Holland Escorts

Mark and Wes at the Ohgane Korean BBQ in Oakland, CA .

Sites of Interest:

• Amazon CEO apologizes for removing George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm digital books from Kindle machines that had already purchased them.
• History of Amazon Acquisitions and Investments, including Zappos.com for $920 million.
• An old article about the history of Novell Netware, showing its importance at the time.
• iPhone factory worker committed suicide (or was pushed?) after being interrogated (tortured?) about a missing prototype.
• Plastic Logic will ship an ebook reader using AT&T cellular data service.
• New version of Palm Pre webOS lets it sync with iTunes again, and the legal fight begins.
• A Blackberry firmware update offered by UAE mobile carrier Etisalat was designed to spy on users.
• Mark thinks this and this are a lot worse than a country spying on Blackberries.
• CEO of AT&T said iPhone will not always be exclusive with them.
• Google maps had the moon for some time, and now the Google Earth program can be used to view the moon.
• Top 20 signs you are a twitter addict.
• Disney Japan will offer micro-SD versions of movies along with the DVDs.
• Best T-Shirt of the month: Amish Gone Wild.
• Microsoft announces Windows 7 RTM gold master disc.
• A history and evaluation of IBM’s System R and SQL
• Wes likes the O’Reilly "Head First"series of technical books.
• Wes’ stupid Blackberry can’t even run the FartBot iPhone app.
• iPhone Fart App Legal War on the Daily Show.
• Accidents related to factory robots.
• Robot Cannon Goes Berserk, Kills 9.
• IBM PS/2 personal computers with MicroChannel Architecture.
• Rumors that the next iPod Touch will be just like the iPhone, but without the phone.

Wes’ iPhone/Blackberry Applications of the week:

• Later Dude Pro - Blackberry app to create call back reminders.
• Cube - single player and multiplayer first person shooter that provides satisfying and fast oldskool gameplay; kind of like Quake.

Mark’s iPhone Applications of the week:

• SimplyTweet - Mark’s favorite Twitter app this week (he always changes his mind). Includes push notification for your Reply and Direct tweets.
• BoxCar - Provides push notifications for Reply and Direct tweets, but that’s all it does. Useful if your favorite twitter app doesn’t already have this function.
• iGPUtrace - For iPhone 3GS only because it uses the new GPU and the compass. Just a demo of what the GPU can do, but fun to play with because it demos a virtual reality by moving the iPhone around in front of you.
• RedLaser - realtime barcode scanner, supports all standard UPC and EAN barcodes and looks up the products in a database. (Mark said it was a jailbreak app and it is, but he found out that it has also been in the App Store for a while so anyone can buy it.)