This blows my mind on one hand, and doesn’t surprise me at all on the other. Stand back: this will get a little rant-y.
As a guy who has Verizon as his mobile phone and data provider, I am always looking for a reason to switch to someone else, as strange as that may sound. Verizon’s only strength is their network, and while it might be marginally superior to other networks in some respects, it’s not better to the point where other drawbacks to their service can be accepted. Drawbacks such as:
The absoluteworst handset/new phone support on the planet. Verizon never gets high-end phones first. If you see a nice new phone on another provider, you can count on a 8-12 month wait before it shows up on Verizon — if it shows up at all. Verizon claims this delay is a result of their rigorous testing practices, but it’s certainly funny how other providers manage to release reliable phones without the delay.
Crippled functionality. Verizon’s notorious for crippling their most advanced functionality, such as Bluetooth back when the Mororola V710 was debuted. Users don’t get to decide how to use technology, Verizon does.
Relatively bad customer service. I know this is subjective, but overall, my experience with Verizon is either great or really, really bad. Unfortunately, the bad sticks in one’s mind more than the good (and there has been more of them), and that’s what you tell your friends about.
No GSM means no European support. If I go to Europe on business and I have Cingular AT&T, I just call them and ask for temporary overseas/European access for a small fee. With Verizon, I’m dead in the water. No voice, no data. Nothing. Increasingly, this is a problem for me.
There are more — such as Verizon’s insistence on focusing on stupid teeny-bopper picture sharing and other useless gimmicks instead of having a real high-end focus — but I’m getting off track here, and what’s wrong with Verizon really isn’t the point.
I’m downright fascinated by the idea of genius in all its forms. I believe that many people have some level of giftedness in a particular area (or areas), and just now science is learning that static IQ tests in a traditional context cannot capture the essence (or multi-dimensionality) of genius or near-genius intelligence. Someone with a poor IQ in, say, symbolic logic might have an otherwordly emotional intelligence. This would make him rather below average on paper in a classical sense, but absolutely amazing when it comes to relating to others, empathy, leadership and other humanized endeavors.
David Shenk is writing a book that looks incredible, and he as a blog to go along with his book’s progress. If this sort of thing interests you, I encourage you to take a look at his blog periodically and see what he’s up to.
Most interesting concept so far:
Here is the strangest and most enticing thing about this subject: the invisibility factor. We see people being good at stuff — we don’t see them becoming good. I want to try to make the process visible.
What a great point. It’s easy to see geniuses at the top of their game, once they’ve mastered whatever skill their genius provides them; we see Tiger Woods drain 40-foot putts and nail 330-yard drives down a narrow fairway. What we don’t see are these gifted people actually becoming masterful at what they do. It’s not magic, and while they have a natural bias towards something, they still have to travel the road from neophyte to master. It’s just that the trip is far quicker for them than it would be for you or I.
Check out the “Get a Mac” ads for the UK. One might think that they’d be the same as the North American versions given that they’re both done in English, but one would be wrong. The UK version features a more humanized Mac (sorry Justin), and the PC, while not nearly as interesting and show-stealing as John Hodgman, is a bit more assertive and reminds me of Austin Powers, for better or worse.
Pie Chart, Office at Home, and Tentacle are the best.
Recently, WordPress.com rolled out a new add-on called Snap Preview Anywhere to all WordPress.com blogs. This came after a limited — both in time and participation — beta, which presumably found that the functionality, which provides a small, thumbnail-sized pop-up preview of active links, was cool and useful.
It’s not. It’s stupid and annoying. I didn’t like it much right off the bat, and neither does DF’s John Gruber.
It’s too bad that some golly-gee eyecandy gets rave reviews when it compromises readability and usability of the content actually being viewed. What’s worse, the snap previews are small and illegible themselves, so aside from loosely showing what an active link links to, they convey no other useful information. Worse yet, many links haven’t been “fetched” by the Snap system, so often you’ll get a message that gives you a blank preview window with the message “This page is queued for capture”. So not only does the annoying balloon present itself, but it openly admits that it doesn’t have a preview and that it will run and get one when it finds the time.
Meanwhile, you’ve been distracted for absolutely no reason.
It’s a gimmick, plain and simple. Even when they were turned on here on Graceful Flavor, I can’t tell you how many times my mouse would inadvertently hover over a link and I would get the snap preview balloon, only to shake my mouse to make it go away.
If I want to see a link I’ll click on it, thanks. I don’t need a blurry, unreadable picture thrown in my mug to obscure the content I’m actually trying to read.
This Iowa antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft is unearthing more juicy emails from Microsoft’s past than if Gates and Ballmer admitted they used take morning saunas with a goat before writing Windows 95 code.
Previously it was Allchin lamenting his experience with a Creative Zen digital music player and his WMP software, saying that the iPod and iTunes blew it away. Before that it was Allchin saying he would buy a Mac if he didn’t work at Microsoft, which, despite being taken a bit out of context, was still quite damning.
Now it’s an email from Lenn Pryor, the former Director of Platform Evangelism:
Tonight I got on corpnet, hooked up Mail.app to my Exchange server and then downloaded all of my mail into the local file store. I did system wide queries against docs, contacts, apps, photos, music, and … my Microsoft email on a Mac. It was fucking amazing. It is like I just got a free pass to Longhorn land today.
Wow. The email, which can be found in its entirely here as an eminently-readable PDF, goes on to suggest that Pryor didn’t want to give his Tiger installation DVD up and that high-level Microsoft employees were openly sharing OSX Tiger DVDs, which, if I’m not mistaken, is not what Apple and its licensing agreement condones.
Oops.
In any event, it’s clear that Microsoft watches Apple’s OSX very closely when it comes to their own operating system design. For all the Microsoft slappies who think that Micrsoft is too big and important to worry about what little ol’ Apple is doing, well, think again.
Apple is very much on Microsoft’s radar, and not just because of the iPod/iTunes.
Surprising nobody, Google has completed a top-level integration between Google Video and the recently-acquired YouTube. YouTube content now appears in searches performed from the Google Video search prompt. Clicking the YouTube content takes you to YouTube for viewing.
Neat, although it’s a completely obvious step towards deeper cooperation between the two video content portals.
The screenshow below illustrates what I’m yammering about.
UPDATE: I just saw that John Battelle, one of the best bloggers on search on the web, also talks about this.
Google’s Vint Cerf recently estimated, upon the closure of the World Economic Forum, that one quarter of the world’s 60 million internet-connected PCs are part of a botnet. Nearly all of these infected PCs are unwilling victims, doing their deeds unbeknownst to their owners.
Botnets are bad juju and have real, tangible power on the internet. Remember Blue Security? A spammer in control of a botnet attacked Blue Security with a wide-ranging DOS (Denial of Service) attack, which eventually led to Blue’s voluntary folding.
Unfortunately, today’s trendline is sloping in the wrong direction, and there’s potential for the “bot-herders” to do real, immediate damage to more targets if they so choose. These botnets are behind the increased spam we’re all seeing (and I notice it the most when looking at all the comment spam I get), and eventually the day will come when these bot-herders will be bought or coerced by powers larger and darker than themselves. At that point, a real, viable attack on government, financial, or military information targets will be a reality.
As you might imagine, Microsoft Windows has provided the open door through which botnet owners can install their software on unsuspecting machines. Windows XP SP2 and Vista have made great strides towards bolstering security, but it might be too little, too late — especially when you consider that there are already pirated copies of Vista in the wild. Even worse, most pirated Windows programs come with trojans pre-installed, which means that if you try to score that free application from BitTorrent, you’re also scoring a little bit more:
Experience showed that about 50% of all pirated Windows programs came with Trojans pre-installed on them, Mr Markoff said.
All of this makes me very happy that I use Macs exclusively, but guess what? That’s not a solution. Any OS that takes on monoculture status will be compromised, and I think that OSX would only be mildly better if it owned 90%+ of the market. No, the only way this problem will really be solved — before something really bad happens — will be if hardware vendors, software developers, governments, ISPs and telcos all decide they can work together.
I sat next to Cory at a conference today. It was like playing basketball next to Michael Jordan. Cory was looking at more than 30 screens a minute. He was bouncing from his mail to his calendar to a travel site and then back. His fingers were a blur as he processed inbound mail, visiting more than a dozen sites in the amount of time it took for my neck to cramp up. I’m very fast, but Cory is in a different league entirely.
This is something I’ve started to notice about myself and how I process information — I can cover a lot of data, but I also tend to lose organization as my processing increases. And what Doctorow has is also yet another angle of intelligence that cannot be crystallized by a static, traditional IQ score.
People like Doctorow possess an insanely high ability to process and organize information very rapidly, presumably for further handling. In his case, it’s information coming from his blog or to be used later as something to drive content. It’s emails from the thousands of correspondents he gets every day. It’s his travel details, as his success affords him many engagement opportunities and other meetings. It’s any number of tasks and sub-tasks.
Very few people pay retail prices for operating systems, and fewer still will want to pay Vista’s retail pricing, which, for upper-end SKUs, is ridiculous. And by ridiculous I mean horrendously, stupidly expensive.
We’re now getting a glimpse of what OEM pricing will be for Vista. These prices are what you will pay for Windows Vista when you buy new computer parts (typically CPUs, motherboards, or hard drives) from an OEM vendor such as Newegg. The prices are more sane than retail, but the upper end still gets gouged a bit.
Vista Home Basic $99 (standard retail: $199)
Vista Home Premium: $119 (standard retail: $239)
Vista Business: $149 (standard retail: $299)
Vista Ultimate $199 (standard retail: $399)
Compare this to the $129 I speculate (italics to stress this is my opinion, not fact, although I’ll probably be right, so this entire sentence is really sort of superfluous, especially this stuff in parens) Leopard will cost, and you get an idea of why I say the high end appears to get ripped a little.
Note that these are full retail editions of Vista, not upgrade editions. In that light, the home basic and premium are the same price as the retail UPGRADE editions, whereas Vista Business and Ultimate are cheaper than the retail UPGRADE editions.
So, all this is a matter of curiosity more than anything else. Dell will likely be able to buy and sell Vista for even less with a new system sale, which I’m guessing will bring the high-zoot Vista versions right down into my speculated Leopard territory.
Seth Godin has an interesting post on his blog about how people tend to focus on certain metrics in life because they are prominent and precise-looking, and therefore presumably relevant. He cites several examples of this phenomenon, so be sure to read his post to understand the full context of what I’m talking about here. It’s really quite fascinating.
For my purposes however, here and now, I want to focus on a point Godin makes about the almighty metric of blog traffic, usually measured in hits, visits, pageviews, whatever.
When I first set out to write Graceful Flavor, it was November 18, 2006. Yes, I have some early experimental posts back when I had a blog over at Blogger, but that was just messing around and I didn’t take it seriously. GF was born in earnest just over two months ago.
Since that date, I have almost 100K hits, which, by any measure, is good traffic acceleration for a young blog. As I read other bloggers who I find to be at the top of their game, I occasionally see articles about driving raw traffic to a site or discussions about how much traffic the big boys get. I see it enough to realize it’s a meme unto itself, and that sort of puzzles me. In fact, if you look over at the right-hand side of this very blog, you’ll see an insipid little GF Stats counter, which displays how many visits GF has received since its inception on WordPress.com.
Gawker has an interesting poll that asks if Vista will be the reason you consider a Mac or Linux, presumably because you’ll likely have to upgrade your PC anyway to absorb the bloat that Vista imposes on your hardware. There are some interesting results at the time of this writing, with 5042 total respondents thus far. These numbers will change as more votes come in, so don’t freak out and tell me that my numbers are off.
19.4% say yes, Vista will be the reason they will move to a Mac, seeing how they have to upgrade their PC anyway to use all of Vista’s features (most notably, Aero Glass).
18.8% say no, they won’t be switching. They know Windows and will continue to use it.
6% that switching is impossible because they are in an all-Windows home or office.
29.7% are undecided as to whether or not they’ll use Vista.
26.1% said they’ll never use Vista and couldn’t be happier to be Windows-free.
This is an odd poll to me.
The first three datalines are voiced in the context of Will Vista cause you to switch to the Mac or Linux? The last two datalines are more in the spirit of Will you use/upgrade to Vista? So, context consistency notwithstanding, the results are curious.
You have to applaud evolution’s tenacity to gnash its teeth through the armor modern society puts in place to prevent selection from happening as it normally would. After all, that’s what keeps the Darwin Awards alive year after year.
Recently, some imbeciles at KDND radio in Sacramento, CA, decided to have a contest to see how much water contestants could drink before having to urinate. The winner would receive a Nintendo Wii for their effords. Also, because Graceful Flavor is a classy blog and aims at upmarket demographic, I will avoid the obvious “Wii/wee” homonymistic jokes.
Ahem.
In any event, one of the contestants, Jennifer Lea Strange, called in sick to work after the contest was over and subsequently died from water intoxication. Contest participants said that Strange didn’t look well afterwards. Strange consumed nearly 7.6 liters of water. That’s just over two gallons.
After Strange’s death, 10 radio station staff members were fired, presumably for taking more of an interest in coming up with a clever Wii tie-in contest than doing basic research on rapid water consumption. If they had done even the slightest amount of digging, they would have learned that sudden and excessive water intake will interrupt the body’s electrolyte balance, leading to brain swelling, seizures, coma or death.
The saddest parts about this example of gross ignorance and negligence is (a) those responsible for the contest didn’t suffer the consequences firsthand, which, in the spirit of evolution, they should have, and (b) Strange left behind two sons and a daughter.
(b) is particularly heartbreaking, and my thoughts go out to her children and family.
The emails that are cropping up as a result of the Iowa antitrust lawsuit against MS are painting an interesting picture of Jim Allchin.
Previously an email surfaced that had Microsoft Windows Chief Jim Allchin saying that he’d buy a Mac if he didn’t work at Microsoft. That quote — taken somewhat out of context, to be fair — got picked up by Groklaw, Computerworld, and PCPro.
Now another email has been admitted as trial evidence, this time describing how Allchin used a Creative Zen music player back in 2003 and found it far inferior to the iPod and iTunes (which, at the time, had just been released for Windows). The full text (PDF) can be found here, but here’s a juicy excerpt:
In the e-mail exchange — subject line, “sucking on media players” — Allchin described, in detail, his trying experience with the Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra and Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. “I have to tell you my experience with our software and this device is really terrible,” he wrote, before listing problems that he encountered with the device and the software.
“I think I should talk with Jobs,” he concluded in a later message, referring to Apple CEO Steve Jobs. “Right now I think I should open up a dialog for support of the iPOD. Unless something changes the iPOD will drive people away from WMP.”
Pretty insightful on Allchin’s part. It makes you wonder if the culture and political landscape at Microsoft is so overbearing that any idea involving limited cooperation with a competitor (”coopetition”) just gets squashed immediately. It also makes you wonder if Microsoft is arrogant to the point where they think (at some levels of the company, at least — and yes, I’m looking at you, Ballmer) they can just build a copycat product, throw ungodly amounts of money at the scenario, and eventually dominate.
Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth notwithstanding, it appears to me that the global warming “theory” is reaching a critical mass in terms of evidential support: every day there are a few stories linking to credible developments that support the threat of climate change.
The most recent comes from a New York Times story that explains that the main international scientific body assessing causes of climate change is closing in on its strongest statement yet linking CO2 emissions to rising global temperatures.
In fresh drafts of a summary of its next report, the group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has said that it is more than 90 percent likely that global warming since 1950 has been driven mainly by the buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases, and that more warming and rising sea levels are on the way.
Some scientists involved in drafting the report confirmed and clarified details but asked not to be identified because it was not finished.
In its last report, published in 2001, the panel concluded that there was a 66 to 90 percent chance that human activities were driving the most recent warming.
If you oppose the idea of global warming or think that Earth’s current climate conditions are simply an aberration or a temporary cyclical shift that’s natural and no cause for concern, the onus is clearly on you to provide credible data to support your position. There are associations, unions, universities, institutes and coalitions in massive numbers saying that climate change is real and trending in dangerous directions, and there’s virtually none arguing to the opposite.
I’m not vegetarian or an animal rights wacko, but this is disgusting. If it doesn’t make you think twice about pork (and all processed meats, really), something’s wrong with you.
This jumped at me via Boing Boing mainly because I just started An Omnivore’s Dilemma and I’m interested in how we, as a culture, decide to feed ourselves and from where our food really comes.
Here’s a long (but repulsive and fascinating) excerpt about the inner workings of a mass pork producer — but it’s not for the weak of stomach:
Smithfield’s holding ponds — the company calls them lagoons — cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the lagoons pink.
A smart person spent a lot of time on this, which I applaud.
Teaser:
Consideration of these examples makes it fairly clear that the fuck of (12a)-(20a) (henceforth fuck1) and the fuck of (2) (henceforth fuck2) are two distinct homophonous lexical items. These two lexical items have totally different selectional restrictions, as is shown by the examples:
(26) Fuck these irregular verbs.
(27) *John fucked these irregular verbs.
(2 Fuck communism.
(29) *John fucked communism.
There’s more where that came from from where that came.
Steve Ballmer reacts in his typical overblown, extra-animated fashion when he’s asked what he thinks of Apple’s iPhone. Key excerpt:
“$500! Fully subsidized! With a plan! I said that is the most expensive phone in the world. And it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard which makes it not a very good email machine.”
It’s very telling that Ballmer singles out business users above all. That’s why I’ve said before that Microsoft will be increasingly relegated to the corporate world, while more advanced platforms and technologies tackle enterainment, home convergence, and digital media.
With respect to the video clip below, I’m sorry, but Ballmer is the anti-Steve: almost no charisma, his body language is frenetic and nervous and his most vanilla facial expressions make babies urinate uncontrollably. The poor guy just doesn’t have it.
But here’s the real rub: Microsoft’s party line will be to downplay and criticize the iPhone until they decide to screw their Windows Mobile smartphone manufacturers by trying to put enough lipstick on the Zune pig to make it into something that can try to compete with the iPhone.
Operative word is “try”, but you knew that already.
I know almost everyone is iPhoned to death, but I’m not, and since this is my blog, I can write about it as much as I want.
Before you click away — WAIT. I have some interesting stuff here, and if you leave now you will regret it for the rest of your days. You’ll be on your deathbed, your son feeding you the oatmeal you keep asking for, and you’ll look him in the eye and say, “Never…click away…from iPhone news. Ever.” And then you’ll exhale your last breath, nod to eternity with a dramatic head-roll, and your son will be eternally pissed off at you for wasting such an intimate moment with stupid iPhone blither.
So don’t click away if you want to be happy and loved by your son.
Anyway.
Chicago Sun-Times columnist and Mac afficionado Andy Ihnatko got 45 minutes with the iPhone and very much likes what he sees. In fact, he thinks you could call the iPhone “perfect.” That might be taking it a little too far, but it’s nice to see such positive feedback based on really using the device as opposed to speculating about it. And it’s also nice to see some real evidence emerge to counter those who, for some unknown reason, find it necessary to drag the iPhone through the mud even though it hasn’t been released yet and is clearly a step ahead of current mobile phones in many respects.
Apple has reported a holiday quarter to remember, recording record profits and easily topping analyst targets in about every dimension conceivable. Just when you think Apple can’t get much better, they do.
Some details from the most recent announcement:
Profit up 78% versus the same quarter last year.
21M iPods sold, which is 50% more than the same time last year. iPod sales account $3.43 billion (almost half) of Apple’s total revenue for the quarter. The Zune’s introduction couldn’t be a bigger nonissue if it tried.
1.6M Macs sold, up 28% from the same time last year. Remember when everyone was feverishly hoping for a 1M Mac quarter? 1.6M Macs sold makes for a sales growth rate this is more than 3x that of the overall PC industry. Apple’s share of the PC market in the U.S. also grew to 4.7 percent in the quarter, up from 3.6 percent a year ago. So, US marketshare is clearly on the rise, and the iPhone is going to do nothing but massively widen Apple’s halo effect. Think I’m crazy? Think the halo doesn’t exist? Just watch.
Apple earned $1 billion, or $1.14 per share, compared with $565 million, or 65 cents a share, a year prior. That’s an increase of 76%. Revenue was record-setting at $7.1 billion for the quarter, up 24% from $5.7 billion the previous year. To illustrate how easily Apple blew expectations away, analysts were expecting earnings of 78 cents per share on sales of $6.42 billion.
Market share for iPod remains dominant at 72%. Couple this fact with the iPhone’s introduction, and that sound you just heard was the Zune dying.
As I write this, AAPL is trading down $4.79 (-5.04%) as tech stocks are tumbling in general. And let’s not forget that we always see investor selloff on the news, regardless of how good Apple’s numbers are. Consider this dip a buying opportunity.
Please, if you’re not sitting down to read this, find a chair.
I am going to introduce you to two galactically stupid people. You are about to be exposed to ignorance of such crystalline purity that you might actually weep, because it’s rare you experience what you’re about to. If you have goggles, I recommend donning them, even though they will likely do nothing.
OK then.
In Seattle’s Federal Way schools, the administration had been showing Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth to students as part of the science curriculum so they could begin to understand the problem facing their generation and some of the science behind it.
This came to a grinding, screeching halt after one parent, named Frosty Hardison, opposed the film’s showing, citing reasons so uneducated, so religious, so ignorant that I won’t dare dilute them by paraphrase:
“Condoms don’t belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He’s not a schoolteacher,” said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old. “The information that’s being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is. … The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn’t in the DVD.”
Here we have a guy named after a Wendy’s fast-food dessert claiming that Al Gore is no schooteacher, so he should be kept out of schools. Problem is, Hardison isn’t a schoolteacher either, instead choosing to be a religious father of seven whose voice should also be kept out of school policymaking.
The models in question are the Inspiron 1100, 1150, 5100, 5150, and 5160, which, according to a lawsuit originating in Ontario, Canada, are prone to overheating and failure. Keep in mind that this isn’t just one notebook model, it’s five within the same lineup, and from personal experience I can say that nearly every Inspiron I’ve run into recently has been cheap, plasticky and schlocky. They just don’t feel like well-made machines like the MacBook/Pros or Lenovo ThinkPads do. In fact, they’re a solid order of magnitude off.
And Scoble wonders why Dell gets bad PR, continuing on to ponder Apple’s lack of bad press, presumably because Apple’s the industry’s darling right now.
For the record, every time Apple gets itself slapped with a lawsuit, the zeitgeist isn’tkindtothemeither.
If you have to sacrifice compatibility and modern feature support (in this case, advanced HTML and CSS) in order to gain security, is that an acceptable compromise? This is exactly the kind of corner-cutting Redmond is doing that gives portions of its software the tarnished reputations they can’t seem to shake.
The fuss is this: Outlook 2007 renders some HTML emails poorly due to its reliance on the Word 2007 HTML rendering engine instead of the Internet Explorer renderer. The good news is that it’s better for security, because exploits can’t hook one of IE’s many vulnerabilities to compromise a user’s system. The bad new is that Word 2007 HTML viewer is terribly incomplete, lacking the ability to support advanced HTML and CSS. This gives some HTML emails a kludged appearance in Microsoft’s cutting-edge Outlook 2007 email client, which is supposed to be state-of-the-art.
For the purposes of illustration, here are two emails, courtesy of Arstechnica. The first is how the item supposed to appear in Windows Mail (Vista’s email client), and the second is how it appears in Outlook 2007.
Windows Mail:
Outlook 2007:
I don’t call this an acceptable compromise. It’s an end-user value wash at best: trade one thing to get another. This isn’t true advancement. Sure, in one context it is, but in another it’s a considerable regression. No joy.
Whatever your feelings on HTML email are (and if you hate it, you better get used to it, because your voice is getting lost in the cacophony of those who support what HTML offers), this isn’t acceptable. Microsoft should have shipped Office 2007 when this sort of user compromise was fixed. And trust me, because this is already getting ink on blogs around the web, this will eventually be fixed. And no, “just use plaintext or RTF” isn’t an answer — it’s a cop-out.
I understand that Outlook 2007 is a business email client and Windows Mail is geared for the home user. But here’s the rub: it shouldn’t matter. Rationalization of nuances is merely a distraction from the core issue.
The best part about all of this: Microsoft’s refusal to use IE’s rendering engine for Outlook 2007 is a tacit admission that even they know IE is, in a very broad sense, unsafe.
Starting tomorrow, the six-year-old Cingular brand will begin to be eradicated, and will be replaced by a resurrected AT&T. By the time Apple’s iPhone ships, Cingular will entirely be a thing of the past, marketing-wise.
Starting on Monday AT&T will take the wrecking ball to the six-year-old Cingular name, erasing the last internal vestige of the Bell breakup, and reassembling much of the power behind the iconic AT&T brand.
But the dismissal of the Cingular name comes at an awkward time for AT&T. It comes only days after the Cingular name basked in the reflected glow of the much-anticipated Apple iPhone.
Odd timing, but such is business. I don’t think anyone was planning on buying an iPhone because of Cingular’s orange splotch anyway.
The iPhone buzz even made it to McSweeney’s, which is a certain indicator the device will conquer the world within 14 months of release. Those who do not believe will drown in a lake of fire.
An excerpt from the iPhone User Guide:
XII. Using the iPhone to explain why Microsoft believed that introducing the Zune was either wise or appropriate, given the market for MP3 players in late 2006.
UPDATE: Back to Cutline, as you can see. Chaotic Soul didn’t handle long article titles or unordered lists properly. Bugs are bugs. Oh well. I gave it the college try.
As you may have noticed, I’ve given Graceful Flavor a new look and feel which differs dramatically from what it used to be.
The previous theme was Cutline by Chris Pearson, which I still like quite a bit, but it just lacks that…something. I think the line spacing is a bit too great for me. I don’t know. I do know that I keep going back to it, but I’m going to try this change for a few days.
This new theme is called Chaotic Soul, and yes, it’s dark, and yes, it’s a radical departure from what I’m used to GF looking like, but we’ll see how it goes.
Two themes I wish WordPress.com would add to its library:
VeryPlainText — think McSweeney’s. I love the minimalist design, use of whitespace, and focus on content.
The Mac/tech web has been all about the iPhone over the last few days. First it was the hype and exuberance of the new device, then people started to think about the limited information Jobs presented and speculate about the reality of the iPhone — what it is, what it isn’t. For some, this resulted in a pretty dramatic reversal of their opinion on the iPhone; others simply listed some concerns about the device that really were requests for more information rather than some sort of judgment.
We won’t know until June what the iPhone really is. We might see some real-world reviews beforehand, and from there we can start getting a feel for how good (or immature) this device really is.
But I’ll tell you what: in the video below, Phil Schiller demos the iPhone for CBS’ John Blackstone, and it is impressive, especially when you see how well Apple nailed the user interface goals. The GUI and navigation aspects are simply amazing, and the phone seems quite responsive despite all the eye-candy. There’s cross-fading, real-time zooming, and incredibly smooth scrolling.
As the iPhone line matures and diversifies, Apple is going to sell millions of these things.
Fuck communism.
