Gizmodo, the irreverent gadget site, did a great job with this one.

The story, “Apple Cancels All iPhone 3G Orders, Releases iBrick 3G,” starts:

Cupertino, California (Agencies). In a surprising move that is set to stun consumers all over the world, Apple has cancelled all orders for the iPhone 3G today. People who already bought the phones will get them replaced by Apple’s new wonderproduct, the iBrick 3G. “We think it’s the best thing we can do for our customers worldwide,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs declared in a conference call with analysts, “I mean, they won’t really notice the difference after trying to activate their iPhone 3G for the billionth time, would they? WOULD THEY?”

Be sure to read the whole thing.

United Airlines has joined the chorus of organizations blaming speculators for the dramatic rise in fuel prices.

Yes, prices are higher. Yes, there are more speculators. That doesn’t make a cause-and-effect. Perhaps there are more speculators because prices are rising — not vice-versa. That’s not the politically correct viewpoint, because it’s attractive to find a scapegoat.

And thus, we have an “open letter” to all airline customers, sent to me last week by United Airlines. It is also signed by AirTran Airways, Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Continental Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Hawaiian Airlines, JetBlue Airways, Midwest Airlines, Northwest Airlines, Southwest Airlines and US Airways.

An Open letter to All Airline Customers:

Our country is facing a possible sharp economic downturn because of skyrocketing oil and fuel prices, but by pulling together, we can all do something to help now.

For airlines, ultra-expensive fuel means thousands of lost jobs and severe reductions in air service to both large and small communities. To the broader economy, oil prices mean slower activity and widespread economic pain. This pain can be alleviated, and that is why we are taking the extraordinary step of writing this joint letter to our customers. Since high oil prices are partly a response to normal market forces, the nation needs to focus on increased energy supplies and conservation. However, there is another side to this story because normal market forces are being dangerously amplified by poorly regulated market speculation.

Twenty years ago, 21 percent of oil contracts were purchased by speculators who trade oil on paper with no intention of ever taking delivery. Today, oil speculators purchase 66 percent of all oil futures contracts, and that reflects just the transactions that are known. Speculators buy up large amounts of oil and then sell it to each other again and again. A barrel of oil may trade 20-plus times before it is delivered and used; the price goes up with each trade and consumers pick up the final tab. Some market experts estimate that current prices reflect as much as $30 to $60 per barrel in unnecessary speculative costs.

Over seventy years ago, Congress established regulations to control excessive, largely unchecked market speculation and manipulation. However, over the past two decades, these regulatory limits have been weakened or removed. We believe that restoring and enforcing these limits, along with several other modest measures, will provide more disclosure, transparency and sound market oversight. Together, these reforms will help cool the over-heated oil market and permit the economy to prosper.

The nation needs to pull together to reform the oil markets and solve this growing problem.

We need your help. Get more information and contact Congress by visiting www.StopOilSpeculationNow.com.

I am not convinced that more government regulation is the solution to the rise in oil prices.

What should one do on a hot summer week’s vacation? Go someplace hotter! From Saturday through Thursday, my wife and I hung out in Las Vegas, while our son attended a music workshop in Los Angeles.

The temperatures in Las Vegas were high, never dipping into double digits. Most days, the temp hovered around 105-107. On Wednesday, it hit 111. That’s toasty by any standard.

Fortunately, we were able to hop from one air-conditioned venue to another, and with rare exceptions we could park under cover.

Las Vegas is one of our favorite places to visit, and we go there often — even when we’re not in a gambling mood (as we weren’t this week). There are shows, there are buffets, there’s the beautiful desert, there are more buffets, there are outlet stores, and of course, there are buffets.

Here are a few of the many highs and few lows of the week.

Best Buffet on the Strip: We’ve always liked the Flavors Buffet at Harrah’s on previous trips, and it continued to impress.

Best Buffet off the Strip: The Feast Buffet at Sunset Station (1301 West Sunset, Henderson). This casino is a delight, with great decor and even a movie theater. The buffet was inexpensive and delicious. If you only visit casinos on the Strip and downtown, you’re not seeing Las Vegas.

Best Discount Outlets: Las Vegas Outlet Center, 7400 Las Vegas Blvd. (south of the Strip). Lots of great stores in an air-conditioned indoor mall.

Best High-End Outlets: Las Vegas Premium Outlets, 875 South Grand Central Pkwy. (north of the Strip). Lots of great stores in an outdoor shopping center.

Best Shopping Mall on the Strip: Tied between the Forum Shops at Caesar’s and the Miracle Mile Shops (part of Planet Hollywood).

Weirdest Food: The Hofbräuhaus Las Vegas (4501 Paradise at Harmon). We sat down, looked over the Bavarian menu and left without ordering.

Best Show to See: Went to the Phantom of the Opera at the Venetian. What an incredible performance!!!

Lamest Activity: There’s a $10 admission charge to visit the heavily promoted Ferrari dealership at the Wynn Casino. We decided to skip it.

Biggest Delight: Dunkin’ Donuts has returned to Las Vegas, after an absence of about a decade. Stumbling upon the store at 409 East Silverado Ranch Blvd. was a delight. The city’s first new store, which opened in October 2007, is worth the trip!

Biggest Disappointment: The Stage Deli in the Forum Shops at Caesar’s closed on June 29. Huge bummer — it was on our “must visit” list. (See the news report.)

Best Runner-Up: There’s a branch of Los Angeles’ Cantor’s Deli at Treasure Island. It’s okay, but we’d been looking forward to the Stage.

Viva Las Vegas, baby!

The Aribeco Observatory — the world’s largest radio telescope — is an essential tool for basic scientific research. It’s the home base for SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, and the source of data for the SETI@home program.

Founded in 1963, the Puertan Rican facility is well known for its affiliation with Cornell University and the late Carl Sagan, who used its 1000-foot-wide dish for many research projects.

I received this message today from the SETI@home team at the Univ. of California, Berkeley.

If you believe in the importance of astronomy and basic science research, your support only costs a few pennies, and could make a universe of difference.

Arecibo Observatory, the world’s largest radio telescope and the source for the SETI@home data that your computer analyzes, faces massive budget cuts that will END its ability to continue the search for life beyond Earth. The decision to ensure full funding currently rests upon votes in Congress on Senate Bill S. 2862 and House Resolution H.R. 3737. These bills desperately need more support.

Please take a moment to help us SAVE ARECIBO.

Clicking the link below will direct you to a web page that allows you print out letters prepared for your Senators and Congressional Representative urging them to support Arecibo. Printing and mailing the letters is really easy, too! You will also have the chance to add a few personal thoughts, if you wish, to let your Senators and Representative know why this funding is important to you! And if you’re really feeling passionate about saving Arecibo, please use these
letters as the basis for letters you write yourself, urging your congressmen and women to vote to save Arecibo.

Because our representatives in Congress rarely give much attention to all the email they receive, printing out and MAILING these letters via standard U.S. Postal mail remains our best option for contacting them and our best hope for saving Arecibo (The second best option is to call your representatives). Your 42 cent stamps on these letters could help us get the millions of dollars needed to save Arecibo.

Our search cannot continue without the necessary support. Your work, as SETI@home participants, represents an indispensable resource for conducting the search. Now, we need your help to ensure that our other most valuable resource – our eyes and ears to the cosmos – can continue to probe the universe as we seek to answer the question: Is there anybody out there?

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/arecibo_letter.php

Thank you for your help,

The SETI@home Team

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Portable Document Format. Thanks to PDF, you can distribute documents to people – and they can read it without knowing what type of application created it.

Consider the world before PDF’s debut in 1990. If someone sent you a legal contract to review, and it was created by WordPerfect, you couldn’t read it unless you had WordPerfect. If your architect created a drawing in AutoCAD, you couldn’t print it unless you had AutoCAD. Sure, your other word processing or computer-aided-design application might have a WordPerfect or AutoCAD import filter, but it might not render things precisely accurately.

In a world without PDF, the laser printer and the fax machine serve as the de facto document exchange standard. In our world, where data flows electronically, there are certainly plenty of ways of sharing content. XML, for example, lets you communicate the data within a contract or a CAD drawing. But when it comes to faithfully reproducing the look-and-feel of information, especially information that’s designed for paper instead of for pixels, nothing beats PDF. Nothing even comes close.

That’s why, for example, BZ Media uses PDF to distribute electronic editions of all three of its publications, SD Times, Software Test & Performance and Systems Management News. The fact that some pages are created in QuarkXPress, some in Adobe Illustrator, and some in Adobe InDesign, doesn’t matter a bit: we assemble a PDF, and that PDF is identical to the print editions. You can view the PDF version of the publication online, download it for your personal archive, e-mail it with friends, click on hyperlinks, print some or all of its pages on any printer. It’s portable, it’s platform-neutral and it’s open.

Best of all, it’s going to stay open. Adobe has been a remarkably good steward of PDF, and has eschewed attempts to lock it into specific platforms, or to force customers to purchase “premium” readers. Even so, I’m delighted that Adobe has surrendered the PDF format to the International Organization for Standardization, and that ISO has published version 1.7 of the PDF spec as ISO 32000-1:2008.

Alan Bryden, secretary-general of the standards body, said, “As an ISO standard, we can ensure that this useful and widely popular format is easily available to all interested stakeholders. The standard will benefit both software developers and users by encouraging the propagation and dissemination of a common technology that cuts across systems and is designed for long term survival.” That’s the point, exactly.

The Windows NT kernel and architecture, which are at the heart of Windows XP and Windows Vista, are getting more bloated all the time. Packed with every conceivable feature, Windows is home to a huge numbers of different APIs and programming models, object formats and legacy shim layers.

Microsoft needs a reboot — a fresh Windows architecture that ditches the past, and looks toward the future. A clean, new architecture for Windows would be faster, safer, more stable and better for the future than the hodgepodge we have today.

That’s a point I made in a pair of SD Times “Zeichick’s Take” columns published in early 2006. You can read them on my blog, under “Break from the past.”

I was happy to see a similar perspective published in the New York Times yesterday, where Randall Stross says that “Windows Could Use A Breath of Fresh Air.” The San Jose State Univ. professor called the hypothetical next-generation operating system “Windows OS X,” hearkening back to Apple’s Mach-based Mac OS X 10.0 debut in 2001.

Should Microsoft do this? Definitely. Will it happen? Undoubtedly. Will it be soon? No way.

Do you have a Kindle Wireless Reading Device? I don’t. One reason, quite frankly, is price. I couldn’t justify shelling out $399 for the device, sight unseen.

Amazon has just cut the price of the Kindle by 10%. But even so, I can’t justify paying $359 for an e-Book reader. Of course, that’s not the universal perspective. Amazon has had difficulty keeping the device in stock.

Currently, there are 133,788 items in the Kindle Store, ranging from books and journals to applications software, including a daily planner.

If you have a Kindle, let me know what you think of it. As for me, I’m waiting for the price to continue dropping. $99 is the right price for this non-early-adopter.

The Eclipse Ganymede release train rolls out tomorrow, June 25. As part of the festivities, the Eclipse Foundation is having a movie poster conference.

There are 35 great posters available, and you can even vote for your favorite. Sadly, I didn’t realize about the voting until now — and the polls close about 15 minutes from now. Dang!

But in any case, go check out the posters. Some of them are really good.

Last summer, the San Francisco Examiner ran a story that described about how thieves were grabbing portable GPS units out of cars. They’re still doing it.

According to “Auto break-in epidemic hits South City,” published in August 2007, auto break-ins in South San Francisco were up more than 30 percent, as crooks targeted GPSes — and that such thefts can happen really fast:

In a knit cap and dark clothing, a man walked up to a car parked in the South San Francisco Police Department parking lot and shattered the driver’s-side window with a common tool. As glass rained onto the concrete, he unlocked the door and snatched the GPS device suctioned to the front window. The crook — played by Officer John Stankewicz in the simulation — took only 30 seconds to grab the device and get away.

This issue surfaced today, when a good friend reported that her Garmin GPS was stolen, in broad daylight, from a public parking lot in the Bay Area. How? Someone smashed a window and took it.

Never leave the GPS, or its cable or a suction-cup mount visible in plain sight. Lock them in the glove box, the trunk, or other storage area. If the hardware or its accessories are visible, your car is a target.

Yesterday, June 23, 2008, was the 20th anniversary of the launch of Mathematica.

My first experience with Mathematica came in 1990, when I was editor of Miller Freeman’s AI Expert magazine. I loved the software — it was incredible. It was very useful for developing and modeling AI techniques such as genetic algorithms and neutral networks, as well as general problem solving.

In mid-1991, we were approached by Addison-Wesley to see if we wanted to purchase The Mathematica Journal. I was asked if I was familiar with the technology … and responded enthusiastically. After the deal was done, I served as Editor and later Associate Publisher of the Journal.

Not only did we have a great team on the Journal (here’s a big shout-out for Troels Petersen, Peter Altenberg, Michele Anet, Roman Maeder and Bob Korsan), but I had the extreme pleasure of working closely with Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica, and other talented scientists. (Today, the Journal is published by Wolfram Research.)

Sadly, I haven’t used Mathematica for more than a decade. It’s not as much a lack of interest as a lack of time. My projects these days rarely require numerical and symbolic computation.

(Trivia: I was the first kid on the block to have an Apple Mac Quadra 700, using the then-phenomenal 25MHz 68040 processor, which we bought in late 1991 to run Mathematica for the Journal. It’s astounding how much work we could get done on a platform that has less computing power than a modern smartphone.)

I’m disappointed that Apple’s support of 802.11n – the latest, but still draft, incarnation of the wireless Ethernet specs — extends to its Macs and Airport access points, but not to its handhelds.

In my office, all of the desktop/notebook computers that access the network via WiFi are capable of 802.11n. They access it via our current-generation Airport Extreme base station, as well as the new Airport Express wireless hub that extends the signal and operates as a remote iTunes speaker driver.

You’d think, therefore, that we could take advantage of all the 802.11n capabilities that the Airports and Macs have to offer. By switching to run in 802.11n-only mode (instead of the 802.11b/g/n compatibility mode), we could improve throughput and overall wireless performance. We could also shift out entire network to the 5GHz radio band, instead of the crowded 2.4GHz band used by 802.11b/g. (802.11n can work on either band.)

But alas, we can’t make our wireless LAN 802.11n-only. Why? Because our iPhone and iPod touch users wouldn’t be able to be on the network. Those devices, you see, are 802.11b/g-only.

One would think, Apple would remedy that with its forthcoming iPhone 3G. One would think that this device would be 802.11n-capable. One would be wrong. According to Apple, the new iPhone 3G will still be an 802.11b/g device. Slower. Shorter range. Locked into the 2.4GHz radio band.

Thanks, Apple. Not!

Seriously, folks, what you should be doing, if you have a lot of 802.11n devices, and just a few “legacy” 802.11b/g devices, is set up TWO parallel wireless networks. That’s what we’re going to do, one of these days.

Set up the first one to be 802.11n only, and put it onto the 5GHz band. Put the other network onto 802.11b/g band. By letting the WiFi N-capable devices zoom ahead in their own express lane, both networks — and therefore, overall throughput for your users — will be faster and better.

Yesterday, on a flight from San Francisco to New York, we had a clear view of the flooding on the Mississippi River. This photo was taken from seat 11A as we flew over the Iowa banks of the river, near Des Moines.

I’ve created a Web album of 12 photos at full 8-megapixel size.

I couldn’t be more excited about the possibilities for mobile development using the iPhone 2.0 software stack and AJAX.

If you missed the iPhone development classes at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, or if you want an Eclipse-style look at the platform, you’ll want to attend class #207 at EclipseWorld 2008, Oct. 28-30 in Reston, Va.

Here’s the description of the class, being taught by Chris Williams:

Wednesday, Oct. 29, 10:45 am – 12:00 pm
207 Developing AJAX Applications for iPhone and iPod touch

Apple’s iPhone is transforming the Web as we know it and compelling every Web designer to consider handheld portable devices. This hands-on technical class covers various aspects of iPhone and iPod Touch development. It will include tips and tricks as well as best practices to follow.

You’ll learn how to use popular Eclipse plugins, as well as AJAX libraries, to build rich Internet applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch AJAX applications. You’ll be using Aptana Studio and Aptana’s iPhone plugin, as well as the jQuery, prototype, the iUI library and others.

Register today – there are huge discounts for “eXtreme Early Bird” signups.

We’re crazy about testing, and to prove it, if you sign up for the Software Test & Performance Conference by July 3, you’ll get a complimentary Starbucks worth $25.

Here are some of the crazy classes at STPCon Fall 2008:

• #401 Help Your Boss Avoid Being an Idiot, by Robin Goldsmith
• #402 Explaining Testing to “Them,” by James Bach
• #505 I Went to This Conference and All They Talked About Was Requirements, by Robin Goldsmith
• #606 Software Process Improvement’s Dirty Little Secret, by Robin Goldsmith
• #905 Bugs on Bugs! What Looney Tunes Taught Me About Testing, by Rob Sabourin

STPCon Fall is our most popular event, and this year’s conference is going to be huge.

Crazy-but-apparently-true story of the day: A Massachusetts lighthouse, presumed destroyed in 1925, was discovered to be sitting here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Check out this story on CNN. We’ve driven by the Point Montara Light Station hundreds of times. Wow. I may have to visit my fellow New England transplant this weekend.