Santa Santa!

RealNetworks has released RealPlayer 10 for Mac OS X. The irony of this release is that the free version of RealPlayer, minus all the annoying "Superpass" bells and whistles, is the first version I'd be willing to pay for. It does what it is supposed to do -- play streaming video -- and does it rather well and unobtrusively.

Is there a way I can get a license for the software without paying the $13 / month "Superpass" subscription audio and video I'll never use?

Steve, Don't Eat It!

POTD

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An iPod hoodie.

Luke Leighton, largely responsible for Samba's remarkably good interoperability with Windows Domains, has relinquished Copyright ownership of all Samba-related code that he has authored. He is also advocating for an Apache-style software foundation.

Millions of people use Samba, many without knowing it. The effort required to reverse engineer Microsoft's RPC code from the binary wire traffic was enormous. Seemingly impossible, certainly at the level of a mad genius. Despite organizational issues within the project, Samba is a hell of a product.

Russian Man: Don't push.

Spanish Lady: This is the subway. What do you expect?

Russian Man: Well, you don't have to push.

Spanish Lady: Welcome to New York City!

Russan Woman: Yeah, welcome to New York City.

Spanish Lady: You welcoming me? You're the one with the accent!

Via Overheard in New York

"I asked my friend Greg Robbins to help me. His contract in another division at Apple had just ended, so he told his manager that he would start reporting to me. She didn't ask who I was and let him keep his office and badge. In turn, I told people that I was reporting to him. Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive."

That is brilliant. No managers in the loop. I'm totally doing it when I get back to work.

Owned! Very funny gallery.

Apparently this local station created a web-based form for submitting on-screen school closure information. Good idea! No one seemed to be checking the submissions. Bad idea!

False alarm, by the way. Sprinklers went off in the garage.

Even in German, this is frightening. Did the designers really think that "hiding" the taskbar was sufficient security?

My building fire alarm is going off. Yes, I'm blogging this.

POTD

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I'm trying to get into the holiday spirit, but I'm just not feeling it this year.

The end is near. I've read about this in Revelation. Set your affairs in order. The end is near.

It is 16 degrees out, and my building has no heat. I hate where I live.

POTD

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The Scared of Santa photo gallery.