Apple Records corners the market on greed

Ex-Beatle Paul McCartney's record label has hauled Apple Computer into court repeatedly over the past couple of decades.

Basically, any time Apple Computer does anything new with Music, Apple Records sues them again for it.

At this point, nobody remembers Apple Records because record label names aren't important. How many people remember that the Beatles original label was Capital Records?

The only way you could be reminded the name - is if you picked up an album and looked at the sticker in the center of the record. Oh, wait. No records have come out on vinyl in the past ten years!

As BBC says, Apple giants do battle in court:

The computer company's logo is an apple with a section removed out of the side. The record company is represented by a complete green Granny Smith apple.

The average person has a working vocabulary of only ten or twenty thousand words There are a heck of a lot more than twenty thousand companies in the world! Lawsuits like this are silly.

Apple never uses the word Record in any of its products or advertisements. Chances of mixing up an Apple Computer product or service with any Apple Records product are zero.

A word like Apple alone does not distinguish a company in the 21st century, if it ever did. World population is well over six billion. Number of corporations in existence at this point has got to be over a million. Average person's vocabulary not much beyond 20,000 words - if even that.

So of course companies have to use some of the same words in their name!! There is simply no other choice. That is why The computer company calls itself Apple Computer, and the record company has always called itself Apple Records.

Now, the Record company is going a step further. They are saying any image of any apples infringes on their trademark. Give me a break. The two company's trademark symbols do not bear any resemblance to each other. They never had.

I would love to see the McCartney lawyers walking through an art museum, taking notes:

Hmmm... painting of serpent and an apple in the garden of Eden, and it's a very popular work these days... infringing on the trademark terribly. But it was drawn hundreds of years ago! No excuse, we own the trademark now.

Surrealist portrait of man in a bowler hat with a green Apple as a head, same color even. But it is just a painting, and Apple's do exist in the tens of billions in the real world!

Somebody should sue Apple Records for appropriating the use of the Granny Smith Apple invented in Australia for use of their corporate logo. It was invented almost a century before the McCartney and Eastman family decided to shroud it in legal protections!!

Mrs. Smith, who invented it, was at least in the apple-growing business. Steve Jobs at least earned a living picking Apple's in an Oregon orchard during his boyhood. What member of the McCartney or Eastman family - or any Beatle's - ever owned an orchards or picked Apple's for a living?

Now that this thing is back in court, I say it is time for some give-back by Apple Records to Apple Computer. Some of that money from previous lawsuits ought to be returned to Apple Computer, the company who earned it.

I read in an article once that Paul McCartney's nickname as a boy was Mac. Should the McCartney family be able filch a portion of Apple Macintosh computer because they share one syllable of their name with each other? NO!

That would be silly. And so is this lawsuit.

Technorati Tags:
music, apple, lawsuit

Rails 1.1: Release Candidate 1 available

Ruby On Rails 1.1 is nearing completion. The first release candidate came out for it this week. Many improvements have been made since Ruby On Rails 1.0 went final late last year.

Here is the announcement of the 1.1 RC1 from the Ruby On Rails weblog.

Rails 1.1: Release Candidate 1 available:

It%u2019s been roughly three months since the release of the big one-oh. That%u2019s obviously an eternity in Rails time, so its about high time we%u2019re getting ready for the release for 1.1. And boy, is this an exciting upgrade!


I do believe this is the biggest upgrade to Rails we%u2019ve ever done. We have recorded about 500 fixes, tweaks, and new features in the changelogs. That%u2019s a lot and that%u2019s just counting major new features like RJS as one.

Seems pretty exciting.

I am really looking forward to the release of Java JDK 1.6 too. It is not quite as imminent. I really hope they finish it soon enough so that it can be included in Mac OS X 10.5.

Technorati tags: rubyonrails

Rails for Designers

Kevin Clark, a programminer in San Diego, has written a nice, simple introduction to the Ruby On Rails framework, and posted it to his weblog.

It is direct, straight-forward overview of the key facets of a Ruby On Rails application.

Here is a good summary of his, from the post itself.

Rails for Designers:

This is for designers who are going to be working with Rails and is intended to give them a good starting point to jump into work with a Rails developer. This is all introductory material. As such, I cover some basics (MVC, locations of files) and move from there to a code example and more advanced topics (partials, ActionView helpers).

Technorati tags: rubyonrails, rails, programming, web, tutorials

Microsoft Delays Windows Vista Release to 2007

NPR reported this morning that Microsoft announced there will be no Microsoft Vista for consumers in 2006. Instead, they will have to wait until January 2007.

Microsoft Delays Windows Vista Release to 2007:

Microsoft won't offer the consumer release of its new Windows operating system until January 2007.

Not a huge shocker because Longhorn was delayed so many times that after a couple years, they changed the name to Vista.

Spanning more than five years, the upgrade from Windows XP to Vista has taken longer than any other personal computer OS update in history. That is going back to when these type of computers arrived in the mid 1970s!

Apple has always updated their OS at least once every couple of years.

Other personal computers did the same in the 1970s and 1980s. The only reason for going more than several years until now was - the company was not in business anymore!

Technorati tags: mswin, microsoft, vista

TechNet Pre-Beta Release Registration

I wonder if the marketing folks will put the nix on code-naming the next version of Office to be 'Office 13'.

Somehow it sounds ominous with a 13 at the end.

Read more at www.microsoft.com/techn...

TechNet Pre-Beta Release Registration for Office and Vista

Microsoft calls 'Office 12' a code-name???!

Read more at www.microsoft.com/techn...

NetNewsWire 2.1b16 released | MacMinute News

A new Universal Binary (includes native Intel code) version of NetNewsWire came out this week.



NetNewsWire 2.1b16 released | MacMinute News:

"A few of the new feature highlights of this release include: Universal Binary support for Intel-based Macs; NewsGator syncing; performance enhancements; email-link and email-contents commands; user interface changes; sorting subscriptions by attention; bug fixes; and more."

Note that a new update to fix a couple regressions in that version just came out today.

EyeTV, EyeConnect Universal Binary updates available | MacMinute News

Great news arrived yesterday for Intel based Apple Macintosh owners looking around for a way to beat the high cost of HDTV television sets.

EyeTV, EyeConnect Universal Binary updates available | MacMinute News:

"Elgato Systems today released EyeTV 2.1 as a Universal Binary update that natively supports both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs. This version expands support for full-resolution playback of HDTV to Macs with Intel Core Duo processors -- a feature previously reserved for owners of high-end dual Power Mac G5 computers. "

MacDailyNews - Apple and Mac News - Welcome Home

The Apple Macintosh community is chortling over a recent article by PC Magazine. They are saying the price listed for a high end Macintosh is less than half what the magazine claimed it is.

MacDailyNews - Apple and Mac News - Welcome Home:

"'PC Magazine is flat-out wrong in pricing the PowerMac G5 Quad, and they should correct the error. You can buy a PowerMac G5 Quad for less than half the price they list, which means: For about the same as an equivalent PC, or somewhat less,' Leland Scott writes for Musings From Mars. 'The serious error here is that PC Magazine lists Apple’s Power Mac G5 Quad as costing . . . Guess! You’ll never guess how much they say it costs. Honestly.'

Scott writes, 'OK, I gotta spill the beans at some point. PC Magazine says a Quad costs $7,023 to $9,522!'"

MacDailyNews - Apple and Mac News - Welcome Home

MacDailyNews - Apple and Mac News - Welcome Home: "he Government’s FÍS film project has proved such a success that all of Ireland’s 3,500 primary schools will soon be using film right across the teaching curriculum,' Apple's UK website explains. 'Apple technology is at the centre of this unique education project. 'The three watch words for FÍS are simplicity, connectivity and creativity,' says Creative Director Ciarán McCormack. "

Mac News: Apple News : Apple's Bangalore Plans Fuel IT Outsourcing Debate

Discussion continues about Apple's recent announcement of its plan to open a call center in India.

Mac News: Apple News : Apple's Bangalore Plans Fuel IT Outsourcing Debate:

"Apple Computer's (Nasdaq: AAPL) Latest News about Apple announcement last week that it plans to open a new call center in Bangalore, India, has stirred the debate, once again, over outsourcing Latest News about Outsourcing of high tech U.S. jobs.


With the move, Apple joins Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) Latest News about Dell, which last year opened a call center in India amid much criticism, and IBM (NYSE: IBM) Latest News about IBM, which is increasingly moving jobs to the subcontinent and has said it may employ as many as 50,000 workers there in the coming years.


'Apple has gained millions of new customers in the last year and we are building a call center in India to help meet our growing service and support needs,' said Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesperson."

The article goes on to say such moves have recently proven to offer some short-term cost savings - but at the expense of profits. Meaning, it has turned out to cost some companies more revenue than the cost-cutting measure saved.

It cites Dell as a victim of the effects of worse customer service after they moved call centers to India.

Apple has said the workers at the call center will be Apple employees.

Personally, I had better customer service from a call center in India once than I got at the local Apple Computer store. I was calling to see if an Apple Macintosh Powerbook had arrived from the shipper yet that morning.

According to that store's employee, it had not arrived yet. However, a helpful Indian woman working at Apple's customer support call center informed me the computer was delivered a couple hours earlier that day.

She gave me the shipper's tracking number, and I verified it myself. Confronted with that, when I called the store immediately, afterward they confessed that it had arrived earlier and they had not bothered to look at the packages that arrived that morning.

U.S. Patent office launches new Mac compatible e-filing system

Macworld announced today that the United States Patent Office added support for the Macintosh in its e-filing system.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on Friday launched a new e-filing system that allows patents to be submitted online. Unlike the previous online system, the new PDF-based e-filing system features complete support for Mac OS X.

“The great news for Apple is that USPTO listened to its customers and integrated Mac OS X and Safari support into its new e-filing system,” Susan Prescott Apple’s vice president of Pro Markets, told Macworld. “Innovators around the world use Macs.”

Now, apparently, the Mac support not only exists - it is better than the Microsoft Windows support. This is not due to a flaw in Microsoft Windows, but rather the superior support for PDF files that the Macintosh enjoys.

Technorati Tags:
macintosh, apple

The Macintosh through Linux eyes | Linux Box Admin

The Macintosh through Linux eyes | Linux Box Admin:

The first thing that struck me was that all the hardware worked (with
one minor exception). Since Apple controls the hardware and operating
system, this was hardly a surprise. As a Linux user, I am used to
spending time to get all my desktop hardware to work. The Mac seemed to
work better with my PC hardware than Windows; without endless,
conflicting drivers and reboots.

This guy really dug his new Mac!

Interesting to hear someone with both Linux and MS-Windows experience react so favorably to the Mac. Especially, all in the same paragraph.

It is true. You just don't hear about Apple's hardware engineers pointing the finger of blame at Apple's software engineers, or vice versa. Unlike the situation you get with some company's computer systems.

Technorati tags: macosx, mac, wins

In pursuit of debugging faulty posts to weblog

Sometimes debugging blog postings can be a nightmare.

This blog of mine her on blogspot.com seems to reject postings when the XML content is not well-formed.

Fair enough.

But would it be possible to get a little explanation of what/where the faults are in the document.

If I could spot the mistake at a glance, I probably would not have made it in the first place.

After getting bit by this problem several times in the past month, I came up with a little procedure that makes it trivial to fix the problem.

1. I copy the text of my posting to a plain text editor.


2. I prepend an HTML and a BODY start tag at the beginning, using lowercase, of course.


3. I append a BODY and HTML end tag at the ending, using lowercase here as well, of course.


4. I save the document to someplace on my hard drive with a .html extenion.


5. I open the document the Firefox web browser, which can be used to read files off the local hard disk - they don't have to be on the Web.

I use the free HTML Validator extension for Firefox to point out the errors for me. It tells me what they are, and when I point to one, it highlights that element in the document.

The validator, which has HTML Tidy open source software built into it, makes it very clear what the mistakes are.

I fix them in the text editor, save, and reload the page in the browser. Then I fix any problems that are still left.

Once the errors are gone, I resubmit the post to the browser. Of course, I have to omit the HEAD section and the HTML begin and end tags that I added to make the page palatable to the HTML validator. No sense taunting the beast with extra hardships.

In some ways, I feel like a lot of the so-called web technology is in its infancy.

However, other parts are quite mature and capable. So when hit with a road block like this, sometimes it is better to back up and try to use a different tool. Even if the tool is not specifically designed for solving your particular program, you might be able to coax it into helping you.

That works pretty well in this case.


Technorati Tags Start

Technorati Tags:
blogging

Technorati Tags End

SPARQL: Web 2.0 Meet the Semantic Web

Someone just posted a neat entry on their blog entitled SPARQL: Web 2.0 Meet the Semantic Web. In it they touted the powerful combination of SPARQL, a new semantic web query language, and several other technologies that have already grown very popular with users and programmers alike.

what, really, can SPARQL do for Web 2.0? Imagine having one query language, and one client, which lets you arbitrarily slice the data of Flickr, delicious, Google, and yr three other favorite Web 2.0 sites, all FOAF files, all of the RSS 1.0 feeds (and, eventually, I suspect, all Atom 1.0 feeds), plus MusicBrainz, etc.

FOAF, RSS/Atom are some of the most popular document file formats being used to share information these days.

Everybody recognizes Flickr photos, del.icio.us bookmarking, Google searching, as very popular free services for storing/organizing their information as well as finding/viewing other people's information.

Until now, while lots of people have created ways to access this data and do mashups of it, there were sometimes some hurdles.

It was somewhat tedious to do some of the coding. While these services tend to have APIs, the XML data that comes back lacks a common, unifying ontology. You tend to want to create a homogenous ontology if you want to give users seamless access to all the information - without making them worry about where the data came from. Everyone from bureaucrats, to news radio listeners, to IT directors are all too familiar with the woes of stovepipe software architectures. SPARQL can be used to help break down the barriers between different XML formats. Then, one piece of code can operate on the whole gamut of technology.

Better, cheaper, faster? Yeah.

How powerful? Well, imagine being able to ask Flickr whether there is a picture that matches some arbitrary set of constraints (say: size, title, date, and tag); if so, then asking delicious whether it has any URLs with the same tag and some other tag yr interested in; finally, turning the results of those two distributed queries (against totally uncoordinated datasets) into an RSS 1.0 feed. And let's say you could do that with two if-statements in Python and three SPARQL queries.

Right. When tagging information, a programmer does not really want to create 10 different tagging services to tag 10 different kinds of data that come from 5 or 10 different sources. A user certainly wants to be able to search all the different information for matches to a particular tag.

Imagine an intern reporter doing research at a major news organization. A huge disaster, say a major chlorine gas leak, has occurred at a factory owned by Noxia corporation, located just outside a medium sized city of Imaginaria, Wisconsin.

Using a SPARQL-enabled Javascript activated application, he can interactively query public databases at the same time as those of his organization for various combinations of these tags: chlorine, industry, factory, disaster, industrial, noxia, regulation, imaginaria, wisconsin.

They will get back a nicely organized, attractively-formatted, interactive window filled with live content that includes:

• photos (with attribution for photographer, source media-repository)


• audio streams


• video clips


• previously published articles by this news organization and other organizations (with attribution/bibliography entry, copyright, copyright owner contact info)


• scholarly research papers on these sorts of incidents, examining past ones or the likelihood of future ones - as well as the likely health effects


• a consolidated timeline of any relevant events


• relevant legislation (ratified or defeated)


• court cases involving similar disasters (those matching any/all of the following: same industry, same company, same location, same victims)


• industrial leaders in chlorine industry (corporations, executives, scientific experts)


• local physicians with experience in treating patients suffering from chlorine-inhalation


• symptoms of inhaling dangerous amounts of chlorine

Some of this information being presented sort of assumes some news media specific programming buttressing the tag-driven queries the reporter does. That too could be implemented using SPARQL and other RDF-aware semantic web technology.

This is just one example. Obviously, there are similar applications useful to librarians, health organizations, law firms, shoppers, playwrights, historians, curators, satirist comedians, geologists, hobbyists, CSI style criminologists, etc.

What needs to be done? Well, Web 2.0 fans, builders, and advocates need more love from SW fans, builders, and advocates. These two worlds really belong together. Next, Web 2.0 apps/services need to export (or make it easier for others to wrap) an RDF interface around their data. Then we need - as Leigh Dodds mentioned to me recently - a good SPARQL client implementation in Javascript, along with some conventions for building and moving queries around in an AJAX-friendly way. SPARQL over AJAX just by itself is so cool it gives me a headache! Last, SPARQL implementations have to spread and mature, but they're already off to a very good start. There are SPARQL tools in Java, Python, and other everyday languages.

Java and scripting languages are enjoying their highest popularity ever. JDK 1.6 will make it easy to use scripting languages as front-ends for Java services. More and more AJAX/DTHML user interfaces are created every week. Users enjoy liberation from the 1970s-like batch-style interfaces that forms with a Submit button engender. Users have never understood or liked systems that arbitrarily kept data from different sources separate. That really flouts the fact that they have gotten a system that can access all those systems at once.

Recently, there has been a surge of new semantic web tools. Older ones that have been around for half a decade have added support for the newer semantic web file format standards, like OWL. All these things can be used to help seamlessly put together data from different sources/formats into one cohesive document. That document can naturally be manipulated through one coherent, highly responsive, graphical user interface. And that is what users want.

Technorati tags: xml, rdf, semanticweb, sparql, web2.0, foaf, rss, atom, javacript, java, python, programming, sql, database, rdbms, wsdl, ajax, tagging, flickr, photos, socialsoftware

Record set for hottest temperature created in a lab on Earth

Just read on digg.com:

Scientists produce gas more than 100 times hotter than the sun. And: they don't know how they did it.

I wonder how fast that could cook my supper?





read more | digg story

Technorati Tags:
science

TiVo.com | TiVo Desktop

At last! A version of TiVo Desktop for Mac OS X 10.4 !!!

TiVo.com | TiVo Desktop:

TiVo Desktop for Mac v1.9.2 Updated February 14, 2006. This update provides compatability with Mac OS X 10.4: Tiger

Technorati tags: tivo, macosx

oXygen XML editor - XML Editor and XSLT Debugger 7.1

Today, OxygenXML 7.1 was released.

oXygen/XML editor and XSLT Debugger:

Version 7.1 of the oXygen XML Editor adds support for Berkeley and eXist XML Databases, an XSL templates view for easy navigation through the edited XSL stylesheet and an XPath builder view for editing complex XPath expressions. Effort has been made to improve the loading time and to reduce the memory usage especially for large documents. Multiple modifications were made to improve the general usability of the editor.


There are changes in:

• Support for Native XML Databases
• Performance


• XML/CSS Pretty Print
• Graphical User Interface


• XSLT / XPath
• Component Updates

Technorati tags: xml, database, css, xslt, xpath

Mozilla XForms Project

I stumbled over a nice announcement tonight.

Mozilla XForms Project:

March, 1st, 2006:
Release of preview version 0.4.

Yes, at last, version 0.4 of the XForms processor extension for Mozilla Firefox was released. It just happened yesterday. It has been about 5 months since version 0.3 was released.

So far all I have done with it is installed it, and verified that the version number updated.

Technorati tags: xforms, xml, gui

Ruby On Rails Tutorial for Macintosh Updated for Intel Macs

In December, Hivelogic put up a tutorial on how to install and configure Ruby On Rails and the software needed in order to run it on a Macintosh.

They recently updated those instructions in order to make them work on the Intel Macintoshes.

read more'|'digg story

Technorati Tags:
ruby, rubyonrails

Google Earth now runs on the Apple Macintosh

Now you can get Google Earth for the Apple Macintosh. You need to have Mac OS 10.3 or greater to run it. Specific hardware and software requirements are at the Google Earth site. If your Macintosh has been made within the last few years, chances are good it will work.

Google Earth:

Google Earth puts a planet's worth of imagery and other geographic information
right on your desktop. View exotic locales like Maui and Paris
as well as points of interest such as local restaurants, hospitals, schools, and more.

Technorati tags: google, mapping, earth

Running the Google Earth software is really a kick. You can learn a lot about places you are interested in - and how to get there from where you are - by just typing in the city or full address.

The program makes it easy to add your own information and save it, as well as get information from other sources. So, there are really no limits to how much you can get out of it.

Whether you have always been a geography buff - or just wish you knew a little bit more about where places are - this is a truly great program.

The fact you can get it for free does not hurt much either!

Quake 4 available for Macintosh

Not everyone is convinced that the Macintosh is a suitable gaming platform. Well, they should be.

The Mac is steeped in gaming-friendly technology:

• highly optimized OpenGL 3D graphics pipeline


• fastest C/C++ and Objective–C compilers around: GCC 4


• Xcode IDE that is fully integrated with GCC compiler


• very mature profilers and debuggers

Aspyr February 2006 Newsletter:

QUAKE 4%u2122 is available now for $49.99 through Aspyr%u2019s website. This title is rated %u201CM%u201D for %u201CMature%u201D by the ESRB. For more information, you can also visit the Official QUAKE 4%u2122 site.

Technorati tags: gaming, macintosh, macosx, rpg, scifi

Now that the new MacMini with DualCore Intel processors has been released, running 2-3 times the speed of its PowerPC based predacessor, the Mac is sure to become a gaming platform of choice.

Granted, lots of games still run on Windows XP that won't run on Mac OS X. But think about it, do you really care if the 9900 worst games run on the Macintosh, so long as the 100 best games do?

Also, who really knows how many games written for Windows XP during the past 5 years will run on Microsoft Vista when it comes out? Judging from past OS upgrades, a lot of games will not run on Windows Vista anyway.

Vista is going to be a whole new ball game. Going from a 32-bit to a 64-bit OS is going to break a whole lot of game software, probably. First, the Windows XP API is designed for 32 bits - not 64 bits. Second, the graphics API (GDI) is being replaced. And third, game software often directly manipulates/expects certain graphics hardware. Something bumping up the OS to a new version generally conflicts with.

We will see.

In the meantime, go check out the newest games for the Macintosh.