by Robert X. Cringely®

iTunes fans out of luck, Dell user shows off burned truck

analysis
Feb 15, 20072 mins

Being for the benefit of Mr. Jobs, the fifth Beatle

The Cupertino crew may have settled its differences with the Fab Four, but apparently not with the Redmond horde. Apple has warned iTunes fans to avoid Vista, and vice versa, if they value their music collections or the iPods they rode in on. A new, more Vista-friendly version of iTunes should be available in a few weeks. By then, rumor has it, iTunes may be offering the Apple Corps song catalog for download. Maybe Steve Jobs really is the fifth Beatle.

Gimp my ride: 62-year-old Thomas Forqueran, whose 1966 Ford F-250 was totaled by an IEDD (improvised explosive Dell device) last summer, is still waiting for the company to cover the costs of restoring his truck. He says he can’t find any legal beagles willing to take on the mighty maker of smoking-hot notebooks, so he’ll take his case to the people. In April he plans to tow the charred truck to a vintage vehicle show with a big sign on it, thanking Dell for customizing his wheels. That’s exactly what Dell needs right now — more bad PR. Maybe Dell should spend some of the $800 million in kickbacks it allegedly got from Intel and buy the man a new truck.

Take a bow, Wow: On Microsoft’s new “Show us your ‘Wow’ ” site, users can post photos or videos demonstrating the “awe and exhilaration” they experienced when using Vista for the first time, similar to “the birth of a child … or an historic event, like a classic sporting moment.” Right. My favorite, so far: the video of a skinny Italian drag queen in a stringy blonde wig shimmying to Shakira’s “Whenever Wherever,” while being periodically splashed by an off-camera water bottle. Wow.

This security report has been brought to you by Sesame Street: The DoD’s DNS got DDoS’ed last week, but it remains A-OK. The attack also affected the F, G, I, L, and M root servers, but damage was minimal, thanks to network geeks who followed security procedures to (ahem) the letter.

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