I’m back on the MacJury for the latest session, along with Jacqui Cheng of Ars Technica, Scott McNulty of The Unofficial Apple Weblog and Warren Williams of the AppleWorks User Group. We had a fun discussion on two topics: Microsoft’s abandoned attempts to acquire Yahoo! and “Can we dump Microsoft Office yet?” It was a [...]

Yet another example of why Microsoft is no longer worth worrying about. The idea that anything that can’t “prove” it’s legal is therefore presumed illegal is insulting, contrary to the American principle of law and potentially illegal itself. Microsoft’s willingness to hand over its users rights to Fair Use and essentially sell them out to [...]

There are few things as satisfying to me as taking a really dumb argument and ripping it to shreds with logic and facts. If that stupid argument is delivered with pomposity and arrogance, it’s all the more fun. Few people have elevated this to the level of sport as well as John C. Welch. A hunting [...]

Microsoft announced it was abandoning its attempted acquisition of Yahoo!, according to a statement from Microsoft. Steve Balmer, Microsoft CEO, said “Yahoo! will never know how good they could have had it,” “We continue to believe that our proposed acquisition made sense for Microsoft, Yahoo and the market as a whole. Our goal in pursuing [...]

Via a post on Twitter, Rick LePage reports he has received word that Stan Flack, founder of popular Mac news sites MacCentral and MacMinute, has passed away. No other details are available at this time. MacCentral was one of the first major Mac news sites on the web until it was bought and its content [...]

Back in the late-nineties, I produced what would now be called a podcast on the long-defunct “GiveMeTalk” Internet Radio Network. They were mostly 10-15 minute scripted shows, wherein I offered some analysis and commentary on the day’s news. Topics back then ranged from the introduction of candy-colored iMacs to the passing of legendary Mac journalist [...]

Now that Apple has opened its 10th New Jersey store (in Cherry Hill, for those wondering), I thought it would be interesting to take a look back at how we covered the Garden State’s first store, which opened in Tice’s Corner in 2001. Back then, of course, there were only five retail outlets, and the [...]

Daring Fireball’s Jon Gruber noted a site that removes Garfield from his own comic strip, usually resulting in a better strip. In the category of “there’s nothing new under the sun,” I give you “Garfield Without Words,” which leaves the cat in the picture, so to speak, but silences him. Again, the result is often [...]

Following an apparently successful upgrade of WordPress (the Content Management System that replaced the homegrown version previously used on the site), our servers got in a virtual snit and started refusing to serve up webpages. We apologize to all who were unable to reach the site over the past 22 hours or so, and we [...]

The slides from my Macworld San Francisco 2008 session on setting up a WiFi network are now available as a PDF file. Thanks to all of you who attended and responded so enthusiastically. I was lucky enough to have great crowds for all four sessions — they were attentive, asked great questions and were very [...]