After having a beer and posting a long rant about Windows XP

Good afternoon all:

You’ve read my long rant about Windows XP, its impending expiration, and what you can do about it.

I expect we’ll see as much panic in the mainstream press over this as we did over the Y2K crisis. Remember that? That’s when a lot of executives realized that to save room, they had their mainframe programs use only 2 digits to indicate a year. That brought a lot of old COBOL programmers a nice extra paycheck.

I think NBC put together a Movie-Of-The-Week where Y2K essentially brought life on Earth to a standstill. Lots of explosions and scantily clad starlets running around screaming. Ah, the good old days.

Now on to other matters. I believe we’ve lost our privacy. Now we have to trust in boredom. Scarlett Johannesson is probably getting a lot of attention as a suspected member of Al-Queda. At least, that’s what the NSA analysts are telling their bosses. And Megan Fox. Even Sharon Stone. Kerry Washington? Definitely….

But you and I get the once-over quickly. Now if the NSA gets into targeted ads-gotta make up the trillion-dollar deficit somehow-we can expect all kinds of junk mail in our inboxes.

Now I can just hear those NSA analysts about how I, another cog in the Federal government, don’t appreciate the vital role they play.

I would refer you to a recent New Rules segment by Bill Maher. Bill Maher ran a slide of the MK-54, the so-called “suitcase nuke”. These have been around since the 1950s, so my guess-not Bills-is that constructing one of these has become an engineering problem and not a problem for nuclear physicists. Do we want our government keeping an eye and ear on whomever wants to make one or buy one on the black market? Yes, I do. You don’t make novelty coffee tables out of this.

And the pictures are available for a quick Google search.

So Remember guys, you’re looking for this:

And not this:

AT least not during business hours!

But Back to Apple News Now…

Apple Keeping an Eye on Inventory Levels

Now inventory isn’t as sexy as new Retina iPad Minis, iOS 7, and OS X Mavericks. Apple must keep an eye on its levels on inventory. It keeps plenty in the pipeline for high-volume products, such as the iPhone and iPad. Other products, such as the Mac Mini, not so much. This article in Appleinsiderexplains what’s going on and why it might take longer than you think to get that particular Mac you wanted.

 

Obama vetoes ban of Apple products proposed by International Trade Commission

No, this veto doesn’t affect new products. It relates to stuff in the past. But I think we can all agree it points to the Chief Executive having an iPhone in his pocket instead of a Galaxy. And Apple having successfully lobbied more Senators than Samsung did. Here’s the Appleinsider article.

Handy New App to Play with

 

Mac360 has a new program launching app to play with. It’s called Apptivate. I’m playing with it right now and I’ll have a report on its usefulness later.

Tom Briant

Editior, MacValley Blog