When I first saw this headline, I thought it was saying that the guy got Vista to run ON the printer, like, in the printer’s firmware.  Ridiculous, yes, but interesting.

But no, it’s nothing that exotic; it’s actually a story about how a guy was able to print stuff from Windows Vista.  It’s... touching.  Inspirational, really.  I mean, being able to print, from your computer, to your printer... welcome to the future.

Pennsylvania will soon finally join the rest of the northeast, the majority of the US, and many of the world’s nations by adopting a public smoking ban.  After a committee last week produced a bill and the House passed it, the Senate today also passed it.  It will become law 90 days from the date that Governor Ed Rendell signs it, which he has said that he plans to do quickly.

You can read the ridiculous smoking ban timeline that the PA legislature has traveled over the past year or so.

The public smoking ban will have the following exemptions:

- up to 25 percent of the rooms in hotels

- designated outdoor smoking areas at sports or recreation facilities, theaters, etc

- bars whose annual food sales are 20% or less

- cigar bars

- tobacco shops

- private clubs

- up to 50 percent of casino gaming halls

- long-term care facilities

- private homes, residences and vehicles unless they are used for child-care, rehab, or mental health services

You’d be forgiven for thinking that, with such a list of exemptions, this bill resembles swiss cheese more than a smoking ban.  And in fact, part of the bill is that Philadelphia’s existing, stronger smoking ban will still stand.  But this is still a huge step in the right direction for PA, and in my case for instance, only the hotel and arena/theater exemptions will affect me, and then only rarely.

This is so dumb as to be almost unbelievable; he’s got to be kidding, right?

Quoting Ben Charny:

Just how will Apple meet expectations? Using the patent application as a guide, Apple appears to be making room on the iPhone for flash memory, which means an end to Apple’s standoff with Adobe (ADBE) that’s kept iPhones from easily viewing a plethora of [Flash-based] Internet videos.

So let me get this straight.  Dow Jones actually pays Ben Charny to write about technology, yet Charny doesn’t understand that flash memory chips are not the same thing as Adobe’s Flash software platform?

This has to be a joke.  No technology writer can really be that clueless.  It’s like telling someone -- with a straight face -- that if they upgrade their car’s old and busted brakes to the new anti-lock brakes, then they’ll never have to worry about locking their keys in their car again.  "See?  It’s got anti-lock!"

Here’s something funny from last week’s episode of Security Now, from a listener who wrote in to the show about his dying hard drive:

Quoting Steve Gibson:

A listener by the name of Alex Walters wrote, and he said, ... "A little while back, [my hard drive] started to give me the dreaded ’Backup your data now’ error."  Now, he says, "I’m not a dumb person, but I hadn’t backed up my data on that drive in some seven and a half years.  I was quite interested in backing up that data."

Of course, it IS extremely dumb to not backup your data for seven years.

There’s a saying among computer people that "a file doesn’t exist until it exists in two places."  That’s because all drives are guaranteed to fail; the only question is when.  Most drives have warranties in the 1-5 year range, so that gives you some idea of how long the manufacturers expect them to last.

The bottom line is that if you’re not backing up your data, you’re essentially saying "my data is worthless to me."  In Alex Walters’ case, he was eventually able to recover the data for a mere $89 using SpinRite, but that’s not always possible.

Today, the House-Senate conference committee finally approved a compromise version of a public smoking ban for Pennsylvania.  In order to become law, it must be approved by the full House and Senate -- which could happen as early as next week -- and by governor Ed Rendell, who has stated that he’ll support this version of the ban.

This is a good step forward and if it becomes law, it’ll be a huge improvement over the current situation.  However, the ban does contain a bunch of exemptions, allowing smoking in certain places, such as bars that make less than 20% of their revenue from food, and up to 25% of rooms in hotels.

This ban allows Philadelphia’s current ban to stand, but does not allow any other local bans to come into effect.  This has some people upset:

"You’re saying to the people of Allegheny County and city of Scranton, go to hell," said [Senate Minority Leader Robert Mellow], who cast the lone dissenting vote.

I agree with Mellow.  However, it’s clear that this legislature has neither the brains nor the guts to enact a real ban, so for now we’ll have to take what we can get.  But this isn’t over, and I suspect that reason and health will prevail in the long run.

About half of the states in the US, as well as many countries around the world, have smoking bans now.  But in some cases, I think it’s going to take a generational turnover to purge those politicians who are in the pockets of the scumbags running the tobacco companies.

Pennsylvania has been dubbed "the ashtray of the northeast" because it is the only state in the region without a public smoking ban.

There is no debate in the scientific and medical communities: secondhand smoke kills Americans by the tens of thousands every year.

And the people of Pennsylvanian overwhelmingly support a public smoking ban.

The only debate is in the Pennsylvania legislature, where our lawmakers continue to stall on the smoking ban, ignoring the scientific and medical evidence, and violating the will of the people.

Why?  Because Pennsylvania lawmakers are corrupt.  They are bending to the lobbying from the tobacco industry, and are unwilling to damage the tax revenue stream they receive from tobacco sales.  Ostensibly they are trying to protect businesses who claim they’ll be hurt by the smoking ban, but that’s a lie because all evidence shows that smoking bans do not hurt businesses.

To be fair, I should say that I have no proof of this corruption, and there is one other possible explanation: that PA lawmakers are incredibly, mind-numbingly incompetent.  But when you ignore the will of the people, ignore the scientific and medical evidence, when all the other states in your neighborhood are on board, and when the only group on your side is the tobacco industry itself, well, that sure smells like corruption.

Here is a timeline including the many delays that our lawmakers have caused so far by failing to act on the public smoking ban:

1993-2006: PA Senator Stewart Greenleaf (R-Montgomery County) introduces smoking ban bills in every legislative session, to no avail.

Summer of 2007: there was supposed to be a vote on the ban, but it was pushed back to September.

Fall of 2007: the two chambers produced differing bills on the ban, and failed to reach a compromise on them.

April of 2008: a joint House-Senate committee was supposed to produce a compromise bill, but postponed it for a month.

April of 2008: a month later, the committee postponed their work again, for a week.

May 7, 2008: a week later, the committee again postponed their work.

Quoting The York Daily Record:

A vote on compromise legislation that would ban smoking in most indoor places was postponed again.  A meeting of the joint House-Senate conference committee was tentatively scheduled for Monday, according to the office of Sen. Stewart Greenleaf, R-Montgomery.  A Wednesday meeting ended shortly after Sen. Chuck McIlhinney, R-Bucks, said he needed time to revise his proposal to incorporate concerns from the governor’s office over enforcement provisions.  McIlhinney would not talk about any other aspect of his proposal.  Some of the major issues that have divided legislators for the past year are whether to ban smoking in bars, restaurants and casinos, and whether a state law should pre-empt local smoking bans, such as the one in Philadelphia, that are stricter. (Senate Bill 246)

May 12, 2008: the committee was set to vote on a bill written by Senator Chuck McIlhinney, but failed to do so after Governor Ed Rendell threatened to veto any bill that weakened Philadelphia’s existing smoking ban.  McIlhinney is trying to paint the delay as being the fault of Rendell’s veto and/or of Philadelphia itself:

Quoting Chuck McIlhinney:

"This whole issue is coming down to Philadelphia getting its own law or not," McIlhinney, R-Bucks, said.

But the truth is that McIlhinney’s "new" bill is essentially the same as the failed bill that the Senate passed last year, and the whole issue is really coming down to the fact that what lawmakers are putting forth isn’t what the people of Pennsylvania want.

McIlhinney continues:

Quoting Chuck McIlhinney:

"If Philadelphia is allowed to have its own law, then each municipality will want its own law..."

And why is that?  Because your state-level law is shaping up to be a piece of garbage, so naturally each municipality wants to have the option of implementing a real ban, as Philadelphia has already done.

May 28, 2008: the committee is scheduled to meet next week, on June 3rd and 4th.

June 3, 2008: the committee finally produced and approved a compromise version of the smoking ban, which must now be approved by the full House and Senate.

June 4, 2008: the House approves the committee’s ban, but the Senate rejects it, thanks to Senate Democrats who are upset that the ban preempts local ordinances other than Philadelphia’s.  In theory they’re right, but in reality, 90% of Pennsylvanians currently have no smoking ban, and this bill would cover the majority of them; so the Senate should get its act together and pass this ban.  They’ve got a re-vote scheduled for June 9th.

June 9, 2008: the Senate postpones their scheduled vote.

June 10, 2008: the Senate votes to approve, so the public smoking ban will become law.

June 13, 2008: Governor Ed Rendell signs the public smoking ban into law, to take effect in 90 days.

When spam subject lines go from annoying to insulting:

You look stupid in this video anthony!

So there I was, writing my weekly letter to Obama wherein I beg him to carry my children since he’s obviously the second coming of Christ, when I heard this on the news:

Quoting Barack Obama:

"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them," Obama, an Illinois senator, said.

"And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations," he said.

Thanks Obama; we love you too!  But you forgot cannibalism and NASCAR.

Anyway, we’re sorry for turning to such barbaric things as our belief in God, our second-amendment rights, and our desire to have secure borders.  We’ll try to do better by taking after you, and turning to more enlightened things like cocaine.

The irony, it hurts.

How can a dial go MIN->MAX->MED->HI?
I’ll tell you how: FAIL

Ugh.  I’m not even particularly cool, but even I had to gag a little bit when I read that.

Nice job, Comcast.  I can’t think of a better way to say "Hi, I’m a clueless 50-something business executive, and I’m trying really hard to sound hip for the kids in the 18-35 demographic!"

So I’m on weather.com just checking up on the weather forecast.  On the side of the page I see this "Tee-Off With Tiger" ad.  Obviously the image is a combination of three separate images, those being the golf course, the car, and the man.

But then I take another glance because something doesn’t seem right.  Ah yes, the "Buick" name and logo are totally Photoshopped onto that vest.  Haha, lame.

But there’s something else.  What’s wrong with Tiger’s head?  It looks freakishly small in that photo, almost as if it doesn’t match the body.

And then it all becomes clear when you notice that the arms on the body are clearly the arms of a white man, not a black man; and yes, the body that the arms belong to is clearly about twice as big as it should be for the size of Tiger’s head.

Today I had to actually physically go to the bank, something I virtually never need to do, and I encountered a great example of poor interface design.

At the drive-through, there’s the terminal for the canister that’s used to send stuff to the bank teller via a forced-air tubing system.  This terminal has only 2 buttons, Send and Call, but the canister was behind a hard plastic door and therefore inaccessible to me.

I sat there for a few seconds looking at it and trying to figure out what to do.  I thought that perhaps pushing or tapping on the plastic door would open it, but it did not.  The teller must have noticed the stupid look on my face because she got on the speaker and said, "Can I help you?"  "Yes, I’d like to make a deposit," I said.  "OK, just press the Send button and put your check into the canister," came the reply.

Why, of course!  You press the Send button in order to retrieve the canister.

I had actually considered pressing the Send button, but I assumed that it would send the (empty) canister to the teller, before I’d gotten a chance to put my check into it, which would obviously be stupid.

Here’s PA representative Bob Belfanti in a Philadelphia Inquirer article:

Quoting Rep. Bob Belfanti:

"Face it, cigarettes are part of the military," Belfanti said. "Those guys and girls who come home, maybe without an arm or a leg, want to go to the VFW and have a cigarette."

That statement is all kinds of dumb, not least because 70 percent of the military are non-smokers.

Conversely, an intelligent comment by senator Stewart Greenleaf, from the same article:

Quoting Sen. Stewart Greenleaf:

You wouldn’t allow people to blow asbestos in other people’s faces.

Why not?  Because it’s a carcinogen, exactly as tobacco smoke is.  The only difference is that asbestos lacks the rich and powerful lobbying forces that tobacco has, and states aren’t collecting millions of dollars in tax revenue from asbestos sales like they are from tobacco sales.

More from the article:

Quoting The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Cigarette maker Philip Morris spent $275,000 seeking to influence lawmakers in 2007.  The Breathe Free Coalition (American Lung Association, American Heart Association, and the American Cancer Society) staked out a spot in the Capitol this year where they set up a large poster reminding passersby that six people die each day in Pennsylvania from the effects of secondhand smoke.

Someone uploaded this picture today:

My hatred of Verizon started sometime in 2004, when I started hearing horror stories from Kim about the despicable, greedy, and just plain evil things that Verizon did in the course of providing her cell phone service.  And I don’t mean 1 or 2 small issues; it was 5 or 6 or 7 totally unbelievable instances in which they either intentionally or through gross incompetence tried to defraud her of vast sums of money.  I wish I would have written them down.

As an aside, it’s funny to read posts by iPhone haters saying that it’s doomed because it’s tied to the evil AT&T, and if only they could get it with service from Verizon instead, then they would get an iPhone.  I’ve had zero problems with AT&T in the 6 months that I’ve had my iPhone, and their coverage is far better than Nextel’s ever was, and I’m pretty sure that their $20/mo for unlimited data is the best data deal going.  But the fact is, all of these giant telecom companies pretty much just suck if you give them enough time.

Anyway, back to Verizon: the only reason I have a landline at all is for my business.  When I signed up for this business line, we ended up moving a couple months later.  And despite the fact that now you’re supposed to be able to transfer your phone number to a different provider, Verizon couldn’t even let me keep my number while still using Verizon service at the new house.

As if that weren’t bad enough, they also told me they couldn’t provide me with voice-mail at the new house, which makes no sense whatsoever because it’s not like the voice-mail is stored at my house -- it’s stored on Verizon’s servers anyway!  So I actually had to use something called an answering machine -- a physical device used by primitive peoples before the invention of fire or dirt -- to get my messages for the past few months.

Verizon’s website is as terrible as such a terrible company’s website should be.  Literally every time I log in to my account, it displays the following 2 messages:

We are temporarily unable to retrieve information for this phone number. Please try again later.

We are temporarily unable to retrieve current billing information for this phone number. Please try again later.

And most unbelievable and frustrating of all, when you try to call Verizon for support, they don’t put you on hold like a decent company would; instead, you get a recording that says "all representatives are busy; please try again later" and then THEY HANG UP ON YOU.

Now to the bill: it was nominally $30 or $40 per month, but virtually all calls are "local long distance" or regular long distance, so it always ended up being $70 or $80, even though I hardly used this phone line (for outgoing calls) at all.

Of course, Verizon is the local monopolist, so as much as I would have liked to tell them to go take a long walk off a short pier while I switch to another provider, the fact is that there is no other provider that I could use.

Well, I finally found a way to escape Verizon’s evil clutches: I switched to Vonage.  Vonage is a VoIP phone service provider, which means your service comes in over the internet instead of through a phone line.  But it sounds and acts just like a regular phone line: you can plug any normal phone into it, you get the normal dial tone, etc.  They provide all the standard stuff like voice mail, and unlike Verizon, they let me keep my existing number no problem.  They also have some cool and innovative features like sending copies of your voice mails to your email account.  But here’s the best part: Vonage costs just $25 per month and that includes unlimited local and long distance.  There was a setup fee of about $40, but the first month is free, so there’s effectively no setup charge.

But here’s the real best part: Vonage calls your existing phone provider and takes care of the cancellation and transfer and everything, so you don’t have to do any of that.  But once that happened, Verizon called me (of course I didn’t answer) and left a message crying about the fact that I was leaving, and "we’d really like to keep your business" and "we have some very competitive plans that we’d like to discuss with you."  Yeah, like you really have anything competitive with $25/mo with free everything, you scumbags.  And then, a couple days later, I got a "DHL EXPRESS EXTREMELY URGENT" package in the mail, containing a letter from Verizon still begging me to stay.  No wonder their service is so expensive when they’re wasting money on overnight shipping instead of working on, oh, I don’t know, VOICE MAIL SERVICE maybe?

Quoting ABC News:

The Iranian Foreign Ministry, however, called the incident "ordinary"

Yes, a speedboat jaunting around in the wake of another country’s warships is entirely ordinary.  These guys were obviously trained by Baghdad Bob himself.

It’s certainly possible that Iran is trying to provoke us into war, but nonetheless the above statement is absurd.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece on the history of maritime incidents as they relate to the wars we’ve fought.

It’s tragic for sure.  But no one should be surprised that a tiger could scale a 12-foot wall.  Our housecats are less than a foot tall, and they have always been able to scale the 6-foot fence surrounding the pool at my parents’ house.

What is surprising, and amazing, is this:

Quoting The New York Times:

The tiger was killed by three shots fired by four police officers.

Huh?

Is it really not possible to delete a file from the trash in Mac OS X, aside from the "Empty Trash" action which deletes ALL its files?

Kim and I have been downloading the TV show "Heroes" in iTunes and watching it on our TV.  This is on my Mac Mini system, using Apple’s DVI to video adapter to display the video on the TV, which works quite nicely.

But today, right in the middle of watching one of the episodes in full-screen, iTunes decided to pop-up a dialog box saying "Thanks for using iTunes.  Would you like to back up your collection?"

Frankly, if I wanted this kind of brain-dead and annoying behavior while watching a video, I’d use Windows or Linux to watch it, where the overall experience is nowhere near as seamless and polished. I expect that kind of thing on those operating systems; I expect more from Mac OS X.

On every operating system, there should be a flag that any application can set, which would tell the operating system "I’m in full-screen do-not-disturb mode", the effect of which would be to prevent anything from popping up in front of the application.  I’m surprised that OS X does not have such a mechanism, especially in the tightly-integrated environment of iTunes/QuickTime, where all the running code should know that there’s a video playing.

(Update: the public smoking ban goes into effect on September 11th 2008.)

The PA House of Representatives and the PA Senate were both working on legislation in the past few weeks that would ban smoking in most public places, including restaurants.  But the ban ultimately stalled because the two chambers could not agree on a set of exemptions to it.  The ban is now shelved until September.

I hate breathing other people’s smoke.  That’s not only because second-hand smoke kills 50,000 Americans including 3,000 Pennsylvanians every year; it’s also because it’s freaking disgusting.  So naturally I want this ban enacted into law as soon as possible.

The main arguments I’ve seen that are against the ban -- i.e. that are pro-smoking -- are:

1. Waaaaah I want to smoke and you can’t take away my rights and next thing you’ll be making it illegal to eat thumb tacks!!

2. Restaurants (etc) should just have smoking and non-smoking sections as they do now.

3. This is a decision that’s best left to market forces to decide.

The first argument makes me angry because it’s so common and yet so moronic and/or disingenuous.  No one is trying to take away a smoker’s right to kill himself.  The issue is whether smokers should be allowed to kill other people, as they have been doing for years and years without punishment.  When you’re spewing cancerous filth in an enclosed area, others have to breathe it in, and that’s as issue of their rights, not yours.

The second argument is invalid because the "non-smoking" sections are still contaminated with smoke, as anyone who’s eaten in one knows.  Any high-schooler who’s taken a physics or chemistry class can tell you that smoke, like all other fluids, moves freely within its container and does not pay any attention to the "non-smoking section" signs.  This whole concept is exactly like having a peeing section in a public pool, except that urine is a sterile fluid, whereas tobacco smoke is a lethal fluid.  Air ventilation and filtration systems have been shown to be ineffective in solving this problem, and in any case, the workers in the smoking sections are not protected at all.

The third argument says that anyone who doesn’t like smoke can simply avoid establishments that allow smoking.  I’ve seen a bunch of news or opinion articles making this argument, stating that "many" or even "most" restaurants are already smoke-free so non-smokers should just patronize those businesses instead.  I don’t know where these people are coming from, but around here, literally none of the restaurants that we go to on a regular or semi-regular basis are smoke-free: not Chili’s, not the Olive Garden, not Carrabba’s, not TGI Friday’s, not Ruby Tuesday’s, not Red Lobster, not Outback Steakhouse, not Applebee’s.  If there were such a restaurant, we would be all over it.  Instead, when we’re being seated, I always have to say "please seat us as far from the smoking section as possible," and still about half of the time, we need to ask to be moved once we’re seated, because the "non-smoking section" is too darn smoky.

Second-Hand Smoke Statistics

therecordherald.com, 20070619:

According to the American Lung Association, secondhand smoke is responsible for approximately 3,400 lung cancer deaths and 46,000 heart disease deaths in adult nonsmokers annually in the United States.

nosmokeindoors.com, 20070621:

Three-thousand Pennsylvanians die each year as a result of the health conditions caused from breathing in someone else’s tobacco smoke.

For every eight smokers that die from the effects of their own tobacco use, one nonsmoker dies from the effects of secondhand smoke.

84 percent of Pennsylvanians believe that all workers should be protected from exposure to secondhand smoke in the workplace.

Waitresses are almost four times more likely to die of lung cancer compared to workers in other fields, and bartenders face a 50 percent greater risk of dying from lung cancer, other cancers, and heart disease than other workers.

Secondhand smoke is harmful and hazardous to the health of the general public, and particularly dangerous to children.  It is a proven cause of lung cancer, heart disease, serious respiratory illnesses, low birth weight and sudden infant death syndrome.

businesswire.com, 20070626:

In June 2006, the Surgeon General of the United States declared that there was no safe level of second hand smoke, ever. Secondhand smoke - a carcinogen classified in the same league with asbestos, formaldehyde and radon - is known to kill more than 53,000 Americans each year, including 3,000 in Pennsylvania alone.

And that doesn’t include people who actually smoke. These are just the people who stand within breathing distance of smokers and suffer the fatal consequences.

During just a one-hour dinner in a restaurant where smoking is permitted, nonsmoking patrons "smoke" the equivalent of three cigarettes. That’s enough to cause stiffened arteries, prompt irregular heartbeats, exacerbate colds, bronchitis and pneumonia, worsen heart attacks, and trigger asthma, particularly in children.

Nonsmokers who are regularly exposed to tobacco smoke pollution, either at home or at work, have almost double the risk of heart disease. And secondhand smoke causes 30 times as many lung cancer deaths as all other regulated air pollutants combined.

PC Magazine has some serious iPhone hate going on.  On their current front page, there are 6 negative items about the iPhone:

Will the iPhone Be an iNightmare for Business?

The Anti-iPhone Solution

Cranky Geeks: iPhone: A Recipe for Failure?

Any Phone Can be an iPhone

Apple iPhone Exposed: How we secretly an obtained an iPhone, reviewed it all night, and found some serious flaws.

Apple iPhone Launch Reveals Phenomenon (in which John Dvorak makes fun of iPhone line-waiters)

There’s 1 neutral item (but this is just copied from Think Secret):

Inside Apple: Getting Inside the iPhone

Then there’s 1 positive item... about iPhone accessories:

10 Awesome iPhone Accessories

Then there’s this last item, which seems partially positive but is ultimately negative:

Apple iPhone: Fun, Fabulous, Flawed

This one contains all kinds of dumbness:

put simply, it isn’t a very good phone. Call quality was the worst we’ve heard on a high-end device in years

...and their testing apparently consists of just saying "it sounds teh suxorz."  Compare this with wirelessinfo.com’s review in which they actually perform tests on the audio, and then conclude things like "compares extremely well to other phones", "performance...was very good", and "overall, the sound quality is very acceptable".

It’s complicated to dial

...because it has the exact same dialpad that phones have had for decades?  Or because, since the iPhone is a multifunction device, you have to hit the "phone" button to put it into phone mode?  If that’s complicated, what the heck are you doing writing a review for a tech mag?

difficult to send text messages on

...despite the fact that just about every other review has praised its iChat-like text-messaging interface?

the iPhone Internet experience is loads of fun. It’s not quite "the Internet in your pocket," however. It displays HTML pages gorgeously (even over EDGE!)

...because the speed of the connection has ANYTHING to do with the aesthetics of how pages are displayed?

but the Internet is now loaded up with Javascript, Java, Flash, streaming media and other plug-ins. The iPhone can’t hit many of these rich experiences

Javascript isn’t a plug-in; every major browser supports it natively, including the iPhone’s browser.

The internet is hardly "loaded up" with Java; quite the contrary, Java is rarely seen nowadays on web pages, thankfully, since web-embedded Java applets were never anything but clunky and ugly.

Flash is the one item in this list that actually makes sense, but the most popular Flash destination on the internet is YouTube, and Apple convinced YouTube to convert their proprietary Flash content to standard H.264 video, specifically for iPhone and AppleTV.  Many internet users, including myself and apparently Apple, are fed up with the clunky non-native proprietary mess of plugins like Flash and Java that have plagued the web thus far, and the move to standard formats like H.264 can’t happen quickly enough.

Anyway... here are the 2 cell phone items from the front page of PCmag that aren’t about the iPhone:

Video Review: Hot Slim Phones

Sprint’s Most Powerful Smartphone

Quite a difference in tone there.

I never read PCmag; it just happened to come up as I was browsing news.google.com today.  So maybe it’s common knowledge that they are an anti-Apple publication (they are called "PC" Magazine after all).  But you’d think they’d at least pretend to try to hide such a glaring bias as this.

PS - here’s a screenshot of the hate-filled front page:

Apparently the people who lived here before us had DirecTV.  We’ve never had it, and we sure don’t now.  A few days ago I heard what sounded like a metal trash can blowing around in the parking lot, but, no, it’s just a satellite dish hanging from the roof and banging against the siding.  I told the landlord about it a few days ago, but nothing’s come of that yet.

That’s quite possibly the longest and most complex URL that I’ve ever seen in an advertisement.  Did no one at IBM (or their ad agency) realize that a 30-character URL including 3 sublevels is the opposite of simple?

Look what just came in the mail from Nextel:

It’s pretty much your typical here’s a special deal that’s only for special customers like you (er, along with every single other customer we have, whom we also sent this letter to) which will allow you to get huge savings of $70!!OMGFTPBBQ off a new 2-year contract regularly priced at $1680 and PLEASE STAY WITH US AND DON’T JUMP SHIP FOR THE IPHONE COME JUNE 29TH! -type letter.

Fat chance, Nextel.

Apparently it was 2 years ago this month that I signed my 2-year agreement with them, and of course this month the iPhone will be released.  The iPhone ads are quite salivation-inducing, especially in light of the fact that every cell phone I’ve ever owned has been basically garbage, including my current sucky Motorola cell phone: call-making ability is only adequate, interface/usability is without exception awful, and ability to do anything else is nonexistent.

The $500 iPhone price tag seems steep at first, but when you consider the total cost it’s pretty much negligible.  My current phone cost me $200, and with my "$60/month" plan which of course costs me $70+ each month, the total cost for the phone with service is $200 + $70x24 = $1880.  So the iPhone with a similarly-priced plan would be $2180, which is a difference of only 16%, and is actually only $12/month more overall when you consider the cost of the hardware as part of the 2-year contract (which of course it really is: the "free" or cheap phones that we get are of course paid for over 2 years as part of the service plan).

Twelve dollars per month is so worth it that it’s a no-brainer when you consider what you’re getting: the old phone could only make phone calls, but the new phone also has:

-full internet capabilities on a decently-sized screen

-a sweet Google Maps front-end (GMaps being one of my favorite things ever which you know if you read my blog)

-a decent digital camera

-photo-displaying abilities (again, the big screen makes all the difference)

-the ability to use WiFi internet connections

-an iPod

As I’ve said before, its 4-8 GB capacity will be far too small for my ~40 GB music collection, but I’ll upgrade in a couple years when one that large is available, and in the meantime I’ll have all those other awesome features which I didn’t have with my cell phone before.

Also, WWDC is next week and Steve Jobs’ keynote will be at 1 PM eastern time on Monday.  MacRumors and Engadget will be live-blogging the event, during which some interesting secrets about the iPhone and/or other Apple products will likely be revealed.