Ok, there’s something in the water in Redmond that causes illusions of adequacy. No doubt it’s the same stuff that Mr. Bush and his six friends have been chugging for the last few years. It’s “pretty awesome” that their piece of Zune player will have a million victims by JUNE!
Years from now when Microsoft becomes […]

Digg alerted me to this insane article from Radioandrecords.com
which is apparently a trade rag for the greed and arrogance industry.
I’ll let you click on the link and read the entire thing, but this last
paragraph says it all.

“Mechanical royalties currently
are out of whack with historical and international rates,” RIAA
executive vp and general counsel Steven Marks said. […]

While rumors of the Apple iPhone spin crazily about the internets, it seems that some few have sold their souls to leak info about yet another Apple mobile phone, one that may or may not ever see the light of day, but seems to have some pretty neat features.
No wonder the rumor mill is so […]

[Obvious] Windows Vista took 10,000 employees five years to create. Preliminary breakdown includes 100 software engineers, 900 marketing experts and 9,000 lawyers

Really stupid business model #233049-a:

Assume that all of your customers are criminals
Ask your distributors to raise their prices to pay for these imaginary crimes
Wonder why your sales are way down

Now the movie studios want a ‘piracy cut’ from Apple
Movie studios are demanding that Apple implements a tougher and more restricted DRM system if it […]

I could listen to Woz talk all day long. He’s funny, hyper and he has something to say about growing up smart and doing good work. Woz is America at it’s best. His grandparents were some of those awful immigrants you’ve heard so much about lately.
Guy had a chance to interview Woz and […]

Richard Dreyfuss Sr. Advisor Oxford University on Democracy has been making something of himself. Here is an amazing video of him clearly explaining what has happened to America and unlike most of the bobbing craniums on TV, he explains in no uncertain terms what to do about saving the precious “twinkle” of democracy that once […]

Too bad this is such a toss-off. The issue deserves more thought and discussion than just a 15-second blurb.
Now that the iPod
has reached such iconic status that airlines are willing to put their
particular pukas into the seats, is there any chance at all that
Microsoft or any other company could gain market share without adapting
Apple’s ipod […]

Zune MP3 players’ opening salvo a dud
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, USA –  Microsoft’s attack on the Apple iPod began with a whimper Tuesday as Zune players made a lackluster debut in US stores.
Two boxed Zune players sat ignored on the top shelf of a Plexiglas showcase packed with iPod accessories in a Virgin Megastore near Union […]

One of the few realistic concerns that geeks had when Apple switched their chips to Intel was the presence of “Trusted Computing” features on the latter’s devices.
Trusted Computing
is the Rovian name for a technology that allows manufacturers to lock
you out of your own computer if you do something they don’t like such
as run a competitor’s […]

It’s about time! I was getting so sick of seeing Dell-bricks being slathered across campuses in some sort of self-reinforcing cluster-fuck of low price crap somehow creates an emerging standard so the prices go down. As the bargain basement drones begin turning to slag, the kids are spending Dad’s hard earned bucks on something with […]

I’ve just added this blog to my list. 37 Signals states:
This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about entrepreneurship, design, experience, simplicity, constraints, pop culture, our products, products we like, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago.
Except for the Chicago part, that sounds real familiar. What brought them to my attention was this […]

You can read it in the Guardian, which has joined in the frantic barking that someone has CRACKED the iPod so that it can now play tunes that don’t come from Apple.What a crock! iPods can play mp3s’ and a stack of other formats and they always have. There’s only a problem with Microsoft formats […]

Apple Upgrades MacBooks - now thinner, bigger, with more stuff
Apple today upgraded their MacBook Pro line of metal-clad lap warmers with new features, more speed and less thick. Still priced from $1999.999±.02, these new portables sport a faster double-wide chip, more RAM, larger capacity drives and a nice closet to store sweaters during the warm […]

Is it just a rumor or my dreams come true?
I hate telephones, especially cell phones. The interface sucks, the buttons don’t work, they cost too much and they are UGLY. When my cell phone rings I have to pop out the ear bugs connected to my iPod, find the damn thing, push just the right […]

From Business News:

Silicon Color acquired by Apple Computer
Makers of the Mac computer and iPod digital music player Apple
Computer have acquired Silicon Color. Silicon Color is the makers of
FinalTouch color-correction software. The news was published on the
company’s website, which said:
“We are pleased to announced that all Silicon Color technology and
intellectual property, including FinalTouch color correction […]

So there’s this lawyer who’s dumber than a redundant metaphor.  He buys a G5, sticks his head up his ass, then writes about it. So a Mac guy takes him to task only to prove that this lawyer is wrong about everything and should get his meds checked.
Make my day
A fellow named “Larry Bodine”, who […]

For a while I’ve been craving some place to house my non-Mac writings, so this evening I crawled under Google’s Blogger and in about 40-mminutes built another blog titled “ADDvanced Features.” Blogger is pretty damn cool, I was even able to put it up with a beta of the on-line software. With technology like this […]

That was special! In the twenty years we’ve been here perched on a volcano there have only been a few tremours - enough to skew the paintings. But the one this morning was noteworthy!
Even when I lived in California I never felt one like that - but we only lost a wine glass and […]

Go see if you can tell.
As a professional portrait artist, even I was almost fooled - this is pretty cool tech and one more step on the road to artificial people on the web and TV. Perhaps now they can come up with a more convicing artificial President - the one they’re using now shouldn’t […]

From Apple Matters - a blogsite that specialzes in hysterical, attention-getting articles - also runs a great series called “This day in Apple history.” October 6, 1997 was a particularly special date, whence Michael Dell made one of his less prescient, stupid comments:
Michael Dell offers Guidance for Apple ExecutivesGil Amelio had recently been ousted […]

Guy Kawasaki, Apple’s former lead ‘Evangelist’ and current venture capitalist recently hosted a panel on what youngsters do with technology. The answers to his questions are very enlightening. As usual, the kids are doing things that us old farts don’t even understand. The manufacturers are shown as clueless about the features that this market wants […]

It’s been a busy week in Cupertino, what with the emergency fix iTunes 7, updating all the iApps and now the lastest version of Tiger.
Open your System Preferences and go get the update.
The 10.4.8 Update is recommended for all users and includes general operating system fixes, as well as specific fixes for the following applications […]

Whilst wandering the blogs over this morning’s bagel, I stumbled upon an article by ZDNet Australia’s Munir Kotadia that was sane and coherent - features not often found in mainstream geek sites such as ZDNet.
Here are some excerpts from an article he wrote a while back about Apple’s BootCamp program that allows Borgs to ‘downgrade’ […]

Rughlydrafted.com has put up a very interesting analysis of the popular fantasy that iTunes is some sort of monopoly, and poor, beleaguered Microsoft is the good guy.This fantasy is a trick called ‘F.U.D.,’ which stands for “Fear - Uncertainty and Doubt,” a technique first introduced by IBM then raised to an art form by Microsoft […]

The prodcut namers at Microsoft - who once named a operating system for hand-held devices “WINCE” without doing so - have now released another ‘iPod killer.’ The device is called a ‘Zune’.There must not have been any naughty Canadians in the office that day - they’d all gone out for a beer or something.
From MacWorld […]

If you saw the scene in a movie, you would have laughed. At the time though, I didn’t think it was that funny.
Walking across the kitchen with a full cup of very hot coffee, I was plugged into the latest downloaded Podcasts. Arriving at the door to our front porch, I was just reaching for […]

Apple’s big ‘Showtime” event has gone and went, taking with it our expectations and fantasies.
The new iPods are great, their introduction came just in time and the changes announced were all improvements, especially for those who wanted less of a god thing. Fark.com announced the tiny new iPod Shuffle with their usual insight and […]

Hear the story of Carmen vs HP via India, Scott’s new Mac and iPod fantasies and how a CD cover got produced over iChat and across the islands.

Scott screws up the recording but it all works out in the end.

Send your questions, checks and suggestions to: scott@machelpmaui.com

From Keola Beamer’s Sweet Maui Moon CD you’ll hear […]

It was just an iPod event
Well, maybe not ‘just’, but Steve’s standup this morning was about movies, iPods and iTunes which are all very cool, and which all support the bottom line. It’s been a while since Apple did anything for the iPod and the webs was starting to get a little testy […]