You can’t stop Dan Moren, you can only hope to contain him. Oh, wait, what’s this? You can stop him. If you’re a virus. Powered by nine years of Under the Knife, these are your remainders for Friday, October 1, 2010.
How Apple dodged a bullet (gdgt)
Peter Rojas of gdgt.com takes us back to five years ago, when speculation about an Apple phone was reaching a fever pitch. Back then, the latest and greatest idea was for companies to lease network capacity and become Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs). (You might remember MVNOs from such failed phone services as ESPN Mobile and Amp’d Mobile.)
Basically, MVNO’s seemed like a good idea, but in the end they just didn’t make it. If Apple had gone down that path, Apple wouldn’t have had to partner with AT&T, but it would’ve been reselling mobile service… and Rojas argues, it would’ve been just as big a disaster as some of those other MVNOs. If you’ve ever wondered what would have been worse than Apple signing a years-long exclusivity agreement with AT&T… this might be it.
Google fixes the Untitled Document Problem (Sawyer McFarland Media)
Web-design writer and teacher (and Macworld contributor) David Sawyer McFarland writes about an interesting fix Google has made to its search engine. If you create a web page in Adobe Dreamweaver and don’t manually give it a title, it’s named “Untitled Document” by default. Do a Google search for “Untitled Document” and you’ll find millions of pages by that name.
But it turns out Google has recently tweaked its search engine to deal with this issue. Now Google results for pages with the title of “Untitled Document” are, in large part, named with something approximating what they’re actually about. Kudos to whatever clever Google engineer realized that this was a problem and decided to fix it. Sadly, if you search for “Welcome to GoLive CyberStudio” you’ll still find more than 2,400 old, untitled Web pages.
Apple’s Steve Wozniak appears on CBS’s Big Bang Theory (MacRumors)
On Thursday’s episode of The Big Bang Theory, the show’s main characters spotted Woz having dinner at The Cheesecake Factory. (His dinner companion appears to be his real-life wife, Janet Hill.)
In the episode, Woz is approached for an autograph by Sheldon, who is operating a remote presence robot for reasons far too situationally comedic to go into here. Spoiler alert: The episode ends with Sheldon laying at the bottom of his stairwell with a smashed-to-bits Apple II. (And presumably some Cheesecake Factory patron makes off with the robot.)
FaceTime hits prime time on Hawaii Five-O (Engadget)
It turns out that FaceTime’s not just for dads in hotel rooms talking to their kids. It’s also for punks and guys who solve crimes and, just perhaps, punks who solve crimes.
By which I mean, if you are not of retirement age and missed Monday night’s episode of the rebooted Hawaii Five-O on CBS, you missed FaceTime in action! (What is it with Apple and CBS this week?)
That’s right, folks. The show that made Jack Lord a household name (in ’70s households) is now showcasing Apple technology in the solving, and fighting, of crime.
MacBook ’em, Danno.
(Ouch. Walk it off. You’ve got the weekend to recover. With any luck, Dan Moren will be in the pink by then.)