Sao Paulo, Brazil – Apple’s restrictive control measures and policies will ultimately fail, according to Linus Torvalds.
“Technologies that lock things down tend to lose in the end,” said Torvalds at the keynote of LinuxCon Brazil. (Cult of Mac is reporting from Sao Paulo; come to our Nov. 20 meetup for a chance to win a signed copy of the Brazilian edition of Leander Kahney’s “Inside Steve’s Brain.”)
If the U.S. makes it easier for tourists to enter the country, more of them will come to spend their money – especially on electronic gadgets, Fox News maintains.
They make the case for iPad buyers from Brazil, one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. Despite the evidence that they’ll be soon making iPads and iPhones there, nightmarishly high tariffs still make the U.S. a better place to buy Apple products. (By the way, Cult of Mac will be in Sao Paulo Nov. 20, come say hi and talk about all things Apple in Brazil).
Love this portrait of Apple co-founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs silhouetted in an old-school Apple logo. It brings to mind the early days of the Cupertino company and its humble beginnings.
It’s the handiwork of Laurent Bourrelly who was inspired by Jonathan Mak’s iconic black-and-white image of Jobs that spurred a media storm.
“I thought Woz deserved as much props as Jobs,” he said.
Let’s hope this re-imagined logo ignites less controversy.
Via Flickr
Oi paulistanos! Cult of Mac writer Nicole Martinelli will be in Sao Paulo and looking to talk all things Apple with you, especially the local scene.
Microsoft opened doors on its first retail store in Northern California just a few steps away from an Apple store.
Apple employees at the Westfield Valley Fair mall in Santa Clara must have had a strong sense of déjà vu watching people camp outside waiting for the doors to open on Microsoft’s 4,000-square-foot shop today. The proximity is unlikely to go unnoticed, since the mall is about 7 miles away from Apple’s Cupertino headquarters.
“I feel bad for those guys in Apple,” said Blake Contreras, a 12-year-old from San Jose who stayed overnight so he could be first in line for the grand opening. “Microsoft’s having this big party and the Apple employees just have to sit there and watch.”
Reallymet is a new app that claims to be about making those real-life social contacts important – but perhaps the real utility is showing your boss or your spouse that you really are where you said you’d be.
The free app is billed as a “check-in service” for people suffering from cyber-friend fatigue (“Do you ever get tired of the long list of friends you don’t really know on your social network service?) and seems plagued with the usual gamefication features (you earn points if your friends confirm the check-ins; “It’s the social game of your real everyday life!”).
Election officials in Oregon are giving an “aye” to an iPad scheme that helped disabled voters cast ballots in yesterday’s elections.
Some 89 disabled people were able to have their say in choosing a representative to Congress thanks to Apple’s tablet computer, Politico reports.
One voter was “just so tickled with the iPad he’s committed to coming back in January to mark his ballot,” Secretary of State Kate Brown said.
A high school in Bulgaria is reportedly going to dump Lenin as its namesake for Steve Jobs. And if it does, it probably won’t be the first school named after the Apple co-founder.
If reports are to be believed, a technical secondary school in Bulgaria would topple communist politician Vladimir Ilyich Lenin as its namesake in favor of the symbolic innovation and insight offered by Steve Jobs. (Or a famous scientist. The decision hasn’t been made, yet.)
Microsoft allegedly aborted a deal with a Swedish mobile blogger because he uses an iPhone.
Toni Johansson, at the helm of site winMobile.se, said that responding to an email with the “sent from my iPhone” signature cost him a funding deal from Microsoft. As a result, he’s closing the site.
Pilots use them. Maintenance crews use them. Now you can rent an iPad to boost your entertainment options in flight.
The much-touted iPad entertainment system has finally take off at Jetstar, a subsidiary of Australian airlines Qantas. They will keep the minds of passengers off priority boarding irks and missed upgrades on a Nov. 9 flight from Melbourne to Auckland and will be on board for all flights over two hours.
Remember those days when you didn’t want to go to school? Mondays. Rainy days. Exam time.
What if they’d told you it was “iPad Day?” You’d be up and atom with your lunchbox, pronto.
Teachers at three elementary schools in South Carolina say that thanks to the iPad, keeping kids focused on formerly “boring” subjects isn’t a problem.
Disabled voters in Oregon will nominate their next Representative in Congress with the tap of a finger.
The state is launching the first iPad voting scheme in the U.S. as it goes to the polls tomorrow to replace ex-Representative David Wu, who left amid allegations of sex with a minor.
Election workers will take the iPads to disabled voters who might otherwise have difficulties marking their ballots, the AP wrote.
People peddling pretend iPads in U.S. parking lots have now gone mobile. First spotted in North Texas, a 50-person strong scam ring has branched out to Florida, Georgia and Mississippi.
Take the winning pic on your iPhone with Hipstamatic’s new Nashville HipstaPak and you’ll get to party like a rock photographer.
Walter Isaacson’s warts-n-genius biography of Steve Jobs is a publishing sensation – over 380,000 copies sold in the U.S. alone in the six days since its October 24 launch.
Not surprisingly, pirated versions of the ebook are also a hit.
A cash-strapped county in Ohio hopes to help social workers become more efficient by equipping them with iPads. Instead of the hand-written notes many of them now take during house calls while working with at-risk kids, they can save time by typing on the tablet computer.
Dubbed “Operation iPad,” the $300,000 purchase of 187 Apple devices is considered a major upgrade for the staff at Jobs and Family Services in Hamilton County, Ohio.
Online retailer extraordinaire Amazon wants to become your steady real-world shopping companion.
They’ve launched a free augmented reality app called Flow for your iPhone. It works like this: you see something in a store, point your iPhone at its UPC code and a stream of information comes to you including product information, customer reviews and related products.
Sure, you don’t have to be particularly well-endowed upstairs to swipe an iPad out of a big box store, but the police reports make this guy sound like an Arsène Lupin III 2.0.
Two iPhone apps tied for first place won the top two spots in a national challenge on safety and emergency for young adults.
There were a total of 33 entries in the “Apps Against Abuse Technology Challenge,” but the top two places went to iPhone apps. Both will be available for free download in early 2012.
There are a few red faces over at the Veteran’s Affairs Department headquarters in Washington. The day after they unboxed iPads for a pilot program, one of the tablet computers was already missing.
The iPad had not been issued to an employee and did not have any apps or information loaded on it, according to VA Chief Information Officer Roger Baker.
It sounds as if the thief seized an opportunity: Baker said that if the iPad had been formatted, the $50 million department-developed cyber security app would’ve been able to find it. The data service plan was cancelled as soon as it was discovered missing. Security footage hasn’t yielded any info about the theft that included another 21 computers.
Blog Next Gov reported the iPads will be loaded with an app of patient records as well as other apps. Those records will be downloaded only by doctors in encrypted form.
The hiccup is a small one in a 1,000 iPad-deployment. Baker said that while there are currently only 500 Apple devices (iPads and iPhones) in use at the VA, he expects the number of iPads to mushroom to a thousand and eventually tens of thousands. The VA has plans to roll out 100,000 tablet computers (Android and Apple) and in line with the U.S. CIO’s recently unveiled “Future First” plan to move to cloud computing.
Via Next Gov
A 22-year-old man got a 25-year jail sentence for a ripping off part of a man’s pinkie while stealing an iPad.
The Denver Post reported that Brandon Smith apologized to the victim, Bill Jordan, who did not appear in court for the sentencing hearing “because he fears for his life.”
Snap your Halloween party pics right by taking photobooth-style shots from your iPhone with Hipstamatic’s Incredibooth — offered free over the weekend.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6kZ89OzsPY
The iPhone 4S arrives in Italy today – along with another 22 countries – and the Italians are so into it, they are apparently standing in orderly lines to get it.*
Outside the Roma Est store in the country’s capital, however, Apple employees went on strike.
Last year, a poll by the Consumer Electronics Association found that Apple’s iPad came in second to world peace for Christmas desires.
If you believe another poll from a U.K. app developer, world peace is soo last year. Now all anyone wants is an a ton of money, closely followed by an iPad.
You probably don’t give too much thought to all the parts that make up your shiny new iPhone 4S, but there’s a whole Apple economy built in.
For example: that sharp new 8-megapixel camera that is a key feature of the new device is causing a lot of headaches for a company called OmniVision Technologies Inc. — there are already two law firms looking into what happened when Omnivision realized that it couldn’t supply as promised the camera for the iPhone 4S.