In response to analysts’ concerns about GM’s dwindling liquidity in light of the latest slide in demand for its most profitable vehicles and the jump in raw material costs, Wagoner responded that “under any scenario we see, we’re good until the end of the year.”

What an incredible country we live in, where such short-sighted business leadership can survive even that long.  Is six months now considered taking the long view?  Do we want give our execs bonuses and other incentives based on that kind of performance?

Wagoner shouts “Save us!”

Unbelievable.  As far as we know nothing illegal has happened to bring the US auto industry to this precipice, but there’s a level of irresponsibility that matches or exceeds what went on at Enron and Worldcom.  These executive criminals deserve far worse than they’re ever going to get.  I think we should at least arrange for them to be pilloried in downtown Detroit.  The kind of violence being perpetrated against the US by its own corporations calls for retribution in kind.  That these men are getting off scott free ($1 a year salary?  This is sacrifice?) and being allowed to helm our largest corporations onto the rocks defies logic.

I don’t have automatic updates enabled, to prevent Microsoft pushing their pet projects like IE7 on me as “critical” updates. As a result, I missed KB931836, which appears to have just been published 02/07/2007 anyway. Way to support those of us who don’t drink your koolaid, M$.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/WFNXwor69-U" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

The last line should have read, “Having your identity stolen by an elephant incapable of either speaking or forging a signature: priceless.”

The coolers use heatpipes to transfer heat from the GPU to a large radiator-like surface that covers the whole video card.

Yeah, we call that a <Dr . Evil finger quotes>heat sink</finger quotes> in tech geek lingo. Maybe you’re paid by word count. Whatever.

If you are looking for additional cooling performance or have very little airflow in your case you can install an additional Turbo Module that uses an active fan to improve cooling.

Whoa. When did the whole active fan thing become publicly available. I’d heard there were tests in secret labs, but never thought I’d see the day.

NB: This is not directed at people who appropriately use “away” messages to indicate temporary non-availability.

Is Firefox 2.0 a dud?

Is Firefox 2.0 a dud? Are users better avoiding it and waiting until a future build? Are too many of the new features buggy and incomplete and is the browser overall more unstable that previous versions? What about Firefox on Vista?

This is not news. This is not journalism. This is not “reportage.” This is FUD and rumormongering. While there may be an article in there somewhere, I’ll never read it because of the so-called style the writer chose to use. Thank you, drive thru please.

I am completely flummoxed that anyone who uses email on a daily basis has no idea what the common-sense conventions and practices of using email are, or just refuses to use them.

Here are some of my suggestions for business email. Ignore them and you may find yourself wondering why, at best, you don’t get replies to your urgent missives.

• Use an email client that understands and sends text. Not HTML, not RTF, not some wonderful format that allows you to WYSIWYG your way through decorating and emphasizing and cutesifying everything. Learn to use text.
• If you send me an HTML email, please don’t expect me to see your blue reply. As a non-member of the virus of the month club, I prefer not to indulge the world’s attempts to get me to electronically ingest any goodies that hit my inbox. HTML email is like a rat during the plague times. HTML email at work is like handing everyone you work with a rat and telling them they make great pets – during the plague times.
• If you top post, please don’t expect me to weed through the disorganized mess you’ve made of the sequence of conversation to try and divine the context of your reply, and therefore your meaning.
• Avoid emails that consist of “me too” or a single word reply while including the entire thread of conversation and your 15 line signature with the clever talking dog ASCII art. Go look up the concept of signal to noise ratio. When you send these emails, you’re the noise.
• Your email client has a quoting mechanism built into it that is likely to be able to save you from yourself, should you decide to let it. Typically the quote character is a single ‘>’ with multiples of these stacking up along the left side when quotes are nested. Don’t type in the middle of the quoted text. Seperate your reply text from the quoted text by putting a blank line or two between. If you really must reply inline, split the quotes up and again seperate your replies from the quoted text with blank lines.
• For the love of Pete, stop using Microsoft Outlook. Outlook and Outlook Express are the Dumb and Dumberer of email clients. If you insist on using Outlook, you’re opting in for the virus of the month club, as well as causing the rest of us untold headaches when your system becomes infected and spam the world with our return addresses.

People familiar with PVR applications for the PC are probably aware of Myth TV, and are wondering why the free homebrew project isn’t included. The answer is simple: It requires Linux. There’s nothing wrong with Linux at all, but our roundup focuses on competing Windows applications. Besides, if you want to turn your PC into a PVR with Linux, Myth TV is pretty much your only good option.

In not doing the truly interesting work of investigating free, open products like mythtv, they’re just being mainstream, and hey, who can blame them? But if you’re not going to include the gamut of available options, then it’s beyond the scope of your article to make statements like “Myth TV is pretty much your only good option”; there’s a big difference between “best option” and “only good option” but they don’t even make the effort to get that far.

Their testbed setup includes a P4 3.2Ghz and 1G of RAM, but they say “We’re going more for quiet and reliable than for blistering speed.” Uh huh. Of course you’ll need the RAM simply because you’re running under XP, but I don’t see why (if you’ve chosen a tuner card with any hardware encoding / decoding capability at all) you need to run one of the hottest CPUs ever made just to watch and record TV. I’m doing it under linux with an old Athlon 1400 with plenty of CPU cycles to spare.

It boggles the mind that people think building their own PVR using Windows is going to throw off the yoke of the TiVo’s and other DRM-rich services. They’re really just trading one master for another. Meet the new boss, indeed.