A friend just told me the most horrifying thing. She just got a call from some random stranger. The caller claimed the new phone he bought from RadioShack had a bunch of data, including photos and address book entries, already in it. She backtracked and found out that her parents had just returned a phone they bought from RadioShack. So apparently, someone at the store thought it was sufficient to just re-box and re-sell the phone.

I may be terminally clueless, here, but I just saw Widgetarium on my VersionTracker feed. Damn, I was ramping up on Cocoa to build this same application. Crap!

From Digg:

Microsoft has hired one of the key figures behind a popular distribution of Linux in order to educate its in-house developers about open source.

read more | digg story

Please, Gentoo is so rice. I would have more respect for the story if a Debian maintainer or RedHat ex-employee were the one Microsoft hired. But Gentoo?! Come on.

Take a look at this. And here’s another interesting write up, though I don’t agree with the conclusion. I tend to agree with Dvorak’s interpretation, that folks will be willing to pay a bit more to get a piece of hardware they are going to be happier hanging onto for the longer obsolescence durations we are seeing. I think it is conceivable that once the Mac’s market share reaches some critical mass, just like the iPod, Apple will reverse their stance to claim further market share.

At all events, the next couple of years are going to be very, very interesting.

I’m getting a little tired of the gross over simplification of Apple’s decision to use Intel processor to mean that this directly equates to beige boxes flooding the market running Mac OS X. I don’t pretend to know the full ramifications of their decision, but I think the very notion of flies in the face of what makes Apple an attractive alternative to any other PC platform choice.
Read the rest of this entry »