• Image courtesy of Shutterstock

It feels a little strange that I didn't know the name of one of the people who deeply influenced my life until today, but thanks for bringing home computing into my life, Jack Tramiel, founder of Commodore:

Tramiel was born in Poland to a Jewish family in 1928. During World War II, he and his family were sent to Auschwitz, after which he and his father were sent to a labor camp called Ahlem, near Hannover. Tramiel was rescued in April 1945 and emigrated to the United States in 1947.

In America, Tramiel started a typewriter repair business. Staying in the forefront of technology, his typewriters morphed into calculators, and later computers. In 1982, Commodore International launched the Commodore 64, which went on to the best-selling personal computer of all time. In 1984, after being forced to leave the company he founded, Jack bought the crumbling Atari Inc.’s Consumer Division and formed Atari Corporation.

“Jack Tramiel was an immense influence in the consumer electronics and computing industries. A name once uttered in the same vein as Steve Jobs is today, his journey from concentration camp survivor to captain of industry is the stuff of legends,” says Martin Goldberg, a writer working on a book about the Atari brand and the early days of video games and computing with Atari Museum founder Curt Vendel.

My first computer was a Commodore 64 and my family went through two of them (maybe even three?) hanging on to a box full of floppy discs and a dot-matrix computer long after the world of technology left that particular device in the dust. I tried to make birthday cards with Print Shop, explored underground worlds with the Zork Trilogy and probably started my way down the world of carpal tunnel issues rapidly smashing buttons playing low-tech sports games. My family couldn't afford the far more expensive products by Apple and IBM, so Tramiel's belief that computers should be for "the masses, not the classes" was directly responsible for introducing me to computing. There are times these days where I wish I could escape the world of keyboards and screens, but still, I wouldn't be wherever it is I am today, if I didn't have years of feeling comfortable with computers developed while using the C64. Thanks, Jack Tramiel.

With opening day just a week away, we talked with Tucson Padres General Manager Mike Feder about the upcoming AAA Baseball club's season. He's excited about a lot of things, but he made a point of mentioned that this year's Thirsty Thursdays (co-sponsored by your friends here at Tucson Weekly) will feature this astounding technology of Bottoms Up beer.

"The beer pours from the bottom and it pours a virtually perfect 16-oz. beer," Feder says. "The beauty of it is, you can do 40 or 50 beers a minute."

Here's the upside: The cups are 16 ounces, so you're getting more beer per cup. Minor downside: Thirsty Thursday beers will be $1.50 instead of a buck, but with the larger serving, you won't need to go back as often and lines will be shorter, so quit your complaining.

Opening night is Thursday, April 5. Details here!

According to a news report by the New York Times' "Bits" blog, AOL has slashed the team for its long-time instant messaging program, AIM.

Nick Bilton reported that a former AOL employee told him that “nearly all of the West Coast tech team has been killed," effectively ending the upcoming development for the software.

In the age of Facebook chat, Google Chat and Skype, AIM is a bloated, decrepit dinosaur that tries to install too much crap into your browser. Its death is long overdue, to be honest.

But at the same time, I feel like my generation owes it a debt of gratitude — particularly because I know that many of my longest friendships wouldn't exist had I not been able to connect with those people using AIM to talk outside of class (yes, I'm of the generation of kids who didn't go outside, lay off me).

And I'm pretty sure that NBC's To Catch a Predator would have had to work twice as hard to snag the same number of potential pedophiles had AIM chat rooms not been around.

So my fellow Millennials, let's take the time to pour one out for AIM — may its alert tones ring in our hearts forevermore.

[New York Times]

It's only seven minutes long and there are pictures of cats included. I don't know what's going on over there at PBS, but if they could produce more mini-documentaries about the nerdy stuff I'm into and fewer three hour specials about doo wop, that would really help me out.

[HT: The Awl]

Tough luck, Cubs fans. You'll have to purchase a $60 video game (and possibly a PS3) to even experience a glimpse of a World Series win.

Of course, I'm a Cleveland Indians fan and I suspect that MLB The Show won't even simulate a championship in digital form for my team. You get to the final out and a screen comes up that says "NICE TRY, LOSER. NOT NOW, NOT EVER."

Thankfully, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's headless running robot "Cheetah" still needs to be attached to an off-board hydraulic pump to operate, but at some point, DARPA will continue its technological advances and this bucket of bolts will be running the streets at 18 miles per hour hunting down human prey.

Noel Sharkey, professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield said the latest achievement was very impressive.

"With faster than human speed, this is a step in the development of a high speed killer that could negotiate a battlefield quickly to hunt and kill," he said.

People get mad that the government is paying for healthcare, but they don't flinch at the development of free-running death robots? Color me confused.

As someone who has spent a significant amount of time thinking about Insane Clown Posse (this is my tenth post on The Range about the band!), the idea of a Juggalo-only social network where the group's fans can be seen in their natural environment, interacting Juggalo-to-Juggalo is quite exciting. However, it almost makes too much sense that the site doesn't seem to be working at the moment (I'm still waiting on my confirmation email at the moment, for example). However, Vice magazine made it on the site somehow, and it's nearly everything anyone could dream of:

Check out some of the amazing ICP-inspired twists: you don’t “like” a post, you “Whoop Whoop!” it. Your “friends” are “homies,” and you identify yourself as a Juggalo, Juggalette, or Juggalo (Female). Gender equality is alive and well on JuggaloBook.

After about 10 minutes on the site I learned that it’s basically a horny teenager’s cough syrup-induced daymare. Everyone is looking to sext immediately, and they’re very liberal with providing personal cell numbers to strangers—within 20 minutes of registering, I received a homie request and a message from a homely Juggalette. She told me she had to “put her kids to bed, but feel free to text me.” She then gave me her actual cell phone number....

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to scrub off the layer of filth this experience has coated me with. Nothing about JuggaloBook was fun; it was simply a bunch of whacked-out Midwesterners collectively losing their shit. Me and my laptop need an immediate chemical peel.

Maybe you're ok with Google combining all the information its gathered about you into one database of knowledge that certainly won't be used to take over the world, but certainly will be used for goodness and for the benefit of humanity. Maybe you don't have weird items in your Google web search history. Maybe you haven't looked up "Cleveland Steamer" once or twice.

However, if you'd like to perhaps make it slightly harder for Google to assemble a genetically assembled copy of your brain in a lab somewhere, you might want to follow the instructions put together by the Electronic Frontier Foundation ahead of Google's new privacy rules kicking in on March 1st.

It looks like there's a tipping point, when the happy awesome things that your friends are posting starting getting to you, making you sad that your life is a colossal disappointment. That tipping point is at 354 friends:

Among the group who read updates, the study revealed that having 354 Facebook friends seemed to be the tipping point after which people were increasingly less happy with their lives.

The reason: Much of how we judge our success in life is based on how we stack up against our peers. “The problem is that Facebook gives us a limited view of our friends’ lives, and that view tends to be unrealistically positive,” says study author Dilney Goncalves, Ph.D., a marketing professor at IE Business School in Madrid. The more friends you have, he adds, the more likely you are to spend your day enviously reading about someone’s paradise vacation, new girlfriend, or job promotion.

Tough luck to the 141 "friends" I'll be disposing of (virtually) today. No more social media imposed depression for me.

[HT: ShortFormBlog]

• Illustration Ryn Gargulinski

Each manufacturer had its own help desk service, each stocked with people familiar with its products and issues surrounding them.

A helpful-sounding someone would answer the phone, listen to your problem, and then offer a solution. If the first fix did not work, the person would keep trying until your issue was resolved, or at least as close to a resolution as you could come without ripping all the wires out and hurling your computer and related gadgets out the window.

Even if the help desk helper was unable to fix your problem, the call was usually worth your while. At least you knew you had been supported by someone who knew what you were talking about and what was going on.

All that has changed.

That thing called a help desk has instead morphed into more of a hell desk, where you no longer reach knowledgeable staff but random overseas workers who follow a written-out script regardless of your particular problem.