Monthly Archives: June 2007

Facebook iPhone Poll: Good news or Bad news for Apple at iPhone Unlocked

From my iPhone Blog:

facebook poll

Facebook iPhone Poll: Good news or Bad news for Apple at iPhone Unlocked
the rest being some form of undecided.

This actually looks like great news for Apple. The 7% of yes repondents represent ~140,000 of Facebook’s 20M users. At $500 a pop, that’s 70M in revenue for Apple (perhaps more if they get a kickback from AT&T, something that could be as much as 50% of the cost of service). That 7% also represents people who are apparently ready to buy soon. That’s a significantly higher penetration rate than the 1% Apple is shooting for in the overall mobile phone market (at least for the time being).

London Bombs Bomb-out

British authorities stumbled on to two cars in what appears to be a bombing plot. All the reporting is quite breathless, the headline writers all say the cars were packed with explosives, public officials talk about how terrible the carnage and destruction could have been.

The police defused both bombs, but had they exploded “there could have been significant injury or loss of life,” Peter Clarke, Britain’s senior counterterrorism police official, told reporters.

What a load of hooey. Yes, someone was bent on doing a lot of damage, but guess what? They were clearly incapable of doing anything more than giving the media and the authorities an excuse to whip up fear.

The first car was discovered because a passing ambulance noticed smoke. The second had been ticketed and towed to an impound lot for illegal parking. Does this sound like a well thought out plan? I don’t. It sounds to me like the first bomb probably fizzled, and the second never went off.

But it was kind of inevitable that the bombs would fizzle. The headline writers all mention explosives, but the actual reporting only mentions gasoline, propane, and nails. No explosives. The gas and propane might have made for quite a fireball but without explosives, the gas probably would have burned for a while, giving plenty of time for evacuation before firemen put it out. At worst they might have been some property damage, and maybe some firemen injured by the unexpected propane cannisters exploding. When I say some, I mean maybe, 5. Not the hundreds that died in the World Trade Center, not that 5 isn’t meaningful, but it’s more like a building fire gone from bad to worse than a huge terrorist incident.

The nails could have really done some damage too, but not without a real explosion to send them flying. The gas and propane could have contributed to that explosion if they were properly vaporized, confined, and mixed with air. Clearly they weren’t.

Fortunately, in this case, the bombers were boobs, and London isn’t easily terrified after all the bombing it’s put up with in the last 65 years.

I think it’s dangerous and misguided to inflate the accomplishments of these unaccomplished bozos.

iPhone Mania, or maybe, not

At about 8:30 this evening I was in the neighborhood of the Seattle Apple Store in University Village. I swung by to see what the crowds were like.

There weren’t any. There were some people milling about out front, along with a couple of Seattle cops.

There seemed to be a lot of Apple associates waiting at the door, and there were a few customers inside, which gives me the impression they hadn’t sold out yet, and weren’t in any rush to.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of iPhones on eBay that are getting bid up towards or past $1000. Perhaps more interesting, people are selling iPhone related e-mail addresses, like unlocked_apple_iphone_4_sale@yahoo.com, some are bid up over $500.

Just for kicks I decided to check out domain names and found that unlockediphoneforsale.com was unregistered, so I went ahead and picked it up.

Lust, cussing and ambivalence: Erik considers the iPhone

Ok, I really want an iPhone, but I really don’t want an iPhone.

On the plus side: Shiny shiny shiny shiny. I could almost choke down
the price.

On the down side: HOWMANYFUCKINGDOLLARS?!?!?!?!?!?, AT&T, slowww-ass
internet for $50something a month. AT&T Fuckin Ed Whitacre, feudal
cocksucker. SLOOW. No 3rd party apps unless you are Google. No
upgradeable memory. HOWMANYFUCKINGDOLLARS?!?!?!?!?!? AND tied to AT&T
and their slowww-ass mobile internet.

Oh, but so shiny.

I’m considering slaking my lust with a Nokia N800 Internet Tablet PC.
Cheaper. Not as shiny. Open platform (down to the OS). WiFi only,
but theoretically can piggyback on a bluetooth phone for internet access.

The last one is probably the clincher. If I can figure that one out, I may do it.

Goddamn Google

Sometime in the last few months, Google rolled out an update to Google Talk that gave the option of logging my chats to Gmail, rather than my local hard disk. I installed the update, but said “no thank you” to the Google-side logging. Today I realize that means I don’t have a local chat log anymore either.

I don’t like it, they took away a feature, and they only way I can get it back is give up more of my privacy.