Audi R8: The slowest car we’ve ever built (Video)

I’ve always loved the design of Audi cars. They’re good looking, classy, and the R8 is no exception to this.

In an unprecedented move, Audi UK is investing more than 6 million pounds (roughly $12 million dollars) to support its new R8 high-performance car with one of the most ironic claims in the history of advertising: “the slowest car we’ve ever built”.

The R8 is, of course, anything but slow. It is the fastest production car Audi has ever produced, but because each one is constructed with painstaking precision, largely by hand, it actually has the by far the slowest build process of all Audi models. Only 450 cars will be delivered in the UK this year, and 750 in 2008, with prices starting at £77,000 ($155k).

TVLinks Shut Down, Owner Arrested

By David Peralty
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

There are many ways to get your favorite shows, you can watch them at their scheduled time on television, record them with your PVR or VCR (does anyone use a VCR anymore?) or watch them on the broadcast companies website. If none of these choices work well for you, sometimes you can catch them on sites like TVLinks (tv-links.co.uk), where they link to illegally uploaded videos on various video hosting websites, which allows you to view them at your convenience.

I don’t want to focus on the legality of this whole thing, but for the many people that use such sites, a sad thing has happened: TVLinks has been shut down.

Not only has the site been taken down, but the owner, a 26-year-old man from Cheltenham, UK, has been arrested. Though he doesn’t host the content himself, only providing links to the material on major video hosting sites, he has apparently been charged with the “facilitation” of copyright infringement.

Personally, while I agree that the service wasn’t entirely legal, I think it provided a remarkable video on demand service for shows both on and off the air, and should continue to prove to studios, production companies, and cable providers that the audience demands to have their media at their disposal. I hope that the charges are dropped.

Also, as they have started to realize with both video and audio, consumers will get what they want, any way they can and companies can adjust, or try to bully people using the legal system. Unfortunately, bullying won’t get them very far. Proof of this is the number of such video linking websites, torrent websites, and private content sharing networks still out there today.

Now is your chance to chime in on the discussion. Was it right for the site to be taken down and the owner arrested? Will the removal of TVLinks stop you from watching television shows and movies online, or will you find another source?

Do you believe that the future of both video and audio is a complete multimedia on demand service? If so, how much would you pay every month to access any and every movie and song available in a massive library?

Please do not link to any video sharing, torrent or any other illegal or grey area websites as such comments will be moderated. Geeks are Sexy does not condone piracy, but we do believe that certain, currently illegal, models are proof that the handling of media is rapidly evolving and changing to a very consumer focused model.


MP3 Spam starts appearing in inboxes

Can you believe it? After using YouTube, PDFs, and pictures, spammers have now turned themselves to audio files in order to send you their crap and bypass your spam filters.

Spammers involved in pump-and-dump scams touting penny stocks now are using MP3 music files to lure investors, a switch security experts say is the latest tactic designed to sneak the messages past spam filters.

According to e-mail security provider MessageLabs, the spam run began late on Oct. 17, with roughly 10,000 messages blasted out per hour. The e-mails include semi-random subject lines that matched the title of the attached MP3 file, which plays a short 20-60 second message touting microcap shares of a company called Exit Only Inc.

So the next time an email that contains an attachement named “getbiggernow.mp3” lands in your inbox, please don’t open it, unless you’re really looking to… Nah, forget it! :)

Stock Spammers Pump It Up With MP3 Files

Lifetime supply of beer for a laptop

Free beer!A New-Zealand brewer just promised that he would provide free beer for life to the individual who would help him get a stolen laptop back. The system, which apparently contains crucial enterprise information, has disappeared early this week when one of the brewery owners forgot to set the alarm before going at the end of the day.

Owners Paul Croucher and Nigel Gregory are desperate to get it back, so much so they are offering free beer to whoever dobs in the person responsible for the burglary.

It happened some time between 8pm on Monday, when Mr Croucher left the Depot St building, and 9am on Tuesday when he arrived back.

I know some of our readers are from New-Zealand, so you guys might want to keep your eyes open for this stolen laptop. Hmmm, free beer for life, that’s certainly a good deal! (but probably not for your health :))

Lifetime supply of beer for a laptop (The Daily Post)

HOW TO: make a GREAT first impression

Let’s face it, when going to an interview for a new job, first impressions are what count for the most in the hiring process. This is why you want to look your best at that first meeting, because we all know that you won’t get a second chance if you mess up. Here’s a short video tutorial that will teach you how to make the right choices in order to be liked by your potential employer.

Why are we happy? Why aren’t we happy?

In the following video, social psychologist Dan Gilbert challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our “psychological immune system” lets us feel real, enduring happiness, he says, even when things don’t go as planned. He calls this kind of happiness “synthetic happiness,” and he says it’s “every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for.”

Steve Ballmer and Linux: A love and hate story

It seems that Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, will never stop hitting the top of the open-source community’s head. Ballmer, during a press conference in London last week, renewed attacks that started a year ago against the world of the “open”.

According to Ballmer, Linux and open-source software users currently violate 235 patents that he claims Microsoft owns. We’re mainly talking about Linux’s kernel, its GUI, its messaging client, and OpenOffice.org.

The strangest part of all of this is that Novell isn’t targeted by these allegations anymore, most likely because of the deal they signed with Microsoft just months ago. This accord changed the nature of these attacks, and now, it seems that Microsoft has only one target: Red Hat.

“People who use Red Hat, at least in respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to eventually compensate us,” Ballmer said at a company event last week in London.
 
“We’ve spent a lot of money licensing patents,” he said. “When people come to us and say, ‘Hey, this commercial piece of software violates our patent, our intellectual property, we’ll either get a court judgment or we’ll pay a big check.”

Microsoft’s attitude in reponse to this whole mess is suprisingly ambiguous. Most of the source code for all Linux distributions is similar, so why would Red hat violate Microsoft’s patents when Novell’s Suse does not? If we follow this line of thought, we can say there is “good” and “bad” open-source applications. If Microsoft endorses the software, then it’s good; if not, it’s evil.

When looking at Microsoft’s position in regard to the Linux world, we can clearly see that Ballmer’s attacks are not targeted toward the community, but more against its individual members. What does this mean? That if you want to run legal “open source”, you have to kneel down and grovel in front of the software giant.

For those of you interested in listening to Ballmer’s speech, you can do so by following this link.