Elliott C. Back: Technology FTW!

This year’s Black Friday tragedy is a Walmart stampede which left a 34-year-old temp worker (Jdimytai Damour) dead and four shoppers (one eight months pregnant) injured. 2000 shopper stormed the Queens-area Walmart gates at 5 AM after chanting “push the doors in.” People at the scene reported chaos:

“They were jumping over the barricades and breaking down the door,” said Pat Alexander. “Everyone was screaming. You just had to keep walking on your toes to keep from falling over.”

Kimberly Cribbs said “When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, ‘I’ve been on line since Friday morning!’ They kept shopping.”

The deals included a $798 Samsung 50-inch Plasma HDTV, a Bissel Compact Upright Vacuum for $28 and Men’s Wrangler Tough Jeans for $8.

The Wallmart in question, in Long Island NY

I was wondering why this would happen. I’ve been in huge crowds–concerts, for example, regularly have many thousands of rowdy, excited riotous fans–but they’re always carefully controlled to minimize the chance of a trampling rush. The Walmart itself is not in a particularly bad part of NY; the average salaries, education, age, and racial composition are more or less normal.

On the other hand, there’s a thread on slickdeals where seancashmere disagrees:

Yeah, really and truly, the people who live in Valley Stream and some points to the East have nice homes and are educated enough, but the people who shop at the Valley Stream Walmart are terrible. They are under educated and poor. Many come from Jamaica and South Ozone Park, Queens, the projects, Rosedale and the surrounding areas…

I don’t buy that particular argument; any tightly-packed large crowd is dangerous, whether filled with the upper or lower crusts. Pictures of the scene show the problem: a small doorway, and way too many people.

A picture of the crowd waiting for Walmart to open

Interestingly, there are other incidents driven by crowds, bargains, and human rage. For example, see Fatal shooting followed toy store brawl about a Black Friday skirmish inside a Toys-R-Us.

Just listen to Gizmodo (oh how I hate to say they’re right on this one)–You Don’t Really Want This Crap. Deals aren’t to die for.

Just got this lovely email, pretending to be from Blizzard:

Subject: Warning : World of Warcraft Account Notice
From: donotreply@blizzard.com
To: arfenhousetoo@gmail.com

An investigation of your World of Warcraft account has found strong evidence that the account in question is being sold or traded. As you may not be aware of, this conflicts with Blizzard’s EULA under section 4 Paragraph B which can be found here:

WoW -> Legal -> End User License Agreement

and Section 8 of the Terms of Use found here:

WoW -> Legal -> Terms of Use

The investigation will be continued by Blizzard administration to determine the action to be taken against your account. If your account is found violating the EULA and Terms of Use, your account can, and will be suspended/closed/or terminated.

In order to keep this from occurring, you should immediately verify that you are the original owner of the account.

To verify your identity please visit the following webpage:

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/account

Only Account Administration will be able to assist with account retrieval issues.

Thank you for your time and attention to this matter, and your continued interest in World of Warcraft.

Sincerely,
Account Administration
Blizzard Entertainment

See, the thing is that the first two links go to real Blizzard pages, but the last one secretly goes towww.blizzard.com.login.xml.mcnewvision.com, which is clearly a moronic phishing attempt. This leaves me with two questions:

1. Did they target me as a Wow user specifically by harvesting my WoW-associated email address somehow? A Blizzard partial hack?
2. What would they do with my account if they got it? Sell my lousy lvl 45 char on ebay? LOL….

It has to be said–Apple iTunes sucks. It’s freakishly slow on Windows. I don’t know what the problem is, but plugging in my iPhone into a USB 2.0 port to sync it causes the whole system to come to a drag. I’ve got 3 Gbs Seagate drives, 4 Gb of RAM, and I’m still running Windows XP so I can’t even blame Vista.

That leaves Apple holding all the blame. It’s not just syncing either. These are all slow:

• Importing new songs into my Library of 15K items (probably due to parsing, editing in place, and writing to disk a 10+ Mb XML file for each song) [who uses XML as a database...]
• Searching through my Library
• Playing any kind of high bitrate media or encoded video (I have an nVidia 8800 with 512 MB of RAM… it should be able to play a little 720p video smoothly)

Suspiciously, Mac users don’t complain iTunes is slow. Either Steve Jobs literally makes them duller so they tend not to notice the passage of time, or it’s just iTunes on Windows that sucks.

I think that I found the official wallpapers that are going to be used in Windows 7, whenever Microsoft gets around to releasing it! They’re quite pretty, and quite high-res. Take a look, and let me know what you think:

It’s almost like they took cues from Apple with these, which are smooth gradients and curves. No more boxy Windows in Windows 7! Update: I got these from somewhere else, but reader Skidzopedia has a download link.

Are you an iPhone 3G user with a “No Wiki” greyed out on your settings? Do you see this when you access your phone’s settings?

For me, I’ve only seen it once. I have a first-generation iPhone. The solution and fix for this problem was simply to do a soft reset by holding down the top power button and the home button until it restarted, at which point the wifi was working again. As another point of reference, I use FIOS and have the ActionTec router they supply.

You should also check out iPhone WiFi Problems (aka greyed-out “No WiFi”) from earlier this year, where he indicates that for him, it was a hardware failure:

I have to say, after hours of working through all the things other people have tried, I am finally at the same place - I am pretty convinced that my colleague’s iPhone at least, is also a solid hardware failure.