The Empty Soda Can

Okay, so this is old news, but I just thought I’d share it with anyone that hadn’t seen it yet: Microsoft and Burger King decided to get together and promote last month’s release of Microsoft Windows 7. The promotion? Well, you’ve heard of a Double Whopper ® ; you’ve probably even heard of a Triple Whopper. So what better way to promote Windows 7 than with a Septuple Whopper? Japanese mafia hit: ¥50.000.000 Windows 7 Burger: ¥777 Knowing a deal when you see one: priceless.

For the last two days, I’ve been bombarded with RSS feeds about a recent study from the NPD Group. According to the NPD Group’s report (and about a thousand blogs regurgitating the information), “Nearly 85 Percent of All Apple Households Also Own a Windows PC.” While this could certainly be possible, nobody seems to have seen the original report; they’ve just seen NPD’s resulting press release . it really makes me wonder how well the release reflects reality. Let’s take my household, for example: I don’t think myself a Mac bigot, but at present, all of our functional computers happen to be Macs. Specifically, we currently own 11 computers: 10 Apple Macintoshes (ages 2-18), plus one partially assembled “white box” (read: generic) PC. The “white box” is one of my eternal projects and just sits in the closet; it doesn’t even have a motherboard or a hard drive at the moment, let alone an operating system. So that leaves us with the ten Macs. Here’s the OS breakdown, in numbers of instal...