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Interesting Ars Technica article on spam:

From April 1 to May 1, McAfee ran an experiment with 50 volunteers designed to measure just how much spam a person would receive if they actually registered at all the sites that request your e-mail address. The total amount of spam that comes flooding down the system is almost awe-inspiring.

Tech talk on launchd by its creator from July 2007.

I’ve been putting this off, because I really don’t want to clash horns with The Macalope. Mostly because he’s got, well, a nice rack. And I don’t. But a recent tweet by the horny one meant I have to get this off my chest.¹

I live in Canada, so I only wish I had the prices and plans available that AT&T offers. But even then, I note an interesting consequence to the way the new iPhone costs you money:

Assuming the Macalope’s numbers are right, sure, the iPhone 3G is $40 more expensive. But that’s over two years! On the day you sign the contract and leave the store with a nice, shiny box on your way to your “unboxing!” photo shoot, you’ve got an extra $300 in your pocket.

All of which begs the question of what you’re going to do with that extra $300 until then. I suggest that instead of blowing it on a Wii² you consider how to turn it into $340 by the end of the contract. That’s only 13% over two years. I’m no financial whiz and I’m not even sure how to spell “whiz,”³ but I bet even I could manage that one. If you don’t think you can, maybe you should step away from the computer long enough to think of something.

Sure, it isn’t cheaper. But if you play your cards correctly⁴ it may turn out to be to your benefit anyway. For the record, I don’t give credit to Apple for that. I’m sure no one there said “Hey, let’s hike the price, but we’ll make them pay the extra over two years. Our customers will be able to invest the money they save on the initial purchase and end up ahead!” It’s just the way the numbers work. Hooray for math!

1. Wow, it would be fun to be paid to write like this. [↩]
2. Because, let’s face it, you either already own one or are mocking the people who do. [↩]
3. I guessed financial, too. [↩]
4. And odds are you won’t, but whose fault is that? [↩]

You say you want a revolution? Well, you know, I’d rather have a browser that worked.

“Revolutionary” is not how I’d describe this. I’ve seen installers crash before. No doubt I will see it again.

I saw an episode of Yes, Prime Minister today. I haven’t seen this series in years, but it’s quite possibly both the most talky-talky and brilliant British sitcom. Whenever I see YPM, I’m reminded of Sir Humphrey demonstrating to Bernard how survey results can be cooked.

With this thought fresh on my mind, I ran into the Firefox vs. Safari link on Daring Fireball Obviously, feature charts are the same: The person developing them arranges it so their product gets the most checks. I decided to generate a more balanced feature comparison chart that would give Firefox and Safari an equal number of checks.

Firefox fan? Well, you probably won’t find this as funny as I do. You might even be deeply offended. But the thing is: I’ll still find it funny.

And for the record: I found Firefox 3 to be an improvement over Firefox 2 in most areas, but a major step backwards in complying with Mac behavior. I know they tried, but the closer (but definitely not perfect) appearance makes the poor behavior all the more jarring. But that’s starting to read like a review, and I’ll save that for a later post.¹

1. Or more likely never: the subject will probably be beaten to death by the time I get back to it. [↩]

I think of WordPress’s tags as free association. I try to just start thinking of related things and type as many in a short period as I can. And I’ll often go back and type more in later. I know this isn’t a great system, but I figure over time I can build enough of a tag library that I can start reusing terms.

But I didn’t realize they could have spaces in them. That’s right; if you’re using WordPress, you don’t need to limit your tags to URL safe characters. Give it a try.

I plan on updating my tags in the coming weeks to add spaces, capital letters and such. The tag “hall of shame” is much more appealing to me than “hallofshame.”

In Canada we have two GSM cellphone providers: Fido and Rogers. Well, actually, we don’t really. A few years ago, Rogers bought Fido. So these days, I’m used to Fido getting the short straw out of every cup.

I called service a few days ago for an unrelated reason was surprised to hear “If you are calling about the iPhone, press 2.”¹ After completing that call, I tried 611 again and hit 2.

I was expecting “The iPhone will not be available to Fido customers,” but I was surprised. The iPhone will be available to Fido customers. Don’t believe me? There’s actually a news story on CBC. This seems to be a big turn-around by Rogers in offering Fido customers a good phone.

I don’t know how affordable the data plan will be, though.

1. The message has since been removed; I guess the rush died down. [↩]

One of my pet peeves is “hint hint, nudge nudge.”

Why? Because you’re asking for something and trying to make it appear as if you’re not. Is it really that hard to ask for what you want? I should add that I have no problem with this as a joke, it’s when you actually expect to get results by hinting that it starts to bother me. Are you afraid people are going to be afraid to refuse you? If so, wouldn’t you be better served by — oh, I don’t know — allowing them to refuse without jumping down their necks? Do you think you could stop trying to manipulate people around you?

It would be really great if people had backbones and asked for what they actually wanted. Hint hint, nudge nudge.

Via The Macalope, Microsoft’s leaked reaction to Mac OS X’s new search capabilities:

Lenn Pryor:

You will have to take Vic’s disk…I am not giving mine up. Tonight I got on corpnet, hooked up Mail.app to my Exchange server and then downloaded all of my mail into the local file store. I did system wide queries against docs, contacts, apps, photos, music, and my Microsoft email on a Mac. It was f*cking amazing. It is like I just got a free pass to Longhorn land today.

Jim Allchin:

Yes. I know. It is hard to take. I don’t believe we will have search this fast.

The funny part for me as I read this is that they’re talking about Mac OS X 10.4 search. Mac OS X 10.4’s search worked, but it was very slow. Yet apparently, even that blew away what they had.

Still, it isn’t all bad for Microsoft: It looks like they at least realized the speed of search was important.

Macworld | A year after iTunes Plus, Apple faces stepped-up competition - Page 2

Music services shutting down may let DRM finally shows its teeth.
[...]
Microsoft is one company that’s recently had to deal with just this sort of problem. The company’s MSN Music venture stopped selling music in 2006, but only recently announced its intention to shut down the servers that let users continue to play purchased music at the end of this summer. Past that point, those users will only be able to play their music as long as they keep using the same computer and operating system. But if they upgrade either hardware or software, they’re out of luck.

Wait, wait. Back up just a bit. Is it possible that Microsoft shutting down MSN Music wasn’t just stupid, but calculated? There’s no question that MSN Music’s shut down has raised the profile of DRM a bit. At this point, could the labels themselves want people soured from DRM so they’re soured from the iTunes store?

Just a crazy conspiracy theory, right?