Tag Archive for 'Apple'

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Can you say oops?

Of Nukes and Fanboys

How do you mistakenly transport nuclear cruise missiles across the United States? Better ask the Pentagon, which recently admitted a B-52 bomber flew over several states loaded with nuclear weapons. Scary? Just a little.

What’s even worse, the crew of the plane didn’t even know what their payload was. What would have happened if they lost an engine (or four) or ran out of gas? “It’s okay, we can ditch the plane! It’s not as if we’re carrying bombs on board!” Strange how the press secretary to the Defense Department said the public was never in any great danger. I think I hear Murphy’s Law calling.

I can’t even understand how this could have happened. My guess is that some hacker in New Jersey is laughing his butt off, having created false orders for ground crew or some such. I really have no idea. It’s not as if nuclear missiles look like, I don’t know, giant cardboard boxes filled with teddy bears for Katrina victims (the plane was headed to Louisiana, after all). Someone goofed.

In other (random) news, the iPhone is getting a much-needed $200 price drop, which means anyone who ran out and bought it the instant it came out is going to be crying themselves to sleep for a while. You’ll be getting no sympathy from Steve Jobs. While he did give out $100 store credit certificates to early adopters, the general feeling is “That’s what you get for succumbing to the hype, you geeks.” Okay, he didn’t say that, but it’d be funny to have Jobs calling people geeks.

The hype is right

Call it the Snakes on a Plane effect. Something gains immense popularity based solely on hype. Everyone thinks it’s going to be amazing, but none of those people have any actual evidence of that something’s awesomeness. Good examples are the movie Snakes on a Plane (much ballyhooed by teh Interweb but sucked massively), politician Ron Paul (acts like a libertarian, but is just as anti-everything as the next Republican), and the recently released iPhone.

Surprisingly, the iPhone didn’t (completely) succumb to the SoaP effect. Yes, it was being hyped way before it was even officially announced in 2004, but the hype appears to have been justified. I mean, this is Apple we’re talking about. Look at how successful the iPod is and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Continue reading ‘The hype is right’

A Safari for the rest of us

Web browsers are interesting things. Most people don’t even care which they use. If you have Windows, you use Internet Explorer. If you have a Mac, you use Safari. If you’re smart, you use Firefox. But the operating system barriers have been slowly breaking down. Internet Explorer can be installed on Mac OS, although the Mac version is outdated and fairly crappy. Now, however, you can install Safari, the formerly Mac-only browser, on Windows. Granted, it’s only a beta version (more like an alpha, as I’ll later explain), but you can still try it out if you so like.

Continue reading ‘A Safari for the rest of us’

Get a Mac…why?

I used to like the Mac vs. PC ads on TV. They were funny at first. Now they just seem kind of…mean. Upgrade nightmares? Too many versions of Vista? Those are pretty low blows if you think about it.

For one thing, upgrading to any new operating system is painful. Newer OS’s require newer hardware. That’s a fact of life. I mean, it was the same way going from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X. There are still many Mac users with OS 9 who couldn’t afford to upgrade to OS X due to–gasp!–hardware limitations. The funny thing is that if you lack the hardware necessary for Vista, you can simply buy new components and upgrade your existing PC. Can’t do that with a Mac. You’d have to buy a whole new one, and Macs aren’t exactly cheap.

The other bit about multiple versions of Vista is also kind of silly. The commercial for that one claims that Mac just has one version with everything. Windows does too: it’s called Ultimate. Of course, an upgrade version of Ultimate costs about $259 to the $129 OS X upgrade, which is quite a difference, but when you consider that you can install Vista Ultimate on any type of computer you want that has the hardware support (as opposed to OS X, which you can only install on those expensive Macs), as well as the extra features Ultimate packs (such as BitLocker hard drive encryption), I think it’s worth the extra cost.

Don’t get me wrong, Macs are good computers. But you can’t really compare them to PCs like Apple does. I could probably tear apart their points pretty easily, but that would be petty and I don’t want to waste my time. I’ll just suffice to say that my PC “just works” fine as it is. And it plays games. No such thing as a Mac gamer, is there? I rest my case.

Can it get any smaller?

No more iPod Mini. It’s been replaced by the iPod nano, which is smaller and more expensive. Doesn’t life just suck sometimes? I had been planning on getting a 4GB Mini, which would have cost roughly two hundred smackeroos. Now, if I want to get the same size (4GB) nano, it will cost two hundred and FIFTY. Erg. Smaller isn’t always better…it’s just more expensive and easier to lose. Or break.

Give it a year or so before Apple pulls it because so many people misplace it.

 

February 2012
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