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Month: December 2004

Dear Paul Thurrott…

Published December 8, 2004

Could you explain just what you mean in your article [Apple Macintosh Installed Base Set To Grow Again](http://www.internet-nexus.com/2004_12_05_archive.htm#110251423620527604)?

1) You show Forbes quoting Goldman Sachs as saying in 2005 Apple will see “unit growth of 10% compared to our industry growth estimate of 9%”. Doesn’t that mean, at least, that *Goldman* thinks Apple’s installed base will grow relative to the rest of the industry? Why should we use Goldman’s numbers for Apple, but Gartner or Merrill Lynch’s numbers for the industry? Isn’t that comparing apples to — no, I promised not to use that phrase again…

2) You say “if just one ex-PC user switches to the Mac this year, than the Mac’s ‘installed base’ increases, rendering this headline moot.” Doesn’t this argument *support* the headline, instead of making it moot (which I looked up to make sure I understood: “1. Subject to debate; arguable / 2. b. Of no practical importance; irrelevant”)?

3) “I’ll mention once again just for kicks that I’d love to see Apple really grow its Mac market, though no one seems to believe it.” I’d *like* to believe it, but as you seem to keep going out of your way to find the worst in every Apple item, it’s hard. Perhaps twenty years’ of Macintosh use has enfeebled my mind.

Thanks for your consideration.

[Since I can hardly pretend Paul Thurrott reads my weblog, I actually sent this by email as well. Let’s see if I get an answer.]

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The Tres Amigos of Iraq

Published December 3, 2004

Al Kamen in the Washington Post (scroll down):

> President Bush announced yesterday he’ll be awarding the presidential Medal of Freedom to the Tres Amigos of Iraq: former CIA chief George J. “Slam Dunk” Tenet, who gave him bad information; retired Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who didn’t have enough troops for the postwar occupation; and former Iraq viceroy L. Paul Bremer, who complained about the troop levels too late.

The Medal of Freedom? Are you kidding?

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Prehistoric links fixed

Published December 2, 2004

To the fraction of a person who cares: the one [page][] on the Internet that links to my pre-MT blog is now correctly redirected to the equivalent items in the MT blog. (Originally, I used a [Redirect][] directive instead of a [Rewrite][]. After I reinstalled MT and switched to a MySQL database because the Berkeley DB was corrupted, I just put the archives at a compatible URL.)

Oh, and Google finally indexed my website again, so searching for the title of the weblog now yields the weblog as the second result (the first result is still [Blogshares][], for some reason — I don’t play, but I claimed my blog anyway).

That is all. Please resume your regular indifference.

[page]: http://www.nickbastin.com/archives/000146.php
[Redirect]: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_alias.html
[Rewrite]: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html
[Blogshares]: http://blogshares.com

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Ketchup: the "Esperanto of cuisine"

Published December 1, 2004

I’m not sure exactly where I came across the reference to this article about [ketchup][] — apparently it hit the blogosphere a while back — but like many others I found it quite fascinating.

[ketchup]: http://gladwell.com/2004/2004_09_06_a_ketchup.html

The author, Malcolm Gladwell, writes periodically in [The New Yorker][] on a variety of topics and apparently makes them all equally fascinating. His articles are archived [here](http://gladwell.com/archive.html). (Bonus pick: [How caffeine created the modern world][].)

[The New Yorker]: http://www.newyorker.com/
[How caffeine created the modern world]: http://gladwell.com/2001/2001_07_30_a_java.htm

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