GearBits

eBay Classic: Ryobi Router Table

Amidst the questionable sales of souls and Stinger missiles, sometimes someone on eBay, comes up with a straightforward classic, like this sale of a Ryobi Router Table that is a triumph of modern marketing.

And since we all know that eBay listings are ephemeral, I've reproduced the listing here for posterity.

RYOBI ROUTER TABLE - WORTHLESS JUNK NR!

Item number: 2389286139
Winning bid: US $26.22
Ended: Mar-28-04 10:45:22 PST
Start time: Mar-21-04 10:45:22 PST
Winning bidder: burglarproof(110)
Seller information: davesan455(48)

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Description (revised)
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For any prospective bidders - I have 100% positive feedback so you know my descriptions are good. I'm trying to describe this item the best I can.

This Ryobi router table is the worst thing I've ever spent money on. Period. I've wasted money on a lot of things in my life: women, cars, other things I didn't need, you name it, but I've never felt like I totally 100% wasted my money on something until I bought this router table. I've wasted money, but I normally got some sort of satisfaction out of it, no matter how small, I got something out of it This is the most worthless piece of crap item I have ever had the displeasure of working with in my life. I have much more colorful ways of describing this but I realize that there may be some kids that will read this so I will try to keep it PG.

It comes complete with most of the crappy accessories it came with. An example is the plastic pusher miter thingie that's so sloppy that I don't understand why they even bothered making it adjustable. It's really nice when you're trying to rout something at an angle and it slips in the middle of the cut and jerks the workpiece right out of your hands and flings it across the room. Or the super anti-precision fence that's almost impossible to adjust and keep in place. Or the slippery painted surface that wears off, exposing the rough surface that mars the workpiece as you slide it over. It does come with a power switch that always worked. I'll give it that. It has a really nice power switch. Some of the other small items got destroyed in a fit of rage one day after fighting it for a couple of hours.

The best part about this table is that it's a one of a kind. yep that's right it's a three legged router table. It became three legged after I was trying to rout something one day and I noticed that the table was moving. That was from the plastic inserts working loose on the leg mounts. It was like routing wood on a waterbed. It was moving back and forth oh I'd say an inch and a half or so. Well after a few more pieces I'm in the middle of a cut and the leg just fell off. So I had to stop to keep from losing any fingers, and I tried to beat the inserts back in. Looked ok so I start making my cut again and would you believe it fell out again?!?! It's supported by a beer bottle to keep it from falling over while taking the picture.

I am an engineer by trade and I feel sorry for the engineer that was responsible for this marvel of science. Someone told him to design this thing and not spend any more than $0.65 on it. So he did it, but I bet he probably lost all self respect for himself after he realized that he just released this miserable failure onto society. Or maybe he got a big kick out of it and is still laughing I don't know. I know they suckered me out of my money that's for sure.

There is a router shown in the picture, the router is not included since it will kind of work most of the time. This auction is for the table only. Hell I'll even throw in the beer bottle (not full per eBay standards) if the buyer wants it. I wouldn't use it as a leg though.

This table comes with no warranty from me. I never bothered to try to take it back, even though it was under warranty because I was so ticked off that I knew I would create a scene when I threw it through the front window of Home Depot. So it sat in my basement for a few months, and now you have the opportunity to own this piece of scrap. If someone had some time they could probably work on it a bit and make it into something that's functional. Like a doorstop or maybe a paperweight. But it will need some more work before it's that good.

I accept paypal, cashiers check or money order. Shipping quoted is parcel post. If for some reason you would want to receive your misery faster I can do that ask me for a quote.

Seriously though I have a couple other nice things that I'm selling. Check em out if you need a saw blade or 1972 Z28 parts.

ADDED 3/22/04 - I've received some emails, and yes I am willing to set it on fire, shoot it full of holes, etc. and mail pics/video to you. If the bid gets high enough to cover my ammo costs, I'd be willing to shoot it full of holes with your choice of the following: 12 gage slugs, 00 buck, or a 40 round mag from an AK. Then I can make a pile of the remains, douse it in gasoline, make the Wile-E-Coyote trail of gas dribbles for my safety, and light it on fire. The winning bidder would get pics if they so choose. Or I can ship it to you. I could even ship you the charred remains if you like. Hey man I just hate it. Let me know. Whatever trips your trigger.

ADDED 3/23/04 - Yes I can drive over it with something. I can drive over it with a Massey Ferguson 620 CI diesel powered tractor.

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On Mar-24-04 at 09:06:41 PST, seller added the following information:

For those who are interested, the bottle does carry a $0.10 Michigan deposit, and it's pre printed for the other standard deposits for other states ($0.05). So yeah it's like a huge bonus, worth hundreds of times what the table is worth. Remember - I'm throwing that in for free!

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On Mar-24-04 at 20:59:57 PST, seller added the following information:

Yes the beer bottle is a "double deuce" or a 22 oz ish beer bottle. Actually it's a Miller Lite 24 oz beer bottle, so that makes it extra rare. From what I hear there was only somewhere around 42 million of them made this year, so get yours fast! I suppose it has some additional extra value from a scrap weight aspect, but I think the deposit is the same. Collector's value had got to be in the hundreds if not thousands of Turkish Liras.

No unfortunately I don't know of any women that are willing to fire the guns naked and send you the pics. If I did I wouldn't be wasting my time writing this auction, that's for sure.

The tractor is basically a huge articulating tractor with dual wheels on each corner. It weighs somewhere around a gajillion pounds. It's about six times the size of the largest general motors product you can think of. It's big. It might take me a couple of weeks to get video etc but yeah I'll send it to you. Pics/video will be complete with firearms, Ryobi arson and all the profanity you desire, whatever you want. Again - for christ's sake the next bid is $0.02, and I'm willing to do all this crap for a penny - the video's got to be worth $5!!!!!! Bid and tell me what you want!!!!

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On Mar-25-04 at 18:31:48 PST, seller added the following information:

Dear davesan455,

I will bid if you place it in a barrel and fill barrel with concrete. I will pay the insurance if you pay the shipping.

um....ok. I can do that as long as the bid is $1400.

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On Mar-25-04 at 19:08:08 PST, seller added the following information:

Why are you restricting shipping to USA only? I would think you should be excited about the possibility of sending it to Iran, or hell or france or something. Just wondering.

Yet another good idea. I will ship free to France as long as they surrender. It doesn't matter who they surrender to, it could be Australia, Bruce Willis, or even McDonalds. But if they surrender before this auction ends free shipping to France!

Also- Free shipping to any US military base (Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, Venezuela, Selfridge Air force Base, etc) upon the following conditions: The person receiving the router table send clear pictures/video back of the table being destroyed by superior force, i.e. tank shelling, hellfire missile attack, shooting sheet with an anti-aircraft gun, or some sort of awesome display of military power, or even a pic of their whole company dancing around a bonfire which contains the router table. Three Cheers to the US Military / Coast / National Guard! I'll drink to that.

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On Mar-26-04 at 05:18:33 PST, seller added the following information:

Could I see a picture of it actually ripping something out of someones hand and tossing it to the other side of the room? Or better yet an arm off or something?

Sure. Buy it, and have someone videotape you using it. Eventually someone's going to lose an appendage.

Ramifications of a Ubiquitous Internet

Because of new technologies like Broadband over Power Lines, WiMAX, and other innovations on the horizon, high-speed access to the Internet will soon be almost completely ubiquitous in developed countries.

By "soon," I mean possibly by the end of the decade. By "almost completely ubiquitous," I mean that there will still be gaps; the Badlands of South Dakota, Death Valley, some summits in the Alps, perhaps all of Alabama (I kid, I kid) may not be covered.

What are the ramifications of this? If access to the Internet is truly as omnipresent as, say, electricity, if not moreso, what does this do to the price of access? Obviously, it should drive it down...way down. At that point, using the Internet won't ever require an "is it worth it" evaluation, much like electricty is today (assuming you don't live off the grid) and much like how home broadband users slurp up bandwidth without a second thought today.

Another ramification of truly ubiquitous, fast Internet connections is that nearly everything involving electronics -- cars, refrigerators, traffic lights, HVAC units, car stereos -- will somehow use, access, or rely on the Internet for some part of its functionality. In addition, many things that don't today involve much (if any) electronics, such as running shoes, bicycles, a gallon of milk, street signs, shopping carts, etc., will start to in order to enhance their functionality.

Based on this, my prediction for the next two buzzwords that marketers will start to over-use and abuse when describing or naming their products will be "connected" and "smart." We've already seen the rise of "the connected organizer" from Palm, and we've been so far subjected to smartcards and smartmobs, but these are just the tip of the marketing iceberg.

So, what would you do with truly omnipresent broadband Internet access?

Free Soft-Core Courtesy of the Miss USA Pageant

Yes, beautiful women representing everything that is unholy to the contemporary feminist abound at the Miss USA website. However, their website is slow as molasses and painful to navigate, so I scripted up a set of links to the swimsuit photos from each contestant, er, delegate (sorry) with a link to her profile page.

The profile pages are where you can watch videos of them strutting the catwalk and answering really interesting questions such as "what's your favorite movie?" Or, if you're really hard up with some cash to burn, you can actually purchase photos of the contestants delegates.

Click the "Continue reading..." link below to see the photo page I crafted up (warning: lots of women in bikinis, in case that offends). If it's slow, blame their server...I'm not hosting any of the photos for obvious (c) reasons. Hint: best enjoyed without sound.

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FuelEconomy.gov

The US EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) runs a really useful, interesting, and fairly nicely laid out website at fueleconomy.gov. There, you can look up nearly any car model sold in the US in the past 20 years and compare its environmental impact side-by-side with, say, what you're driving now or something you're considering buying. Or, it could be handy if you just want to shame that SUV-driving friend of yours. There's some good info on fuel cells and hybrid technology at the site as well.

Update on Internet Setup at Our Home

Well, we finally moved into our new house. Well, sort of. There are still a lot of unpacked boxes sitting on the basement, but at least my office is clean. One of the things I did when we moved was to get rid of the phone company's DSL service and moved over to Earthlink cable service (via Time Warner Cincinnati), and I'm happy to say that the change was well worth it. The cable service is much faster than the phone DSL service, and it's a lot more reliable (no more interrupted service when phone rings and no more occasional resetting of the modem box--power down/up).

Well, it also turns out that my study does not have a cable outlet, and in order to install another cable outlet, it would have been extremely costly (we would have to call an electrician to do this). So, we are now completely wireless, and as a result, we have switched over to 802.11g from 11b. After reading Craig's recent entry on the switch, I couldn't resist, and I'm really glad about the change. I got a great deal on the Belkin router from Staples ($49.94) and the notebook card ($39.94). I can't believe the speed improvement here. Even though we are not really getting the full 54Mbps, it's still darn fast.

Anyway, that's all for now. My weekly PalmCorner will not be back for another week or so (I'm testing the new Sena Palm T3 case--it's great btw), and I'm off to assembling my new ping pong table in the basement. I can't believe the table weighs 270lbs (it almost didn't make it down to the basement).

Free Google eMail

I heard this morning that Google will be offering free email accounts with 1 gig of storage in the near future. If you don't want to be Bob54789 you better be ready to jump.

Beware of Scams in Ebay

One of the greatest inventions in the Internet is Ebay. If you are a seller, where can you go and post your items so that everyone in the United States or the world can see what you are selling? If you are a buyer, where can you go and find assortment of items that you might be interested in buying? I'm actually new to Ebay, but I have recently sold a number of items, and I personally think this concept rocks.

However, as with anything else these days, you have to careful not to fall prey to a scam perpetuated by unscrupulous buyers and sellers. I came across a scam recently, and I feel fortunate that I didn't fall prey to it.

The scam works something like this:

1. You get an e-mail saying that he/she would like to buy your product and ask you to close your auction early.

2. Then he/she will ask you to ship the product to an international location (e.g., it's a gift). He/she usually insists that you ship by International Express Mail the same day you receive your payment and asks you to forward the tracking number when you ship it.

3. You get a paypal payment (usually via credit card).

4. You ship the product as requested and send him/her the tracking number.

5. A few hours after you send them the tracking number, he/she reverses the charge on the payment (you usually get notified by Paypal).

Of course, by this time, you would have lost your money and the item (since the package is already on the way to an international location). In other words, you've been duped and you will never see your product again and never receive your money.

Recently, I almost fell prey to this scam, and fortunately for me, the product wasn't physically shipped (only the tracking number was generated). So, I just did not ship the product. Of course, I never heard from the buyer again. I'm sure this is not an isolated incident.

So, if you want to do business in Ebay, I suggest you protect yourself by

1. selling only to US customers.
2. shipping only to a confirmed address (especially credit card purchases)
3. getting e-check payments (or direct transfer from bank account)
4. shipping UPS ground a day after the payment is received (so there is one day buffer and also few days in transit)

This way you and your buyer will also be protected by Paypal/Ebay seller/buyer protection, and you won't fall prey to the scams out there.

Happy E-baying!

Not Impressed with New Gizmodo 'Style'

A few weeks ago, after losing Peter Rojas, Gizmodo made some editorial changes. One of the changes appears to be an attempt to bring a rather sophomoric emphasis on sex and drugs to the site. OK, we get it...you hipsters are just so cool. Now, how about going back to focusing more on the tech, hmm?

GearBits Celebrates First Birthday

A year ago today, I posted the first entry at GearBits, a new blog mostly about my love of technology. It was born of my desire to share my experiences and opinions with others and start a dialogue. Along the way, I invited some close friends -- Ken, Mitch, and Sam -- to join me in writing down what they thought was interesting.

Well, it's now a year later and the site is still going. I guess there's something to be said for sheer stubbornness. The graph below shows what kind of ride it's been so far -- since I started keeping traffic stats back last July, visitations to the site has grown quite a bit.

As you can see, in the middle of last summer (2003), we welcomed under 100 different readers each week. Now, that number has grown a hundred-fold. Hopefully, that's a sign that we're providing some useful, interesting, or provocative reading (an alternate explanation is that there are just a lot more search bots combing and cataloguing the web).

Either way, thanks for a great first 12 months. In the brief time we've been around, we've made 556 posts and you all have added 1,230 comments. Please let us know what you like and what you don't and we'll try to do more of the former and less of the latter. We're looking forward to another great year!

Phone Company or Cable Company--Lesser of Two Evils?

As you know from my recent entry, I have an opportunity to select a new broadband carrier in the next few weeks. I have been using the phone company's broadband service (DSL) here at Cincinnati (Cincinnati Bell's Zoomtown). Last year I upgraded my service to hyperspeed (3 Mbps download / 768 Kbps upload), and I haven't had any problems. However, I thought I should check out the cable broadband service this time. Looks like the cost would come out about the same (less than $5 difference per month) and therefore the cost is not an issue. So, it may come down to performance and service. I got my own Wireless router; so, I don't need to worry about that also.

So, folks out there, what's your opinion? Should I stay with the phone company, or should I switch over to cable?

Rojas' New Blog

Peter Rojas, the creative force behind Gizmodo, has left that site and started a new tech blog called Engadget.

According to Peter, Engadget will focus on "lots and lots of gadgets and [be] obsessively updated every day." Should be a great daily read.

Broadband over Power Lines Rolled out in Cincinnati

Cinergy today announced that it is concluding a successful trial of providing broadband Internet access via power lines (BPL) to about 100 residential customers and will be, starting today, rolling out the service to about 16,000 homes in Cincinnati, Ohio.

"A unit of Cinergy Corp. today will become the nation's first electric utility to offer high-speed Internet service to customers via its power lines, turning every electrical outlet in homes or offices into a Web connection.

The technology, which will be offered first in Hyde Park and Mount Lookout, holds the promise of adding competition and cutting prices for broadband services while making such service available (particularly in remote and rural areas) without costly investments in cables."

The whole story is here...more soon once I've looked into it a bit more. Given that I live in Hyde Park, I expect I'll be investigating this quite closely in the near future.

At first blush, this is pretty exciting! It will definitely put pressure on Time Warner and our local phone company, especially when Cinergy starts offering VOIP phone service too. Things they are a-changin'.

Using Technology to Find Your Dream House

If you read my entry yesterday, you know I have been house hunting. During our search for the "perfect" house, I came to rely more and more on several Internet real estate websites, and I wonder what would have been like to shop for a house when these tools were not available.

First, I've been using our local MLS (multiple listing service) website here at Cincinnati to do our initial search. We can do a search on multiple neighborhoods, price range, and other requirements. You can even do a search on upcoming open houses and new listings as well. The listing also contains several outdoor and indoor pictures, and although they are not perfect, they help us to select or eliminate certain houses from our list of potentials. Some houses even boast virtual tours of the house (where we can scan the 360-degree views of rooms).

We've also discoverd that most county auditors have their own websites that list all the properities in the county. We've been able to look up previous sales data, lot size, improvements, and especially in one county, we can even look at the aerial photo of the house. We wanted to have a wooded backyard view, and the aerial photo helped us elimianate a number of houses that we thought we liked from the MLS list.

Overall, these tools have helped us save tons of time in our search, and who'd ever thought even a couple of years ago, this would have been possible. I wonder whether in not so distant future, we would all be doing virutal house hunting where we don't even have to be at the house physically to find the "perfect" house.

WheresGeorge.com

I wandered down to the vending area at work on Friday and I found a dollar bill sitting on top of one of the snack machines. Stamped on it was "wheresgeorge.com" -- so I had to find out what this was.

Well, it turns out that the Where's George? site bills itself (pun intended) as "The Great American Dollar Bill Finder."

The idea is that you can enter the serial code and unique ID info from the dollar bill into the database and see where it's been tracked. The tracking isn't anything scientific or government-sponsored, it's just folks like you and me putting the data into the website. But, it's amusing when you see one.

It's ironic to think that there are lots of folks freaked out about the (false) idea of the government tracking those $20 bills in your pocket using the little plastic strip in them, but other folks are more than happy to input the location of their cash into a publicly accessible website.

Imaginary Girlfriends on eBay

Want a girlfriend? Hate the hassle? Check out eBay.

A few enterprising individuals are offering "imaginary girlfriend" services to bidders.

Listings are similar: "Sexy college student seeking money for books will, for one month, write you frequent e-mails and send pictures and perfumed letters you can show to family, friends and ex-girlfriends."

However, in most cases personal contact is strictly prohibited. One listing points out: "This in NO WAY makes me your real girlfriend."

Hundreds of listings were previously available. Unfortunately for lonely geeks all over the world, some listings began to cross the line into more overtly sexual. eBay now deems all such auctions as inappropriate, and has started closing them down, so you have to act fast to get the girl of your dreams.

Sir Tim of the World Wide Web

Tim Berners-Lee, known as the "Father of the World Wide Web", is receiving a knighthood, as announced by Buckingham Palace as part of Britain's 2004 New Year's Honours list.

Laying the groundwork in the early 1980s, Berners-Lee proposed development of the World Wide Web in 1989 while at the CERN Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland. He wrote the first WWW client and the first WWW server along with most of the communications software, defining the URL, HTTP and HTML protocols.

London-born Berners-Lee graduated from Oxford University in 1976, and is currently a senior research scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Ironically, the news of his knighthood was given to Berners-Lee by telephone, and not by email.

Happy New Year, Sir Tim!

Gamer Sues, Wins Over Virtual Property

In a landmark case on virtual property rights, a court has ordered a web-based game company to return virtual property to a player whose online cache of virtual currency and weapons was stolen.

Li Hongchen, 24, spent the equivalent of $1,210 over two years on his virtual cache for the Chinese game Red Moon, only to find in February that his account had been cyber-burgled via the game's central servers by a hacker.

Hongchen took the game's creators, Arctic Ice Technology Development, to court when they wouldn't help him identify the hacker.

In court, the company stated that Hongchen's property had no real world value, but this December, a District People's Court in Beijing ruled that the company was liable for the player's virtual property because access weaknesses in its servers had allowed the looting to take place.

The result is one of the first legal rulings on virtual property rights, and another example of the blurring line between virtual and real worlds. Some Everquest gamers, for example, already trade game characters and articles for real money through eBay and similar sites.

Fun With Spam

I have an email address that has been active since the mid-1990s. That was back when it was unheard of to post anything commercial to USENET and there was no such thing as spam on the computer unless you were a messy eater. Email addresses were posted in the open in those dawning days of the new Internet frontier. That has come back to haunt the folks who have been "here" for a while.

My old email account receives 99.999% spam and the host it resides on does not filter at the mail server level. I have taken to not monitoring it for months and then opening the firehose just to see what crawls out.

Today I downloaded nearly 10,000 emails and started playing "The Spam Game" with them. Using the search tool, I tried to come up with the most common words that might reside in spam subjects. Using my total messages and my find hits, I could get a pretty good running percentage score.

OK, so I had some spare time today...

The Funniest eBay Auction Ever

I've always been a big fan of the Brit sense of humor. The average bloke on the streets of London is funnier than our best stand up commedians. Case in point with this eBay auction for the world's junkiest motorcycle. This guy deserves a million hits for a presentation like this.

A New Favorite: Eyesore of the Month

Boing Boing linked to a wickedly cool site: James Howard Kunstler's Eyesore of the Month. James takes a no-prisoners approach to pointing out how the great banality and poor taste evident in a lot of American architecture is representative of failures and disturbing trends in other aspects of life in this country.

In one of my favorite pages from July of 2003, James posts this under the photo of a Denny's with an enormous American flag in front of it:

   Do you have this problem -- you walk out of the Target store at 4:30 in the afternoon after a day of shlepping and chaufeurring and. . . you forget what country you're in??
   Where the fuck am I??
   Portugal??
   Lichtenstein??
   Oh, thank God, there's the American flag. Whew, that's a load off my mind. Now I can drive eleven miles across the metroplex and pick up the kids at Soccer World.
   Actually, I have a theory about the promiscuous deployment of Old Glory all around the tilt-up utopia of Parking Lot Nation. A flag is a sort of supernatural totem, meant to protect the bearer against animadversion and harm. We're trying to distract ourselves from the spectacle of ugliness and banality that we've created, and protect our sensibilities against the suspicion that we have become a land of wicked, self-destructive slobs.
   Happy Independence Day.

Genius. Enjoy...

Eye of the Beholder

Speaking of virtual people, the website for the first ever virtual beauty pageant - Miss Digital World - is now open, and accepting entries.

Franz Cerami, creator of the pageant, said "Miss Digital World is the search for a contemporary ideal of beauty, seen through virtual reality."

The outpouring of interest after the first announcements meant that the pageant - aimed at digital artists, advertising agencies, movie production companies and videogame developers - has pushed back several entry deadlines to December 20.

Prospective contestants should note that models "should not have taken part - not even as extras or cameos - in pornographic films, shows or plays nor have made statements...in any way out of tune with the moral spirit of the competition." (Too bad... it would have been nice to see Lara Croft on that catwalk...)

Contestants will be programmed to parade along a virtual catwalk, surrounded by virtual guests, with a virtual emcee presiding over the event. The winner - determined by votes over the Internet - will be crowned at a real world celebration in November 2004.

One Remote to Rule Them All

If you're like me, you've got a remote control for your TV, DVD, PVR, video, stereo, satellite, and other sundry electronic boxes....12 at the last count. Universal remotes? Cumbersome IR programming, new remotes which turn out to be incompatible, the need to switch modes from TV to DVD to stereo....I'd just about given up.

Until now. The Harmony Remote by Intrigue Technologies is a universal remote with a difference - well, three to be exact - and promises to herald in a new era of clickophile nirvana.

Advantage one: A scroll wheel aids navigation through different modes, and aids in accessing stored preferences, viewable via a small LCD screen at the base of the unit. This makes the Harmony ergonomically a joy to use.

Advantage two: Instead of having to switch control modes by electronic box (TV, DVD, stereo), the Harmony uses macros to organize functions by activity: "Watch TV", for example, turns on and controls your TV, cable/satellite and speakers. "Listen to CD" turns on and controls your amplifier, speakers, and CD player. "Play a DVD"....well, you get the picture.

Advantage three: The Harmony Remote is the first Internet-programmable universal remote. Connect the Harmony to your computer via USB, and you can tap into a growing online database of tens of thousands of remotes. Everyday new remotes are being added, thanks to Harmony's online user community. You simply select the remotes you want mimicked, and download to your Harmony....no more IR mating rituals to teach your universal remote new tricks. Oh, and you can download TV listings as well.

The reviews have been ecstatic. One user enthused: "My mother-in-law, a 77-year-old woman raised on an island mountain farm without electricity, got it working within seconds. And her techno-hostile daughter, my wife, declares the Harmony the first gadget I've brought home that actually does something useful."

All this adds up to the Harmony being possibly the one remote worth fighting over.

Largest Prime Number (Yet) Found

New Scientist is reporting that the largest prime number yet was just found using a distributed computing system consisting of over 200,000 computers.

The new prime is 6,320,430 digits long (yes, so I won't be publishing it here). The result is a victory for the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) project.

Math news is usually pretty rare, but late 2003 has had a couple neat stories. Beyond the new prime story above, we also were tantalized by the partial solving of Hilbert's 16th problem by Swedish PhD student Elin Oxenhielm.

iTunes Hacked

Apple's digital rights management (DRM) system on the iTunes Music Store has been challenged by Jon Johansen, well-known as the author of the DeCSS program for bypassing DVD copy protection.

The new program, QTFairUse, does not actually crack the DRM. Instead, it intercepts the music file while it is in the process of being streamed and before the DRM is applied.

While this implies that - similar to DeCSS - the program works only on content legitimately purchased from iTunes, a number of observers suggest that the program can be mis-used because it allows users to compile their own database of unprotected - and potentially distributable - content.

In its current release, QTFairUse does require some programming knowledge to implement, but more user-friendly versions are likely to appear in time. The current version is available only for Windows-based PCs.

NEIC -- A Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On

I found a really cool website last night. A friend reported that he thought they had just felt a small earthquake, so I started Googling to see what resources I could find to let me know if they had.

What I found was the National Earthquake Information Center (or NEIS), a division of the US Geological Survey (itself a division of the Department of the Interior).

The NEIS's website has some of the most real-time and user-friendly science resources I've seen, especially on a governmental site. For example, the Current Worldwide Earthquake List displays all the recent seismic activity of interest, updated almost to the second. Clicking on an activity will take you to a page providing incredible amounts of information about the event, including clickable maps that convert to high-detail diagrams providing additional info.

Perhaps even cooler are the Recent Earthquake Activity maps for the USA and the world. These diagrams are both visually useful (Tufte would be proud) and interactive (you can click on them to get more detailed close-ups of areas with activity). You can even see actual seismogram charts for US stations (updated daily).

Anyway, whoever did this website deserves some major kudos, as it's well-designed, fast, user-friendly, and highly informative. Now if only my state's DMV would be so innovative with its website...

Fark.com -- News with Reviews

Fark.com is a news aggregator blog with something extra: it both classifies the stories (e.g., Amusing, Dumbass, Obvious, Unlikely, etc.) and offers readers message boards on which to post their reactions. Based on the number of posts, Fark.com gets a lot of readers.

Fark covers a lot of the same news stories you get on other media, but also throws in a refreshing dash of the odd, the bizarre, the disturbing, and the naked just for fun.

Think of it as /. for the rest of us.

Watchster

Watchster is an interesting website. It is a news aggregator or meta-blog (whichever you prefer) site that focuses on tech news and gadgets with three categories of stories:

PDA News has links to stories about PDAs from over 30 PDA-centric news sites like Palm Infocenter and Pocket PC Thoughts.

Tech News lists stories from about 20 general tech and gadget sites, including Slashdot, Gizmodo, and yours truly, GearBits.

Mac News lists, as you might guess, stories from dozens of Mac news sites -- the list is absolutely huge.

Go check it out.

More Halloween Horror? Microsoft Eyes Google Takeover

According to the New York Times, while search company Google prepares for an IPO, it is also entertaining the possibility of a partnership - and even a merger - with Microsoft.

Google has noted that its preference is to take the IPO route, but it has been in talks with Microsoft over the last two months regarding possible alliances, including the possibility of a full acquisition.

Google is considering selling a 10-15% percent stake to the public, expected to raise more than $2 billion.

According to some sources, even if Google completes its IPO, Microsoft may still be interested in pursuing Google at a later date.

Amazon.com Launches Full Text Searching of Books

A letter from Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO, on his Amazon.com site today, states:

"Starting today, you can find books at Amazon.com based on every word inside them, not just on matches to author or title keywords. Search Inside the Book - the name of this new feature - searches the complete inside text of more than 120,000 books - all 33 million pages of them."

Click here, for example, to find all the books that mention MemoWare, Craig's main online endeavor before GearBits.

After finding books that mention your search terms, you can also see a scan of that page. An Amazon.com press release gives more details of the service. The service inaugurates a capability unmatched by any other major online or bricks-and-mortar book retailer - although publisher O'Reilly's subscription-based Safari service has previously allowed IT professionals to search through the text of 1,000 selected technical reference books.

This appears to be the first results of Amazon.com's foray into search, under its wholly-owned A9 subsidiary. A9 was founded earlier this year, and operates independently of Amazon.com under Udi Manber, a former executive at search giant Yahoo.