Mythbustin' the Moon

Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage, special effects experts better known as the "MythBusters", just crushed the conspiracy theorists that said the moon landings were fake. "Do we really think that the same government that screwed up so badly during the Watergate scandal could have perpetrated the moon hoax? Come on!" "There seems to be a common tendency among conspiracy theorists, as well as among a lot of people with entrenched belief systems, to get stuck on an idea and never give up. Conspiracy theories are not really a special category -- maybe you can call them myths, but I look at them as an obsession that people want to maintain, like being abducted by aliens, Bigfoot and so on. You can't really expect that reasonable evidence will change anyone's mind if they are determined," observed Hyneman.

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Apple products selling well for both home and business users

The Baltimore Sun's David Zeiler writes that Business suddenly discovers the Mac. "Mac use in businesses rose from 1.1 percent in October 2006 to 4.5 percent in June of this year, according to a report by analyst Benjamin Gray of Forrester Research released Friday and made public by eWeek’s Joe Wilcox."

"Finally, Gray offers this reason for Mac growth among businesses: “Tech populism drives younger, more tech-savvy workers to buy whatever they need to work smarter, faster, and cheaper.”

Today’s students are tomorrow’s young workers, and ever-higher numbers of them are Apple customers. In a report released earlier this month research firm IDC said Apple had regained the lead in notebook sales from Dell with 36.5 percent of the market. Dell sunk to 27.1 percent.

“What we’ve seen over the past couple of years is a significant increase in the number of students who own an Apple laptop or Apple desktop or plan to buy one,” Eric Weil of Student Monitor, a research company focused on college students, told Investor’s Business Daily."

Suzanne Choney of MSNBC wrote that Macs continue to gain in home, business share.
"More home users, and a growing number in the small business sphere, are opting to move to Apple’s computers, their interest driven by positive experiences with Apple's other products, as well as disenchantment with the Windows world."

It's been good news for the Apple iPhone as well this week as AT&T has announce new pricing plans for travelers. Also it seems that Apple has been vindicated because recently a Swedish firm has tested the iPhone 3G antenna and found no problems! Interestingly the new BlackBerry suffering same 3G connection drops as iPhone. This would seem to be some type of software problem as both phones use different chips. 

In other iPhone news it seems that some European users have also reported problems with being billed for data use even when they are on their home WIFI networks! Ouch!

Is Something Rotten at Apple?

"Apple's customer base is widening beyond longtime Mac fanatics—people who give the company a pass because they regard it as an underdog. The Mac's market share is growing rapidly, suggesting that lots of Windows users are switching. Last month, millions of people waited in line for the iPhone not because it was emblazoned with the Apple logo, but because they'd heard it was the best phone on the market. Combine that with the fact that the iPhone and MobileMe are vital to people's lives in a way that, say, an iPod isn't, and you've got a recipe for customer dissatisfaction. You may be willing to overlook Apple's silence about a dead battery on your MP3 player. But if the company continues to stonewall people whose phones cut off every five minutes, Steve Jobs better get ready for some marches on Cupertino."

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Apple Plans To Drown World In iPhones!

Forecasting iPhone sales is one of tech's toughest guessing games. Since Apple's iPhone 3G came storming out of the gate with 1 million units sold in the three days after it went on sale July 11, analysts have scrambled to come up with a reliable forecast for how many of the devices the consumer electronics maker will sell in the coming years.Many analysts expect Apple (AAPL) to sell around 11 million iPhone 3Gs in 2008 and another 25 million in 2009. But perhaps the most optimistic forecast is from Piper Jaffray (PJC) analyst Gene Munster, who expects the company to sell 13 million this year and 45 million next year.

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The ugly truth: Satan, social networks and security

SocNets and social media become more and more a part of our daily lives, and as the race to go to market and to gain marketshare continues, we think SocNet security will continue to become a larger problem, and recent activity seems to show that the appeal of a large and active userbase as a target for the malware industry is hard to ignore.

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Your Printer is lying to you, and what you can do about it.

Out of ink? Already? When Farhad Manjoo's Brother printer abruptly stopped zipping out prints, he began to wonder if the printer wasn't simply lying that it was out of toner in order to trick him into buying more before he needed it. The prints hadn't been fading at all, but the printer simply refused to go on without a new cartridge.

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Researchers Question Wide Use of HPV Vaccines

Two vaccines (Gardasil & Cervarix) against cervical cancer are being widely used without sufficient evidence about whether they are worth their high cost or even whether they will effectively stop women from getting the disease, two articles in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine conclude.

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