The elimination of the vendor's often cryptic and bloated scanner interfaces and arcane setups (I speak of HP's Photosmart stuff, but others have related similar stories on their scanners) has now been replaced by the incorporation of scanning into Image Capture and also in a tab on the print dialog.

Hurray! No more launching massive programs to do what is not part of the input/output dialogs.

Trivia: SigAlerts were named for Loyd Sigmon, the first radio traffic reporter and co-owner of an LA based AM radio station, whose Los Angeles based traffic reporting was the stuff of legends. He called his reports SigAlerts, and the name stuck. He invented a device to grab LAPD police band broadcasts and record them. He passed away in 2004 at age 95.

http://www.snopes.com/autos/hazards/sigalert.asp

After the recent policy change on data plans for 2G iPhones, I am finally considering jailbreaking my 2G iPhones.

You used to be able to shut down the data plan on the non-subsidized 2G iPhone. My son, who has ubiquitous WiFi all over campus, and myself, who has city-wide WiFi, has no need of the data plan, but AT&T has changed the configurator to no longer allow removing the data plan, nor will customer support shut it off anymore either.

They also have no plans on returning the $400 difference between the $599 unsubsidized price of the 2G and the $199 subsidized price of the 3g/s.

Will jailbreaking (and some really kewl app then available) allow me to spoof the AT&T network into thinking the connected device is NOT an iPhone or is the IMEI database just gonna pick it up anyway?

Apple tried this years ago - the bandwidth demand was completely outside of any possible reality (kinda like the Victoria Secret's online fashion show). It will be up on Apple, probably tonight, to watch, when demand will not be everyone at once.

One other point: it has been said that Apple is a closed proprietary environment. I would argue the exact opposite. Yes, their hardware is closed, consistent, and show little diversity, which reduces software complexity. And yes, the hardware may, in some instances cost more, although X Serves are significantly cheaper than say, a Dell server, particularly when you add Windows licensing costs.

However the real cost is in the data, not the commodity hardware. Almost every software package that Apple produces either stores data in non-proprietary, documented open formats, or provides the translation capability to get there. The vast majority of Microsoft data uses closed proprietary formats, which, in effect, holds your data assets hostage; you are forced to stay with Microsoft, or go with an expensive conversion effort. Too bad MS is incapable of competing on features and capabilities, but instead has to rely on blackmail.

I have run a few IT shops, the largest with 262,000 desktop computers and over 40,000 servers, in 122 countries. We tracked IT costs in great detail. The total cost of a PC desktop over a 3 year life, vs. an OS X machine over the same life worked out to be a revelation. The Mac cost about 14% of the Windows machine. Although these costs are based on a large corporate population, very similar issues are faced by individuals every day.

This cost includes support costs, help desk, anti-malware, and a significant cost in dealing with configuration management issues. Unlike a Mac, every variation of hardware in a PC requires a different software image to be installed - ghosted - as Windows only installs what matches the hardware configuration. Different chip sets for video, I/O, controllers, interfaces, etc. all have different driver configurations, and compatibility issues. The Windows problems of DLL hell, with version control of shared DLLs for different software packages interacting and causing software failures; the registry issues with corruption from a variety of sources, and the compatibility testing for applications, all added to the cost.

The more the back end infrastructure was Microsoft based, the more costly it was to operate, and even more costly to interoperate. The system administration resource for a Windows server is almost 30 times more than the server administration resources for a similar performance OS X server, and more than 3 times the cost of a UNIX server. WIth all the proprietary formats of Microsoft products, from Office versions, to ActiveX, to the bastardized IMAP format of Exchange calendaring, to the proprietary Outlook file format, to their proprietary kerberos implementation, to Active Directory's limited support for all things NOT Microsoft - these all add massive costs to managing an IT infrastructure.

And this says nothing of the lost time from long boot times, or lost time, and even worse, lost corporate data from system hangs and blue screens of death.

Microsoft's penchant for making everything proprietary to Microsoft creates massive costs for moving off Windows, but the cost of staying with Microsoft is huge as well. The latter costs you forever; the former costs you once, and reduces your cost from that time forward.

Just like GSM vs. CDMA, the US will adopt competing and mutually incompatible standards and therefore no standard at all, and we will have to build out redundant infrastructure - again. Other places in the world adopted a single technology standard, and then competing on features - our country deploys redundant approaches, which makes neither as prolific as it should be, and spends zillions on building out the dual infrastructure, instead of adding user capabilities.

Head in the sand approach - typical.

Part of the reason that the iPhone is such a success, is that it can be deployed to most of the world. If it were on Verizon, it would be the US, Canada, S. Korea and Japan, and although that is a substantial market, it ain't the world.

Pick regular gauge railroads or narrow gauge, so that you don't have to develop and support 2 different incompatible trains.

This stuff is a hobbyist-hacker toy, not something that one would wager their livelihood on. However, I have a decidedly enterprise view - one that, although lives with a plurality of Windows boxes, is not by choice, but by vendor (Microsoft) design.

I am in a somewhat unique position to comment on this, having been part of the development team for the original IBM PC, but also the co-founder of the world’s first Mac user group. I've run IT shops with as many as 262,000 desktop computers - about 10% of them Mac OS X machines. Tracking the total cost of ownership, which includes acquisition cost, support manhours, help desk, application installation, operating systems upgrades, and back end integration into servers, databases, security, etc. Macs cost me 1/10th to 1/25th the operational cost of a PC.

Caveat: The more the infrastructure (servers and back office applications) are proprietary, non-standards compliant Microsoft products, the more if costs to get the OS X machines integrated into the environment.

In addition, the Mac’s minimum hardware diversity is a key factor in platform stability (less drivers to support), and the real reason to be concerned about OS X running on unsupported platforms in anything but a hobbyist environment.

This cost insight is the significant irony - the argument that the proprietary Macs are more costly does not hold up under scrutiny. Ignoring that a similarly equipped Dell - the better built corporate machines, not the consumer junk - is more expensive than the Mac equivalent in all categories, acquisition cost of computing hardware is inconsequential in the overall cost of a computer in an enterprise. This acquisition cost is so insignificant compared to the costs associated with the proprietary nature of Microsoft generated data and applications. This Microsoft data (e.g Office file formats), protocol (e.g. Exchange's bastardized IMAP protocol for calendaring), standards breaking IE, ActiveX, and applications interdependencies (e.g. Application servers, email servers, collaboration servers, active directory dependencies) locks you into the a suite of Microsoft only products, and places significant financial barriers to entry for any other player.

Companies that have adopted proprietary, and therefore, restrictive, Microsoft based platforms, applications, protocols, and data format, have pigionholed their companies into a situation with no clear financial migration strategy. Pinning one's hopes to a single vendor is an exercise fraught in peril, placing you at the whim of the vendor (Vista is a recent case-in-point). And with the costs of a Windows environment 4-10x more than a Mac environment, this is no small cross to bear.

The real key is using data formats that are application portable, application functions that have multiple alternative vendor solutions, and an environment that does not lock you into the agenda of a single vendor, all the while, creating a low cost of ownership, and minimal barriers to user acceptance. OS X provides this, as almost every effort is made in OS X to support interoperability between applications and transparent data transfer/translation. The only things that ever seem to create problems, is attempting to integrate with the proprietary (and prevalent) world of Windows back end infrastructure.

Yes, fewer applications exist on OS X (last published number of native applications was more than 25,000), but virtually every functional capability of alternative platforms, including Windows, exists on OS X. Due to consistency in human interface guidelines, and a rabid user community that demands high quality, Mac applications are easier to train users on, and studies show Mac users regularly run a broader range of applications and functionality - resulting in the computer as a tool that garners more productivity across a greater number of user skills.

I have yet to find a PC user, that, when forced to use a Mac exclusively for 30 days, has ever wanted to return to a PC - the exception being a dependency on some proprietary data that cannot be manipulated in a OS X application. "Course I only have data on a quarter of a million machines to rely on, so my insights may not be as dependable as Joe Hacker-on-a-PC.

Windows does have one winning statistic - the platform just went over 1,000,000 known virus application, while OS X has zero. Oh, well, you can't win them all. You have no idea what costs that creates in a corporate environments. The financial bailout pales in comparison.

Apple Tax? Huh? If you compare any laptop in the Apple lineup, against equivalently featured (size, screen RESOLUTION (not just size), ports, etc. Sony, Lenovo, even Dell and HP QUALITY machines (not the consumer grade junk, with flimsy hinges, low res, poor quality displays, heavy, thick plastic garbage), the Apple gear is always less expensive, and often 10-20% less.

Part of this is consistent internals. With PC hardware, you pay a serious premium to get the same chipset over a large number of machines - makes managing Windows images far easier. Consumer grade PCs vary in internals from machine to machine, but this variability also increases instability. Apple's legendary stability comes from a limited variability of internal hardware, so that the software/drivers/etc. undergo rigorous development and testing discipline.

The same cost saving is true of desktop and server boxes, with the XServe way, way less expensive (large % in CALS, but still a good hunk in hardware $$s.

I have over 1500 cards - I maintain about 850 in my address book, most of which have been manually entered, and probably only about 20% of which I have the business card for. Love to get the rest of them into an automated search environment.