Slashback: Membership, Quarkiness, Audioggogy

Slashback this fine tax-day evening (you did remember, right?) brings you updates on Gentoo Linux, Mike Myer's brush with the Humor Police, Microsoft's spin on the waning Hailstorm, and more. Read on for the details.

A tornado's worth of spin control. telstar writes "The Code Report is reporting that last week's story from the New York Times concerning the death of Hailstorm was not entirely accurate. A Microsoft spokesperson has stated that Microsoft is shifting from a model in which MSN was the sole operator to a model where the operation of these services is available to multiple operators."

Onan Meets Midas. daoine writes: "Reversing the outcome of an earlier argument, boston.com is reporting that MGM and New Line Cinema have reached an agreement that permits New Line to continue with the Goldmember name. It also stipulates that further satirical names must be approved by MGM."

Does dishes, saves gas, freshens your breath, cleans your pets ... Apparently, Gentoo Linux is contagious. JigSaw writes: "OSNews features an interesting review of Gentoo Linux 1.0 and they call it 'the fastest loading, fastest-operating Linux distribution to date.' Gentoo may be the fastest Linux for a workstation today, but according to the review, it still has some problems, most notably, annoying bugs. However, it still manages to score a glowing 8.2 out of 10 overall."

Reader sckevyn also points to the Gentoo PowerPC page for those equipped different.

First steps always seem small. camusflage writes "Yahoo has a story from ZDNet about TheKompany's recent release of tkcPlayer for the Zaurus, which is being billed as the first portable Ogg Vorbis player. A player for a format not many people are using on a platform even fewer people are using. Admirable, but not likely to be a commercial success."

Honey, your quark is showing. ngrier writes "As a quick follow-up to the story posted here a few days ago regarding the potential quark star, the NASA APOD today is a picture of the aforementioned star."

Comments

Portable(ish) flac

[srichman]

...which is being billed as the first portable Ogg Vorbis player.

Yeah, but these guys had flac support two months ago.

New Hailstorm nothing but damage control.

[Alsee]

Another case of over eager media looking to see the worst in tech companies. Or maybe just the worst in Microsoft.

Nope, Hailstorm is dead dead dead. A key feature of Hailstorm was that Microsoft wants to be the "gatekeeper" of the internet. In order collect a toll requires a monopoly. People are NOT going to pay at a toll booth when there's a free street to the same place.

The "new and improved" version of hailstorm is nothing but a glorified version of a standard username/password database. I doubt many companies are going to buy the software, and even if they do the proffits of selling the software are nothing compared to OWNING the identity of everyone on the net and selling the service.

The "new and improved" hailstorm is a desperate attempt to keep a colossal failure from sinking .NET with it. Hailstorm was .NET's flag-ship product. Saying "Hailstorm is alive and well" is nothing but a damage control spin.

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My delusion that lawyers are rational human beings

[Alsee]

MGM was negotiating to place an ad for the upcoming Bond adventure "Die Another Day" before the "Austin Powers" film

That really sums up the value of MGM's case against Goldmember. If they genuinely felt that the name tarnished their James Bond property then why the hell would they want to use it to advertize a Bond film?!

It also stipulates that further satirical names must be approved by MGM.

Ok, maybe I'm having delusions that lawyers are actually rational human beings, but you *could* read that to mean MGM realized it was a frivolous lawsuit and to avoid a countersuit they stipulated they would approve any and all satirical names in the future. :)

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