From Charlie’s Diary (Charlie Stross):

There are several good arguments for not using Apple’s computers. For one thing, they’re expensive; no cheap netbooks here. If money was all there was to it, I’d stick to generic cheap PCs — and indeed, I have run PCs in the past.

Are Mac’s more expensive? No. But Mac’s are not cheap devices, either.

The reason I choose to pay through the nose for my computers is very simple: unlike just about every other manufacturer in the business, Apple appreciate the importance of good industrial design.

John Gruber on the growing trend of newspapers which charge for access to the news on their websites.

The question these companies should be asking is, “How do we keep reporting and publishing good content?” Instead, though, they’re asking “How do we keep making enough money to support our existing management and advertising divisions?” It’s dinosaurs and mammals.

Do you feel like living dangerously? Take the fabled and famous BeOS, marry some of the pieces to an open source project, give it a new name, and Haiku is born.

Haiku is a new open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by the BeOS, Haiku is fast, simple to use, easy to learn and yet very powerful.

Haiku runs on most Intel PCs, recent Pentium models and up. No applications, no 64-bit version, but the price of intriguing agony is free.

Notebooks, even Macs, get stolen. Once it’s gone, what can you do to get it back? Orbicule’s Undercover. Petter Roisland’s MacBook was stolen, but Undercover provided enough information to track down the thieves:

Early this morning I received a new email from Orbicule. This time they received several pictures from the machine. The pictures were in an amazing quality - as if taken with a normal digital camera! They showed four people sitting behind the computer, and there was also a screenshot where one of them wrote his name.

After some research I found out that one of these persons was actually the leading drugs dealer in our region. I quickly gathered the pictures and gave them to the local police… The police called me to say they had received the necessary information from the ISP, and that they recovered my Mac.

On Mac360 we wrote about our Undercover experience a few years ago; here, here, and here.

Add this one to your list of This Is Very Cool™ items for Mac users who want to escape Adobe, Photoshop, and expensive tools. Sumo Paint is very cool and a quick look at what the future may bring. From Macworld UK:

If recently established rival SUMO Paint was a margarine it would be called “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Photoshop”. Because, although it’s entirely browser based and is powered by Flash, it has the look and feel of the world’s best image editorTM – from toolbox to layers palette.

It looks and feels like a mini version of Photoshop in a browser window. Photoshop is online, too. Is this the future of computing?

From MDN: AT&T to buy Verizon’s 1.5-million rural territories customers for $2.35-billion.

AT&T today announced a definitive agreement to acquire wireless assets from Verizon Wireless for $2.35 billion in cash. Under terms of the agreement, AT&T will acquire wireless properties, including licenses, network assets and 1.5 million current subscribers in 79 service areas, primarily in rural areas across 18 states.

That works out to over $1,500 per customer.

For the Mac do-it-yourselfer, the web site iFixit is a great resource:

We now have manuals for 91 Mac models, 34 iPods, and a couple of iPhones. Together, our media servers currently host 154,556 images (including revision history and thumbnails) and over 1,000 step-by-step guides.

And now a bombshell for do-it-yourself repair folks from iFixit:

Today, we are giving all that content to the world. Effective immediately, we are licensing all iFixit repair manuals under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. To my knowledge, this is the largest free release of repair documentation ever. We are committing to make our repair manuals available to everyone in the world, forever, for free.

That’s a strange business model, but thanks.