AT&T won’t charge extra to use Apple’s FaceTime over cellular networks as previously reported, but there’s still a catch: Subscribers will need a new Mobile Share plan to use the video chat service on the network.
Let me fix that for you AT&T:
“Our network sucks balls. If we tried to let all of you rabid iPhone users have FaceTime, our network would take a firey crash into Hell. Many of the executives that have been too goddamn cheap to upgrade the network are now scared shitless that they will lose their cushy bonuses. So we decided to fuck our users.”
Halifax has never seen anything like it. Hundreds of people lined up to see Apple launch its latest retail store, screaming and clapping, as excited as you would expect people to be on Christmas morning before opening their gifts.
Before today’s opening, the closest Apple retail location to Halifax was just over 900 kilometers away in Quebec City. Obviously, much too far for people to take a casual drive to pick up a new Mac.
The new location will not just serve Halifax and surrounding area, but it will be a draw for Apple users living in the entire Atlantic region. According to Apple, 75 local jobs were created by opening the store here.
Unfortunately for Apple, there was a little hitch with the opening. An early morning power outage caused much of the city to be in darkness until about 10:00 am. The store was scheduled to open at 9:30 am with the rest of the mall.
However, you have to give the team at the store a lot of credit. They went out into the line of people waiting, talking to them about Apple products, where they came from and other topics of interest to the Apple faithful.
Apple employees also went out and bought cases of bottled water, giving everyone waiting in line a little refreshment. With the power being out, there was also no air conditioning.
None of that bothered the people waiting to get into the store though. As the doors opened and the Apple store staff cheered and clapped, the crowd cheered and clapped right back. A very successful opening.
Motorola Mobility unit said it filed a new patent-infringement case against Apple claiming that features on some Apple devices, including the Siri voice-recognition program, infringe its patents.
The pioneering cloud gaming service OnLive confirmed today that its assets have been sold to a new company. The company will continue to operate its services during the transition and it is backed “by substantial funding,” said a spokeswoman for Steve Perlman, the chief executive of OnLive.“We can now confirm that the assets of OnLive, Inc. have been acquired into a newly formed company and is backed by substantial funding, and which will continue to operate the OnLive Game and Desktop services, as well as support all of OnLive’s apps and devices, as well as game, productivity and enterprise partnerships,” the company said in a statement.
It’s that time of year again, when college students scramble for textbooks, in the hopes they’ll have money left over for food and fun during the school year.No longer does the campus bookstore have the monopoly on book sales. The key is to find the right edition of a textbook at the right price, and that can take some research.Fortunately, a few websites can help with that. Amazon has just hopped on the rental bandwagon, launching its own textbook rental service. Other sites offer books you can both rent and buy.
I was luck that, as a Political Science major, my “textbooks” were often mainstream but my CompSci buddies just got crushed by the cost of textbooks. Check out some of these sites to see if they can help save you some beer money.
Danica McKellar, former Wonder Years star, is on a mission to make young women know they’re just as good at math as their male counterparts.She just released her fourth math book for girls, Girls Get Curves. It’s designed to teach girls math but also confidence so that they don’t shy away from pursuing it in college or their careers beyond. Playing off the geometry focus, the book also tries to teach young women how to have a positive body image in a world that tries to keep them from it. McKellar speaks to BuzzFeed Shift about why women are so underrepresented in mathematics, her own experiences in the field, and more.
Winnie has growed up real good and, after graduating summa cum laude from UCLA with a degree in Mathematics, has made another career for herself as an award winning author and mathematician.
Ladies and gents, we present to you the official Worst Sentence of 2012:“As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.”
I have been a fan of the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for years but be careful – the web site can be a huge time suck!
Do you have $50? Do you trust strangers with it? Do you like paying for evanescent access to a service you may never use? Then IHave50Dollars.com is the site for you. Not everyone has $50 they’re willing to push down a rat-hole in hopes of access to a social media service based on a promise by a man with a proven track record in being compellingly earnest on camera, but if you do, this may be your lucky day.IHave50Dollars is a parody site, obviously (there’s an Easter Egg at the end) but it does offer a fairly poignant criticism of the bandwagon mentality in the Valley.
Born from the lineage of the six-figure Sony Oxford digital console, the Oxford EQ plug-in is a flexible and powerful tool. Let’s take a look at the Sonnox Oxford EQ and explore some of the ways you might use it in your productions.
There are also some audio samples at the bottom of the page.
There’s been a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt generated by Twitter’s latest announcement. I wanted to let everyone know that the world isn’t ending, Tweetbot for Mac is coming out soon, Tweetbot for iOS isn’t going anywhere. So sit down, grab a towel and let’s go over some of these API changes.
Yesterday, I experienced my first layoff as myself and many of the other talented people at Hipstamatic were let go as part of a downsizing. In retrospect it wasn’t that shocking. When you play back things in your mind, the signs become more obvious. It doesn’t make it any less frustrating knowing that yesterday you thought you had job security and today you’re sitting and writing this article in your gym’s cafe area.
The negotiations are reportedly seeing Apple joining forces with its courtroom foes Samsung and HTC, as well as smartphone platform rival Google, in an effort to obtain the patents for a price well below that sought by Kodak.
I don’t understand why Apple wouldn’t just buy them — they have the money. Unless they are worried about having too much control.
Over the three-month period, the company found more than 14,900 new malicious programs targeting the platform. Nearly half of the malicious files were classified as multi-functional Trojans that were programmed to steal data from smartphones and could also download and install programs from remote servers.
Thanks to TextExpander and Smile for sponsoring The Loop this week.
The new TextExpander 4 from Smile dramatically increases the options for automating your work with advanced “fill-in” snippet types. They are great for creating form letter templates that can be personalized on the fly. Check out the video demo and see the new multi-line text fields, multiple choice popups, and optional text blocks in action.
Registered TextExpander users can upgrade for $15. (There’s no charge for the upgrade if you purchased after January 15, 2012.)
Still haven’t tried TextExpander? Download the free demo! There’s even a new Snippet Creation Snippet to get you started.
Apple aims to make it so viewers can watch any show at any time via a cloud-based DVR that would store TV shows online. The service would be designed so viewers could begin streaming a show minutes after it began airing live.
I settled on the Sony Xperia Pro, with the knowledge that if I didn’t like it, I’d only have to wait a few months for the new iPhone.So far the experience has been terrible; I’ll be in line, come September.
“My colleague has a dirty keyboard and has gone to vacation,” writes this Redditor. “I did the only logic[al] thing: I planted cress in his keyboard.”
The included GIF is a bit misleading. You have to go to the full album to see the prankster “cheated” a little bit – he put dirt in the keyboard and watered the garden cress seeds so of course it was going to sprout. Still – you’d like to see the look on the co-worker’s face when he comes back from vacation!
“I mean come on. 75 pages! 75 pages! You want me to do an order on 75 pages, (and) unless you’re smoking crack, you know these witnesses aren’t going to be called when you have less than four hours,” Koh said.“Your honor, I can assure you, I’m not smoking crack,” Lee replied matter-of-factly.
One of the smartest decisions that Apple made over the last decade was to open retail stores worldwide, giving users a chance to get some hands on time with its products. One of the worst decisions came recently when the new vice president of retail John Browett decided to gut the operation. Luckily, he admitted his mistake.
Browett, who took over the post from Steve Jobs’ hand-picked head of retail Ron Johnson earlier this year, apparently thought one of the best run retail operations in the world was “too bloated,” according to a detailed post on ifoAppleStore.com.
“Browett’s decision reportedly came despite strongly-worded advice from Retail segment veterans that reducing personnel ahead of the annual Back-to-School promotion and the September introduction of the iPhone 5 could create a customer service catastrophe,” reads the report. “Browett disagreed with his staff, and said the chain needs to learn to run ‘leaner’ in all areas, even if the customer experience is compromised.”
This has the stench of a man looking to make a name for himself, not someone that’s doing what’s best for Apple or more importantly, its customers. To take one of the most heralded retail experiences in the world and gut it, stripping it of everything that makes an Apple store what it is, just doesn’t make sense.
It seems to me that Browett is trying to make Apple retail just like every other retail store on the planet. A few employees trying to satisfy an ever growing consumer base. That formula doesn’t work. It may save a few dollars in the short term and Browett may look like a hero on paper, but in reality the whole company would suffer the consequences.
With $100 billion or so in the bank, the last thing Browett needs to worry about is cost cutting measures to save a few pennies here and there. After noticing how casinos not on Gamstop maintain a loyal audience by prioritizing convenience and engagement, he realized the real focus should be on delivering an exceptional retail environment. That way, he’ll be better equipped to serve the surge of consumers who will take to the stores in the coming months to buy new Apple products.
I tried to contact Apple’s retail PR team for the last couple of days hoping to get to the bottom of the reports of staff cuts, but so far no reply. [Apple did call me back shortly after this story posted.]
Apple did however give a statement to Dow Jones, admitting its mistake. “Making these changes was a mistake and the changes are being reversed,” said Kristin Huguet, an Apple spokeswoman. “Our employees are our most important asset and the ones who provide the world-class service our customers deserve.”
Let’s hope Apple doesn’t let Browett make any more crazy decisions.
Update: I noted that Apple PR did call me back shortly after the story posted.
Apple Inc.’s retail boss told employees that the company made mistakes with its staffing levels, leading to news reports that the company was cutting employees, according to two people familiar with the matter.Apple acknowledged the retail staffing changes. “Making these changes was a mistake and the changes are being reversed,” said Kristin Huguet, an Apple spokeswoman. “Our employees are our most important asset and the ones who provide the world-class service our customers deserve.”
This comes on the heels of a detailed IFOAppleStore report about various changes Senior VP of Retail John Browett was making to the retail environment to increase the stores’ contribution to company profit.
The Taylor Guitars Road Show is all about guitars, giving you a chance to talk shop with our team from the Taylor factory. Whether you’re new to Taylor, a longtime Taylor owner, or thinking about getting your first guitar, we think you’ll find our Road Show a fun, informative event.
My Taylor is the best acoustic guitar I’ve ever owned, seen or played.
DAW Master Sedric Pieretti shows you, using different DAW’s and plug-ins from different manufacturers. Everything you need to know about compressor plug-ins and how to use them in your productions and songs is right here. Plus, the information you’ll learn can be used on any hardware unit or software plug-in compressor made.
Using a compressor in your mix properly is an art form.
The proposed settlement would require the three settling publishers — HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster — to terminate their existing agency pricing contracts with Apple. Apple says that isn’t fair: “The Government is seeking to impose a remedy on Apple before there has been any finding of an antitrust violation.” This case, the company states, revolves around “an alleged conspiracy to force Amazon to adopt agency.” So a settlement “enjoining collusion or precluding publishers from forcing agency on Amazon would be appropriate,” but Apple is entitled to defend its contracts in court.
It does seem unfair to impose a settlement without giving Apple a chance to defend itself.
Paramount is re-releasing the classic 1981 adventure movie, directed Steven Spielberg, executive produced by George Lucas and starring Harrison Ford, in Imax theaters next month, ahead of a splashy debut on Blu-ray.
An official announcement is expected this week, but some have already noticed the movie on on schedules for Imax theaters. Should be fun for movie mavens looking to see the original Indiana Jones movies on as big a screen as possible.
Apple has begun talks in preparation for a set-top box device that could be used to watch live TV as well as view other content, reports Jessica E. Vascellaro and Shalini Ramachandran at The Wall Street Journal. This would apparently be a new direction that would let Apple get a stronger presence in the living room. It would involve them getting deals with cable providers, which the report says has not happened.
