TamsPalm – the Palm OS / web OS Blog

Don’t ask me who was responsible for this ad – but he definitely knows how to hit the iPhone’s vulnerable spot:

via FaceBook

We have covered the World Business Guide Scam some time ago – don’t ask me why, but the jerks still don’t give up (even though they know that I covered them on here some time ago). The email below has just hit my inbox:

Ladies and Gentlemen.

In order to have your company inserted in the registry of World Businesses for 2009/2010 edition, please print, complete and submit the enclosed form (PDF file) to the following address:

WORLD BUSINESS GUIDE
P.O. Box 2021
3500 GA Utrecht
The Netherlands

email: register@wbgtoday.net
FAX: redacted

Updating is free of charge!

If you are not the intended recipient, please submit an email to unsubscribe@wbgtoday.net Your request shall be dealt with accordingly.

Once again: if you get ANY communication from these folks, just delete/destroy it unless it comes from a court in your home country (which has never happened so far). The boys have never sued anyone AFAIK, and are sending these emails out illegally themselves.

Tech CEOs with acting/music production experience obviously have an edge over their MBA competition (think Steve Ballmer). Elevation Partners Roger McNamee is in a similar league.

His hilarious comments about the Pre have made analysts laugh a lot in the past…Palm even had to retract some of them. Unfortunately, he didn’t have enough – his latest stunt can be seen at Engadget.

In case anyone of you feels like wasting 2 minutes and a few CPU cycles – definitely hit the link above!

Image: Wikimedia Commons / Glenn Evans

The images below are sure to ring a bell in the mind of quite a few of you. Long gone are the days…:

(post ends here)

P.S. Stories from the inside of MetroWerks are always gladly accepted.

Aah, the joys of internationalization – if translators only were cheaper and languages were easier to learn. The temptation to take shortcuts is very real…but can lead to funky mishaps like the one pictured on the left side.

The German text is gravely insulting – in this context, the word gefaelligst does not mean kindly but rather god-darn, you a$$hole. Thus, the translated text would be as follows:

Dear Guests,
we kindly request our guests to eat them fruit only god-darn in our restaurant to eat.

While you and I are likely to see the translation error and laugh about it (or, in my case, blog it); more sensitive people will feel gravely insulted. I am aware of at least one person in this hotel who was heavily insulted by the sign and terminated his stay early.

Cutting a long story short: don’t save money on translations…

I have had my fair share of eekers with shipment companies in the last years: some were stupid, some uncooperative and some just slow. However, the folks at GLS Germany’s have business practices which I consider nothing short of legalized extortion. But let’s start at the beginning.

Yours truly ordered a parcel from the German notebooks-billiger-Shop, which was to be delivered to his new office in Linz. The parcel went out on the 23rd, and arrived in Linz on the 26th according to GLS’s web site:

However, nobody arrived. Both I and my wife were at home at the time, and never heard even the slightest beep of our doorbell. The web site furthermore stated that a card was affixed to the door, which was nowhere to be seen either. As for the call: nothing here, either.

At first glance, I thought that I would just need to give em a call and get the stuff tomorrow…until I found out that the phone number costs a whooping 95 cents a minute! Of course, no fax number was given…and emailing was not possible either (web form only, which is not legally binding).

After asking some friends who had similar experiences, I personally feel that GLS Germany is performing a particularly nasty form of racketeering scam. They don’t ship your parcel, and when you call to ask them about the whereabouts, they earn about 50 cents a minute.

Folks: whatever you do, beware of GLS and use DHL instead. Their staff is always friendly and calling them is free. Your customers will definitely appreciate your move…

P.S. I have sent an email to GLS press heads asking for a statement, and will update this post as soon as I hear from them. If this post doesn’t get updated, they didn’t react…which essentially validates this post and my suspicions further…

According to the CNN, Mosquitoes in Africa will soon face a new technological threat:

Lead scientist on the project, Dr. Jordin Kare, told CNN that the laser would be able to sweep an area and “toast millions of mosquitoes in a few minutes.”

Unfortunately, initial shipments of the technology are intended to go to Africa (as there are more Mosquitoes there). Nevertheless, the Tamoggemon Content team can literally hear the screams of millions of people in the west and east begging for such a device…let’s all keep our hopes up for now.

P.S. Some of the technology was recycled from the US Star Wars project…I would say that this is literally a case of tax dollars at work…

Image: pd per United States Department of Health and Human Services, via Wikimedia Commons

I have never been to happy with the way traditional print magazines cover mobile and IT-related topics: the Austrian daily magazine Kurier just shot the ball right out of their court with a three-page story looking at the “various dangers of computer gaming”. As usual, all of it was bullsh*t – read on for the best parts:

Safer texts – or – on copy and paste
In Austria, journalists usually receive training which allows them to disguise PR gags from real events. However, the padded lamp post story (which has been forgotten for a few months) has just received a revival from the boys in red:

I have no idea why they didn’t stumble across messages like these:

Charity organisation Living Streets said that, if the trial is successful, streets including Charing Cross Road, Old Bond Street and Oxford Street will be fitted with the lampposts.
Advertisement

The padding is sponsored by directory enquiries service 118118, which commissioned a study into injuries suffered while texting.

Demanding them to ask themselves why the original Yahoo story was pulled is – um – superfluous…

Wii: movement causes pain
After having proven their intellectual prowess with the story above, idiocies continue on the next page:

The picture shows a gamer playing Wii Fit, while the tag line claims that “all kinds of bodily injuries are caused by the Wii, as it demands bodily activity”. I ask myself what they would write about sports like Tennis or Jogging…but am pretty sure that it would be a lot less aggressive.

In the end, I personally feel offended by their sloppy and misleading editorial work. If this wouldn’t be my wife’s subscription, I would cancel it immediately…and urge any Austrian computer gamers to give them the same treatment. Not getting enough ad purchases from game manufacturers can be painful – but IMHO does not allow for insane moves like the one above…

A sucker is literally born every minute – the latest a$$hole to waddle past me takes the form of a spammer offering an advance fee/directory scam. The whole story starts out with them sending an email similar to the one below:

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

In order to have your company inserted in the registry of World Businesses
for 2009/2010 edition, please print, complete and submit the enclosed form (PDF file)
to the following address:

WORLD BUSINESS GUIDE
P.O. Box 2021
3500 GA Utrecht
The Netherlands

email: register@worldbusinessguidenow.biz
FAX: +31 20 524 8107

Updating is free of charge!

If you are not the intended recipient, please submit an email to
unsubscribe@worldbusinessguidenow.biz
Your request shall be dealt with accordingly.

The attached form points out its “freeness” multiple times, but contradicts itself in the fine print at the very bottom. While this alone IMHO disqualifies them under Austrian law (misleading contracts are prohibited), the legalities of spamming potential customers IMHO doesn’t need to be discussed under the latest Austrian ECG act.

Their actual web site is pictured below: please do note that the date there is still displayed as the 24th of November:

P.S. I have googled the web looking for other “victims” of the World Business Guide scam, and found none who were actually prosecuted: it looks like the best thing is to formally dispute their charges and ignore both them and their (nonexistent) debt collection agency…

P.S.2. Thanks to Peter Burgstaller’s Lawfirm Linz and the FH Hagenberg, I am well aware that their action is not legal (thanks, Peter, for the great course). I have thus decided to go Ed Fagan on them – here is my response:

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,
thank you so much for your letter, which constitutes punishable spam under Austrian legal code (§107 TKG)! I have passed this on to my attorney and will seek legal action against your company.

However, I am willing to settle with your company for the payment of the costs I incurred in processing your email, which make up for a total of 35 Euros, which constitutes half an hour of work! I am more than willing to provide you with an invoice and a contract freeing you of all further claims from me if you so desire!

All the best from Vienna
Mos. Tam Hanna

P.S. I have taken the liberty to publish this to my well-read web site network:
….

A recent issue of the Financial times contained an article on the partnership between Microsoft and LG. This is nothing new (Microsoft has an excellent PR department and buys many ads) – but the image assignment is funny as hell:

In case you don’t follow TamsS60: the picture shows Samsung’s Omnia HD fractal:

And to make things worse: the Omnia HD runs S60. Yikes!

News from Linux Pro magazine is that Sony is releasing a 10MP camera which runs busybox, and believe it or not, ALP, ACCESS’s thought-to-be-deathware-like-cobalt Operating System.

The camera, the Sony DSC-G3 runs busybox and kernel 2.6.11 for ALP. The makefile (source available here) for the kernel states in part:
VERSION = 2
PATCHLEVEL = 6
SUBLEVEL = 11
EXTRAVERSION := $(EXTRAVERSION)-alp
NAME=Woozy Beaver

What this may mean for the ALP platform in the future is beyond me. Having a full fledged camera running a handheld operating system seems like far overkill to me, but perhaps Sony may be shifting in a new direction with their devices, taking steps to slowly but surely integrate these two platforms into one.

This is not a full ALP operating system on the camera; only the kernel is used from ALP.

While working with Microsoft Outlook 2003, I just stumbled across the extremely funny thing pictured below – look at the caption of the first email group:

P.S. I am perfectly aware how this was caused, but posted it for fun’s sake – have a laugh, folks!

Fanboyism can sometimes go quite a bit too far – the latest super-fanboy is pictured below:

This Texas-based, 23 year old girl has posted the picture above to MySpace, but has since removed it from there – I don’t want to know what she was up to…

The folks at Engadget’s are known to be extremely good when it comes to all things rumor: unfortunately, their analyst team sometimes gets carried away by bad or humorous feelings.

Their latest stunt is a gift list “for your biggest enemy” – while the idea sounds funny, some of their selections are nothing short of bone-headed:

• Celio REDFLY
• Meizu M8
• Treo 800w

P.S. I could recommend a gift for your enemy: an Asus product of your choice. Its crap cheap due to bad design…and when it breaks down, things get really really funny…