This parody video pokes fun at Microsoft Paint, the aging art software included with Windows. YouTube commenters already point out that Vista Paint, the latest version, isn't much of an improvement. But that's not what makes it so funny to me.The real humor in the clip is its reminder that no one gets this excited about desktop software anymore. Take Apple's announcement earlier this week of iLife '08: The only real selling point of Apple's newest iLife software, used to manage photo collections, edit movies, and so forth, is that it's integrated with Apple's .Mac Web service. Yes, Microsoft Paint seems hilariously out of date. But to today's Web generation, it's not Paint that's outdated — it's the entire field of programs written to run on a PC instead of on a website. If you're in your 30s, this video will make you laugh out loud. If you're in your early 20s, I'm betting it will just bore you.

Here's what no one's saying about Blockbuster's acquisition of Movielink, the Hollywood-backed movie-download site: It's a desperate move to shore up Blockbuster's online failures. Blockbuster, remember, has been promising video downloads for most of this decade. First came a deal with Enron's broadband division, and, well, we all know what happened there. Since then, Blockbuster has said that video downloads would be coming soon for years. But Hollywood studios, burned by past negotiations with Blockbuster for sharing video rental fees, are understandably loath to cut favorable online deals with the video-rental chain. And it's hard for Blockbuster to compete technologically with the likes of Apple, Amazon.com, and Netflix. Buying Movielink gets Blockbuster deals with studios and ready-made tech — all of which gives it merely a place at the online-video table, not the ability to eat everyone else's lunch.

Brad Stone, the ruggedly handsome Timesman who outed Fake Steve Jobs, explains how Apple drove Forbes editor Dan Lyons to starting the faux-Apple CEO blog. [New York Times Bits Blog]

When Fake Steve Jobs — sorry, I mean Dan Lyons of Forbes — parodies real Apple CEO Steve Jobs's imperious view of Silicon Valley's subservient press corps, it's so over the top that some might think he's kidding. But he's not, as this exchange with a reporter from today's keynote, where he announced new hardware and software products, handily demonstrates:

Ah, gadget love transcends party lines. Presidential advisor Karl Rove, shown here consulting with White House colleague Josh Bolton in Minneapolis, is, it seems, an iPhone user — despite the fact that Al Gore sits on Apple's board. (Photo by Chris Usher for Time)

The most fascinating bit in Brad Stone's exposé of Fake Steve Jobs? For commenter davidu, it was the revelation that real Apple CEO Steve Jobs was interviewed by instant messenger. Impressive: Someone at the Times — most likely John Markoff — has Jobs's iChat screenname. And editors at Gray Lady consented to the inclusion of notes from an IMterview. We sent our crack reporters on a digging mission and they discovered this exclusive transcript. Must credit Valleywag!

Says blogfather Dave Winer: "The iPhone is a great example, but it'll be a short-lived product, I think, kind of like the Apple III or the Newton." Or, say, every business venture Winer has ever touched. [Scripting.com]

A power failure at a Samsung factory in Seoul, Korea forced a partial shutdown of chip production for the world's largest memory supplier. The breakdown is likely to boost competitors Hynix and Toshiba and impact manufacturers of consumer products using NAND Flash memory... particularly Apple, makers of the iPod and JesusPhone, who had — until recently — been reaping the benefits of high margins. [AP]

The stock market seems inexplicable. In June, when Engadget posted a memo, later proved fake, about delays in the iPhone launch that later proved false, Apple shares sank but instantly recovered. Yesterday, when TheStreet.com ran a story based on a supposed Wall Street report on iPhone production cutbacks, shares dropped 7 percent — and dropped further today, despite a thorough debunking by CNBC's Jim Goldman and Business 2.0's Phil Elmer-DeWitt. Why the difference?

Well this sounds familiar. One blog's erroneous report caused Apple shares to fall today. The stock was down 7% after TheStreet.com published a story about cutbacks in iPhone production. [CNBC]

Mindy Bockstein, chairwoman and executive director of New York's Consumer Protection Board has taken time out of her busy schedule to write a heartfelt missive to Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Among her complaints: Apple's iPhone return policies are too restrictive, and the battery has to be replaced by Apple technicians. "I encourage Apple to redesign the iPhone in order to provide for a replaceable battery," Bockstein instructs Jobs. Right, lady. When Steve Jobs takes design tips from a state bureaucrat, it will be a cold day in Cupertino. Says Silicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer: "Never mind police, health care, crime, mass transit, etc. — save us from not-quite-perfect $600 gadgets!"

With a secretive company like Apple, sometimes you have to read between the lines. And what I'm reading is that Steve Jobs & Co. think that sales of iTunes movies and TV shows are nothing to brag about. Apple's latest press release touts how the company has sold 3 billion songs to date. But unlike its last milestone press release from January, no mention is made of how many videos Apple's online store has sold. No wonder Jobs refers to the company's Apple TV set-top box — a potential market for the iTunes videos Apple is selling — as "a hobby."

Apple's stock was up more than two bucks to close at $137.26 today, as the company gets set to report June-quarter earnings. Investors have recovered somewhat from the revelation that AT&T activated fewer iPhones in the last couple days of June than some on Wall Street hoped for. With only two days of sales, no one expects the iPhone to contribute much to sales. MarketWatch states the obvious: Mac and iPod sales will make up for most of Apple's sales for the quarter, which analysts think will come in at around $5.2 billion. Nonetheless, the cell phone, as Apple's big growth opportunity, will be the focus of everyone's attention. I covered the call live, blogging the highlights here. On the call: CFO Peter Oppenheimer and COO Tim Cook. CEO Steve Jobs usually doesn't show for these things, and he didn't tune in for this one, either, even with all the iPhone buzz.

TheStreet.com is reporting that AT&T is paying unusually large fees to Apple in exchange for the right to sell the iPhone. The totals? $150 to $200 per phone, plus a $9 per user per month cut of the service fees. The upfront commission, which you can also think of as a discount on the true cost of the phone, is common in the industry and widely predicted; sharing service-fee revenue is something new. For Apple, which already plans to account for its iPhone hardware revenues evenly over the 24 months after a sale, this means that iPhone sales will juice revenues even more than expected. And for AT&T? It's getting a lot of high-tech, early adopter customers who wouldn't have gone to the carrier otherwise, but at the cost of setting a revenue-sharing precedent that will ruffle feathers in the wireless industry. Steve Jobs strikes a hard bargain.

Apple shares are down more than 4 percent to $139.53 right now. And why? Because AT&T has revealed that it only activated 146,000 iPhones in the last two days of the second quarter. Analysts, ludicrously, had expected 500,000, a number seemingly plucked out of thin air. Consider that Apple only has 160 U.S. stores, and consider that, while flagship stores like Apple's Stockton Street palace in San Francisco got as many as 750 iPhones for the Friday, June 29, launch, smaller stores got a much smaller supply. Consider that some of AT&T's 1,800 U.S. stores got as few as 15 iPhones. Even selling their entire stock as fast as they could, could Apple and AT&T's retail outlets really have moved many more phones than they had? (Photo by Dan_H)

The tip, incredible. The source, ironclad. Microsoft has apparently told executives at one of the world's largest PC makers not to expect a formal release of Windows Vista SP1 — the first major set of upgrades and bug fixes to its Vista operating system — until 2009 at the earliest. That explains why Microsoft was so desperate to correct erroneous reports, spread by a careless team of developers at Microsoft, that a beta version of SP1 would be out last week. Microsoft now says it "currently anticipates" a beta of SP1 later this year. Anticipations, of course, are not always met. Especially if you're a sluggish beast like Microsoft, with thousands of developers to keep in train on a release. And this delay would have wide aftershocks.

When Fake Steve Jobs does a pretend Apple earnings call, who's going to be on the line? Why, Fake Gene Munster, of course. (CNBC tech correspondent Jim Goldman tipped me off to this anonymous Apple blogger.) It's a sign of the insanity that's grown up around the faux Apple CEO that someone is now impersonating a stock analyst at Piper Jaffray, a second-tier investment bank known for its tech research. Personally, I'm betting it's actually Munster himself. SEC restrictions on what analysts can say and do have gotten so absurd that an anonymous — and plausibly deniable — blog makes for the perfect outlet. Come on, Gene, fake or otherwise — tell us what you really think.

Hate to say it, but Jason Calacanis had it right: NYT gadget reviewer David Pogue's "iPhone: The Musical" was a trite, derivative, and boring piece of Apple propaganda. But a group of San Francisco webheads have come up with a pitch-perfect take on the iPhone phenomenon. Behold the glory that is "Dontcha Wish Your Cell Phone Was Hot Like Me?" — and after the jump, my take on why this spoof gets it right while Pogue's flopped.

You'd think that people would be getting sick of reading about Apple's new iPhone. Or at least that jaded hacks would tire of writing about it. But no. The Apple 2.0 blog reports that the volume of news coverage about the iPhone has nearly doubled since iDay. A chart by Blackfriars Communications, a research firm, shows that from June 29, the day the iPhone launched, to July 8, when it peaked at 22,605 stories. In one day. Even now, Google News is still reporting more than 20,000 daily stories mentioning the iPhone. Add, to that staggering total, this one.

Glossy music magazine Blender has named Apple CEO Steve Jobs to the top of the Powergeek 25, its list of the top 25 people who influence online music. We don't object to the content of the list, but we do object to the title. His Steveness is no geek! And neither are flashy MySpace founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson nor suave Youtubers Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. The only recognizable geek on there is Bram Cohen of BitTorrent, at number 19. The rest are either techies, hipsters, or businesspeople. Someone at Blender should read up on their definitions.