Pete Mortensen - page 31

Just in case you’re wondering if Steve Jobs has changed his mind about offering music on the iTunes Store in any form other than purchased downloads, here’s a reality check, courtesy of Reuters:
Not gonna happen.

“Never say never, but customers don’t seem to be interested
in it,” Jobs told Reuters in an interview after Apple reported
blow-out quarterly results. “The subscription model has failed
so far.”

Are you sure Steve? I mean, mayb…

“People want to own their music,” he said.

Cool. We hear you. I do think Steve is basically right, of course, as I’ll explain after the jump. 

Technorati Tags: itunes, Steve Jobs, steve jobs

Yes, this image of an EDIT: unfortunately misidentified man in a hoodie eating a piece of toast might well be the first image ever uploaded to the Internet from an iPhone. Remember this moment — I’m sure your grandkids will ask you about where you were when you saw the first iPhone picture.

It came from a set of two that got posted to Flickr, got marked private and finally got deleted. The EXIF data is interesting, but could easily be fraudulent — this is editable stuff. Still, I like this story, because it involves toast. A second photo, along with the EXIF data, is posted after the jump.

Technorati Tags: iphone, camera, rumor

Most of you have probably never heard of iLoad, a $300 device designed to rip CDs to iPod without the use of a computer. Granted, it is a high price, but I can see the market need, as many people can’t afford to buy a computer, but at $300, there’s no reason they couldn’t get a computer instead. It’s been pretty niche, but the product’s manufacturer has promoted it fairly aggressively.

As they are wont to do with all things iPod, the venerable iLounge reviewed the little box in a not-so favorable light, and then the fun began. Wingspan, the maker of iLoad, allegedly declared war on iLounge. And that’s when the fun began. Check out this hilarious YouTube video, then head over to iLounge for the full sordid story. It’s well worth your time.

Getting Rid of iLoad and Wingspan: The Full Story | iLounge

Technorati Tags: humor, ipod, iload

The iPhone hype-tornado is blowing at full gale now. Best sign? The rumored problems with it change from day to day. You know how it is: Massively anticipated device is less than two months from shipping, but an anonymous tipster has uncovered a DISASTROUS design flaw! This time, MacScoop reports that it might be doomed by a slippery case! Look out! It might slip out of your hand, which would be a first for a phone!

Overall, our source found the iPhone awesome but he mentioned, as a sole negative point, that the material used on the device’s case makes it feel even more slippery than the iPod and will probably require the purchase of a protective skin or case so as to avoid unintentionally dropping it.

And we all know just how slippery the iPod is! Or something. This is too funny. Apple always ships its products without the rubberized handles or raised edges that Palm and some competitors do, but it seems to work out OK most of the time. My phone is covered in rubber to prevent slipping, but I’m STILL thrown it across the room. Sometimes, it’s about the person, not the product.

That said, MacScoop does report that the battery life of the iPhone is even better than anticipated. And that’s all I care about. If this thing can keep on ticking for hours and hours of talking and mobile web-browsing, it has a right to be the smuggest phone on the block. Sign me up.

iPhone’s true battery-life to surprise us – source | MacScoop
Via Business 2.0

Technorati Tags: iphone, slippery, speculation

I’m somewhat speechless. They call it the GIPod200. I think we’re running out of product categories that aren’t directly compatible with the iPod. GEORGE FOREMAN

Via Sensory Metrics.

Technorati Tags: foreman, ipod, grill

Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when we do but first allegedly manipulate stock option grant dates to make more money for ourselves. Or something. Former Apple CFO Fred Anderson and general counsel Nancy Heinen had civil charges brought against them by securities regulators relating to the back-dating of stock options to Apple leaders, including Steve Jobs, almost six years ago.

As you might expect, the cone of silence has officially been broken. Anderson, who settled with the Securities Exchange Commission today, went straight after his former boss Steve Jobs, as well as Heinen, the board of directors, and probably everyone reading this post, according to the San Jose Mercury News:

As for the responsibility for the backdating of an earlier grant in 2001 that was made to Anderson, Heinen and other members of Apple’s executive team, Roth pointed fingers at Jobs, Heinen and Apple’s board. Jobs and Heinen picked the date for that grant – and the board verified it – after Anderson warned Jobs that moving the grant date might result in an accounting change, Roth said.

Roth’s statement marks the first time that anyone has suggested that Jobs had reason to know the accounting implications related to backdating. Although Apple has acknowledged that Jobs knew that backdating was going on at Apple and that he picked some favorable dates, the company said he didn’t commit fraud, because he didn’t know that there were any legal or accounting implications with the practice.

Anderson “was told by Mr. Jobs that the board had given its prior approval (for the grant) and the Board would verify it. Fred relied on these statements by Mr. Jobs and from them concluded the grant was being properly handled,” Roth said in a statement.

Heinen, of course, blames the Board. This is so sordid. If only Fake Steve Jobs could tell us what’s really going on… Oh, here he is!

He didn’t settle. He flipped. They played him and Nancy Heinen off each other. Made them both an offer. Nancy, being a lawyer, figured she’d be cute and reject the first offer and bump them to something better. Instead, Fred rolled. And now Nancy is going to trial. I just mailed her a pamphlet that shows you how to make a shiv out of a bar of soap.

All this stuff about how the Jobsmeister is off the hook? Fuggedaboutit. Fred is the Big Pussy Bonpensiero of the Apple crime family. He’s betrayed us. Note to Fred: I’d stay away from boats if I were you.

Zing!

Technorati Tags: back-dating, fake steve, fred anderson, steve jobs, Steve Jobs

Hey there, college seniors! Looking for a great first job in beautiful Austin, Texas? Know a lot about phones and iPods? Apple is looking for you! Yes, the signs are out that the iPhone is really almost here: Apple is hiring iPhone tech support representatives, and you could get in on the ground floor. It looks like a typical tech support job for Apple, but I found this quite funny:

Preferred Qualifications:

“¢ Experience with Microsoft applications such as Office or Outlook
“¢ Ability to navigate in the Windows environment –œ such as getting basic system information, explorer navigation
“¢ Basic understanding of hardware configurations –œ such as USB vs. Firewire
“¢ Knowledge of Device manager –œ( Knowing when something is connected/mounted)
“¢ Knowledge of program files and system files in Windows
“¢ Experience with troubleshooting external devices in Windows
“¢ Understanding specific media file types used by iTunes/iPod/iPhone –œ AAC, Mp3, Wav, mpeg4
“¢ Basic installation and removal of application in Windows.
“¢ Experience with iTunes in Windows
“¢ Must act independently and be self-motivated
“¢ Excellent interpersonal skills
“¢ Must act independently and be self-motivated
“¢ Ability to work in dynamic situations

Now, one interpretation of the bolded line items is that Apple recognizes that many, if not most of its iPhone customers will be Windows users, not Mac people. I prefer to believe that Apple understands that Windows users won’t be able to figure out how to troubleshoot their own problems. The Mac folks will be fine. Please note, by the way: It’s doubly important to act independently and be self-motivated for this job!

AfterCollege – Entry Level Jobs & Internships
Via Digg.

Technorati Tags: apple, Jobs, Steve Jobs

The international spin-offs of Apple’s Get a Mac ad campaign are quite wonderful. The newest UK spot, “Posse,” is an all-new spot created specifically for the UK market — the others have copied U.S. ads. I’m really quite partial to it, if only because I adore Mitchell and Webb. I love the real shame on the faces of the MS Office folks as they refuse to come home. It’s awkward, just like “Peep Show” was. Click through the jump to watch the YouTube version.

Technorati Tags: get a mac, mitchell, posse, webb

Pete Doherty, the shambolic baby of a lead singer for the Babyshambles, is a Mac user. According to GeekSugar, Doherty, boy-toy of Kate Moss, chased paparazzi away by focusing the iSight on his MacBook on them and recording their activity on video. Kind of takes those fun surveillance-cam videos and photos from MacBooks to the next level, doesn’t it? Now they’re active security systems, not stealth ones. Wherever shall we go next?

Thanks, Angelica!

Technorati Tags: apple, isight, macbook, pete doherty

No, it’s not April Fool’s Day. A company calling itself IP Innovation, LLC, is suing Apple for allegedly infringing mid-1970s user interface technology that was patented filed on behalf of Xerox PARC in, ahem…1991. Ars Technica has a pretty comprehensive run-down of the situation. This is the best bit:

Xerox did get around to suing Apple eventually in 1989, prompting Steve Jobs to dismiss the company as an organization so dysfunctional that they “couldn’t even sue anyone on time.”

IP Innovation has filed at least 32 patent-related lawsuits over the last few years. I love the guts behind the name, don’t you? “We let others innovate, then we buy the patents so we can sue even more successful companies!” I understand that they’re soon going to go after GE for infringing on Prometheus’s patent on light. In all seriousness, I’m a tremendous admirer of the innovators at Xerox PARC. Unfortunately, I really doubt any of them wills ee a dime if this frivolous lawsuit strikes gold.

Apple sued over vague user interface patent [Ars Technica]

Technorati Tags: apple, parc, gui

I’ve got good news and bad. The good news is that Panic software, the makers of such venerated Mac-only shareware apps as Transmit, Unison and the much-mourned Audion, will soon release a new, extremely powerful web-development program, Coda. The bad news is that I shouldn’t already know this: MacApper ran a review a day before the official announcement and even posted screenshots. The cat’s out of the bag now, so the review stays, but Panic had the screenshots taken down shortly after the offending blurb popped up. It’ll all be public in a few hours anyway. The app sounds sweet, by the way:

Which brings me to the built in editor. For me this is really the deal maker. One of the problems I have had switching to a Mac is the editors on OS X. They aren’t bad, but they aren’t great either. Having said that, I think the guys at Panic are off to a really great start with their own editor. All of the usual languages are supported and styled appropriately including: CSS, HTML, Javascript, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, SQL, XML, and straight text.

Dig it.
Via digg.

Technorati Tags: coda, macapper, panic

If you’re not too busy detailing ways to make Firefox better, you might want to contemplate a more radical shift. Shiira, the Webkit-based alt-browser put together by a team in Japan, has just made it to version 2.0, and it’s beautiful. I haven’t gotten to use it yet, so I can’t report on its performance, but the interface might just be the best on OS X. Yes, even nicer than OmniWeb. It’s free and open-source. Remember: Together, Everyone Achieves More. Go Joe!
Shiira Project

Technorati Tags: shiira, webkit

Oh, Apple. You and your unannounced Leopard features have gone too far this time!
Baby Trapped in Apple Mac: Optical Illusions
Via Digg.

Technorati Tags: ad, apple, baby

I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t let you do that. AppleInsider has reams of photos taken at the National Association of Broadcasters conference last week in Las Vegas. Apple was out in full force: 3/4 Petabytes of storage space, 3 miles of fiber optic cable, 4 M2 Gb networks, 90 Xserves and 40 Xserve RAIDs.

Sadly, that config is not available for purchase from the Apple Store at this time. Check it out.

Technorati Tags: apple, nab, geekhead, xserve

Apple’s insistence on secrecy has many unintended consequences: Mac fans are hard to please, rumor sites do their best to steal information about unannounced products, and, most interestingly, it gets easy to forget that Apple is a company made up of real people with feelings and lives. That’s why this spectacular farewell to Cupertino written by Buzz Andersen, formerly the author of shareware app Podworks and for four years an Apple software engineer, hits me square in the left ventricle. There is love and life in Cupertino, folks:

Like the Macintosh team of old, I started out at Apple as a young engineer willing to subordinate my life (for a time) to something I was passionate about. When I left my first position at Apple (in OS X Integration) for a real engineering job in Pro Apps, I was eager to make the features I was assigned the best they could be, even if it meant putting in difficult hours to get them done on schedule. So I put in the hours. I worked evenings and weekends. I worked while I was ill. Even when I ended up laid up at home in the throes of what turned out to be mononucleosis (a condition, for those who haven’t had the pleasure, that lends itself more to constant unconsciousness than constant concentration), I sat in bed fixing bugs. And little by little, I burnt myself out.

<sniff>No, no, go on, Buzz. I’m not crying. It’s just something in my eye, that’s all.</sniff> That just killed me. Maybe I’ll see you on the other side, man. When the fighting’s through.
Apple: A Romance – Buzz Andersen
Via Digg.

Technorati Tags: apple, buzz andersen

Firefox makes me crazy. So much about it is great: Cross-platform functionality, a dedicated community of developers, a massively extensible plug-in system, it’s nice. But it’s also slow, buggy and burdened with a non-standard Mac OS X interface.

Friday, Developer Colin Barrett put out a call to know what Mac users would fix on Firefox if they had the chance. The conversation’s been good, but make sure to make your voice heard! I’ll add my own pet peeve: Drop the XUL garbage and build a real Mac interface. Oh, and learn how to constrain functionality so that you don’t get memory leaks every few hours. Oops, hang on. Am I just describing Camino?
Firefox on the Mac
Image via Kstruct
Via Digg.

Technorati Tags: firefox

Ladies and gentleman, I think we’ve reached a new peak for an iPod case that hides your digital media device as something much less desirable. Meet the Gama-Go Pack-O-Smokes Mp3 case, perfect for use in rough neighborhoods where it’s more important to look like a crazy person listening to your cigarettes than like a rich kid with an iPod.

Gama-Go iPod case [BoingBoing]

Technorati Tags: game-go, ipod

Signs you’ve ready made it, No. 2,789,879 of a 3 million-part series: McDonald’s teams up with “American Idol” and makes a toy based on you. Yes, iPod, you’re on top. Starting tomorrow, little kids across the land (and probably a few Mac geeks) will dig into Happy Meals filled with “American Idol” toys, including a fake mp3 player that looks, shockingly, exactly like an iPod with the Idol logo on it.

It can’t be loaded with music, but it seems to have at least contain a tiny amount of music. Anyway, it beats a Dell Digital Jukebox.

Via BuzzSugar.

Technorati Tags: apple, ipod, American Idol

You might recall that we raised something of a ruckus in these parts about the BBC’s plans to open up its full archive online — and not let Macs in on the game. There was a petition and hand-wringing, and, yes, even overt weeping. But it paid off. Yesterday, the BBC announced its iPlayer will be re-engineered to work with Macs. This was all reported by…the BBC.

The BBC’s plans for the iPlayer were put on hold earlier this year after its regulators, the BBC Trust, asked the corporation to look at whether the iPlayer should be platform agnostic.

Mr Highfield said Apple’s “proprietary and closed framework for digital rights management gives us headaches,” but, “it is one of our top priorities to re-engineer our proposed BBC iPlayer service to work on Macs”.

Unfortunately, you still need to live in the UK to use the service. And the Windows version will still be first. But you win some, you lose some.
(Image comes from the BBC’s glorious “Look Around You” series. This was from the Your Vision of 2000 segment. This gem is the iTrak: “I believe that in the year 2000 people will want to carry their music collection everywhere they go, and the i-Trak is the answer. An 8 Track cassette player that runs off a large square blue 9V torch battery (enough for 30 minutes of continuous playback) with leather carry strap, making this unit truly portable.” Bless.)
BBC NEWS | Technology | BBC to open up archive for trial
Via TUAW

Technorati Tags: bbc, iplayer

I have a pretty big music collection — I can’t come close to fitting even all of my favorite tracks onto my creaky 15GB iPod — but I have nothing on New York Sun staffer Will Friedland, who allegedly has the largest iTunes library in the world: 172,150 tracks, taking up 849 gigs and 809.2 days of music. Glenn Wolsey has a fun interview with Will. Obsession is a beautiful thing, sometimes.
Glenn Wolsey : Blog Archive : Interview: Will Friedwald, Owner Of The Worlds Largest iTunes Collection:

Technorati Tags: itunes, world record

It takes a lot to surprise me in the iPod accessory market these days. The new DLO Jam Jacket managed it. Amid a sea of seriously generic cases, the company came up with a good way to manage the headphone cord of standard iPod headsets. And it’s not ugly! That alone puts it ahead of 70 percent of iPod cases.
On the downside it, appears to only work with 30GB models, not the full 80. But it’s only $20, so it would be hard to go wrong at the price, anyway.
DLO | Jam Jacket with Cord Management
Via iLounge

Technorati Tags: accessories, ipod

Yep, you knew it was going to happen. News about Monday’s Virginia Tech shooting has officially leaked into every other domain. How do I know? Well, the blogger at Habla Mierda has begun speculation that killer Cho Seung-Hui… might be a Mac user:

I was reading the article and found this line pretty interesting.

Among the materials are 23 QuickTime video files showing Cho talking directly to the camera, Capus said. He does not name anyone specifically, but he talks at length about religion and his hatred of the wealthy.

Quicktime Video? Talking directly to camera?

Let’s check Apple’s site real quick.

<snip>
<sigh>
I don’t even know what to make of this. The guy over at Mierda is pretty juvenile about all this — he wouldn’t throw ethnic terms around casually otherwise — but I don’t think he’s suggesting Mac use as playing a role in Cho’s attack. Give it a rest, everyone. Sometimes, people just do horrible things, and we can’t blame an external forces. A few dozen people are dead right now not because of gun control (or lack of it), video games, terrorism, video games, illegal immigration, conservatism or liberalism. They lost their lives because one very mentally ill individual chose to do something incredibly destructive.
Habla Mierda. VT Killer probably a Mac User

Via Digg.

Technorati Tags: cho

Activists have been working for a few years now to try to convince Mac fans that we should be extremely upset about Apple’s environmental record. Most people, however, haven’t been that bothered. The cause actually has real proof now, however, as Apple has been ordered to pay a $43,200 fine to the Sacramento Metropolitan Air Quality Management District for a violation a year ago, reported the Sacramento Business Journal.
The fine is a pittance, obviously, and I don’t think this is the kind of issue Greenpeace had in mind when they set up Green My Apple (the source of our delightful image)…

The violation occurred over several days as Apple operated its emergency standby generator for a purpose other than maintenance or emergency power. Apple was notified that it violated its permit requirements April 21, 2006.

I imagine they want Apple to stop using toxic metals in its products or something, right? Yeah, this doesn’t even make a dent.

Technorati Tags: apple, environment

Apple is better at presenting its product launches than anyone else. Which is why it’s so funny when things go slightly wrong. Eastern Illinois University student Laura K Fennema uploaded this quick snapshot from the National Association of Broadcasters conference, where Apple’s Final Cut Studio 2 banner began to melt and come off in strips.

Hilarious. And, wouldn’t you know it, Apple’s video rivals Avid are the ones who helped get the clip posted. I doubt it will do anything about the charge of Final Cut Server, though…

Via Digg.

The worst thing about using a PC at work is that I don’t get to enjoy Vienna, my favorite RSS reader, to keep up with all of my feeds. I miss the interface and I miss the note-perfect feel of a great Mac application. Well, Hicks Design has an answer: gReader, a beautiful skin for Google Reader, the search giant’s RSS tool. It takes Google’s highly adequate, inoffensive cross-platform interface and swaps it out for the latest version of Aqua, right down to the transparent overlays.
And, hell, I’m actually looking forward to going to work tomorrow!
Via Digg.

Technorati Tags: google, rss, software