Apple Sauce

Nose strips only make you dorky, not faster. The Curmudgeon pointed to this story which says that those plastic strips which are supposed to increase the airflow through your nose don't help athletic performance at all. Apple has mastered bench-marketing. In the presentation this afternoon, Apple posted benchmarks comparing their iMacs to a Gateway Astro. Astros aren't even manufactured anymore, nor were they ever intended as machines to run Quake III on, which is what this benchmark was all about. I also question the validity of their Photoshop benchmark, considering that it showed the G4 took 45 seconds for some test, a Sony VAIO PIII-600 took 130, and a Dell WebPC PIII-600 took 180. How much can this benchmark have to do with CPU power, if two machines running the exact same CPU had such wildly different scores? Of course, no details were provided about RAM, hard disk, etc.

I did manage to stump one of the Apple guys with this simple question: "Brent, exactly what market is Apple targeting with their G4 Cube product?" He looked at me and said: "I have no idea". It's too expensive too be a low-end product and too wimpy to be a high-end product.

I searched the web (using Google) for my grandfather's name yesterday. I found this story, written by him, about an incident during World War II. He's told me it before, but never with this much detail, here's a bit:

"Ein moment," she said, only to disappear and return shortly with a key and pointed to a door. I unlocked the door and entered to find myself confronted by two Kraut non-coms in their underwear. They grabbed their lugers—and handed them to me. I never got my 45 out of the holster, but I had forgotten it was April Fools Day. And it wasn’t a "wasser kloset" after all.

Apple is doing a presentation in our building later today. Anyone who wants to come is invited, there will be free food, etc. Maybe I can sucker the Apple reps into taking me out for lunch before the show. Details are here.