Quotulatiousness

September 19, 2012

Just who does join the early queue for a new iPhone?

Filed under: Britain, Business, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:09

The Register‘s Anna Leach asks the folks in line at the Apple store in London:

The iPhone 5 doesn’t go on sale until 8am on Friday, 21 September – yet lines of fanbois, socio-averse hipsters, campaigners and self-promoting twits awaiting the new mobe are already clogging the pavements outside Apple Stores.

Yesterday on the steps of London’s flagship Regent Street pomaceous-product outlet, punters queueing to seize the slightly updated phone include an unemployed bloke, a very keen Apple enthusiast and his carer and some very recalcitrant bods who insisted that El Reg bring them coffees. No such luck, Popeye.

The fact that four of the first seven queuers were making films about why people queue for iPhones speaks volumes about pre-launch iPhone hype. Given the media circus surrounding those who shun more practical methods of shopping and instead queue in the British September air, it’s not surprising that all of the first six were representing interest groups on the lookout for publicity.

September 18, 2012

Guild Wars 2 to be available on Mac OS X

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:39

ArenaNet just announced that they will be releasing Guild Wars 2 for Macintosh computers (so you Mac heads now have no excuse for not playing Guild Wars 2):

Today we’re happy to announce another major milestone in the development of Guild Wars 2: going forward, ArenaNet will also be supporting the game on Apple’s Mac OS X. The Mac Beta client is available immediately for all Guild Wars 2 players. It shares the same features and connects to the same live game servers as the PC client. Anyone who purchases Guild Wars 2 can now play it on both PC and Mac.

Bringing Guild Wars 2 to the Mac is huge for us, because it introduces the game to an entire group of players who are often ignored by game developers. The ability to play together with your friends is one of the underlying principles of Guild Wars 2, and providing a Mac client means that friends and guildmates can play together regardless of what operating system they favor.

September 13, 2012

iPhone fans are going through this progression right now

Filed under: Humour, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:06

From Pedro Dias on Google+:

September 7, 2012

Jesse Kline: Consumers the biggest losers in Apple-Samsung battle

Filed under: Business, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:07

In the National Post, Jesse Kline points out that the grubby legal dispute between Apple and Samsung may end up hurting the consumer much more than either of the combatants:

Software is unique because it is covered under both copyright and patent law. Computer software is written in a human-readable language, called source code, that is then translated by the computer into something the machine can understand. Much like writing a book, or newspaper article, source code is automatically covered under copyright law.

But no one is alleging that Samsung copied Apple’s code. What Samsung was sued for was achieving the same outcome as Apple, even though it was done in a different way. In this literary world, this would be akin to someone being sued for violating the copyright on Harry Potter, just because they wrote their own story about a boy wizard.

Intellectual property laws are supposed to encourage innovation by allowing companies and individuals to profit off works that may have cost a significant amount of money to develop. Apple says it was undercut in price because its competitor simply copied its design. In actual fact, Android was cheaper to produce because it is based on the open source Linux operating system, which saved money compared to Apple proprietary system.

For its part, Samsung accuses Apple of resorting “to litigation over market competition in an effort to limit consumer choice.” It’s one thing for the legal system to protect new inventions and original works, but this is quite clearly a case of a company engaging in anti-competitive behaviour.

August 30, 2012

21st century problems: who inherits your digital property?

Filed under: Books, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:37

Unless medical science has a solution up their collective sleeves, we’re all going to die (eventually). It may be an individual shock, but humans have been dying forever — it’s the unwelcome end of the trip. As a result, we’ve evolved ways to redistribute the property of deceased members of our families and communities. When the issues were as simple as who got Uncle Grog’s club and who got his loincloth, we came up with solutions.

Fast forward to our becoming-ever-more-digital age, and not all of our property is tangible: we’re becoming “owners” of digital property that may be as valuable as our physical possessions. What happens to our music libraries, e-book collections, social media accounts, and all the other non-physical things we’ve bought and used during our lives?

Someone who owned 10,000 hardcover books and the same number of vinyl records could bequeath them to descendants, but legal experts say passing on iTunes and Kindle libraries would be much more complicated.

And one’s heirs stand to lose huge sums of money. “I find it hard to imagine a situation where a family would be OK with losing a collection of 10,000 books and songs,” says Evan Carroll, co-author of “Your Digital Afterlife.” “Legally dividing one account among several heirs would also be extremely difficult.”

Part of the problem is that with digital content, one doesn’t have the same rights as with print books and CDs. Customers own a license to use the digital files — but they don’t actually own them.

[. . .]

Most digital content exists in a legal black hole. “The law is light years away from catching up with the types of assets we have in the 21st Century,” says Wheatley-Liss. In recent years, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Indiana, Oklahoma and Idaho passed laws to allow executors and relatives access to email and social networking accounts of those who’ve died, but the regulations don’t cover digital files purchased.

Apple and Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.

August 19, 2012

ESR on the limits of “lawfare” for Apple

Filed under: Business, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:56

To put it mildly, ESR isn’t a fan of Apple’s lawfare approach to competition:

It’s beginning to look like Apple’s legal offensive against Android might backfire on it big-time. Comes the news that Judge Koh has declined to suppress evidence that Apple may have copied crucial elements of the iPad design from prototypes developed by Knight-Ridder and the University of Missouri in the mid-1990s.

Those of us aware enough of computing history to be aware of early work by XEROX PARC and others have always been aware that Apple’s claims of originality were highly dubious. Apple’s history is one of adroit marketing and a facility for stealing adapting ideas from others, wrapping them in admittedly excellent industrial design, and then pretending that all of it originated de novo from the Cupertino campus.

The pretense has always galled a little, especially when Apple’s marketing created a myth that, footling technical details aside, the whole package somehow sprang like Athena from Steve Jobs’s forehead. But it didn’t become intolerable until Apple began using lawfare to suppress its competition.

The trouble with this is that there’s actually a lot of prior art out there. I myself saw and handled a Sharp tablet anticipating important iPhone/iPad design tropes two years before the uPhone launch, back in 2005; the Danger hiptop (aka T-Mobile Sidekick) anticipated the iPhone’s leveraging of what we’d now call “cloud services” in 2002-2003; and of course there’s the the Sony design study from 2006, described by one of Apple’s own designers as an important influence.

If only Apple were honest about what it owed others…but that cannot be, because the company’s strategy has come to depend on using junk patents in attempts to lock competitors out of its markets.

July 30, 2012

QotD: Playing “The Last Post” over the notion of Apple’s innovation

Filed under: Business, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

This isn’t speculation — an Apple employee copied Sony’s design, circulated it to his bosses, and testified to these facts in court.

From now on, when anyone heaps phrase on Apple’s design excellence and superlative innovation, just point and laugh. Some of us have been saying for years that what Apple is really good at is ripping off other peoples’ ideas and stealing the credit for them with slick marketing. This, right here, is the proof.

Eric S. Raymond, “The Smartphone Wars: The iPhone Design Was Inspired by Sony”, Armed and Dangerous, 2012-07-29

July 7, 2012

Tim Worstall: the software patent system is FUBAR’ed

Filed under: Business, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:05

In Forbes, Tim Worstall explains the odd situation of Amazon trying to obtain patents to use defensively when (not if) they get sued for entering the smartphone market:

… Amazon isn’t searching out patents which would allow it to build phones to, say, the GSM or CDMA standards. For those patents, by virtue of being included in those standards, must be made available to all comers on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms (RAND, or Europeans add “Fair” to the beginning to give FRAND). So any patent that is actually necessary to make a phone that interacts with the network is already available to them on exactly the same terms that Samsung, Apple, Nokia or anyone else pays for them.

No, what Amazon is looking for is just some bundle of patents, somewhere, that have something to do with mobile telephony. So that when (and sadly, it really is when, not if) they get sued by someone or other for breaching a patent then they’ve got some great big bundle of documents that they can wave back at them. Such patents can range from the possibly valid (slide to unlock perhaps) through to two that really irk me: Apple claiming a patent on a wedge shaped notebook and, unbelievably to me, on the layout of icons on the Galaxy Tablet in Europe.

I take this to be evidence that the technology patent system has simply got out of hand: that the system is entirely Fubar in fact. We need to recall what a patent is supposed to do: it is not that intellectual property is some God given right. Rather, we realise that given that ideas and technologies are public goods it is very difficult to make money out of having invented them. Thus we artificially create intellectual property in the form of patents and trademarks. But we are always walking a narrow line between encouraging invention by awarding such rights and discouraging derivative inventions by awarding rights that are too strong.

June 27, 2012

The “JesusPhone” turns five

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:32

At The Register, Tony Smith looks back on five years of Apple’s iPhone phenomenon:

The iPhone first went on sale five years ago this week and it has already clocked up more than $150 billion in revenues — more than the annual GDP of Hungary — for Apple.

More than 250 million iPhones have been sold since 29 June 2007, the day over-the-counter sales began in the US, almost six months after its January 2007 launch.

That’s just the hardware, of course. Apple takes a 30 per cent cut of the purchase price of ever app downloaded through the iTunes App Store, and with well over 30 billion apps downloaded since the app shop went online on 10 July 2008.

[. . .]

The original iPhone, lest we forget, was a 2G device with GSM/Edge data connectivity. Its 16 bundled apps — it couldn’t run third-party native software, only JavaScript-coded “web apps” in its browser — ran on a 400MHz Samsung ARM11-based S3C6400 CPU and were presented on a 3.5in, 320 x 480 display.

There was no external storage — there still isn’t — and the battery was tightly integrated into the casing — it still is. It has a 2Mp camera and 4-16GB of on-board Flash storage.

But the iPhone introduced the world to smooth touchscreen operation, its capacitive panel outclassing the less sensitive resistive screens commonplace at the time. Likewise, it introduced roll, pitch and yaw detecting accelerometers, now found on every smartphone. Likewise Wi-Fi.

March 8, 2012

Sweatshops and Apple

Filed under: China, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:15

Sam Bowman points out the economic factors which many western critics miss when they slag Apple for working conditions in the factories where iPhones and iPads are assembled:

Like sweatshop workers in China and elsewhere, Foxconn employees endure long hours, low pay and dangerous working environments, but do so because there is no better alternative. In fact, jobs in sweatshops (and Foxconn factories) tend to be massively in demand, because the alternative is worse. It’s not uncommon for a new employee’s first action being to sign up their relatives to the waiting list for new job openings.

It’s easy to recoil from seen evils, while ignoring unseen alternatives that are even worse. No one in the West will ever have to put up with such bad conditions.

If wages and conditions in Apple’s hometown of Cupertino, CA, were as bad, nobody would work there. That people do so in China is because they have no better alternative. China’s economy is growing quickly, but much of it is still grindingly poor, and difficult to do business in. It’s poverty that makes China’s factories such unpleasant places to work in.

[. . .]

It’s no surprise that China is still very poor compared to neighbouring countries like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. Forty years of brutal socialism under Mao’s Communist state halted China’s development, and decimated institutions crucial for wealth creation, like strong civil society and the rule of law.

The exception, of course, is Hong Kong, where conditions and wages are much better than on mainland China — not because of a bigger government, but because of greater wealth caused by freer markets.

December 1, 2011

iPhone may not be quite as badly exposed by rootkit as Android devices

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

Get your tinfoil hats out, boys, your smartphone may be logging your every move:

Blogger and iPhone hacker Chpwn believes that the controversial Carrier IQ software isn’t confined to Android devices.

In this blog post, he says a look at the /usr/bin folder reveals Carrier IQ’s agent software, identified as IQAgent in iOS 3, and either awd_ice2 or awd_ice3 on iOS 4 or iOS 5 devices.

At this point, Chpwn believes the daemon does not have access to the UI layer, which means it may not be able to capture the kind of data exposed in Android devices.

While Chpwn states that he is not certain the software is launched except when the phone is in diagnostic mode, the discovery is certain to add further momentum to the fury mounting at Carrier IQ’s surreptitious installation on consumer devices.

Update: Lifehacker offers the instructions on turning off the Carrier IQ component on your iPhone:

Hacker Chpwn discovered Carrier IQ after this week’s uproar, and while we still aren’t positive what it can track and send, he’s fairly certain it doesn’t include a keylogger like the Android version. So far it can log your phone number, your carrier, your active phone calls, and your location, though it’s unclear as to what it’s actually sending back to Apple. Luckily, there’s an easy way to turn it off. Just head to Settings > General > About > Diagnostics and Usage, and tap “Don’t Send”. That’s it! We’ve also updated our original post on Carrier IQ to include this new information.

Update, the second: Daniel Bader posts that two of the major Canadian mobile operators stated that Carrier IQ is not on the devices they sell:

Rogers has done an investigation and has confirmed that Carrier IQ is not present on any of its devices. On Twitter they stated that “Hi all. I’m happy to confirm that we have investigated and Carrier IQ is NOT on any of our devices”. TELUS also confirmed that they have not installed Carrier IQ on any of their devices. We are waiting to hear back from Bell.

November 2, 2011

Disagreeing with Pete Townshend

Filed under: Economics, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:03

Felix Cohen has an interesting article up at the Guardian‘s “Comment is free” section:

When I was originally sent some quotes from Pete Townshend’s John Peel lecture on Apple — which he refers to as a digital vampire — and music piracy, I was ready to fundamentally disagree with the thrust of his argument, but having taken the time to read it and parse it I’m surprised at how much sense there is. Regrettably, though, he also commits some fairly serious and unforgiveable misunderstandings of Apple and Amazon as companies, the internet and, perhaps least forgivable, the nature of creativity and the auteur as arbiter of what’s acceptable for public consumption.

[. . .]

Because I also believe that the commercial success you and your peers achieved was a brief, Burgess Shale-like period in popular culture, where the dearth of real social recommendation meant that people like John Peel, and now, sadly, Simon Cowell, imposed their tastes on swaths of youth. Peel (Cowell considerably less so) was an amazing, charismatic, much missed man who was able to tap into the zeitgeist and promote acts who wouldn’t have a chance without him. But he had his tastes and dislikes like anyone, and that’s the downfall of auteur theory; you don’t get to see outside of someone else’s perspective.

[. . .]

And, like the creatures in the Burgess Shale, we can look back and say: this brief flowering of bizarre and fantastical cultural expression was only made possible by its environment. This was what popular culture looked like when the only people who could make a real living were the top 0.0001%, while everyone else toiled in garages, college music rooms and village halls, trying everything in their power to break through. And, sadly, it ended up anodyne, populist and, well, The X Factor.

[. . .]

I’m not sorry that the period where you were able to be wined and dined by vast, terrifyingly wasteful record labels because you were paying for all of their A&R failures is over. To return to my prehistoric metaphor, the Cambrian period ended with a mass extinction event, but the period that followed allowed for the establishment of the species we see today. We should hope that creative popular culture follows a similar pattern, and that new artists and musicians will be able to be successful, widely heard, nurtured by crowd-supported services such as PledgeMusic rather than bloated A&R corporations; companies with a more human attitude to what they do and who they are doing it for.

October 18, 2011

The “Long Tail” gets chopped off for App Store customers

Filed under: Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

Matt Asay considers the “Long Tail” argument and finds it doesn’t apply for app developers:

Two years ago The Register‘s Andrew Orlowski, writing for the New Statesman, poked crater-sized holes in the notion that “long tail” economics were good for musicians. In 2011, it’s equally clear that the long tail* is bad business for app developers, brands, and, well, everyone. The internet has not diffused the ability to make money; it has concentrated it.

The reason is clear: the more abundant the content or apps, the greater the value of separating wheat from chaff. We simply don’t have the time or patience to scavenge the long tail of production.

This isn’t a new idea. For me, Orlowski’s review of the music industry was dispositive on the issue, along with Nick Carr’s analysis of web traffic. But it bears repeating because of the continued euphoria around app stores and their supposed ability to share the wealth in a growing mobile economy.

If only.

Some of the blame for this diminished opportunity for small app developers has to go to the app store’s organization (or lack thereof). In the Apple App Store, I found it very hard to find what differentiated many apps from all the (sometimes dozens) of similar apps other than the odd spelling of the name and the even odder choices for the app icons. Early gaming of the review and ranking made it even less useful. I’ve had an iPhone for over three years, but it must be at least a year since I downloaded a new app — partly because my aging iPhone 3G is no longer able to run the current iOS — but mostly because it’s such a pain to find things in the App Store.

October 17, 2011

What’s in a name?

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:22

Jean-Louis Gassée contrasts what was expected and what was delivered:

On 4 October, after months of speculation, Apple finally launched the iPhone 5. The commentariat were ecstatic and approvingly listed the new smartphone’s strongest points: twice the processor speed; seven times the graphics oomph; a new camera with an Apple-designed lens, 8MP and improved image processing; the power of the new iOS 5; iCloud integration and synchronisation with iDevices; a new smart antenna; Siri, the innovative intelligent assistant. And, courageously resisting the temptation of capricious cosmetic changes, the iPhone 5 stayed with Jonathan Ive’s elegant, timeless design.

The preternaturally modest Apple execs cringe at the gushing praise, but what can they do? It’s their cross to bear.

That’s what we expected. Now let’s consider the reality: Same phone, same features, same design, but it’s now called 4S instead of 5. This changes everything. The pundits are indignant: The iPhone 4S is a lame, evolutionary product; the bosses’ presentation (video here) is flat, uninspiring. This dog won’t sell. Apple has lost its mojo.

(Regarding the “flat” presentation, Apple executives knew Steve Jobs was just a few breaths away from his last, but they got on stage and delivered anyway. When news of Jobs’s demise came out the following day, many critics, such as blogger Robert Scobble, had the good grace to apologise to Cook & Co for railing about their subdued performance.)

October 13, 2011

This will probably be a common source of humour for a while

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:01

Posting your conversations with Siri, the new voice assistant feature of the iPhone 4S:

I’ve spent a week with an iPhone 4S loaned to me from Apple, and I got hooked on Siri quickly. Creating Reminders with Siri was the most useful. I found it silly, however, that items you create with Reminders do not show up in the Calendar app. That means if I create reminders and calendar events, I have to open two different apps to see everything I have to do. I’m hoping Apple integrates Reminders into Siri in a future update.

The only other problem with the iPhone 4S is that once you start using the robot assistant, you’ll wish it did a lot more. It is limited, but really good at what it can do so far.

Here are some of my favorite examples from experimenting with Siri:

Me: “I’m drunk.”

Siri: “I found a number of cabs fairly close to you.” (Perfect; it didn’t dial my ex-girlfriend.)

Me: “I have a flat tire.”

Siri: “I found 14 towing services. 12 of them are fairly close to you.”

Me: “Remind me to steal a ream of paper when I arrive at the office.”

Siri: “Here’s your reminder for when you get to work: Steal a ream of paper. Shall I create it?”

Me: “I’m going to kill myself.”

Siri: “I found four mental health agencies. Three of them are fairly close to you.” (This was just a test — don’t be alarmed.)

Just remember, if you’re going to do something silly with Siri, that everything you do can be (will be?) recorded on Apple’s servers. Siri doesn’t work without an internet connection, as most of the processing is done remotely and the response is generated on your iPhone. In case you thought it’d be wickedly funny to pretend to plot something illegal with Siri’s help.

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