Brontoforumus Archive
Discussion Boards => Thaddeus Boyd's Panel of Death => Topic started by: MadMAxJr on April 15, 2010, 07:38:43 AM
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Most articles I read say that flash isn't allowed on the iPhone/iPad because it's a hideous beast of resources, Steve Jobs hates it, and has said "No" numerous times.
This article (http://stevecheney.posterous.com/the-genius-in-apples-vertical-platform) was an interesting change in point of view. Essentially it states that Apple may be looking to change how the processing playing field works, rather than simply hating on Adobe. (Or maybe they want to do both.)
The latter part of the article seems to read as pure fanboyism, but it's still an interesting idea. Guess we'll have to wait for someone to take apart the A4 processor.
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Someone already took apart the processor. (http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Apple-A4-Teardown/2204/1) It's a single-core ARM, not special.
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The latter part? I can barely get the meaning of any of the paragraphs of the article because the author has THE BACK OF HIS THROAT LOVINGLY WRAPPED AROUND THE TIP OF APPLE'S DICK
Hell, even -if- these changes were intended to bring forth the kingdom of Steve Jobs on earth, that's not what sets me on edge. Ok it IS but it's not ONLY that. The problem is that as long as you are Apple's little bitch they can change the rules of the game at any step and you can't do anything but bark like the bitch you are.
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Markos Moulistas, runner of Daily Kos, is an ardent iPad supporter. But, when faced with issue of closed system, pointed to a 13 year old kid who had developed an iPad app. Proudly proclaimed, "If it's closed how did this kid develop an app!" Completely ignoring that the kid had to use a separate, more open system to achieve this fabled goal.
Which is one of the problems I have with Apple apologists. The gist of their support for Apple's policies relies on two issues I happen to disagree: 1) That it's finally providing a platform for independent developers to get develop stuff and 2) That Apple products "Just work!", which is the fundamental trade off of a closed system.
The first issue just sounds rather ridiculous, as it ignores that most of what we use on the internet and in our day to day life comes from garage programmers who have always had a platform to create and distribute their own software. What Apple has actually done is find a way that they can personally profit off of that freedom and essentially make every independent developer an Apple employee that pays the company.
The second issue is with the "It just works" mentality. For years Apple has justified their closed systems with the mantra that in doing so, they create a device that just functions the way the user wants without having to deal with crashes or inconsistencies. Seeing as how each of my apps takes a nose-dive at least once a day (sometimes more. The other day my Evernote app crashed 9 times in a row), and the number of times I've had to reboot the entire phone just to get it working again actually seems to be larger than the number of times I've had to reboot my Windows 7 machine.
But above all is how Apple simply treats the idea of an open system as a choice as repugnant. They don't even provide the option to open the system for people who know what they're doing or at least feel confident in their abilities to operate the device. Apple even treats people who seek to open their system with jailbreaking as a violation of their rules which gives them legal right to brick the device you paid for. Apple's continued insistence that they still own the device I paid for is the greatest sin, and the one that is the biggest deal breaker these days.
tl;dr: LOL Appl€
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has the ipad been jailbroken yet?
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So I like how they do this and claim it's to keep the quality of apps high when the quality of apps are definitely not high. Yeah sure, blame the tools, not the legions of developers who still think they can get rich quick. I also hate when people act as if Apple is a much nice, loving choice than Microsoft. Apple makes very good products, but they're still a raging bag of dicks.
Dreth: sorta. It's been jailbroken, but a method isn't available for download yet as far as I know. The crack team is still 'packaging' it.
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The latter part? I can barely get the meaning of any of the paragraphs of the article because the author has THE BACK OF HIS THROAT LOVINGLY WRAPPED AROUND THE TIP OF APPLE'S DICK
Hell, even -if- these changes were intended to bring forth the kingdom of Steve Jobs on earth, that's not what sets me on edge. Ok it IS but it's not ONLY that. The problem is that as long as you are Apple's little bitch they can change the rules of the game at any step and you can't do anything but bark like the bitch you are.
There are times when I read your posts and just sit back in awe thinking holy crap that isn't even his first language
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Apple adheres to a strictly literal minimalist interpretation of a promise it made last week, while being so absurdly anti-competitive as to threaten the heyday of Microsoft OEM agreements. (http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/04/with-new-developer-agreement-apple-unlevels-the-iad-playing-field/)
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"How are we going to keep a foothold on this market we created?"
"Simple, make sure we can do things with the market others can't do."
I thought we had laws against this kind of thing.
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Well, let's be fair. It's hardly limited to "do things with the market". (http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/04/07/apple_rejected_ipad_app_for_using_pinch_to_expand_gesture.html)
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The latter part? I can barely get the meaning of any of the paragraphs of the article because the author has THE BACK OF HIS THROAT LOVINGLY WRAPPED AROUND THE TIP OF APPLE'S DICK
Hell, even -if- these changes were intended to bring forth the kingdom of Steve Jobs on earth, that's not what sets me on edge. Ok it IS but it's not ONLY that. The problem is that as long as you are Apple's little bitch they can change the rules of the game at any step and you can't do anything but bark like the bitch you are.
There are times when I read your posts and just sit back in awe thinking holy crap that isn't even his first language
complaining is my first language
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Israel prohibiting iPads from entering the country (http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/isreal_blocks_ipad_imports/).
The first comment is amusing because it links to another incident involving bringing a Mac into Israel (http://lilysussman.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/im-sorry-but-we-blew-up-your-laptop-welcome-to-israel/).
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To go back to the Apple vs Microsoft (in terms of evil), man, I am more afraid of Apple. They're about as bad (if not in some areas, way worse) but waaay more capable and have a way better public perception. The stuff they get away with while maintaining consumer trust staggers me.
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Apple wants to push hardware.
Microsoft wants to push software.
Pray one never buys the other.
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...have we gotten to the part where Apple is telling programmers what languages they're allowed to develop in yet?
I mean, I hate Flash. I'm actually okay with Apple trying to choke it off in an effort to force HTML5 implementation and compliance -- because breaking compatibility is the only way to get people to stop using shitty-but-ubiquitous Web development methods.
But telling people they can't code in ActionScript and compile to an iPad binary? Fuck. That. With a rusty hook.
...anybody want to try and find the other various iPad side conversations we've been having across the forums for a splitmerge? I think they're relevant.
Here, I'll go look.
Adjust Search Parameters
You may have meant to search for IPA.
...SMF makes a good point. Fuck this, I'm going to go grab a beer.
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But telling people they can't code in ActionScript and compile to an iPad binary? Fuck. That. With a rusty hook.
Hey, as Steve Jobs puts it, "intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform."
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Yeah, well, he founded the company with a guy who could compile an OS BY HAND. I think most of us can agree there should be more layers between the developer and the platform than that.
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I still can't believe he refused to write the foreword to Wozniak's memoirs because he thought it wasn't flattering enough. It's like, okay, you can still be a not terrible person while being an insane control freak with a deranged corporate philosophy, so not gonna go from there to personal judgments, but ... man, that's just a complete dick move.
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Beginning to understand why those myths about him firing employees in elevators because they farted or whatever have some staying power.
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Well, when Apple was first gearing up to go public, he refused to give any of the engineers any stock options. They were going to get practically nothing for building Apple, since Jobs didn't want to dilute the value of his own stock. Wozniak, being not a sociopath, ended up just giving out some of his shares to the engineers instead.
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Steve Jobs: An asshole lucky enough to be able to convince Wozniak to start a company with him, then take all the money/credit for Wozniak's greatness.
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Aha, and here I thought when I just completely stopped talking to my Koolaid-guzzling supervisor that I had escaped Apple conversations for the day. My bad.
My favorite overheard conversation from being literally surrounded by admitted felatists is this:
"Hey, you know how you can open up Task Manager in Windows and force a program to quit?"
"Uh, yeah?"
"How do you do that on a Mac?"
"Why would you want to do that on a Mac?"
"Well when one of my programs locks up I need to close it."
(NOTE: Without the faintest hint of irony.) "That doesn't happen."
"Uhhhh... it happens."
"No it doesn't."
"It's happening right now." *drags the guru over and shows him the screen*
"...oh, okay."
Then he tells the guy how to do it without even having to think about it because it's obvious he has to do it all the time.
The "Apple Cult" is no fucking joke. I've seen these guys preach, justify, outright lie and get ridiculously aggressive about any and all perceived shortcomings of absolutely every Apple product. It's getting to the point where I need to bite my tongue around them for fear of harassment, though fortunately for the most part it's easy to get a bunch of software developers and testers to want to talk about something besides technology for a while.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVVUNQUTGj4
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The Onion! (http://www.theonion.com/articles/apple-claims-new-iphone-only-visible-to-most-loyal,2772/)
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That's an old article but I love it more with each passing day that I hear people gushing about the iPad without ever actually seeing one anywhere.
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That's an old article but I love it more with each passing day that I hear people gushing about the iPad without ever actually seeing one anywhere.
Pretend I quoted this about six more times and reposted it on Facebook and Twitter.
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oh my god that's so good
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The latter part? I can barely get the meaning of any of the paragraphs of the article because the author has THE BACK OF HIS THROAT LOVINGLY WRAPPED AROUND THE TIP OF APPLE'S DICK
Hell, even -if- these changes were intended to bring forth the kingdom of Steve Jobs on earth, that's not what sets me on edge. Ok it IS but it's not ONLY that. The problem is that as long as you are Apple's little bitch they can change the rules of the game at any step and you can't do anything but bark like the bitch you are.
There are times when I read your posts and just sit back in awe thinking holy crap that isn't even his first language
complaining is my first language
I'm off to learn Portuguese just so I can- never mind, there's no way I'd be able to handle the brilliance.
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(http://img301.imageshack.us/img301/9018/4212j.jpg)
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:smile:
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Steve Jobs: An asshole lucky enough to be able to convince Wozniak to start a company with him, then take all the money/credit for Wozniak's greatness.
While I like Woz a hell of a lot better than I like Jobs, he doesn't have Jobs's talent for marketing -- in fact, few people do. Saying Jobs doesn't have any responsibility for Apple's success ignores the last 15 years of history -- the 15 years where they were on the verge of bankruptcy, hired him back on, and pretty much changed the way people consumed music.
He's not the engineering genius that Woz is, but he is DAMNED GOOD at making people want to buy his shit.
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He's not the engineering genius that Woz is, but he is DAMNED GOOD at making people want to buy his shit.
A skill that I have absolutely no respect for and indeed adds more points into the asshole stat in my book.
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Thats rather ignorant. Without Jobs, Woz would have never even realized what he had going on. It's more than getting people to buy things, it's knowing what way the wind is blowing and what you have to do demand out of a project to make it the 'best'.
Understating that role is practically saying "I have no idea how good products get made". Though yes, it makes him even more of a douche nozzle and I hate him. BUT REGARDLESS, he brought a lot to the table.
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No, he's right. Good marketers are assholes, it just comes with the territory.
edit: derp should read your whole reply
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Hey good marketers or designers can be nice! Marketing work is never exactly happy work, but you can not be a jerk about it. Besides being brilliant with marketing and having a good eye for solid design, Jobs is gifted enough to have an outrageous value in his "asshole" stat.
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Being an asshole is a handicap - not a totally debilitating one, but neither is it orthogonal to success - when any part of your marketing strategy includes making yourself into a brand, as Jobs has done. That he's an asshole just speaks the more highly of his talent.
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I've heard this story from dozens of people, but I'll quote the summary from rotten's (sadly abandoned) library:
When Steve Jobs worked at Atari, the company was working on creating the arcade game Breakout, which required 80 Integrated Circuits (ICs). The less ICs there were, the cheaper the games would be to produce, so Nolan Bushnell (Atari's president) offered $100 for every IC that could be knocked out of the design. Jobs brought Woz the challenge, and over four days and nights at Atari they put together a design that only required 30 ICs. Bushnell gave Jobs his $5000 bonus, which Jobs "split" with Wozniak by telling him it was a $700 bonus, giving him "half," or $350. Woz was delighted, but years later found out the truth. And cried.
This little story really does show the difference between the two founders: Wozniak, the classic hacker, facing challenges and improving a project so that people like himself could enjoy it, and Jobs, the goat fucker. As life has gone on to prove, it's the goat fucker that ends up running the company. Or, as might be said more poetically, In the valley of the goats, the Goat Fucker is king. Jobs would run the company for a good number of years before being shoved aside, and then return in a triumph when the company sunk to new lows in the 1990s.
Does a pretty good job of illustrating the character of the people involved, but actually isn't why I have such contempt for apple toys.
Apple is essentially AOL for hipsters. Roll that around in your mouth a little. Savor the woody textures of the metaphor. They sell devices and services that are, in every way that matters, inferior to something else except in that they're stylish and uncomplicated. If you want to pay a premium to save yourself from the time necessary to learn how something works and maybe get exposed to the guts of things, sure. I can see how that's attractive. Maybe your time is so valuable that you can't spare it for that sort of geekery. More likely, you're trying to create that impression while masking the fact that you're just really fucking thick.
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Can you get that last sentence published so I can quote it without preceding it with "Some guy on an internet forum said..."?
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Jobs = Ben Affleck, Woz = Matt Damon
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Can you get that last sentence published so I can quote it without preceding it with "Some guy on an internet forum said..."?
Oh, just tell them I said it. Could have written it on a bathroom wall with a crackhead shit pencil and people would be all acting like I brought it down from a mountain on a pair of tablets.
I'm kind of a big deal, ya know.
(http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/mspaintadventures/images/6/67/Dave.jpg)
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Apple is essentially AOL for hipsters. Roll that around in your mouth a little. Savor the woody textures of the metaphor. They sell devices and services that are, in every way that matters, inferior to something else except in that they're stylish and uncomplicated. If you want to pay a premium to save yourself from the time necessary to learn how something works and maybe get exposed to the guts of things, sure. I can see how that's attractive. Maybe your time is so valuable that you can't spare it for that sort of geekery. More likely, you're trying to create that impression while masking the fact that you're just really fucking thick.
Won't deny there's that aspect to it, because of course there is, but UI simplicity is a good thing, too. I'm a Linux guy, so I've spent plenty of hours working out how the guts of my OS work, and I can say without equivocation that I don't want to hack a fucking Xorg.conf ever again. (Pretty sure we had a similar conversation a few years back but we were talking about hardware and were on opposite sides -- I suggested you build a computer instead of buying one, and you said fuck that, you'd rather spare yourself the aggravation. Having bought one computer and built another over the course of the past two and a half years, I'm...well, still more inclined to build them, but if I were making $5K more a year I wouldn't be.)
There's plenty of padded-cell bullshit to Apple's approach to things, but I really do think being able to drag a program to the goddamn Trash is the way things should be uninstalled. (Have I said "Fuck Windows 7's control panel" yet? Fuck Windows 7's control panel.)
Realize I'm talking about the desktop and not the gadgets (because I own an Apple desktop and no Apple gadgets, other than an old 60GB iPod with a battery that won't hold a charge that I use mainly as an external hard drive), but the principle's the same. Simplifying shit is not inherently wrong, and there's a lot of really brilliant UI shit Apple's done over the years that deserves its accolades and imitators.
My objection's less to the UI usability and more that the philosophy carries over to fucking absurd walled-garden shit where, well, Apple gets to tell you what language you're allowed to fucking code in if you want to develop for them. That's not a fucking usability/QA issue, no matter how many times Jobs swears it is.
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Windows 7 and Vista's control panel is a lot more intuitive when you've got a year of experience doing tech support for it under your belt.
Having said that, yes, fuck Windows 7's control panel.
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My objection's less to the UI usability and more that the philosophy carries over to fucking absurd walled-garden shit where, well, Apple gets to tell you what language you're allowed to fucking code in if you want to develop for them. That's not a fucking usability/QA issue, no matter how many times Jobs swears it is.
I'm a simple layman who is ignorant on all things technical and legal, but what exactly is the difference between this and when Microsoft was trying to tie everything Windows did to Internet Explorer to kill Netscape? Because to me, it looks like Apple's decision here has as much to do with controlling what goes on their system as it does with making it difficult to port things other systems.
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My objection's less to the UI usability and more that the philosophy carries over to fucking absurd walled-garden shit where, well, Apple gets to tell you what language you're allowed to fucking code in if you want to develop for them. That's not a fucking usability/QA issue, no matter how many times Jobs swears it is.
I'm a simple layman who is ignorant on all things technical and legal, but what exactly is the difference between this and when Microsoft was trying to tie everything Windows did to Internet Explorer to kill Netscape? Because to me, it looks like Apple's decision here has as much to do with controlling what goes on their system as it does with making it difficult to port things other systems.
The difference here is that Steve Jobs is doing it, instead of Bill Gates. That means an absurd number of otherwise-seemingly-intelligent people will go out of their way to defend it as being a good thing, important for system stability and for the ultimate benefit of the user.
Seriously. Facts are materially identical, but because of who's involved, it's actually seen as a colorable issue.
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I think the difference is that people who don't like it actually feel like they have viable alternatives, or will once Google steps up and the two of them have some sort of Kaiju Battle.
As opposed to the other scenario where Apple was like "Hey we're the viable alternative!" and people mostly laughed.
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Market share, in other words.
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Guy finds lost iPhone, turns out to be development model of next iPhone (http://gizmodo.com/5520164/this-is-apples-next-iphone). Apple issues remote-kill command to phone.
Lots of skepticism on this one but if true, this amuses me.
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I find it funny that Apple products conveniently get 'stolen' 'lost' or 'leaked' right before major announcements and just happen to find their way into the hands of tech bloggers.
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Oh like these bloggers don't root on Apple's garbage bin every day.
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(http://img402.imageshack.us/img402/6890/w4bib.jpg)
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Even if that's totally made up, it's still awesome.
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So Gizmodo called out the guy by name (http://www.thinq.co.uk/comment/2010/4/20/gizmodo-blows-whistle-on-iphone-loser/) who 'misplaced' the iPhone G4.
As expected, the whole thing could possibly be A PAID HOAX OR STUNT (http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9175819/Gizmodo_paid_5K_for_next_gen_iPhone)! Shock!
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Apparently, the person who found the iPhone did so on March 18th. He spent weeks calling the person whose phone it was, people at Apple, trying to return it, and nobody gave a shit.
Either he was being laughed off as a crank in what would be an incredibly boneheaded move even by Apple standards, or that phone was intentionally left there for someone to find. Look at how much free press they're getting about iPhone 4G specs.
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Yeah I don't think the whole LOL WHOOPS I TOOK THIS ULTRA-SENSITIVE PROTOTYPE TO THE LOCAL BAR AND DROPPED IT :whoops: thing is fooling a lot of people who don't already love being lied to. Anybody who's ever been anywhere near a respectable RD department kniws that would pretty much entail a collosal, company-wide fuckup to ever happen.
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You guys make it sound like Apple needs to trick people into giving them press to begin with.
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Free press that doubles as making Apple seem like a noble victim full of cool, bar-hoppin' dudes? People are denouncing Gizmodo as engaging in industrial espionage.
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Free press that doubles as making Apple seem like a noble victim full of cool, bar-hoppin' dudes?
Public opinion of Apple has turned sour as of late. So a story of them "getting their comeuppance" would generate even more free press.
Everyone clamors to hear about how Apple got "so totally owned" and it just so happens that "new iPhone" is mentioned in tandem with that every time.
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dear god it's just an iphone with an extra camera. it's not like it shoots fucking lasers that will make a hologram of a girl that will have sex with you. The only reason anyone cares about it is because these people have SCRATCHED THE FACE OF THEIR MIGHTY GOD.
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dear god it's just an iphone with an extra camera. it's not like it shoots fucking lasers that will make a hologram of a girl that will have sex with you. The only reason anyone cares about it it's because these people have SCRATCHED THE FACE OF THEIR MIGHTY GOD.
Dude it has sharper edges THIS CHANGES THEIR WHOLE DESIGN MOVEMENT
:derp:
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I imagine the whole thing going down like that episode of Aqua-Teen Hunger Force where Shake really wants a PDA.
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dear god it's just an iphone with an extra camera. it's not like it shoots fucking lasers that will make a hologram of a girl that will have sex with you. The only reason anyone cares about it it's because these people have SCRATCHED THE FACE OF THEIR MIGHTY GOD.
Dude it has sharper edges THIS CHANGES THEIR WHOLE DESIGN MOVEMENT
:derp:
The Sharper Image? :whoops:
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Also the backing is ceramic now.
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I hate sour apple flavour.
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I dunno, I see the addition of a front-facing camera to be a game-changer, as I assume they are finally getting around to making a true widely-distributed cellular videophone a reality. I mean, you have to have an unlimited data plan anyway to use an iPhone anyway, so why not take advantage of all that bandwidth?
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But AT&T hates iphones already because they already use too much of their tubes, tubes which they never widen because they're cheap motherfuckers.
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Yeah, unless the iPhone 4 comes with an announcement of WiMax/4g support, I'm not going to be impressed with anything that takes extra bandwidth. AT&T is already the worst in the country in terms of their data service.
I still can't understand what was going through apple's head at the time. You can't tell me this phone wouldn't have been a better fit with Verizon or Sprint.
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Isn't it headed to other carriers in the supposed near future?
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Yeah, but years after the fact.
I'm just saying, there's a reason I don't have an iphone and it isn't the pricetag. I have this dream where I've died and gone to heaven, and I have an apple iphone and I'm with everyone I love and then someone asks me to look up a restaraunt review and I suddenly realize I'm stuck on a data network that is slow as hell, and I am, for all eternity, waiting for the review to finish loading. And then I realize, I'm not in heaven, but I've been in hell all along. I suspect this dream is reality for everyone who owns an iphone.
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I think the difference is that people who don't like it actually feel like they have viable alternatives, or will once Google steps up and the two of them have some sort of Kaiju Battle.
As opposed to the other scenario where Apple was like "Hey we're the viable alternative!" and people mostly laughed.
Right, this. The difference is that 90% of desktops run Microsoft Windows. You can't make the monopoly argument against Apple nearly so easily. Leastways, not until all its music players use the App Store.
Yeah I don't think the whole LOL WHOOPS I TOOK THIS ULTRA-SENSITIVE PROTOTYPE TO THE LOCAL BAR AND DROPPED IT :whoops: thing is fooling a lot of people who don't already love being lied to. Anybody who's ever been anywhere near a respectable RD department kniws that would pretty much entail a collosal, company-wide fuckup to ever happen.
It's only a big deal because Apple is notoriously secretive about its upcoming products. I'm as ready to call bullshit on free publicity as anybody, but this doesn't fit Jobs's MO at all. I've heard stories of him firing people for accidentally revealing much more trivial shit than this.
Rather an elaborate ruse and I'm inclined to trust Occam's Razor on this one. And of course if it's NOT an elaborate ruse, Gizmodo broke the law; they knowingly bought stolen property. Yeah, freedom of the press entitles them to break stories based on leaked information, but not to buy shit they know is stolen.
Yeah, unless the iPhone 4 comes with an announcement of WiMax/4g support, I'm not going to be impressed with anything that takes extra bandwidth.
Well, seeing as how the Gizmodo story we are currently talking about specifically refers to it as the iPhone 4G...
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According to Gizmodo's account of things, the person who found the phone tried repeatedly to get in touch with Apple, and the engineer who "lost" it, to return the phone to them, and he was laughed off or ignored every time.
The relevant statute is California Penal Code Section 485 (http://law.onecle.com/california/penal/485.html), which reads "One who finds lost property under circumstances which give him knowledge of or means of inquiry as to the true owner, and who appropriates such property to his own use, or to the use of another person not entitled thereto, without first making reasonable and just efforts to find the owner and to restore the property to him, is guilty of theft."
So, no, not stolen property. Unless weeks of calling the owners to try to return the device doesn't qualify as making "reasonable and just efforts".
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Rather an elaborate ruse and I'm inclined to trust Occam's Razor on this one.
Yeah but I think the conspiracy theory is the Occam's Razor answer, at least for the question How the fuck did an engineer ever manage to get an incredibly valuable prototype out of the office and why the fuck does he still have a job?
We're kind of in the position here of trying to decide whether Apple is blatantly lying or whether their information security department is just amazingly incompetent. For some reason this never seems to affect a company's reputation that much.
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the 3gs disguise case makes me think that it's more likely to be an actual loss. If they were planting it to be found why would they design and make a disguise for it? Also, field testing signal strength or this alleged noise cancellation extra mic seems pretty plausible to me.
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What doesn't sound plausible is that Apple wouldn't send any suits or extra backup whose entire job is to tap the engineer on the shoulder and say "Did you forget the iPhone?"
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Yeah but I think the conspiracy theory is the Occam's Razor answer, at least for the question How the fuck did an engineer ever manage to get an incredibly valuable prototype out of the office and why the fuck does he still have a job?
We're kind of in the position here of trying to decide whether Apple is blatantly lying or whether their information security department is just amazingly incompetent. For some reason this never seems to affect a company's reputation that much.
Hanlon's Razor IS a version of Occam's Razor, you know.
I really don't understand what makes it hard to believe that someone might test a cell phone outside of a damn clean room. When people only test products inside artificial environments and fail to mimic everyday conditions of use, you...well, perhaps worst-case is you wind up flagging fucking svchost.exe as a virus (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-20003074-83.html). The 3G launch was an EPIC fuckup (http://gizmodo.com/5024187/apple-and-att-stores-having-difficulty-activating-iphones-update-its-the-ipocalypse), and I seem to recall some MobileMe problems too.
According to Gizmodo's account of things, the person who found the phone tried repeatedly to get in touch with Apple, and the engineer who "lost" it, to return the phone to them, and he was laughed off or ignored every time.
That initially triggered my bullshit detector, but on R'ing TFA (http://gizmodo.com/5520729/why-apple-couldnt-get-the-lost-iphone-back):
I work for AppleCare as a tier 2 agent and before the whole thing about a leak hit the Internet the guy working next to me got the call from the guy looking to return the phone. From our point of view it seemed as a hoax or that the guy had a knockoff, internally apple doesn't tell us anything and we haven't gotten any notices or anything about a lost phone, much less anything stating we are making a new one.
Apple doesn't tell its techs shit? Yeah, that sounds reasonable.
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Yeah, having worked a tech support job, esp. when it comes to new tech, you don't find out shit.
I remember the launch of the Samsung Instinct. "Hey Eric, this guy is calling in trying to register a samsung i800" "A what?" "An i800. I can't find it in KMS." "...Let me see that. Must be an old phone. Check the big phone list for the old SAmsung models." "He says it's brand new. Looks like an iphone." "...Son of a bitch."
The official announcement that we were supporting the Instinct and the training for it came about 3 weeks after the official launch of the product.
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That initially triggered my bullshit detector, but on R'ing TFA (http://gizmodo.com/5520729/why-apple-couldnt-get-the-lost-iphone-back):
I work for AppleCare as a tier 2 agent and before the whole thing about a leak hit the Internet the guy working next to me got the call from the guy looking to return the phone. From our point of view it seemed as a hoax or that the guy had a knockoff, internally apple doesn't tell us anything and we haven't gotten any notices or anything about a lost phone, much less anything stating we are making a new one.
Apple doesn't tell its techs shit? Yeah, that sounds reasonable.
This aspect of the story triggers my bullshit detector too, but not on the part of the guy who found the iPhone. Apple, a company as secrecy-conscious as it is, doesn't immediately make every effort to find the phone? They don't even tell their techs to escalate calls about a prototype iPhone? If they fire people who accidentally reveal much more trivial shit, why does Gray Powell still work there?
The whole official narrative stinks. Gizmodo starts to raise the question themselves:
The only uncharacteristic part of whole story is that Apple had employees using top-secret hardware in the wild, amongst the masses, without so much as a simple password lock. (Though Apple has a history of public testing: They sent 200 field technicians out to vet the first-gen iPhone.) What about Apple's storied (and absurd) internal security protocols? The leak-hunting Gestapo? Was this an unprecedented, utterly unique slip, or has everyone been giving Apple too much credit?
But they take it the wrong direction. It seems blindingly obvious to me that the phone was lost intentionally. Their actions make absolutely no sense otherwise. Gizmodo tries to claim that that's impossible, because of the backlash and downside, but they assume as a premise of their argument that Apple's planting the phone becomes known.
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See, while I think it's odd that Apple would have very little protocol in place in case of a lost phone, I also can't think of what they stand to gain from a leak like this. People are talking about the new iPhone now, but it's not like it would be less of a big deal in June when they announce it anyway. Apple isn't exactly a company that needs to rely on leaks and subterfuge to generate buzz.
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They did kill the thing in like two days. And once it was dead, they couldn't call it or ping it to find its location. Wah wah waaah.
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Letting Steve Wozniak play with a 3G iPad for two minutes during the iPad launch gets you fired. (http://www.cultofmac.com/woz-accidentally-gets-apple-engineer-fired-for-showing-ipad/39931) But not losing a prototype iPhone?
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If they fire people who accidentally reveal much more trivial shit, why does Gray Powell still work there?
Paradoxically, I think it's actually because the story's GOTTEN as big as it has. This is national news, and if Apple fired him that would be national news, and Apple would not come across looking good for it. Usually firings can go under the mainstream radar and only get reported in tech journals and suchlike.
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How about the month between the phone being lost and the story breaking? Why wasn't he fired during that?
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Because firing him would imply he was the one at fault.
Because Apple wants to make it a case of theft, not a case of lost property.
Because police just aprehended Gizmodo's editor's computers in order to find the name of the person that sold them the phone. (http://trunc.it/7jguz)
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Oooooh! This ought to get good! :glee:
I wonder if it'll turn out that Powell's still employed because he claimed he was robbed?
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What in the FUCK is going on here
Because it looks like California's pissed about something that Apple doesn't care about.
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Thoughtcrime.
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It's really funny to compare this thread with the Talking Time Equivelent. Or comparing the threads on piracy. It makes me lol.
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Apple's position in Flash seems to be:
1) We support open standards on the Web.
2) For this reason, we will not allow Flash on the Web.
3) For the same reason, we will not allow Flash on the App Store.
Wait wait what [RECORD SCRATCH]
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also we will not allow code in Flash's language to be ported to another language/framework that we support and then compiled
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Jobs posts an incoherent screed on the evils of Flash, little connection to reality or sanity. (http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/)
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I just don't understand how Jobs can crow about open platforms when Apple's flagship device is a carrier locked cell phone where applications can only be developed with Apple's approval and blessing. I'd write this off as an exception if their computer hardware wasn't designed to be upgradeable and unserviceable.
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I guess its too much to ask for people to actually read the article. Aside from the lengthy, true paragraphs about how awful and unstable Flash is, the basic idea is that there's nothing wrong with proprietary software, but proprietary formats are kind of dumb. Which, y'know--if you're not an open source zealot--is pretty reasonable.
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It IS rather reasonable until you realize it's coming from the dude that just limited the use of the iPhone API in every way possible. It's like hearing Bush speak against Saddam's invasion of Kuwait because invading other countries for no obvious reason is evil. PRETTY REASONABLE IN GENERAL BUT ONLY BEING USED TO FURTHER HIS OWN MEANS.
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The issue I have isn't what's being said, it's who's doing the saying.
Let's look at iPhone app development; You can't make a program for the iPhone at all without Apple OKing you as a developer. Then, you create the app, and Apple has to approve the individual app. If you want to sell the app, you have to sell it through the app store. If a customer wants the app, they have to have an iPhone, and to have an iPhone they have to use AT&T. If the customer does not want to use AT&T, they can't use the app, and Apple reserves the right to brick the phone for taking it off the network.
I don't see how this is somehow different or better than "If you want to use Flash, you have to install a free plugin, and only Adobe gets to make flash players."
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One of these things is trying to make itself a web layout and video delivery mechanism standard.
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The other thing is trying to make itself an EVERYTHING standard.
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Honestly Jobs is kind of being a fucking tool here. He has a laundry list of extremely good, hard to argue reasons for the decision, and keeps going back to the one that makes him look like the most self-unaware person on the planet. Apple has been criticized for being too closed since the day it was freaking founded.
Adobe's rebuttal, on the other hand, puts into perspective why they're so understandably pissed: Apple just hamstrung Flash's interoperability, one of it's biggest selling points. Hell, I remember Thad actually suggesting a few years ago that an aspiring game developer could switch to Mac and comfortably use Flash for cross-platform development. That's still technically true... But it's not exactly tempting right now.
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Wait he just said that Flash is made for mice and not touch interfaces.
...
Theres a difference on a technical level? In fact, Flash only uses one button!
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I don't see how this is somehow different or better than "If you want to use Flash, you have to install a free plugin, and only Adobe gets to make flash players."
The difference here is that non-Adobe flash players exist. Actionscript and .swf are open formats, and anyone can write readers for them.
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So, basically, Steve Jobs is not only a hypocrite, he's basically completely wrong?
Also, has anyone else noticed the irony in closing your platform to someone because they don't operate an open platform?
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Well, he does seem to impose values which are not universal (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/30/seal-hunting-game-gets-de_n_558515.html).
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IE's product manager jumps onto the bandwagon with Apple, asserting that Flash is too buggy and insecohgodicantdothiswithastraightface.
For Christmas this year I'm going to give every executive in the computer industry a really big mirror.
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Courier tablet (http://gizmodo.com/5527442/microsoft-cancels-innovative-courier-tablet-project) and the HP Slate (http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/29/hewlett-packard-to-kill-windows-7-tablet-project/) cancelled, iPad to reign supreme complete unchallenged for the forseeable future.
I wanted a slate, goddamnit. :rage:
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HP Slate was cancelled because HP just bought Palm.
There's going to be an HP-Apple war all right, but now HP's coming in with a version of Palm OS instead of a cockfucked Windows port. Jobs' increasing hysteria is warranted.
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I guess its too much to ask for people to actually read the article. Aside from the lengthy, true paragraphs about how awful and unstable Flash is, the basic idea is that there's nothing wrong with proprietary software, but proprietary formats are kind of dumb. Which, y'know--if you're not an open source zealot--is pretty reasonable.
Except that he's, you know, advocating H.264.
Related: MS has started spreading FUD about Ogg Theora, and Jobs has allegedly written an E-Mail (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/30/steve_jobs_claims_ogg_theora_attack/) asserting that there's about to be a patent suit over it.
Honestly Jobs is kind of being a fucking tool here. He has a laundry list of extremely good, hard to argue reasons for the decision, and keeps going back to the one that makes him look like the most self-unaware person on the planet.
This.
Like I said, I wholeheartedly support refusing to support Flash, because Flash sucks and somebody needs to force a new standard.
It's everything AFTER that that's fucked.
Adobe's rebuttal, on the other hand, puts into perspective why they're so understandably pissed: Apple just hamstrung Flash's interoperability, one of it's biggest selling points. Hell, I remember Thad actually suggesting a few years ago that an aspiring game developer could switch to Mac and comfortably use Flash for cross-platform development. That's still technically true... But it's not exactly tempting right now.
Worse than that, Jobs is actually howling that the very IDEA of cross-platform design is evil. He gripes at length about how long it took Adobe to implement Cocoa, and says that makes it "the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X" -- which I guess is true if you don't consider Microsoft Office to be major third-party software. And of course omits the fact that there are still FIRST-party Apple programs that haven't implemented Cocoa yet.
He's literally advocating that every piece of software be developed, from the ground up, for the single platform the binary is going to be run on. Which is not a very good position for a guy with 10% of the desktop market to take.
It's crazy 1960's stuff. I mean, I'll grant that a ported application is not going to work as well as it did on its native platform. (Just look at how awful iTunes for Windows is -- ZING!) But the idea that applications should therefore never be ported is fucking asinine. The entire history of software development has been a movement toward apps that work the same on different platforms. (I'm typing this in Firefox under Windows on a Mac -- I am a guy who cares about interoperability. Hell, I wouldn't have booted to Windows at all if I could fucking play Dragon Age in Linux.) Jobs wants to go back to the days before portable code. Before C, for God's sake.
He wants what he's always wanted: tightly-controlled, very high-quality software that works predictably, exactly the way it's designed to, to the benefit of stability and usability but at the expense of user choice.
It's not an inherently bad goal (most users are happy to sacrifice choice in favor of stability and usability), but he's taken it to a truly ludicrous extreme.
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FTC and the DoJ are thinking about maybe starting an anti-trust inquiry on Apple possibly (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/goverment-weighing-possible-apple-antitrust-probe/)
As far as I'm concerned, this is a pretty open and shut anti-trust violation. Apple is trying to block other developers from developing for their product in an attempt to control the market. The whole thing sounds almost note for note like the tune Microsoft was took to court over for the IE integration in Windows.
Of course, all of this will probably go down up until Steve Jobs just commands them to stop.
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For what it's worth, Your feds are investigating whether an antitrust suit is possible (http://www.huliq.com/8738/93172/antitrust-investigation-apple-possible).
Hope to hear more from this in a month's time.
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Apple's market share for mobile app sales, including free apps, was 99.4% in 2009. Even in its heyday, Internet Explorer never got that high.
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Source? Because I'd like to have one for the next time someone tries to make the market share argument.
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Here you go (http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/apple-responsible-for-994-of-mobile-app-sales-in-2009.ars).
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I gotta be honest, I work on macs a good deal and I never noticed them running adobe products any better than the PCs I regularly use. In fact, my PC kicks the crap out of the iMacs I've used. The reason is obvious: I'm running more powerful hardware, on average. I sorta get sick of people saying "I use macs because I'm a designer and it's better for design". Pound for technological pound, Apple makes hot products, but dollar for dollar, the price/performance ratio isn't there. I want them to just say it how it is. "I use a mac because PCs are bullshit and I want my shit to work all the time without being some tech geek" which is TOTALLY fine. Or a lot of other reasons (like, you know, being thoughtfully designed and generally pretty damn consistent and intuitive), but implying that these products magically run better on OSX constantly annoys me. It's a question between money/power and money/convenience.
Not that I'm accusing Guild of any of this, but I hear it ALL THE DAMN TIMED AND HE REMINDED ME HOW MUCH I HATE THAT.
.... Though the sad part is, what makes people shut up the most is when I show them that it's a tablet laptop that runs photoshop and I can draw on the screen. It makes me sad that tablet laptops are just not the type of devices Apple makes. :(
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Hahahahaha better for design AAahahahahahahaha.
Trust me, any artist worth their salt can tell you that hoary old sawbones was complete bullshit even fifteen, maybe twenty years ago. it's just the kind of mythological stuff that Apple revels in perpetuating "This is the computer for ARTISTS, not accountants!"* Yeah. [joke about Mac-vs-PC commercials]
The crux is pretty much that photoshop and other such industry standard programs (not just Adobe) have consistently run as well or better on PCs, the lions share of these programs having been designed for PCs first.
*It probably doesn't help that artists are generally the kind of idiot who'll swallow that line and propagate it like some high school kid who truly believes that this parsley is in fact the best weed he's ever smoked.
:tldr: It's not the hardware. It's the software. And the very best software is not an Apple product.
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It should also be of note that The Safari browser through the iPhone was the first thing to get hacked in this years Pwn 2 Own contest (http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/03/25/pwn2own-2010-google-chrome-is-the-last-man-standing/). Smug and stupid are not mutually exclusive, it would appear.
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Final Cut's still better than Premier AFAIK, iMovie and iPhoto are better than their comes-with-Windows-under-the-Accessories-menu equivalents, and it's not like Garageband is the greatest thing ever but it's better than pretty much anything you'll see bundled with a new PC.
It IS pretty stupid, given how many very-damn-useful pack-ins Macs have, that there's no fucking simple Paint program.
Especially given that Apple fucking invented (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacPaint) that shit.
EDIT: Also, despite Steve's one-button-mouse fetish, Apple's produced some pretty great mice with obvious Photoshop interface implications, like 360-degree scroll and multitouch gestures.
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Final Cut is a pretty good example, though I believe theres a good deal of competitors as well that aren't premiere. I can't speak on video editing much though -- not my field. Anyways, I'm not saying Mac's are bad or anything. They also definitely come with a better set of packaged programs by leaps and bounds... But if you're a designer (and like, a real designer, not a "I blog and make websites for my dog" designer), includes don't count for much. Nice for the casual folks, for sure. Really for me, most of it seems to be that designers and artists are VERY NOT COMPUTER PEOPLE and I can't blame them for that. I'm not much of a car person and, given the funds, would buy one that wouldn't break compared to the one with the highest cost/performance ratio. I got no problem with whatever anyone uses to make something. When it's printed out, or put on the web, I can't tell the damn difference. I just hate how some artists are about it, which is in a way totally removed from reality. In fact, when I ask "Why are macs better for graphic design", they can't really give any reasons. This has nothing to do with the product (Which is a great product, but not for me), just, as seemingly always with Apple products, it's just the people who use them. When it's professionals and not hipsters though, I get bugged a bit more.
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There are a few mac labs around campus at my school. I'm as baffled as you, Kayin.
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I got no problem with whatever anyone uses to make something.
Which of course brings us back around to what's horribly wrong with Apple imposing limits on languages and devkits.
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Actually, to add:
In fact, when I ask "Why are macs better for graphic design", they can't really give any reasons.
Snow Leopard actually has some really cool shit going on at the backend, between Grand Central routing processes to different processors and OpenCL offloading them to the GPU. Not sure how much of that Adobe has implemented yet (my understanding is OpenCL requires a hell of a lot of very specific code but Grand Central is largely handled by the OS), but the potential is obvious.
And also something I wouldn't expect most users to know anything about.
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Hah, it's also funny that I know more about that stuff that they do, or the old argument that they were better due to the RISC processors or whatever (not sure how true that was, but it was a reason someone could try and use!). Though like I said, pound for technological pound, Apple machines more than pull their weight with a lighter and more reliable operating system. But for the price of any non-Mini Mac, you can put together some sort of God Machine with PC hardware.
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You keep saying Apple machines are hold up "pound for technological pound". What exactly do you mean by this? Last I checked, the physical hardware requirements even for things as Mac-friendly as Blizzard games were significantly higher on Macs than on PCs.
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But for the price of any non-Mini Mac, you can put together some sort of God Machine with PC hardware.
And the Mini is probably the LEAST value for what you pay. They've priced it right out of its niche. I quite liked having one as a media center, but there's a reason I built a PC for my new one. For less than I'd have paid for a Mini, I got a dual Pentium with 4GB RAM and 2 terabyte hard drives. Which I can upgrade if I need to. OTOH, as a media center it doesn't have as seamless an interface as FrontRow with the Apple Remote. (And Windows is actually far behind Mac and Linux in terms of Wii remote support. GlovePie's neat and all, but it's basically a hack, and the MS Bluetooth stack is pretty spotty.)
That said, you start talking student discounts and what-have-you and they start to get competitive.
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Oh all I'm saying is if you get one of the cheaper minis you can't make a GOD MACHINE with the same price. You can eaaasily beat it though, but it's not going to be a god machine. If you're sending a grand or 2 on a PC though, JESUS CHRIST that's going to be some insane monster.
As for the pound for pound comment, I can't speak for games, but OSX -SEEMS- to be handling editing/graphical tasks well considering they tend to have statistically weaker hardware. So while a similarly statted windows machine might (MIGHT) open photoshop slower or open files slower or render something a little slower, the price difference is usually huge. Granted, like you said, this could be totally wrong, though wow's requirements seem about the same when you consider it in comparison to modern operating systems as opposed to XP. But could all be wrong and I wouldn't even care. This is just general observation in my time working with Macs. I can't be sure it is the correct observation.
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As I understand it the design bias has nothing to do with hardware performance and more to do with display accuracy. Mac has had advanced color management as part of the OS since 1993; Windows tried to catch up starting with Vista, but it's still not very good. Then there's historic support for higher resolutions, sharpness adjustment, etc - basically, at a system level, it's easier to make Photoshop represent actual photos with a Mac, which is way more important than the time it takes to render it.
tl;dr: Guild's comment was actually completely accurate and he's the only person in this thread who knows what the hell he's talking about. :bizarro:
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That is semi true. While on a system level, yes, it's harder to adjust color settings in windows, tons of 3rd party tools can do the same thing. It's just a matter of buying a proper screen. All macs come with a quality IPS screen, which is not something everyone is willing to binge on, but is definitely very affordable. My thinkpad has an IPS screen which has excellent color accuracy as well. Compared to my toshiba portege that has terrible purple/blue reproduction. Even my desktop monitor, which was a cheap acer, does well with some color correction.
But really anyone who works in print will tell you, even if they work on macs, you can never trust a screen anyways. You can make it as trustworthy as possible, but that still doesn't mean too much.
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That is semi true. While on a system level, yes, it's harder to adjust color settings in windows, tons of 3rd party tools can do the same thing. It's just a matter of buying a proper screen. All macs come with a quality IPS screen, which is not something everyone is willing to binge on, but is definitely very affordable. My thinkpad has an IPS screen which has excellent color accuracy as well. Compared to my toshiba portege that has terrible purple/blue reproduction. Even my desktop monitor, which was a cheap acer, does well with some color correction.
But really anyone who works in print will tell you, even if they work on macs, you can never trust a screen anyways. You can make it as trustworthy as possible, but that still doesn't mean too much.
This man speaks the truth. If you care about the print product, you always have to print, then go back and adjust the digital file.
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That is semi true. While on a system level, yes, it's harder to adjust color settings in windows, tons of 3rd party tools can do the same thing. It's just a matter of buying a proper screen. All macs come with a quality IPS screen, which is not something everyone is willing to binge on, but is definitely very affordable. My thinkpad has an IPS screen which has excellent color accuracy as well. Compared to my toshiba portege that has terrible purple/blue reproduction. Even my desktop monitor, which was a cheap acer, does well with some color correction.
But really anyone who works in print will tell you, even if they work on macs, you can never trust a screen anyways. You can make it as trustworthy as possible, but that still doesn't mean too much.
I want to point out that the Mini does not come with a monitor by default.
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http://theappwhisperer.com/2010/05/12/oh-no-not-again-apple-loses-another-4th-gen-iphone/
Attention on deck: Uh oh. Uh oh.
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I can't post anything but jokes (http://www.gocomics.com/features/66/feature_items/514987) in this thread.
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http://theappwhisperer.com/2010/05/12/oh-no-not-again-apple-loses-another-4th-gen-iphone/
Attention on deck: Uh oh. Uh oh.
how does anyone not think Jobs is doing this on purpose now?
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Um, because if he is, the federal case against the people who sold and bought the last one is massive fraud?
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... and?
Jobs is a complete asshole with no regard for the law. He drives his car without plates because he doesn't like they way they break up the aesthetic, and parks in handicapped spaces, because he can afford the tickets and gives no fuck.
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I headed into the apple store to give the iPad a try and.. I kind of liked it. :humpf:
It's a solid piece of technology, I'll give it that much. It really did feel like I'm in the future for once.
Hoping for the Droid Tablet to be good. Or maybe for the JooJoo to get out of the legal shit hole it's in.
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For some reason,
parks in handicapped spaces
it's this kind of thing that irks me over anything else.
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Maybe he's handicapped!
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Emotional and moral handicaps don't count.
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Maybe the liver he bought came with a handicap pass, then.
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It didn't (http://www.cultofmac.com/steve-jobs-still-parking-in-handicapped-spaces-the-pictures/2613). He gets the tickets, hands them to his assistant to pay, and continues doing the same thing every day.
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“He seemed to think the blue wheelchair symbol meant the spot was reserved for the chairman,” Hertzfeld writes.
(http://www.tdbimg.com/files/2009/01/14/img-author-photo---steve-jobs_215805254551.jpg) You mean it's not? That's not very intuitive. That's poor design.
We are currently developing the iLot, the Apple-based parking lot. Each space will be sized according to the type of vehicle and you will only be allowed to park in those spaces. For example, an "SUV" space will only fit an "SUV" car. If a smaller car attempts to park in an SUV space, it will be towed, because that goes against our design.
Vehicle designated spots will be sorted according to gas mileage. The cars that get the better gas mileage will be forced to park in the back of the lot, and the gas-hog SUVs will get front parking spaces so they do not waste gas driving around the lot.
There will be concrete barrier walls between each spot as well, instead of lines painted on the asphalt. Yes, we understand the limits this brings. You can't open your doors as wide as a normal parking lot, but we feel that this isn't important to the parking experience.
Sent from my iPad
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Ziiro wins.
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I don't care if he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, we're talking about a goddamn police report with multiple witnesses saying the seller knowingly stole the phone. Now, it's possible that Apple GOT TO THEM, but I think at that point you're starting to get into some pretty wacky conspiracy-theory stuff.
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Nobody's saying that Hogan didn't find the phone, shop it around after calling Apple, and end up selling it to Gizmodo.
Just that Powell left the phone in the bar on purpose, as per his instructions.
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Yeah, this has all been part of some brilliant PR strategy on Apple's part. They WANTED to get raked across the coals in the press and come across looking like a bunch of incompetent, litigious assholes.
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I'm still pretty fucking mystified how an information security fuckup of that magnitude could have ever occurred, but yeah I'm with Thad that most of the followup does not seem to be :justasplanned: after all.
Then again, it isn't entirely out of the question that the whole charade may have just been orchestrated by an insane dying prick.
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Look - I'd honestly have believed that this was an accident the first time, and that it getting out was a massive failure on the part of someone in Apple's engineering department, but two prototypes getting out within weeks of each other is kind of hard for me to swallow. Jobs has proven himself, time and time again, to be completely morally bankrupt. I really don't put it past him to push the weight of his legal team to give the "accidental leak" story credibility. Sure, he might be committing fraud, but he has to have one of the best legal teams in the business, considering how close Apple is to dealing with an anti-trust case. Apple's name might be getting shit on, but for the most part that's being completely overshadowed by the huge amounts of free press and hype they're getting for the new iphone.
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I also believe that Steve Jobs has an ego so massive, and so constantly fed by yes-men, that he is really beyond the comprehension of criticism. Like Prince. He simply does not understand when people disagree with him or disapprove of him - they're just so obviously wrong.
It's worth keeping in mind that people have been talking about this phone for a month, and it hasn't cost Apple a dime. And even assuming you like iPhones in the first place, it's just not an impressive phone. It's a pretty lackluster improvement over the 3GS for hardware, and they already blew their wad on iPhone OS 4. If they announced it as per usual the discussion would have focused on that, instead of how wronged Apple was.
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I guess I can see that. Personally the punchline of "And Gizmodo then goes on to admit it's not that impressive." is my favorite part but I can see how most people would lose that detail in the entire spectacle. And if you can blow that spectacle up bigger while making life miserable for the guys who said it sucks, eh, bonus.
This shit is just way too Xanatos for a real life evil scheme. The most likely scenario is that Apple is trying to turn a bad situation to their advantage, and it's not working that well.
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Once again, though, I am flummoxed for an explanation for why the engineer who let Steve Wozniak play with a 3g iPad for two minutes during the iPad launch got fired, but Gray Powell is still employed. Except for "he did nothing he wasn't told to do".
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Already covered: it weakens Apple's theft case.
As for flummoxed: I'm flummoxed that you guys think Apple thought it was in need of a new advertising machine that got it the most negative media coverage it's gotten since...well, ever.
Apple needs help getting free media coverage of iPhones? Really? Fucking REALLY? And, you know, figures that that media coverage should revolve around what a bunch of pricks they are?
Guys, come ON now. I'm right there with you on the "Steve Jobs is a prick" bus. But what you're suggesting is he is a complete fucking idiot on the subject of advertising. Which is sort of like saying Jack the Ripper didn't know anything about killing prostitutes.
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To be fair, Apple is one of those odd companies that kinda benefit from being thrashed on. The more the core customer base sees them as being attacked by mainstream, the more they'll show their support by buying whatever redundant crap is coming out this month.
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And you can hardly say that this whole debacle hasn't dramatically polarized the blogosphere. Between Gizmodo and Adobe, "Us v. Them" sentiments are very high, which directly fuels Apple's counterculture rhetoric. Shit, Apple's worth roughly a hundred times Adobe, and they're still constantly portrayed as an underdog against the all-consuming monstrosity of Flash.
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Eeeeyeah, if Apple's marketing strategy for the past ten years had been to appeal to people who already loved Apple, we'd still be hearing bankruptcy rumors every six months.
Counterculture heroes don't send the cops to knock down people's doors. The only people who can maintain that kind of cognitive dissonance are a market Apple doesn't have to worry about.
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Well there's an important difference between marketing yourself as a rebel and actually rebelling. No cognitive dissonance is required to explain that.
But I also agree that "rebel company" isn't the only tool in Jobs' marketing shed by any means.
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Apple Won't Take Cash for iPad (http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2010/05/19/dnt.kgo.apple.no.cash.KGO?hpt=T2)
I was under the impression that it was illegal for a vendor to not take US currency as payment for goods, but I guess that's a myth.
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So today I got an email from apple advertising Adobe CS5.
I thought you might want to know that.
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Apple Won't Take Cash for iPad (http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2010/05/19/dnt.kgo.apple.no.cash.KGO?hpt=T2)
I was under the impression that it was illegal for a vendor to not take US currency as payment for goods, but I guess that's a myth.
I know some stores won't take bills larger than $50... I think there's a difference between "I won't sell this to you if you pay with cash" and "You owe me money, but I won't accept cash payment". Stores aren't legally obligated to sell you anything, and if you haven't been sold anything, there's no debt to settle in which they would have to accept your cash.
That's just my guess, though.
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It's a pretty stupid policy if it's only a purchase of one unit. Either the woman is stupid or they hyped up the inconvenience factor, though, as she could have easily found someone who was willing to charge it and help her out in exchange for the cash, I'd imagine.
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Probably not, Spaco. There's a lifetime limit of two iPad purchases per customer.
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Lifetime? That seems amazingly counterproductive. Especially if someone wants to outfit their staff or make gift purchases or any of a thousand other scenarios that would involve buying, oh, more than two. I can't see how that "cure" isn't vastly worse than whatever "disease" it is they think they're fighting.
Oh and I guess she could have just asked an Apple-hater who isn't pathological to buy it? But I don't know dick abut these... maybe you need to buy it in your own name because there's some kind of registration issue?
Which neatly brings us to the spectre of an actual physical product being sold on the Steam and/or doctrine-of-first-sale-can-go-fuck-itself models.
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HAPPY ENDING (http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/7_on_your_side&id=7451437&hpt=T2)
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Didn't she say she wanted an iPad for its internet capability? Can she also afford internet service and a wireless router?
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So, my mp3 player just died yesterday and now I want to replace it with something top of the line. Though I have never really liked iPods, the Touch is vastly different and actually looks right up my alley. Recommended or no?
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The iPod Touch is extremely shitty in terms of storage space and serviceability, and has all the problems that come with needing to install and use malware like iTunes to do anything with it.
I've been hearing very, very good things about the Archos 5 (http://www.archos.com/products/imt/archos_5it/index.html?country=us&lang=en) tablet. 500gb, good high-res screen, good battery life, the ability to hook it up to a hdtv. Good device, particularly if you're at all interested in video.
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malware like iTunes
perhaps you would like to start spelling apple with a little euro sign at the end
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Or Valve the same way? Or call Valve's service $team?
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You know guys, those criticisms would probably be pretty valid...
...in any thread other than one titled "Applepocalypse".
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Va£ve?
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I've been hearing very, very good things about the Archos 5 (http://www.archos.com/products/imt/archos_5it/index.html?country=us&lang=en) tablet. 500gb, good high-res screen, good battery life, the ability to hook it up to a hdtv. Good device, particularly if you're at all interested in video.
I've been looking into this and I'm not sure where exactly you've been hearing good things. All of the reviews I've read are universally negative on the grounds that it can be buggy and unreliable and that Archos has abysmal customer service. I don't really like Apple, but buggy tech and terrible customer service Creative's been giving me is the reason why I'm not going back to them in the first place. I don't want a new system with the exact same problems as my old one.
Also, about ninety percent of the features are utterly useless to me, even the ones that sound cool. I've had other mp3 players that could be connected to a TV, but I never once even bothered to try it out.
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You know guys, those criticisms would probably be pretty valid...
...in any thread other than one titled "Applepocalypse".
You know guy, that criticism would probably be pretty valid...
...if any of us actually started the thread.
BRB PATTING SELF ON BACK
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perhaps you would like to start spelling apple with a little euro sign at the end
tl;dr: LOL Appl€
Goddamn I'm trying.
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You were always ahead of your time, Soup.
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The reviews (http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/11/10/review-archos-5-internet-tablet-with-android/) I'm seeing (http://carrypad.com/2009/12/06/archos-5-internet-tablet-android-32gb-ssd-full-review/) say that the launch of the Android version was buggy, but that Archos was very active with firmware updates, and by the time Donut finally got pushed out, the stability problems had been pretty much ironed out. Look at the dates on reviews.
I do have to wonder what's attractive about the iPod Touch if 90% of the Archos's features are useless to you.
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I do have to wonder what's attractive about the iPod Touch if 90% of the Archos's features are useless to you.
Marketing.
You know guys, those criticisms would probably be pretty valid...
...in any thread other than one titled "Applepocalypse".
You know guy, that criticism would probably be pretty valid...
...if any of us actually started the thread.
I don't give a damn who started the thread. The point is you're complaining about someone bitching irrationally about Apple in a thread who's entire purpose is to bitch about Apple.
BUT OKAY WHATEVER.
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At the point where iTunes starts stealth installing shit like Safari, without permission, and reinstalls it when you remove it? I think it's perfectly rational to call it malware. That's the definition of malware.
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The reviews (http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/11/10/review-archos-5-internet-tablet-with-android/) I'm seeing (http://carrypad.com/2009/12/06/archos-5-internet-tablet-android-32gb-ssd-full-review/) say that the launch of the Android version was buggy, but that Archos was very active with firmware updates, and by the time Donut finally got pushed out, the stability problems had been pretty much ironed out. Look at the dates on reviews.
Okay, cool.I do have to wonder what's attractive about the iPod Touch if 90% of the Archos's features are useless to you.
Because I have to return a gift to Wal-Mart so I'll have a big store credit that I can use on something in-stock immediately, and because while I hear Apple's customer service is iffy, Archos' is legendarily bad.
Basically, while I can see that the Archos is clearly the superior tech; it's also nearly impossible to have repaired, up to twice as expensive, and would require me to order it online. There are things that I really like about it (like supporting pretty much every format of everything ever), but they're not absolutely necessary to me.
The bit in their product demonstration about how much of a HUGE TERRIBLE ORDEAL it is to have to pull out my laptop to send an instant message slays me by the way.
also i didn't realize this thread was just for apple bashing
how bout them one button mouses huh
ca-razy
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how bout them zero button mouses huh
ca-razy
THEY DON'T EVEN CLICK
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I don't give a damn who started the thread. The point is you're complaining about someone bitching irrationally about Apple in a thread who's entire purpose is to bitch about Apple.
Wait. Computer. Zoom in and enhance.
someone bitching irrationally about Apple in a thread who's entire purpose is to bitch about Apple.
Show side-by-side comparison.
someone bitching irrationally about Apple
in a thread who's entire purpose is to bitch about Apple.
Zoom in and enhance.
bitching irrationally about Apple
purpose is to bitch about Apple.
Look for differences.
irrationally
Eureka.
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Also, on the Archos: mp4 playback costs $40 extra.
Now, while most of my pirated music is in mp3 format, all of the music that I care enough to actualy buy and rip from the CD is in mp4 format. So I am paying extra for the ability to music that I legitimately bought on an already expensive piece of tech while my other music gets off scot-free. Genius.
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ogg 4 life
:pimp:
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irrationally
Eureka.
Interesting that you chose to pick at that word, considering TA's actually backing up his assertions. He might be wrong and he might be right, but I wouldn't dismiss his view out of hand.
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Um, I think he's calling you out for it, actually.
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:wat:
I didn't even say anything originally. Teg said he was looking for a new mp3 player, then TA said not to buy Apple because blah blah blah, then Niku and McDohl complained about someone complaining about Apple in the complain-about-Apple thread and I made fun of them.
Where are my criticisms of Apple - rational or otherwise - in that string?
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I don't see what was unclear about Thad's post at all. It's okay to bitch about Apple in this thread, as long as the bitching is rational.
I don't give a damn who started the thread. The point is you're complaining about someone bitching irrationally about Apple in a thread who's entire purpose is to bitch about Apple.
This post implies that you see nothing wrong with IRRATIONAL bitching in this thread, which Thad has a problem with. Of course people shouldn't be making irrational arguments on this board.
Now you can go ahead and claim you were ONLY JOKING when you made that post.
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No, I wasn't joking, but it's kind of stupid to assume that (sub-forum rules notwithstanding) a thread devoted to complaints will be full of measured, well-considered critiques (I am shocked, SHOCKED, I tell you!).
And that's setting aside the fact that TA's comments were somewhat hyperbolic, but not exactly irrational.
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all of the music that I care enough to actualy buy and rip from the CD is in mp4 format.
Why don't you just rip it to another format?
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Okay, I use iTunes, and I can't 100% follow the malware claim that TA is making. Yes, for a while safari classified itself as a 'necessary update' in the apple application updater, however I review that shit and unchecked it every time they did a content push/update. Later on they put it in another box on the updater where it was not checked by default. I use still use iTunes and as far as I can tell, I still don't have safari installed. It's annoying and persistent, but I don't think it's malware.
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No, I wasn't joking, but it's kind of stupid to assume that (sub-forum rules notwithstanding) a thread devoted to complaints will be full of measured, well-considered critiques (I am shocked, SHOCKED, I tell you!).
Catloaf aside, I do generally expect people to make non-idiotic posts here. Even if I did expect stupid posts to be prevalent on this board, I sure as hell wouldn't be defending their existence.
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generally
Something something Eureka.
Even if I did expect stupid posts to be prevalent on this board, I sure as hell wouldn't be defending their existence.
At any rate, my cynicism about Niku's complaint does not a defense of TA make. Though I did offer a half-assed defense after TA explained himself.
Are we done dropping dirt on this molehill yet?
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well hopefully not, because you're still wrong
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all of the music that I care enough to actualy buy and rip from the CD is in mp4 format.
Why don't you just rip it to another format?
:>_>:
Actually, my DVD drive doesn't work at the moment anyway.
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Okay, I use iTunes, and I can't 100% follow the malware claim that TA is making. Yes, for a while safari classified itself as a 'necessary update' in the apple application updater, however I review that shit and unchecked it every time they did a content push/update. Later on they put it in another box on the updater where it was not checked by default. I use still use iTunes and as far as I can tell, I still don't have safari installed. It's annoying and persistent, but I don't think it's malware.
I don't know if it's changed in the last two years, but when I last had an ipod, the software installed a bunch of extras, ran in the background 100% of the time, and left shit behind after the install that ran in the background and collected system data. When I killed the processes they restarted themselves. I ended up having to get a cleaning tool off of Apple's website to fully remove everything.
If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck...
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No, I wasn't joking, but it's kind of stupid to assume that (sub-forum rules notwithstanding) a thread devoted to complaints will be full of measured, well-considered critiques (I am shocked, SHOCKED, I tell you!).
Catloaf aside, I do generally expect people to make non-idiotic posts here. Even if I did expect stupid posts to be prevalent on this board, I sure as hell wouldn't be defending their existence.
(http://i133.photobucket.com/albums/q78/Catloaf/Reactions/1164563393645.png)
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hey guys guess who just got a HIP AND TRENDY DEVICE with extended warranty, screen protector, and awesome pink and black rubber case thingy?
ack oh god i'm slipping on all this money
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It finally happened: Apple is now bigger than Microsoft. (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/apple-knocks-off-microsoft-as-biggest-tech/article1581873/)
Well. How about that.
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Well, Apple being more than ten times the size of Adobe hasn't stood in the way of bitching and moaning about Adobe trying to "bully" Apple.
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go away ta
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all of the music that I care enough to actualy buy and rip from the CD is in mp4 format
I'm assuming you're using iTunes for ripping. It probably has an option to rip to mp3. If it doesn't, just use EAC (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/) to rip your music.
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iPhone "security" trivially bypassed, ridiculously unsuitable for any business or medical or legal or other environment where it matters than people can't just read and copy and modify everything you have on there. (http://marienfeldt.wordpress.com/2010/03/22/iphone-business-security-framework/)
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My company issues Blackberries to the middle managers and iPhones to higher executives.
Come to think of it, massive security fuckups aren't so mind-boggling after all.
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all of the music that I care enough to actualy buy and rip from the CD is in mp4 format
I'm assuming you're using iTunes for ripping. It probably has an option to rip to mp3. If it doesn't, just use EAC (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/) to rip your music.
As of right now (I also just bought a new DVD drive) I'm using this thing called dbpoweramp which works really really well. It was a very pleasant surprise for freeware.
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Forgive me if I fuck up this link:
http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Apple-is-the-new-AOL-and-whoa-that-cant-be-a-good-thing (http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Apple-is-the-new-AOL-and-whoa-that-cant-be-a-good-thing)
Apparently Sharkey's not the only one who thinks Apple's going the Internet for Mouthbreathers route.
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Link doesn't work, but this one should (http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Apple-is-the-new-AOL-and-new-Microsoft-and-whoa-that-cant-be-a-good-thing/1275406379).
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In response to Google's subtle jabs at Google I/O, Jobs said, "Just because we're competing with somebody doesn't mean we have to be rude."
Steve Jobs.
CEO of Apple.
Creator of the Macintosh.
Pretty much spent the last three years bombarding us with advertisements where the competition is characterized by a dumpy loser with every problem imaginable.
The worst part is I imagine that his biggest fans are the ones who wish to aspire to his level of constant, repurcussionless hypocrisy.
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I assume this is what is meant by "Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field". (http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/06/steve-jobs-explains-it-all-for-you/)
One thing I can agree, though. Apple does not compete with other companies, in the same way a car does not compete with dogs, deer or the occasional pedestrian that occasionally cross in front of it.
Apple was never a "rebel" or a "competitor". Jobs thinks, quite simply, that The Apple Way is The Way Things Should Be, and everything and everyone else is just a temporary obstacle.
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Man, I reaaaally hate Jobs. Which is problematic since I try and keep moderate opinions about this Apple business (they make great products you may or may not care about and a very solid OS and blahblahblah)... He's just such a dick... and it annoys me that they can still play the whole 'hip kid' angle... They got the whole 'evil' thing down pretty well. Every time I read about an iphone developer being fucked I cry a little inside. Anyways, I wonder how the whole 'next AOL' thing will play out. I can see that, but apple is a much smarter company. I imagine eventually Apple will have to start making concessions and giving up control
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No more unlimited data for iPhones or iPads. (http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20006534-1.html)
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I recently heard that Google was going to phase out using Windows in house because of security problems. My first thought was "Oh, so their going onto their own OS." Then the article mentioned they weren't phasing out the use of macs or linux. Fuck, I would think google of all companies would realize that Macs aren't actually safer, they just have less viruses because historically they haven't been used as much, especially in the areas that virus makers would target and they haven't switched over yet because windows still has more of the OS market share even if Apple is now officially worth more. And that goes double for linux, which is the least safe because of it being open source.
I'm starting to think that a good portion of the internet is becoming a propaganda mouthpiece for Apple product advertising. I keep telling myself that Apple isn't paying them, and I'm pretty sure they're not.... But there is just too much shit about them for it to be a possibility that a disproportionate amount of editors have Job's dick stuck down their throats and I have no idea why.
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That seems like a bit of a misunderstanding. Macs are more secure. The thing thats wrong is people thinking of their Macs are impenetrable walled fortresses.
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"unlimited" is just cellphone company-speak for "we will harass the top 5% of all users because consumer service is a 20th century concept"
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No more unlimited data for iPhones or iPads. (http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20006534-1.html)
And now I will never own an iphone or ipad
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So I've been wondering for awhile -- how long until Apple gets fed up with AT&T?
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I assume this is what is meant by "Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field". (http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/06/steve-jobs-explains-it-all-for-you/)
One thing I can agree, though. Apple does not compete with other companies, in the same way a car does not compete with dogs, deer or the occasional pedestrian that occasionally cross in front of it.
Apple was never a "rebel" or a "competitor". Jobs thinks, quite simply, that The Apple Way is The Way Things Should Be, and everything and everyone else is just a temporary obstacle.
My god. He's like if Prince had influence.
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No more unlimited data for iPhones or iPads. (http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20006534-1.html)
And now I will never own an iphone or ipad
It was never unlimited. It's always been UNLIMITED*
*we are reaming your ass if you go over a secret limit.
basically what zara said.
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No more unlimited data for iPhones or iPads. (http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20006534-1.html)
And now I will never own an iphone or ipad
It was never unlimited. It's always been UNLIMITED*
*we are reaming your ass if you go over a secret limit.
basically what zara said.
Having worked for a cell company, I can assure you that Niku & Zara are 100% correct.
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True enough, but 'not unlimited' means 'even less data for you to use.' I expect they'll be shifting to something stupid like a 30 mb limit.
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Yes, they killed off unlimited data. It's bad, but it's not as bad as you would assume. (http://gizmodo.com/5553418/att-just-killed-unlimited-wireless-data-and-screwed-everybody-in-the-process?skyline=true&s=i)
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Honestly, as an iPhone owner, I don't really give a shit. Looking back over the past year or so of use, my heaviest months I didn't even break a gig. I'm not going to step down to the lesser tier in case Netflix gets their shit together on streaming me videos, but it's still nothing I personally want to cry over.
If I had an iPad I'd be pretty goddamn pissed off right now for the reasons stated in the Gizmodo article.
(Also why is Ziiro's EVERYTHING OKAY link text linking to a pissed off rant and TA's being TA link text leading to a reasonable "it's not that bad" argument are you guys doing this on purpose)
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I need to check what my actual data use is. The current counter on the phone says 7.5 gigs, but it's unclear if that's since I got the phone or for the monthly billing cycle, which is all of one and a half day.
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Most tickers built into phones' firmware has no way of recognising your monthly renewal date, plan, or anything else. That's all done server-side normally.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that you're probably looking at a lifetime (of the phone) figure. The only way it can display monthly data is if you're connecting to your cell provider each time you want to check your data useage and getting the number from them, rather than the phone.
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Yeah, as been said twice now, this probably doesn't affect iPhone users... but makes the whole "iPad is going to kill the PC!" meme even more hilarious than it already was.
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Yeah, as been said twice now, this probably doesn't affect iPhone users... but makes the whole "iPad is going to kill the PC!" meme even more hilarious than it already was.
Well, this only applies to the 3G service, right? I would think most netbook-style heavy online usage would come from WiFi. Anecdotal evidence suggests people mostly use the ipad at home anyway. As for the iphone, I don't know what you would download to eat up that much bandwidth. Do iphones have the option to connect to WiFi as well?
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Yeah, and the only reason I use up as much 3G bandwidth as I do is because I have no access to wifi at work.
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Streaming video. Streaming music. Cloud computing. Metered service basically kills these as possibilities.
Depending on your plan, watching an HD movie on your iPad over 3G will cost between $200 and $1500.
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Which is why you go to starbucks or leech of your neighbors wifi like the cheapskates who bought the wifi only version of the magic floor tile.
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The problem is that the main selling point of the 600+ dollar 3g magic floor tile is 3g internet anywhere you go. Given that even a cheap, shitty 3g aircard is a hundred bucks off contract, you can't tell me that's not being rolled into the sticker price of the product you paid for. Imposing the bandwidth cap on the iPad is hamstringing it as a multimedia platform, despite multimedia being (as far as I can tell) the main point of the goddamn platform.
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Oh, and also the video conferencing feature that is going to be one of the bigger selling points of the next iPhone. That's gonna tear through these bandwidth caps pretty damn fast.
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I'm really just waiting for Apple to get on board with CDMA and move to sprint or verizon. The iPhone has been on the wrong network since day 1 - GSM is years behind on data and multimedia and isn't likely to catch up anytime soon.
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I recently heard that Google was going to phase out using Windows in house because of security problems. My first thought was "Oh, so their going onto their own OS." Then the article mentioned they weren't phasing out the use of macs or linux. Fuck, I would think google of all companies would realize that Macs aren't actually safer, they just have less viruses because historically they haven't been used as much, especially in the areas that virus makers would target and they haven't switched over yet because windows still has more of the OS market share even if Apple is now officially worth more. And that goes double for linux, which is the least safe because of it being open source.
First of all, what. The heterogeneity of their computing environment definitely more "safe" than a homogeneous one in that the same attack method would not compromise multiple environments. However it does increase the pool of vulnerabilities their IT department must keep up with. Phasing Windows out would reduce Google's vulnerability to blind drive-by attacks, but it would not decrease Google's vulnerability to dedicated attacks, usually catered toward the targets in question. This then places emphasis on the OS itself.
Contrary to your uninformed opinion. Linux is probably the safest option, given a competent IT team. Options like SELinux and AppArmor provide kernel-space protection against application hijacking. Windows kernels since Vista provides the same kinds of protection via application privilege tables. But the kicker there is that individual applications must be coded to use the new Vista-era APIs to actually gain that kind of protection. Guess who was caught not using them? ALL POPULAR ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE, except Microsoft's own. This, I wager, is the reason why Google's IT department wants to move away from Windows. 3rd party software on the platform is difficult to review. Despite all this, Microsoft's internal practices surrounding security is actually pretty good these days. So if you are using Vista or 7 and stick to only 1st party software, you're mostly okay, maybe?
The real devil is Mac OS X. Despite it being one of the True Descendants of Unix (off BSD 4 or something IIRC), Apple really hasn't done much to ensure that the platform is secure. They've mostly spent their time and efforts on issuing DMCA threats to keep OS X on Apple hardware maintaining the Apple Experience. They provide very nice development tools and APIs but it is always for the New rather than the Safe.
And that is what the iPad essentially is: New. The primary reason why Apple is consistently able to sell well is not because of their value proposition nor really their UI work. It's that they're marketing New Toys for Grownups. These devices are not technically superior to many other products on the market in the same price range. But Apple's work is not to offer superior products for less, but rather inferior products for more. Inferior technically but much more approachable to the Average Man. So with that in mind, I would argue that AT&T limiting the bandwidth does NOT actually impact iPhones/iPads for the general populace. Apple is only selling this image of what is capable with this toy. The majority consumers don't necessarily fill this image of streaming media on the go with the cloud making rainbows and unicorns sprout out of Apples magic slab. They, by purchasing this thing, don't purchase its function, but rather its image. And it's quite evident given AT&T's statistics showing the vast majority of iPhone users clocking in less than 200 MB/mo.
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Actually, that's what's hurting them MORE: the perception that the data cap is limiting the device in ways that it actually isn't. I actually agree with Det's rebuttal: most homes are equipped with Wi-Fi, and the Pad is only portable if it doesn't happen to be a sunny day. This hasn't stopped the ame tech blogs that have been sucking Jobs' jobs for weeks from proclaiming the cap's going to render their shit useless, though.
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Hurt who, Apple? Oh I think they'll be quite alright. (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127292959) First, the people who would cry about this have some understanding of technical parlance. And that they cry about the iPad at all would indicate they care, and very likely own an iPad already. What exactly will this hurt? iPad sales? Do you really see these people returning their iPads because they don't like AT&T's plan?
It would be different if the general hype around iPads turned around into a do-nothing piece of plastic but that is far from the public perception. All this does is put the onus on AT&T.
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I know they're not selling iPads at a loss, but I'm pretty still Apple still makes the bulk of its money from app and music retail. Besides being, you know, data, it means that they can't exactly drop aftermarket support.
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I am reading this thread on an iPod Touch to be ironic.
B)
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Pretty much spent the last three years bombarding us with advertisements where the competition is characterized by a dumpy loser with every problem imaginable.
But so much more LIKEABLE than the other guy.
Man, I reaaaally hate Jobs. Which is problematic since I try and keep moderate opinions about this Apple business (they make great products you may or may not care about and a very solid OS and blahblahblah)... He's just such a dick...
I don't like Microsoft, but it's pretty hard to say anything bad about what Bill Gates has been up to for the past decade.
Fuck, I would think google of all companies would realize that Macs aren't actually safer, they just have less viruses because historically they haven't been used as much, especially in the areas that virus makers would target and they haven't switched over yet because windows still has more of the OS market share even if Apple is now officially worth more. And that goes double for linux, which is the least safe because of it being open source.
I am going to fucking punch you in your face.
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Fuck, I would think google of all companies would realize that Macs aren't actually safer, they just have less viruses because historically they haven't been used as much, especially in the areas that virus makers would target and they haven't switched over yet because windows still has more of the OS market share even if Apple is now officially worth more. And that goes double for linux, which is the least safe because of it being open source.
I am going to fucking punch you in your face.
No, don't! If you do, your fist will turn stupid!
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...okay, okay, this being Real World or whatever it is now, I should probably elaborate instead of just express rage. Aintaer already did the bulk of the lifting, but here goes:
Open-source software is not inherently less secure than closed-source software; security through obscurity is a myth. Fuzzing software works just fine on binaries, and the notion that IE6 was more secure than the pre-Firefox browser of the day is absurd.
Yes, having access to source code makes it easier to find vulnerabilities. But that works both ways: you don't just have people searching for vulnerabilities in order to exploit them, you also have people searching for them in order to fix them. There's a maxim in the open-source world: Given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27_Law) The upshot is, Firefox reports more vulnerabilities than IE does, but patches them quicker. Like, usually within a week.
There IS something to the argument that MS is a bigger target and therefore more vulnerabilities are found. However, as IE6's share shrinks, it's still the most exploited browser (as in the Google case that started this shitstorm).
I'm not sure I'd agree with the notion that OSX itself is unsecure, but its two most important apps, Safari and iTunes, are.
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I thought any unix-based system was inherently safer than windows merely by the fact admin access is built into both the OS and file system, as opposed to the equivalent of a plastic shell and a polite "do not touch" letter over privileged files Windows uses.
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Yeah, funny how that works with Bill. People on Slashdot were joking that Borg Bill needed to be replaced with Borg Jobs the other day. Apple is a pretty scary company right now, products aside. I'm wondering how this is going to pan out for them.
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The basic argument is the one originally posed by Douglas Adams: "The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
This is probably true in Apple's case, in which, as I've illustrated before, the typical guru's first instinct when confronted with a technical failure is to simply believe that it's not possible.
I really doubt this is the case with Linux, though, for a couple major reasons:
* The ability to monitor, fix, and protect against potential problems is built directly into the kernel, not into a layer slapped over at runtime.
* Not having any closed-off or black box parts of the system makes it easier to find holes and/or monitor what's going on.
* In terms of support, the people who manage to make money off of *nix generally do so by offering their services, so there's no lack of qualified analysts there.
The one argument I would say is valid is that once a hack is enacted in a *nix environment through the most preferred method - social engineering - it's probably easier to pull crap than in a Windows environment, simply because having valid credentials and a working knowledge of the system virtually guarantees that you won't run into any problems that you can't have foreseen, unlike Microsoft's stuff that generally protects itself under a cloud of garbage that even the authorized user is unaware of.
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This is probably true in Apple's case, in which, as I've illustrated before, the typical guru's first instinct when confronted with a technical failure is to simply believe that it's not possible.
Fun story, at a party about a month ago I was talking to a friend of mine about the stability and performance of the iPhone. Guy is a Mac geek, first adopter on the iPad, does everything on a MacBook, developed an app for the iPhone, once worked as an "Apple Genius" at a Mac store. I tell him "You know, I've actually had more crashes on my iPhone than I have on Windows 7. The thing crashes probably once a day."
Which is true. Whether it's Safari, iTunes or a 3rd party app, my iPhone constantly hangs up, chokes, outright shuts down or just refuses to load certain programs, my iPhone has shown an amazing ability to be the opposite of what the tech world wants to claim it is. I won't say my iPhone doesn't get a lot of use, but I only have about 3 pages of apps and rarely fill up the HD. But on a frequent basis, shit just don't work. And this is ignores various bugs that come with updates, such as the time that 3G data connection just halted after 15 minutes of use until I rebooted the phone.
Anyway, I tell the guy that I have problems with the iPhone, and maybe it is isn't as stable or wonderful as Steve Jobs and all the Mac faithful claim it is. His response is to straight up deny this. "That's impossible, the iPhone doesn't crash" he tells me. I remind him, I use the thing everyday (as an aside, the iPhone's profound affect on the way I use the toilet cannot be measured) and at least once during the day I'll get something minor, such as a program refusing to load or at worst the entire thing needs a hard reboot to get functioning again. But he sticks to his guns, claiming that something must be defective, crashes don't happen, that shit just don't exist.
I think this illustrates how typical Mac geeks operate.
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Well, to be fair, their survival partially depends on an unshattered mystique.
The three pillars holding up Apple's fortunes are 'cool for the cool kids', 'easy as sliced bread', and 'shit just works'. Knocking away any one of those things means you start to see more sober feature-by-feature comparisons to Windows or Linux products (since they don't seem so different anymore), which starts to shine some glaring light onto things that they're not so good at.
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Android leaves itself wide open:
(http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l3gy7f97Ye1qzpapzo1_500.png)
Presumably taking a shot that's big enough to read will be covered in a second article.
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I thought any unix-based system was inherently safer than windows merely by the fact admin access is built into both the OS and file system, as opposed to the equivalent of a plastic shell and a polite "do not touch" letter over privileged files Windows uses.
That too, yes, absolutely.
Something that's come to vex me about Win7 privilege escalation: it's not sudo-like, it's su-like. As in, I'm not running an installer as Thad with temporarily-heightened privileges, I'm running it as a completely separate Administrator account.
Which might be okay if the fucking "Run this program now" checkbox was removed from every single goddamn Windows installer in the universe, but since it isn't, I wind up constantly inadvertently setting up programs under the wrong user account.
The basic argument is the one originally posed by Douglas Adams: "The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
In fairness, he was also the world's biggest Apple fan.
* The ability to monitor, fix, and protect against potential problems is built directly into the kernel, not into a layer slapped over at runtime.
* Not having any closed-off or black box parts of the system makes it easier to find holes and/or monitor what's going on.
Very, VERY true on the iPhone. As for OSX, not sure I buy it -- it IS running on an open-source BSD kernel.
* In terms of support, the people who manage to make money off of *nix generally do so by offering their services, so there's no lack of qualified analysts there.
Apple's actually pretty widely regarded as having some of the better tech support guys out there.
The one argument I would say is valid is that once a hack is enacted in a *nix environment through the most preferred method - social engineering - it's probably easier to pull crap than in a Windows environment, simply because having valid credentials and a working knowledge of the system virtually guarantees that you won't run into any problems that you can't have foreseen, unlike Microsoft's stuff that generally protects itself under a cloud of garbage that even the authorized user is unaware of.
Not entirely sure I've parsed that right.
Situational, of course. Shit like phishing is going to work just as well on Linux as anything, of course (though as you say, a Linux user is simply going to be more wary of them by virtue of automatically being a savvier computer user). Malware executables, on the other hand, are dead in the water; you have to intentionally flag a file as executable before you can execute it in Linux.
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Yeah but the argument against Google in this scenario is repeatedly that they don't have to worry about malware attacks nearly as much as targeted ones. Whether or not that's true is up to some major speculation, but there is a glimmer of truth to the fact that, yeah, being immediately comfortable with the environment makes a deliberate larceny go so much smoother.
...
LUPIIIIIIIIIN THE THIRD okay sorry.
Android leaves itself wide open:
Yeah, comparing a programmable interface to an immutable one where the user has to press the OFF BUTTON to execute a function doesn't raise the flag in the direction that guy apparently thinks it does.
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Yeah but the argument against Google in this scenario is repeatedly that they don't have to worry about malware attacks nearly as much as targeted ones. Whether or not that's true is up to some major speculation, but there is a glimmer of truth to the fact that, yeah, being immediately comfortable with the environment makes a deliberate larceny go so much smoother.
True. Getting off IE6 and Adobe Reader will be a pretty big help, though.
OTOH, Google's record on privacy and its push toward storing everything in the cloud makes for a pretty vulnerable situation right out the gate. As ridiculous and hypocritical as MS's heckling Google on security was, the core point is absolutely true: it's fucking stupid to store highly sensitive data on the Internet.
...getting rather off-topic here. Oh, this:
Yeah, comparing a programmable interface to an immutable one where the user has to press the OFF BUTTON to execute a function doesn't raise the flag in the direction that guy apparently thinks it does.
Bet he spent the last 15 years making fun of how Microsoft put shutdown under a menu called Start, too.
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A breakdown of exactly how little streaming video can be squeezed into AT&T's new plans. (http://www.clicker.com/blog/how-much-video-can-you-actually-stream-with-atts-new-data-plans/)
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Run, don’t walk, to get your iPad 3G before the end of the weekend.
I'm wondering if this kind of advice is part of why Apple doesn't mind the decision. They've been making an awful lot of noise about early sales of the thing.
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A breakdown of exactly how little streaming video can be squeezed into AT&T's new plans. (http://www.clicker.com/blog/how-much-video-can-you-actually-stream-with-atts-new-data-plans/)
Of course, it's also bloody convenient how AT&T drops "unlimited" support just when it begins to matter.
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That's because their deer-sized eyes saw the lights of the oncoming bus.
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yeah, suddenly AT&T realized that they wouldn't be able to get away with having the worst data network in the USA if they didn't do something fast.
Fuck GSM forever.
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I know things always look greener on the other side, so I just want to say that "All CDMA" is not nearly as great as it sounds.
Up in Canada, every company but one exclusively uses CDMA and it's been plain ruination. CDMA's preference for proprietary phones has done more to kill innovation and competition than just about anything else we could have done.
Now, as the Canadian cell market faces a period of intense competion thanks to a pile of new entrants to the market (the iron head on a giant government telecommunicaitons battering ram), every company is rushing to add GSM capability to their networks in order to be able to compete.
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Yeah, meanwhile in the united states we have innovation that is meaningless because the popular network standard is technologically five years behind.
As for innovation, if anything I think GSM popularity in America and Europe is hindering it more than anything else - japan and korea are home to the biggest cellular companies, with japan favoring CDMA-2000 and South Korea using CDMA. Neither country has GSM networks. Europe and the US are clinging to outdated standards either out of a fear of change or the idea that being able to switch a sim card between phones is massively more convenient than just punching in an MSID on your carrier's website. Sure, you could argue GSM is big in the middle east and africa, but the middle east and africa have never been huge embracers of modern technology and innovation, have they?
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I don't know about that, most impoverished African states have better cell service than Canada.
I'm only half joking. When a guy from the CONGO says "Man, your cell service sucks", you have problems.
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Could be worse.
He could have been from Sierra Leone or Burkina Faso.
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Data Congestion thwarts Jobs' iphone 4 demo. (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/personal-tech/apple/data-congestion-thwarts-steve-jobs-iphone-demo/article1595191/)
Ladies and gentlemen, the word you may be looking for is "schadenfreude".
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Aaaaand TA explains it's all part of Jobs's plan because he WANTS to look like an incompetent douchebag in 3...2...
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(http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/gargoyles/images/thumb/f/fe/Xanatos.jpg/275px-Xanatos.jpg): Man, I could learn a lot from this guy.
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Aaaaand TA explains it's all part of Jobs's plan because he WANTS to look like an incompetent douchebag in 3...2...
To be fair, we all know that's not Jobs's fault, though it is pretty much indicative of the future.
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Yes, but is it more delicious than the time Bill Gates was demonstrating Windows and it BSOD'd him?
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Yes, but is it more delicious than the time Bill Gates was demonstrating Windows and it BSOD'd him?
Had Windows been billing itself for the previous decade as being something that "just works"? Claiming that what it does do, it does perfectly and flawlessly every time? Pretty sure that even on stage at the time, Gates wouldn't have claimed that the new Windows never crashes.
Apparently one of the many things the new iPhone can't do is give you the foresight to set up a separate, secured wireless network for demonstrators with an independent internet connection. Or even fuckin' load a local copy since you're demonstrating image clarity, not even render speed.
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If you want porn, you're still gonna have to buy an Android. (http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/06/windows-phone-7-marketplace-to-be-porn-free-zone.ars)
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Did Google just win the mobile wars? :suave:
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Yes, but is it more delicious than the time Bill Gates was demonstrating Windows and it BSOD'd him?
Had Windows been billing itself for the previous decade as being something that "just works"?
Why no, it had Plug-n-Play. COMPLETELY different.
Did Google just win the mobile wars? :suave:
Worked for HD-DVD!
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Did Google just win the mobile wars? :suave:
Worked for HD-DVD!
Yeah, then Sony changed its mind.
I totally expect Apple to do the same.
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So, back when iAd - the whole "popup ads baked directly into the OS that freeze your phone until you look at them" thing - when that first showed its face during the announcement of iPhone OS 4, it was pointed out that language in the developer agreement barred the collection of data by advertising agencies. This would include, say, "How many people saw my ad?" or "How long did they look at it?" or "How many people opened the page the ad links to?" or such things. You know, the sort of data collection that is absolutely necessary for it to even be possible to compensate someone for running your ads.
Well, Apple's changed the developer agreement (http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/08/apple-revises-ios-rules-on-outside-advertisers-cuts-out-google/?utm_source=engadget). Now, you're allowed to do that. HOWEVER, you are only allowed to do that if you are "an independent advertising service provider whose primary business is serving mobile ads". The agreement goes on to say that "an advertising service provider owned by or affiliated with a developer or distributor of mobile devices, mobile operating systems or development environments other than Apple would not qualify as independent". Which is essentially Google, Google, and Adobe, respectively.
There are antitrust laws against saying "You can't do this if you're Google" in that sort of agreement. I have little expectation that what is essentially "You can't do this if your name has an 'oog' in the middle of it" will stand up to the inevitable lawsuit, and this certainly won't help Apple with the antitrust probes they're already facing.
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A "security firm" called Goatse Security gets the emails, and potentially access to a lot more, of every iPad buyer. And handed out the code on how they got this before ATT closed the hole (http://gawker.com/5559346/apples-worst-security-breach-114000-ipad-owners-exposed?skyline=true&s=i)
If this page isn't filled with ass & poop jokes I will be very disappointed in what I've come to expect from these boards.
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That's far too easy a target, and it's not even a real company. Boo.
vv I stand corrected.
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The two things I did NOT expect to read in that article were the fact that a: They did it entirely using publicly available data (Haha, oh AT&T), and b: that's actually a legitimate security company.
Of course I really shouldn't be surprised at the former.
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So, back when iAd - the whole "popup ads baked directly into the OS that freeze your phone until you look at them" thing - when that first showed its face during the announcement of iPhone OS 4, it was pointed out that language in the developer agreement barred the collection of data by advertising agencies. This would include, say, "How many people saw my ad?" or "How long did they look at it?" or "How many people opened the page the ad links to?" or such things. You know, the sort of data collection that is absolutely necessary for it to even be possible to compensate someone for running your ads.
Well, Apple's changed the developer agreement (http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/08/apple-revises-ios-rules-on-outside-advertisers-cuts-out-google/?utm_source=engadget). Now, you're allowed to do that. HOWEVER, you are only allowed to do that if you are "an independent advertising service provider whose primary business is serving mobile ads". The agreement goes on to say that "an advertising service provider owned by or affiliated with a developer or distributor of mobile devices, mobile operating systems or development environments other than Apple would not qualify as independent". Which is essentially Google, Google, and Adobe, respectively.
There are antitrust laws against saying "You can't do this if you're Google" in that sort of agreement. I have little expectation that what is essentially "You can't do this if your name has an 'oog' in the middle of it" will stand up to the inevitable lawsuit, and this certainly won't help Apple with the antitrust probes they're already facing.
And all of two days later ... (http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/10/apple_faces_new_antitrust_investigation_over_ios_advertising_restrictions.html)
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BTW:
Yeah, unless the iPhone 4 comes with an announcement of WiMax/4g support, I'm not going to be impressed with anything that takes extra bandwidth.
Well, seeing as how the Gizmodo story we are currently talking about specifically refers to it as the iPhone 4G...
Oh hey, just read today that it's not actually 4G. Sorry about the smugness there; I am forced to eat some crow on this one.
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Due to design defect, iPhone 4 predictably loses reception if you hold it with your bare hand. (http://gizmodo.com/5571171/iphone-4-loses-reception-when-you-hold-it-by-the-antenna-band)
Edit: While it seems obvious that this would come up immediately given any kind of testing, I've seen it put forth that maybe because all the field testing was done with the phone in a dummy 3GS case, the problem wouldn't have been apparent during that. Which is hilarious.
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Dear Apple,
Can I PLEASE change my fucking e-mail/text message notification beeps to something other than your canned bullshit?
Love,
Dohl
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So apparently even when you DO have five bars on an iPhone, you don't have five bars. Huh.
What's more amusing to me is that Android and Blackberry phones have a feature that will tell you the exact signal strength rather than giving you a roundabout bar thing (mine is -100dB at the moment, which is actually kind of shit, but you can barely notice). The funny part is iPhone used to have this too.
...yeah.
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That's what they're claiming, anyway. That when 3G suddenly stops working and people drop their calls just by shifting their grip on the phone, it's a mere display error, to be fixed in an OS update.
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To be fair, my iPhone does that without the benefit of being the iPhone 4.
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What's more amusing to me is that Android and Blackberry phones have a feature that will tell you the exact signal strength rather than giving you a roundabout bar thing (mine is -100dB at the moment, which is actually kind of shit, but you can barely notice). The funny part is iPhone used to have this too.
Is there an easy way for Android to display that in the top bar, as opposed to it being buried in the Phone Info in Settings?
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That's probably dependant on your UI skin. What phone are you using?
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Still a G1, running stock 1.6.
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That's what they're claiming, anyway. That when 3G suddenly stops working and people drop their calls just by shifting their grip on the phone, it's a mere display error, to be fixed in an OS update.
And also the problem has existed since the original iPhone and nobody noticed until now.
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Here's the thing. I believe that Apple has programmed the iPhone OS since day one to lie to its users about signal strength, calculating bars to greatly exaggerate how much signal they get. That's really par for the course. Suggesting that that lie (which has been present since the original iPhone), plus what they're claiming causes a loss of signal on every cell phone out there (including the original iPhone, 3G, and 3GS), is the reason people are going from 5 bars to no service on the iPhone 4? That is just a lie. A flat-out lie. Apple is demonstrably lying to its customers about why their products do not work.
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Mr. Jobs offered some contrition. He said Apple was not perfect and apologized to customers affected by the antenna problem. “We are human and we make mistakes sometimes,” he said.
But he quickly went on the offensive, saying every smartphone suffers from similar problems. To bolster his case, he showed videos of smartphones, including a BlackBerry, an Android-powered phone and a Windows Mobile device, that dropped signals when they were held in certain places.
When a reporter said he could not replicate the signal drop on his BlackBerry, Mr. Jobs said the problem was only evident in places where the signal is weak.
"Just trust our prerecorded video, IT'S PROOF."
I have two bars right now. I'm watching the video of how to hold a Blackberry. I'm doing it exactly the awkward way they have it. Oh look, two bars.
I really want to ignore this jackass and move on but I'm kind of sensitive to people who think good business is telling god damned lies about the competition.
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Works pretty well for politicians.
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I love the contrasting articles today.
For those of you not following along at home, Blackberry is about to get kicked out of Saudi Arabia because they're - get this - too secure for the government to spy on users (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/saudi-arabia-to-halt-blackberry-service-on-friday/article1660827/). Meanwhile, in Apple-land, the iPad and iPhone are 100% zombie compliant (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/hackers-could-enslave-ipad-iphone-reports-security-firm/article1660667/).
:glee:
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Jobs makes insinuations that turn out to be disingenuous. (http://www.informationweek.com/news/smb/mobile/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227300031&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_All)
I'm getting tired of them.
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Falcon Punch (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFtw7qW7Vcw#)
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Deciding that the curated, "Install what we want and nothing else" method of the iPhone App Store is a good thing for general use, Apple's putting a curated App Store in OS X 10.7 (http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/20/app-store-for-os-x-unveiled/). While you remain technically still able to install programs from outside the App Store, those programs are denied access to several key aspects of 10.7 (http://gawker.com/5669083/beware-the-garden-of-steven).
At this rate, I'd expect outside installs to be gone entirely by 10.8, and the fans eating up every step of it.
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That's okay. Eventually, we can go back to the old days where the Mac was a target of perpetual ridicule for having no games.
But wait, you say that developers will be brought to heel by the power of the newer, mightier Apple? While this is quite probably for at least a little while, sooner or later there'll be a really top-shelf game that comes out that flagrantly crosses the censorship guidelines set-by Steve-O. Then the real fun will begin.
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God damn, how will Mac users ever cope with having a limited software library?
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Steve views his products as pieces of art. He's already disgruntled that he has to let users use them. The next best thing is to control every aspect of how a user can use them. Then they will see his vision. Then they will understand art.
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I think the idea of Mac as a completely closed software platform is a paranoid fantasy (though not entirely out of the question). An app store isn't an inherently bad idea (it's just Apple catching up to where most Linuxes have been for the better part of the past decade), but banning anything Java pisses me off pretty thoroughly. Hell, a program where you can download software as long as it doesn't require any dependencies to be installed pretty much takes the idea of apt and then misses the entire fucking point.
Apple's abandonment of Java is going to prove devastating to the small but loyal market of programmers who've switched to Macs; if I had to hazard a guess I'd say it's going to benefit Canonical more than Microsoft.
I'm curious about portability. If it turns out to be easy to port iOS apps to this OSX framework, that could potentially be a big deal for Mac gaming. But I'm just saying that because I want Final Fantasy Tactics, dammit.
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Why Macs will never have games (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/10/jobs-lack-of-gaming-vision-led-to-lost-opportunities-for-apple.ars).
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And also why Steve Jobs is to blame for EA.
Hah!
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Following a link on that article...
“So, during the day, I got an email from Steve Ballmer asking me to phone Steve Jobs and calm him down about the whole thing,” he said.
“Anyway, we did this deal with Apple where we’d port some PC games to the Macintosh and help Peter Tamte create this company to do it, and I had to go to a Mac developer conference and get on stage and talk about this whole new partnership. It was a pretty strange time.”
I don't understand what's going here. Steve Jobs calls Microsoft to throw a hissy fit, and the MS people have to placate him? What was he gonna do? Were they afraid he was going to have an aneurysm? Had I been in charge of that I would have been all nelsonhaha.wav and farting into the phone.
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This was back when Microsoft was a terrifying monolith dealing with wave after crashing wave of antitrust suits, and not a beached whale slowly bleeding out on the beaches of the microcomputer movement.
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This was back when Microsoft was a terrifying monolith dealing with wave after crashing wave of antitrust suits, and not a beached whale slowly bleeding out on the beaches of the microcomputer movement.
Wouldn't it make even less sense for Ballmer to do this back when MS was far more dominant than it can hope to claim now?
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Only if you assume they weren't busily trying to prove they WEREN'T a monopoly.
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With all the disadvantages of a curated app store, it's important to remember that there are some advantages, as well. Apple has strict rules about what content is or is not acceptable for the iOS app store - nothing pornographic or bigoted, no offensive content. Everything that's sold is something Apple has approved for sale, something they've judged to have an acceptable message they're willing to stand behind - thus the banning of political apps, since approving them would be taking a political stance as a corporation.
So it's good news for the makers of the PeekaBoo Tranny app (http://www.peekabootranny.com/), which promises to insert "fierce tranny bitches in hilarious poses" into your photos, that Apple has deemed nothing about "a tranny surprise in every shot!" to be offensive to right-minded people.
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Good news on the OSX Java front: Apple IS giving its code to OpenJDK, and Java apparently WILL be allowed on the Mac App Store. (Reg (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/12/apple_oracle_openjdk_project/))
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With all the disadvantages of a curated app store, it's important to remember that there are some advantages, as well. Apple has strict rules about what content is or is not acceptable for the iOS app store - nothing pornographic or bigoted, no offensive content. Everything that's sold is something Apple has approved for sale, something they've judged to have an acceptable message they're willing to stand behind - thus the banning of political apps, since approving them would be taking a political stance as a corporation.
So it's good news for the makers of the PeekaBoo Tranny app (http://www.peekabootranny.com/), which promises to insert "fierce tranny bitches in hilarious poses" into your photos, that Apple has deemed nothing about "a tranny surprise in every shot!" to be offensive to right-minded people.
I have never wanted an iphone more.
MS BURRITO IF YOU'RE NASTY
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What?
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I don't know how we've avoided talking about Rupert Murdoch and Steve Jobs working on a newspaper app together (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/nov/21/ipad-newspaper-steve-jobs-rupert-murdoch), but that should cause some definite outrage.
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Because the concept was so ludicrous as to inspire harrumphing.
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"A world so absurd it surpasses all possible parody"
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Okay, this isn't really newsworthy, and it's not even much of an Apple story, but I just had to share because this headline is just too funny: Hidden charges in iTunes game snares kids, Smurf backlash ensues (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/personal-tech/hidden-charges-in-itunes-game-snares-kids-smurf-backlash-ensues/article1831088/)
(I mean, I would have quoted the headline, but then someone would have asked for the link anyway, so... )
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VLC pulled from the App Store (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2375476,00.asp) because Apple's DRM practices violate the GPL.
And the owner of a piracy site is mad at VLC's original developer for it (http://torrentfreak.com/apple-users-forced-to-pirate-vlc-player-whatever-next-110108/).
What?
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:hurr:
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"When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers." Taking the side of the grass is all well and good but you still gotta realize that on one side there's an elephant named Steve Jobs and on the other side there's an elephant named Free Software Developers Trying To Avoid Sliding Down The Slope That Ends In A Big Pool Of Getting Fucked In The Ass.
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This is pretty much why I find the "Piracy is wrong because it deprives people of money" argument to be toxic: it implies that copyright infringement of free software is A-OK.
Saw a Cnet article (http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-20021377-233.html) a couple months back that acted incredulous about this story, as if it were a man-bites-dog thing and the devs are CRAZY for not letting Apple violate their license because hell, it's not like they charge for their software!
He even included the following sentence:
Apple doesn't collect any money for hosting the app, and the DRM (which to my thinking doesn't impact iOS usability in the slightest) is necessary to prevent piracy.
:scanners:
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hey Thad is that you in like half the comments of that page
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...yeah, it was a slow day at work.
On the plus side, now Google image searches for my name pull up pictures from Cnet!
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Using an iPhone when it's cold outside voids the warranty, says Apple (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/11/frozen_iphone/).
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I like that they're trying that line in NORWAY.
Like, I'm sure Scandinavia isn't their hottest sales region but hey, let's not throw this whole market under the bus or anything.
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Like, I'm sure Scandinavia isn't their hottest sales region but hey, let's not leave them out in the cold, or anything
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Also currently at warranty-voiding temperatures: New York City, Washington DC.
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Update: Live in Finland? Mistakenly purchase an iPhone, thinking it was a functional device? You are owed a refund (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/28/finland_iphone/).
According to the quality reporting at the Register, of course, this is obviously a Nokia-funded conspiracy to slander the magical and blameless Apple.
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Yes, because the Reg is so well-known for kissing Apple's ass.
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curse you, nokia, for providing a product standard apple cannot compete with!
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Yes, because the Reg is so well-known for kissing Apple's ass.
Well, in the space of two weeks, Bill Ray went from "Apple is totally out of line for saying walking out of a Norwegian Apple Store with your iPhone voids the warranty" to "Silly Fins, it works totally fine! You musta been bribed by Nokia!"
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Basically anything that happens is a conspiracy by somebody.
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(http://onceachef.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Oranges-Limes-3015-300x200.jpg)
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Sony e-Reader app barred from App store, Kindle app likely to follow (http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/02/change-in-apple-policy-has-e-book-fans-worried-about-their-apps.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss). Turns out Apple won't let apps on there that let you access content you purchased through someone other than them, though they might make an exception if they get their 30% for all non-App Store purchases too. (http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/02/apple-responds-to-app-store-furor-says-it-wants-a-cut-of-e-book-sales.ars)
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... So they're trying to preserve the value of these competing tech toys? What? I don't get it.
Does apple actually believe that their products aren't glorified readers for a significant portion of their user-base?
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Oh hey I was reading the Kindle version of Dracula on my Android not a minute ago. Serendipitous!
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... So they're trying to preserve the value of these competing tech toys? What? I don't get it.
Does apple actually believe that their products aren't glorified readers for a significant portion of their user-base?
More likely they're hoping that denying access to the large iOS market is enough of a threat that they can extort money out of Amazon. There is a not-insignificant number of people who, presented with an iPad that has no Kindle app versus any other device that does, will just re-buy all their stuff on the iPad instead, and Apple is essentially ransoming those loyalist consumers to Amazon.
If you have an iOS anything, and have bought any Kindle stuff, it's probably a good idea to install the Kindle app and download everything you have access to before that gets cut off.
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Man, it seems Jailbroken Apple stuff is just becoming more and more popular in spite of the risks.
Funny, that.
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Of course, none of this would be possible without DRM.
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Speaking of DRM! Remember that whole "Jailbreaking iThings is legal" ruling?
First-party apps are starting to check for jailbroken phones, and will force-close if they find they're being run on one. (http://www.cultofmac.com/ibooks-1-2-1-tries-to-run-jailbreak-code-to-detect-jailbroken-iphones/82097)
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Relatedly, that whole e-reader thing comes to a head, as Apple now requires in-app subscriptions that give Apple their cut (http://futurebook.net/content/official-apple-locks-down-kindle-app).
I'm just gonna quote someone else's teardown of the scenario, because they put it really well.
Lets take two examples;
I sell a swanky tasklist app. We'll call it DontForgetTheMilk. I make it available on android and iOS. I sell it in the market, and the app store. Both google and apple take their cut for marketing, handling billing, and shipping my app. Fair enough. I don't have much of a choice with iOS, as the only way to get apps on there is via the app store.
So now I add web-sync. Your tasks are stored on my server, and you can access them from anywhere - website, local pc app, mobile app. This costs money for hosting, so I sell monthly or annual subs on my website - you get a login account with a valid sub, you put that in the app, and bingo - your offline app now syncs to the cloud. Yay!
Now apple launch in-app subscriptions. As part of the terms of selling my app on the app store - the only way to GET DFTM on iOS - I *must* now add an option to subscribe in-app to my online sync service, and I *must* sell it for the same price as my website subs; I'm not even allowed to tell people in-app I'd rather they'd buy it from the website - so any iOS customer I have, I'm risking they'll use the mandatory in-app channel, and cost me an extra 30% of every sub. For doing bugger-all.
OK, let's try example 2.
I'm a swanky new digital online magazine. I set up an agreement with amazon to sell subscriptions to my magazine; in return, it gets hosted on the amazon store, and subs are available on any platform that supports kindle; PC, iOS, android, etc, etc. I pay amazon my cut for hosting the subs.
Amazon make the kindle app available for free. I don't know if apple charge publishers for putting free apps in the webstore; either way, as a magazine publisher, I don't really care, as that's Amazon's problem.
Now Apple introduce in-app purchasing. Amazon *must* make subscriptions to my magazine available in the kindle app, and *must* make them the same price as the amazon kindle store price.
Now, I, mr magazine publisher, *must* either pay apple 30% for every in-app sub on iOS, or pay amazon for paying them on my behalf - somehow, I doubt amazon is going to eat the cost.
I don't even have the luxury of not making my sub available on iOS, unless I pull out from kindle entirely and set up my app infrastructure that never goes via iOS - and I can't access kindle devices easily any more, as it's quite hard if not impossible to get updating content on kindle e-readers without going through amazon.
So I either suck up an extra 30% apple tax for iOS users that use it, for doing bupkiss, because I sell magazine subs via amazon/kindle, or I pull out of the entire market and go it alone.
Update: Rhapsody says "Fuck you" (http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/15/rhapsody-wont-bow-to-apples-subscription-policy-issues-statem/).
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NICE EDIT. Likin' those brass balls on the Rhapsody folks.
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Update: Rhapsody says: (http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/15/rhapsody-wont-bow-to-apples-subscription-policy-issues-statem/)
Cee Lo Green - FUCK YOU (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAV0XrbEwNc#ws)
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Yeah, Apple might've had a better chance of actually getting away with it if they had decided to start their rape session with the usual roofies and bullshitting, rather than going straight for surprise buttsex in the middle of the dance floor.
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this does pretty neatly decide which smartphone i'm getting, though.
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*smartphone platform/OS
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whichever
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Own an iPhone? Your exact location is constantly tracked and stored in a perpetual log file on your phone, and any computer you sync it to (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/20/iphone-tracking-prompts-privacy-fears), and dumped on Apple's servers every morning (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2450738?threadID=2450738&start=0&tstart=0).
This data also isn't being sufficiently wiped when phones are refurbished for sale, as some curious people are learning when checking phones they bought "new".
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Own an iPhone? Your exact location is constantly tracked and stored in a perpetual log file on your phone, and any computer you sync it to (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/20/iphone-tracking-prompts-privacy-fears), and dumped on Apple's servers every morning (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2450738?threadID=2450738&start=0&tstart=0).
And they're charging you for the transfer. Great.
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It is a nice touch that in less than a month, that burned through almost $30 of data at the 200MB plan.
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If only there were some sort of literary metaphor for a company spying on its customers.
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Which a competitor could use in a spicy commercial.
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Pretty sure I've seen at least two Apple 1984 ads. To be fair, they left themselves wide open and inviting for it.
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Pretty sure I've seen at least two Apple 1984 ads.
:joke:
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Which a competitor could use in a spicy commercial.
Well, they COULD, if they weren't doing exactly the same thing (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/22/us-apple-google-privacy-idUSTRE73L0CG20110422).
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Ahahahahaha!
Wait.... did these guys just manage to make Microsoft look good?! (Assuming of course that they're not doing it too - which is far from a given).
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"Windows Phone Tracking Its One User"
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Even if location is turned off, your iPhone is collecting and archiving it. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704123204576283580249161342.html) As is your computer, if Apple made it or Safari is installed on it (http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/137432/20110423/apple-we-must-have-comprehensive-user-location-data-on-you.htm).
Feds are (http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple_google_summoned_for_senate_hearing_on_mobile_privacy/) demanding explanations (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703856704576285402575655210.html). Class-actions filed (http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9216156/Florida_N.Y._consumers_sue_Apple_over_location_tracking?taxonomyId=17).
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Hm. While I spend most of my time booted to Linux, I DO boot to Snow now and again, and while my location data isn't exactly an effective means of tracking my movements (it's a desktop computer; the location data will show that it is sitting in my house), it's still something I didn't authorize.
So I'm guessing I'll have settlement money coming my way within the next year or two.
And so will everyone who installed iTunes or Quicktime on their Windows machine and got Safari with it. :whoops:
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Worth mentioning that this whole scheme is flagrantly illegal under California law (http://law.onecle.com/california/penal/637.7.html).
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It's probably buried somewhere in the EULA.
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I am quite happy to lose out on my anticipated $6.47 settlement cheque, in exchange for never having had Safari/itunes on my computer.
EDIT: Oh wait, there was that one time I temporarily installed itunes so I could give my friend a bunch of my music. Maybe I can have the best of both worlds!
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It's probably buried somewhere in the EULA.
Isn't it still disputed whether EULAs are considered a valid form of consent? Especially sealed-box EULAs.
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There are people who actually read the things. I think if it were in there somebody would have noticed it before now.
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A little bit about it was slipped into the EULA with a one of the earlier critical iOS 4 patches. Probably shortly after consolidated.db was relocated to the part of memory that any app can see and access, since iOS 3 didn't keep the file in as accessible a part of the file system. Prior to that, no, there was nothing in the EULA.
I don't buy Apple products for personal use. How feasible is it to never update the OS, given how you're leashed to iTunes?
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Well, Apple's support cycle is a lot shorter than MS's, but Snow Leopard was a comparatively minor update and I'm pretty sure there are plenty of people still using Leopard. (There probably aren't very many using Tiger anymore, but it should still be functional too.)
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I meant on mobile devices.
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Class-actions filed (http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9216156/Florida_N.Y._consumers_sue_Apple_over_location_tracking?taxonomyId=17).
Too bad! No more class actions for you. (http://www.latimes.com/business/sc-dc-0428-court-class-action-web-20110427,0,1239412.story)
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Thanks for your signature.
(http://i.imgur.com/N6mq1.jpg)
Perfect summary.
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I meant on mobile devices.
Hm. Well, I don't know for sure, but my understanding is older-model iOS devices (first-gen iPhones, etc.) don't support the newest versions of iOS but still run.
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Too bad! No more class actions for you. (http://www.latimes.com/business/sc-dc-0428-court-class-action-web-20110427,0,1239412.story)
Holy shit.
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Honestly, that ruling seems to be more "You can't get around the arbitration agreement you signed by joining a class action", which is good law. The problem, which wasn't the issue in this case, is the validity of mandatory arbitration agreements as a whole for consumer products, and that's a much bigger and entirely different battle. Probably one that needs to be fought in the legislative arena, not the courtroom.
Anyway. If I had an iPhone 4 with whatever the current version of iOS is, and an update was put out that was compatible with my phone, can I plug in and sync and do all that shit you have to do to manage an iPhone without ever accepting the update? It doesn't really matter, adding "you consent to being tracked" language to your EULA with a hotfix is shitty no matter what, but I'm curious.
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yes. I'm jailbroken so I don't update firmware etc. but i can still sync and everything
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Honestly, that ruling seems to be more "You can't get around the arbitration agreement you signed by joining a class action", which is good law. The problem, which wasn't the issue in this case, is the validity of mandatory arbitration agreements as a whole for consumer products, and that's a much bigger and entirely different battle. Probably one that needs to be fought in the legislative arena, not the courtroom.
Don't worry, every corporation in the US is going to class action proof everything over the next month or two. (http://uverseonline.att.net/uverse/tos)
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I guess this is a good thing in a way?
The faster that corporations drop the "lets fuck EVERYBODY over" curtain...
... the faster we get fucked.
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Apple monetizes piracy. (http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/06/apple-wwdc-icloud-itunes-match.html)
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That's actually really nice to see. No real complaints here.
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I've actually seen a lot of fairly clever people suggest that the ultimate solution to piracy is to stop pursuing increasingly ridiculous laws and suits and just have a cut of everybody's Internet bills go to the content publishers.
Of course, the rub is finding a way to figure out how to do that fairly and accurately.
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Well, I can see how people might have a beef with a flat tax-and-subsidy for the arts. It might work, but then again it might be a terrible idea.
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Either way I don't see how it could be worse than the current system of finding new and exciting ways to fuck creators and consumers while still utterly failing to address the problem.
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Would not-for-profit game development actually help or hinder the industry? I'd rather not buck the current trend since this is the first time in... pretty much forever that I don't see anybody predicting complete and utter doom and mediocrity forever for the mainstream.
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It's not necessarily not-for-profit; if there were a reliable way of telling how many downloads a thing was getting (and "reliable" includes a means of detecting people trying to artificially inflate numbers) then people making popular things could still get more money than people making unpopular things.
Which still introduces all sorts of questions about how you can treat it as a one-size-fits-all situation; you can't really treat something like Mass Effect as equal to something like Angry Birds, financially speaking. (On the other hand, we've been traipsing down that ludicrous path for nearly a decade; when I told my dad that every song on iTunes was a dollar he responded, "So they charge the same for a minute-and-a-half Ramones song as a 15-minute Miles Davis one?")
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MobileMe webmail app scans your outgoing email for politically charged content and, if it finds something of which it disapproves, will just not send it and not tell you. (http://www.cultofmac.com/apple-may-be-invisibly-filtering-your-outgoing-mobileme-email-exclusive/103703?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cultofmac%2FbFow+%28Cult+of+Mac%29)
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Easy to Hanlon's Razor that one. It's trivially simple to set spam filters too tight, especially on bulk E-Mails that are likelier to trigger a false positive than a unique E-Mail. And the reason you don't get a bounce for suspected spam is that if a server IS getting bombarded with spam E-Mails, sending out bounces for all of them doubles the amount of bandwidth it requires to deal with the problem.
This kind of mistake would be perfectly understandable from a small ISP or a private mail server. It is much less understandable from a company with Apple's level of resources.
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Except it doesn't make it to the server it's being sent to to trigger a bounce in the first place - the app itself is intercepting them before they even go out. And the destinations had no spam filtering, and didn't have a problem receiving the random gibberish emails.
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...E-Mail transmission involves both a sending and receiving server, TA.
The one the filter is on is the server that's sending it.
Now, precisely why the filter only triggers through Webmail and not through a standard mail client on port 25 -- that bit DOES seem a bit bizarre. Putting a spam filter on outbound Webmail but not on mail being sent through an SMTP connection really doesn't make a lick of sense as the latter is the far more obvious vector for spam.
Again, if this were a small operation, I'd chalk it up to a poorly-designed or poorly-configured Webmail program. But Apple doesn't really have that excuse -- except inasmuch as MobileMe's been pretty much a damn mess from day one.
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So apparently Lion's out today. Anyone who gives a crap probably already knows, but Ars has a good and thorough feature rundown in screenshots (http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/07/mac-os-x-lion-a-visual-introduction.ars), and also a gigantic fucking John Siracusa review (http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.ars). Which is also available as a downloadable eBook/PDF (http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/07/lion-review-e-book-now-available.ars) if you want to give Ars money. It's a good read (or, well, skim) even if you're not a Mac user, as it's always interesting to see what Apple is doing. (I find it fascinating that they seem to have cribbed the best interface bits from both Unity and GNOME 3 -- the latter's window management style with the former's dock and space-saving topbar -- but the inability to Cmd-` between a fullscreen window and a non-fullscreen one in the same app looks like it could cripple all the utility of the otherwise great fullscreen mode.)
My major question, of course, is whether I'll be able to make it work with my GTX 570. Time to learn about driver injection!
Meanwhile: the entry-level MacBook is being discontinued, which is a disappointing but thoroughly Apple thing to do.
And in China they don't just sell counterfeit Apple products, they have entire counterfeit Apple Stores (http://birdabroad.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/are-you-listening-steve-jobs/). (HT: BoingBoing (http://www.boingboing.net/2011/07/20/visit-to-a-fake-appl.html).)
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Still working through the doc; it's fascinating.
It looks like Apple's done a lot of legitimately stupid shit with this release (memo to UI devs: a 24" monitor is not the same thing as a 6" touchscreen), but also some genuinely REVOLUTIONARY shit: built-in version control and applications that transparently start and stop depending on whether you're actually using them could effectively make both Save and Quit obsolete. Yeah, there are potential problems there, but on the whole I think it's a great idea that throws out a 1980's-era design philosophy that is frankly obsolete.
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As long as you have some control over what starts and stops; apparently the "openness" of the Android platform involves not even the end-user being able to restrict when and how an application decides to do something.
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A program won't terminate itself unless all its windows are closed or minimized.
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Should have added: the versioning system isn't just a versioning system; it's also designed to keep track of every app's state. So if it DOES, say, terminate a program with some minimized windows, you should be able to transparently reopen it and have those windows reload.
Of course, everybody's still got to implement it, but some devs will have an easier time than others -- Firefox, for example, already has a "Restore previous session" button when you open it; implementation in that case would just be getting rid of the button and doing it automatically. (And since it's a Web browser we're talking about, probably displaying cached versions of the pages instead of reloading every single open page.)
Basically you'd lose whatever time it took to reload the program, but of course the idea is that you make it up in freeing up its resources while you're not using it.
(And maybe it'll mitigate the damn 25-year-old "lol we put the Quit Program button right next to the Close Tab button" problem.)
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The "Confirm before closing multiple tabs or windows" option is useful for that.
Still annoying, though.
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Except that the frequency with which I hit Cmd-Q INTENTIONALLY outnumbers the frequency with which I hit it accidentally by orders of magnitude. The aggravation of interrupting me every. Single. TIME I try and quit out of a program exceeds the aggravation of occasionally quitting it by accident.
MS has it right on this one. The Apple fanboys like to snicker about how Alt-F4 doesn't make any sense, but the truth is it makes PERFECT sense: it is impossible to hit by accident.
Course, Windows lacks a "quit every window in this program" shortcut.
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Maybe you can sell them on making it Alt+Shift+F4.
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If anyone was planning on buying Lion through Paypal, don't (http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/07/27/paypal_users_mistakenly_charged_as_much_as_4000_for_mac_os_x_lion.html).
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Steve Jobs resigns. (http://gizmodo.com/5834141/)
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Which a competitor could use in a spicy commercial.
Well, they COULD, if they weren't doing exactly the same thing (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/22/us-apple-google-privacy-idUSTRE73L0CG20110422).
Ahahahahaha!
Wait.... did these guys just manage to make Microsoft look good?! (Assuming of course that they're not doing it too - which is far from a given).
"Windows Phone Tracking Its One User"
Surprise! (http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/privacy/231600657)
Plaintiff Rebecca Cousineau claims in the complaint that Microsoft is racing to develop a targeted location-based advertising system and has to map the locations of cell towers, wireless routers, mobile phones, and computers to do so effectively. The complaint alleges that Microsoft chose to collect this information from Windows Phone users rather than go through the expensive and laborious process of collecting the information itself.
[...]
The crux of the complaint is that Microsoft asks the user for permission to use his or her location the first time the camera application is opened and then ignores the user's choice, collecting location data whether or not the user has consented.
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https://www.apple.com/stevejobs/ (https://www.apple.com/stevejobs/)
He's dead.
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And now to watch the Apple fans divide between pre-Jobs era and post-Jobs era.
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THE GREAT SCHISM!
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Wonder if next year's coverage of the Apple trade shows will result in a bunch of bloggers just staring blankly at their screen, unsure if they're supposed to like the new iPhone model or not.
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I don't think it coincidence that the lackluster iPhone 4S announcement came in the morning. Cancer deaths are pretty predictable by the end, and now nobody's talking about how weak of an offering it is the way they were this afternoon.
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...are you fucking kidding me?
I mean, dude, good job on coming up with increasingly insane conspiracy theories about Apple PR, but you gotta pace yourself. How are you gonna top this one?
Wait, I know: Tim Cook strangled Jobs to death with his bare hands.
No, wait.
Tim Cook GAVE Steve Jobs cancer.
No, wait.
Steve Jobs got cancer attempting to bring his sister back to life, and made Cook swear he would kill him when the time came so that the 4S launch wouldn't suffer.
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<+Haruhi> Now that Jobs died
[09:51:39pm -7] <+Haruhi> An event at my school went from eyeroll to downright creepy
[09:51:54pm -7] <+Haruhi> ] <@Nue> I did see something..uh. SOMTHIMG at the cafeteria
[09:51:54pm -7] <+Haruhi> [01:40:03pm -7] <@Nue> 3 guys, 4 girls, sitting at a table.
[09:52:04pm -7] <+Haruhi> <@Nue> All had macbooks out. 2 Airs, rest were of various sizes.
[09:52:04pm -7] <+Haruhi> [01:40:28pm -7] <@Nue> All but 1 had an iPhone sitting next to their macbook.
[09:52:04pm -7] <+Haruhi> [01:40:36pm -7] <@Nue> Everyone had an iPod of some sizeo ut, listening to it
[09:52:04pm -7] <+Haruhi> [01:40:41pm -7] <@Nue> And three of them had an iPad
[09:52:12pm -7] <+Haruhi> did they know?
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...are you fucking kidding me?
I mean, dude, good job on coming up with increasingly insane conspiracy theories about Apple PR, but you gotta pace yourself. How are you gonna top this one?
Wait, I know: Tim Cook strangled Jobs to death with his bare hands.
No, wait.
Tim Cook GAVE Steve Jobs cancer.
No, wait.
Steve Jobs got cancer attempting to bring his sister back to life, and made Cook swear he would kill him when the time came so that the 4S launch wouldn't suffer.
No, I think that he probably went into hospice care very recently, and that drove the timing of the announcement. What's insane about that? Cancer deaths are pretty predictable. Or do you think it is a complete coincidence that the new iPhone just happened to be announced a few hours before Steve Jobs died?
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I had a friend get a job offer from Apple today. Coincidence? I think not.
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GUYS I SAW AN IPAD ON MY TOAST THIS MORNING
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The funny thing is that even if TA was right, it has no effect on the hit the share price took for the 4S. In fact Jobs' dyng only drops it further (though I think most of the drop for Jobs had already been priced in).
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Or do you think it is a complete coincidence that the new iPhone just happened to be announced a few hours before Steve Jobs died?
First of all: YES. Of COURSE it is. Apple's had the October 4 date penciled in for WEEKS. After having a keynote LAST October. And the October before. And the October before. And the October before.
Second: That's "October 4", by the way. Not 5. It was not announced "a few hours" before he died, it was announced the DAY before he died.
So what's the takeaway from this? Well, obviously, Apple has known for years that Steve Jobs would one day die in October, and scheduled years of October keynotes to cover up their plan to one day use his death to draw press away from a mediocre product launch. And then, weeks in advance of his death, they scheduled a keynote to coincide PERFECTLY with his death...
...
...and then fucked it up and got the date wrong.
(oh also last Sunday my mom brought me a bunch of my old things, in the box my first computer, an Apple II, came in. Obviously that can't be a coincidence either, so this post is just part of my role in the massive coverup.)
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Macintosh apples were on sale at the grocery store yesterday. 'Tis truly far-reaching!
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Obviously nobody murdered Steve Jobs to cover up the 4S being only somewhat good. That's stupid. Also equally stupid, but much more plausible, is this theory:
The anouncement disappointed him so much that it killed him.
The thing about Jobs' bucket kicking is that it really is overriding analysis of what happened at that presentation, so nobody quite sees what's about to happen here. What you have to understand is that the 4S is bullshit, an incremental upgrade to a popular product that the core audience will buy, and basically unimportant. What's important is the other announcement, the one that's either going to make Apple a lasting fixture in the tech world or will kill it utterly, but either way marks the beginning of the end of the Cult of Apple.
When the 4S is released, the iPhone 3 will be free.
If the iPhone 3 and iPhone 4 were substantially different to the average person, that would be different. But as it stands, what this means is that anybody can have an iPhone. Anybody who wants one. All you have to do is say "Apple" instead of "Android" when the cute girl behind the glass counter asks you what kind of phone you want.
So what? So the truth is that the iPhone, comparatively, is kind of crappy. Nobody really buys an iPhone because they want an iPhone, they buy an iPhone because they want to HAVE an iPhone. iPhone users are richer, smarter, get laid more often, have a better sense of style, and most importantly, they belong. They belong because one way or another they PAID IN to the system - whether they got it on discount, won it, stole it, whatever, at some point an iPhone user has to have made some conscious choice to be such and put their tithe into the jar. They pledged their allegience to Steve Jobs and his United Store of Apps.
To say that Steve Jobs and L. Ron Hubbard had a lot in common is probably a little too rude, but it's not entirely off base.
Tim Cook doesn't get it, though, or more likely he doesn't care. He would rather be Bill Gates than Steve Jobs. He doesn't want the fame, he just wants to quietly take over the world. So he did away with that bullshit. Now literally anybody who wants an iPhone can have one. Will the hipsters that Apple relied on so heavily still care when Felipe the Fry Cook has the same damn thing? No, they won't. Will it still matter? Maybe, maybe not. Will Apple tank because of it? Don't know. But the point here is that the makeup of the company, and its customers, has already begun to change forever.
So there's two statements that could be made here, and one or both of them are probably true:
The Cult of Apple died with Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs died with the Cult of Apple.
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I think that's overstating it quite a bit, really. The iPhone 3GS was an unexciting incremental update too -- Apple has those sometimes. This extended speech control shit isn't that big a deal to start out with, but Ars (http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/10/why-apples-siri-will-chip-away-at-googles-mobile-search-business.ars) thinks it could be a big deal long-term, and it's something Apple's been wanting to do for quite some time.
As for the end of the Cult of Apple? I don't think that's true at all. Everybody already has an iPod. I don't see the iPhone losing its mystique just because there's a free low-end model (though, granted, that DOES diverge pretty heavily from Apple's usual way of doing things), and anyway the iPad is still the vanity product that the iPhone used to be.
I don't even own a smartphone, and I'm terrible at predicting how they're going to sell. The respective strengths and weaknesses of Apple versus Android are well-known at this point, and Apple's stayed ahead up to this point while Android's made steady gains. I don't think free iPhone 3 is going to make a huge difference in the trend.
Things are bound to be different, and very few people have the showmanship or marketing ability of Jobs. But precisely where things go from here is still anybody's guess.
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Apple hasn't stayed ahead in smartphones. Android blew past them last year.
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I heard Windows systems outsell Macs.
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Off topic to the current discussion, buuuuuuut
(http://i.imgur.com/ZrOZd.png)
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That's always pissed me off about apple products.
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I heard Windows systems outsell Macs.
It took me a minute to figure out how this was relevant to the conversation. But yes, you're right, comparing a device to an OS is a mistake and I shouldn't have done it.
That said, fragmentation is one of the "well-known strengths and weaknesses" of Android I was alluding to.
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Apple open-sources ALAC. (http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/10/after-seven-years-apple-open-sources-its-apple-lossless-audio-codec.ars)
Which is irritating, because I just finished ripping my CD collection to FLAC and was planning to stick Rockbox on my iPod so I'd be able to play my lossless music collection on both it and my Linux box.
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Siri selectively omitting information about abortion (http://amaditalks.tumblr.com/post/13513981784/siri).
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Oh wow.
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Some people are getting results, though!
(http://i.imgur.com/P5tlE.jpg)
Of course, those aren't actually abortion providers. Those are crisis pregnancy centers, where all you'll get is a lecture on how abortion is a sin. And if you look up those names and street names, you can find out that Human Life Pregnancy there is in York, PA, and that 1st Choice Women's Health Center is in Leesburg, VA, which means that search was performed from Washington, DC.
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WP (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/aclu-to-apple-fix-siris-birth-control-black-hole/2011/12/01/gIQAdzisGO_story.html): Apple has busted out the "it's a beta, you can expect a few bugs that need ironing out" defense. You know how those betas are...unfinished UI's, instability, wholesale blacklisting of politically controversial healthcare information...
In comments to the New York Times, Norman Winarsky — who runs SRI Ventures, which developed Siri before the program was sold to Apple — said that the program was designed to pull information from third-party services. He said that while he didn’t know how Siri had changed since it was acquired by Apple in 2010, he speculated that those services may not provide answers to those questions.
In other words, expect Apple to quietly fix the problem, and if anyone asks any more questions about it they'll vaguely blame a third-party supplier without naming any names or actually punishing anybody.
(In fairness, it probably IS a low-level employee, a third-party provider, or both; while Lord knows Apple higher-ups have made some terrible and often unscrupulous decisions, this is just bad business. Even ignoring Apple's -- sometimes deserved, sometimes not -- generally liberal reputation, there's nothing to gain from blocking access to abortion services; even vehemently anti-choice right-wingers are not apt to blame search engines for helping people find the things they're looking for.)
(That's more the purview of copyright cops, but that's a different thread.)
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Vehemently anti-choice right-wingers might or might not blame search engines if they do give the info, but they're definitely applauding Apple for denying the info (http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/5353018384.html).
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Well, of course they are.
Doesn't mean they would have been boycotting Apple otherwise.
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Being friends with anti-abortionists is exactly the wrong thing to do if your customer base is the iGeneration.
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Uuhhh, except for that creepy trend where anti-choice the youth is becoming more conservative and stupid. (http://www.jillstanek.com/breaking-new-gallup-poll-the-n.html)
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Being friends with anti-abortionists is exactly the wrong thing to do if your customer base is the iGeneration.
Right, precisely. This isn't Apple Corporate making this decision, it's someone much farther down the ladder.
Seems like every rollout of a new Apple service has included some variety of completely boneheaded censorship. I remember the first time I ever looked at the iTunes Store, the title of Bitches Brew was asterisked out, and of course the various stupidities of the App Store have been chronicled here and elsewhere.
I suspect it's something to do with Apple's culture of secrecy. Not only are its publication standards and policy unclear to its customers and third-party developers, they're unclear to its own employees.
I'm not quite Hanlon's Razoring this, because there's room for both malice AND incompetence in this one. But I think it's downstream malice resulting from upstream incompetence.
Uuhhh, except for that creepy trend where anti-choice the youth is becoming more conservative and stupid. (http://www.jillstanek.com/breaking-new-gallup-poll-the-n.html)
Maybe you missed my two posts pointing out that alienating half your customer base to try to appeal to the other half that you already appeal to does not make good business sense.
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My point was more along the lines that one side is gradually shrinking.
THAT SAID, I'm going to go with that don't attribute to maliciousness what you can to incompetence quote. And for good measure I'll throw in good ol' apathy, as well. Even some of those examples they link actually oppose stuff like non-abortive birth control, which only the extremely far right really hate anyway. It's much easier to say "Person in charge of checking this didn't think and didn't care" than "Apple has a dedicated reason to block birth control and abortions."
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Pretty sure we're all on the same thing as far as whodunnit; the niggling point of unclarity is whether or not Apple benefits from it.
That company is in the strange position of marketing to predominantly liberal market segments while being, itself, so fucking conservative that it would make an oil baron blush. The common cry of "You all have iPads!" to the OWS crowd is supposed to portray them as spoiled brats but accomplishes something weirdly different; it exposes another point where they seem to not be able to pinpoint where their priorities should lie. And I can't disagree with THAT sentiment.
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It's rather similar to when Whole Foods came out as Anti-Worker and Anti-Health Reform a few years back. Totally struck the wrong chord with the wrong crowd. Not like it matters, the people who shop or buy from those companies will stop at nothing to keep buying from them.
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That company is in the strange position of marketing to predominantly liberal market segments while being, itself, so fucking conservative that it would make an oil baron blush.
Well, it's a bit more complex than that. Apple donates to liberal causes and offers liberal benefits to its employees, like healthcare for unmarried partners (gay or straight).
It also has its shit built in rather unpleasant conditions in China, and indulges is anticompetitive behavior ranging from DRM and closed marketplaces up to gigantic patent and copyright suits.
Essentially they have liberal sympathies but really, really like money.
Not like it matters, the people who shop or buy from those companies will stop at nothing to keep buying from them.
Some, sure. I don't know about most, and certainly not all.
Even a beloved industry leader with a devoted customer base can fuck up and lose them in droves. But it takes a special combination of ballsy and stupid to do what Netflix did.
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It's rather similar to when Whole Foods came out as Anti-Worker and Anti-Health Reform a few years back. Totally struck the wrong chord with the wrong crowd. Not like it matters, the people who shop or buy from those companies will stop at nothing to keep buying from them.
That's kind of exactly the thing. There is a large crossover between the portion of the Apple customer base that might take offense to this, and the portion of the Apple customer base that will never be alienated from Apple no matter what they do, and are even now trying to justify this.
There's a lot of "Apple is a progressive company, and thus wouldn't do this on purpose" circular reasoning going on.
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TA, do you think this was deliberate?
It's not a matter of "progressive", it's a matter of "not suicidal". The conspiracy theory that Apple is secretly and maliciously sabotaging their databases to provide skewed information to advance their secret conservative agenda is uncharitable and implausible. Business directories are hard (http://tidbits.com/article/12653), and it probably doesn't help that the anti-abortion groups have a lot of money to throw at SEO.
Today, I was searching for a band on allmusic. I omitted the word "The" from their name, and despite being the only band with that particular word actually in their name, they were the sixth result. How crazy would it have been to suppose deliberate malice on the part of allmusic's search engineers?
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it probably doesn't help that the anti-abortion groups have a lot of money to throw at SEO.
This is true too. The anti-abortion crowd likely has people who work full-time to ensure that crisis pregnancy centers are listed in every indexing service known to man.
Planned Parenthood has plenty of resources at its disposal too, but I'm not sure advertising and outreach are as high a priority as lobbying -- it has to make sure it keeps its funding and, of course, that its services continue to be legal.
And that's the best-heeled women's health provider. Never mind the smaller ones; they certainly have more to worry about than whether they're listed in Yelp.
...but anyway, there's rather a simple test for whether this is all an elaborate conspiracy on Apple's part to court nutty right-wing groups who haven't actually been refusing to buy its products: if that is the case, then Apple will never, ever fix the problem.
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In Soviet Russia, Apple caves to public opinion.
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This is true too. The anti-abortion crowd likely has people who work full-time to ensure that crisis pregnancy centers are listed in every indexing service known to man.
Please, they prefer to be called "anti-choice."
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I'll accept the "pro-choice" and "pro-life" labels when they start campaigning against Obamacare and the Afghanistan theater, respectively.
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Apparently Siri just doesn't acknowledge (http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2011/12/01/siri-total-misogynist/) female sexuality.
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I am not under the impression that Apple is anti-choice or that they’re out to screw over women. I think they’re just reliant on too many dude programmers.
Dingdingding.
Not a new problem. My girlfriend has commented that even the click-wheel is an interface a woman would never have designed. And the netadmin at my engineering college commented that many Unix commands reflect that the thing was made by dudes -- a woman probably wouldn't have come up with "kill", never mind that "Unix" itself is a ball joke.
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the click-wheel is an interface a woman would never have designed.
???
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Nails.
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I think she was thinking more along the lines of running your finger in a circle around a button.
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So, women would have instead given us the iPod wheel?
or that nub buried in laptop keyboards
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i was just talking about how much i like those
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Apple releases new iBooks Author program, for the creation of ebooks! Yay?
Oh wait, the EULA states that any book created using is only ever allowed to be sold via Apple. (http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/apples-mind-bogglingly-greedy-and-evil-license-agreement/4360?tag=nl.e539)
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That's still good (in a way), because it'll give people the idea to make a non-asshole version. True, it'll take more work, but the idea's out there at least.
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Apple was top PC seller in Q4, if you count iPad as a PC. (http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/desktop/232500794)
Now, obviously that's kind of silly, for a number of reasons. The first of which is, most people already have a computer and most people don't have a tablet. If you're buying a computer, it's to replace an existing computer; if you're buying a tablet, well, odds are you are not buying it to replace a computer. (I do know one guy who bought an iPad and sold his laptop, but he already had a desktop and in any case I think we can consider him an outlier.)
Now, there ARE questions we can ask about these numbers that are actually worthwhile. The biggie is whether tablets are a fad or something that's here to stay; I'm inclined to believe the latter. The next question is what the difference is between a phone and a tablet, besides the obvious (one can make phone calls and the other is larger) -- I'm willing to bet that at this point most iPad owners also have iPhones, and I'm curious if that will continue or if customers will decide it's redundant. I still don't own a smartphone and am perfectly happy with a phone that's just for making phone calls, but I can see the appeal of a tablet -- are there many people like me who'd like to have a phone-that's-just-a-phone and a tablet, or am I an outlier once again?
From the numbers I've seen, there are more Android phones being sold now than iPhones (which isn't quite a fair comparison given that Android is an OS and iPhones are a device, but let's leave that for a moment) but the iOS App Store is still selling more programs than the Android equivalent(s). And from the reviews I've read, there's no other tablet that's really a viable competitor to the iPad yet -- HP's had the best shot but was overpriced and abandoned; it'll be interesting to see if anyone else can make a go at it as they're open-sourcing WebOS.
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Apple's FileVault disk encryption can be circumvented in less than an hour, according to a computer forensics firm.
Requires physical access, though, and it's a pretty well-worn axiom of security that if you're trying to protect a machine from someone who's got physical access to it, you're already fucked.
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Apple releases new iBooks Author program, for the creation of ebooks! Yay?
Oh wait, the EULA states that any book created using is only ever allowed to be sold via Apple. (http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/apples-mind-bogglingly-greedy-and-evil-license-agreement/4360?tag=nl.e539)
Amended to only apply to the .ibooks format (http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/02/apple-updates-ibooks-author-eula-to-clarify-restriction-on-format-not-content.ars), which Apple claims is what it meant in the first place. Still stupid and irritating, but much less stupid and irritating than before.
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I had figured Lion would be the last version of OSX, because where do you take the Big Cat theme from Lion? Nowhere, that's where.
Well, turns out that you take it to Mountain Lion (http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/02/apple-unleashes-mountain-lion-on-developers-set-for-summer-release.ars). Which is stupid. Because 10.1 was already called "Puma" and they are the same fucking animal.
Looks like more "make your desktop act more like a phone" foolishness. I've barely used Lion and unless there's some neat shit going on on the backend I don't see much incentive to upgrade.
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Thunder.
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Thunder?
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Thunder.
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It's where you go from Lion.
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Thunder.
Ah-waaah Ah-waaah aa-ahhh-aa-a-ahhh.
Thunder?
Ah-waaah Ah-waaah aa-ahhh-aa-a-ahhh.
Thunder.
Ah-waaah Ah-waaah aa-ahhh-aa-a-ahhh.
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Appears it's also going to start warning you about running unsigned software (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/16/mountain_lion_preview/).
(And before you start, TA, Windows has been doing this for years.)
I'm ambivalent about this trend. On the one hand, the security advantages to verifying the source of a binary are obvious. On the other, so are the barriers to homebrew software. I had to set Win7 to Test Mode to run PPJoy (http://ppjoy.blogspot.com/), and there are rumblings that Win8's OS-level code signing might make it harder to run Linux.
I suppose on some level these problems are self-selecting -- a user advanced enough to install Linux in the first damn place shouldn't have any trouble disabling cert checks in the BIOS, and maybe if you're using something arcane enough to require a third-party unlicensed unsigned driver you SHOULD be savvy enough to enable Test Mode.
Flipside is that this is likely just one more occasion where lusers will just click the "Allow" button and run unsigned code anyway, which tends to defeat the purpose of the entire endeavor.
The only way I really see this as a barrier to end users running whatever the hell they want would be if Apple really DID lock down its desktop OS the same way it does iOS and not allow unsigned programs at all. Which, no, is still not going to happen, even if the UI guys think converging the two is a great idea.
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Why wouldn't that happen?
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Because customers -- even Apple customers -- have different expectations from a computer than they do of a tablet or phone. A platform -- even the MacOS -- thrives on having a wide variety of options and people being able to use (or develop) whatever software they want.
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More specifically, you have to go into the computer's settings and disable Gatekeeper in order to install software from outside the Mac App Store.
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Well, no.
"Signed by an Apple-approved source" is not equivalent to "from the App Store", for starters. (People still sell Mac software in boxes, you know.) And if that Reg article I linked is correct, then the default is that it will WARN you if you try to install unsigned software, but won't block it. You CAN set it to only download and install programs from the Mac App Store, but that's not the default at present.
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...oh. So apparently pre-2008 Mac Pros are not supported by Mountain Lion.
See, now I have a dilemma. On the one hand, I'm not really sure I want the thing. On the other, Apple is telling me I can't have it, which is pretty much the best way to make me try to install it anyway.
(I assume the compatibility issue is related to 32-bit EFI. And while I perfectly understand Apple's lack of interest in continuing to support same, I'm guessing the hacker community will step up.)
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Apple is running out of cats.
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THUNDERCATS, HOOOOOOOOO
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Thad was waiting for 48 hours or so for someone to use the word 'cats' so he could use that joke.
Bravo, Thad.
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Rob Beschizza on GateKeeper (http://boingboing.net/2012/02/16/gatekeeper-cancel-or-allow.html). He says a lot of what we've already said.
He also cites a Dustin Curtis post on the potential scareware nature of the warning message (http://dcurt.is/gatekeeper-s-dialog) ("Adium has not been signed by a recognized distributor and may damage your computer. You should move it to the Trash."). He points out that while yes this is kind of horrifying it at least supports Apple's claim that this is about security -- for now.
Closing paragraph:
The truth is that Macs don't currently suffer much from malicious software, and DRM-esque lockouts are always circumvented. So what's the point of a DRM-esque system for malware prevention? A more pleasingly cynical answer is that it's a marketing move, aimed as much at analyst-fed Mac malware hysterics in the tech press as it is at real threats. For everyday users, Gatekeeper's more likely to echo the good old days of Vista's "Cancel or Allow" than to save them from themselves.
Doctorow spends an entire article pointing out that while DRM doesn't do a damn thing to stop piracy, it works great as an anticompetitive tactic (http://boingboing.net/2012/02/17/drm-gives-companies-security.html), and that yes indeed it has been very good to Apple over the past decade on those grounds.
On the "MS vs. Apple" front I would add that it's not just Windows 6.x that uses the "Cancel/Allow" popups; XPSP3 does too.
Also, per Ars (http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/02/developers-gatekeeper-a-concern-but-still-gives-power-users-control.ars), it costs $99 a year to get signing certs from Apple, and while that's a hassle it's a fifth of what MS charges (http://www.verisign.com/code-signing/microsoft-authenticode/index.html).
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It also fucks Steam completely. (https://www.develop-online.net/news/39842/Next-Apple-OS-update-to-block-unregistered-games)
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Getting a timeout on the link.
1. How does it fuck Steam completely, exactly?
2. A note to those who constantly whine about how unreasonable I am for requesting descriptive links: websites sometimes go down.
3. You hate Steam.
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1) Steam is a source for installing apps that is not the Mac App Store. You have to disable Gatekeeper completely or it won't work.
2) Link's working fine over here, even on hard refresh.
3) Anti-competitive behavior is anti-competitive behavior. Mountain Lion is only available through the Mac App Store (http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/44422/mountain-lion-mac-app-store-only), there's really no question what they're building here.
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The link came up for me. The byline is "'Gatekeeper' to restrict Apple users to App Store games by default", which is a pretty accurate summary. Basically anytime Steam is running, you will have to keep gatekeeper shut off.
EDIT: TA got there first.
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1) Steam is a source for installing apps that is not the Mac App Store. You have to disable Gatekeeper completely or it won't work.
I've read multiple sources that say that a Windows-style warning popup is not only an option, it's the default. That's hardly "you have to disable Gatekeeper completely or it won't work".
If that's wrong and there really are only two modes, "Don't run at all" and "Run everything" and the former is the default, then yes, I think that's a pretty fucking serious problem, but I don't see how it's a problem for Valve. I think Valve can probably scrape together the $99 it would take to sign its binaries. (See "Signed by an Apple-approved source" is not equivalent to "from the App Store", above.)
Mountain Lion is only available through the Mac App Store (http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/44422/mountain-lion-mac-app-store-only)
Er, so's Regular Lion. What's Apple's distribution method for its own OS got to do with this?
there's really no question what they're building here.
Of course there fucking-well is. Again, Windows has been doing this "pop up a warning when you try to run unsigned code" business since 2007 (see And before you start, TA, previous page), and Win8's going to have an App Store of its own.
There is a security best-practices rationale for code signing. There is a software-freedom rationale against it. This can be leveled against both MS and Apple, and both vendors are certain to grant preferential treatment to publishers who give them a cut through their respective App Stores.
That is distinct from actually disabling the execution of unsigned code, even as a default option that can be turned off.
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if you're using something arcane enough to require a third-party unlicensed unsigned driver you SHOULD be savvy enough to enable Test Mode
Dual Shock 3 controllers aren't exactly arcane.
Sony's people are cocks and provided no drivers for the DS3 controllers. Wanting to use those on a PC doesn't make you a fucking wizard. Unsigned crapware like MotionInJoy is the only option for getting that going.
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Hm, really? Don't have any DualShock 3's but I've had no trouble using the PS3 version of the MadCatz SF4 FightPad.
(Where "no trouble" means I had to install a USB card with a VIA chipset because my onboard USB didn't work with it. But no SOFTWARE trouble, anyway.)
I'm a little surprised, but only a little -- the Wii Remote is what I needed PPJoy for.
My point stands that you probably shouldn't be running unsigned device drivers unless you know what the fuck you're doing, but there should be a way to whitelist certain specific ones instead of having to open the door to ALL of them. Or, to put it another way, I don't really get why Win7 should treat unsigned drivers any damn differently from how it treats unsigned executables.
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Cory Doctorow says (http://boingboing.net/2012/02/29/seth-godin-apple-wont-sell.html) that David Weinberger says that Seth Godin says (http://paidcontent.org/article/419-who-decides-what-gets-sold-in-the-bookstore/) that Apple won't carry his ebook because it links to hardcover books on Amazon.
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So it turns out a good bunch of the stuff in The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs by Mike Daisey, as featured in the recent This American Life episode that helped spark the furor over working conditions in the Apple factories, is made-up (http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/03/this-american-life-retracts-hugely-popular-episode-on-apple-and-china.ars).
"I stand by my work," [Daisey] wrote today. "My show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity. Certainly, the comprehensive investigations undertaken by The New York Times and a number of labor rights groups to document conditions in electronics manufacturing would seem to bear this out.
"What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue. THIS AMERICAN LIFE is essentially a journalistic—not a theatrical—enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations. But this is my only regret."
No fucking shit, asshole. And "allowed" is a fucking weasel word; Ira Glass claims that Daisey straight-up repeatedly lied and claimed all this stuff had actually happened. And lied some more when they asked him for contact info for his sources.
It's okay to make shit up for dramatic purposes when you're trying to make a point in a stage show. But don't fucking lie to a news program about it.
Do you have any idea what you've done? You have, potentially, done far more damage to your cause than if you hadn't fucking said anything in the first place. Because YOU went on the radio and lied, now people are going to DISMISS all the rotten shit that actually IS going on at those factories.
YOU'RE a tool of the theater.
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Stross on the new iPad (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/03/gadget-patrol-the-new-ipad.html); hits a few beats that will be near and dear to our hearts:
What drove the improvement in quality home was reading. The Amazon Kindle app is retina-iPad compatible, and switching from it to a different ebook reader (Stanza) using the same typeface size made it glaringly clear that something was going on with font antialiasing. Simply put, reading text on the screen using an ebook reader app on the iPad is indistinguishable from reading on paper (except for the backlight). I'd rate this as a better reading experience than any e-ink device I've tried. And as I've only got the one pair of eyeballs, and they're not getting any better, that feature alone was well worth the price of entry as far as I was concerned.
The important point to note is that the virtue of the iPad 3 display is entirely dependent on the apps supporting it. There's a flood of re-compiled retina-ready apps coming through the app store right now (it started about 48 hours ago), and for text-oriented apps the process looks (from the outside) to be quite straightforward, but I suspect a lot of iPad games (especially the less profitable ones) may not see an upgrade. Games rely on artwork, and while art that was prepared offline can be rescanned (I'm thinking hopefully about Machinarium here), some may not be available in any higher resolution and may have to be re-made from scratch.
As to what it's good for ...
The iPad was launched as a media consumption device, but it's mutating rapidly into a proper computing platform. Yes, there's a walled garden for apps: some folks find this more than a little annoying. But as someone with eighty-something relatives to support, knowing that they can't easily shoot themselves in the foot with their computer is actually a plus point. Meanwhile, the restrictions on what can be sold via the app store appear to be relaxing — as witness, for example, this Python for iOS (http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/python-for-ios/id485729872?mt=8). At the iPad's launch, the official word was "there will be no interpreters on the iPad, ever". And now they're happily selling IDEs. You can start by selling a locked-down platform and then open it up gradually, but you can't go the other way; so I expect the iPad to slowly become more useful for general-purpose computing over the next year.
Stross knows enough about games that I was legitimately surprised to find out he's not actually a gamer. His observation on resolution was obvious to this crowd, but might not be for laymen.
I think that last quoted sentence is relevant to our discussion about whether or not Apple's binary-signing is a harbinger of OSX turning into iOS (AKA "Apple is going to start doing the exact same thing Microsoft has been doing for the past 5 years, everybody panic!"). Closing an already-open platform is like squeezing toothpaste back into the tube, even if that platform is a niche one. (If nothing else, does anybody seriously think Adobe's just going to shrug and give up 30% of its profits on Photoshop without a fight?)
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Well the good news at least is that those sweatshop allegation just got a whole lot harder to dismiss. (http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-03-29/apple-china-factories-violations/53869272/1)
(Do note though: Apple is not Foxconn, and in fact it was in fact Apple that commissioned the damning report.)
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(http://francois.brontoforum.us/miscpic/apple.png)
:rage:
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News sites lately have been absolutely infested with obvious and persistent trolls. Obviously trolls are not something new, but the usual signal-to-noise ratio has pretty much cratered over the past few days as certain people have just started sitting on these sites and blasting every single post with filth.
I think it relates to the earlier argument about the idle frustration of the youth reaching a boiling point, except that author was clearly himself a throwback from a previous generation if he thought that it would result in mass activism. This generation's disenfranchised are less defined by Lollapalooza and more defined by Lulzsec.
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Honestly, I think the real difference is that this generation will be among the first to only really get mad after it's too late and probably after most of the boomers are gone. Childhood has been dragged out longer, there's more and more ways to cheaply fritter away our time, and idle living in tawdry fantasy worlds is bigger than ever.
One day they'll wake up and realize they're 45 and not only do they have no future and that everything they've ever been told is a lie, but that it's really just too damned late for their lives to see much improvement.
They're not going to ever buy that house. That debt will always be with them. They're not going to ever really have that good job. They're not going to have those kids or go on those vacations, or do half the small seemingly-average things they ever ever dreamed they might do over the course of a "normal" life. The "normal" life their parents and grandparents knew. And that the only people who are going to have such things are maybe not wealthy, but whose parents had just enough money to shore up the potemkin village that passed for their income.
Maybe they'll just fall into a collective despair so bleak it'll make Russians look like Filipinos, or maybe we'll see Rage On A Scale Heretofore Unseen By Man, but either way I doubt the results will be good.
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DOJ sues Apple, 5 publishers for e-book price fixing. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304444604577337573054615152.html)
The lawsuit included a quote from the late Steve Jobs, head of Apple, describing his company's strategy for negotiating with the publishers: "We'll go to [an] agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30%, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that's what you want anyway."
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Forbes (http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelbobelian/2012/04/12/the-irony-of-the-governments-antitrust-case-against-apple-and-five-publishers/) (who, I was surprised to learn, apparently employs Les Moore (http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/08/02/funkywatch-julys-most-depressing-and-infuriating-funky-wink/)) runs down the essential irony of the case: that at this point antitrust law has been so gutted that if those 5 publishers had just merged they would be harder to prosecute, and that this particular price-fixing is in response to Amazon's equally-questionable price-fixing.
There's not really a good guy to root for in this one. Amazon set prices artificially low in order to sell Kindles; that's to the short-term benefit of customers, but served to further entrench Amazon's control of the book market, and establish it as a monopoly in the ebook space. That doesn't just hurt publishers, it also hurts other booksellers (both independent and corporate), and in the long term that's NOT good for customers.
Which isn't to say that I approve of Apple and the publishers colluding to fix prices, either. It gives us a second player in the market -- which IS a good thing -- but while it gives Amazon a competitor, it's pretty damn anticompetitive with everybody else.
Ideally we'd have Amazon AND Apple getting their knuckles rapped. And publishers starting to realize that DRM is what lets the device vendors push them around.
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The Reg (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/12/ebooks_analysis/) has more. Keep its biases in mind -- it tends toward the fiscally-conservative, regulation-is-bad side -- but Stross (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/04/hiatus-ending.html) is plenty liberal and seems to agree.
For its part, the DoJ thinks it has a workable compromise. It hasn’t outlawed agency pricing, but outlines restrictions on publisher-set pricing, neatly tying the industry’s hands, which it thinks it can pull off without overstepping its authority. The vital section can be found in the final judgment’s "permitted conduct" (section VI.B).
This proposes that an ebook retailer will not be permitted to sell books at a loss cumulatively over a 12-month agency contract "as long as the total dollar amount spent on discounts and promotions did not exceed the aggregate of the retailer's full commission from the settling defendant over a one-year period".
So Amazon can still aggressively discount bestsellers, but it can’t retail the backlist catalog at a loss.
[...]
The proposal also wants to be tough on collusion: ebook retailers can’t negotiate with more than one publisher at once. In a world where rolling negotiations take place with everyone, it’s difficult to see how this one can stick.
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Charlie's got more (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/04/understanding-amazons-strategy.html); it's really about Amazon rather than Apple.
What he builds up to is that this suit cuts off the publishers' best effort, to date, to get out from under Amazon's predatory pricing -- and at this point their only option is to abandon DRM.
He adds, in the comments section of his previous post, that he predicts we'll start to see cracks in the DRM strategy in about 6 months, and it'll be gone in 18.
Here's hoping.
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Apple abandons EPEAT environment ratings for their products in the interests of saving on production costs, can no longer sell to federal agencies. (http://www.epeat.net/2012/06/news/apple-leaves-epeat/)
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Ars (http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/apple-pulls-products-from-green-electronics-registry/) notes that this could be because they're making their products progressively more difficult to take apart -- it's a lot harder to recycle a computer when its battery is glued the fuck in.
Doesn't entirely explain why they've pulled their entire line from certification, including older models that were previously certified, but it's Apple we're talking about -- completely severing older hardware is par for the course.
This line caught my eye:
Certain schools, government agencies, and businesses require their IT departments to buy EPEAT-certified products, so Apple's move could eliminate them as an option for many institutions.
Apple's not big in business or most government agencies, so I don't see it hurting much there. Schools, on the other hand, buy a disproportionate number of Macs, largely due to Apple's large educational discounts. Apple could hypothetically lose some serious business there -- but in practice, I think it'd be pretty trivial for them to convince school boards (or whatever necessary government regulators) to drop those requirements.
From the end of the article:
Apple still offers recycling programs through its website. Shaw Wu, an analyst at Sterne Agee, speculated to the Wall Street Journal that Apple might create an alternate standard for its own products. That however, is purely speculation at this point.
Wouldn't surprise me. Apple likes the image of being green but also likes the image of being compact. And when Apple doesn't comply with standards, it's happy just to make up its own.
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I work at a Maryland State School. We're actually *required*, by law, to purchase only EPEAT Silver or Gold electronics. This decision by Apple to withdraw all their products from the EPEAT registry means we can't buy Apple products anymore.
Which, as someone who has to support them, I'm all in favor of.
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Depends, a lot, on how much leverage Apple has and how much it chooses to exert.
There are cities and states with laws on the books saying they can't do business with a company with a recent antitrust conviction. I don't know of a single example of any of them dropping MS after the verdict came down. I also don't know of any examples of anyone trying to sue to force compliance.
MS, of course, is a lot more fundamental to business and government infrastructure than Apple is.
Anyway. First city to officially drop Apple is San Francisco (http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/san-francisco-turns-its-back-on-apple-after-green-registry-pull-out/).
That could sting -- or not. I imagine part of why Apple's made this call is it's not too concerned about losing government customers.
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About-face on EPEAT (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/business-technology/whoops-apple-rejoins-green-tech-standard-after-mistake-exit/article4415488/)
Well well now.
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This, of course, only a couple days after their proud claim that they're better than EPEAT, and EPEAT's standards are outdated and getting in the way of being truly green (http://gizmodo.com/5924995/apple-releases-epeat-statement-were-special-but-different).
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Wow, that was quick.
Apple backpedaling on something and admitting to a mistake? We really ARE in a post-Jobs era.
...though I can't actually tell if this means they'll go back to designing things to be EPEAT-compliant, or if they've just resubmitted their old shit and will ignore it going forward.
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Wow, that was quick.
Apple backpedaling on something and admitting to a mistake? We really ARE in a post-Jobs era.
...though I can't actually tell if this means they'll go back to designing things to be EPEAT-compliant, or if they've just resubmitted their old shit and will ignore it going forward.
To be fair, the mistake isn't backing out of EPEAT because EPEAT is good. The mistake is backing out of EPEAT while underestimating the backlash they'd get. And they flat-out say that.
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And I'm sure if they DIDN'T flat-out say that, you would totally not be posting to complain about how disingenuous they were being by not just coming out and admitting it.
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Apple censor regime still completely fucking tone-deaf on the subject of political apps.
Frederic Jacobs produced an iOS app called "Angry Syrians," which was apparently blessed by Rovio. It was intended to raise awareness of the ongoing bloodbath in Syria. Apple rejected it (http://fredericjacobs.com/the-hypocrisy-of-the-west) because "We found your app contains defamatory or offensive content targeted at a specific group, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines." (the defamed and offended group in question is the brutal Assad regime and its supporters).
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Kind of on the seesaw about that one. On the one hand I can't say I don't enjoy sticking it to the occasional Acceptable Target (i.e. Nazis), I always end up feeling a little embarassed about certain Acceptable Targets (i.e. everyone else) a couple years later.
Really though I kind of have to grudgingly put that point in favor of Apple - if we're going to agree that free speech in this case should be limited in the sense that you can't put up Angry Niggers, then we need to not be ourselves biased in the implementation of that, even if the target in question really, really deserves it.
It also means that they need to pull Wolfenstein RPG off as well. If they have the balls to do that then I'll be really impressed.
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Well, right, I think it's probably more about the title than the content. And I think whatever monkey is at the controls just selected a damn radio button to spit out a vague formula rejection notice. Because obviously that is superior to saying "Hey dude if you change the title you're probably good."
The problem, as always, is twofold: individual people having to make decisions, and a total lack of transparency on the Why.
Course, given that Jobs himself was of Syrian descent, it would have been interesting to see HIS reaction on this, but realistically I doubt it would have been different from any of the other times someone rejected an app with not-very-political overtones and Apple looked stupid for it.
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Er, I thought they were being serious about unilaterally applying their defamation policy to cover an oppressive killer regime. The way their guideline is written:
Any app that is defamatory, offensive, mean-spirited, or likely to place the targeted individual or group in harms way will be rejected
they are kind of obligated to.
Had they written it in such a way as to say that Apple reserves the right to reject submissions based on defamation of an individual or group, it would be all-around better, but that would place the burden of proper judgement on Apple and they aren't having any of that.
And, again... Wolfenstein RPG.
OR of course you're right and it's just Hanlon's Razor in effect, in which case lol I guess.
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Siracusa reviews Mountain Lion. (http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/)
I'm 6 pages in (of 24); he seems pretty upbeat about it. So far it sounds more like Apple fixed a lot of the problems with Lion than doubling down on them.
Maybe if I get bored some weekend I'll try installing it. I've got an old Pro that won't support it, but you can get around that by putting an OSx86 bootloader on the sucker. And again, Apple telling me I can't do something is, in itself, an incentive to try and do it.
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As it turns out the ugly stuff starts around page 12 (http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/12/), with the iCloud integration.
Now, there's some good stuff here. I imagine that if I had an iDevice -- as the vast majority of Mac users must surely do -- then I would love to have such a seamless way of syncing documents. (Fun fact: while the most common search topic that brings people to my website is FF7 mods, #2 is document syncing between Windows and Ubuntu.)
BUT the actual implementation sounds clunky as fuck. The folder hierarchy in iCloud is only 2 deep (including the root), and you can't access your iCloud directory from Finder, which is FUCKING INSANE.
And that's before we get into the insidious part: the APIs for accessing iCloud are only available to App Store devs.
Never mind binary signing, THIS is the power play. Distribute through the App Store or you can't access the thing we have positioned as the PRIMARY STORAGE DEVICE for our OS.
It's going to be very interesting seeing how Adobe responds.
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Cory Doctorow says (http://boingboing.net/2012/02/29/seth-godin-apple-wont-sell.html) that David Weinberger says that Seth Godin says (http://paidcontent.org/article/419-who-decides-what-gets-sold-in-the-bookstore/) that Apple won't carry his ebook because it links to hardcover books on Amazon.
Apparently this shit is still happening.
Holly Lisle (http://boingboing.net/2012/07/28/apple-wont-carry-an-ebook-be.html) has pulled all her books from iBookstore after Apple first told her to remove live links to Amazon and then, when she resubmitted, told her no actually she had to remove all MENTIONS of Amazon. From a book about self-publishing.
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Ars (http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/08/graphics-improvements-give-mountain-lion-that-speedy-feeling/) confirms that ML is zippier; somebody on MacRumors (http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1325709) gets it to run on an old Mountain Lion WITHOUT putting an OSx86 bootloader on it. netkas (http://netkas.org/?p=1157) confirms that it works with a GTX580, but it's not clear whether it works with a GTX580 on a Pro with 32-bit EFI. (Don't suppose anybody knows whether having 32-bit EFI means you need a 32-bit kext?)
At any rate I don't see upgrading right now, but maybe later.
Curious whether putting Chameleon Bootloader on there would allow me to ignore EFI and, therefore, get rid of the old GeForce card I've still got installed strictly for boot time. Don't know if that would help with anything or not, but I'm still having trouble getting ME2 to run reliably with the GTX580. (Got WINE working under OSX -- sort of -- and it even crashes my system that way.)
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Mike Daisey's performing a new version of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs (http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/08/how-mike-daisey-retooled-the-agony-and-the-ecstasy-of-steve-jobs/), where he acknowledges Making Shit Up and, apparently, is trying to stick to the facts this time.
With the revisions, Daisey has powered down his own Reality Distortion Field (http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Reality_Distortion_Field.txt) and apparently become more fact-based, but the show does leave out plenty of information. For example, Daisey said little about Apple's moves toward greater transparency about its sourcing (http://www.apple.com/supplierresponsibility/), including joining the Fair Labor Association (http://www.fairlabor.org/affiliate/apple) and submitting to an FLA audit (http://www.fairlabor.org/report/foxconn-investigation-report) of Foxconn facilities. (In a question-and-answer session after Saturday night's performance, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak supported Apple's overall strategy (http://phys.org/news/2012-08-apple-co-founder-wozniak-cloud.html).) It also barely mentioned other, less-profitable gadget vendors—say, Samsung (http://blog.laptopmag.com/samsung-investigating-alleged-child-labor-abuse-at-chinese-factory)—who have yet to experience the same scrutiny as Apple.
It's interesting that Woz is doing shows with this guy at all, and that link about what he said is interesting.
"I really worry about everything going to the cloud," he said. "I think it's going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years."
He added: "With the cloud, you don't own anything. You already signed it away" through the legalistic terms of service with a cloud provider that computer users must agree to.
"I want to feel that I own things," Wozniak said. "A lot of people feel, 'Oh, everything is really on my computer,' but I say the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we're going to have control over it."
I'm inclined to agree with Woz, of course, and I've always liked Frank Zappa's comment that communism was doomed to failure because "people like to own things."
But I'm increasingly of the opinion that that ship's sailed, and that when it comes to computers, most users do not give a fuck about whether or not they actually own their shit. Course, every time there's a major story in the news about a company (Sony, Amazon, whoever) forcibly reminding its customers that they don't own the files they've "purchased", there IS a backlash, so maybe there's still hope.
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Security implications scare me more than the ownership thing.
At least some services allow for local syncing (DVCS-based systems and stuff like Dropbox).
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“I’ve been against Macintosh company lately. They’re trying to get everyone to use iPads and when people use iPads they end up just using technology to consume things instead of making things. With a computer you can make things. You can code, you can make things and create things that have never before existed and do things that have never been done before.”
“That’s the problem with a lot of people”, he continued, “they don’t try to do stuff that’s never been done before, so they never do anything, but if they try to do it, they find out there’s lots of things they can do that have never been done before.”
I nodded my head in agreement and laughed to myself – thinking that would be something that I would say and the coincidence that out of all the people in the coffee shop I ended up talking to, it was this guy. What a way to open a conversation.
The old man turned back at his coffee, took a sip, and then looked back at me.
“In fact, I’ve done lots of things that haven’t been done before”, he said half-smiling.
Not sure if he was simply toying with me or not, my curiousity got the better of me.
Oh really? Like what types of things?, All the while, half-thinking he was going to make up something fairly non-impressive.
I invented the first computer.
via (http://boingboing.net/2012/08/09/do-things-that-have-never-be.html)
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The abandonment of quotation marks halfway through that story really threw me.
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Yeah, I considered copying his indentation and italics but frankly it's kind of an inconsistent mess even with them included.
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So, with iOS 6, Apple has ditched Google's map data and map service in favor of one concocted in-house.
It ... doesn't work. (http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19659736)
It really, REALLY doesn't work. (http://theamazingios6maps.tumblr.com/)
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Also: Apple just don't give a fuck about other people's trademarks (http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/09/apple-apes-trademarked-swiss-railway-clock-for-ipads-new-clock-app/). But of course we've known that since the Apple Records suit.
(The second one, anyway. I think Apple Computer was in the right the first time around.)
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(http://craphound.com/images/io6mapstfl.jpg)
(via (http://boingboing.net/2012/09/21/advisory-ios6-maps-on-the-tub.html))
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ouch.
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All Things D (http://allthingsd.com/20120926/apple-google-maps-talks-crashed-over-voice-guided-directions/) cites "multiple sources familiar with Apple’s thinking" to claim that Google was deliberately leaving features out of the iOS version of its app that were present in the Android version.
To that end I can see Apple's thinking -- they weren't simply ditching a competitor's system, they were ditching a competitor's system that the competitor was making DELIBERATELY INFERIOR to the version for its own OS.
The massive fuckup, as usual, seems to be in Apple's culture of secrecy leading to yet another product being released without a public beta that, surprise, turns out not to have been tested very thoroughly.
I guess on balance Apple's silence-silence-silence-SURPRISE! approach to product unveiling appears to work pretty damned well for its marketing, and its history of crap like this doesn't appear to have hurt its popularity. To that end, I don't think we should expect anything to change in the near future.
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Of course, it's not "the iOS version of Google Maps". Google didn't code shit. It was Apple's app, and Google was providing the map data. The claim is now that Apple wanted them to also provide turn-by-turn data, without paying extra, and that not doing so was "deliberately crippling" the iOS Maps app.
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Basically they were sick of each other, and now are both rushing to each do on one's own what they did together:
http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/25/3407614/apple-over-a-year-left-on-google-maps-contract-google-maps-ios-app (http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/25/3407614/apple-over-a-year-left-on-google-maps-contract-google-maps-ios-app)
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Well, when you've got an effective monopoly, then yeah, refusing to provide support for a competing platform DOES make for anticompetetive behavior. MS played similar games with Office and IE in the '90's.
Seems to me that there's plenty of blame to go around. And I don't exactly find the notion that Google was gathering too much user data to be farfetched.
One way or another, when the software's mature I expect it'll make for some healthy competition, and that's a good thing. Right now, of course, it's yet another one of Apple's testing fails -- which, again, I don't think we're likely to see happen any less frequently in the coming years.
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It's a question of whether they were holding a feature back from Apple or whether Apple was trying to demand a paid feature for free. Sounds like the case is a little of both.
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Right, that's how I see it.
Google's more than willing to provide features for "free" in most cases -- its strategy is, generally, make your shit work on every platform so that you can have as broad a userbase as possible and rule the world with the power of statistical analysis. (Hell, Android ITSELF is free -- though if you want the Play Store icon on your distribution, you're going to have to agree to some terms. Which, reasonably enough, include not also shipping a Chinese fork with its own bootleg-riddled store (http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/09/pirated-android-apps-featured-prominently-on-aliyun-app-store/).)
Their increasingly sour relationship with Apple has demonstrated that the game is beginning to change -- that Google and Apple are looking at each other genuinely as competitors now despite each one needing to support the other on some level. (Which is not the asymmetric relationship that MS and Apple have historically had, or MS and Netscape -- those have been pretty much situations where MS had the power. At least, until iTunes became so prominent on Windows and Office became less necessary on Mac. The closest analogue I can think of is Apple and Adobe, but that's still much smaller-scale than what we're looking at here.)
And make no mistake -- Google is going to lose a hell of a lot of Maps users on this one. As pissed off as iPhone owners are over this, I don't see any significant number jumping ship to Android over it.
But Google losing Maps users is of course different from Google losing users. Pretty much everybody using iOS or any other damn computing platform in America is still a Google user, one way or another.
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Ars: Samsung claims foreman lied about his past to get on Apple v. Samsung jury (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/samsung-claims-foreman-lied-about-his-past-to-get-on-apple-v-samsung-jury/)
The foreman is a patent holder himself, and there's speculation that he mentioned things in deliberation that were not presented in evidence.
Things that may not actually be accurate.
His legal misstatements have been picked apart by Samsung lawyers, who noted he said design patents are based on "look and feel," and that prior art must be "interchangeable" in order to invalidate a patent. "These incorrect and extraneous legal standards had no place in the jury room," wrote Samsung in its brief.
Oh and also he failed to mention that he went bankrupt after being sued by Seagate, a company which is partly owned by Samsung. (Hogan responds that he was only specifically asked about suits in the past 10 years.)
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An iPhone 5 owner walks into a bar. Or a restaurant. Or a church. Or...
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Oh yeah, the foreman basically refused all jury instruction and lectured the jury on his own interpretation of patent law and prior art, which had absolutely nothing to do with the actual laws regarding such things. Claiming that since the prior art runs on different processors, it's not prior art, and such.
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So, the UK courts ordered that Apple place a notice on apple.com that Samsung's Galaxy Tab does not infringe on the iPad. Good so far.
So Apple tucks a tiny little link at the very bottom of the page with non-descriptive text. The court did not approve (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/nov/01/apple-samsung-statement), and ordered them to fix it, placing descriptive text in no less than 11 point font with a link to the full statement.
And they did! Of course, they also script up the site to dynamically resize the splash image of an iPad so that no matter your browser resolution, you'll have to scroll down to see it. (http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/12kce9/apple_resizes_website_so_that_the_samsung_apology/)
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Koh orders new damages trial (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/judge-slashes-apples-court-win-against-samsung-by-450m/) for 14 of the 28 infringing Samsung patents.
The $599M for the other 14 holds; rest to be determined, but will be less than the $450M originally awarded.
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Well this isn't creepy at all (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BUuWywlCAAEBbiG.jpg:large)
Flyer handed out by the NYPD urging consumers to update to iOS7
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You know that much-lauded revolutionary new fingerprint identification technology built into the 5s?
Yeah that's just the same useless fingerprint scanners that have been around for years. Easily bypassed. From a print you can get off the phone itself, no less. (http://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2013/ccc-breaks-apple-touchid)
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Well this isn't creepy at all (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BUuWywlCAAEBbiG.jpg:large)
Flyer handed out by the NYPD urging consumers to update to iOS7
ATTENTION CITIZENS
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The NYPD doesn't have spell-checkers, apparently.
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According to EA Games, Apple paid them "a truckload of money" to delay the Android version of Plants vs Zombies 2. (http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/apple-denies-paying-ea-to-delay-plants-vs-zombies-/1100-4747/)
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As far as I can tell the only story here is "EA exec says something inaccurate and tactless", and that's only worth an entry on a reel dedicated to such things.
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Apple patent suit thrown out in Germany (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/apples-german-patent-suit-shut-down-by-a-2007-video-of-steve-jobs/) because Jobs demonstrated the software publicly before Apple filed for the patent in Germany.