Now There's Too Much Apple News

One of my friends here actually convinced me to go a step and sculpt class at the gym today with her and it was actually more of a workout than I had expected! Still, I was the only guy there, so that was a little weird. Oh well, it kept my legs busy. Yesterday, you'll remember that I had a number of articles about Google. Today though, it's all about #2 on the Wired 40: Apple. The big news coming out of the Cupertino giant was the unveiling of the $900 17-inch iMac specially designed for educational institutions. This is actually a really good deal since it features a 1.83 Ghz Core Duo, 512 MB of DDR2 RAM, an 80 GB hard drive, a Combo drive, and of course the iSight. I guess this doesn't affect most of you directly, but parents may soon see them at school and try to sneak in after hours while college students may see upgrades if their department has enough dough. If you do end up on one of these strange boxes, this switching guide will probably help you out. You can never have enough Apple rumors, and so try this one on for size: iWork 07 may see a spreadsheet counterpart called Charts targeted at households and small businesses rather than the wider, tech-savvier, audience that Excel gears toward. This sounds similar to Google Spreadsheets, and is likely to be announced at January at Macworld, but don't be too surprised if they decide to have it ready in time for the holiday season. What isn't a rumor is that the brisk sales of the iPod Nano and Shuffle are fueling demand for NAND flash memory, which means that we may soon see flash memory based DRAM in pre-built computers (I'd think especially for laptops since they're small and quite shock-resistant). Lastly, Mercury News has a short piece about how Apple keeps taunting Microsoft with their quick turnover time between OS upgrades, of which there have been 4 since the release of XP. What's great about being the little guy is that it's hard for people to hate you despite how mean your marketing campaigns are. Of course, security experts are providing added incentive for using Mac OS X with praises for how Mac OS users aren't vulnerable to most (if not all) the worst viruses and worms in recent months.

I wish I didn't have only bad news about Microsoft, but I do. It starts with a possible security vulnerability that Microsoft claims is a feature where if you name a shortcut a URL (minus the http://) and point it to a program, you can put in that URL in your web browser and it'll open the program rather than the website. Who wants to count the days before some malware exploits this "feature"? The other bad news for them is that PwC is investigating them for possibly giving schools bum licenses in certain areas that actual lock them in to not-so-great deals. By September we'll hopefully have some insight on the possibly sad situation. If you're looking to start programming then you'll find these tips very helpful. I give them my seal of approval and strongly recommend that you seriously adhere to them if you really want to try coding. Amanda Congdon has sadly left Rocketboom for seemingly conflicting reasons. She claims that her partner (the show's creator) no longer wanted to work with her while he claims (on the actual site) that she went on to pursue bigger and better things in Hollywood and he's unable to follow her. I trust her though as she even gave evidence for her side of the story. Lastly, if you want to see some cool infared photography, then check out this gallery.

I'm going to start off with multimedia today because we have so much of it. The first item is the trailer for Hollywoodland over at Yahoo Movies where Adrien Brody's character investigates the unsolved Hollywood mystery of George Reeves's death, the actor who formerly played Superman. It looks intriguing, but ever since King Kong I'm starting to wonder if Brody is right for his roles. There's also a trailer for Renaissance, which I don't know much about other than that it has a neat visual style that seems like a cross between A Scanner Darkly and Sin City. The last trailer I dug up is another one for The Science of Sleep, which I hope just isn't another overhyped out-of-the-box movie (like I <3 Huckabees). There's also a video of the Clerks II poster shoot floating around, which you'll appreciate if you're a fan of Rosario Dawson and won't want to miss. AICN's Massawyrm saw Pirates of the Caribbean 2 (though not much in advance, albeit) and is raving about it. Could this series be a double play for Verbinski? Maybe we'll find some time this weekend to scope it out. AICN also has word that Jean Claude Van Damme has signed on to be the villain in Rush Hour 3 from a reader presumably abroad who actually saw him speak about it on a British television show. Is this good news? Lastly, we have a few new pictures from The Illusionist, and I just thought I'd post one because I'm interested to see how the movie turns out.



Now for the Wednesday Mind Hump:

1. Are you a workaholic, or lazy? Or in between?
I'm pretty close to a workaholic. I know my boundaries, but I'm not satisfied unless I meet my goals for a day or get decent close to them.

2. Do you think people are overworked today, or do you think they manage a good balance of work and non-work life?
I think that students are actually get overworked nowadays. I don't mean college students, because they've always been worked hard and I think it's part of forming a good work ethic, but younger kids really have too much to do. I know that I spent a lot of time doing stupid busy work that didn't really benefit me intellectually.

3. What's one job that you'd glady put in hour and hours of overtime for?
Other than programming? I guess if I was a video game tester or something.

4. Fun, random question: Do you prefer hot dogs or hamburgers at a cookout, and why?
Hamburgers, because you can make the patties from scratch to ensure that you know where it all comes from and do special stuff with it even like putting garlic and onions and stuff right on the patty for an enhanced grilling experience. Can you tell that my stomach was pleased with me Monday? I can't even remember the last time I had hot dogs at a BBQ.