As you may have heard, everyone's favorite little phone that can has kind of a big bug that kinda sorta makes it, oh, seem like you might be protected when, in fact, your "hysterical" buddies poked holes in your entire pack of prophylactics with pins and didn't tell you until after spring break.
So, yes, it's a bad bug and, yes, Apple needs to fix it post haste. Which, of course, is license for everyone to freak out.
InfoWorld's Peter Sayer sagely notes:
One way to avoid such unauthorized access to e-mail messages or Web favorites would be not to add e-mail addresses or URLs to favorite address book entries.
Right. Don't email your friends. Become a hermit. Put the phone in a mason jar and bury it under your front porch.
Or, if you're just lazy and don't like to get a little dirt under your fingernails, you could just change the setting for Home Button to, uh, Home. Which, if the Macalope's not mistaken, is the default setting. So, you may not even have to get up.
But Pete's idea is good, too. Living a life of solitude might be good for you. What with your sex addiction. Whatever.
Again, the Macalope's not arguing that this is a bug. It's clearly a bug. It's bad. It needs to be fixed.
The Apple Blog's Bob Rudis, meanwhile, just causes the hoofed one to scratch his furry head.
As Alex Hutton points out, you can mitigate the threat by disabling the "home button double-tap" feature of your device.
Well, no, you can't "disable" it, you can only select the behavior. And by changing the behavior you can "mitigate" the threat all the way down to a little number the horny one likes to call "zero".
For the umpteenth time, Apple has a real security problem and needs to better address the issue and this is just another thing that make the company look stupid. In and of itself, though, it may not be worth phoning home about.
Although, if you need to phone home, just hit Emergency Call and double tap the Home button and...
Several people on the Twitter reported late last night that a fire hit Apple's Valley Green 6 building (Tom Krazit has more in it here). No one was hurt and the major concern is smoke damage. One humorous Twit even offered their tongue-in-cheek lament that it wasn't their building.
The horny one knows it was just a joke, but what with recent charges that Apple's a sweatshop for programmers...
Well, has anyone seen Milton?
It's shoot for the moon daze, people! Following up on Al Gore's challenge to convert all electricity production to wind, solar and recumbent bike power in the next 10 years, two other probably even less likely to be accomplished challenges were raised.
First, TechCrunch wants users to build them a dead-simple web tablet for $200. There's that can-get-other-people-to-do-it spirit that made this country great! Make sure you get a tetanus shot before taking those test models for a spin! Some of those edges might be sharp.
Now one of the founders of Ubuntu maker Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth, says he wants the operating system that's fun to say to "blow right past Apple" in terms of an artful desktop experience. Right. Look, the Macalope has some really nice things to say about Linux and Tux himself, who he frequently plays against in the Mythical Creatures Intramural Softball League. But artful experiences are rarely, if ever, created by committee. Also, it's not just the presentation layer that separates Ubuntu from OS X. It's also this. It's not enough to look good, it has to just work, too.
Well, you know, MobileMe notwithstanding.
Cough.
The Macalope has assiduously avoided the "issue" of Steve Jobs' health to date simply because he finds the armchair diagnoses of people who aren't doctors but play them on the Internet to be repugnant. Today, Michael Gartenberg sums up his feelings perfectly:
Steve Jobs health is no one's business except his. That's my last word on this topic.
PEOPLE the battery life appears less because YOU CAN'T PUT THE DAMNED THING DOWN.
That would pretty much explain it.
In a review of Apple's quarterly post-conference call beating on the market (yawn, SEEN IT), ZDNet's Adrian Kingsley-Hughes hits upon a gem of an idea while musing on the much-discussed upcoming "product transition".
Revamped AppleTV that's App Store compatible - Give the AppleTV a Wii Remote-like controller and it's ready to bring Super MonkeyBall to the world.
Let's ignore the fact that Apple's sold more iPhones and iPods touch ("iPod touches" just sounds wrong) than Apple TVs so Super Monkey Ball already reaches a wider audience. And let's also ignore the fact that this doesn't completely describe a transition to a lower-margin product. Instead, let's run with the remote controller idea. Because the remote controller is already in your hand.
It's the iPhone and the iPod touch. Both have the accelerometer and already act as a menu remote with Apple's Remote app. Rolling out the App Store to the Apple TV is a fabulous idea that could really add legs to an otherwise average device. Upscale the graphics and you're good to go. Game makers can create their own remote applications, allowing them to configure the buttons any way they like. Sure, there are some problems with that. Games may be a very good example of an instance where a physical button can be the difference between virtual life or death ("I thought I was pressing 'fire' and instead I was pressing 'night vision goggles'."), but the screen real estate on the iPhone and iPod touch is expansive enough that large virtual buttons could make up for this.
This is all pie-in-the-sky at this point. Maybe the product transition is an Apple TV/iPod touch bundle. Maybe it's lowering the cost of the iPod touch to where it's viably priced as a remote control.
More likely it's none of these things, but if Apple isn't going in this direction, maybe it should be.
The Macalope is sure that many of the kinks in the iPhone App Store as it exists now will get worked out over time, but one of the purported selling points was that customers would know that they're getting applications that have been vetted by Apple.
That's great and all, but if the "vetting process" means that bug fixes are slow to make it to users, it kind of tends to increase the exposure, rather than decrease it.
As you know, the Macalope's not galloping out this morning to get an iPhone 3G. Particularly since he feels like he just got a new iPhone yesterday with the 2.0 software update.
And it seems that might not be a bad idea all around. Taking a look on the Twitter, MacUser's Dan Pourhadi says AT&T's in-store activation system isn't working and they're telling people to activate at home (that won't get you a phone you can unlock, though, unless you want to pay $600 for it -- failure to activate).
Meanwhile, MacVoices' Chuck Joiner says the AT&T store he's at is out of black 16 GB models. Oh, you can order one and it'll get there in 7 days. But if a truck pulls up to the back of the store with more later in the afternoon, you still have to wait for yours to arrive next week. The Macalope's seen that model lots of places, but it never gets any less annoying.
As with the last launch, AT&T stores are going to be far easier to get into than Apple Stores. Unless you're looking for a 3-hour meetup with your Apple-loving brethren, get thee to an AT&T store.
Or wait until this afternoon. Or tomorrow.
Reports to the contrary notwithstanding, waiting a few hours for one isn't going to kill you. Really. Well, at least there's not direct proof that it will kill you.
UPDATE: Also, the horny one is seeing reports that the iPhone 2.0 update is now available through iTunes, but it's effectively bricking peoples' iPhone since the Store is down. The update gets installed, but the phone can't reactivate. Probably want to wait on that one, too.
According to InformationWeek, Microsoft has finally come clean and admitted its Vista mistakes (tip o' the antlers to Daring Fireball).
But what's an admission of guilt without spreading some blame around?
Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is now acknowledging it screwed up with its initial launch of Windows Vista, and is ready to try again.
Oh. OK. So, wait, Windows will be five years late instead of four now? Huh? How's this going to work exactly? Has it used its vast resources to somehow turn time back?
"We broke a lot of things."
We broke your applications. We broke your hardware. We broke your collectible figurines. We broke your Aunt Elma's hip...
"We know that, and we know it caused you a lot of pain."
Particularly Aunt Elma.
"It got customers thinking, hey, is Windows Vista a generation we want to get invested in?"
Yes. They're thinking that. A year and a half after Vista's launch. That's awkward, isn't it?
If only there were some other operating system...
So Brad Brooks, Microsoft's VP of Windows Vista consumer marketing, fessed up publicly this week.
Wow, bummer detail you pulled there, Brad.
"Say, Brad, this thing you're going to do at our Partner Conference next week... are you familiar with the Japanese tradition of seppuku? Here's an informative pamphlet."
Speaking at a keynote address at Microsoft's annual Worldwide Partner Conference, Brooks signified that Microsoft was ready to admit mistakes and reposition itself to tell a better story about Windows Vista...
Yes! Because it's all about the "story" about Vista. Well, a minute ago it was about breaking things. But sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make a story omelette. Or something.
"You thought the sleeping giant was still sleeping, well we woke it up and it's time to take our message forward," Brooks said.
We didn't think it was so much "sleeping" as we thought it was "lumbering". Lumbering drunkenly down the hall smashing things and blaming everyone else when it woke up in a pile of its own filth.
In the coming weeks and months, Microsoft will launch a huge advertising campaign that's been reported to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Finally! Yes, please, Microsoft, make the pain go away through the power of marketing!
"We've got a pretty noisy competitor out there," Brooks said of Apple whose "I'm a Mac... and I'm a PC," commercials criticize Windows Vista. ... "We're going to start countering it. They tell us it's the iWay or the highway. We think that's a sad message."
"iWay or the highway"? Microsoft must buy its tone-deafness in bulk from Costco or something. "I know our slogans are meaningless and our product names are vapid, but we got a great deal on them!"
Overall, the message Microsoft hopes to impart is that Windows Vista is ready, and that Microsoft will no longer take a back seat while word of mouth and Apple drive negative messaging about the company and Windows.
Look, the Macalope has actually been somewhat sympathetic to Vista. It's got a good security model -- certainly better than Leopard's as poor Brad rightly notes -- and a decent enough user experience. And he knows the audience was Microsoft partners who are looking for any kind of help they can get to mask the smell of Vista flop sweat.
But Microsoft made its bed by over-promising for six years and then delivering an OS that forced a lot of uncomfortable decisions. Marketing isn't going to clean this mess up. The horny one really isn't sure what is, frankly, but the "Get a Mac" ads aren't responsible for businesses choosing to stick with XP. Microsoft is.
The InformationWeek piece portrays this as an "about time" move, but this is more "my dog ate it" territory.
UPDATE: some delightfully shrill piling on can be found here and here.
