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Number Seven Hundred and Thirty Six on the list of things that really torque me off are people who intentionally and knowingly mislead folks for fun and profit. And to this list of Mortgage Brokers, Right Wing Talk Radio Hosts, and Tobacco Lobbyists, we can now add Roger L. Kay president of Endpoint Technology Associates (aside — people who are ‘president’ of companies employing 50 or less people, are number 977 on the list of things that annoy the crap out of me.)

El Presidente Roger authored a white paper at the behest of Microsoft titled: “What Price Cool” which serves to illuminate us all as to how we all have been paying some imaginary “Hidden Apple Tax” all these years.

Of course, a younger man might shrug this drivel off, yet as I grow older I find my patience for such things eroding. While I’m not quite at the yelling at kids to get off my lawn stage, I am quite crotchety enough to spend my Saturday night debunking this garbage.

Follow me after the jump where we reveal the obviousness with which Le President Kay sold his credibility.

Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s CEO, has been calling on Apple to see about extending the carrier’s deal as the exclusive US service provider for the iPhone, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Having already received a one-year extension of its original two year deal, with its current exclusivity protection set to expire sometime in 2010, AT&T is reportedly seeking to sweeten the pot somehow to keep Apple’s revolutionary mobile device out of competitors’ hands for another year.

Well, of course. AT&T added 4.3 million iPhone subscribers in the second half of 2008 alone — about 40% of whom were new customers, according to the company. In an era when landline customers are dwindling rapidly, anything that brings in new wireless subscribers is a good thing for the phone company.

But is the AT&T exclusivity deal good for anyone other than AT&T?

From Apple’s perspective it’s likely good insofar as it keeps things simple, having only one behemoth service provider to potentially screw up the tightly controlled customer experience around which much of Apple’s mystique has been been built. And to be fair, AT&T appears to have done a reasonably good job of deploying iPhones in the field. As the Apple spokeswoman in the WSJ article was quoted, “We have a great relationship with AT&T.”

But how about the consumer? Even if technical issues cannot be overcome that prevent iPhones, as they are currently manufactured, from working with Sprint and Verizon’s CDMA-based services — and surely they could be overcome in this day and age — having a choice between AT&T and T-Mobile is better than having a choice between AT&T and not using an iPhone at all.

Many people howled furiously about AT&T being the exclusive US provider when the iPhone was introduced in the summer of 2007. Looking back, it’s now easy to see how revolutionary and wildly transformative the device was; it was likely a good strategy for Apple to reduce its integration bandwidth to a single carrier in each market where it deployed the phone because it could have turned out to be more problematic a transformation than it actually was.

But now Apple has many millions of happy iPhone users the world over and it knows how its device performs in the field. It’s time for Apple to reclaim dominion over the user experience with its mobile communication device. And the single biggest change that would add to customer happiness (other than video recording capability and Flash functionality) would be to open it up up and let customers choose whatever service provider they can stand.

I spent a week in Paris recently, and although I was on vacation, I was still on the lookout for Macs. I almost missed this homage to the Apple design while I was out shopping with my uncle. Fortunately, he saw this excellent window display at the Printemps department store and stopped me to take some photos.

The display case, several large windows long, was completely littered with Apple products. See if you can count them all. You can also see the reflection of the other side of Boulevard Haussmann.

What it is: A simplified air-traffic control game. You drag paths for aircraft to direct them to designated landing zones. The number of aircraft on-screen rapidly increases, making it harder to avoid a collision. One collision and the game ends.

Why it’s good: It’s an original concept, perfectly suited to the iPhone touchscreen, and utterly compelling. At first, it seems like the game will be a breeze, but the difficulty curve is steep, and after only 20 or so landings, you’ll find the screen full of aircraft to deal with. The game also has a great sense of humor in its presentation (including twee aircraft ‘muzak’), and, for those moments where it all gets a bit much, a handy pause button. Like Tetris, it’s a simple game that you’ll return to regularly.

Where to get it: Flight Control’s available on the App Store, and is at the time of writing on sale for $0.99. More information about the game can be found on the Flight Control website.

Speculation that Apple is poised to release a touchscreen netbook remains persistent as winter snows, with dozens of outlets reporting again today that unnamed “sources” in Taiwan and China “confirm” the new product will be released as early as the 2nd half of this year.

So what the heck, as long as we’re talking about something that may or may not come to pass, why not talk about what it may or may not look like?

16 year-old German artist Darakas, who also goes by the name Jesse, gets the conversation started with this 3D modeling rendition of his vision for the Apple MacTouch.

Until the badly lit spy photos start showing up, we think this is a pretty good jumping off point. Have you finished your Apple netbook mock-up, or see any others out there? Let us know in comments and we’ll feature them here.

Steve Wozniak is hoping to get the geek vote for his fancy footwork on Dancing with the Stars.

He will be tripping the light (?) fantastic tonight with partner Karina Smirnoff on the ABC show (8/7c), where he’s up against “Jackass” Steve-O, former Go-Go Belinda Carlisle and actress Denise Richards, among others.

Here are the numbers to vote:

Steve Wozniak & Karina Smirnoff

phone number:  800-86834-10 or  800-VOTE4-10
text in code:   3410

To vote online, check out the official site (poll page goes up when the show goes live).

You can also follow the Votes for Woz movement via the dedicated  twitter stream or Facebook group.
Dancers are judged by professionals but the folks at home decide whether the couple moves forward in the competition.

Phone lines, text votes (AT&T customers only) and online polls will open at the top of each performance show so viewers can vote for their favorites.

Phone and text lines stay open for 30 minutes after the end of the show. Online voting will remain open until noon (Eastern Time) the next day. (Wonder if that means Woz fans outside the US can vote for him or it will be blocked…Update: you can vote online — 13 times — until noon EST the day after the show is broadcast, from anywhere, as long as you register.)

Wozniak adds: “You can vote up to 13 times with your cell phone. Actually, you can only vote as many times as there are contestants, which will likely be either 11, 12 or 13 this Monday, but extra votes surely don’t hurt.” He also spoke of an iPhone app to vote in the iTunes store, but a quick search didn’t turn it up…

Are you planning on voting your support?

Leave it to Van Morrison to pull back the curtain on the state of the music industry today: “We don’t know where the record business is going, and the record companies say, ‘We don’t know what’s happening, and it’s a really bad time.’ So if it’s really bad, why would you want to do business with a record company?”

Morrison, perhaps Rock’s greatest living iconoclast since the death of Frank Zappa, gave a wide ranging interview to TIME, in which the much-beloved, notoriously cranky Irish troubador downplayed the importance – to him and fans of his music – of download sites such as iTunes, admitted he’s neither inspired nor impressed by anything or anyone in music today, and said if he had one thing to do over he would never have become famous.

Follow after the jump for more on Van the Man’s thoughts on the music business and why he doesn’t need iTunes

French software development company Visuamobile is planning to launch an iPhone app called  ELIZA AI, based on the 1966 artificial intelligence computer program trained to respond to questions like a therapist, that is by asking other questions.

Though the program is dated, Leca says the Eliza iPhone app still had the same effect that surprised creator Joseph Weizenbaum back at MIT in the day — at a certain point people forget  ELIZA is not  a human therapist.

“What seemed really interesting, and I have tested it at the office, is that people are reluctant to show you what they have been discussing with Eliza,” Dominique Leca of  Visuamobile told Cult of Mac. Leca, who handles business development at the Paris-based company,  had the idea for the app. “And, to tell you the truth, Eliza has helped me several times. The fact that she constantly asks you to explain yourself is a great way to analyze what you think.”

Set to be released for free download on the visuamobile store on iTunes March 3, Leca said the Eliza app will likely remain gratis but the company has more sophisticated psyched-up apps in the works, like one based on AI chat robot ALICE, that will probably be fee-based.

Assisted navel-gazing anyone?

Images courtesy visuamobile

This doesn’t look like the simplest DIY project, but one creative Mac fan turned an old G3 into a house for an old Sega Dreamcast.

The project, dubbed the iCast, started out while doing a workshop cleanup: handy person logicdustbin realized that among the spare parts were a few G3s and an LCD monitor.

Once the Mac was gutted, the LCD fit inside nicely.

Then “it was an easy decision to slap a Dreamcast inside,” logicdustbin wrote on the  www.cgcc.ca forum. “The hard part was figuring out where to place it. I didn’t want to cut a big hole in the side of the case… but I ended up doing a ‘PS1 upside down mod’ – its not great, but it works pretty good.”

In final analysis, logicdustbin concedes: “A lot of work went into this, like getting the original power button to work for the new monitor and adding a power switch for the DC, then adding a sound amp to power the iMac speakers…it was all pretty fun to do and it plays just great!”

Step by step, with pics here, check out the video of the working iCast here.

Photographer Russ Croop used his fingers and app NetSketch to create what may be largest iPhone drawing to date, a portrait of his Boulder, Colorado living room. At 72 pixels per inch it measures 85.579 x 70.931 inches, or about 7 feet by 6 feet. (NB: full-sized version on his site.)

“If you were going to print it at 300 ppi, when converted, it measures 20.543″ x 17.023  That’s much more than most high-end digital cameras, ” Croop told Cult of Mac. “A camera with a 11.1 megapixel resolution will render a photograph at 300 ppi of 13.5″x9.”

The super-sized sketch created some problems, however.Croop couldn’t upload the drawing to the NetSketch site to share with the community — his iPhone kept crashing.

“I felt like the guy who built a boat in his basement and couldn’t get it out because it was so big,” Croop told us.

AppleTV is dead, it just hasn’t stopped moving yet.  With fewer than 2 million units sold, it hasn’t achieved the commercial success of its rivals, and continues as a failed effort on the part of Apple to extend the digital hub into the living room.

The final nail in AppleTV’s coffin comes yesterday as Netflix announces a digital only subscription option, but the fatal shot was fired back in November.  Follow me after the jump, as we discuss how Netflix strategy not only killed AppleTV but also threatens more than just longtime rival Blockbuster, and what (if anything) Apple can do about it.

Canadian-born, Hong-Kong based actor and singer Edison Chen is in court against a computer technician after explicit nude photos of him and several starlets were posted on the Internet.

Chen says some 1,300 sex pics, including about a dozen celebrities, were illegally copied from a custom pink PowerBook that he brought in for repairs in 2006.

He’s testifying in a criminal case against Sze Ho-chun, a computer technician charged with obtaining access to Chen’s computer for dishonest gain.

Chen believed he had erased the files by putting them into the trash before the machine was handed over for repairs.

“I did not know about encrypted data or securing the trash. In my opinion, when you deleted a file and put it in the trash bin, it was deleted,” he said, adding that he later found out that files deleted from the trash could be recovered in some cases.  Chen went on voluntary hiatus career after the scandal broke in early 2008, media reports that it halted careers of several of the women involved.

No matter if you have nude starlets or bad poetry or bank info on your Mac, this is about as nightmare as it gets.

To clean out an old MacBook to give to a friend recently, I tried out permanent eraser and (until the Internet proves me wrong) it seemed to do the trick…

Aside from remembering to take out the trash after binning it, what’s your preferred method of erasing data?

Via Globe & Mail, Guardian, AFP

Came across this art work by Nick Rodrigues while trying to find help for my dying iPod.

His “diePod,” made back in 2007, is an an iPod gravestone that contains all note worthy songs and photos of your life debuted at Art Basil Switzerland.
Of it, Rodrigues says, “A child born today will most likely carry some type of media device with them for there entire life. If these devices live on with us we will carry a record of our entire life with us to the grave-that’s better then the tomb of king tut.”

Amen. My fourth gen 20 GB iPod is ready to shuffle off this mortal coil, and I just can’t let it go. Yeah, I know it’s old but it was great for audio books and came in handy now and then as an external hard drive.

The folder icon keeps cropping up, no amount of partitioning + erase + restore seems to fix it for longer than a week, when the battery runs out. It’ll soon be ready for my drawer/graveyard, since there’s no recycling program yet locally.

Ever kept your dead pods around, perhaps for use as doorstops or paperweights?

Image courtesy Massachusetts Cultural Council, copyright Nick Rodrigues

Microsoft used an image of an ambling snow leopard licking its chops for the backdrop to its Live Search homepage on Thursday, prompting a few in the business and technology press to speculate why.

Among them, Ina Fried at c|net is likely furthest from the mark, with her suggestion Microsoft could have been showing a player’s tell that Live Search will be the default search engine in Safari’s tool bar when the next version of OS X launches.

Fried suggests that because Microsoft has money to spend and because it might be willing to do so in order to get the market share boost for Live Search that such a deal would bring, well, she admits the idea is a “crazy” one, but she put it out there any way.

Why it won’t happen: Apple doesn’t need the money and has almost never made it a practice to co-brand its products with services that suck.

The Cult team members are not famous for colorful desktops, but when I saw this little beauty I felt it deserved some link love. This gorgeous desktop picture (and its slightly spikier sibling) are now available for free from the generous hands of Wolfgang Bartelme, having recently made something of a splash of their own on Flickr.

Wolfgang is no stranger to design gorgeousness, having also created other desktop and iPhone wallpapers like Dashball, ColorFlow, and ColorFlow 2.

Download and enjoy.

Ooooh, now this is interesting. Flux solves a problem that I didn’t even realize I had.

It automatically adjusts your computer’s monitor brightness according to the time of day and likely lighting conditions. Most screens look fine during the morning hours, because they’re made to be BRIGHT like the day outside. But when you come back to them after dark, or even just as evening’s falling, they sear your eyes and you reach for the brightness controls.

Flux automates that. Tell it your location and the kind of lighting you normally work under, and it will do the rest. I like the way you set it up and forget about it after that – it will take care of everything without you having to think about it. My kind of software.

(Larger version here.)

Norwegian Mac support company Teknograd likes to have fun with its advertising campaigns, and this latest one is the cleverest idea yet.

In recent years they’ve had a series of ads showing a Mac desktop where the Hard Disk is under attack from a mass of files and folders. But for this year’s campaign, they wanted something new that made use of the default Leopard desktop wallpaper.

The result is these TIE fighters, created by advertising agency TBWA. I asked them how they did it – surely not with real icons on a real desktop? No.

“We have photoshopped this, in almost 400 layers, but each folder is named individually, so it was a hell of a lot work. Martin Holm, the illustrator and art director, just passed out when we asked him how long time it took,” they told me.

Yes, it’s true. There is a man who swapped his iPhone for a Blackberry. In some respects, I greatly admire Ben Ackerman. Not because of his choice of smartphone, but because he was brave enough to own up to his change of heart in public. Not many self-confessed members of the “giant Mac fanboy” club would be prepared to do that.

But Ben has. He prefers the Blackberry, as he explains in a slightly contradictory post on his blog.

I say “contradictory” because Ben is clearly caught between a rock and a hard place. He’s the first to admit that the iPhone:

(a) is “prettier”

(b) has better apps

(c) and better web browsing

… but he *still* prefers the Blackberry. Why, Ben, why?

Because, it seems, the Blackberry is (in Ben’s opinion), simply a better mobile device. It does things you’d expect a mobile device to do, like, you know, MMS and copy-paste. The basics. That’s what it does, and it does superbly: the basics.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why the iPhone doesn’t appeal to Ben and many thousands of other people. It’s because Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Jonathan Ive and the rest of the Apple gang just don’t consider “basics” to be part of their remit. They leave basics to everyone else. Their products go above and beyond.

So, two questions for you:

(1) Do you agree with any parts of Ben’s argument?

(2) If you ever ditched your iPhone for a Blackberry (or, God forbid, your Mac for a Windows PC), would you have the guts to say so in public?

Apple’s new 24″ LED Cinema Display suffers the fatal flaw of “ridiculous, terrible glare,” according to Jason Snell, editor of Macworld, who informed his Twitter followers Monday he’s putting his monitor back in the box and returning it to Macworld Labs.

Snell has spent his professional career as a writer covering Apple and, despite the presumed objectivity of his position as the editor of one of the larger, more recognizable mainstream media brands associated with the Cupertino computer maker, likely wouldn’t give up on such a major piece of Apple hardware unless he felt it was poorly executed.

Snell, of course enjoys a luxury many consumers do not, in that he can give his display back to the magazine’s lab and not have to worry about its cost or the space it may take up sitting unused in a corner or on a shelf. Average folk who’ve bought Apple’s new display and discovered after using it for a time that the glare is unbearable have far fewer options for doing anything about it.

What about you, dear reader – how do you feel about Apple’s embrace of the glossy screen on its flagship display? Is it worse in the wild than the glossy notebooks’ display? Would you send it back to “the Lab” if you could?