Cringely is continuing to speculate about HD video. As exciting as I believe it would be, I don't think most people would be. I'm a little skeptical that the transition has anything to do with hardware at all. I'm more inclined to believe the reason margins will be lower is Snow Leopard.

We haven't heard anything about it for a while, but I think OS X will finally be making the official transition from Macs to PCs. I don't think this is the smartest move for Apple but it would certainly give it a jump on OS market share at the cost of cannibalizing hardware sales, but does Apple really care about Mac sales as much these days?

The iPhone is a bone-fide platform, selling millions. Macs, as of late, have received little attention. True, they still makes up for a huge portion of Apple's revenue, but could that portion easily be supplanted by shipping discs of OS X for PCs to a billion people? Maybe.

This is an old theory but I'm surprised it hasn't bounced back as of late with what could be construed as evidence mounting.

1) Snow Leopard will just focus on stability, security and be x86 only. Why purposely remove the support for the older platforms after only 3 years (of Intel Mac shipping)? That's a large base of installed users you're leaving out in the cold. Yes, it could be used to sell more Intel Macs, but if grandma is still using her PowerPC iMac, I highly doubt the selling points of Snow Leopard will make her go and buy a new one. To me, it could be simply to make room for the larger hardware support required to support Dells, Gateways and beige boxes.

2) Many Macs haven't received significant upgrades or even speed bumps in a while. The Mac mini in particular is the red-headed stepchild with rumors that the lowest cost Mac could be dropped entirely. For sure, you don't need a Mac mini when it'd be more expensive than the almost all of the low cost PCs that can now run OS X. This model would definitely be the first to get the ax.

3) The 'big product transition' or more precisely, "a future product transition that I can't discuss with you today." What have they really got left to transition? The fact that it says product transition and not component transition implies that it could be a major part of the product in question. We've already seen Macs transition architecture. The iPhone/iPod/AppleTV are closed platforms that don't have really anything to transition. I don't think there's much room left.

It is Apple now anyway, not Apple Computer. Focusing on more mobile, more media-centric platforms other than full-blown, monitor and keyboard computers is what they want long term. Better to have the commodity PC vendors do your dirty work for you. You can still influence hardware design by having a few Macs around. And you can still make a ton of money selling OS X to people with cheap PCs that probably wouldn't have bought an expensive Mac anyway.

*SPOILERS BELOW YOU WHINY SUCKER*

I have quite a few gripes with the movie itself but when people start harping on those gripes as if I missed something it kinda annoys me.

One of my gripes is obviously the pretty crap ending that graced Revolutions. Why was it crap? It answered nothing. How did Neo destroy Smith? Will the machines be destroyed? How did Neo stop the machines in the "Real World"? Will all of humanity know the truth? Why did it take Trinity so long to die? Why was Morpheus even there?

For everyone out there that says Revolutions didn't have the "usual Hollywood mindless happy ending" I say bullshit! It simply just didn't have the happy per se (unless you actually cared about that dirty hole-in-the-ground Zion). It was typical in the point that it was completely mindless. Use special effects in a huge battle sequence and destroy your enemy without any real sense that anything meaningful has happened. Mission accomplished!

The lack of an interesting, thought-provoking ending to bookend an idea that started so fresh and full of vigor is extremely disappointing.

Another major gripe of mine is, didn't we care about some of these characters at one point? What happened? Morpheus was reduced to a button-punching co-pilot. Neo just wanted to keep asking questions he should've figured out a long time ago. Trinity just wanted to fuck. And the rest of Zion... we never really cared about Zion in the first place. That orgy-loving, woodstockesque burrow.

Numerous characters were introduced in the sequels, none of them did very much. Most of them had one big scene that featured a whole paragraph of dialog and then *poof* they vanished. Only to be shot in cameos for the remainder of the trilogy. This is poor character development if you ask me.

On another note, people are whining about a "spoiler" on the front page, to that I say bullshit! The whole of the so-called spoiler was:

"I still haven't seen this film, so I'll refrain from passing judgment, but I'm ever so happy the matrix-within-a-matrix theories were unfounded."

How is that considered a spoiler? It tells you what the ending wasn't, not what it was. So stop crying at your earliest convience. Another point to that is, it's Saturday night. The movie came out on Wednesday. If you cared so much about it and were dying to know, you would've seen it by now. This is obviously just typical nitpicking as demonstrated so beautifully by the /. community.

Just had to get that off my chest. Much love.

The past two days has seen two stories about email blacklist services falling to DoS. Is this method of denying unwanted email bound to go the way of the DoDo? Well, if history teaches us much, yes.

The biggest targets of DoS has mostly been IRC services. Why? Well, because the people behind the packets easily feel wronged. They get their feelings hurt and what not and all of a sudden, the world owes them one. So to settle the score, they unleash, through illegitimate means, a fury of packets. IRC has gotten the brunt of this because well, when you're talking to someone in such and intimate and realtime manner as in IRC, it's easy to offend someone.

Moving back to the topic at hand, the blacklisted will always be offended. You are after all, by blacklisting somebody, telling them they did something wrong. Caught in the act. Guilty. I guess it was only a matter of time until somebody felt they weren't going to take it sitting down.

I don't feel this recent DoS situation is the work of spammers per se. Just a "wronged" net block admin seeking retribution.

Blacklisting's concept is arguably flawed anyway. Blacklisting entire /24's can take out alot of innocents and in some cases, they don't just stop at the /24. They can and sometimes do go much larger. The idea is to get the administrator of the larger block to put pressure on whomever is doing the spamming. But sometimes, no matter what you do, a spammer will get on your network and make you seem like you're not doing your job.

Obviously, in this situation, fast reaction is essential. However, it can quickly become too late. You're guilty! You let a spammer spam and a kitten will die. Getting off the blacklists is often a feat in itself and sometimes admins just choose to let it go and see if it will just go away.

It doesn't really work that way and customers begin to get angry that their email is not getting to where it has to go. That is when blacklists go bad. They're no longer a help but instead a hinderence. If the DoS'ing persists, blacklists will go away. Will spam much worse than it already is? I doubt it. But it will be one less target for angry people with packets.