I have had to think about this long and hard, since I used to be their biggest fan, but I’ve come to a decision that I can no longer recommend Dell computers to anyone. I have an Inspiron 7000 laptop, less than 6 months old, and Dell has decided that they will offer no support for it and Windows 2000; they now have a newer top-of-the-line Inspiron, and because of that, I get no support for my machine. No drivers, no ACPI-compliant BIOS, nothing.

I didn’t realize that some of the images are back from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. Some of the pictures are just amazing.

As if there was ever any doubt that it would happen, my Barnes & Noble order is now lost, and they cannot explain what has happened to it. I got three different excuses for what “could have happened” from three different customer service reps, and a manager who outright refused to come to the phone, instead relaying various and sundry concessions through one of the first-tier reps. What a horrible, terrible company; I hope that Amazon puts them out of business.

Very very very very cool: David Carter-Tod has implemented LDAP authentication in Frontier. (David’s the same guy that wrote an XML-RPC client and server for Active Server Pages.)

There’s an interesting press release at the official Star Wars site that answers the question of why there are no releases, or planned releases, of the Star Wars movies on DVD. The bottom line is that George Lucas ostensibly wants to “do something special with the DVD release,” and due to his concentration on Episode II, doesn’t have the time to put into it right now. Our loss…

Can Mardi Gras survive without the nekkidness?

Ummmm… could there be anything cooler than a microscope that can see a single atom? Wow.

A GAO study released this yesterday confirms what I’ve suspected — most daytraders lose big money. Interesting to me is the fact that the GAO study was commissioned in the wake of Mark Burton, the daytrader who slew nine people and then committed suicide last July. (I’m looking for a link to the report; it’s not on the GAO site yet.)