Archive for the 'Geek Rants' Category
Today MacWorld keynote was quite likely the worst in apple history. It is now obvious why Steve Jobs didn’t bother showing up, he was afraid he would fall asleep giving the presentation.
I will give Phil some credit, he is a great speaker, and he did manage to get the crowd worked up over several of the features in the newest versions of iLife and the new threat to Google, iWork. Really, though, neither of these products are worthy of headlining what was the most prominent of Mac days in the year.
Phil spent over an hour discussing these two pieces of software, which is more time then the original release of OS X got, and there are some really cool features which we will cover in detail later.
The new MacBook Pros, which I don’t think should be considered as new since they are just upgrades to an existing line of laptops. While these are obviously awesome machines, they’re are some glaring issues.
One major problem, no removeable battery. Seriously?!? I realize they are touting an eight hour battery life, but I still want to have the ability to carry an extra battery with me and switch them out. It also lasts 1000 charges, which is about 3 years. Now, the laptop I am writing this post on is 4.5 years old and on it’s second battery … so I guess I will a process to go through to replace the battery in a few years.
Also an issue is the lack of a glare free screen … These high end MacBooks are not going to be used by people who want to watch DVD’s, some of us want to do real work on them, in coffee shops, and offices with windows during the day … I guess that will be a thing of the past.
The “one last thing”, was iTunes. iTunes finally adopts a DRM free platform, and bring iTunes to 3G instead of forcing wifi. Both of these things are very very cool, but also very very late. This all should have been a part of the iPhone 3G release last year. DRM Free had to come, but I am not sure it came in time to salvage iTunes place as leader in music sales, from competitors like Amazon and Walmart that have been selling DRM Free for some time now.
In the end, todays keynote seemed to be a waste of two hours, and dissapointed many. Since this is the last MacWorld that Apple will attend, I was really hoping that they would have made more of an event rather then pushing out a random marketing exec, and leaving us with little more then a software update.
In no particular order :
1. [ Watchman ] movie will be pushed back and will end up being a Christmas blockbuster instead of the summer blockbuster starter they were hoping for. Thanks Fox for taking something beautiful and trying to crap all over it. Just one more, in a long list of reasons to despise you as a company.
2. Nothing excitingly new will come from this years, and Apple’s last, MacWorld. By the end of the year, Steve Jobs will have stepped down as CEO and will fill an emeritus roll of some sort.
3. [ Twitter ] will be overrun by malware, spam, and hackers making the service useless and a thing of the past. We have already seen the start of this, and unfortunately the twitter API is full of security holes, and the twitter dev seems to have reactionary view of security instead of a precautionary view. Since Twitter is finally starting to make it stamp in histories timeline of the internet, it will draw far too much exposure from unwanted forces.
4. Net Neutrality will finally get the political backing that it needs to become an actual reality, and yet somehow, the US gov’t will still think that they have the ability or the right to control content on the intertubes.
5. [ Wolverine ] will kick so much ass, that it will make us forget, at least for a little while, how pissed we are that [ Watchman ] still hasn’t been released.
If you read this blog at all, you know that we heavily favor Apple over Windows, but that doesn’t necessarily make us “fanboys”, and the recent news that Apple will no longer be a MacWorld participant has us disappointed, but even more then that, the last minute announcement that Steve Jobs will not even bother with the Keynote this year is a just a big slap in the face.
MacWorld is, historically, the place that all the mac lovers show up to to find out what latest and greatest products Apple will be giving us for the year. The buzz that MacWorld generates for Apple has been huge in the past, but Apple now feels that they have a no need to make an appearance.
Why? In its own release apple said:
Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before, so like many companies, trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers. The increasing popularity of Apple’s Retail Stores, which more than 3.5 million people visit every week, and the Apple.com website enable Apple to directly reach more than a hundred million customers around the world in innovative new ways.
All of this makes sense, and as a mac fan, I can completely understand the decision. In fact, I myself wasn’t even planning to attend this year, even though I have faithfully attended over the years. Last years MacWorld was a severe dissapointment, being nothing more then a collection of small time application developers and iPhone accessories. What made it worse was that several of the accessory dealers weren’t even selling. The general feel from most of the exhibitors was “You can look, touch, and love, but you can’t buy it, at least not here.”
The biggest problem I have with this announcement is that Steve Jobs is pulling out even this year. The keynote has been a high point of the MacWorld event since day one, and the opportunity to “interface” with Steve Jobs, and find out from the man, what is in store for the year. This year we get Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. Who? Exactly.
Even more frustrating is that this announcement was made on December 16. Less then a month from MacWorld. Will MacWorld expo be refunding the cost of the Keynote passes to people who have no interest in a jobless keynote? Doubtful.
In the end, I don’t disagree with the decision to ditch the expo scenes, but c’mon Steve, give us one last hoorah and a last “one more thing”.
Superman is faster then a speeding bullet, can leap tall buildings in a single bound and is the man of steel, but give him some kryptonite and he gets a little whiny and all the bad guys take over.
Today is the long awaited day that we finally get the iPhone 3G in hand, and currently it has been available for a total of 3 .5 hours on the east coast, and not even an hour on the west coast, and what has at&t done. They have killed the buzz. They have handed the iPhone a big block of kryptonite in the form of activation servers that can not handle the load… SHOCKING.
Remember this post [ Buy your iPhone3G online? Apple and at&t say no way! ]. In that post I reminisced back to last year when the at&t activation servers went down, because they couldn’t handle the load. I don’t want to say I told you so, especially since everyone told you so. No one should be surprised that at&t is too inept to have learned its lesson last year. No one should be shocked that iPhone sales will ONCE AGAIN be halted due to a carrier that can’t seem to pull its activation servers out of their corporates asses.
What we should be shocked by is that Steve Jobs allowed this to happen… again. Do you think that Superman would continue to partner up with Lex Luther after he had given him a big block of kryptonite? NO! So, Steve, what the hell are you doing?
You have created a worldwide race of lemmings willing to stand in line for days for a PHONE… that in itself is a masterpiece of marketing. You have proven that your company is the leader in creating fan boys. Yet, for some reason (money) you insist on forcing us to use a carrier that is so useless and so inept that it may single-handedly be the death of the iPhone.
The next big dissapointment for the lucky few that did get the 3G iPhone activated, will be the limited and frustratingly bad 3G network that at&t has, that will likely crumble under the weight of the new iPhone users.
One of my all time favorite movies growing up was Wargames. To this day it stands alone, as a movie the semi-accurately depicts what hacking was and what was involved. Our young hero David didn’t just click some keys really fast while a pseudo server graphically appeared and spun in circles while he beat his way into it. Instead they showed him spending months researching the network, it’s creator, all possibles connections. I especially loved the war dialing sequences. It was nothing less then a slice of Awesome!
So, in a further effort to destroy the happy memories of my childhood, Hollywood has decided to release this crap, and label it as a “sequel” to Wargames. It is called “Wargames : The Dead Code”. Here is the trailer.
Stephen Falken must be spinning in his grave, and probably wishes he had just let Joshua wipe us all off the planet the first time.
Ugh .. At least this is a straight to DVD experience and it won’t clutter up the theaters.
Ok, first of all, I don’t condone hacking, or cheating. I think both activities are egregious and if you get caught doing either then you deserve to be punished.
Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, what happened, if you haven’t been keeping up, is that two high school seniors were caught hacking the school network, and altering grades, and they also apparently broke into school property and stole tests and answers.
Omar KhanThese are very serious charges, no doubt, but really? 38 years … I could murder someone and not get 38 years in prison for it. I think we need to take a very serious step back here, and realize that these kids are only doing what they have seen touted in popular movies like WarGames and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. While that does not make it OK, are we willing to sacrifice someone’s future over a crime that in reality show’s that they have extreme promise for a career in computer technology, if properly guided.
Coto de Caza is an extremely well-to-do area, and these kids have obviously not received proper parental guidance, and they have found, likely through most of their short lives, that shortcuts are easier then actual work. However, taking their lives away because of that is as wrong as the crimes these kids committed.
Jim Amormino, of the local sheriff’s department, said that he was astonished by the sophistication of the scheme, especially given the age of the defendants. “I think they wish they would have put their talents into studying,” he said.
Way to go Jim.. you hit the nail on the head. Yes, they should have put their efforts into studying, but clearly they were not guided in that direction.
Should these kids be punished? YES! They definitely need to feel the consequences of these actions. Should this be the end of what could be a promising future? NO.
A 38 year sentence for this kid is a crime in itself. All the kids involved should serve no less then 90 days (summer vacation) in jail, and then perform a years worth of community service, where they can put their computer skills to a proper use. After which, I am sure there are a few high-tech companies that would love to put their skills to use.
AIRPORT guards stopped a man boarding a plane — for wearing a Transformers T-shirt showing a cartoon gun.
Brad Jayakody, 30, was shocked when he was told to change his top if he wanted to catch his flight from Heathrow’s Terminal 5.
IT consultant Brad — on a British Airways trip with four colleagues to Dusseldorf, Germany — asked to see the security chief.
He thought the boss would “see sense” — but he backed up the decision and threatened him with ARREST.
Aussie-born Brad said:
“My mate set off the alarms and was searched. But then the guy told me to stop and said ‘you cannot get on the plane because there is a gun on your T-shirt’.”
The top has the Transformers film character Optimus Prime on the front.
Brad added:
“It’s a cartoon robot with a gun as an arm. What was I going to do, use the shirt to pretend I have a gun? I was flabbergasted. I thought the supervisor would come over and see sense, but he didn’t. After I changed he said if I changed back I would be arrested.”
A spokesman for Heathrow operator BAA said:
“If a T-shirt had a rude word or a bomb on it for example, a passenger may be asked to remove it. We are investigating what happened to see if it came under this category.”
Last year Gatwick guards made a woman hand over a beef sandwich before boarding and last week a PhD student was stopped for wearing a gun-shaped charm necklace at an airport in Canada.
Down here in Sunny Southern California, one of the local AM stations had a “Free Gas” extravaganza. I wouldn’t have taken notice of it, except it happened to be close to my house, and in the middle of my commute, so I knew that traffic patterns would be jacked up for the rush hour drive to work.
You will notice that I didn’t mention any interest in said “free” gas. Why you ask? Good question sir. Here comes the point of this post.. It is NOT worth it. Look at a few facts
1. They were only giving away 10 gallons. Which quick math determines is about 40 bucks.
2. They were having this party from 6AM to 9AM, and only the first 400 people got it.
OK. Now, take a step back and look at this situation with me. If I made you the to get up and meet me on this corner a few miles from your house at 6 AM, and if you did I would give forty dollars. Would you do it? Maybe. 6AM is annoying, but hey it’s forty bucks.
OK. New scenario, if I said, get up and meet me at 6AM and stand in line with 400 other people to get the 40 dollars. Would you do it then? Hmm.. not so much anymore.
Now, in this particular scenario that happened this morning, people showed up at this gas station as early at 3 AM. Yep, you heard that right. When I woke up, at 6:15, they were interviewing people who had been in line since 3 in the morning. The best part, they were about 100 people back in the line.
At 7:30 they interviewed a woman who was starting to pump her 10 Gallons of “free” gas who had been in line since “3:15 or so”. So, this woman, got up at Oh God Thirty in the morning, waited in line, with her car likely running, for 4 hours and 15 minutes, so that she could get 10 gallons of free gas.
Wow.
Please, someone tell me that society is really not this stupid.
It’s a Big Lebowski reference, for those already lost, but the Telegraph is reporting that Britain’s Home Office is working on database designed to store the details of every phone call, email, and web page accessed by British citizens in the previous year. Can someone say Big brother. Apparently the Brits are even less concerned about privacy then [ Google India ].
The general plan is that all telecoms will turn over personal data consumed over the course of a year to the “we watch everything” department of the UK government where it will sit and wait for the local authorities to need access to it. The interesting thing about this, is that this database will be cleared out after a year, which is the same amount of time that Telecom companies are required to retain this information anyway, and local authorities can already gain access with proper permission. So basically, the government is just building a massive, scary database of personal information with endless potential for abuse by low-level, underpaid, overworked, bitter bureaucrats.
It hasn’t made it to law .. yet. Hopefully, someone will come to their senses before this becomes a precedent that other “democratic” countries can follow…
Today, AT&T sent an internal memo to it’s employees stating that iPhone sales were limited to one person, this is a reduction from the original 3 per person limit, and that Cash and Checks would no longer be accepted for purchases.
Hmm. I can see no real value to the limit per person, especially if they are getting ready for the 3G release, since I would imagine that they would like to clear out their stock of Edge iPhones.
Also, no cash. Really!? I can understand the check thing, but since when is cash not welcome. The only validation I can think of here, is they want a way to track you down if you buy the phone and then crack it and use it on a different provider. To that I say bugger off. Once I buy the phone, I can do anything I want to it.
AT&T has time and time again proved itself to be a bizarre and strange company making decisions that seem to have no real value other then to piss off their customers.
Anyway, here is an image of the memo from apple insider.
