Apple has not been taken over by xenophobes. The discrimination is one result of trying to enforce flawed and haphazard United States export controls against countries, like Iran, that are under sanctions. Retail employees are left to interpret and implement federal policy, and racial profiling results.
I think Abdi’s conclusion here is reasonable. I live by a precept known in some circles as Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity,” and that’s exactly what this sounds like to me. Replace “stupidity” with “ignorance” if you want to soften the message a bit.
Abdi goes on to explain that this has happened, at least in part, because of “flawed and haphazard United States export controls.” What’s bizarre to me is that these retail store employees would take it upon themselves to try to enforce such regulations, which are clearly beyond their judgment or control. I’m unclear on whether this is just overzealous enforcement on their part, racial profiling or what. What I’m certain it’s not is any sort of corporate policy, spoken or unspoken, that says “if a tanned person speaking what sounds like Farsi comes in, don’t sell them anything.”
Abdi goes on to pontificate that Apple must “enact policies to prevent discrimination,” and this is where he goes off the rails. Apple already does a huge amount to prevent discrimination, and has a much better track record than most other companies its size, I would venture to guess.
I don’t think Apple deserves to be singled out for special scrutiny, or should be held to some higher standard than it already is, notwithstanding the misguided attempts of a a few of its retail store employees to protect national security, or whatever-the-heck they had it in their heads that they were trying to do.
[SkyVu Entertainment founder Ben] Vu explained that cross-promoting other developers’ games via services like Chartboost was his primary method of reaching users, but the rising costs are a big problem.
“This mismatch is insane,” Vu said. “You have to pay attention to this, down to the hour or the minute.”
[Machine Zone CEO Gabe] Leydon cited costs as high as $7 for acquiring users, up from 50 cents a year ago. He sees a number of “billionaries” coming into the market with large brands to sell, with Asian mobile developers close behind. Weber backed up Leydon’s claims, explaining that it’s difficult to find the top-end of user acquisition costs.
The problem is that some companies are turning the “free-to-play” game industry on its head by spending more to acquire customers than they’ll see in a lifetime of ad revenue for that title. While it sounds foolish – and by some measure it is – Leydon sees it as a side effect of those “billionaires” settling in for a long-term war of domination on the iOS App Store, Google Play and Windows Store.
Pixelmator 2.1 Cherry is already fully Retina-ready, including all of the user interface elements as well as the image editing engine itself. And, what can I say—Pixelmator on the new MacBook Pro with Retina display (we’ve got a few of those around the office) looks totally incredible.
The company tweeted from its @BlackBerry account “Fill in the blank: BlackBerry helps me ________.” However, many of the people who responded didn’t find BlackBerry too helpful.
“Realize how thankful I am for my #iPhone,” said one user, in one of the tamest yet worst responses RIM could have received. Not to be outdone, though, another user said the same about Android.
It’s not surprising that nobody at RIM saw this coming.
Apple’s new $1 billion data center — one of the highest-profile new data centers in the world — has put the town of Maiden, North Carolina (population: just over 3,000) on the tech map. But it almost didn’t get built.
Americans’ confidence in television news is at a new low by one percentage point, with 21% of adults expressing a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in it. This marks a decline from 27% last year and from 46% when Gallup started tracking confidence in television news in 1993.
For example, to connect to my corporate servers, I need a specialized VPN client that only runs on Windows. I can’t open a path to my servers unless I have a Windows computer, which means even if I took my iPad, I’d still need a laptop to open a gateway to do company work. A full Windows 8 Surface would be nice to carry and would eliminate needing to carry the laptop.
SNK Playmore has announced the release of Metal Slug 3, an iOS (and Android) conversion of their classic “run and gun” side-scrolling action game which originated on the Neo Geo system. It’s available on the App Store as a universal iPad/iPhone app for $6.99.
The original arcade game is intact in the “Arcade” mode, and additional enhancements have been made too, like a “Mission” mode that lets you select whichever stages you’d like to play.
The game lets you command “Slug” vehicles including Slug Mariners, Drill Slugs, Elephant Slugs and the original Metal Slugs and Slugnoids. A branching map system lets you take a different route to the end of the game.
Metal Slug 3 also features Bluetooth cooperative multiplayer support and worldwide network ranking functions.
HP dropped -12.7 percent, Dell dropped -9.5 percent, Acer -14.1 percent and Toshiba -19.5 percent in the U.S. market for the second quarter of 2012.
Apple was up 4.3 percent.
Note that the numbers include “desk-based PCs and mobile PCs, including mini-notebooks but not media tablets such as the iPad.” So they included everything that would make the PC companies look as good as possible. Imagine if they included the iPad in Apple’s numbers.
Of course this model isn’t new either, we typically just call it a “paywall”. But a paywall in its basic form is ineffectual for what I want, because then it becomes a massive hurdle to gain new readers (since all my content would be hidden out of the public eye) — I don’t want that.
This is a bold move by Ben. It will be very interesting to see how it works out for him.
“We’re taking this issue very seriously,” he said. “I wish we had more to share at this time but I’ll be sure to share what comes down the line from the engineers relating to solutions or any workarounds they can find.”
We’re happy to announce a major update to the Facebook SDK for iOS that makes it easier and faster to develop Facebook-integrated iOS apps. We’ve also introduced a new iOS Dev Center so you can quickly access the tools and resources you need to build great social apps for iOS.
There are lots of changes and goodies in here, including iOS 6 integration.
Then, at last, psychologists came to the music lover’s aid. They declared that he had a full-blown disability in the form of a psychological dependence on Black Sabbath.
Roaming charges may have made sense at one point, Schuster said, but added that “it is not justifiable going forward and the industry will change.”
Schuster said his company has stopped some charges for its customers who roam onto rival’s networks and also applauded European regulations that are forcing the issue.
Let’s hope things follow suit in the US. International roaming fees for Americans traveling abroad are insane.
Microsoft’s biggest consumer success over the past decade has been Xbox. It needs to replicate that success, and the only way it can be assured of doing that, at least in the short term, is to screw its hardware partners.
I couldn’t agree more. For better or worse, Microsoft needs to go for it.
Scoople surveys its users with questions in its iPhone app. The latest questions, about the app approval process, had some interesting results, including almost half that think malware will be a significant issue. I don’t think it will myself.
Apple on Tuesday responded to concerns that it asked to have its products removed from EPEAT, the U.S. government’s list of environmentally friendly products.
“Apple takes a comprehensive approach to measuring our environmental impact and all of our products meet the strictest energy efficiency standards backed by the US government, Energy Star 5.2,” Apple representative Kristin Huguet, told The Loop. “We also lead the industry by reporting each product’s greenhouse gas emissions on our website, and Apple products are superior in other important environmental areas not measured by EPEAT, such as removal of toxic materials.”
It’s important to note that in addition to not measuring toxins and other environmental areas, EPEAT also doesn’t measure smartphones or tablets. Clearly these are two areas that are vitally important for Apple and not covered by EPEAT.
Companies like Dell have 171 products listed on EPEAT, but yet if you look on Dell’s Web site, none of their computers are even Energy Star Compliant.
By its own admission, the EPEAT certifications are old.
“Part of it is expanding EPEAT’s global reach through the multiple certification [process]; as well as moving into new, additional products; as well as updating the EPEAT [certifications], because they’re a little long in the tooth. [Each of those] is a huge project on its own,” Christine Ervin, an EPEAT board member told GreenBiz in March.
The hubbub over Apple pulling out of EPEAT is interesting because the products that were listed as gold products by the environmental organization are the same ones Apple is currently selling.
Apple has done more than any other technology company in recent memory to be environmentally friendly. What’s more, Apple publishes everything that makes up its carbon footprint on its Web site. Again, this is something EPEAT doesn’t measure. Visit carbon click to see all the carbon offsetting companies.
After months of keeping this very exciting project top secret, we are very happy to finally tell you about the new children’s voices for Proloquo2Go. As a first in the industry, AssistiveWare and Acapela Group have developed two authentic British children’s voices: Harry and Rosie.
Up until now, children with communication difficulties could only speak with an adult Text to Speech (TTS) voice or artificially emulated children’s TTS voices that sounded robotic and not genuine.
I met with the CEO of AssistiveWare in San Francisco when I was there in June and saw the app in action. It was truly amazing to see what this company is doing to help people communicate more efficiently using their app and an iPad.
Time to be a meeting rockstar! Meshin Recall’s calendar for Evernote helps you prepare, organize and succeed!
Meshin Recall unifies all your calendars in one place. You can easily create or link Evernote entries (text, audio or photos) with specific meetings, share notes with fellow meeting attendees and use tags to categorize and search your entries.
As people add more stuff to Dropbox, we want to make sure they don’t have to worry about space.Today we’re happy to announce that our upgrades are getting a huge upgrade! Dropbox Pro now comes in flavors of 100 and 200 GB, but at the price of the original 50 and 100 GB plans. For those of you who need even more space, a brand new 500 GB plan is also joining the posse! If you’re already a Dropbox Pro subscriber, just take a seat and enjoy the fireworks — your Dropbox will supersize itself automatically tonight.
So, we’re turning to you. Would scouring ads from Penny Arcade, with everything that entails, be something you’d be willing to reach into your pocket for? The more we considered it, the more we agreed it might just be. Not only would you no longer have to look at advertising when browsing Penny Arcade, but not having ads would create a chain reaction that would lead to a bunch of other interesting stuff.
Interesting idea. The Penny Arcade folks are proposing that people fund the site through Kickstarter for a year. In return, they’ll pull advertising and do “other interesting stuff” with the space. Time will tell if they can successfully do this, but they’re already off to a ripping start.
Research In Motion Ltd. (RIMM), which has lost 95 percent of its market value since 2008, is selling one of its two business jets under a plan to save $1 billion in operating costs, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
Wait a minute. You’re telling me that while thousands of employees lost their jobs, market share tanked and the stock price plummeted, executives kept a corporate jet? Yep, everything is just fine at RIM.
