Results tagged “geturgeekon”

Since we have to lead with anything Journey here at SFist, check out the YouTube clip of the ad for Atari's "Journey Escape" we found on Kotaku. Avoiding (pixelated representations of) crazed fans and manipulative music industry types never looked so fun! Buy it now! If espionage is more your game, then the cloak-and-dagger shenanigans at HP should be up your alley. Even reporters were entangled in the web of lives spun to discredit a board member who once wed John Traina's sloppy seconds ex-wife Danielle Steele.

In honor of Labor Day, we'd like to point out that every employee, freelancer and consultant in Silicon Valley has to bargain their health benefit terms on their own or take what the company offers, and many end up one of the 46 million Americans without. So this techie is rooting for Tom Ammiano to legislate health security, at least for San Franciscans. While individual entrepreneurial successes like the Mercury News' Matt "Silicon Beat" Marshall going solo are inspiring ('Web 2.0' bubble prophecies aside), we hope he doesn't have dependents or any pre-existing conditions that need insuring.

There are few places where people get their collective geek on like Burning Man. A lot of folks are staying home this year -- Violet Blue gives some good reasons why -- and taking a chance to relax on the full-press coverage and pimp as much anti-party legislation as they can while the freak vote is out of town.

The big news yesterday, which hit our feed reader right before our wifi crapped out, was Google CEO Eric Schmidt driving down the 101 to Cupertino to join Apple's Board of Directors. Considering some of the trouble Apple's been in lately -- suppliers suing newspapers over reports of overworked employees in China, a less-than-stellar environmental record, stock option backdating scandals -- could this be a way for Google to outsource all the evil they're supposedly not going to do? Oh right, this is about taking on Microsoft, kinda. Apple certainly loves to talk trash about Windows.

With SFist Rita's report yesterday about Apple settling with Creative, Apple fanboys can console themselves with the news that Microsoft is also getting dinged for even more money in a patent infringment suit. Meanwhile, retail workers who downloaded the development version of Apple's new OS, Leopard, are getting canned left and right (scroll down). But BusinessWeek thinks good iPod news is on the way, while Wired News explores the back alleys of Chennai in search of smuggled iPods and Powerbooks.

Locally, the big news was the second best blog party last Friday thrown by TechCrunch down in Menlo Park. Scott Beale was commissioned to take the photos, including the one above featuring an uneasy handshake between Valleywag's Nick Douglas (left) and his favorite whipping boy, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. Nick had been bumped off the exclusive invite list, but Michel must have relented. If he had been dis-invited, apparently crashing the party was not an option.

The good news is that the first battle in the legal fight against the NSA's wiretapping program has been won by everyone who doesn't work for the NSA. The bad news is that internet-enabled vigilante mobs could be the next big fad here in the States. Eh, we're too busy applying a new Dasani-branded profile treatment to our MySpace profile and checking out some of the videos.

We've held out this long, and we're only gonna make this jokes once, but this summer, watch out for... Drinks on a plane! (We'll now run across the street and demand of the priest an appropriately harsh prescription for penance.) But don't worry, technology and, to a lesser extent, the Bush and Blair administrations, are here to protect you. With biometric terrorist detectors, other tech that's been around for generations, and the latest in arbitrary and invasive search and profiling trends. When of course, your laptop from Apple or Dell could pose just as much of a threat. All the while, organized crime may just avoid the lines at the gate by telecommuting -- we can't wait until infesting MySpace hipsters with extortionware and bullying World of Warcrafters out of their gold gets a mention on The Sopranos.

Hello on your puzzling adventures, Perplex puzzlers! We're hoping they lured you to our site out of your competitive spirit of gamesmanship, and we'll keep you with our obsessive coverage of most things Bay Area.

It's been a while since we published a tech roundup. But the Internet turned 15 last Sunday, we got a new laptop from an entrepreneur and friend who'll be enabling this 'Fister's addiction to blogging, and SFist Chuck, whom we dearly miss, was kidnapped by Disney, who force him to Imagineer at gunpoint. All the while, you've been lost in the unmapped multiverse, wondering who Supr.c.ilio.us and TechCrunch are, and which is the hipper one to name drop when asking your IT department for help (Supr.c.ilio.us); anxious about the hygenic example set for the children by superstar CEOs in the valley (they're terrible); and, dude, what's up with MySpace? 'Cuz there's, you know, awesome bands and some serious hotties, which are cool, but there's also, like, ads that install viruses, and that Tom guy, who's totally creepy.

Remember that totally awesome scene in where the Witch King was leaving Cirith Ungol with the Orc army and Frodo started freaking out and then that big shaft of light shot out of the building as the people of Minas Tirith looked on with a dread that something great and terrible was coming?

Well, Apple is rumored to be anouncing the iPod phone by Motorola at the Moscone Center on the 7th. 100 songs, service through Cingular are the rumored deets. In the meantime, the music business, not happy with the $350 million they've pocketed from the iTunes store since 2003, want a tiered pricing scheme, with new releases bumped to $1.49 -- which would be a great way to send people back to filesharing for the latest.

Well, Google is set to announce their Google Talk and Google Desktop v2.0 tomorrow -- but folks have already been using Talk for a few hours now (and the client has been released). Was the leak to create 'buzz,' mayhaps? Danah Boyd doesn't call Google (whom she used to work for) out specifically, but it isn't too hard to figure out who she's talking about when she points out that when your competitor is Microsoft, you shouldn't help them by building tools exclsuively for their platform.

Oh, so much geekery, we're gonna do this bullet-style. Shall we get started?

Via Brian over at The Bay Area is Talking, we find out that everyone's favorite nerd sweatshop (because of, um, their on-campus exercise facilities, natch), Google, is being accused of workplace discrimination. Christina Elwell alleges Google was very much evil when she was purportedly demoted and harassed after letting her boss know that she was pregnant, and at a high-risk for health problems or miscarriage. You'd think for company of such smart people, they would have eschewed a manichean worldview for something a little more complex...because now, any bad publicity counts double.

So it looks as though there's a little less competition in the Valley, and therefore the world, for portable MP3 player technology. D&M Holdings went and sold the rights to Rio's IP assets to SigmaTel. You may remember Rio as the folks who brought one of the very first MP3 players to market (we bought a 32mb Rio as a Christmas gift for our mom back when we were flush with dot-com boom cash, figuring she could rip her Joni Mitchell CDs onto it).

Matt Mullenweg is calling it the "Blogger" Harlem photo, and man, is that a bunch of beautiful geeks. We despatched one of the cuter SFists to the fete, but next time we'll have to give him a little media training -- lesson one: "How to elbow your way to the front of a group photo, babies be damned."

Kevin Rose, the cutie-pie techie on TV who moved to LA when Tech TV became the G4 network, has wiggled out of his contract and is producing a new show for internet distribution, Systm, and also promises to start producing new episodes of The Broken. As long as forties and Ramzi are on hand, we're sure it'll be a success. [via BoingBoing]

Washington, D.C. Federal District Court says the FCC has no power to foist the broadcast flag upon our wonderful gadgets. The forces of evil Rightsholder lobbyists shall decend on Congress. Gigi Sohn points out that constituents probably don't want their TV's f**ked with by their elected representative.

Art critic and photographer Claudine, who has been something of a modern-day Chalfant or Ahern by cataloging photos of graffitti pieces throughout the city, left a comment in our Get Ur Geek On: Warbussing EssEff piece where we had posted a picture of his trademark frog on the mural space at Galeria de la Raza. She tipped us to a debate about the piece over at Flickr brought on by a posting at the gallery shop taking Ribity to task for defacing the billboard space, which often features some pretty exciting work (and is often tagged by others as well). The post reads:

It's been a while since our last Get Ur Geek On, so we've got a lot of hottness today and will use a bullet list, power-point style, because our attention spans have begun to shrivel in inverse proportion to our abdomen's expansion:
• Dan Gillmor, the last top tech writer standing at the San Jose Mercury News, has decided to leave the Knight-Ridder corporate family to become a 'Citizen Journalist.' Is that a fancy term for unemployed blogger? [From Slashdot]
• PowerLight, of Berkeley, has installed the world's largest solar array in warm, sunny Germany. SuperaffenT****nturbogeil, naturlick! [From SFgate]
• Apple can't keep up with demand for Mac computers, so you better get your butt down to the Apple Store and grab what you can, or your relationship will founder on the rocks of the iRiver. [From Cult of Mac]