Let he who has not been fooled by a fake Twitter page cast the first stone.
Yet, though Kanye West has demanded that Biz Stone and friends do something about fake feeds, St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa has gone one step further.
He's suing.
According to the Associated Press, La Russa who is, let's not forget, a lawyer, was appalled to discover someone had set up a Twitter account allegedly bearing his name and a sick sense of humor.
According to the complaint, filed last month in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco, one tweet of the now now-deleted account read, on April 19: "Lost 2 out of 3, but we made it out of Chicago without one drunk driving incident or dead pitcher."
For those of you who don't follow baseball closely, Cardinals pitcher Darryl Kile died in his hotel room in 2002 of an arterial blockage. While relief pitcher Josh Hancock was killed in a car accident, after which his blood-alcohol level was said by authorities to have been twice the legal limit.
Quite a sense of the jolly, this Twitterer.
However, unlike other fake Twitter pages, the fake La Russa feed did apparently include a few words that read: "Bio Parodies are fun for everyone."
It will be interesting, should the matter ever come to court, what weight might be given to this alleged disclosure.
In his lawsuit, La Russa allegedly claims that the tweets were "derogatory and demeaning" and that the feed damaged his trademark rights.
However, it seems as if he is giving an intentional walk to the person who actually created the fake page. Which is an interesting decision.
Technological progress always comes with a hefty price. (Unless it's a PC, I suppose)
So I must admit to feeling a little heartskip at hearing that the search to commune with aliens in the outer beyond will leave humans looking like, well, porky aliens.
According to a report in the Telegraph, scientists believe that long flights into space will not have beautifying effects on the star-crossed trekkers of the future.
In fact, they will make them short, fat, and bald.
I wish I could find more comforting words to describe their fate. Just as I wish that more people would realize that "bald" does not equate to "ugly."
A long time spent up in near zero gravity will mean that humans will not have to make an effort to get off the couch. They won't have to do anything to stay warm either. And no exercise means, well, blubber.
Will these be trekking humans waiting for plastic surgery?
The otherworldly atmosphere will also mean that humans won't exactly grow, as muscles and bones will not develop in the way they do here in the gyms of the earth.
Astrobiologist Dr. Lewis Dartnell from University College, London, also said that fluid will pool in humans' skulls and there will be no need for protecting yourself from the cold. Which means your face will bloat and your hair will fall out. Oh, and don't forget that you'll be fat, too.
"With little effort required to move around in microgravity and an environment that is never too hot or cold, future spacemen and women are likely to become pretty chubby," he said.
But here is what Dr. Dartnell did not conceive.
On every future long-haul space flight there will be plastic surgeons ready to nip, tuck, and weave you back to beauty in a perfectly painless, weightless environment. Jowls too puffy? Let's pop that air out. Hair dropping out? Let's graft a little from your other regions.
Yes, it will be not unlike the masseuses on the original Virgin Atlantic Airways.
We must never think negatively about technological progress. Science will always find a way to keep us just as beautiful as we are today. I mean, what else do we need science for?
A developer preview version of Google's Chrome is now available on Mac OS X.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
Updated Jun 4th 8:53 p.m. with download links and further details and 9:47 p.m. with hands-on testing results.
Google released Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux Thursday--but only in rough developer preview versions that the company warns are works in progress.
"In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux, but whatever you do, please DON'T DOWNLOAD THEM," Google product managers Mike Smith and Karen Grunberg said in a blog post, evidently trying to employ a little reverse psychology. "Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software."
Until now, Google's open-source browser has been a Windows-only product, and some Mac and Linux users have been clamoring for their own version. Google coders have been working to rebuild some Chrome components, such as its graphical interface and its sandbox that isolates different processes from each other, to move beyond just Windows.
Google offers three versions of Chrome: stable, beta, and developer preview. The Mac OS X and Linux versions fall into this last, category, the most buggy and least tested and complete.
Chrome for Mac OS X sports the same new-tab interface as the Windows version. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
The Flash plug-in won't work, for example, so forget watching YouTube videos. Printing or bookmark management aren't implemented yet. And privacy controls aren't fully baked. Google said there are more than 400 bugs that need to be stomped.
Even though only released for the experimental crowd, the new versions are a big step forward for the browser. First, the versions will plug into Google's auto-update service that automatically downloads new versions. Second, the products bear the Google Chrome brand, not just the Chromium label of the only incarnations available until now. And third, a much larger audience will be helping Google debug the code through automated crash reports of the new versions.
Not everyone can try the Mac and Linux versions, though. Google spokesman Eitan Bencuya said the Linux version is supported only the Debian and Ubuntu incarnations of Linux, and the Mac OS X version only works on Intel-based Macs.
I gave the Mac OS X version a 40-minute whirl and was delighted to find one of my favorite Windows features--fast launch. Pages loaded reasonably quickly, too, though a few times the browser seemed to hang while loading one.
Chrome has edged up to 1.8 percent of the browser market--small but good enough for fourth place.
(Credit: Net Applications)
The only pages that didn't work for me were Yahoo Mail, which told me I had an unsupported browser, and those that required Flash. But a number of complicated JavaScript-based sites, including Gmail, Flickr Organizr, and Google Docs, had no troubles.
The animation around the tabs is pleasing, but also helps your mind grasp what's going on. A new tab rises up from the window frame. When you close a tab, the adjacent ones slide over to fill the gap. The active tab is lighter, though the other tabs are not as relatively dark as in an earlier build that I tried.
I experienced what I thought was one crash I feared brought down my machine, but after about 15 seconds the browser and machine became responsive again as if nothing had happened.
I was pleased to see the three-finger left or right swipe work to page backward and forward. However, some keyboard shortcuts were flaky--or perhaps I just have to learn new ones.
Google isn't saying when the new versions will make it to beta status, much less stable. "It's unclear. This is a first step," Bencuya said.
The Mac OS X version, 3.0.182.5, is close to the latest Windows developer preview, 3.0.183.1.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
According to Net Applications statistics, Internet Explorer remains the king of the heap, with 65.5 percent market share in May 2009. Firefox has 22.5 percent, Safari 8.4, and Chrome has edged up to 1.8 percent since its launch in September.
All this variety means Web developers have to test their sites to make sure they work with more versions. Because Chrome uses the WebKit engine for interpreting and displaying Web page coding, the same engine Safari uses, Google argues that Chrome should be similar. But Chrome uses a different engine for JavaScript called V8, and Web-based JavaScript instructions are at the heart of much of the present proliferation of elaborate Web pages and applications.
The browser challengers argue that having multiple browsers on the market means that Web programmers will aim more for supporting standards such as HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and JavaScript. And indeed, Microsoft made a standards mode the default for IE 8. However, varying interpretations of standard and varying degrees of support complicate the matter, and a large number of people haven't upgraded from IE 6, much less IE 7.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs briefly addressed his state of health onstage at an Apple event last October.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET News)
Steve Jobs is on track to return to the helm of Apple this month after nearly six months of medical leave, according a report in The Wall Street Journal that cited unnamed sources.
Jobs announced in January that he would be stepping down temporarily from the chief executive post whilerecuperating from a hormone imbalance, and a return to the company this month could coincide with an appearance at the Worldwide Developers Conference, which opens Monday in San Francisco. The centerpiece of the conference is expected to be the App Store and the new features of the iPhone OS 3.0, but there has also been speculation that Apple will unveil a new iPhone as well.
"He was one real sick guy,'' said a source whom the newspaper described as having seen Jobs in recent weeks. "Fundamentally he was starving to death over a nine-month period. He couldn't digest protein. (But) he took corrective action.''
Last week, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told the Journal that Jobs seemed healthy and energetic.
Tim Cook, Apple's chief operating officer, has been running the company during Jobs' absence. Apple has said Vice President of Marketing Philip Schiller will deliver the WWDC keynote address, assuming Jobs' customary role as he did at the Macworld conference earlier this year.
Ray Ozzie, speaking Thursday at the Churchill Club in Palo Alto, in a discussion moderated by Wired's Steven Levy.
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)
PALO ALTO, Calif.--Ray Ozzie tends to see things much like a Seattle meteorologist--always cloudy.
Making a trip to sunny Silicon Valley, Ozzie addressed Silicon Valley's Churchill Club, outlining the transformational role that cloud computing will play.
As he discussed that vision, moderator Steven Levy asked if Microsoft itself was sufficiently cloudy when he had arrived.
"The Hailstorm had passed," Ozzie quipped, making a reference to Microsoft's widely panned first attempt to offer cloud services.
In seriousness, though, Ozzie said that Microsoft wasn't really cloud-focused when he joined the company, following Microsoft's purchase of his Groove Networks.
"Respectfully, they were very busy working on things that would become Vista and Office 2007," he said. "There was a lot of 'PC' thinking. I worked with Steve and Bill on change management and that's what I have been doing."
Ozzie declined to agree with Levy's assertion, however, that perhaps packaged software was the buggy whip of our times.
"No," Ozzie said. "Different market segments want to consume value in different.
The goal of the cloud era, he said, is to create a world in which applications are sandboxed like the browser, cached like Javascript and all the data fully synchronized.
Levy suggested that perhaps that kind of world might be bad for Microsoft's Windows business, but Ozzie disagreed.
"We'll always need an OS," he said. "Every device needs an OS. The programming model on top's of that OS is what's changing."
Ozzie said the key is making sure that operating system is "contemporary and relevant."
The Netbook factor Netbooks really are an opportunity, he insisted. "We have to write an OS other than XP runs on it, and we've done that with Windows 7."
He expanded later on, noting that what most users really want in a Netbook is actually a full-fledged PC that can do more than just browse the Web.
"The Netbook as consumers have spoken for it is a laptop," he said. "People expect Office for it. They expect to be able to go to Download.com...and download for it." (Editors' note: Download.com is a property of CBS Interactive, which also publishes CNET News.)
As for ARM-based devices, or other non-Windows products, Ozzie noted that historically consumers haven't bought keyboard-based devices that weren't full computers.
"I'm not writing it off," he said. "If it happens and if it happens in volume it will be a different type of device."
But he said. "I believe the X86 instuction set and Intel and AMD Netbooks...they are going to be the majority of what's out there."
Levy also pressed Ozzie on what it's like now that Bill Gates has been gone from full-time work for just about a year.
"He writes, he calls, but infrequently," Ozzie said. He said Gates remains involved on a few key projects. He's also just an e-mail away, when he or others have concerns.
Some things have changed, he said, such as the company's review process as well as its famed ThinkWeek in which employees from all over Microsoft would submit hundreds of papers for Gates' review.
"Bill has an amazing ability to consume very quickly," Ozzie said. "A thousand some papers would come in for each Think Week. He would go off to a cabin and sequester himself. He would probably read a couple hundred of them. People loved it."
However, Ozzie said that ThinkWeek, as it was set up was "a very Bill-unique thing"
"I don't think that's something we want to reproduce," Ozzie said. The replacement for that, he said, is a process in which a broader set of technical people offer their thoughts on new ideas.
"People like feedback--senior technical feedback," Ozzie said.
Steering the ship Ozzie noted that Microsoft is a bigger company than the one he competed against during his time at Lotus and Groove.
"We always were amazed at how quickly the ship could turn," Ozzie said. "But that was a different era. It was a smaller company."
In trying to change Microsoft, Ozzie said he has tried both things very much in the company's tradition--his Internet services disruption memo was modeled on Gates' missives--as well as in ways that are less familiar, such as trying to break down the company's well known organizational structure, with software developers working in offices and corresponding over email.
Levy asked Ozzie how many companies have the ability to build the kinds of data centers that Microsoft and Google are building.
"Not too many," he said. When asked about who will be there for the long term, Ozzie wasn't ready to include Amazon in that list.
"I don't know about Amazon," he said. "They are the leader. They have done amazing work, but the level to which you need (to invest) to build it out...it's very substantial."
Ozzie credited an unusual source for Microsoft's position to be able to deliver cloud-based services--its much maligned MSN consumer services. He noted that it was Hotmail and Messenger that gave Microsoft the skills it needed to ultimately build Windows Azure.
"Had we not kept MSN alive...we wouldn't have had those competencies in-house," he said.
Ozzie also spoke about the business side of cloud computing. I captured his answer on video. (Apologies in advance for any quality issues--I'm multitasking).
In the question-and-answer period, Ozzie was asked for his thoughts on Google Wave, the company's recently introduced tool for combined collaboration and messaging.
He praised Google for taking on a big task, but also took issue with their approach saying it is "anti-Web."
"As a system, I think the complexity is an issue," Ozzie said. "The problem, the way the defined it is a complex one."
That said, it will offer insight into whether people want messaging that is distinct, such as e-mail or instant messaging, or whether there is demand for a more integrated product.
"I hope we learn, as an industry, an awful lot from Wave," Ozzie said.
Other questions from the audience ranged from what computer science professors should be teaching to whether Internet Explorer would support HTML 5. Ozzie said he had nothing to announce on the latter front, but added, "It is our commitment to be a world class Web browser, what our competitors like to call a modern web browser. I think you can expect us to do the right thing."
