you want to start something?

Vader is Luke’s dad — The Empire Strikes Back
Rosebud was his sled — Citizen Kane
She’s her sister and her daughter — Chinatown
Norman is the killer (in drag) — Psycho
Verbal is Keyser Sze — The Usual Suspects
Doc is dead — The Sixth Sense
Earth, in the future — Planet of the Apes
Dog gets put down — Old Yeller
Soylent Green is people! — Soylent Green
He dumps her — Gone With the Wind
Life is a simulation (whoa) — The Matrix
Husband is in on it — Rosemary’s Baby
She is a he — The Crying Game
Dave disconnects HAL — 2001: A Space Odyssey
Split personality — Fight Club
Citizens paint town red — High Plains Drifter
Wife’s head in box — Se7en
Maggie shot Mr. Burns — The Simpsons
Mistress shot J. R. — Dallas
Laura Palmer’s father did it — Twin Peaks
Double suicide — Romeo and Juliet
42 — The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Boys are rescued — Lord of the Flies
Whale destroys boat, lives — Moby-Dick
Shark destroys boat, killed — Jaws
He buries himself — The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
Gatsby is murdered — The Great Gatsby
A-P-P-L-E — The Da Vinci Code
John commits suicide — Brave New World
Burned books are memorized — Fahrenheit 451
Mark Felt is Deep Throat — Watergate
Greek soldiers in horse — The Trojan War
Samus Aran is a woman — Metroid
Prisoner is saved — The Pit and the Pendulum
She’s an actress — Lonelygirl15
They’re all in on it — Murder on the Orient Express
There is no Santa — Christmas
- Steven Leckart

Some of these are fabulous. I can’t believe some of them. Saves me watching/reading/waiting…

Tags: Commentary by mj
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Om Malik on Broadband talks about Gizmo 3.0

“The company claims that it is the first VoIP software client to tie multiple popular VoIP networks. Gizmo Project 3.0 include real-time file sharing which users to exchange files with other Gizmo Project 3.0 users, or send files directly to any major Jabber client.

To make a call, users simply type the username or ID of the person they want to call plus the network domain, for example, username@yahoo.com or username@hotmail.com. Gizmo Project 3.0 users can also call international Yahoo Messenger users for free in France, Spain, and many other countries, for example username@yahoo.fr or username@yahoo.es.”

Why is this not the way that all things work? Why have we had to wait so long?

Why is AIM/iChat not on the list?

Tags: Commentary, Cool by mj
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This ComputerWorld article syndicated on Yahoo News highlights some of what I have always found to be the problem with the Windows UI.

Friction is a good word for it of course. It just slows you down.

The issue I’ve found is that although Windows, including XP and Vista, included items such as fades, transparency and drop shadows, they simply weren’t used properly. Everyone accused Mac OS X of having useless eye candy. This isn’t the case. The eye candy was there, sometimes prematurely, to help guide you to a 3D appreciation of the desktop.

In Mac OS X, menus appear instantly and fade out. The behaviour is fluid.
On Windows, menus take time to fade in before you can make a selection. Waiting for the fade-in slows you down.

In Mac OS X, drop shadows indicate clearly which window is foremost due to the thickness of the shadow.
On Windows, drop shadows don’t indicate layering, they’re just eye candy. It takes longer to notice which window is foremost. This slows you down.

This is exactly what we mean when we say Windows gets in the way.

Tags: Commentary, infurious by mj
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Link swiped from EirePreneur

What is it?
An attempt to establish recognized, open and regular meeting places where entrepreneurs can meet with investors (and anyone else who fancies coming along) in a totally informal setting.

Call to action: Irish OpenCoffee Clubs
Dublin, Cork, Sligo, Galway, Limerick, Waterford, Belfast, Derry, etc.
Lets pick a location in each of these areas – coffee shop – an open space – one with wifi – etc.

James Corbett of Eirepreneur suggests the lobby of the Clarion Hotel in Limerick.
Eoghan McCabe suggests Biabar, Coffee Society or Dakota in Dublin.

So….Belfast?

Tags: Bedouin, Commentary, infurious by mj
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Before I start, this isn’t some impassioned plea for one side or the other on the DRM debate (but I guess I’m acting a little like a headline whore mainstream journalist by including the words play and fair.

Gruber, in his rather great web site, Daring Fireball, writes about whether the interview with Bill Gates conducted by Newsweek’s Steven Levy was fair enough.

I agree with Gruber. It was bogus.

We expect Gates to be in favour of Vista but his statement that:

“Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.”

is, as Gruber writes,

Flabbergastingly false.

I may be old-fashioned here but when an interviewee comes up with something that is flabbergastingly false enough to be considered at best a downright lie or perhaps worse a cynical loogie in the face of the general public whom Gates assumes must be stupid, hairless tree-dwellers, then I would expect a journalist to actually comment on it. The article read like a press release. Was that the price that Newsweek paid to get Gates on board for the interview?

I can only assume that when you’re that rich and you’re trying to buy your way into heaven, you have to have some sort of mental aberration from sleeping on sacks of dollar bills. We know the man has some sort of problems. He can probably remember most of the lines of code he’s ever written but he couldn’t recall the shady dealings his company was convicted of during the infamous flop that became the DoJ trial. Now he’s under the delusion that Windows is secure.

My explanation for the latter is this:

Bill Gates doesn’t do his own IT, is not the first person to see his own email and has probably never had to actually reboot one of his own computers. He’s never had to deal with spyware or viruses because he has legions of Microsofties to filter everything for him. He doesn’t use instant messengers, has no idea what Web 2.0 is and would be very surprised if he realised the morass that his customers find themselves in. He honestly believes he is being picked on.

My explanation for Stephen Levy’s lack of journalistic integrity:

His editors told him to cut that bit out as Bill’s first answer was not convincing. And it’ll fuel the link revenues anyway. Bill has a history of not being an effective speaker and I can guess that his first statement was probably as unconvincing as his interviews during the DoJ cross-examination. And Levy doesn’t give a damn.

Tags: Commentary, Mac, infurious by mj
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