Worth Your Consideration 001 - A GF5 Linkdump

“Other sites have linkdumps, so why not Geek Force Five?”

Well, that’s a good question, Laddie. And I don’t have a good answer. So, here you go:

• The teaser for Kevin Smith’s next film, Zack and Miri Make a Porno (previously mentioned here), has been pulled off of the Internet by the MPAA. Apparently, Kevin’s production company forgot to follow some “important guidelines” or something. Have I mentioned how much I love the MPAA lately?
• The lack of ‘Mac’ branding on certain posters spotted at the Moscone Center in San Francisco (where Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference will begin on Monday) has made the natives restless. Mac Rumors’s Page 2 is wondering if this signals the arrival of OS X for PCs. I, for one, hope it does. I’m sick of seeing poor John Hodgman so mopey all of the time in those Mac vs PC commercials. If he were running OS X, he’d be much happier, right? Isn’t that the idea?
• Apple retailers in Australia have received packages they’re not supposed to open until after the WWDC keynote. This is exciting only because it means some Australian dude is going to be sued by Apple for opening a box ahead of time and leaking photos of the new iPhone onto the Interweb. And we all love a lawsuit, don’t we?

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Newsarama Can Haz RSS?!?

Congratulations to comic book news site Newsarama on their recent redesign, and on finally joining the 21st century and hooking all of us readers up with some RSS love. I have been wanting to subscribe to a Newsarama RSS feed ever since the day I signed up for a Google Reader account a couple of years ago. They remain my favorite site for comics-related news, but I haven’t been getting over there more than once a week lately because I haven’t had Google Reader to remind me that new articles are up. I guarantee that I’ll be visiting more often now, which, I guess, contradicts the commonly held belief that RSS feed availability contributes to dwindling page-views. But hey, I’m weird.

Any Geek Forcers have sites that they visit regularly that still don’t provide RSS? Tell your stories of woe in the comments.

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Free iPod Touch For College Students

Buy a Mac for college and get a free iPod. That’s the deal that Apple is offering students, faculty, and staff at American universities this summer. VentureBeat thinks this is a huge deal and marks the beginning of the end of desktop computing.

Apple can get students started using their free iPod Touches. Then perhaps they opt to upgrade to an iPhone. Then maybe they’ll buy a new Mac Tablet or Newton-type device if and when it comes out. You can kiss the desktop computer goodbye. It’s time to start training the young minds of today about the future of computing: mobile.

I think VentureBeat is getting a little overexcited here. The deal is a great one, and the college campus, with its potentially ubiquitous Wi-Fi, is one of the only places where having an iPod Touch makes sense to me (otherwise, why not just get an iPhone?), but you have to take into account that, on certain university campuses, like the one I work on, the iPod Touch doesn’t work, thanks to VPN or other security software that’s in place.

A device that relies on Wi-Fi alone is never going to make a big splash, in my opinion, because free Wi-Fi isn’t as easy to find as Apple’s PR department would have us believe. And mobile computing on handhelds (in concert with affordable laptops) might kill the desktop, but it’s never going to kill the laptop. People still need keyboards, and most of us still want screens bigger than 3.5 inches to do any seriously involved work on.

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Obama and Firefox vs. Clinton and Safari

I’ve been using Safari as my primary Web browser for quite a while now, on both my iMac at home and on my Dell laptop on the road and at my office. Aside from some rendering issues that I’ve experienced while browsing Google Analytics, I’ve been entirely pleased with my experience. Safari is a great browser. It’s elegant, it’s simple, and it’s pretty darned fast. And, most importantly for me, I have enjoyed having the same program available to me on both of my computers. It has definitely lessened the mental workload involved in switching between platforms every day.

However, with the recent news of a Safari bug that, in combination with an Internet Explorer bug, could do significant damage to a Windows computer, I’ve had to reconsider my options. I’m not going to use IE on a daily basis, because its ugly and it renders Webpages like crap. So, I’ve decided to go back to Firefox (release candidate 1 of FF3, to be exact).

I’m about as thrilled to be going back to Firefox as I am about Barack Obama becoming the Democratic nominee for president, which is to say I’m not very thrilled about it at all. I’ll go along with Obama, and with Firefox, because the cool kids think that each is what’s good for me, but I’m not going to like it.

I guess, when I get right down to it, it’s not so much about disliking Firefox or about disliking Obama (though I still don’t see what everyone else finds so compelling about him). Instead, it’s about me wishing that the candidate (Clinton) and the browser (Safari) that I’ve been supporting were the ones that were coming out on top.

Call me a sore loser, if you wish, or a contrarian, if you must. I just think that there are better options out there than what we’re going to end up with. It’s just that the people behind those options can’t get there heads out of their asses long enough to come up with a winning strategy. Apple refuses to take the Safari bug seriously enough. Clinton’s strategists ran an old-school attack-centric campaign in a year when people were already bummed out enough as it was, in a year when all people really wanted was a little hope and a little bit of positive energy, instead of all the old bullshit.

It bums me out that the people and the companies I support are stupid sometimes, but them’s the breaks, as the saying goes. Dem’s da breaks.

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iPhone 3G Pricing Information

Rumors are flying over at Mac Rumors about pricing information for the new iPhone, which is due to be announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference next week. Citing “unconfirmed whispers,” Mac Rumors is saying that the new iPhone will be priced at $499 or $699, depending on the size of the hard drive inside. That $499 price-point for the low-end model is $100 higher than the price-point of the current iPhone, and it will officially put the device out of my price range (if the rumors are true).

I can only hope that the rumor Kevin Rose is hearing, the one about a $200 low-end model, is closer to the truth than what Mac Rumors is reporting.

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