The Great Geek Manual

1998
Reuters news service reports that an Intel executive testified that Microsoft Corporation’s Bill Gates threatened to withdraw his company’s US$500 million in computer chip technology unless Intel abandoned a pending software project. It’s some of the most dammning testimony to date in the Microsoft anti-trust trial, which is in its fourth week.

1999
The Compaq Computer Corporation unveils a computer targeted for corporate Internet users called the “iPac“. Price: US$499

The Japanese Fair Trade Commission raids thirty Sega of Japan facilities including the company’s headquarters in Tokyo, Japan. According to later statements made by officials, the raids are focused on reports that Sega may have been involved in illegal price fixing practices.

A NASA review board announces that its investigation has determined that the US$125 million Mars Climate Orbiter burned up in the Martian atmosphere due to a a navigation error that resulted from Lockheed Martin engineers failing to convert units from English to the International System of Units (ISU). The software calculated the force the probe’s thrusters were to exert in pounds of force and passed the results to a separate piece of software that was programmed to accept input in newtons. Read the Mars Climate Orbiter Mission Profile.

Silicon Graphics releases version 6.5.6 of its IRIX operating system.

2000
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) lures two Russians, Alexey Vladimirovich Ivanov and Vasiliy Gorshkov, to Seattle, Washington for what is purported to be a job interview with a shady tech firm. Just hours after landing at SeaTac Airport, Ivanov and Gorshkov were arrested and charged with conspiracy, computer fraud, hacking, and extortion. The arrests are the beginning of the agency’s crackdown on the proliferation of hackers that operate outside U.S. jurisdiction in Romania, Russia, and the Ukraine. Read a more in-depth account of the incident at LegalAffairs.org.

Warner Bros. releases the science fiction film Red Planet, directed by Antony Hoffman and starring Val Kilmer, Carrie-Anne Moss, Benjamin Bratt, and Tom Sizemore, to 2,703 U.S. theaters. Astronauts searching for a solution to save a dying Earth from severe pollution and overpopulation on Mars suddenly find themselves struggling to survive. Among the most notable features of the film is the computer generated robot, AMEE. Produced on a budget of US$80 million, it will gross US$8,721,296 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: PG-13) Running Time: 1 hr 46 mins

2001
Apple Computer releases the first iPod, which features a 5GB “1,000 song” capacity. While the device is far from the first MP3 player on the market, it is notable for its large capacity, quick loading times, and sleek design. Price: US$399

Version 4.79 of the Netscape Communicator web browser is released. Visit the application’s official website.

2002
Apple Computer releases Mac OS X 10.3.1.

2003
Federal regulators begin allowing customers to transfer their home phone numbers to their cell phones.

2004
By the end of the first day following the initial public release of the Firefox web browser, the application has been downloaded over one million times. Visit the application’s official website.

Google launches its Google Advertising Professional program.

Microsoft unveils a preview (beta version) of its new search engine, MSN Search, designed to compete with Google and Yahoo!. At midnight Eastern time, Microsoft switched on its search engine. Microsoft claims that its search engine will index five billion web pages, a full billion more than the four billion pages Google recently announced that it had indexed, making it the most extensive search database. The search engine will also feature results that link queries including a musical artist, song, or album directly to Microsoft’s MSN Music store in the hope of competing with Apple’s popular iTunes service.

2005
The first virus to exploit Sony-BMG’s rootkit-style digital rights management technology, which controversially masks files with filenames beginning with “$sys$” from detection, is discovered in the wild. The Stinx Trojan, a variant of the Breplibot Trojan, creates a local copy of “$sys$drv.exe” in the Windows system directory, which, upon execution, installs an IRC backdoor on the infected system. The trojan is transmitted across the internet as an attachment in a spam email claiming to have been sent from a legitimate business magazine.

2006
The full genome of the California purple sea urchin (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus) is published and is discovered to contain many novel genes as well as many analogous genes common to vertebrates.

The NASA spacecraft Cassini records a hurricane-like storm on the south pole of Saturn. It’s the first time such an event has been observed on another planet.

The popular bittorrent index website TorrentSpy surpasses two million registered users less than a year after having surpassed a million registered users. Visit the official TorrentSpy website.

Warner Bros. releases the fantasy film The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson, and David Bowie, to 2,281 U.S. theaters. It’s based on the 1995 World Fantasy Award-winning novel of the same name by Christopher Priest. In it, two magicians’ rivalry ends in tragedy when the they both turn to Nikola Tesla for a trick to end all tricks. Produced on a budget of US$40 million, it will gross US$14,801,808 domestically in its opening weekend.
IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: PG-13)
Running Time: 2 hrs 15 mins

2008
Circuit City Stores Inc., the second largest electronics retailer in the U.S. after Best Buy, closes 155 of its stores and files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy but announces that it plans to remain open for business through the holiday season. Circuit City will liquidate its remaining stores beginning January 16, 2009, and the last of its stores will be closed March 8, 2009. The company attributes its failure to the lack of consumer spending during the late 2000s recession.

2009
Australian student Ashley Towns, age 21, sets off a media frenzy by announcing the creation of a computer virus that only effects Apple iPhones that have been jail-broken to install applications not approved by manufacturer Apple. The virus spreads exploits default iPhone passwords in order to make a photo of singer Rick Astley (recently made famous by the Rickrolling meme) the infected phone’s wallpaper. Read more at the Manila Bulletin.

Activision releases the first-person shooter video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for the Nintendo DS, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Microsoft Windows. It is the sixth installment of the Call of Duty series, and the direct sequel to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Within twenty-four hours of its release, 4.7 million copies of the game will be sold, grossing a record US$500 million. The previous record was set by Grand Theft Auto IV in 2008 when its sales grossed US$300 million in the first twenty-four hours. By June 15, 2010, over twenty million copies of the game will be sold, making the game the best-selling game of all time in the U.K. and the second best-selling game of all time in the U.S. Visit the official Modern Warfare 2 website.
ESRB: M (Mature)

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