Thank John McCain for That Pearl
So it’s like this: Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a policy advisor to Senator and Republican nominee for the presidency John McCain brandished a BlackBerry in front of some reporters and told them that it was a miracle that Sen. McCain had helped to create. He was apparently making reference to the senator’s involvement with telecommunications legislation. But you’d think that any policy aide who remembers the legend of Al Gore supposedly claiming to have invented the Internet would be really, really, really careful about saying anything that sounded even remotely like it involved a candidate having invented anything relating to communications. And hey, if telecommunications legislation is enough to claim credit for a specific phone, wouldn’t the iPhone have been hipper? (Not to mention more patriotic–the BlackBerry is a Canadian product.)

Read more at: Gizmodo

And You Thought Alienware Made Expensive PCs
$25,000 for a Windows computer? It sounds a tad on the pricey side, but it’s really a bargain–the computer in question is from supercomputer pioneer Cray. The http://www.cray.com/products/CX1.aspx, powered by Intel Xeons and running Windows HPC Server 2008, is the cheapest supercomputer the company has ever made. It’s probably overkill for even my most demanding tasks, but the vault-like case is pretty darn neat. Maybe Cray should sell a $1200 version with that housing and a Core 2 Duo inside.

You Want Fries With That Zune?
I’m not sure if Microsoft and McDonalds have ever worked together before, but it was probably inevitable that they’d get together. And now they have–courtesy of a new deal that will give three years of free Wi-Fi at the hamburger giant to owners of the Zune, Microsoft’s MP3 player. The free connectivity will let them buy music wirelessly. Not bad, but also far from world-changing. How about a deal that would let Windows Vista users surf for free at McDonald’s and make everybody else pay up?

Another Google Outage
TechCrunch reported today about an outage for some users of Google’s Custom Search service, which lets anyone create a search engine, that TC said lasted for at least twelve hours. At last report, Google fixed the problem and apologized. But it’s still more evidence that even the company that knows more than any other about delivering reliable service to millions of people can’t promise perfect service. You gotta wonder whether the main Google site is immune from serious problems–and what sort of headlines it would make if that service ever went down for half a day.

Read more at: TechCrunch

More on App Store’s Application Acceptance Policies
Blogger Niall Kennedy has a nice piece digging into the details of what happened with Podcaster, the iPhone app which Apple rejected from its App Store, whereupon the author used Apple’s “ad-hoc” distribution to get it into the hands of anyone who’d donate $10 to him. Niall says that the developer may have made $11,000 over the weekend. Not too shabby–especially since he doesn’t have to share the proceeds with Apple, unlike companies that sell apps through the App Store.