OS X upgrade price

Apple didn't make its customers very happy when they announced that the price for Mac OS X 10.2/Jaguar was going to be the same for those just now getting into OS X and for those who already paid full price for OS X 10.1: $129.

I understand that it's a significant upgrade, it costs money...but it's a bit insulting to treat current OS X users as though they never paid into the pot in the first place. It would have been better to throw us a bone like a $99 upgrade price, or even $109...still plenty of money, but we'd at least get something for having already been on the bus. Apple used to work that way. Plus, psychologically the sop to the customer base would have muted or prevented the gnashing of teeth going on in the Mac market. Oh well.

The change of iTools/.Mac from free to pay bothers me not at all (maybe because I don't use them). Hosting companies like Pair charge more than $100/year to provide sophisticated server capabilities; this isn't that different.  

 bronze-as-bullets

Fussy writer moment: A weird fluff article made the front page of the Post today (why not the article about withholding UN Family Planning funding instead?), about malt-based alternatives to beer: The Buzz of 'Malternatives' [Washington Post].

The most bizarre part about it was the description mid-article of three advertising campaigns, two of which the author described as containing women (or "babes") "bronze as bullets", which I assume means "really, really tan" -- I found no instances of the phrase in Google, so I'm guessing it's original. I really think an editor should have caught the immediate repetition of such a weird phrase (maybe an attempt to coin a new cliché?) and replaced the second instance with some other euphemism for tan-ness... something like, say, "...a pack of overly-tanned babes", or "...a pack of babes well on their way to early skin cancer".

But I'm editorializing...