Where Did the 47% Go?

 Mitt Romney’s little gaffe involving a remark about 47% of voters he supposedly “doesn’t care about” was MIA during Wednesday’s debate. It was supposed to be Obama’s biggest bullet and it was noticeably absent, which came as a shock to O’Reilly, Rasmussen, Gutfeld, Krauthammer, and other pundits. Everyone's got a theory as to why this didn't happen. My thoughts on this are because maybe:

-       Obama didn’t use it because it was a clean fight and he didn’t want to be the first to bring the mud…(“look who just got nasty first”)

-       And/or he felt like starting the mud-slinging meant that more would come back and he didn’t want to answer for his own mud… (“Let’s talk about your video at Jeremiah Wright’s church”)

-       Obama felt like Mitt was doing well enough that he could defeat the attack on the 47%, and Obama would have attacked in vain. Mitt was on his game and could simply roll right over it, and thus render future “47%” usage pointless. ("Didn't we talk about this last time?")

-       Obama felt like the first debate was a wash anyway, (and historically this is true), so why waste a good attack on a lost cause?

It's possibly that many of these reasons come down to a conscious choice on Barack’s part to leave it alone. If so, why? Because it would have hurt him more than it helped him. Whether this is by means of missing the mark entirely, starting a fight that was more damaging than successful, or wasting a good attack…well, who knows? But the honest truth is that it’s potentially a great attack. Given Obama’s position, the urge to use it next time has got to be pretty strong. Obama needs to perfect the attack (simply mentioning “the 47%” won’t cut it), and Romney needs a killer deflection and an even better counter attack. So expect to see attempts for each of these strategies from each contender next time in Kentucky—because after that the shelf life may leave the issue a bit stale. If Obama mentions it on the 16^th it will be three, maybe even four weeks old at the time—which is an eternity in our ADD culture. Obama has to use it or lose it, and it’s possible that the expiration date is looming for him. Either way, Mitt should be beyond prepared for the question and Barack better make it a good one. Odds are, you’ll see it on the 16^th or not at all.

Jailbreaking the iPhone 4S 5.1.1 -- There and Back Again

            Recently I finally caved and gave the uber-simple Jailbreak tool called “RedSn0w” a try. Jailbreaking the iPhone 4S isn’t really that hard—it’s all a matter of procedure and correct order of steps. It’s pretty simple, and once you figure it out, it takes well under an hour to go from bone-stock to a fully tweakable jailbreak.

            What isn’t simple is Cydia, which is the “app store” of the jailbroken world. A user gets Cydia for free when they use RedSn0w or Absinthe to jailbreak their i-device. There are hundreds of tweaks, apps, and theme managers from Cydia and its sources. All these goodies come from source servers on the internet. While Cydia has it’s own clean sources, there are literally hundreds of other source domains online for tweaks, themes, apps, etc. Keep in mind that not all sources are good—be warned, malware is out there too. To start things off I got a reputable theme manager to mix things up in the aesthetic department on my phone.

Dreamboard seemed to be a popular theme manager, so I ran with it

Within moments of installing Dreamboard my phone looked exactly like an Android, complete with working clock, weather, and Facebook widgets. Things could be confusing at times, but thanks to Dreamboard it was extremely easy to swap back to the stock look as necessary. I will say that Dreamboard definitely made swapping and trying themes easy as pie--and fast too.

            Despite the uber-slick theme swapping that Dreamboard provided, I found myself bouncing back and forth between feeling bored, and overwhelmed by all the aspects of jailbreaking. There’s a thousands of tweaks, and themes all from hundreds of different sources. But each source must be manually added into Cydia, and then manually sorted through. Going through the sources is a drag as the search feature is horribly ineffective unless you know exactly what you are looking for. The rating system is a joke, so browsing the app/tweak/theme lists tells the user next to nothing about the quality of the download.

            Using Google and YouTube helps you quickly find the best tweaks and so on. Installing them comes at multiple costs though—some installs cost money (more on this in a moment), and all the cool goodies take system resources. In short, lots of installs will almost certainly make the iPhone run slower than stock. Even I noticed a little performance loss with minimal goodies installed.

            There were two more final straws that made me go back to stock. First were the ads. Cydia has ads on nearly every page. That wasn’t appealing at all…every tweak and theme listing in Cydia had 2-4 ads on the info page, and it took time to load them all in addition to the screen shots. At best, they were annoying, and detrimental to the load speeds in Cydia when browsing.

            Secondly, many of the cool tweaks, apps, and themes cost money. It would seem that “out of jail” everything has a price—and no accountability. Purchases on Cydia can range up to $15 for a theme. Many themes are $2-$3 each, and other tweaks all cost a pretty penny once added up. (And they’re not always bug-free either. Getting them to work properly can take some additional tweaking). Installing a few top tweaks could easily run $10-$20. A friend of mine who had done a jailbreak ended up with a couple of unintentional bills due to hidden subscription fees after purchasing a couple of different items.

            In the end, jailbreaking is pretty simple and easy—but living with it, and taking full advantage of it is not. If you’re obsessed with your phone, and have lots of time to tweak it and get into it, then jailbreaking might be for you. Also, if you have a few specific themes in mind that you just have to have, then it may be worth a shot.

            On the other hand, if you’re not that into your phone then jailbreaking is pretty overrated in my opinion. The possibility of bricking a phone, or messing something up and dealing with the voided warranty isn’t really worth the tweaks in my opinion. It’s cool, but it’s not that cool. I’m happy to wait in jail for iOS 6.