robert_cringely
Columnist

The Geek in Review

analysis
Jun 15, 20072 mins

Is the week over already? Time sure flies when you're swatting bugs in Safari. Here are a few of the week's notable stories. Whom do you anti-trust? Google has accused Microsoft of violating its anti-trust settlement by deliberately sabotaging Google Desktop Search under Vista. Microsoft's newest OS has its own desktop search app that can't be disabled; when both it and GDS are indexing a hard drive at the same

Is the week over already? Time sure flies when you’re swatting bugs in Safari. Here are a few of the week’s notable stories.

Whom do you anti-trust? Google has accused Microsoft of violating its anti-trust settlement by deliberately sabotaging Google Desktop Search under Vista. Microsoft’s newest OS has its own desktop search app that can’t be disabled; when both it and GDS are indexing a hard drive at the same time, the system grinds to a halt. Microsoft says t’aint so; Vista is maddeningly sluggish for everybody, not just GDS users. It’s part of Vista’s “Wow” factor, as in “Wow, I have 2 gigs of RAM and my machine is still slower than a one-legged dog.”

Tres Amigos: A Spanish blogger with a frightening amount of free time on his hands has uncovered a muy pequeño photograph of three smiling men, less than 1mm in size, embedded into the hologram on the Windows Vista Business DVD. Microsoft claims the photo depicts three members of its Vista development team and is there merely to foil counterfeiters, but they can’t fool me. Everybody knows evil comes in sets of three: the demons in the Bible; the witches in Macbeth; the Three Stooges. Even the decline of Microsoft itself began with — yes, that’s right — Windows 3.0. Better back up your hard drive, the apocalypse is at hand.

The Boston G Party: To protest eBay’s ban on using Google Checkout as a payment system, those scamps at Google planned a “protest party” to coincide with eBay’s annual seller conference in Boston. The free event was to take place at the site where the original Boston Tea Party had been planned. After eBay retaliated by pulling all of its Google AdWord ads, the G-boys cancelled the bash. OK, last warning: If you kids don’t stop fighting this instant there will be no staying up late to watch “Squirrel Boy.”

Oh my Darwin: At the risk of sparking yet another theological flame war, Cringester B. H. reports the existence of, you guessed it, yet another Creation Museum, this one in Big Valley, Alberta, Canada (population 300). However, there’s no truth to the rumor that the Adam in this museum’s exhibits posed for Mounties Monthly wearing nothing but mucklucks.

Got hot stories I missed? Post them below or email me here. The tipsiest may soon find themselves in (or at least with) the bag.