atmaspheric | endeavors

I am riding the Acela train back right now (10:21pm EST) from Philadelphia to NYC and I am sitting behind the most annoying family of all time. It’s mom, dad, two daughters and Grandparents all basically shouting to each other in Spanish while the younger sister (probably 5) literally climbs and slides over the [...]

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MacMinute reader Alarik Skarstrom reports that Apple purchased a two-page ad for the Power Mac G5 on the inside front cover of The Economist… [MacMinute]
Looks that way to me… I’ve seen the ads in Business Week as well as Fortune.

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He beats closest rival Jan Ullrich by 76 seconds. [BBC SPORT]

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Popularized by Lance Armstrong, a radio system that allows riders to communicate with their directors and teammates has its advocates and detractors. [New York Times: Technology]
Not only can teams directors be in touch with their riders, but some teams are scanning for opposing team frequencies to try and listen in…

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Yesterday the cable guy came and delivered as expected the new Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 Cable box. It’s loaded with the Pioneer 3.0 OS (according to the installer as I can’t find any reference to that anywhere and have not forced a reboot yet).
I have not had much time to play yet, so bear [...]

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jay’s found a fix that brings back all of the functionality [anil dash's daily links]
Have to tweak mine right away!
Works as advertised!! Very simple to do…

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Wharton experts examine recent megamergers and find that there are common themes to explain the success–and failure–of what are almost always jarring corporate restructurings.
[CNET News.com]

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Microsoft plans to launch an enhanced version of its MSN service this fall as part of its efforts to tap broadband users for online subscriptions, according to the head of MSN. [CNET News.com]

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EFF has launched a service to check whether or not your Kazaa/Grokster/whatever userid is the subject of an RIAA strongarm action against your ISP. It scrapes the PACER subpoena database periodically and indexes all the userids being sought by the recording industry. Link[Boing Boing]

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Some (blurry) pics over at Mobile.Burn of two new Sony Ericsson phones, the P810 (the phone on the left) and the Z600 (the phone in the center). The P810 looks even better than its predecessor, the P800, while the Z600 is said to be a essentially a clamshell version of the well-regarded T610. [Gizmodo]
According to [...]

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A federal grand jury Thursday indicted a Nigerian national and a British citizen living here in an alleged Internet hoax that promised a share of $20 million in a box at Bush Intercontinental Airport.
Nigerian Patrick Omu, 36, and Ambrose Agwuibe, 43, were charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and 18 counts of wire [...]

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“The mobile world has been racking its brains to find something that will succeed on the scale of SMS,” comments James Tagg, managing director of push-to-talk startup FastMobile Inc.. “[PTT] will take off like SMS did. Our estimates suggest that push-to-talk could be worth 150 million ($173 million) in Europe over the next year, becoming [...]

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Michael Phelps moved closer to superceding Ian Thorpe as the world’s best swimmer after a stunning night at the World Championships in Barcelona.
The 18-year-old American destroyed the world record in the 200m individual medley as he relegated Thorpe to second in their much-anticipated showdown.
And that performance came less than an hour after he had [...]

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I just discovered a very cool piece of Java software thanks to the WebDeveloper Weekly newsletter.

JBook lets users retrieve, read, and bookmark electronic texts from Project Gutenberg and other sources. It transforms any computer into an electronic book reader with an entire library available on demand.

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Long-time PIC contributor Mike Cane emerges from his hermitage to once again offer himself up as a human target for the PDA zealots. This time he explains why, after lusting for Pocket PC, he finally decided to stick with the PalmOS platform after all. [PalmInfocenter]

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The media giant hinted at that this week when Don Logan, the executive who oversees America Online and Time Inc., said one reason for the company’s unexpectedly high subscriber losses was the result of “cleaning up the files.”
People familiar with the situation say part of the cleanup involves the termination of subscribers generated by a [...]

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Very clever scheme from Robert X. Cringely to legally subvert the current music distribution model - he calls it “Snapster”:… [Blogcritics]
This actually sounds like an idea a friend of mine and some buddies were working through. It makes huge sense to me. I wonder if Muse could pull this off since they are [...]

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Coming on Saturday is a delivery from Time Warner Cable which is their new cable box which includes built-in PVR. I believe the box is the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 Digital Video Recorder. For $6.95/mo. you can record two programs and watch a third previously recorded show. It’s an 80GB box…
The only [...]

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Motorola has signed an agreement with Jordan mobile network operator Fastlink to be the first in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region to pilot Motorola’s General Radio Packet Service (GPRS) Push-To-Talk (PTT) solution. Point-to-point PTT calls to individuals and PTT group calls have been demonstrated successfully at Fastlink’s facility in Amman.
According to [...]

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Here’s an idea that credit card companies should implement: an RSS feed of your credit purchases, in real-time. Basically have an RSS feed of every authorization on your credit card(s), as they happen. [Gadgetopia]
Interesting thought, but how would it be secure? Seems relatively easy to discover RSS feeds… which is also kind [...]

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