22 posts tagged “apple”
In the Season 4 of 4400 an episode titled Ghost in the Machine has several funny scenes that is well worth watching. The whole episode revolves around a Bill Gates-like character that is running a microsoft-like company that sells the most commonly used OS in the world and that is being attacked by a virus (ie. the Ghost in the Machine). Here's one of the funny scenes where you can see the actor does a good job portraying a Bill Gates-like persona and even blames Steve Jobs as one of the possible causes of his troubles.
If you have the chance to watch this episode I recommend it, especially for geeks this episode is great. =)
I walked up to the Softbank Store in Meguro, Tokyo at around 12 noon to see if there was a line or if they had any demo units there to try out. There were 2 big signs that explained the iPhone 3G sales would start at 12 noon, if you are buying a different phone come back at 3 PM when it's less busy. Then on the front entrance door there was a small sign saying that all iPhone 3G's were already reserved from that store, thus there aren't any available at the Meguro Softbank store.
Photos taken with my Nokia N82 are below:
The first store to start sales in Japan will be the Harajuku Softbank Store, sales starts at 7 AM Tokyo time. At 12 noon other Softbank stores will start iPhone sales. For those that want to be the first in Japan to get an iPhone 3G a line has been growing since Tuesday. I visited the Harajuku Softbank Store tonight (the night before sales start), to see for myself how the line looks. There is an increased number of security guards making sure the people don't block the flow of traffic on the sidewalk, the security guards have placed dividers around the people waiting in line to prevent people from accidentally stepping on the people in line or bumping into them. By my rough estimate there were approximately a little over 100 people waiting in line. I bet Schomer is glad to see this kind of response to the iPhone 3G. If you are wondering, do I plan to get one, the answer is no. I already have an iPod Touch and I prefer the flexibility and openness of the S60 devices that I work on at Nokia rather than the closed structure that Apple offers with the iPhones.
Here are a few photos of the line and 2 videos at the bottom of this post recorded with my Nokia N82.
Chris Pirillo of former TechTV fame and creator of LockerGnome has made the big switch from windoze to Mac. He posts 50 Reasons why he made the move to Mac and states, Once You Go Mac, You Never Go Back.
I found this site called Buy iMovies by clicking on a Google Ad. I was expecting the Google Ad to bring me to an AppleTV site or the iTunes store but instead it brought me to this sort of unofficial looking Buy iMovies site. They advertise the ability to purchase from anywhere in the world downloadable MP4 movies that can be played onthe iPod Video, iPod Touch, and iPhone. From browsing through their library of movies they seem to have a fairly large selection ranging from older classics to new movies. They also have a small selection of TV shows available for purchase. I was wondering is this really a legal site? I would guess no, and them using the name iMovies alone I would expect Apple to have them shutdown pretty soon. I didn't buy anything from them but then again I am curious, if you do purchase the movie from them could you then download the movie? If so is this legal or not? Again my guess is it's not legal.
If you take a look at this site I'd like to know what do you think? Legal or not?
The creator of KHTML, Lars Knoll, has been promoted to VP of engineering at Trolltech.
A little background story about KHTML and Webkit, KHTML was first started as the HTML rendering engine in the Konqueror web browser for KDE's Desktop environment. When Apple started porting KHTML to Mac for use in their Safari Browser the changes that Apple made to KHTML were Open Sourced as Webkit. Shortly after this Nokia was looking to utilize the benefits of Open Source in a browser for the S60 platform. After careful consideration Nokia announced that they would also be using Webkit in it's new S60 Web Browser.
Prior to S60 3rd edition Nokia had developed a proprietary browser for S60, but with the many complexities of web standards and the fast advancements in web technologies it became increasingly difficult to maintain the proprietary browser. At the same time Open Source browsers were thriving on the web with the success of Mozilla's browser suite projects and KDE's browser technologies improving in terms of complying with web standards. Nokia sponsored the Mozilla Minimo project in order to encourage porting and minimizing Mozilla to run on embedded mobile devices. Both Minimo and Webkit were closely looked at for use in the next S60 Browser, the winner of the 2 was Webkit due to it's less demanding usage of RAM and CPU. S60 third edition was the first time for the Webkit based browser to be available on S60 devices, but just in case of any legacy webpages that were not standards compatible the older proprietary S60 browser was also included on all S60 3rd edition devices.
However with S60 3rd edition Feature Pack 1 the Webkit based S60 Browser became the default and only browser on the devices that run S60 Feature Pack 1. Last year Apple introduced the iPhone and iPod Touch that also have a Safari Browser that is based on Webkit. Google has also announced that their Android software will have a Webkit based browser. Along with these big players there have been other ports of Webkit to run on various OS ranging from the GNU/Linux Maemo project to windows mobile.
With the huge success of Webkit I would like to congratulate Lars Knoll, he deserves this promotion to VP of engineering at Trolltech.
On an interesting side note, if the Trolltech acquisition by Nokia is approved by the shareholders then he and I will both be working for the same company. I would be proud to work with such a talented engineer. =)
Two words, Bad idea.
Apple has released the 1.1.3 firmware update for iPhone users for free, but are charging iPod Touch users for the same feature set.
It's a stupid move to charge for a firmware update. I have an iPod Touch but I certainly won't be paying $20 to get E-mail, Google Maps, a Weather widget, Notepad, and a Stocks widget plus the ability to move the icons around and add bookmarks to the home screen (oooh wow a group of old applications rehashed on the Touch, bookmarks, and arranging the icons, oh let me get my credit card .. umm no Not really.) The 5 apps are the exact same apps that iPhone has had since it was released and charging for the ability to move icons around and add Bookmarks to a new place is really not worth any money in my book. For those people that have unlocked the filesystem (ie. jailbreak) their iPod Touch they could already have the same apps installed a couple months ago.
http://rupertgee.wordpress.com/2007/12/03/install-iphone-apps-into-ipod-touch/
Owners of the iPod Touch have already paid for the actual device hardware that Apple has received a profit margin of it, many users buy music from iTunes that Apple also continually gets a percent of. It's as if some marketing and sales managers had a last minute meeting before the Mac World announcement and hastily decided it was a quick and dirty way for Apple to make more money off of the iPod Touch.
Plus this is only for a minor firmware update. (1.1.2 to 1.1.3) I can't help but think that if Apple wants to charge 20 dollars for a minor update what will they charge for a major update?
- Charging for a new application that is Not yet available is understandable (ie. That is how the mobile games market and Enterprise application developers make money.)
- Charging for a service (webhosting, online storage, etc.) or content (Music, videos, etc.) makes sense.
- Paying for a firmware update does not make sense.
Mobile Gazette's 2007 Year in Review. What was the best of 2007? What was the ugliest? Checkout the List to find out.
The OSX 10.5 Leopard guided tour is now available in Japanese.
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