ShadowRAM: That old trans-Tasman rivalry

COMMENTARY: Rumours, truth and innuendo

The Australian round of the World Cyber Games cranked up a notch earlier this month.
 
The inaugural Trans Tasman Challenge sees traditional sporting rivals Australia and New Zealand face off on the digital battlefield.
 
The rival teams converged for a face-off in Sydney at the City Hunter gaming venue. The national team finalists will play Davis Cup-style rounds of Counter Strike: Source and Warcraft 3 on PC, as well as Halo 2 and Dead or Alive: Ultimate on Xbox.
 
The finals will be webcast live via the official site -- www.worldcybergames.com.au -- using custom software designed to provide a better sporting service to spectators.
 
“Gaming is not underground -- it’s a mainstream culture, but with no TV,” said tournament organiser Russell Hanna. “It’s not a sport. TV is king, so we developed webcast technology to get it out there.”
 
At the Trans Tasman launch in Sydney, the teams were spurred on by appearances of honorary team captains.
 
The rugby Super 12s Waratah Mat Rogers led the Cyberoos, while former All Black captain Joe Stanley fronted up for the NZ eBlacks.
 
Finalists from 64 participating WCG countries will meet in Singapore for the World Finals in November.


Sun plays well with others

Sun ran a pricey two-page colour ad in The Wall Street Journal recently touting its ability to -- in a kindergarten parlance -- work well with others.
 
Sun’s new byword apparently is: “Share”. It’s so, so, well, cosmic ... Sun is a tad late to the whole mi-code-es-su-code world of open source, but hell, why not spin it?
 
The ad features Sun luminaries Bill Joy, John Gage and James Gosling. Conspicuously absent is Scott “Scooter” McNealy. Could this be a not-so-subtle hint that McNealy is out?
 
Or a tacit recognition that Scott, and his past hilarious but divisive rhetoric, is not the best poster child for sharing? Or maybe Scooter was just busy finalising Sun’s US$4.1 billion StorageTek deal.
 
Some people howled at a column in The Journal about the obviousness -- and obtuseness -- of some academic studies.
 
One study found that people who make career choices after careful research end up happier in their jobs than those who take a flier. Gee, who’d have thunk it?! But the fave is: “Scientists reported in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research that college students tend to drink much more alcohol than they think. Or, may I suggest, than they like to think. Or than they admit to their parents. Or remember.”
 
You think?


Dell salesperson gets nasty

Ah, looks like the old "vendor-bashing" is still alive and well and left one US-based Dell salesperson in a spot of bother, The Shadow has learned.
 
The person was caught emailing former IBM clients, discouraging them from buying Lenovo products, a report in Associated Press said.
 
Last year, IBM sold its PC business to Lenovo, which is part owned by the Chinese Government. China’s official Xinhua News Agency said the email was published earlier this month in a Chinese newspaper.
 
Certainly, the Dell versus Lenovo battle is in full swing.


Linux nerd miffed

You gotta love Linux developers for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that they don’t mind airing their dirty laundry in public.
 
One Linux contributor was in a snit recently after a patch he wrote was made public without all of his identifying information provided to the Linux kernel developer’s group.
 
In a post to Linux caretaker Linus Torvalds, the offended party wrote: “Linus, please do not apply patches from me which have my personal information mangled or removed. I object to having my contributions anonymised [sic] in this way, just as I object to the contributions of others being anonymised.”
 
It seems some other developer got the patch and decided to put it in the public domain without due credit for fear of violating Britain’s Data Protection Act.
 
Torvalds found himself defending the developer’s action, blaming the British privacy law. “He’s worried about legal issues, and while I’ve also tried to resolve those [by having the Open Source Development Labs lawyers try to contact some lawyers in Britain], that hasn’t been clarified yet,” Torvalds wrote.