Parity Violation

Tax breaks sidetrack minimum wage bill - Yahoo! News … Shouldn’t the headline be GOP filibusters minimum wage - because that’s what happened here. They filibustered it because they want - gasp - more tax cuts. Damn Republicans.

Digging For The Truth - Atlantis: New Revelations is a show on the History channel that I’ve seen several ads for. Apparently the history channel is unaware that Atlantis is a complete myth … something Plato made up. Maybe the history channel should change its name to the Made Up Stuff Channel.

In looking at reaction to the iPhone, Thomas Fitzgerald echoes my earlier sentiments in posting about why no one has been able to compete with the iPod.

Simply put? The entire consumer electronics industry is focused on cramming in more features This is how they took on the iPod- oh, we’ll add DRM’ed wi-fi sharing and an FM tuner and voice recording and then people will buy our product. Mmm, that hasn’t worked has it?

So, here we have the iPhone and people seem to think that it does the same things other “smart phones” do. MMm, maybe - but perhaps it does them better. I still use a very simple cell phone. But, if the iPhone spawns different models at different price points, I could see myself getting one. I mean, mp3 players were not at all ubiquitous when the iPod debuted and now you see white earbuds everywhere.

The iPod succeeded by being the way to make music portable, not by cramming in features. The iPhone will be a success by being the best phone. We’ll see how it plays out, but I’d bet on the iPhone.

Salon writes about the Golden Globes, echoing my sentiment expressed late last year about the nominations in general…

… even more surprisingly, “Grey’s Anatomy” beat out “24,” “Lost,” “Big Love” and “Heroes,” for best TV drama. “Grey’s Anatomy” is a solid show, but with such strong competition, not to mention neglected dramas like “Battlestar Galactica” and “Friday Night Lights,” the oft-repeated words of Ellen Pompeo’s Meredith Grey came to mind: “Seriously? I mean, seriously?” Series creator Shonda Rhymes humbly echoed those words upon accepting her award.

Battlestar Galactica returns this Sunday.

Well, I’m very tempted by the newly re-christened AppleTV. I have had a iBook G3 functioning as sort of a media center for a while, and I even bought one of the infrared remotes for it… but the hard disk on it died a few weeks ago. So, it’ll cost $75 + cost of a 2.5″ drive to fix. That’s probably going to be $175 all totalled, unless I got a very small hard drive, and who wants that?

And, while I can display the iBook’s video on my tv, the interface is not that well suited for remote use … and it’s not taken advantage of the high-def display … so, I think I’m just going to sell the iBook, even broken, and put that money towards an AppleTV. We shall see.

The only catch is … can one browse by composer when using the AppleTV to listen to Music. That might be a deal breaker if I can’t. Also, will it really work with any Mac that runs OS X 10.3.9 and iTunes? Because if my pokey 400 MHz AGP G4 Mac can host all the media… that’d be pretty cool. I guess since the AppleTV has an Intel chip (which one, we don’t know) in it, the hosting computer need not have much horsepower. I don’t think my old Mac can even play iTunes video files … but presumably it can stream them to an AppleTV.

I haven’t posted in a while, so I feel like I should. Recent events include that I’ve been traveling for 3 weeks and finally get back home on Monday. Democrats took over Congress, and the press interviews…. John McCain. And Steve Jobs’ Macworld Expo keynote is on Tuesday.

Some sort of phone from Apple is all the buzz… as it has been since 2003. I’m not holding my breath. I expect to see more “iTV” news though, as well as more Leopard features.