Day: February 2, 2010

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Irresistible iPad Video… and One Notsomuch Irresistible

And continuing the dissing of Apple’s latest bid to leech money from suckers, this article and discussion at PCMagazine’s site compels me to respond (here, because with a couple hundred W3C errors on the PCMag page, wouldn’t you know that one of ’em is making my comment submission fail). But first, the “official” Apple iPad intro:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDNVAgxOIew

Apple: “The best web surfing experience, the best email experience, the best photo and movie watching experience… ” And no, I did NOT add the emphasis. Just watch the thing. It’s in the original Apple video.

These claims are simply over the top, unsupportable, ridiculous. NONE of those experiences on a 9.7″ screen with NO keyboard and tiny lil speakers can be “the best” anything.

Also from the video, “…a screen THIS large…” *feh* As large as my usual 23″ widescreen I’m using to view this page? “Large” is silly. Large compared with a iPhone? Sure, but that’s not what 99% of folks use for their primary web browsing and email and video viewing experiences. For a reason. Actually, many reasons.

Contrast the iPad’s really minimalist feature set (designed to do almost nothing but sell more media from Apple) to something like the ASUS Eee PC T91MT Multi-touch (convertible, on the fly) Tablet Netbook. 32GB SSD (+500GB included online storage), actual keyboard and touchpad for real computing needs, USB, media card slots, WiFi, Bluetooth and more… for $115 less than the base 32GB SSD iPad.

Add 3G hardware to the iPad and bump it up another $130, but add the same functionality with an UNLOCKED 3G USB peripheral to the ASUS unit? Easily done for about $50. Oh, and did I mention almost unlimited inexpensive expandability for the lil ASUS via the USB ports?

What’s to like about the iPad in comparison to the lil ASUS?

Well, the chief “benefits” of the iPad seem to be paying (lots) more for (a lot) fewer features and being locked into the Apple Straight Jacket. Woo-hoo! Sign me up to blow more of my money for fewer features!

Not.

Caveat: I don’t own one of them–yet; gotta save those nickels and dimes, folks–but I gather from users that the first thing to do with one of the lil ASUS comps is UNinstall the preinstalled Touch Gate software, since it is just a hanger-on from when the comp was designed to be able to run XP with multi-touch. Win7 Home Premium (preinstalled) has all the multi-touch capabilities built in.

BTW, the lil ASUS unit has been in the channel since at least November of last year, and numerous tablet notebooks abound. So, tell me exactly, just what’s so new and ground-breaking about the iPad? Oh, the Apple book/media store? Kindle for PC, and Barnes and Noble’s eBook offerings alone top 1,000,000 in the ePub and pdf formats, downloadable without a B&N nook and usable on a PC, why! even on a lil ASUS (or any other) tablet PC with higher screen resolutions than the iPad.

Color me unimpressed with the iPad. Just another way for Apple to con suckers out of more money in the Apple Straight Jacket Store.

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Gullibility: Bad; Skepticism: Good

First, the obvious denotative meanings:

gullible: easily duped or cheated

skeptical: relating to, characteristic of, or marked by skepticism: 1 : an attitude of doubt or a disposition to incredulity either in general or toward a particular object
2 a : the doctrine that true knowledge or knowledge in a particular area is uncertain b : the method of suspended judgment, systematic doubt, or criticism characteristic of skeptics

I’d bet the post title led regular readers to think this post’d be about politics. Well, it could as easily have been, but no.

I am, on the one hand, amused by all the spam I still get that attempts to gull me into opening infected attachments. I filter my email two ways, so spam in my inbox is way down from the hundred per day I once received to just a few a day. But still, I get at least 3 or 4 emails a week with infected attachments that some spammer thinks he can fool me into opening. Such as,

Microsoft has released an update for Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express. This update is critical and provides you with the latest version of the Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express and offers the highest levels of stability and security.

Instructions

* Install Update for Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express (KB910721). To do this, follow these steps:
1. Run attached file officexp-KB910721-FullFile-ENU.exe
2. Restart Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express

Riiiight. As though Microsoft sent out critical updates as email attachments. Not. Any moron with more active brain cells than a head of cabbage would sneer at this attempt to gull users into self-infection. I didn’t even bother to rescan the thing, since it didn’t get flagged by resident AV on its way in (some don’t, you know). The “sender” was… me. That’s right, the email header was forged to make it appear that I sent the email that was supposedly from Microsoft to myself.

Silly spammer. As though such silly stunts would fool me. I do have more active brain cells than a head of cabbage. Just. *heh*

I don’t know how anyone who is able to press the “On” button on a computer could be stupid enough to fall for that, but surely after viewing the following information, even a head of cabbage would hesitate to open any attachment:

(Yeh, I smudged some of the info in this image expanded header.)

Of course, if I’d been either operating Thunderbird Portable in a sandbox or viewing my mail in a Mint or PCBSD VM at the time, I’d have played around with the attachment a bit. As it is, I didn’t even open it in a sandbox with a text editor. Why play with it when I know I’d just end up deleting it anyway?

So I did. Just delete it. With extreme prejudice.

(BTW, I regularly use an “eraser” utility to scrub any files quarantined by AV, as well as to scrub both free space on my drives and page files on boot. Just sayin’.)