Say Goodbye to Scrabulous.com

Looks like the wildly popular online game and Facebook application Scrabulous will soon disappear as quickly as it rose to preeminence, thanks to a lawsuit filed today by Hasbro, which owns Scrabble, from which Scrabulous is obviously derived. Enjoy it while you can -- frankly, I expect Facebook to be next in Hasbro's crosshairs if it doesn't immediately disable the Scrabulous application. I'm no lawyer but I've read the complaint and am completely convinced that Scrabulous is a flagrant rip-off of the classic Scrabble game. How could two bright developers have been so stupid as to think that they could simply reverse-engineer Scrabble, put it online, gain hundreds of thousands of users, and expect the rights holders to behave like doormats? It boggles the mind. You can read more about this at the New York Times excellent Bits Blog.

Steve Jobs vs. Steve Ballmer, Circa 1996

With concerns rising about Steve Jobs' health (which naturally has an ill effect on Apple's stock price, because Apple without Jobs is much worse than Martha Stewart LLC without Martha), here's an old clip from PBS' 1996 series, "Triumph of the Nerds" (hat tip to ValleyWag.com for finding it). Interestingly, Steve Jobs today looks 20 years older than he did back then, whereas Microsoft's Steve Ballmer looks almost the same. Life really isn't fair, is it?