First things first… it comes out July 11th, so all of you calm down.

Now, for those who don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s all about the new iPhone… iPhone 3G. If anything was missing from the original iPhone release, it was 3G support as opposed to EDGE technology. The simplest way to explain it is that in the demo today, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, displayed a web page in 21-seconds on 3G, while in EDGE it took 59 seconds. In other words, it’s a lost faster.

This is something that really should have been around since the beginning, and I’m going to be blunt, I think the original iPhone adopters got shafted. More and more, it is looking to me like the original iPhone was more of a “beta” than an actual full release.

No 3G. Now it has it.

No enterprise support. Now it has it.

No third-party app support. Now it has it.

No GPS. Now it has it.

Only out in six countries. Now in seventy.

Yes, all products get upgraded, but these are such basic features and support in a device such as this, it almost seems iPhone 1.0 was a year early and a dollar short in retrospect. Never mind the fact the price is now $199 for 8GB and $299 for 16GB… you all enjoying that $599 you paid on release day now?

The new phone is certainly more tantalizing to me, but so long as AT&T is the sole carrier in the United States, I will not be getting one. They have lousy service, horrible customer support, and I want nothing to do with them. Mr. Jobs boasts endlessly about how many iPhones they’ve sold, but think how many more he would have sold if he had gone with multi-carrier support, or even a carrier with broader coverage than AT&T. Blech.

I will say I am very excited about the launch of MobileMe. Being a small company, exchange sever type service has always been something we would like to have, but it was never very practical. For $99 a year, having this sync our two iPod Touch devices, as well as having access from our browsers, seems like a great solution. The only thing I am curious about is if I will be able to set it up to work with our Gmail accounts; I’m not thrilled with the idea of having to start a whole new system of emails yet again.

True, we will only be able to work with this when the Touches are near Wi-Fi, but that will be fine as we are already used to that. A centralized calendar system will make our lives a heck of a lot easier though as all of us always seem to be heading in about 20 directions at once. It took a couple days just for us to get together on finding out if all three of us had a clear schedule for one day, so a centralize calendar is aces in my book!

With the news that iPhones and iPod Touches will be getting support for Office files, these devices are finally getting to the full PDA status I had hoped for when they first came out. I will finally be able to stop carrying around my Axim and just get down to my BlackBerry 8830 and the iPod Touch. One less device in my life! Woo! It looks like a good portion of my What I Want From The Apple SDK list is coming true, even the Sling Player is in development, so we are well on our way to what I had always suspected.

So, no iPhone for me still, but bring on MobileMe and the Apps!

Oh… and Snow Leopard as the next OS name… really? Um… okay, sure, why not.

Well, the Dell Vostro 1500 I got in late April had something go wrong with the hard drive on Wednesday, and it is completely fraked.

I went home on Wednesday afternoon to do some work, turned it on and was greeted by a blue screen of death. After several attempts, I couldn’t even get it to boot into safe mode, so I called Dell support for some help. They couldn’t have been nicer, and tried everything under the sun to get me up and running, but the final conclusion was that it was a physical error and hopeless. They expressed me a new hard drive that arrived on Thursday, and I was back up and running.

I took the old hard drive to a local tech company, and they couldn’t get the drive to do anything, so all my data was lost. Luckily this isn’t my primary computer and what was lost was fairly trivial stuff, but still a huge pain in my behind to set up a computer from scratch again so soon after having done it.

The most disappointing thing was that just two days before I had signed up with a new off-site backup service, and I was in the early stages of backing the entire system up. I’m a bit concerned since this happened only 2 days into the process that it might be to blame, so I am just foregoing installing that again and will ignore what ever was saved. I am not going to name the service since I can’t be sure that it was the cause, but I had never used them before, so I will give them the benefit of the doubt and not disparage their name on this blog.

So, now I’m stuck. I tried installing another off-site companies software, and it wouldn’t properly install. DocSyncer, which I’ve used to back up documents to Google Docs, is calling it quits on June 20th, so that won’t even be an option for me. I’ve always been nervous about backing up stuff to a hard drive in my house because if there is a fire, I’m still out of luck, so I’m not sure what to do at this point.

How does everyone else back up their files? Do you do it locally, or do you do it off-site?

Paul McGuinness, the long time manager of the super group U2, is up to his antics again.

Back in January of this year, Mr. McGuiness made an infamous speech about how all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should institute a three strike policy for people caught engaging in music piracy on the Internet. As I said in my commentary in the incident, The Music Industry Vs Net Neutrality, Mr. McGuinness has no real understanding of how the Internet works, or what role ISPs play in the system, and his new comments just go on to demonstrate this point again.

In his latest diatribe about the industry, given at the Music Matters conference in Hong Kong, he likened ISPs to “shoplifters” that are “turning their heads” to the troubles of his industry.

“The recorded music industry is in a crisis, and there is crucial help available but not being provided by companies who should be providing that help — not just because it is morally right, but because it is in their commercial interest.”

How is huge investments in new equipment necessary for deep packet inspection “in their commercial interest”? Not to mention the potential violations of Net Neutrality that says all information should be treated equally? Does Mr. McGuinness and his ilk propose to pay for the fines that ISPs will run up against for violating neutrality? I sincerely want to know how any of this “is in their commercial interest”.

He also went on to say:

“Cable operators, ISPs, device manufacturers, P2P software companies — companies that have used music to drive vast revenues from broadband subscriptions and from advertising. They would argue that they have been neutral bystanders to the spectacular devaluation of music. I don’t believe that is true.”

Well, Mr. McGuinness, that’s okay, because I quite frankly don’t believe the ignorance that comes out of your mouth. I would like someone to point me to one advertisement from an ISP that talks about stealing music. I have seen ads about getting music, but they are always talking about commercial subscription programs like Napster, and not about things like BitTorrent theft. What devices is he talking about? And, newsflash for this guru of the Internet, P2P software is generally freeware or shareware, costing the users nothing, those companies are not making money. Yes, tracker sites do run advertising, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Torrent people getting rich.

The thing is, he used the line that “they would argue that they have been neutral bystanders”, and the problem with this is that they would be correct. ISPs are nothing more than a portal to the Internet, they have absolutely nothing to do with what their users are doing. This is like saying that the cable companies are responsible for someone recording a television program that they aren’t supposed to. The scale of his “solutions” are so immense and daunting as to be inconceivable. Every single packet of information transferred would have to be inspected, and that just is not even a remote possibility.  Mr. McGuinness has said many times that he is not looking to turn ISPs in to Internet Police, but really, what else could you call this?  He wants them to monitor our traffic, turn over people they find to be sharing music, if that’s not a cop, I don’t know what is.

Let us take the case of someone like my own family and their Internet connection. My parents have a connection because they want to email friends and family, they want to do online shopping, they want to play games, never once have they said, “You know, son, we got the Internet because we want to steal music!” I think you would find the vast majority of Internet users are similar to my parents, but no, the truth is that ISPs are getting rich from all of these people stealing music, silly me.

McGuinness paints the entire Internet industry in extremely broad strokes where we are all on the Web for no other reason than to steal from his clients and the rest of the industry. First of all… get over yourselves, the music business is not only industry in the world, though I think you might have a hard time convincing them of that. If anything, I think some one has planted this bug in McGuinness’ ear that this could be a money spinner for the music industry, and like a dog with a bone, he’s just not going to let it go.

As I have said numerous times before, the music industry has to look inside itself to find their problem. The Internet has become an easy whipping boy for them to conceal that their problems go far deeper than they are saying. Quality has slipped, prices have soared, and yet it is those evil ISPs that have caused all the problems for the industry, and it’s now them making all the money from luring in innocent consumers to a life of piracy.

Something about this whole story intrigues me, though. At the conference, McGuinness really harped on how even ringtones are being stolen over the Internet, and Lachie Rutherford of Warners Music said that 2% of ringtone money goes to the artists, and that has to be protected.

Wow… a -whole- 2%? Excuse me, but who are the thieves again, the line seems to be getting a bit fuzzy for me.  Could this possible be a view into who is really upset about music piracy?  Could it really be the record labels, because, I’m sorry, but 2% of ringtone revenue going to the artists is laughable.  Let us say that the wholesale price of a ringtone is 50%, where are the other 48 percentage points going?

Remember folks, it’s all about protecting the artists… pay no attention to the men in suits behind the curtains.

Yes folks, I’ve been trying to fight the urge, but it’s that time again. That magical time where Michael Bay makes another movie where it looks like he threw a bunch of ideas in a blender, hit “mince” and then put the results on celluloid for all of us to “oooh” and “awww” at.

It’s time for another Transformers movie.

I’ve only done one post about Transformers 2 thus far, I’ve actually been trying to be good. I know I got a little… rabid?… last time, and I thought I would try to spare you all from the same torture. Alas, Bay’s stupidity vision, is once again taking a form that will just make me go “why?” as I sit in the theater.

Yes, I’m not even going to pretend I’m not going to see it. It’s like that link someone sends you and they say, “don’t open if you’re squeamish!”, and you think, “eww… I don’t want to see this!”… -click- “Ugh, why did I look?!?”

However, hear we are, ready to click on that email come June 26, 2009 when he unleashes Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen on us. (Yes, this has been confirmed to the be the title.) This time around, Mr. Bay has opted to go with a disinformation campaign against the Internet, so I am going to stick to only official announcements, and hopefully less chatter about it in general.

The disturbing issue is that we’ve been promised more actual Autobots and Decepticons in this one (one of the writers is hinting at 10 on each side, and possibly Soundwave as one of the new ones), but yet there is an endless stream of human actors being cast, just as there was with the first movie. Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson and (sadly) John Turturro are all returning. In addition we’re getting Rainn Wilson, Isabel Lucas, Matthew Marsden and a still unnamed college roommate for LaBeouf’s character.

That is an awful lot of humans for a movie about robots from another planet. This also tells me that Bay still hasn’t realized one of the biggest issues of the first movie was there simply wasn’t enough of the actual Transformers. Starscream was always well known for being a loudmouth in the cartoons and comic books, constantly bickering with Megatron over their plans, however, in the movie, he got exactly three lines (one saying he was coming to the fight, and two with Megatron outside the dam), and wasn’t even seen until the third act of the film.

One issue that will hopefully be erased is the rather robot-free first act of the film seeing as all of the characters are already in place. Sure, we’ll probably have the new ones arriving, but at least this time we can see some of the Autobots from the opening minutes, and not just Bumblebee breaking car windows so he’ll be picked by Sam.

The film has been shooting in Pennsylvania this week at an old steel mill they’ve converted to look like a factory in China. People who can see the set have reported lots of running, explosions, military attack choppers, running Chinese people… in other words, a typical day for Michael Bay. I am sure this will pretty much sum up the entire film, as we learned with the first movie, you don’t need none of that nasty depth to your characters.

It’s a year to go, and I am sure I will have some vague hope once I hear who all the new Transformers are, then I will remember who’s directing it, and be utterly crushed. At least it will be vaguely pretty… maybe… okay, no, it won’t be, it will be a chaotic, jumbled mess, but there will be cool toys! (I hope)

One potential hiccup to this whole mess is the possible actor’s strike that may occur at the end of this month. Perhaps Mr. Bay will be forced to include more robot shots in the film as I believe the Transformers are all non-union…

I can finally talk about this since it has been published, but I am now one of the hosts of the “Mashable Conversations” podcast. My first audio episode is an interview with the lead singer of Dredg, Gavin Hayes, about the new microblogging service, Blip.

Blip allows you to share what you’re listening to in music with other members in an interface similar to Twitter. You can find the actual song, insert it into your message and other users can listen to it, so it turns into a huge music finding/online radio experience. Quite fun. You can find my Blip profile and follow along, though I haven’t had much time to use it yet.

You can check out my article and podcast by heading over to the article on Mashable.

***MAJOR SPOILERS***

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When I first wrote about Garfield Minus Garfield, I thought for sure that the strip’s original creator, Jim Davis, would eventually shut the strip that removes his beloved cat down.

Sure, it’s silly on some levels, and you wonder how long this can last before Jim Davis, the creator of the comic strip, tries to shut it down. One hopes he will just leave it alone as it has probably brought his strip more attention than it has gotten in years

Well, in a New York Times article about the comic strip, Jim Davis not only admits to occasionally reading the derivative of his work, but to finding it “fascinating”. He also said that he is flattered by it rather than peeved, but he also sees that some of the strips work better than others.

Mr. Davis, who has been drawing Garfield for 30 years, said that “Garfield Minus Garfield” has actually prompted him to take a different look at his own work. He compared Mr. Walsh’s efforts to the cerebral approach of Pogo, the comic strip by Walt Kelly.

“I think it’s the body of work that makes me laugh — the more you read of these strips, the funnier it gets,” Mr. Davis said. As for Garfield himself, “this makes a compelling argument that maybe he doesn’t need to be there. Less is more.”

I am floored by this. Utterly, and amazingly, floored. We are in a day and age where people are sued at the drop of a hat for even remotely looking at someone else’s copyrighted work, let alone wholesale copying of it. I have to applaud Mr. Davis for not only taking this in the manner it was meant, but to also having the ability to see that it might teach him something about his own work.

In case you haven’t already done so, do make sure to swing by the site, and check out this amazing take on a comic strip, and know that the creator has no problem with it.

Bo Diddley was one of those musicians that most people would see him and go, “Oh yeah, that guy with the square guitar.” Then they would just move on. Sometimes, and even worse, they remember him for that “You Don’t Know Bo” TV commercial with Bo Jackson.

Without Bo, rock n’ roll wouldn’t have moved forward like it did. Bands like the Rolling Stones may not have happened, and his influence is still heard in guitar riffs all over the musical spectrum.

His guitar playing was always a mixture of pulse-pounding riffs mixed with a sense that at any moment they might spin wildly out of control, losing all semblance of planned music. His playing always seemed to leave you with a sense of wanting to say, “Whew! We made it out alive!”

In short, he was one of the greats, and it’s a sad day for music that he’s gone. Hopefully history will remember him well for his contributions to the musical sounds we enjoy today.

In 2000, Metallica founder Lars Ulrich was one of the biggest names and faces associated with fighting the file-sharing site Napster.  I can vividly remember Lars wheeling a cart load of documents (for obvious photographic effect) up to the doors of Napster, proving who had shared his band’s music through the music site.  He then went on endlessly in interviews about the evils of the Internet, and how people should be ashamed of themselves and on and on and on.

Now it’s 2008, and it seems Lars has woken up to the Internet.

The other day I get an instant message from one of my co-workers at Mashable, Mark Hopkins, alerted me to this story, and he had a feeling it was up my alley for one of my usual rants.  In short, Metallica is releasing their new album via a special website, Mission: Metallica, and it will be DRM-free.  It actually took me a few days of thinking to decide how I felt on this because it is such a turn around from their previous decisions, but I pretty firmly decided it meant they still don’t get it.

First off, by releasing the album as digital downloads at 320 kbps, and DRM-free, essentially the band has guaranteed that the piracy sites will have a field day with this.  They are releasing it at CD quality, without digital locks, how can they not expect this to end up all over the BitTorrent sites?  As soon as one or two people have purchased it, they will unleash it to the trackers, and it will spread like wildfire.

Why should people turn to the torrent sites?  Well, they are charging $12 for the digital version of the album in a day and age when you have bands such as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails giving away similiar projects for free.  What does this say about Metallica that not only are they charging, but they are putting a price tag on it above the going rate of $9.99 for the majority of downloadable albums on the sites that do charge?  Metallica has had a strained relationship with their fans since the Napster actions, wouldn’t the goodwill they could have built by a free release have outweighed the profit?

This is also a band that has not released a studio album since 2003, and that was the poorly received St. Anger, which is pretty much an unlistenable mess in my opinion.  This is a band in need of good will, and to make amends with their fans, so they do it by showing themselves as hypocritical by seeming to entice piracy with no digital right management and a seemingly inflated download price?  This whole plan seems like a “fine, we’ll follow the trend, but we’re going to do it on our messed up terms” sort of maneuver.

If it wasn’t a band I used to care about so much, I was a big fan up through 1991’s Metallica, I probably wouldn’t care as much.  I would have shrugged off this story and moved on with my life.  This is a band I would like to see regain some of their former glory, and most of all I want them to actually release an album I like, but this just doesn’t seem to bode well for what is to come.

Nice try guys, when you catch up to 2008, let me know.