I guess i had never stopped to think about where food mascot costumes come from. I suspect you haven’t either. I ran across this site for a business that will sell you a costume so you can dress up as a large hot dog or tasty turkey dressed up like a pilgram. These costumes are not cheap by any means with the Turkey running about $1300.

Facemakers Incorporated :: Hot Dogs & Fast Food

Yesterday, Senator Larry Craig of Idaho, went into full denial mode with regard to any wrongdoing in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport restroom. Why now deny anything happened at all when in June, he admitted something happened and he was in the wrong.

The Police report from Senator Craig’s restroom encounter with a plain clothes officer tells it all. Apparently the officer was in the restroom doing his business in a stall and was essentially harassed by Craig; who peered into the stall for a couple of minutes then moved to an adjacent stall for a little footsie.

“Larry, you are one strange dude!”

The TPM DOCUMENT COLLECTION - Statement of Ofc.Karsnia re: Arrest of Sen. Craig

This guy is great!

Scott Finnie at Computerworld has done an analysis of Macs versus PC costs and concluded that Mac’s are in fact less expensive for a similar configuration than Windows based systems from Dell and others.

Scott writes: “I was a little surprised to find that Dell’s Inspiron line doesn’t currently offer processing power equaling that of the MacBook Pro. To get a 2.33-GHz Core 2 Duo processor (a 2.4-GHz version isn’t available yet), you have to move up to Dell’s more expensive XPS M1710 with Vista Home Premium.

Once I did that, though, and tricked out the M1710 with only those extras it had to have to compete with the MacBook Pro, I was surprised to see the Dell come in at a whopping $3,459, some $650 more than the Apple product.”

The cost analysis can be found at:

Mac vs. PC cost analysis: How does it all add up?

Also of interest is a follow on article headlined as Round II in which he compares ease of use and life cycle cost of the alternatives. In this article he concludes:

“Mac users who have Windows in their past tend to agree on a simple point: The Macintosh operating system and its custom-tailored hardware make for a far more reliable, less trouble-prone environment than Windows. It’s difficult to put a price tag on that advantage, but it’s the advantage that I find the most compelling.”

Moving on to point out the pleasurable experience of computing on the Mac:

“The unexpected advantage I gained is that using my computer is more enjoyable. My concentration isn’t broken periodically by problems, updates, security pop-ups and the like. I’m not thinking that I’m using a Mac. I’m thinking about what I’m using the computer to do — what I’m reading, writing, figuring, buying, watching and so on. The Mac becomes just so much chrome wrapping the data I’m interacting with.

You’re not conscious of your TV while you’re watching it. That’s the way it is with a Mac. I found that much harder to achieve on Windows PCs, which are constantly drawing attention to themselves.”

The Mac vs. PC cost Analysis: Round II

Since businesses and users starting connecting PCs running Microsoft Windows to networks, problems with the inherent lack of security of MS Windows have been exposed and cost Billions of dollars in lost productivity, compromised data and totally trashed systems. Lately the Windows pundits have been trying to throw up a smokescreen to shield Windows from criticism by saying Macs and the iPhone too are vulnerable.

Given many of these supposed ‘experts’ make a living in ways that are connected to the health of Microsoft and Windows market it is no surprise they spend time and effort to try to focus attention away from the debacle that is Windows Security and the weaknesses in WinCE. If what they were saying about major issues with Mac OS X were in fact true one might expect that a least one real virus or malware technology might exist in the wild that would turn Macs into spambots or compromise user data. None exists so why don’t they spend their quota of hot air on something else?

I get about 250-300 spam messages a daily in my inbox. These messages come from millions of systems that have been taken over by spammers using malicious code to control these systems to do their evil bidding. If I charged the OS vendor of the PCs that were taken over and converted to spambots (clearly at fault since their poor code allowed the systems to be hijacked in the first place) .03¢ for each annoying spam message I received, Microsoft would owe me $2737.50 a year just for my personal mail account. How much would Apple owe me? Exactly zero.

How much does Microsoft owe you? Shouldn’t we be contacting a lawyer to get our due?

For a thorough overview of the issues with security on these OS X and Windows platforms click on over (see link below) to Roughly Drafted. Daniel does a great job providing balance to the debate.

A Thoughtful comparison of security issues on Windows versus Apple OS X