Doug, Mtn. View, CA

DOJ Uses Google to Send a Message

.... and that the Democrats eat their own. I.e., Schmidt and Jobs are big time Obama backers. LOL!

iTunes' Inevitable Price Increase

Why isn't the title of this piece "iTunes inevitable price decrease"? I bought a bunch of songs yesterday for $.69 each, which is cheaper than it was only last week. Yet, ALL of the bloggers only talk about the rise in price of the pop junk to $1.29. The stuff I listen to and want to buy just had a price DECREASE *and* DRM was stripped off. Why didn't this fact get any ink?

Microsoft Gets the Blogging Community

There's a good reason why "no known bloggers work at Apple." Jobs insists on lsecrecy for everything he does. That is indisputable. All of his employees are cloaked under a similar veil of secrecy. If they openly blogged, I think, they'd be gone pretty quickly. You or I may not like it, but that's just the way it is. SJ's attitude is to let his products and service do the talking, not some loose-lipped employee who might let some internal secrets go out the door.

Google's Page, Brin and Brilliant on Clean Energy from Davos '08

This is the same Brin/Page team who park their 767 jet at NASA? Did Bono and Algore rode bicycles to attend this parade?

I love conferences like these. Ultra-rich, ultra-liberal guys sitting around, passing ideas as easy as passing gas, as if they know HOW to make any of this happen. They remind me of Stan Laurel's description of Laurel and Hardy: "two minds without a single thought." Ten cents per kilowatt hour using some pie-in-the-sky generator? Sure! What's the big deal? "I'll just take this Picasso painting off of my wall, auction it, and we'll start building that windmill farm over yonder, in the middle of your little useless subsistence farm. Outta my way, plebe!"

This nonsense would be laughable except for the fact that if/when these clowns get put in charge of policy, which could easily happen, millions of impoverished people on this planet are going to get killed. But it's okay to kill people if your intentions are good.

There is only one certainty about this: these idiots will never be affected by their policies like we mere mortals will be.

Apple's Extraordinary Edge

You missed my (admittedly) sarcastic point, Marcel. What Apple sells is SIZZLE. Some people desire it, others don't.

The market speaks for itself: there are lots of people, like the appropriately-named Blah, who are quite content with beige rectangular boxes (and horrid clothing, to use my example). But to compare that ugly piece of crud (my description) to an iMac and say "they are equal" demonstrates the difference between the two customer types. I gag when I see a PC; not one has any sense of style. I'd never allow one in my house. I feel the same about OSX vs. Vista. You may disagree. Fine. But that's my way of explaining the differences that this article alludes to.

If you're content to drag files around to play music, then by all means, a cheap, hard-to-use music player will suit you just fine. That's where the mp3 business was in 2001. But if you want to manage your music with a sense of elegance and style, Apple offers it to you via iTunes. I didn't say Blah was wrong in this regard, only that he isn't an Apple customer and as such had nothing constructive to offer about this piece. I believe he used the term "idiot" to describe me and my ilk. He opened the floodgates, not me.

However, Blah clearly doesn't know what he's talking about in regards to Macs either, when he drags out this old hit piece from ZD-Net, written by a former ballet dancer. Even the "report" cited in the ZD-Net article said “PLEASE NOTE: The statistics provided should NOT be used to compare the overall security of products against one another." Just more fluff from the Microsoft camp trying desperately to defend its rapidly crumbling empire.

Apple's Extraordinary Edge

Hey Blah: In response to your idiotic "vulnerabilities" claim, see if you've got the guts to read this retort:

www.roughlydrafted.com.../

You sound like the stylish kind of guy who is content to wear his black socks with his brown dress shoes while wearing his old burmuda shorts on a summer's day. I believe you when you way you're just as happy with a $600 laptop as you would be with an $1100 Macbook (if you're going to compare "cheap PC laptop" to a Mac laptop, at least choose the "cheap Mac laptop" for your comparison). Enjoy your stripped down, no-power Vista OS on that cheap PC laptop while you're at it. I'm surprised you gave up your old Sony Walkman cassette player for a modern MP3 player. Your discount $50 pink Zune probably matches your wardrobe.

I'm glad that you're a vocal PC-head. You're the best kind of advertisement for Apple products that Apple could only hope to buy.