smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

"You just flip the large toggle switch to ‘on’, pull the small trigger and off you go at a rate of 6ft/s. The original unit moved at 10ft/s, but it was almost too jarring." — hack-a-day write up on their field test of the brutal-looking rope ascender.

"More than a tale about a computer maker, this is the story about the age-old battle between mediocrity and excellence" — all the more poignant given my first taste of computing, an Amiga 500.

"Apple says it actually sold 270,000 iPhones in the first thirty hours (that’s about 150 iPhones per minute)." — it seems AT&T’s claim of 146,000 is based on fully activated services, not raw sales.. and the activation delays likely did not help one bit.

"A lot of IT infrastructure is fragile rickety crap, and the people responsible for it aren’t smart enough to fix it so they make rules and place blame.." — no, the ‘people responsible’ are cost-fixated management, not the grunts expected to support it

"After turning it back on, I received a grey screen with a blinking folder containing a question mark." — a timely reminder from Dave that [having] backups, rock.. and that hardware failures, suck.

"Until we publish our review of Apple’s iPhone on Saturday, June 30th at 6 PM PDT, come back here whenever the green light on the iPhone on the front pages of our websites flashes green." — quick Robin! to the bat iPhone! can we hype it? yes we can!

"GM flew me out to Pittsburgh, PA last weekend to check out Carnegie Mellon’s autonomous SUV compete in a DARPA site visit." — the inside scoop on one of the 2007 DARPA entrants, Carnegie Mellon, via Paul Stamatiou.. a good read for the geek within.

"Apple’s soon-to-be-launched iPhone will be irrelevant to business users because it is a "closed device" and does not support Microsoft Office, a senior executive with the software giant said.." — as apposed to closed software? .. pot. kettle. black.

The furvor surrounding the return of the C= Commodore Brand, in the form of dedicated gaming rigs, results in the ususal "cash in on geek nostalgia".

Whilst the designer case graphics are very swish indeed, it’s still just dressed-up off-the-self kit. #

"Macintosh computers appear to be making market-share gains in the home, opening the door to similar success in the enterprise." - aka how to make any system admin happy.