I like to push the design envelope wherever possible, so I put my thinking cap on and came up with another niche flash drive design – The Penis.

It is a cross between a floppy disk and a USB stick. Place your limp device into a USB slot in your PC and within 4 milliseconds it stands to attention, unlike any other pen drive.

When you start surfing, a small chip detects any references to penises and other derivatives of the word. When it spots a penis or penis in action on a web page, it will auto download material. The more porn it finds, the more it downloads, and unlike any other solid state storage device, it has almost no limits to size. Thanks to a unique design its capacity to store data grows unbridled, and its growth can only be stunted either by exhausting every sexual reference on the internet, or by closing your browser and depowering your laptop.

One user who pushed the flash drive to the limit and failed to disconnect from x rated sites, ended up watching his Penis drive breaking a hole in the wall of his 8 storey penthouse apartment. The fire service had to be called to save him and his neighbors from certain death.

I never found a manufacturer willing or able to produce this penis pen drive. Maybe when the Minority report era has finally dawned? There is more USB storage machinations over at The Pisstakers.com

Looking a bit deeper into Skype, ie beyond the end of my nose, I see there is another cause for concern. Pagetable reveal that when you log on to Skype, they tap into your BIOS and motherboard serial number to verify your user info.

So, that is a bit like picking up your phone and before you talk, the telecom company asks for your phone serial number, how many times you have phoned out, and are you the only user.

When you put it like that, this BIOS / motherboard check doesn’t seem so intrusive. In fact, thank god Skype can work out what they need to know to keep their system working properly, without engaging you in a conversation. Can you imagine the inconvenience of turning your phone upside down and trying to remember the first long number you see, only to be told it is the other long number, stupid!

The naked tech truth is that free comes at a price. That is surely the biggest lesson people need to learn when they use the internet. I will now get off my soapbox as quickly as I got on it.

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Viewing this page with a version 2 browser automatically submits Email containing your captured Email address. Your Email address is sent to an address which then bounces an Email message to you to prove that this web page grabbed it (“it” being the Email address field in your JavaScript-enabled browser, if it’s filled in.)

See what I mean?

There are hundreds of other stupid scripts, such as widgets that grab information from around the internet and place loony data in one “neat” spot on your page. A couple of particularly stupid widgets are Shave my yeti! and an Idiots List, to name but two.

There is loads more stupidity over at Widgetbox. I challenge you to come up with a more dumb idea than What not to do in accident.

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Yesterday I blabbed about the life-changing news from EMC, who are using flash drives as part of their data storage solutions. Speed is the theme, and they also boast low energy costs compared to traditional hard drives.

Just like a coffee machine needs beans, so hardware needs software. As you may know, EMC own a company called VMware who are the world leaders in virtualisation software. This means it is possible to store loads of data in such a way that it doesnt really exist until you need it.

Taking it a stage further, it just so happens that today, VMware announced the purchase of Thinstall. These guys can now centrally install one copy of a software program and make it accessible to a whole building full of brain dead office workers – simultaneously. That’s right. Many people sharing the same single program. Cheap, fast and easy to control. Big brother is here!

So, EMC and VMware’s flash-based hard drives combined with virtualisation software give us a glimpse at a killer tech combo that will be all the rage in the commercial world soon.

And this, I hypothesise, is the future for Starbucks !

The ailing coffeee houses should each install a flash server loaded with this virtual software from Thinstall. Thereafter, anyone with a laptop can walk in and drink coffee and log in to th eworld’s greatest software while downloading itunes etc etc.

Admittedly that will cut out the need for workers to go the office buildings that have been tricked out with VMware /Thinstall / flash servers, and this service should clog up Starbucks queues good and proper, but you get the idea of the potential for getting even more bums on seats for longer. And imagine, art students wont need to pirate Photoshop, and architects and engineers wont need to rip off Auto-Cad. The world will be a more moral place, thanks to Starbucks.

At the moment the technology is nearly as expensive as a Starbucks double whatever it is mocha, but unless they push past a basic wi-fi coffee shop experience, Starbucks will have no future.

If you want to know anything else ahead of time, just ask.
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Profits for the world’s number 2 phone producer, LCD screen manufacturer and biggest chip maker, yeah that’s right, quite a record, have dropped 6.6 percent year on year.

Imagine that, the Korean conglomerate failed miserably and only made $2.1bn PROFIT. I say off with their dumb heads. The management, however, are celebrating the fact that investors are even dumber than them. The share price rose, because, get this, investors view this is the best of the last 5 declining quarters. Go work that out. Samsung executives screwed up less badly than they did over the last 15 months, so their company ends up being worth 2.5% more, in 24 hours.

The moral seems to be, in the corporate world, you get ahead by screwing up. Therefore, I can’t wait for armaggedon / Samsung style earnings results from some of these screwed-up financial companies. The failures are bound to catapault plunging share prices of such stellar tech companies as EMC to new highs on Wall St – it’s obvious! Cheers.

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And now, EMC, the masters of the data storage universe, where they think in terabytes and beyond, are the first to incorporate solid state flash drives for industry. Woah, it finds info so fast on your hard drive that it shows the results before you even finish your search term!

I wondered what it would be like to pack one of those flash drive babies into your iPod. Talk about putting a big bulge in your pocket, having to lug one of those around. And a hole in your pocket to buy one.
Of course, EMC couldn’t care less about iPods, they have bigger fish to fry, but on the domestic front, it is a hint of the future of PC hard drives. Amongst other things, instant on computers will be feasible. There we go, another 30 seconds a day saved.

What will you do with your 30 seconds? Listen to a sample of music on iTunes? EMC execs will probably use the extra half minute to compute their extra money.

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For instance, did you know that Skype users have to agree to let Skype piggy back off of their computer to route other users’ calls around the internet? The Internet Patrol read all the small print that us normal folks don’t take any notice of, and unearthed that gem.

Don’t despair, this universal interconnectivity has its advantages. It is probably very hard to break into the Skype network per se, so you can’t really over hear any wildly interesting phone conversations, but it offers some interesting possibilities. For instance, you can use conventional methods to hack into your geeky neighbor’s computer, and to find out what files really matter to them, sit quietly and wait for them to access their computer from their mobile phone via a Skype plug-in called Soonr.

There are plenty of other Skype hacks here, if you are wired that way, but beware, Skype could really screw with you and enable millions to listen in.

More from Ed about Soonr and hacking and Skype

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Microsoft is rapidly losing the search engine battle with Google and despite humungous viral and trojan marketing tactics, organic growth is not going to help them close the gap. Therefore, the only way to pay catch-up is by big check acquisitions. Enter stage left, Yahoo, number 2.0 in the search engine field.

Buying up Yahoo, numero dos in the industry, may sound like a great idea for Microsoft, but they should not go ahead with this crazy merger. The last time I looked at my stats for The Pisstakers (my main site), Yahoo provides at best one quarter the volume of Google search engine traffic. 50% of that 25% is mainly irrelevant and the 25 percentage points are dropping by the week. As my site is obviously a barometer for the whole internet, any merger, (to create Microhoo), would give MSFT an underwhelming, diminishing 30% share of the search engine market, with 10% of that producing crap results.

When you lay it out like that, paying $100bn for such mediocrity sounds like a typical MSFT investment! 100% chance it will probably happen.

If MSFT were wise, for once in their monopolistic lives, they will take the $100bn and invest $1bn in me and give the rest to charity. I will write a killer tech blog, draw a modest $50k weekly wage, and I won’t plaster Google Adsense left and right. Melinda and Bill can use their $99bn to save the world, and we will all say whatever MSFT want us to say, with a clear heart.

I got to writing this post after reading a spoof email from a guy called Andy who claimed to run MSN. He said he was closing MSN down and I needed to tell all my friends! I know, I nearly fell for it, till I realised it was probably from the guy Andy who runs Yahoo.

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If you are an opinionated but lazy reader, you will love the idea of rating an article with a simple click on one to five stars. (And if not stars, some weird “creative” graphics.) This click-and-go system is much more convenient than emailing or commenting. Just hit one to five stars, the javascript records your choice on a server, computes the effect on the aggregate votes and sends the end result back for all to see. No chance of a debate, no need to justify yourself to someone who disagrees with your opinion, just click and go.

If you have a blog, consider installing a javascript rating script to see what the lazy bastards really think of your posts, (I mean, to encourage feedback from your valued readership.) Here are some specific ideas for a simple rating script that you may want to try out. 

In order to increase one-click feedback, you could do as Yahoo Finance do, and make commenters rate the post before they can leave a comment. But unlike Yahoo, please put a little note in an obvious place, explaining the commenting process. Don’t be like me and scan through 300 comments in search of a comment box, to find none!

As an alternative to javascript, ratings lovers could try a php rating script from Phazos.

Did you like that info? I have no ratings scripts here, cause I think that whilst ratings are a teeny bit of interactive fun, they are too open to abuse. I prefer readers to leave a comment to add to the conversation. And perhaps the rating system is the line of  javascript that finally reduces your site-loading speed to a crawl.

Cheers. Ed

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