will be happy with it are those who don’t know any better, either having nothing before, or truly moving from Works to this product; every other user will look elsewhere for a much better solution.

§

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Quote of the day:

Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.

- Thomas Szasz

•

Microsoft and News Corp. have been discussing an alliance that would remove the news and entertainment corporation’s content from Google’s search results and news page and move them exclusively over to the Microsoft Bing site.  This is a hit or miss deal, on one side you have the need for news agencies to be paid for the content they produce and on the other side you have the problem of exclusivity with Microsoft being a limiting factor for who is able to find their content.  I do not disagree that news agencies have been hurt by the ability of online content aggregators to reduce the number of viewers those agencies have to their sites - thereby reducing ad revenue.  I think it is very important that we have a news media that can sustain itself while still being able to pay for reporters to do their work.  If you haven’t noticed, the trend has gotten very bad recently.  You can read four or five different newspapers and find the exact same stories written by the exact same AP or Reuters reporters without every finding original content written by someone who actually works with the paper.  That means that the number of viewpoints you are likely to see on any given issue is extremely limited.

What the deal with Microsoft would do for the news would be to lay a foundation for search engines that create news pages to pay for the content they pull.  I’ve heard it said that print media is dead and I’ve heard it said that the future of news is blogs and social media sites like Twitter that can offer unfiltered news the moment it happens.  I don’t agree with that assessment at all.  Blogs are not written by journalists, they don’t have to go through fact checking or through an editor.  They don’t have the ability to work on a story for weeks or months in order to get it right.  I would say that most of the new media sites do nothing more than offer opinions and repackage news they read from real journalists.

Like it or not, the news media does need money in order to pay for the services they provide.  The deal with Microsoft would provide for that, and I think Google should pursue a similar strategy with the news agencies that appear on the Google News page.

The Opera browser that combines Opera with the Unite additions complete and ready for the world is here. It has been given the short shrift in the United States by many, but people in Europe use the browser in much greater numbers – showing that it is worthy of everyone’s consideration.

A short introduction on v3.co.uk, formerly VNUNet, gives a different perspective than is frequently seen on U.S. sites.

Opera is a popular browser with some of the best support for standards. Opera 10 promises even faster web surfing, built in spell checker and HTML emails.

The faster web browsing is thanks to a new rendering engine, this is the software used to create the web pages. It also claims to support web standards properly including the Acid3 test (click the link to see how your current browser fares).

Acid3 is an extreme test, a more visible effect will be the sthirdupport for web fonts. Most browsers can only use the fonts installed on the computer.Web designers often give the browser a list of fonts. The font they would actually liked used, a similar but more common font and then let the browser choose its own serif or san serif font. Web fonts let the browser load the font from a website.

Auto-update is one improvement we are pleased to see as it is a simpler process than having to download a installer.

Note that this is the final and official public release of Opera 10.10 which contains Unite.

Opera give the user a sleek, clean interface; one that can be modified to the user’s liking, without fear of problems such as the ones recently found to be problematic with Firefox.  Though not as fast with certain parts of the solution to browsing as Google Chrome, Opera is faster with each iteration, and more secure than other browsers as defined by the security companies who track these things.

Opera offers features that no other browser implements, and many features implemented in other browsers were features of Opera first. Over its lifespan, Opera has had more great ideas than any other browser, for making the the web an easier place to inhabit for everyone.

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It was ironic that on the day I went to the eBay site to look for a product I wished to purchase, that eBay would be out of action. No problem since I just went over to Amazon and made the purchase through the mega online retailer.

So this morning when I learned that eBay had a glitch on their site, it made me wonder how many sales were actually lost? In a CNN article it stated the following:

Some shoppers found a blank page; some received a message that said, “We were unable to run the search results you entered. Please try again in a few minutes.”

The company said it had resolved the problems by Sunday.

“We are happy to report that critical search functionality was restored overnight on Saturday, and we are seeing normal activity levels today,” eBay Marketplace Operations President Lorrie Norrington said Sunday in a statement.

The company’s Web site offered various scenarios under which sellers could be compensated, including those with auctions that ended Saturday.

I don’t know about you, but I have no loyalty to any one web site. I shop until I find the lowest price possible. Last Friday I was looking for a new mouse for my laptop and finally found what I was looking for at Wal-Mart online. They offer free delivery to any of their stores. Though I may have to wait a week to get the mouse, the price was right and delivery is free to any of their stores.

Comments welcome.

Source

Microsoft and News Corp., the news company that runs the Wall Street Journal of the US and also The Sun of the UK, may be in the process of entering into a pact. But this pact has an unusual twist to it. Microsoft wants the news agencies to opt out of Google search and instead go with Bing. What’s the catch? Microsoft is going to pay these news companies to go with Bing.

In a recent CNN news article it also states:

One website publisher approached by Microsoft said that the plan “puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them”.

Microsoft’s interest is being interpreted as a direct assault on Google because it puts pressure on the search engine to start paying for content.

“This is all about Microsoft hurting Google’s margins,” said the web publisher who is familiar with the plan.

Google responded with this:

Matt Brittin, Google’s UK director, told a Society of Editors conference that Google did not need news content to survive. “Economically it’s not a big part of how we generate revenue,” he said.

I believe this is what Microsoft and News Corp. do not understand. Google doesn’t need the news companies as bad as the news companies need Google. Microsoft has never been able to get above 10% of the market when it comes to search. They can spend all of the millions of dollars they want, but Google is just well liked by the Internet community.

With that being said, this will be beneficial to Microsoft and News Corp in the long run. Some people will opt in for the paid content and may switch over to Bing. But the majority will stay with Google and continue to look for the free news.

The only way these newspapers will survive is if they find a way to shutdown the Internet! LOL

Comments welcome.

Source

Several places on the net are reporting on a couple of cases where people with Apple computers are finding that Apple Repair will not take care of problems due to the users being smokers.

As someone that has worked on several dozen computers used daily by smokers, I can say that it is not a fun experience. The very first thing that needs to be done is blowing out all the dust and ash that accumulates, which can cause anything from overheating to complete failure.

I have a memory of one computer worked on, from back in the days of Windows 98, used in an automotive setting, where the floppy drive was so full of ash that when the drive was removed, a gentle tap on the side yielded an ash plume which was quite impressive. That entire computer was clogged with ash and dirt, and the heatsink and fan combination had been rendered a heatsink only, as the fan was dead, bearings ruined by the dirt and ash. It was a good thing that ash is not usually conductive, because the unused PCI and ISA slots were filled and had to be blown out. It was not a big surprise, the entire garage was that way, the only thing that helped the mechanics not choke was a huge exhaust fan in the back wall.

All that to say that smoke by-products, dust, and dirt are not the friend of electronics in general, and specifically computers.

So when the cases of Apple computers coming up with problems that would not, or could not, be repaired, I was very interested.

I saw it first in ITWire, from down under -

A leading consumer blog has reported two instances in which Apple technicians refused to work on Macs that had been used in houses where people smoked. In both cases, Apple claimed that the smoking voided the Macs’ warranties.

The Consumerist blog , published by the Consumer Reports people, was cc’ed on an e-mail from one Apple customer to Steve Jobs complaining that the Apple Store refused to work on his MacBook because it was contaminated with smoke.

The site later heard also from another Mac owner whose computer was sent back by an authorized Mac service center for the same reason: smoke contamination that voided the warranty.

That user also complained to Steve Jobs. She did hear back from someone at Apple, who told her the company would not require an employee to work with hazardous materials.

Apple offered to do minor repairs if that was all that was required, but upon investigation, the technician found that accumulated tar made the computer impossible to repair.

The Consumerist has not been able to get a comment from Apple about the incidents.

Before forming an opinion on Apple’s position, it’s instructive to read the comments on the Consumerist site from people who’ve actually had to work on computers owned by smokers.

I often wonder why anyone smokes. In this day and age, where more than enough proof is out there to prove the damage smoking does it is truly beyond belief that anyone does it. With all the signs shown on heavy smokers (tar and nicotine build up, etc.), I am surprised that those that smoke would not wise up and not smoke around their electronic items. Perhaps you think that your body will rid itself of the toxins from smoking, but, just as your clothes don’t, your electronics will not be able to remove the effects of tar, nicotine, ash, and any other nasty solid matter from burned cigars and cigarettes.

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A man’s got to know his limitations. Clint Eastwood

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