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Saturday, May 29, 2010

Apple Chest-beating

Mark WebsterView, New Zealand Herald

Why has Apple been so successful? Many say it's because Apple is 'just' a marketing company. I absolutely refute this. Apple has brought innumerable innovations to market over the last three decades, and even creates the manufacturing processes to make its products as good as Apples insists they have to be. Besides, Apple hardly does any real marketing (think Carlsberg, Nike, even Toyota for marketing campaigns that readily spring to mind).

Another Way To Keep Track Of The Elderly

Eric A. Taub, New York Times

A new home monitoring service designed for the elderly can also keep track of them when away from the home.

iPhone Security Flaw: Using A PIN Won't Help You

Sarah Jacobsson, PC World

Basically, plugging an up-to-date, non jail-broken, PIN-protected iPhone (powered off) into a computer running Ubuntu Lucid Lynx will allow the people to see practically all of the user's data--including music, photos, videos, podcasts, voice recordings, Google safe browsing databases, and game contents. The "hacker" has read/write access to the iPhone, and the hack leaves no trace.

Public Radio Pushing iPhone Donation Requests: OK Or Not?

Jacqui Cheng, Ars Technica

This American Life's solicitation for donations may not have been much more than an annoyance, but it highlights how developers could potentially abuse the notification system to nag users for money.

Copy And Paste Means Copy What I Want And Paste What I Want

Heng-Cheong Leong, MyAppleMenu

I've been very annoyed with the practice of some web sites that changed the agreement between me and my computer on exactly what is been copied and pasted. As John Gruber describes it: "what happens is that when you select text from these web pages, the site uses JavaScript to report what you’ve copied to an analytics server and append an attribution URL to the text."

Like Mr Gruber, the nature of my hobby involves a lot of copying-and-pasting. This means that I have to also make use of my backspace key a lot when linking articles from websites that uses this stupid technique. In fact, I've removed many of these stupid web sites from my RSS reading list. (I still link to articles from these web sites, but only I've discovered them from other people, not from my own RSS reading. And I still hate to link to these web sites.)

Mr Gruber outlined two possible solutions to block the copy-and-paste technique used by these web sites. I'll try them today.

Bugs & Fixes: Solving Flash Problems On A Mac

Ted Landau, Macworld

I Don't Like Wires But I Do Like Ports

Dave Winer, Scripting News

Computers are meant to be more than DisneyLand, they are meant to solve societal problems and help our species evolve. That means we must have freedom. And freedom and control are exact opposites.

Grocery Shopping With The iPad

Jason Kottke

It inverts the usual "wander around the grocery store searching for items" shopping practice; instead you wander about the house looking for what you need.