Brain-eating zombies invade SF Apple store

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A horde of decaying zombies invaded San Francisco's downtown Apple store on Friday evening, hunting for brains, terrifying the customers, and gnawing on iMacs.

I've placed some photos here. I'm pleased to report that the zombies ultimately decided human brains were tastier than plastic iMacs, although it wasn't for lack of effort in trying to vary what must be a monotonous diet.

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-972...=2547-1_3-0-20

More significant -- and perhaps a harbinger of things to come -- was Apple's acknowledgment that they've had to modify their open door policy, clamping down on visitors who take advantage of all that free access to snazzy technology and fast Internet connections.

As Caroline McCarthy reported in CNET's Crave yesterday, Apple had already started to restrict user access before the MySpace incident that made headlines last week. Many Apple stores had voluntarily set up "mild" filters on their Web browsers to block guests who were using Apple's demonstration machines to cruise porn sites. Other stores set up the computers to play only promo material or allow only access to websites Apple had pre-bookmarked.

But what was really driving Apple nuts were those MySpace junkies.

"MySpace is a big issue for the Apple stores because people come in, Photobooth themselves (using Macs' built-in webcams), then stick their picture up on their MySpace account and loiter at machines for hours," one Apple store employee told McCarthy. "It is especially troublesome at the flagships and high-volume stores, and for a while there was no official word on how to deal with it." (link)

The bottom line was that the people drawn like flies to Steve Jobs' magical elixir were getting in the way of business. (Perhaps, as reader Scott Smith suggests below, not by hogging machines, but hogging bandwidth, making the Macs seem sluggish.)

http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache...&client=safari