Apple was ordered by the U.S. District Court in Eastern Texas early this month to pay damages to Personal Audio. Within weeks, the non-practicing entity had filed a second suit seeking damages for alleged infringement of Apple’s iPhones and iPads, which had not been included in the original suit.
Trying to double-dip against Apple. Thankfully, the judge stopped it.
When OS X Lion was released earlier this month, some users were inadvertently charged multiple times for the purchase. (more…)
In an attempt to promote his new venture, this PR stunt is being done in the hope of distancing his name from the brand that helped make the T-Pain effect so famous. He is asking for $1 million in damages and also for them to stop using his name and image in any marketing. I suppose a simple email wouldn’t sufficed for T-Pain?
I was hoping he would stop making music, but apparently he’s just going with another company called Izotope.
“When students at the new Lake Minneola High School in Lake County return to classes in a few weeks, they’ll have access to more than half a million dollars worth of new iPads that they’ll use at school and at home.“Lake Minneola will be is the first public school in Central Florida to buy the devices for every student as part of a state pilot program to save on textbooks and offer a new dimension in learning for students.”
In the current economic climate, forward-thinking schools looking to employ technology effectively for their students are faced with a dilemma: how to get the most bang for a dwindling amount of bucks? The iPad certainly helps – as long as curriculums, faculty training and IT policies are tailored accordingly.
NPR:
Patents are a big deal in the software industry right now. Lawsuits are proliferating. Big technology companies are spending billions of dollars to buy up huge patent portfolios in order to defend themselves. Computer programmers say patents are hindering innovation.
Personally, I think companies and individuals should be able to protect their products and ideas. However, the balance seems to be off kilter these days.
The actual patent in question, 5,636,276, is for a “Device for the distribution of music information in digital form.” Sound broad? Of course, as the patent attorneys in the audience will tell you, it’s not the title of the patent that matters, but the claims. So go read through the claims and try not to gag. What’s described is the very generic idea of streaming music.
I’m surprised Spotify was able to last two weeks in the U.S. without being sued.
“As you might expect, the slower processor on the base 11-inch model provided more room for overall performance gains than the slightly faster 13-inch model. So here’s what happens when you spend $150 to upgrade the 11-inch MacBook Air to the Core i7 processor: Our Cinebench CPU and file compression tests ran 21 percent faster, our iTunes encode went 19 percent faster, and our HandBrake test went 14 percent faster.”
Choosing a Configure-to-Order (CTO) upgrade with the Core i7 processor certain offers you a measurable improvement in overall performance, but there’s a significant cost increase too. Take a close look at Macworld’s benchmarks to find out if it’s worth it.
Softpress has released an update to its Web design software Freeway. Version 5.6, a free update for version 5.5 users, is ready for download for both Freeway Express and Freeway Pro. (more…)
As reported on Thursday by 9to5Mac, AT&T on Friday confirmed plans to throttle the data transfer speeds of smartphone users still on “unlimited” data plans. (more…)
I think Apple will sell 36.89 million iPads during the first and second quarters of next year. If I’m right, then Apple will sell 100 million iPads in 2.25 years — 55% faster than it took the iPhone, and 144% faster than the iPod.
Apple’s sales are crazy these days. They are dominating every market they enter.
The same goes for a myriad of mobilized gestures that can get confusing, even for power users. Do I use the three-finger double-tap or the two-finger double-tap to zoom? (It’s the latter — a three-finger double-tap pulls up the dictionary.) After playing around with the system for a while, I found myself regularly going back to System Preferences to disable new touchpad features because I simply couldn’t keep them straight.
Hayley Tsukayama is going through some of the same things I did with Lion. I turned off “natural” scrolling too, but turned it back on and forced myself to use it for week. It’s making more sense to me now, so I’m leaving it on. This is a good overview of how some of Lion’s changes affect how we interact with the OS.
“…if you haven’t yet gotten around to upgrading to iLife ’11, buying a new Mac mini or MacBook Air essentially gets you iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand for all your Macs running OS X 10.6.6 or later (since you need at least that version of Snow Leopard to run the Mac App Store). And this isn’t sneaky or dishonest—it’s right there in the Mac App Store’s software license.”
It’s efforts like this that make it plain to see that Apple is very intent on eliminating physical software distribution as much as it can – at least for its own products – and emphasizing the Mac App Store as the preferred delivery method for its users.
Florian Mueller at FOSS Patents:
There was some speculation on Twitter about it in light of the fact that I’m vocal about the intellectual property issues facing Android and WebM — just like I’m vocal about issues involving and concerning various other companies. All of my concerns are based on my convictions, and such concerns have repeatedly been proven right. It’s certainly not implausible at all that someone who disagrees with me (who could be employed by whichever company) might have attempted to hack my account and thereby triggered the suspension of my account and all of my Google services, including this blog. Since I frequently change my password and use very long (in this case, more than 40 characters) and safe (a random mix of lower-case letters, upper-case letters, numbers and symbols) passwords, brute-force algorithms that try out huge numbers of passwords in a short period of time wouldn’t realistically succeed in actually getting access. However, it appears that such activity then triggers a suspension.
Good to have Florian back online. He gives some of the best patent perspective on the Web.
Using an Android tablet for creative work? Let’s talk.If you use an Android tablet and use it (or would like to use it) for creative imaging, photography, etc., please drop me a line. We can’t let the iPad kids have all the fun. 🙂
There was no doubt that it was going to happen, but speaking for the iPad kids, we will still have more fun.
A research firm posted an IQ test on its Web site and then compiled the results from more than 100,000 users. It found that there was no substantial difference between users of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. But Internet Explorer users had IQs below average.
Yes IQ tests are kind of stupid, but I couldn’t pass this up.
New figures from the U.S. Treasury Department indicate that the government has a total operating cash balance of $73.768 billion, less than Apple’s own war chest of $75.876 billion.
Steve is just going to buy his own galaxy and make his products there.
Market research firm IDC released its latest phone data, which shows the worldwide mobile phone market grew 11.3 percent in the second quarter of 2011. This growth was, in part, due to Apple, which more than doubled its market share over this time last year. (more…)
A new change for AT&T Wireless’ Unlimited Data subscribers will soon be taking place. Rumored to be starting in the first week of October, we’ve heard that AT&T will start throttling the data speeds of the network’s top data hogs. As Verizon (PDF) and Virgin have recently done, AT&T will be adopting a similar plan to try to curb the problem of data congestion and overall network issues that have hurt its 3G network’s performance since the onset of the iPhone.
It doesn’t come as a big surprise that AT&T would start doing this, but I can’t figure out how people use 2GB-4GB of data a month. This is the rumored limit before throttling will start. I know this for sure — if that’s the limit I have to reach, I’ll never have to worry about throttling.
Spiderweb Software has announced the forthcoming release of Avernum: Escape from the Pit, a reboot of their popular “classic”-style role playing game series. The game is coming to Mac OS X, Windows and iPad. (more…)
“But the cut in price, while welcome, still fails to solve the single most fundamental issue with the 3DS as of July 2011: There are no damn games. The last legitimate hit was The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time 3D, but even that wasn’t enough to move a sizable number of consoles. Throughout the history of game consoles, one thing has remained true above all others: A game console without games is no game console at all.”
Ricardo Bilton’s absolutely right. A fair number of Apple pundits have used the price cut to crow about how this is a sign that Apple is superior to Nintendo, and that the iPad and iPhone are better gaming systems – that’s misguided, at best. The 3DS is a fine game system in terms of hardware, but Nintendo’s major failure here has been to get a good library together out the gate. And that’s somewhere Apple has succeeded greatly – in getting together a huge software ecosystem for its iOS hardware.
Groove Coaster is a cool new game from Square Enix subsidiary Taito. The game is available until August 7, 2011 for 99 cents – after that it goes up to $2.99. (more…)
Time:
Once upon a time, products that were labeled as betas were indeed undergoing beta testing. They were works in progress, and nobody dreamed of sharing them with the general public. The Internet changed that by making it easy to distribute pre-releases to millions of people. And then Google rendered the “beta” moniker largely meaningless by applying it indefinitely to massively popular services such as Gmail. (The company has since largely backed away from beta gimmickry — among other reasons, it discovered that big corporate customers aren’t so excited by products that claim to be unfinished.)
Making products “just work” has been the secret to Apple’s success over the last decade.
Nearly nine of 10 Hulu subscribers watch streaming TV shows and movies on a computer, but only 42 percent of Netflix users do, according to a recent Nielsen survey. And while nearly three-fourths of Hulu subscribers watch mostly TV shows, only 11 percent of Netflix users say the same.
Again, I will say it — I love Netflix.
The most apparent change is a new user interface with dockable, tabbed panels. The design borrows heavily from Microsoft’s Office Ribbon, though a more subdued appearance makes it look just as comfortable on the Mac. My guess is that power users may just hide the whole thing and stick to keyboard shortcuts, but it should do wonders for discoverability for new users or more casual users not comfortable with that.
I don’t know how to read music and probably never will, so I’ll leave this one to Peter, who I respect a lot.
Oomph on Thursday released a new version of Sidekick (formerly Network Location), with a new user interface and many other features that will automatically change your Mac’s settings based on your location. (more…)
A new report released by Nielsen on Thursday shows that Apple is the top smartphone manufacturer in the United States. (more…)
I was talking to a friend today about my Taylor guitar and after raving about how good it is, he’s going to get one. This is the best acoustic guitar I’ve ever played.
“The iPad iPlayer app launched in the UK in February. The US, Canadian and Australian launches will follow before the year’s end. For now, users in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, The Republic of Ireland, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland will be able to access the app.”
iPlayer is BBC’s video-on-demand service; it’ll be good news for anglophiles and fans of BBC’s program(me)s once it’s available in former colonies like the US, Canada and Australia.
One of the biggest frustrations I have is seeing so much bad, erroneous, poorly written and just plain “woolly-headed” information that often passes for news in the Mac Community. Any number of rumor sites have sprung up, any number of “journalists” pontificate, any number of online “sources” spew tidbits of information out to the masses, journalistic and otherwise, who gobble it up whole with no thought to whether it’s even true.
Your Mac Life host Shawn King has a new project he’s calling “Stupid Apple Rumors.” King’s goal is track Apple rumors and record, over time, how accurate the rumor is. That’s not all — he will also track how accurate a particular site and individual authors are in reporting rumors. To top it off, King has a section for sites that “ride the coattails” of a story. In other words, sites that parrot a rumor without adding anything to the story.
This, my friends, is going to be interesting.
Macs that have Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) graphics processing units have an implied license to the patents, the judge said. Gildea found that two other S3 patents were invalid, as were aspects of the two patents found to be infringed.
Bloomberg says OS X infringes on patents “related to graphics chips.” Is that only Nvidia graphics, because all of Apple’s computers have switched to either Intel or AMD graphics chips.