Time is allowing readers to vote on the year’s list of the top 100 most influential people — and Steve Jobs is rising fast. I confidently predict that Jobs will shortly be #1. (At 6.54am pacific time, Jobs is #5 and comedian Stephen Colbert is #1).
Apple’s ex-CFO has cut a deal with the SEC in Apple’s backdated options scandal, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing anonymous sources. Anderson will pay a fine of $150,000 and repay about $3.5 million worth of options. The deal does not include an admission of wrongdoing, the WSJ says.
The SEC reportedly intends to pursue civil charges against Nancy Heinen, Apple’s ex-general counsel, who will contest the case, according to the WSJ.
The AP reports:
Cris Arguedas, a lawyer for former Apple counsel Nancy Heinen, said Monday that the Securities and Exchange Commission has informed attorneys in the case that it plans to file a lawsuit against Heinen alleging fraud in connection with two options grants. One involved a grant to Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs on Oct. 19, 2001, for 7.5 million shares and another involved a grant made to top executives, including Heinen herself, on Jan. 17, 2001.
“We do expect them to file against our client and we will be defending those charges because they are a misunderstanding of the activities of Apple,” Arguedas said.
More from our Greek friend Anthony (see below). Not only is Anthony’s house in Athens filled with Macs, his wife Christine made him some Mac knitwear to wow Athens with.
Above is his handmade waistcoat featuring the famous Apple logo. Below is Anthony’s Mac sweater with the Happy Mac on the front and Sad Mac at back.
Link to Anthony’s cult of mac Flickr set documenting more of his Apple obsession.
Anthony Sigalas, a Mac nut par excellence from Athens, Greece, has filled his home with Macs. The pictures below, lifted from his Flickr set “My Mac Home,” shows that every corner of every room has a Mac.
Here’s the workspace with His and Hers MacBooks, plus a Mac Mini under the telly.
Here’s the view from the bed: a 20” iMac. Anthony writes: “It’s the mac that wakes us (via Aurora and iTunes) and put us to sleep (via Sofa Control, VLC and our favorite TV Shows and old Greek Movies). Furthermore its huge internal hard drive houses our music library (iTunes), our photo library (iPhoto) and a large collection of movie files. All in all a worthy media extender for the bedroom.”
Check out the cool Greek interface:
And then there’s a 12” iBook G4 in the “office room” that acts as a backup server, a wireless print server and a fax.
Alexander Amosu, a London entrepreneur known as “King of the Ring” for making a bundle on urban ringtones, has introduced a line of gold-plated iPods. The 24 carat iPods cost $600 for a 30-Gbyte version and $800 for the 80-Gbyte model.
According to Amosu’s site, the ringtone millionaire is branching into gold- and diamond-encrusted phones and iPods for “the rich, famous and sophisticated.”
He wanted to be the first person to have a dedicated website for high end customised mobiles phones with gold, white gold and various colours of diamonds.
His words are “to have an exclusive phone that cost more than anyone else is like having a Bentley rather than Ford, the type of phone you have speaks allot (sic) about your lifestyle and ambition. That’s why celebrities, footballers, actors and millionaires get their phone from me”
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.
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
Oh, Apple. You and your unannounced Leopard features have gone too far this time!
Baby Trapped in Apple Mac: Optical Illusions
Via Digg.
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.
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]
A giant, five-story Apple retailer just opened opposite the biggest, swankiest plaza in Milan and look what they have displayed in the window — my crummy books!
The Apple stores here in the states won’t carry the books because they only sell “how-to” titles. We were told the decision went “right to the top.” We suspect you-know-who doesn’t like the jokey “Cult of…” titles. Clearly not a problem across the pond.
Gary Allen at IFOAppleStore reports:
The grand opening of the five-story Mondadori Multicenter in central Milan (Italy) was important enough for Apple’s CEO of Italy operations to attend, perhaps because the store includes a large Apple sales area. Enzo Biagini viewed the 1,200 square-foot space on the second level that includes displays of laptops, iMacs, MacPros and Cinema displays, as detailed in a story and photos on the setteB.IT Web site. The interior design includes white-painted walls and wood display furniture similar to U.S. Apple stores.
Check out the Genius Bar — now serving coffee and fine food!
(Ignore the HP kit in the pic below. Apparently the store sells all kinds of junk.)
Pictures by SetteB.it.
Sometimes, users of high-end, professional software despair when Apple buys the company that makes it. Stu Maschwitz, one of the founders of <a href=”https://www.theorphanage.com/”>The Orphanage</a>, a San Francisco FX studio responsible for Sin City, The Host, and a bunch of others, explains:
When you buy expensive software from small companies, you effectively become best friends with the development team. You know them by first names and you send them holiday cards. You have a folder full of emails from and to them. Apple, however, mistakenly applies the same strategy of black-box secrecy that works so well for iPods and iPhones to its Pro Apps division as well, cutting off developers from users and vise versa. I have struggled with this enough that my company, The Orphanage, no longer has any special relationship with Apple. It’s just too much of a one-way street. I can’t buy my bread-and-butter tools from someone who can’t conduct an open conversation with me (under NDA of course) about the future of the product.
Maschwitz’s post is about the new Color tool in Final Cut Pro, and though he has misgivings about what used to be a separate app from a small, friendly company going behind the Apple firewall, all in all he’s delighted with the outcome.
I hate to admit this, but my kids hate Macs.
Despite forcing them to dress as iPods at Macworld* the little chickens aren’t in love with beautiful Apple hardware.
Even though the house is filled with wonderful Macs, the kids prefer an old ThinkPad we have kicking around for playing Club Penguin and other online games .
Why, I hear you ask?
“It is much faster,” says son number one, Milo, seen here giving his Mac user salute.
They couldn’t give a hoot about the elegant interface or the better quality of QuickTime video. All they care about is the responsiveness of the Flash games they’re addicted to.
Worse thing is they have a point. As my esteemed colleague Paul Boutin pointed out many years ago, Windows machines are much faster on the Web than Macs.
*Actually my wife’s idea. I was mortified.
I found this striking picture of a Mursi tribeswoman at iLounge’s “iPods Around the World” gallery, but there’s very little information about it.
The caption simply says: Female member of Mursi tribe in Southern Ethiopia. Unfortunately, there’s no other information, but a quick Google search reveals:
We’d been hearing for days about the Mursi tribe–the one where women split their lower lip and insert a round metal plate. As we were repeatedly told, the Mursi are neither fun nor friendly. And while they’ve kept their distance from the outside world–largely in part because their territory is a vast expanse of remote national park–they nevertheless have turned their small contact with foreigners into an art form of extortion. Pictures equal money. No exceptions. (from Gabriel Openshaw).
Hacking stories bore me to tears, but the cleverly named “pwn-2-own” hacking competition (Hack a honeypot MacBook, get it as the prize) is getting such attention, it’s worth pointing to some of the better reporting on the subject:
Dan Goodin at The Register:
A New York-based security researcher spent less than 12 hours to identify and exploit a zero-day vulnerability in Apple’s Safari browser that allowed him to remotely gain full user rights to the hacked machine. The feat came during the second and final day of the CanSecWest “pwn-2-own” contest in which participants are able to walk away with a fully-patched MacBook Pro if they are first able to hack it.
…Dai Zovi, who is not attending the conference, was recruited on Thursday night by Shane Macaulay, a friend and conference attendee. The ease Dai Zovi found in pwning the machine was all the more remarkable, given an update Apple pushed out yesterday patching 25 Mac security holes. Macaulay described Dai Zovi’s vulnerability as a client-side javascript error that executed arbitrary code when Safari visited a booby-trapped website.
Turn off Java; to be safe, until Dino lets us say more, turn off everything else too. Or live dangerously like me.
… huge numbers of pundits and anonymous nerds on the Internet will decry Apple’s lack of security and how unfair it is that Microsoft, which expands so much effort on security, is perceived as having a less secure OS. Meanwhile, Mac users will rationalize the situation, including me.
Silicon Valley’s hometown paper, the San Jose Mercury News, says Steve Jobs is unlikely to face criminal or civil charges in Apple’s options backdating scandal.
A close review of the events that led to the controversial grant reveals that the backdating emerged from a good-faith, although clumsy, attempt by Apple’s board of directors to reward its star chief executive for resurrecting a moribund company.
The Merc’s story details a series of stock grants given to Jobs by Apple’s board between 1999 and 2003. The grants were often generous (and one was a record breaker) but because of fluctuations in Apple’s stock price, Jobs’ grants were often underwater. Several times, Jobs gave the underwater grants back, and the board gave him new ones.
However, according to the Merc, Jobs sometimes spent weeks negotiating the price of these new options, which affected their value. Jobs held out for the lowest price, and sometimes the board backdated the options to keep their price low.
The upshot is that neither Jobs nor the board were very good at picking the right number of options at the right price. If Jobs had simply kept all his grants, instead of constantly swapping them for new ones, they would be worth considerably more:
… Last year, Jobs handed back to Apple 4.6 million of his restricted shares – worth $295 million – to pay the taxes on them. His remaining restricted shares are now worth about $494 million.
But given the rise in Apple’s stock over the past four years, even that turned out to be a bad deal for the iconic CEO. Had he held on to all of his options, they would be worth about $4 billion right now, even if the 2001 grant had been given the December date.
An iBone from Flickr user laughtonb.
Instructables: Build a periscope for your MacBook’s built-in iSight camera for filming lectures or talks.
Check out this bizarre video of a elderly woman in Moscow surfing the net on a brand new MacBook. It appears that the guys who shot the video were so surprised to see her, they tried to sneak a peek at her screen — but she shooed them off. Anyone speak Russian?
UPDATE: Olegs Straume writes:
Realy nice video
The guy wasn’t so nice to her – at first The guy in a black jacket says her “don’t worry i’ll just take a picture” than the man who is filming this scene says to his friend – “I think shee is watching some Porno” – “i’ll go and check” – when he got closer to her she answered “What? – Is it Interesting” ( Russians say that – when they are not so happy) – so the guy anwsered laughing “Sorry” on the way back he says “She was surfing”¦ (some kind of) “WISE SURFACE” (or something like that i didn’t hear well – thats it
Sorry about my bad English literacy
Reuters | Apple seen having upper hand in music negotiations:
NEW YORK, April 20 (Reuters) – When Apple sits for contract negotiations with the major record companies over the next month, it will probably seek further concessions from them on selling music without copy-protection software.
AppleInsider | Target stores to pick up Apple TV:
Big-box retailer Target is poised to become just the second third-party retailer to market Apple Inc.’s new Apple TV device at its brick-and-mortar retail stores, AppleInsider has learned.
Fortune | Inside China’s PC frenzy:
While MP3 players are everywhere, and imitations of an Apple iPod Nano go for about $50 (a two gigabyte model with a larger screen than Apple (Charts, Fortune 500) offers), if you want the genuine article you’ll get fleeced. For an 80 gigabyte black iPod like one Amazon sells for $330, one salesman quotes me a price of about $700. As for PCs, Apple’s presence here is minimal.
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
Gartner pegs Apple’s current U.S. market share at 5 percent — a whopping 30 percent increase of the 4 percent figure estimated for the first quarter of 2006. According to the research firm, this makes Apple’s market share the fastest growing among PC vendors in the U.S, with Toshiba following closely at 26.8 percent growth. Dell, meanwhile, saw a 15.5 percent decrease in market share, though it retained its spot as top PC vendor in the U.S.
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