Results tagged “computers”

You can feel it in the air. Mac sect members eagerly awaiting the next pearl of genius to drop at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, which is happening right now at the Moscone Center. (Today's frenzy even managed to temporarily shutdown Digg.) Since your editor is a PC user, naturally, he only cares about the WWDC after-parties' amuse-bouche platters. But what say you, Apple fans? What's the hub, bub? What will be unleashed this year? Something light-weight and irresistibly twee yet hip, we hope. And for those of you who want to follow what's going on today through the 12th at the conference, check out Laughing Squid, gdgt, MacRumors, Macworld, Gizmodo, VentureBeat, the Mac Observer, or #apple for more information.

The Wall Street Journal reports that many of San Francisco's homeless are savvy at finding ways to go online regularly. Shelter attendants say the number of overnight visitors with laptops is growing, and SF Homeless, a two-year-old Internet forum, has 140 members. As noted, many job and housing applications must be submitted online, and some homeless advocates say the economic downturn is pushing more of the wired middle class on to the streets.

Easy and compact, check out Apple CEO Steve Jobs' 90-minute keynote speech in 60 seconds. It's like the Golden Globes, only not as pretty or deadly important.

They still make phone books?

SFist interviews the Reverend Billy of "what would jesus buy?"

This is startling: Francis Ford Coppola has a Zoetrope Argentina office. What's more, the other night thieves came in and "tied up employees and took computers, cameras and other valuables" including his screenplay for the yet-to-be-released Tetro, a movie about "rivalries of an artistic Italian immigrant family."

SFist recieved this call to action from Officer Andrew Cohen, who is best known for being the focal point of the so-called "VideoGate" scandal. As with his responses in our recent interview with him, we believe that he raises some very thought-provoking points and offers further candid insight into the imbroglio. If you believe that moving forward with the case against the "VideoGate" participants is a waste of time, he asks you to take action by writing. Also attached below is a letter to his union's journal, in which he castigates the union for non-support.

When we talked to Phil Bronstein, the publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle, a few weeks back, he told us that "the Chronicle will continue to be packed with talented journalists who will keep providing what (SFist) Rita called 'an essential public service.'"

New Jersey-based blogger "Serge the Concierge" has the goods on a pretty cool local party venue -- a junkyard!

Last week's winner, the East Bay Express. A Oakland teacher beats up a social worker and threatens her students -- and still can't be fired. Why can't you get a free weekly in San Leandro? Cover article: The agony of med students waiting to find out where they're going to be doctors. (It's done by computers.) Do you think male poets read Bitch Magazine? Goat meat on International Boulevard. Irish rockers on St. Patrick's Day. And Dan Savage on low female sex drives.

Hey everyone, in the midst of all this Ruby Rippey-Tourk madness, guess who showed up for a photo session and interview with the Chron? That's right -- Peter Ragone's best friend and your correspondent's biggest fan, John Nelson! We always love to meet our readers!

MacWorld. Keynote. It's Steve's time.

San Francisco wasn't the only place moved by the Kim family tragedy. People around the world followed the tragic story with bated breath as the events unfolded. For most of us it's hard to feel anything but sadness after such an event. We turn off our computers, talk about how the search should have started earlier, wonder what would have happened if the road the family travelled on was locked as it should have been. But a rare group of us hear stories like the Kim's in the news and do something with the loss they feel.

What? This isn't Thursday? OK, all this holiday brouhaha has made us a day late from our usual posting schedule but we just know you'll forgive us. To make it up to you, we want to share a brand new video from Trainwreck Riders. According to our buddy Nat, last week the band hit the streets with a super 8 camera and a bag full of costumes that they dug up from their basements. They started the day at 'Drink Liquor' (where they used to buy alcohol at when they were in high school - uh, allegedly), picked up some 40 oz's of Olde English as inspiration, and shot a video at some of the stomping grounds that Pete sings about in the song.

Oh, where would we be without those local news I-Team reports? Probably stuck in a world full of scamming businesses, not enough labels on things, and bad tanning salons. Now we owe another round of thanks to an I-Team, the KGO one. Because thanks to their hard-hitting report, San Jose is going to undertake the task of cleaning up their libraries.

SFist interviews Matt Costa

will remind us. That's right, it's the year 2000, and the cool new sport is kill as many pedestrians and other drivers as possible (insert Muni joke here). Caine and Rocky star alongside Mary Woronov in this Queen B of thrillers.

We continue with our raging discussion on this year's upcoming baseball season. The rest of the award-winning SFist sports desk will join in as soon as their stupid day jobs let them. Oh, how we long for the days when we were merely crack monkey's chained to computers in Jackson's basement dungeon. Anyways, part I can be seen here and Part 2 here. SFist Chris

The National League West?

If there's one thing we love more than passing along days-old links to non-stories, it's laughing and pointing at people on the internets getting all riled up at perceived assaults on their freedom of expression.

Here in the SFist Tech Labs, we're committed to two things: science, and our readers. So we'd never let anything like the debilitating headache we've been going through for the past 18 hours or so keep us from bringing you the links to tech news you deserve. While we read the symptoms on BBC's health page, you can follow along.

Here in the labs, we're not above passing along a bit of Corporate Advertising as if it were genuine tech news. So we'll tell you that Apple is running a Billion Songs Countdown promotion for its iTunes Music Store. Every 100,000th song downloaded gets a free iPod nano and a gift certificate, and the recipient of the billionth download gets an iMac, a $10,000 gift certificate to the iTMS, and ten (10) 60GB iPods. (If you don't feel like giving your money to The Man, there's a free entry form).

Well, somebody at Casa de Ted y Molly is writing about this crazy February warm weather. If you're looking to meet girls, avoid propositioning them to pose for Suicide Girls. Trust us, it's creepy, especially if you're wearing "bright, striped pants." And Halsted at Cygnior's Quill has an interesting idea -- why not "archive the homeless?" $20 their political commentary is more interesting than DailyKos.

Look! Up in the sky! It's... well, just a bunch of fog, apparently. People have been spending a lot of time looking to the tech world for heroes and personal saviors, only to have those illusions shattered when they realize all they're getting are software, search engines, and MP3 players.

We're thrilled to the gills that the dailies are learning about this cool new sex podcasting thing all the kids are doing with their computers.

Last week, we posted our 'Fistie awards for best coffee/cafe in town. A few of the people leaving comments mentioned Cafe Organica at 562 Central Ave. (at Grove) as a contender for the crown. We're pleased to say that had we visited Cafe Organica, which opened last May, just a couple weeks earlier, stalwarts Ritual Roasters and Blue Bottle would have had to share some of the limelight. This place is great.

An inspector at the Dept. of Building Inspection has been arrested for accepting bribes. Augustine Fallay is alleged to have accepted money in "red-colored envelopes" to expedite certain developers' applications, and became the target of suspicion when people noticed he kept bragging about his weekend trips to Europe. Fallay claims everything was a loan. Newsom said, "I hope we can continue to send the message that we're not going to put up with the actions of some individuals that are participating inappropriately in the process of favoritism." (cough cough, Joe O'Donoghue.) In response, Joe O'Donoghue told the Chron that "Newsom is a liar. Ninety percent of the department is excellent, and 10 percent is corrupt. The corruption accelerated in the last year and a half since Newsom came into office." Hey, that doesn't rhyme! In other news, a woman from San Mateo was extradited to Wisconsin to stand charges for murder. Turns out Cherie Barnard's ex-husband, who was the DA in their county at the time, killed someone who threatened to kill a sheriff after the sheriff shot his three dogs. (But he didn't shoot the deputy?) She divorced her then-husband about five years later, after he shot a guy she was seeing on the side. As SFist Eve says, "it's totally an Ann Rule book." And DMV workers in Oakland were busted by the feds for selling illegal drivers' licenses to new immigrants for $3000-4500 apiece. Other workers were in on the take, getting money to enter false information about residency into the computers and selling registration stickers to people whose cars had failed smog tests.

In the "How would Mario Savio feel?" department, Dale Gieringer of California NORML posted the following on Indybay.org:

Yesterday on Slashdot was a review of local NYT tech correspondent John Markoff's new book, "What The Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry." Quoting the review:

Jury duty. Ack. While we won't get into the specifics behind our general reluctance in doing our civic duty, we were glad for the opportunity to revisit one of our favorite coffee joints -- Wild Awakenings, 142 McAllister Street, right behind U.N. Plaza. This used to be our daily spot when we worked around here; we hadn't been since about August 2003.

Here at SFist, there's nothing we hold dearer than our precious preconceptions and snap judgements. As evidenced by our recent plague of Blink-readings, we busy urban hipsters have no time for fact-gathering and mold-breaking -- we want decisions, motherf**cker, and we want them now! That's why our latest intarweb-obsession is Buttercouple.com, a sort of statistical matchmaking cross between Friendster and AmIHotOrNot plus The Gottman Institute (you know, that guy from This American Life who can watch a couple for a few minutes and then predict how long their marriage will last). Cooked up by a cabal of Berkeley kids, Buttercouple allows you to submit your picture for side-by-side comparison to argorithmically selected potential mates, a coupling then rated by other users for feasibility based solely on your looks. Or in plainer terms, you get to vote on what couples you think ought to get together, and to find out who everyone else thinks that you should be paired with. "We're a serious answer to a problem that's not serious at all," says Buttercoupler Noam Lovinsky. Noam and co-butterers Annie Chang, Matias Cudich, Kavin Stewart, and Scott Grant set out to harness the collaborative filtering power of the intarweb, or as Annie puts it, "something computers can't do that humans can." For now, Annie ... for now. BWAH HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!