Going slightly off-topic the usual focus of the blog here, I’m pretty darn sure that a war is coming based on recent events. Check these stats out…

June - Pentagon hacked by Chinese Military. (FT)

September - Chinese military “infiltrates defense companies”. (FT)

September - Chinese military hacks Pentagon AGAIN. (vnunet)

September - UK foreign office attacked by Chinese hackers. (vnunet)

September - Chines military strikes again in France. (vnunet)

October - Chinese military attacks German networks. (vnunet)

December - MI5 contacts 300+ businesses warning of Chinese attacks. (vnunet)

December - Unexplained NSA (National Security Agency) website unavailability. (NSA)

December - US Military Labs Computers broken into. (Gadgetell).

Rather… We are IN a digital war. A technology war. A race for power. With China’s development of anti-satellite technology and the Great Firewall Of China, Iran’s undoubted nuclear warhead creation, North Korea’s embargo on e-mails, scanning and re-scanning everything that goes in and out of the country, Russia’s shady movements and secretive scientific research. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the Cold War never ended. Except it’s a little more of a World War than a Russia Vs. Britain feud.

What d’yall think? Pity we’re blocked by the Great Firewall Of China ourselves. Would have loved to have heard some views from inside the country.

… … … …

ROFL!

It’s amazing how things change… In 2001, the world was hip ‘n’ dandy over Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban, The World Trade Center attack, Nostradamus (think end of the world style death and destruction), Anthrax and dare I say it, perhaps most horrifically of all, Windows XP! Six years on, the general public is more concerned over the iPhone’s well-being, Webkinz (the fluffy animal that’s been gutted out and kitted with a sub-par Fisherprice processor), TMZ (celebrity scandals), Transformers (geek domination or movie obsession?), YouTube (go online video!), Club Penguin (don’t ask), MySpace (icky/buggy social network full of glittery puff dolls), Heroes (I’m thinking movie/TV/video obsession), Facebook (the good social network we all need to use) and finally Anna Nicole Smith.

What will be thought of us, in 100 years time? In the space of half-a-decade, we’ve gone from paranoid, terrorist obsessed, war-mongering Googlers (if I can use that term, not working at Google myself) into a nation of fluffy-animal-celebrity-social-sex-video lovers. Some of us anyway. O_o This is a time when I’m proud to be different. Seriously - Club Penguin just cramps my style. Being aimed at “6-14 year olds”, even I, with absolutely no life outside my computer, clearly realise that this is SAD.

You gotta love Google and the crazy stats that a trillion searches a second result in.

And Engadget? No need to source us at TechZi or anything - not like we reported the news FOUR days before you or anything. Seriously. I mean, sheesh…

THIS article was via Gizmodo. We have the decency to source. Not that Engadget don’t or anything. Nah… Not at all. Sheesh, I mean… Ah. You know. There’s always the possibility they found it themselves. Especially when no-one else had blogged it apart from… Oh, geez. Just shut up David and get back to writing Affiliate Defined. Then you can go ‘n’ buy Engadget, that tiny little geeky site who pales in comparison to the l3t uber TechZi.

… Please note that the above tag is not XHTML Strict compatible …

Oh geez… I wish I was being paid to write this, because as you can see, I’m doing it anyhow. *rolls eyes* This isn’t the first time this week Microsoft has amused us with their antics. Randomly playing classical music and now a fake presidential debate. Oh cow - This rocks. The first edition of “America’s Talking” (strangely reminding me of The Colbert Report) questions the serious possibility of riots throughout the nation at the news of domesticated stay-at-home servers.

Phase 2 of the home server inflitration comes in the form of a cleverly disguised children’s picture book, wittily entitled “Mommy - Why is there a server in the house?” “Helping Your Child Understand The Stay-At-Home Server” was written by server/child integration expert Dr O’Connor. “When a Mommy and a Daddy love each other very much”, says Dr O’Connor, “The Daddy wants to give the Mommt a very special gift. He buys a stay-at-home server.”

Is an epidemic on the horizon? Will our working lifestyles change? sweeping the nation? Probably not. Hit the jump to find out more. “Dueling Experts, The Clash Of The Generations and Home Sweet Server coming soon!”

This has to be one of the better Microsoft Knowledge Base articles I’ve seen written. Boldly entitled, “Computer Randomly Starts Playing Classical Music” - the article looks at a rather peculiar safemode extra, the ability for the computer to randomly decide it’s time for some Fur Elise. Go figure…

SUMMARY

During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play “Fur Elise” or “It’s a Small, Small World” seemingly at random. This is an indication sent to the PC speaker from the computer’s BIOS that the CPU fan is failing or has failed, or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance. This is a design feature of a detection circuit and system BIOSes developed by Award/Unicore from 1997 on.

MORE INFORMATION

Although these symptoms may appear to be virus-like, they are the result of an electronic hardware monitoring component of the motherboard and BIOS. You may want to have your computer checked or serviced.

Microsoft has brought many a tear to my eye, but never before in a GOOD sense (no offence guys - or Yuvi). Hard-drive failures make me cry. Fatal errors make me teary. “Error: Operation Completed Successfully” sends me off in floods. But this my friends? This is good…

Check out the Knowledge Base article for yourself and listen to the classics. This is what I’m talking about… Rock ‘n’ roll! Viva-la-fur-elise!

The best Apple marketing campaign yet? Sheer genius.

When you consider that a PS3 game costs about a gazillion dollars on average, it’s pretty obvious that when Madden 2007 is being offered for $9.99 with free shpiping, you know they’re desperate to clear the stock for the holidays and start pushing ‘08.

Engadget are also having one heck of a giveaway in line with the christmas shopping season. You can get your stinking grubby paws on everything from Sidewinder mice and Slingbox Pros to MS Wireless Entertainment Desktop setups, the Apple iPod Shuffle, a nice looking AT&T Tilt and a Limited Edition Halo 3 wireless controller (something I’ve been talking myself into getting this coming holiday).

Apple seem to be having a pretty nice deal going on today only, too, with iMacs and iPods in particular being graced by some pretty impressive savings.

Not to be outdone however - Circuit City wins editor’s pick this year with an incredible set of geek offers up for grabs. $7 for a 2GB SD card? Get out! $800 for a Sharp Aquos 42″ HDTV LCD display, too, and a Roadmate GPS system for $125 - Darn importation taxes. Believe me, if I had it my way, I’d be living in the US right now. I don’t suppose I mentioned the $300 HP laptop by the way, did I?

Just when you thought you had it good, a dual processor-powered eight-cored, 16GB DDR2 RAMed up behemoth comes and knocks over your little parade by encoding a 2TB video in less time than it took you to read this sentence. And it ONLY costs $18,400.00. Sheesh kebab! Supply and demand just got thrown down the toilet! Rolling in with some pretty impressive specs, the Apple Mac Pro can be configured with up to two 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processors, 16GB of low-latency RAM (8 modules weighing in at 2GB a piece), a thousand-dollar Mac Pro RAID Card for optimized storage performance, not one, not two, not three, but FOUR 750GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA HDDs running at 3Gb/s EACH.

As if that wasn’t enough, presuming you’re going flat out and getting yourself two 30″ Apple Cinema HD Displays to bask in your super-speedy glory, you’ll need a pretty hefty graphics rig to handle the pressure. Good job the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 512MB is on hand (Stereo 3D 2 x dual-link DVI). Think of it as the 8800-Ultra’s big brother-in-law’s body-builder’s trainer. Holy cow… Now we’re talking! When you consider that you can fit in two 16x SuperDrives (how I love their automated fancy eject) and both Bluetooth 2.0+EDR AND AirPort Extreme support within the chassis of this beauty, the genius of Apple’s so-called “designers” (really another way of saying astro-phyiscists moulding our products to perfection) really starts to shine. Quad-channel 4Gb Fibre Channel PCI Express card, an Apple USB Modem to boot and an Apple Wireless Keyboard and Apple wireless Mighty Mouse (WOOHOO!) included.

That’s one powerful web browsing system, so I figure to make use of it’s talents, we could either run Protein Folding applications, simulate a nuclear explosion or use some of the software I specifically included in the order menu, to be preinstalled. Mac OS X Leopard (What else!?!?!? Vista?!?!?) - iWork ‘08 (I’ve been testing it - a nice MS-Office competitor!) - Aperture 1.5 (Schaweeeet!) and Logic Express, for when the likes of open-source Audacity just don’t cut the chase. If you’ve got some spare moolah flying around, don’t hesitate to send it my way. (Joke, BTW…)

…but seriously. If anyone’s got a spare $18.4 grand you were going to give to some noble cause, consider us little guys. Hit the Apple Store to check out my configuration. Inspired by none other than our very own Nate Whitehill’s single most uber Apple rig EVER.

(Again, a joke. Don’t take everything I say so seriously and stop flaming my inbox. I just changed e-mail addresses.)

Boeing 747s aren’t necessarily known for their stunning looks and the super-modified anti-nuke laser-equppied aircraft seems certain not to change this less than thrilling sterotype by adding a fish-hook nose onto the existing pokey-dokey primer. Of course, all it needs is a stray wicked-laser and you could “accidentally” blow up Terrorist Country X’s (naming no names) latest attempt to “destroy the west”. Peace and love, terror-obsessed dudes. Peace ‘n’ love.

SIDENOTE: What d’you do when you lose your Inter Continental Ballistic Missile? You look for it! (Hoy, hoy, Seshi-chan!)

I’m taking this rather well considering the seriousness of the situation. The Thunderbird e-mail client just tried to self-update and… well… pooped itself. My whole “last-update.log” file hidden in my AppData/Local/Thunderbird/Mozilla Thunderbird/updates folder was (or should I say IS) full of error messages and I’ve conveniently lost 25,000 stored e-mails along with about 30 e-mails saved in my drafts - some of which contained irreplacable data. Maybe I’ll find a way to get my stuff back. Maybe I won’t. Stuff happens. It’s life. You just gotta keep moving on!

On a more cheery note, Affiliate Defined is going well - though not so well I could buy myself 30-years of video game nostalgia, something at this point in time I’d consider killing for. (Joke - by the way, I’m not really that unstable CIA bot who keeps spidering my site.) $15,000 Of Video Game Relics… 1,700 boxed games. Goodness knows how many consoles!

Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Atari Jaguar, Atari Lynx, Coleco ColecoVision, Coleco Gemini, Coleco Telstar, Commodore 64/128, GCE Vectrex, Mattel Aquarius, Mattel Intellivision, Mattel Odyssey 2, Microsoft Xbox, Microsoft Xbox 360, APF TV Fun, Miscellaneous Handheld Games, Miscellaneous PC Games, SC Eight Thousand, Sega Pods, Miscellaneous TV Games, NEC Turbo Duo, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Game Boy Advance, Nintendo GameCube, Nintendo NES, Nintendo Nintendo 64, Nintendo Super NES, Nintendo Virtual Boy, Nintendo Wii, Sega Dreamcast, Sega Game Gear, Sega Genesis, Sega Master System, Sega Saturn, SNK Neo Geo, SNK Neo Geo Pocket, Sony Playstation, Sony Playstation 2, Texas Instruments TI 99/4A, VM Labs Nuon.

Officialy the longest list I’ve ever had to type (or read at all, for that matter)! I have a hard time believing that the lot (including the 1,700 video games) went for $9,000 - as much as a cheap car. Give it another 20 years and this lot will be worth $50,000. Hit the lot and join the 120,000 other drewling geeks who already did (myself proudly included). Be sure to check out Technabob, who sourced this for us too.

UPDATE: Okay, so reality is hitting home and I now realise how much I needed them 25,000 e-mails. O_O Holy cow - techie advice welcome!

UPDATE: Well he is my Dad, afterall. Problem sorted. At least for my TechZi mailbox. Now it’s just hard manual labor getting the remaining ones sorted out. Zoids. O_o