The four english-language words that start with “dw” are:

dwarf
dwell
dwindle
dweeb

Yes, dweeb is in the O.E.D. So hush.

The things you stumble across when scanning through the magazine rack … in the new issue of PSM (dated August 2006) we find this startling tidbit:

PSM: Can we expect PS3 games to be priced in the same range as Xbox 360 titles?

Sony: Generally Speaking, over the past twelve years or so, there has been a consumer expectation that disc-based games are maybe $59 on the high end to $39 on the low end. So, what I can say now is, I think it would be a bit of a stretch to think that we could suddenly turn around and say “PS3 Games now $99.99.” I don’t think consumers expect software pricing to suddenly double. So, the quick answer is that we want to make it as affordable as possible, knowing that there is a set consumer expectation for what software has cost for the past twelve years. That’s kind of the best answer I can give you. So, if it becomes a bit higher than $59, don’t ding me, but, again, I don’t expect it to be $100.

So not only is Sony setting up consumers for the harsh reality that PlayStation 3 games will be more than 60 bucks (U.S.) – after you shell out six bills for the actual console – but they are also positioning it as doing you a big favour to you by keeping the price under a hundred dollars.

Un-fucking-believable.

As we have seen in the past, all of the greatest technical minds of our time are in the U.S. government. As a case in point, here is U.S. senator Ted Stevens – a member of the committee that will have a hand in shaping the structure of the internet and therefore obviously a very tech-savvy man – explaining the workings of the internet:

There’s one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service isn’t going to go through the interent and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

So you want to talk about the consumer? Let’s talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren’t using it for commercial purposes.

We aren’t earning anything by going on that internet. Now I’m not saying you have to or you want to discrimnate against those people.

The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says “No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet”. No, I’m not finished. I want people to understand my position, I’m not going to take a lot of time.

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.

It’s a series of tubes.

And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?

Do you know why?

Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can’t afford getting delayed by other people.

Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves.

Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it’s not using what consumers use every day.

It’s not using the messaging service that is essential to small businesses, to our operation of families.

The whole concept is that we should not go into this until someone shows that there is something that has been done that really is a viloation of net neutraility that hits you and me.

Yowzah. For the full effect, you should check out the original audio here. It’s pure gold.

We recently mentioned the fact that the “Windows Genuine Advantage” component of the Microsoft’s latest OS updates is spyware of the worst kind. The module that the Redmond Mafia claims is there to “protect you” is actually an invasive little piece of work that phones home regularly and reports to the mothership on all sorts of your computing habits and data contents. And, unlike other notable pieces of Microsoft spyware (*cough cough Messenger cough*) it doesn’t actually disclose any of this in the user agreement.

This, of course, is dirty pool.

It would now appear that other people feel the same way – a class action lawsuit was just launched against Bill and the gang on this very issue. You can read the entire text of the complaint as filed right here.

UPDATE: Groklaw now has some further analysis and discussion of the suit here.

3,995: The retail price (U.S. dollars) of Motorola’s DynaTAC 8000, the first portable cell phone, in 1983.

I was hesitant to recommend Dice Wars, simply because there is much more of a “luck” component than I usually am willing to accept in a game. The game plays like Risk, but with random boards each time, so there are no “keystone” countries as found in the Parker Brothers classic. The key difference, however, is that your “armies” are the actual dice that you get to throw. Because of this, the games move very quickly, but there is a surprising amount of depth – and after playing a few rounds I am sold. Much like backgammon, the luck component is offset by sound strategy. You will need to figure out the keys to success yourself, but a good starting point is to remember that you get reinforcements based on the greatest number of continuously connected territories you own.

Also, as in all games with a luck component, going last is a definite disadvantage – be sure to check the “order of play” as shown by the dice at the bottom of the screen when you decide to accept a playfield. And start with one or two other players before you work your way up to playing against the full array of seven opponents.

A couple of notes:

You always play as purple.

The “number of players” selected for a game includes you, so choosing five means you and four opponents

This game is begging for a fully connected version where you can play against other mopes instead of just the canned AI opponents. Here is hoping that it shows up soon … but for the time being, managing to beat 4 or 5 computer foes at once is extremely rewarding.

Full thumbs up for this one.

One of the silliest things about the old Dick Tracy comic was the goofy “wrist communicator” that Dick used to call back to headquarters and gab with the chief. Only that isn’t seeming so silly now, is it?

Now this is interesting and a very cool idea. The Chargebox is popping up all over the U.K. – it is a small stand-alone kiosk with 6 small “lockers” that are just big enough to hold a cell phone or PDA or digital music player. It costs a pound (about 2 bucks Canadian as of today) to stash your device in the locker for 40 minutes.

Why would you do this instead of keeping the thing in your pocket for absolutely free? Easy – each locker has power connections inside that will charge up pretty much any phone or PDA on the market. When you are traveling or on the go, a couple of bucks to get your phone or tunes back up and running is a deal. And while they don’t mention it, since one of the connectors is obviously a mini-USB jack (for charging newer Blackberries) you could also juice up a fair number of digital cameras and GPS handhelds.

I fully expect that we will be seeing these on this side of the pond sooner rather than later. And while some of the potential locations are obvious (airports and the like), there are almost unlimited possibilities for deploying this thing. Golf courses (charge your PDA while you play) and fast food joints are two that immediately pop to mind. I am sure you can think of a million more.

Best idea I have seen in a long time.

A number of readers seemed to be interested by this, since they all asked about the “rules” of the list – specifically, whether or not variations on a word counted as separate words. The answer, of course, is no. If we were looking for words that had “emo” in them, then “lemon” and “lemons” and “lemony” would all be one word.

Now knuckle down and get thinking, kids.

Treasure Box may or may not be a game. There are startling parallels to those “busy box” crib toys that little kids poke at for a lesson in cause and effect.

On the other hand, no one ever said that those busy box things weren’t fun.

4: The number of words in the english language that start with “dw”.

A while ago I happened to stumble across the work of Paul Whittington. He is a seemingly cool dude who lives in Calgary and he writes and creates little films that are definitely in the “experimental” genre.

His stuff has usually come across as “interesting” tinged with either “amateurism” or “heavy-handedness”. However, his latest piece is shot with stop-motion photography and he really seems to have found both his stride and and much-needed sense of subtleness with this change of technique. Android 207 has a lot going for it – although there are still moments where he seems to feel the need to force the viewer into noticing something. Take a look – the work speaks on a lot of levels, and the assorted artistic stumbles don’t change the fact that this is an exceptional creation. Enjoy.

Eagle-eyed Adam dropped along a note to point out that These Very Pages got cited in the National Post.

Okay, I’m blushing.

Your mindless Friday morning diversion is … well, I am not real sure what it is called, since the text is all in some language that is definitely not English or French. Let’s call it the Partly Naked Hidey Game. Arrow keys control your movement, and you need to be hiding behind an object when a vehicle or pedestrian or wandering pet comes by. Being exposed will shock the passers-by and cost you a “life”. Note that large vehicles have lots of people in them to shock.

When Tiger Woods made it big, there was a supposition that it would lead to a lot of kids taking up the sport … something that is needed in spades, since the ranks of junior golfers have been startlingly thin for about four decades now. The thinking was that Tiger would be cool to kids (which he certainly is) and the kids would think that, by extension, golf was cool too.

Er, no.

The problem with golf and kids is this: At the age when kids would be best advised to take up the game everything that surrounds golf is spectacularly non-fun. You have to wear certain clothes, you can’t run round and hoot and holler, you have to wait your turn, and people actually use the word “etiquette” when going on and on about the rules.

And yeah, the rules. There are shitloads of rules. Special clothes and rules? Not good.

The upshot is that all of this gets in the way of the good part – whacking the ball – and kids are pretty much turned off from the whole thing. Some people have applied much thought to this and have decided that the key is to take kids out golfing, let them play a bit, and then call it a day as soon as they start to get bored, even if it means only playing one or two holes. That would be fine and dandy, except for the fact that golf is not cheap, and the course won’t refund your forty bills just because your kid got bored on the third green.

Which, in a somewhat roundabout way, brings us to the whole point of this post: Take A Kid To The Course Week. A few corporate sponsors and about 500 golf courses in Canada are giving parents a chance to take their kids out to the links for free, and if they don’t like it, well, it’s pack the clubs up and head off to do something else.

Oh – and there are prizes. Everybody loves prizes.

Speaking of that giant Seattle software company, here is something fun and entertaining that you can do with Notepad:

Open a new document and type this into the pristine page:

Bush hid the facts

Then save your deathless four words of prose and close Notepad. Open the file back up and … voila! Your text has been censored – either removed entirely or overwritten with strange characters from character sets unknown. Is it a vast conspiracy? A collaboration between Microsoft and the U.S. government to stomp out any attempt to record people’s thoughts about the suckhole that inhabits the White House?

No, sadly, it is nothing as entertaining as that. It is just a bug – in a nutshell, Notepad chokes on any document that contains four words that match the pattern of four letters, three letters, three letters, five letters. Typing in “John has big balls” gives you the same result, just in a much less entertaining fashion.

All of which takes us back to the previous post about pointing out Microsoft’s flaws. I mean, Notepad is just about the simplest program in their suite. Anyone can write a text editor, but these mopes – who are supposed to be good at this shit – cant even get it to handle basic text. If they can’t do that, what hope is there of them ever getting an entire operating system right?

Meanwhile, you can at least use this to blow some smoke up the asses of your conspiracy-loving friends. “Hey, didja hear that Microsoft is censoring people’s thoughts about Bush?”

Heh heh.

An intrepid reader wanted to know: “Do you ever get bored pointing out Microsoft flaws?”

The answer? No, of course not.

Having pretty much exhausted the possibilities of 802.11b (painfully slow) and 802.11g (not-quite-so-painful-but-still-annoyingly slow) wireless standards, the mopes who make networking hardware are trying to raise the bar again with the first “draft” 802.11n products. The promise here is supposed to be both higher speed AND bigger ranges.

The real payoff, though, might be the fact that you can completely shut down your neighbours’ 802.11g systems just by plugging these babies in. Better yet, at this point it is completely legal. You get some lovely throughput numbers and you can take the mope next door off-line. Just the thing for those of you on cable who see their network speeds drop every time the kid up the street starts playing Halo 2 with his jerk-off buddies across town …

A couple of people dropped notes to ask if you needed to be a golfer or at least have a more than passing familiarity with the sport to get full value out of A Good Walk Spoiled. To be honest, the answer is probably yes. I hadn’t really thought about that until someone asked, and after re-evaluating the read from a “layperson’s” point of view, I have to admit that it is a somewhat exclusionary book.

However, hope springs eternal – which would probably explain why I still pull the goddamn driver out of my bag when it would be better off hidden under the bed – and there is a solution. Who’s Your Caddy? by Rick Reilly is also about golf, but in a very different way … it’s not about the game, it’s about the people who play the game. More importantly, it’s not about how they play, it’s about who they are. Reilly picks up the bag and caddies for everyone from John Daly to Donald Trump. Okay, he sort of caddies for Trump. It’s a fun read, you will probably giggle a lot, and if nothing else you will at least learn the real reason that Daly has the nickname “Long John”.

There is also a very good bit about a fellow named Bob Andrews and his wife Tina that will make you smile no matter how much of a miserable bastard you happen to be, and about three pages hidden in the middle that finally explain everything about how mother’s and daughters get along.

Oh – and Reilly pretty much sucks as a caddy.

It should come as no great shock that the people who turn the wheels in the U.S. federal government are not the greatest minds of our age. Once in a while, however, they do something so spectacularly stupid that it bears mentioning.

This is one of those times.

In today’s San Francisco Chronicle there is a story in the ongoing saga of Balco / Steroids / Barry Bonds is a cheating piece of crap. The federal government is once again trying to order the reporters in the centre of all this to reveal the source that leaked out some grand jury testimony. The feds claim that the leak will damage and maybe destroy their case against the Balco gang. To support these claims, they released a PDF of the legal request with all of the sensitive parts blacked out – after all, the feds don’t want to be seen as further undermining the case by revealing the exact sensitive info that they claim the Chronicle reporters broke the law by making public.

That would all be great, except for one thing: It’s pretty obvious that no one in the federal government really knows how Acrobat and PDF files actually work. They blacked out the sensitive parts with Acrobat’s redacting tool, which means that you can open the “censored” PDF in any version of Acrobat or Acrobat reader and access the “secret” text via copy and paste. Try it yourself – open the PDF, pick the text tool in Reader, and then highlight the blacked out parts (pages 8 to 11 are a good place to start). Once the blackouts are highlighted, just copy them and then paste them into any text editor or word processor.

Oh, my, the things you can learn from a couple of mouse swipes …. tsk tsk tsk. There is now no real need at all to force the Chronicle reporters to reveal their source – anyone who can work a mouse now knows that the leak is none other than the former head of Balco himself, Victor Conte.

NOTE: I don’t think any of the people at the Chronicle have figured this out yet. When they do, they might take the document down. Then again, they may have done this on purpose to let the cat out of the bag at the feds’ expense. Either way, let me know if the thing disappears so I can post a local copy.

Yet another Windows product turns out to be rife with crushing security flaws. Ho hum.

It looks like the Combat Sudoku site just got Dugg (not as bad as getting Slashdotted, but close) so it might be unavailable for a while as the server gets pounded into submission by ravening geeks. You might want to try it again later. Certainly the head-to-head version will be dog-slow for most of this morning …

There are a million ways to play Sudoku online. But only one of them gives you a way to waste your work day playing head-to-head against a friend. It’s Combat Sudoku, and it pretty much rules.

NOTE: You have to use Firefox for this, since it depends on the “strict” Ajax library.

OTHER NOTE: You can play by yourself or head-to-head against a random mope if you don’t actually have any friends.

For the most part, sports books fall into two mutually-exclusive categories: Those written by the much-missed George Plimpton, and those that suck. Once in a while, however, something comes along that is the exception to the rule and (for the most part, anyway) A Good Walk Spoiled pretty much fits the bill.

The book does have flaws – most notably the “rah rah U.S.A!” tone of the Ryder Cup chapters – and there is a definite lack of journalistic detachment when Feinstein goes out of his way to savage John Daly at every turn. The payoff, however, is the section on the PGA qualifying tournament (the dreaded “Q-school”) which is compelling in the extreme and worth the whole price of admission right there.

Fore!

There is a rather small but non-zero chance that you are saddened by the fact that you can’t seem to find an integrated iPod dock / toilet paper holder. If this is the case, cheer up. Your wishes have all come true.

The Pirate Bay gang, not content to just be back in business, have started thumbing their noses at the MPAA:

$ ping thepiratebay.org
PING thepiratebay.org (83.140.176.146) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from hey.mpaa.and.apb.bite.my.shiny.metal.ass.thepiratebay.org
(83.140.176.146): icmp_seq=1 ttl=49 time=114 ms

Give ‘er.

This guy eats all those foods that you have always wanted to try but never had the nerve to sample yourself.

Actually, you have probably never ever ever wanted to try most of these. In fact, you probably don’t even want to see pictures of some of these foods. If you are eating right now, you might not want to click on the link. Consider yourself warned.

1971: The last year that the visiting team won game seven of a Stanley Cup final.

The biggest problem with beer bellies is that they don’t actually contain any beer. Well, except for this one.

This is one of those “I can’t decide if it’s cracked or brilliant” kind of things. I’m thinking brilliant.

0.002: The percentage of prime time commercials that are in HD.