MetaFilter posts tagged with apple

Stupid new future

Brandon Blatcher — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:08:35 -0800

If people thought Apple's voice assistant Siri was conservative, then Iris, a similar feature for Android (which uses the search engine ChaCha), will blow their mind.

Steve Jobs FBI files

Ad hominem — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:28:00 -0800

Please be advised that the FBI’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) release regarding (STEVEN PAUL JOBS) is now available.

doesn't it feel good to touch

flex — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:22:34 -0800

Slam poet Marshall Soulful Jones performs "Touchscreen".

Anti-employee collusion by SF bay area tech companies

jeffburdges — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 05:31:35 -0800

Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe, Disney, Pixar, Intuit and Lucasfilm are facing a lawsuit for their for their "no poaching" agreements (Bloomberg, TechCrunch). These companies settled an anti-trust case brought by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2010 after the DOJ found “no overarching conspiracy”. The DOJ investigations did expose extensive evidence of pairwise agreements designed to limit employee mobility. Adobe’s SVP for HR wrote “Bruce and Steve Jobs have an agreement that we are not to solicit ANY Apple employees, and vice versa.” Pixar's VP for HR wrote “I just got off the phone with [Apple's] Danielle Lambert, and we agreed that effective now, we’ll follow a Gentleman’s agreement with Apple that is similar to our Lucasfilm agreement.”

The Apple Factory Responds

gilrain — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:19:11 -0800

In a move seemingly inspired by the This American Life episode Mr. Daisy and the Apple Factory (previously), Apple has released a list of its suppliers (PDF) around the world and is voluntarily allowing a third party to audit the working conditions at those factories and make the results available to the public. The third party will be the Fair Labor Association, who also monitor Nike, New Balance, and Adidas.

How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

Blazecock Pileon — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 11:19:35 -0800

“You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.” Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher of the NY Times give an in-depth report on Apple's migration of electronics manufacturing to Asia and its impact on middle class Americans.

Apple gets back into the education market.

empath — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 09:21:59 -0800

Possibly inspired by Al Gore, Apple announces a new iTunes U app, textbooks for iBooks 2.0, and iBooks Author, so you can create your own interactive books.

The Unkindest Cut of All

Artw — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 20:52:40 -0800

Why the video pros are moving away from Apple

Mike Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory

nevercalm — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 02:04:31 -0800

Act One of this week's This American Life finds Mike Daisey, self-described worshipper in the Cult of Mac, visiting Foxconn, where many of their products are manufactured. It's an incredibly well told and heartbreaking story. Act two is the fact check. Foxconn has been experiencing a rash of suicides because of worker conditions. His show restarts a run at New York's Public Theater later this month.

RINOA SUR

jeffburdges — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 15:01:40 -0800

A leaked memo by India's Military Intelligence indicates they eavesdropped on a U.S. government department (USCC) that reports to congress on "the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship [between the U.S. and China]" using "lawful intercept" backdoors provided to the Indian government by Apple, RIM, and Nokia. (previously) An Indian hactivist group Lords of Dharamraja front man Yama Tough said, "As of now we start sharing with all our brothers and followers information from the Indian Military Intelligence servers, so far we have discovered within the Indian Spy Programme source codes of a dozen software companies which have signed agreements with Indian TANCS programme and CBI". Apparently, Yama Tough also claimed they accessed Symantec AV's source code as well, but the group only published some Symantec API documentation. Android isn't explicitly mentioned but conceivably the Indian telecoms implement "lawful intercept" backdoors/spyware themselves, although users could replace the carriers' instillation themselves (previously). And Android has an impressive selection of cryptography tools listed on guardianproject.info, btw.

Steve Jobs and the Joseph Stalin Charm School

daniel_charms — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 06:35:49 -0800

"“Out of the crooked timber of humanity,” Kant wrote, “no straight thing was ever made.” Not even an iPad." "[A]ll the credit you give Steve Jobs for the ecstasy must be equal to the blame for the agony." Gary Sernovitz on Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs (previously), and Mike Daisey's The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. [via]

"Because we don't know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications but useless to bad guys."

jeffburdges — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 04:47:41 -0800

Cory Doctorow's 28C3 talk The Coming War on General Purpose Computation (abstract, transcript) warns that "the coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race." Doctorow treats legislators relatively sympathetically asserting that "information technology confounds [their] heuristics" about whether regulation has unconscionable side effects, comparing regulating computation or networking with regulating the nature of wheels. A few choice quotes : [18m08] "an appliance is not a stripped-down computer, it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box" [19m30] "attempts to make a network that can't be used for copyright infringement always converges with the surveillance measures that we know from repressive governments." .. "In fact, the proponents of SOPA, the Motion Picture Association of America, circulated a memo, citing research that SOPA would probably work, because it uses the same measures as are used in Syria, China, and Uzbekistan, and they argued that these measures are effective in those countries, and so they would work in America, too!" [20m05] "copyright is just not important to pretty much everyone" [22m50] "The grievances that arose from unauthorized copying are trivial, when compared to the calls for action that our new computer-embroidered reality will create." [24m55] "there will be judges in the American South and Mullahs in Iran who will lose their minds over people in their jurisdiction printing out sex toys." [25m29] "Imagine what will happen the day that Monsanto determines that it's really really important to make sure that computers can't execute programs that cause specialized peripherals to output organisms that eat their lunch." [26m28] "as we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits; all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship" I hear Doctorow's book Little Brother contains the unabridged version. Ironically, Belarus criminalized using foreign websites and Spain passed SOPA-like legislation a couple days after his talk. In the same vein, The Un-Internet by Dave Weiner at Scripting News discusses about tech companies trying to take control away from users, taking Apple to task for leading a new "push to control users" through their App Store. "Once [Apple] took the power to decide what software could be distributed on their platform, it was inevitable that speech would be restricted too." Doctorow similarly criticizes the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) which restricts newer PCs to only running signed operating systems, noting that "repressive governments will likely withhold signatures from OSes unless they have covert surveillance operations." ¹ And Thom Holwerda concludes that Richard Stallman Was Right All Along. ¹ LinuxBIOS/Coreboot coauthor Ronald Minnich says "[the UEFI authors] make no secret of the fact that a 'core value' of EFI is the preservation of intellectual property related to chipset programming and internal architecture." (see also lwn.net and linuxfoundation.org)

fuck you mom and dad for not getting me an iPhone fuck you, FML

desjardins — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 18:52:48 -0800

Didn't get that Apple product you wanted for Christmas? Jonathan Mann, with the help of Twitter, composed a song for you: WTF?! I wanted an iPhone! If that doesn't quite rock your world, Mann composes and performs a song a day, so there ought to be something you like.

The original different thinker.

rodgerd — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 02:07:45 -0800

Jack Goldman died this month. Mac? Windows? X11? You may think of visionaries who shaped technology as you know it. You might imagine that they were the original thinkers or visionary businessmen. You're wrong. The guy who laid the foundations started out trying to invent the electric car at Ford, before being hired to Xerox creating the legendary PARC labs that invented computing as we know it; he lived to see his prediction that "...any electric car produced in our lifetime will have to be a hybrid" come true.

Think Different

Artw — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:12:20 -0800

The Real Story Behind Apple's 'Think Different' Campaign

Mr Jobs comes to Lund

mr.marx — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 12:23:08 -0800

In 1985, Apple started the "Apple University Consortium Europe" collaboration program, and one of the first universities to enroll was that of Lund, Sweden. To celebrate the collaboration, Apple CEO Steve Jobs came to Lund - and a 16 minute film of his visit has now been found and been made available by the University of Lund. You can see the clip here (.mov).

The Apple Collection 1986

needled — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 21:02:18 -0800

The Apple Collection from 1986

Battle at Troll Bridge

jeffburdges — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 07:27:36 -0800

Apple has adopted new tactics in its patent war against the handheld industry. Last summer, Apple has transferred patents to the patent troll Digitude Innovations, using a shell company operated by Digitude's primary investor, Altitude Capital Partners. In December, Digitude filed suit with the International Trade Commission alleging patent infringement by almost every mobile manufacturers except Apple. (pdf filing) Digitude has filed suit against all major Android manufacturers, including HTC, LG, Motorola, Samsung, Amazon and Sony, as well as RIM and Nokia, who don't make Android phones. Apple has previously fought their patent cases openly, but they are hardly the first to employ patent trolls against competitors. Microsoft famously backed SCO in patent trolling Linux for the previous decade. A few recent patent war stories : Motorola Mobility won the first round against Apple in their German patent fight, last Friday. Apple recently lost their Australian case against Samsung. Apple settled their previous patent struggle with Nokia this summer, agreeing to license some Nokia amounts.

We need some angry nerds.

jeffburdges — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 14:10:43 -0800

"The PC is dead. Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices [represent] an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other ... This is a little for the better, and much for the worse." - Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law Professor (via battellemedia.com) "…in 2008, Apple announced a software development kit for the iPhone. Third-party developers would be welcome to write software for the phone, in just the way they’d done for years with Windows and Mac OS. With one epic exception: users could install software on a phone only if it was offered through Apple’s iPhone App Store. Developers were to be accredited by Apple, and then each individual app was to be vetted, at first under standards that could be inferred only through what made it through and what didn’t. For example, apps that emulated or even improved on Apple’s own apps weren’t allowed. The original sin behind the Microsoft case was made much worse. The issue wasn’t whether it would be possible to buy an iPhone without Apple’s Safari browser. It was that no other browser would be permitted…" "If we allow ourselves to be lulled into satisfaction with walled gardens, we'll miss out on innovations to which the gardeners object, and we'll set ourselves up for censorship of code and content that was previously impossible. We need some angry nerds."

Pixel art

Horace Rumpole — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:03:02 -0800

Graphic designer Susan Kare was responsible for much of the look of the original Mac operating system. Now, you can take a peek inside the notebook where she sketched out on graph paper the icons for cut and paste. (previously)

The Only JamPad Band?

Hey, Zeus! — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:50:45 -0800

As the encore for their 12th annual moe.down Festival in Mohawk, NY, the band members of the festival's namesake, moe., paid tribute to the recently-deceased Steve Jobs by performing their song Crab Eyes ... entirely on iPads. Four of the iPads were running standard instruments in the GarageBand iOS app to play the guitar, bass, and drums parts. The $2 app Mallets was used to perform the song's vibraphone parts. "We performed the song live and what you hear is a live matrix mix (stereo audience mix blended with a stereo soundboard mix). There are no overdubs, and this is one take, live." For a comparison, check out Crab Eyes performed live on more traditional instruments at the All Good Festival in 2007.

Amazing sixth grader gives TEDx talk

PapaLobo — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 09:31:25 -0800

Sixth grader codes iOS apps, gives TED talks, and - generally - makes me feel like I've been lazy my entire life.

"To elevate the world from mediocrity to greatness"

mek — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 01:19:05 -0800

lululemon athletica, the "yoga-inspired athletic apparel company", has rapidly become a brand fixture in the Pacific Northwest since its founding by Chip Wilson in 1998. Recently, a strange ode to Ayn Rand appeared on their website, and a "Who Is John Galt?" advertising campaign has adorned company packaging this November. Meanwhile, one of their employees has been convicted in the bizarre murder of a co-worker, in which the employees of a neighbouring Apple Store ignored the victim's cries for help.

Sorry, I don't see Eric in your contacts.

sweetkid — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 13:18:55 -0800

Siri meets Furby. (SLYT)

Good Touch, Bad Touch

beisny — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 09:19:54 -0800

What touchscreens lack is something called affordance. It’s a lofty term for an object’s built-in ability to tell you how it works. A doorknob affords turning. The button on a car stereo affords pushing. A touchscreen affords nothing. It relies on software for any affordance, which in turn relies on total immersion for the user.... The days of analog affordance are gone. What we want, apparently, is to surround ourselves with touchscreens of varying size—tiny ones in our pockets, medium-size models for our laps and dashboards, and massive versions for our walls. We want tomorrow’s vintage shops to be lined with identical, blank, anonymous slabs. We want things to be vessels for software, and nothing more. - A Slate piece asks if touchscreens are becoming too ubiquitous