AT&T CEO Proves He's a Tyrant

Randall Stephenson, head honcho of AT&T raises questions of prior LSD use by standing up in front of a crowd at the Mobile World Congress and saying that the iPhone App Store is bad for consumers.  He suggested that cell carriers should sell apps to customers and they should all be written using HTML5.  An idiotic statement like that is most assuredly the result of an acid flashback.

The Wholesale Applications Community (aptly named WAC) is a consortium of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile.  By their way of thinking, apps should be universal and run on all mobile operating systems.  Sounds good in theory, but has that ever worked anywhere?...for anything?  Isn't that what Java was supposed to do?  The problem with universal code is that everything has to be coded to the lowest common denominator to be certain it works everywhere.  The result is slow, crappy apps that run equally terribly on everything you install them on.

I think this is just a play for the cell providers to try and divert the flood of money flowing into the Apple App Store and the Android Marketplace.  Why?  Because the cell companies aren't getting a cut!  I say TO HELL WITH THEM!  They tried selling their own apps.  Remember that?  Before Apple broke their backs by telling AT&T how things were going to be if they were to get iPhone exclusivity, consumers paid through the nose for even the simplest of apps for their phones.  We couldn't watch YouTube.  We had to view video through the cell carriers' portals and got charged through the nose for airtime.  We paid $18.99 for weather apps we now get for free.  Apple and Google have liberated us from that kind of cell provider tyranny.  Tell me Mr. Stephenson, how is that bad for us?

Memory Time!

One of the best ways to upgrade your Mac's performance is to add memory, second only to installing a fast SSD.  While SSD prices are still so high you can get a nose bleed just thinking about one, RAM prices are getting downright cheap.  When I bought my 17" MacBook Pro in August 2009, Apple wanted a whopping $1200 to upgrade the RAM from the standard 2 gigs to 8 gigs!  I chose the less painful ($200) 4 gig option instead, but I've always wished for the beefier configuration.  That's why I nearly wet myself when I went to macsales.com the other day and saw they were offering the 8 gig (2 X 4 GB) kit for my MBP for $110!  WTF? I checked and double-checked the price and specs to make sure it was the right RAM for my (5,2) MBP and sure enough it was.  I couldn't click the "Add to cart" button fast enough.  Just a year ago I bought a 4 gig (2 X 2 GB PC-8500 DDR3 @ 1066 MHz) for my new 27" iMac for the same price.  I remember checking the price of the 8 gig kit then and it was still more than I wanted to pay at $500.  In 12 months RAM prices have fallen by nearly a factor of 5!

If you've been thinking about adding more brain cells to your Mac, I'd suggest you visit the folks at Other World Computing (macsales.com) because you may be pleasantly surprised by how cheap RAM has gotten in the last year.