I can only think of two possible explanations for the following video.

Either he’s simply an angry young man who years from now is going to regret having made the video (like the Star Wars kid), or he’s some sort of creative genius that has discovered an angle to garner lots of online video views.

Today Apple finally unveiled its new iPad tablet PC (“price starting at $499″).

“What this device does is extraordinary,” Jobs said. “It is the best browsing experience you’ve ever had. … It’s unbelievably great … way better than a laptop. Way better than a smartphone.”

The computer will act as a sort of missing link between the two.

From a functionality perspective the iPad falls somewhere in between being a smartphone and a full blown notebook PC, but appears to mostly be intended as a fancy touchscreen Internet browsing device (a “cool” netbook); a super-sized iPhone.

Because of its lack of a real keyboard, I’m skeptical that it can’t be “way better than a laptop” as Jobs states, although I won’t dispute his other claims outright.

I’m going to compare its pricing to other devices it’s advertised to replace.

Netbooks start at around $199 from wireless providers with an accompanying 3G mobile broadband plan.

An iPhone smartphone starts at $199, and so far the iPad is being advertised to do what the iPhone does, albeit with a larger screen.  It even runs apps written for the iPhone and iPod.

Another one of the iPad’s functions is to serve an an ebook reader with iBooks to compete with devices like the Amazon Kindle.

The Kindle recently had a price drop and now sells for $259.

The iPad can also serve as a media player.

Thus the $499 starting price for the iPad seems to be reasonable considering the costs of netbooks, ebook readers like the Kindle and smartphones like the iPhone.  At the very least the iPad could replace both a netbook and ebook reader which could justify the higher cost.

But Apple has taken a page from the airline baggage additonal fee pricing scheme, because you actually only get a crippled iPad for $499, because that price doesn’t include 3G hardware.

That means no unfettered mobile broadband with the basic iPad device; you’d have to count on WiFi to use the iPad for a lot of its functionality.

An iPhone, one of the devices the iPad functionality is mimicking, would be crippled without 3G hardware.  I can’t imagine who would even consider buying a portable network device like this sans 3G.

But to get 3G on the iPad will cost an extra $130.

So a fully functional iPad with 3G (included on the iPhone) actually starts at $629.

That’s putting it into the price range of a notebook/laptop computer.  But without a real keyboard I can’t imagine that it can replace a laptop computer, as it’s not going to appeal to those who do a lot of typing.

Its audience is going to be those can afford an overpriced stylish portable media player, netbook and ebook reader, and most importantly are willing to carry around something too big to fit into a pocket.

That’s one of the principle drawbacks of devices like this with larger displays.  If you don’t want to carry around a magazine sized book, you won’t want to lug the iPad around either, no matter how light or thin it is.  Would you really carry something this big around everywhere you go?

Part of what makes smartphones like the iPhone popular is because of all the things they can do while still being something you can carry anywhere.  The iPad misses that point completely.

Regardless it’s disingenuous for Apple to price the iPad the way they have; I think the price for the iPad (with 3G) is going to have to drop below $500 at the most to be successful, or this thing  is going to go the way of the Apple Newton.

I think Apple knows this too, which is part of why they have they misleading pricing structure.

But I also won’t underestimate the power of Apple marketing and its fanbase.

Although I wouldn’t say this video is hilarious, I still thought it was funny and clever, in a twisted sort of way; just my sort of commercial.  I haven’t seen this one on TV yet (but then I don’t watch that much TV either).  Too bad it advertises the anti-union company Walmart…

And I still think of all the e*Trade baby commercials this one is the best:

Yes, I think clowns are creepy too.

After I had completed the move of the air traffic related entries off this blog to ATC Freqs, I realized that I didn’t have a plan to address links to the posts that had been moved.

As a result, trying to view posts at the original location that had been moved would return a message of, “Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.”

Since I wasn’t happy with that I wanted to come up with a solution to redirect to posts on the new site.

The way I performed the move of the blog entries was to do a simple Wordpress export of all the entries on this blog, then an import into the new Wordpress installation at the new site.  Then I simply deleted the non-pertinent entries from the new site, and then did the same here.

The reason I got lucky is that by doing an export/import, I inadvertently preserved the Wordpress post entry IDs for the imported entries on the new site.

In other words, when I imported the entries, an entry with a link such as “http://www.ruralgeek.com/wpblog/?p=2645&cpage=1″ ended up on the new site at “http://www.atcfreqs.com/wpblog/?p=2645&cpage=1″.

Thus, in order to forward links from the old site it would be simple task of redirecting to the new site, using the same post ID and just changing the domain (and directory if necessary).

Initially I tried some redirect plugins for Wordpress, but in the short period of time I messed around with them couldn’t figure out how to do what I wanted to do.  I’m sure one of them does what I wanted, but I opted to figure out a different solution.

I decided to modify the Wordpress single.php (Single Post) file instead and made some minor changes to eliminate the short “Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.” message with one containing the link to the post on the new site.

(I’ll disclaim here and mention that I’m no PHP guru by any means; there may be a more elegant way of doing the following!)

Since I couldn’t find a Wordpress function to return the original URL of the errant link I needed another way to determine the URL of the post.

The PHP code snippet to return the URL of the current page was found here and I added it to the single.php file first:

<?php
function curPageURL() {
$pageURL = ‘http’;
if ($_SERVER["HTTPS"] == “on”) {$pageURL .= “s”;}
$pageURL .= “://”;
if ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] != “80″) {
$pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].”:”.$_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
} else {
$pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
}
return $pageURL;
}
?>

Then I modified the error message (“Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.”) replacing it with the following code:

<p>Sorry, that post wasn’t found here.</p>
<p>Some of the posts that were previously here have recently been moved to the <a href=”http://www.atcfreqs.com”>ATC Freqs blog.</a></p>

<p>This may be the page you were looking for: <a href=<?php echo str_replace(“www.ruralgeek.com”, “www.atcfreqs.com”, curPageURL());?>> <?php echo str_replace(“www.ruralgeek.com”, “www.atcfreqs.com”, curPageURL());?>
</a></p>

The result is a page such as this, that gives a more clear error message as well as a link to the location of the new page.

Obviously you would need to modify the “str_replace” statements with the appropriate strings for your sites, including the directories if they changed, as well as the message text referring to the new site domain.