Hopeless Geek

AT&T and Verizon Internet Services have reworked their broadband packages and will no longer be offering Flickr pro to subscribers after January 31, 2009.

Damn it. Now I’m upset. That was one thing I loved about SBC/AT&T DSL.

I wonder if they’re pulling out of all Yahoo services (they use them for mail as well) or if it’s just that? Hrm.

I present the reader with a progression of Apple PDA and Apple phone comments from Newton to iPhone. It’s interesting how far in advance this one was called. The train of thought is surprisingly simple: Jobs believes people don’t want handwriting recognition, they want keyboards. What did he kill? The Newton, based on handwriting recognition (or a bulky external keyboard, or an eMate that should have run Mac OS instead). What did he get development started on? A handheld with a smart keyboard built-in. That’s it. That’s the major difference. Well, that and third parties being able to develop for it, the little fucker.

1997

Instead of working on the handheld Newton, Jobs thinks that Apple should be developing stripped-down “network computers” that could be used by “mere mortals” as alternatives to PCs in accessing information and software from the Internet.
San Jose Mercury News as quoted by “David Farber”:http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/199705/msg00039.html

1998

“Apple makes computers, and computers have keyboards”

Well, the pre-release ones did. Back on June 11th, my access logs showed a user agent of:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; OS X Leopard 9A365; en) KHTML

Today, that user agent has become a mine field of keywords for UA parsers:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3

I guess it makes sense, given all the UI flashyness that would come from Core Animation and Core Image.

in•fa•mous |ˈinfəməs| adj. 1. well known for some bad quality or deed : an infamous war criminal. 2. wicked; abominable : the medical council disqualified him for infamous misconduct.
New Oxford American Dictionary

Perhaps not the right word in this case. Hitler is infamous. Stalin is infamous. Bush and Cheney are infamous. The season finale of one of the better sci-fi shows in recent history is more of a melancholic event than an infamous one.

The funniest thing in the world would be for everyone to line up and camp out in front of the Apple Stores for hours, days ahead of time …

... and for there to not be a supply problem and the store to not sell out.

I think I’d die laughing. I mean, think about it. If Apple can hand out 18,000 iPhones to its employees then there’s certainly enough of them in the world (someone said the first run was three million?) and if there’s enough in each of the major stores then it’s possible, while highly improbable, that they could take the first day and still have stock.

I’m not putting money or bets on it — I expect them to sell out — but if they don’t it would be the funniest thing in the world.

1. Open a text editor and create a new document.
2. Go to MacSurfer and select all and copy.
3. Paste into the new document and note the number of lines (682).
4. Save this document and go to Terminal.
5. grep -i iphone the_document.txt | wc
6. Note the first number (172).
7. Divide (0.25).

Twenty five percent of Mac news stories are hyping an unreleased and generally untouched product, only reiterating known facts and complaining about features that haven’t been used yet.

I really don’t want to think about the news scene next week. I may have to change the game plan a little and do more work just to distract myself from the web. That’s really not how that’s supposed to go.