CrankyRants.com

Don’t feel like waiting the few weeks to get an iPhone? Feel a little queasy about pumping more smugness into Apple’s already bloated sense of self by giving them a ton of money for little more than an ipod with a speaker?

Then you need to check out the newest phone from HTC, the “HTC Touch”, released Wednesday to T-Mobile customers. Sporting a 2.8-inch, 320-by-240, 65K-color touch screen and Windows Mobile 6, the HTC Touch offers many of the snazzy finger sweeps and swoops touted by Jobs and the iPhone as “groundbreaking”.

With the HTC Touch, a user can scroll through contacts, songs, or documents with simple finger movements, and can easily sync tunes and files with Windows Media Player and Vista systems.

No doubt Apple will find some way of suing for infringement of the technology that they rightfully stole themselves. Of course, Apple has a way of doing that. Xerox Parc point-and-click interface ring a bell, Stevie?

We’ve all seen the newest head-slapper spark across the network in Twitter.com, and have wondered along with “why didn’t I think of that” the similar but more important question… “why the hell is that so popular?”

For those who haven’t experienced it, Twitter is a mini-blog. A tool to tell the world what you are doing every minute of your day.

“I’m writing a wicked-cool SQL statement right now!”

“I like my raisin bagel. A Lot!”

“I wish my cat wouldn’t look so sad when I eat my raisin bagel and not give her any!”

…and so-forth. This is what we’ve come to. For those who don’t want to go the LifeCasters route like Justin.TV and his Truman-Show side show, there is Twitter. Here’s the catch, though. Unless you are signed up with friends who care about you and your eating habits… no one will ever see it. The content isn’t really worthy of indexing by reputable search engines, so it is literally the same thing as opening your car window on the way home from work and shouting to the busy highway… “I stapled 20 sets of documents today! Wooo!”

The guy in the semi next to you might hear you, and might even alter his personal life… changed forever by your impassioned exclamations. Or he might just return to his cheeseburger dinner and roll the windows up.

For the tens of thousands who are now regular Twitterheads, it’s a spiritual experience and there is no swaying them from their path. And thanks to cool tools like TwitterVision and TwitterTroll.com, the anonymous can be immortalized, if no more than for a few seconds or a few days. But in the end you have to wonder who has the patience and stamina to keep up with the work after the novelty has worn off. Find out at www.twitter.com/crankyrants. I’ll bet it doesn’t take long.
 

“No, really. Our deal with Microsoft will really help the open-source community. Really! Look how much Microsoft has helped the Java cause!”

That is, essentially, what Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos has frantically claimed, flanked by massive military brutes wearing black shades and windows-logo cufflinks. Under a new deal announced Monday, Xandros and Microsoft agreed to a broad set of joint technology and marketing initiatives. The companies plan to develop software that will link Xandros’ System Management tools with Microsoft’s System Center with plans to give IT departments an easier way to manage their combined environments.

More troubling, however, is the fact that Microsoft will extend “patent covenants” to Xandros’ Linux customers, waving its right to sue them for using what the company claims is Microsoft technology embedded in Linux. “For users, it’s a way of saying that if sparks fly between Linux and Microsoft, they have insurance,” said Typaldos.

Obviously, the open-source community is pissed. This “deal with the devil” plan all but puts another nail in the argument that Linux does not use Microsoft Patents, as has been argued in the Novell case. In response, they are re-working the GPL license to prevent future deals. Under the third version of the General Public License, expected to be published in final form this month by the Free Software Foundation, similar deals that were not inked by March 28 are forbidden. As a result, it would appear that Xandros will not be allowed to distribute open source code licensed under GPLv3 because of its relationship with Microsoft.

Typaldos doesn’t seem worried, stating “If you are a businessperson, you can’t worry about every eventuality.”

Thus the commercialization of Open Source code has taken another leap forward, screwing everything good about it in the process. No great surprise, I suppose. But that doesn’t make it any easier to accept.

“It’s… (choke)… It’s Company Policy!”

That’s what a manager at a Wendy’s fast-food restaurant in Miami cried out defiantly on tuesday after being shot several times in the arm trying to protect the chili sauce, authorities said.
 
A man in the Wendy’s drive-through argued with an employee because he wanted more of the condiment, police said. The worker told the customer that restaurant policy prohibited a customer from getting more than three packets.

The man insisted on 10, reports said. The employee complied, but police said the customer wanted even more.

The manager came out to speak to the man, said Miami-Dade police spokesman Mary Walter. The customer then shot the manager, who was taken to a hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening.

The customer fled in his vehicle with a female passenger, authorities said. No word yet on the street value of the stolen packets of Wendy’s Chili Sauce, but authorities place it well into the $1.23 to $2.12 range.

Microsoft Corp. is set to officially release the “Surface”, a coffee-table shaped computer that responds to touch and to special bar codes attached to everyday objects. Kind of like Minority Report, but with a reduced chance of the photos merging to reveal personal visions of yourself murdering anyone.

The machines, which Microsoft planned to debut Wednesday at a technology conference in Carlsbad, Calif., are set to arrive in November in T-Mobile USA stores and properties owned by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. and Harrah’s Entertainment Inc.

Surface is essentially a Windows Vista PC tucked inside a shiny black table base, topped with a 30-inch touchscreen in a clear acrylic frame. Five cameras that can sense nearby objects are mounted beneath the screen. Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by setting real-world items tagged with special bar-code labels on top of it.

With a price tag between $5,000 and $10,000 per unit, Microsoft isn’t currently marketing the device to the family crowd, but will instead focus on the corporate workplace where the demand for push and slide photo-technology is, most likely, staggeringly high.

This is what you have to do to get upgraded to First Class these days? Two doctors on a Delta Air Lines flight from Germany delivered a baby in front of the first seats after first class. Delta Flight 131 to Atlanta was over the Washington area when a woman about 32 to 36 weeks — or nine months — pregnant went into labor Wednesday afternoon, prompting an emergency stop in Charlotte, N.C., about nine hours into the flight.

Vincent said the baby weighed about seven pounds and had not been named yet, though I’m guessing it will somehow involve a reference to the in-flight adventure. “Flyboy” or “Boeing” or “Depp” since the Pirates of the Carribean was probably playing during the delivery. It’s always playing on every plane at all times. Trust me.

Yes, this is what life is like when you’re a mom. Waiting on your kids every move… bored out of your skull and counting the days before they move out of the damn house. 

Happy Mother’s Day, dammit.

A new study in postmenopausal women demonstrates how one half of a cup of soy nuts each day may work as well as anti-hypertension medication to lower blood pressure. And women with moderately elevated blood pressure, a condition known as pre-hypertension, also showed reductions in their blood pressure after eight weeks of eating soy nuts, Dr. Francine K. Welty of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and her colleagues found.

In response to the exciting new discoveries, the American Medical Board is recommending that those with hyper-tension or higher than normal levels of cholesterol and high blood pressure should immediately receive a sex change if they are not currently a women and chryogenically freeze themselves until their body has aged to the point of the the decline of menopause. Then eat lot’s of soy nuts.

As travel season approaches, you need to be careful. These days, it’s becoming increasingly more dangerous to travel the globe. Not because of airline security or road-hazards. No, anymore your biggest concern should be… circulation.

Zahra Ghasemi, a physical therapy supervisor at Cedars Sinai Medical Center, conducts research into venous thromboembolism, a form of blood circulation disorder that is apprently hightened by long-haul travel. Overseas flights. long-distance driving. They all carry a small amount of danger from too little physical activity during such long trips. Suggested tips include wearing loose clothing, not crossing your legs during long flights, and of course… walk around as much as possible during the trip or during stopovers.

The lesson to learn? Plan all of the adventure vacations that you like. Travel the world on a global holiday with exciting destinations offering scuba diving with sharks or rock climbing or wild-animal punching in Africa. Bungie-jump off of a cliff in some European hot spot after hang-gliding from a mountain retreat in between snow-skiing trips and white water rafting.

Just please, for your own safety! Do NOT cross your legs. Ever!

What will $25 million buy you these days. How about a good meal with a really… Really good view.

Martha Stewart is sending gracious living into orbit, picking a gourmet space meal of duck breast confit and semolina cake with dried apricots for her billionaire space tourist “best friend” and his comrades in the international space station.

Charles Simonyi, a software engineer and one of the 400 richest Americans according to Forbes Magazine, is set to lift off aboard a Soyuz space capsule with two Russian cosmonauts. He paid roughly $25 million for a 13-day trip to the space station.

You know, nothing says mid-life crisis like blowing the Gross National Product of a small Eastern European nation to have a zero gravity duck dinner. Atmosphere. That’s what diners are looking for these days. Heh. Atmosphere. Cause… they’re in space. Little gastronomical humor there.

No word yet on how the fabulous meal that Martha is laying out will taste after being crammed into a small toothpaste tube… cause I’m pretty sure that’s how they do things in space these days. Don’t want a stray apricot getting stuck in any Deploy Chute buttons or anything.

Alternative recruitment advertising strategies include podcasting jobs.