The Apple Blog
Motorola quietly released a series of new Linux-based mobile phones this week. There’s been a lot of noise around Symbian moving to open source and Google’s Linux-based Android mobile platform, but both open-source Symbian and Android are still just press releases and talk.
Motorola’s new ROKR line, …
Filed under: Peripherals
You don’t even need to dig into the machine translated read link to understand that the gaming mouse you see pictured above looks a lot like a Razer, but NZXT’s Avatar is a beast in its own right. Best known for lavish (and stylish) PC cases, the outfit has evidently seen fit to dip its toes into the wide, wide world of gamer-centric input peripherals. Boasting a 2,600DPI sensitivity rating and a rather unadventurous design, the Avatar should fare fine in heated deathmatches or WoW raids, though it’s probably overkill for the Excel maven. Nevertheless, the currently unpriced unit has been previewed quite thoroughly by the folks over at TweakPC, so give the link below a look if you could ever see yourself wanting this in your arsenal.
[Via I4U News]
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Tags: Engadget
It’s almost a truism that while Microsoft struggles to do anything right (in the media’s eyes), Apple can pretty much do no wrong.
This is as true of Apple’s cash position, which BusinessWeek recently noted may soon surpass that of Microsoft’s, as it is of Apple’s product portfolio and business strategy.
It’s the cash that I find particularly surprising. Apple is swimming in cash, more than billion of it. The company adds more than billion in cash to its stockpile each quarter. Today we give Apple a free pass on its iTunes/iPod lock-in, which delivers much of the Apple profits, because we can still happily apply such adjectives as “cool” and “innovative” to Apple.
The U.S. Congress is fixated on taxing the oil and gas companies for their “windfall profits” today, while Apple’s profit margins as a percentage of sales are actually higher than Exxon’s and those of the other bogeymen of Congress.
There was a time that we said similar things about Microsoft and happily bought into the lock-in that we’d eventually come to mistrust and seek to escape. Few are saying this now of Microsoft. And its cash hoard of roughly .7 billion has simultaneously become a cause for envy and concern: what will the convicted monopolist do with that pile of money? Can it possibly be in our interest?
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The International Association of Book Towns (”a small rural town or village in which second-hand and antiquarian bookshops are concentrated”) collects information about delightful bibliophiles’ paradises. I once spent a magical day combing the shops of one of these places and by the end of it I was drunk on binder’s glue, ink, and silverfish.
I.O.B. - International Organisation of Book Towns
(Thanks, Marilyn!)
Tags: Boing Boing
Larry Augustin, a venture capitalist and early open-source entrepreneur, made a really good point via e-mail in reference to my post about VMware violating the GPL. A range of people in the open-source community has been pointing the finger at VMware for allegedly creating derivative works of Linux in its …
I was intrigued to see this post on CIO.com about using SugarCRM as a development platform. (Disclosure: I’m an advisor to SugarCRM.) I know and use Sugar as an application. This was the first I’ve heard of someone using it as a development platform:
While SugarCRM delivers
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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes “In an interesting development in a Texas case against a college-age defendant who was 16 at the time of the infringement, the Judge has denied the RIAA’s summary judgment motion and ordered a trial of the damages — even though the defendant admitted copyright infringement using Kazaa — based on the ‘innocent infringement’ defense, which could reduce the statutory damages to 0 per song file. Relying on BMG v. Gonzalez (PDF), the reasoning of which I have criticized on the ‘innocent infringement’ issue, the RIAA argued that Ms. Harper does not qualify for the ‘innocent infringement’ defense, since CD versions of the songs, sold in stores, have copyright notices on them. In its 15-page decision (PDF) the Harper court rejected that contention, holding that ‘a question remains as to whether Defendant knew the warnings on compact discs were applicable in this KaZaA setting’, since ‘In this case, there were no compact discs with warnings.’ Finding that there was a factual issue as to what the defendant knew or didn’t know at the time of the infringement, the Court ordered a trial of the damages unless the RIAA agrees to accept 0 — rather than the 0-plus it seeks — per infringed song.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Tags: slashdot
A Comcast tech showed up at Consumerist reader’s grandad’s house and totally failed to understand how their cable was set up and billed. So he called them thieves, cursed at them, and disconnected their cable. Naturally.
I come outside to witness my grandpa and the Comcast guy in a screaming match. The Comcast tech is threatening to leave and I ask “What the heck is going on?!” Well, my Grandpa starts telling me that he disconnected his cable and says we do not have a cable account with Comcast and basically accuses my Grandpa of hijacking cable. Okay, last time I checked, most 74 years old probably don’t know how to hijack cable. So my Grandpa gets really upset and starts back for the house. I’m trying to find out from the Comcast tech what is going on and my Grandpa comes back out 2 seconds later with a Comcast bill in his hand. He goes to hand it to the Comcast tech and he rudely replies “Sir, I don’t want to see your fucking bill. If you don’t go back in your house and quit disrespecting me, I’m going to just leave.”
Meanwhile, I ask my Grandpa to try and let me straighten it out and go inside for a minute because I could tell at this point he was getting really upset. So I continue to ask the guy what the hell is going on all the while he is telling me he isn’t going back in the house to hook up my internet because he doesn’t appreciate my Grandpa “disrespecting him”. Well, from what I saw, my Grandpa didn’t really deserve to get his cable turned off and treated in such a way. I finally talk him into hooking up the internet (I needed it for school as my homework is submitted online). But the issue still remains with my Grandpa’s service. So I ask the tech why he thinks we don’t have cable. He replies “When I look up the phone number on the account, it only shows internet, no cable television. That’s a red flag mam.”
Comcast Tech Accuses 74-Year-Old Man Of Stealing Cable Service
(Thanks, Marilyn!)
Tags: Boing Boing
The Guardian probes an interesting dilemma for startups: Should you flip or float (an IPO)?
The truth is that innovation blackmail [Starting an industry-changing company] and selling out is becoming an increasingly attractive option. With the world’s financial outlook so torrid that even the most strapping City magnates are being shrivelled up by paranoia and turned into tiny human prunes, we can’t expect much different.
Nobody gets into the startup business just to be average. You’ve got to have big ambitions: change the world, make a fortune, get famous - or perhaps all three. The scrutiny that young dotcoms are under means very few entrepreneurs are simply hoodlums who think they’ll blackmail their way to a retirement fund. But there are two real exit strategies for a startup founder: to flip or float. Option two is disappearing fast….
The post comes in response to Tom Foremski’s post about disruptive startups selling out to the very companies they should be putting out of business. Foremski’s is a fair critique, but as The Guardian notes, it may be that startups have little choice but to succumb. Entrepreneurs like cash, too.
As for open-source startups, Tim O’Reilly posited a year ago that open-source disruptors would mostly end up feeding the hands that they had been biting: “I will predict that virtually every open-source company (including Red Hat) will eventually be acquired by a big proprietary software company.”
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In my childhood, I had two obsessions: Calvin and Hobbes and Apple. And someone has finally had the foresight to bring them together for Calvin and Jobs, which chronicles the adventures of a boy and his imaginary Apple CEO. It’s quite witty, very much in the tone of the real series. The cartooning isn’t so elegant as (almost certainly disapproving) Bill Watterson, but that’s pretty much a certainty. Still, my favorite remix comic since Garfield Minus Garfield, so well done, PinkFloyd99 of Flickr! Click through the jump for four more adventures of Calvin and Jobs!
Update: This set of cartoons was written by Jacob Lambert and drawn by Gary Hallgren, and is from a two-page spread in the current issue of MAD Magazine. (more…)
