While there is, in fact, no place in France where the ladies wear no underpants, there is a place where the French police use Linux. These porcs have moved from XP to a version of Ubuntu. They’ve already moved from Internet Explorer and Office, using Le Open Office and Le Mozilla, and the migration should be complete in a few years, provided they don’t strike, have to visit their mistresses, or remain startlingly thin and healthy on a diet of chocolate, Gauloises, and butter.

Police in France say au revoir to Microsoft, bonjour to Linux [WebInFrance]

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The basic problem with HD Radio is that, no matter how crystal clear you make radio sound, it’s still radio. Commercial radio, on the whole, is absolute garbage. Maybe iBiquity needs to come to terms with that before it starts accusing XM and Sirius of unfair business tactics.

IBiquity, the main force behind HD Radio, says sales increased some 700 percent last year compared to 2006. That’s what it told the National Association of Broadcasters at any rate, which is no friend of the satellite radio companies. Compare that with what it told the FCC, claiming that that both XM and Sirius have coerced their partners—car companies and the like—to “discourage proliferation” of HD Radio.

IBuiquity is telling one party last year was great, and telling another party they’re being screwed by the satrad companies. Well-paid analysts call that “having your cake and eating it too.”

Again, I have no interest in listening to wild shock jock antics like dropping bra bombs on top of TV stations while trying to coin funny catchphrases like “mother hucker” and “brotherman” no matter how high-quality the signal is.

HD Radio: Which hype should you believe? [Orbitcast]

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Hardcore gamers could see the favorite pastime dramatically changed given last year’s sales numbers. All of the top selling games in 2007 were multiplayer ones: Rock Band, Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, etc. Given than, the New York Times hints at a possible trend: why should publishers, and the developers that work for them, go to the trouble of creating 40+ hour single player adventures with top-of-the-line graphics and sounds and so forth if something like Mario Party 93 sells just as well?

Something to think about while you screw around in Azeroth today.

In the List of Top-Selling Games, Clear Evidence of a Sea Change [New York Times via Kotaku]

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I wouldn’t have believed it but it looks like this iPhone survived a meeting with a semi with few ill effects. Sure, the screen is cracked and the back is pretty mangled but you could potentially still use this poor pancake with enough effort. The touchscreen even works and it made a call.

MikeBeauchamp’s Flickr via Read

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Don’t you know that for every song or movie you download from ThePirateBay, you single handedly cause the untimely death of an artist?

There’s an informative kids TV program being shown in Sweden, home of TPB, that shows a classroom being scolded for downloading left, right and center. “Artists want to get paid,” says the man behind the curtain, “and every time you download, that artist doesn’t get paid.”

I guess it’s easier to tell kids they’re “bad” than explain to them the complexities of the parasitic artist-label relationship.

Sweden Warns Kids Against The Pirate Bay [TorrentFreak]

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Hulu, I said! Hulu!

Go ahead and skip the Super Bowl tomorrow, friends: Hulu will have all of the commercials on there for your streaming pleasure after the game, ensuring you don’t miss a single whimsical Monster.com ad or a Miller Lite ad involving two women who fight with a gnome of his secret goldmine of beer. I should be in advertising.

Advertisers are paying $2.7 million for 30 seconds of air time, so let’s all be sure to watch their pitches so it’s worth their while. The gears of Capitalism are oiled by the blood of the masses, after all.

Hulu Plans To Stream Super Bowl Commercials After Game [Underwire]

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Like the kid in Can’t Buy Me Love, now that Microsoft has its eye on Yahoo!, everyone wants to get with the faltering ex-nerd. Good riddance, I say. Let News Corp. or Microsoft or a bunch of hedge fund guys pick up this dog at rock bottom prices and turn Yahoo into what Netscape eventually became — a pet project and then an also ran. This is a small world and mindshare, which fleeting, doesn’t often alight back on the popular sites of old. When, for example, is the last time you hit Buy.com on purpose? Didn’t think so. You’ll do a search and end up there “accidentally” but you don’t type in Buy.com to look for stuff if you don’t know where to look.

Good luck, Microsoft. That 16% Yahoo! search market share will definitely buoy MSN for a while, but not much else. Google might be a giant now, but she will fall to something else and so on and so on, ad infinitum. You can’t go home again.

via TC

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Wii fans looking forward to next month’s release of Super Smash Brothers Brawl should consider buying the game from Frys. The electronics retailers is selling the game on pre-order for $45, an entire $5 off the regular retail price. With those extra $5 in your pocket, you could buy a venti coffee from Starbucks and jitter your way through the game.

Gracias, Dylan

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From this guy’s Flickr

The MacBook Air is finding its way into wanting hands and some early benchmarks have been tallied. There’s two main differences between the two default MacBook Airs you can buy—a 1.6GHz vs. 1.8GHz processor and an 80GB hard drive vs. a 64GB solid state drive. The price difference may be $999; it’s up to you whether or not the following differences are worth that to you.

CPU performance in the 1.8GHz model is marginally better than the 1.6GHz. I doubt you expected 200MHz to matter much, anyway. But it’s the hard drive vs. solid state comparison that people were most interested in.

Sequential file writing—loading big files into RAM—is a slightly slower affair with the solid state drive. Non-sequential writing, on the other hand, is a different story.

In non-sequential writing, a hard drive would be spinning all over the place, trying to locate spread-about files all over the different platters. Not so in a solid state drive. Thanks to the lack of moving parts, the solid state drive is noticeably faster. This here graph shows the actual numbers.

So there you have it.

MacBook Air 1.6Ghz HDD vs 1.8Ghz SSD Benchmarks [MacRumors]

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