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Publisher Wiley's Books Pulled from Apple Stores

getling writes "Looks like Steve Jobs is almost as unhappy about personal details being publicized as he is with Mac secrets. The book publisher Wiley, who is releasing a new unauthorized biography of Jobs has had its entire line of books banned from Apple stores as a result of their unhappiness with the content of the book. Wiley, publisher of the popular Dummies series of books, as well as the Bible series, is quite surprised, due to the fact that they view the book to show Jobs in a largely positive light ..."

12 of 677 comments (clear)

  1. referrer in amazon link? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    That Amazon link looks like it contains a referrer - it has "ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14". That returns over 6000 hits on google, so either it's part of Amazon's system, or whoever provided it is making a lot of money off it. Here is a ref-free sanitized link: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0471 720836

    1. Re:referrer in amazon link? by DrEldarion · · Score: 5, Informative

      As someone who is a part of their referral program, I can say that is definitely NOT an affiliate link. It's just part of Amazon.

      The ref tag is rarely used for referral linking, and when it does, it looks something like "ref=ase_dealmeinnet-20" rather than that. I'm pretty sure that whenever the ref tag is used in regards to the affiliate program, it has ase in front of the affiliate tag.

      This is an affiliate link: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471720836/ ref=nosim/dealmeinnet-20/ Note that the ref tag here is set to "nosim". That means that you don't get the item preview page, it brings you directly to the book page. The actual affiliate tag (dealmeinnet-20 in this case) came as a separate part of the URL.

    2. Re:referrer in amazon link? by getling · · Score: 2, Informative

      Interesting discussion on speculation about something that I have no clue about. For those that are curious, I am indeed NOT making any money off this link - it was pulled via amazon.com's own search function. Try it yourself and see.

      --
      "Life is tough but we're tougher. You only get what you give, so give all that you've got." --Tony LaRussa
  2. Apple==Steve Jobs? by mah! · · Score: 2, Informative
    Apple is reacting to an unauthorized publication about Jobs? It does not make sense: unless it is about today's Apple directly?

    Did Wiley want to sell it in Apple stores (even that would have been, at most, a bit weird) ? With all respect to Apple's hardware and software products, such an action as banning the entire publishing house from stores sound absurdly inappropriate.

    Check for yourself the sample chapter at least, to see whether it's such an outrageous book or not.

  3. Ironic... by vocaro · · Score: 2, Informative

    ...that this incident will probably give Apple and Steve Jobs more bad publicity than the book alone ever would have.

    It even showed up on CNN's main page.

  4. Positive Light?!? by JasdonLe · · Score: 5, Informative

    Does *this* look positive to you?

    --
    ** A Sketch a Week **
    http://www.sketchplease.com
  5. Re:Irony... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Woz has said that Jobs never treated him badly

    That's not the case. Jobs screwed Wozniac when they created Breakout for Atari. Jobs pocketed the entire $5,000 bonus and half the $700 he was offered. Woz got $350 and none of the design bonus for the work he alone did.

  6. Re:Irony... by Martin+Blank · · Score: 5, Informative

    From "Broken Breakout Promises" which was the only other place that seemed to have the entire quote about the money, comes this bit to put it into context over the course of time.

    It wasn't the money that bothered Woz. Had Jobs asked, Wozniak would have done the project for free because he was turned on by such technological challenges. What hurt was being misled by his friend. Looking back on the incident, Wozniak realized Jobs' behavior was completely in character. "Steve had worked in surplus electronics and said if you can buy a part for 30 cents and sell it to this guy at the surplus store for $6, you don't have to tell him what you paid for it. It's worth $6 to the guy. And that was his philosophy of running a business," says Wozniak.

    --
    You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
  7. Re:Funny you should mention this by shigelojoe · · Score: 2, Informative

    This may help out a little bit.

    Summary: iPhoto generates 240 pixel wide thumbnails for each photo in the library; if the album view is set so that the thumbnails are wider than 240 pixels, iPhoto will load the photo and shrink it to the necessary size instead of using the premade thumbnail. Obviously, this leads to massive processor usage. I don't know how the iPhoto team could have missed something like this when they were developing the software, but I'd like some of what they were smoking.

  8. Re:Funny you should mention this by As+Seen+On+TV · · Score: 2, Informative

    I can't give you details because I just don't have 'em, but there's going to be a pretty big rewrite of iPhoto hitting the street real soon now.

    This is one of the dirty little secrets of Tiger: iPhoto is totally, 100% incompatible with Spotlight. We're gonna fix that, obviously, but it's a big job.

    See, Spotlight calls for metadata to be stored inside files. That's why we changed the way Mail works, creating a new mail message file format (emlx) that's basically an mbox-style mail message concatenated with an XML property list. That way we can store a message and all relevant metadata in one file, making it trivial for Spotlight to index it.

    iPhoto doesn't work like that. iPhoto stores all its metadata in a database, and generates a buttload of ancillary files for thumbnails and albums. That's very much not Spotlight-friendly. Plus, as you point out, it's got a big scaling problem.

    So we're gonna be releasing a new version, referred to internally as 5.1 but that may not be the actual number, real soon now. When? Dunno. What specific features will it have? Dunno. But it's coming.

  9. Re:Funny you should mention this by Chucker23N · · Score: 2, Informative

    "Does that mean installing 10.4 over 10.3 will mean Mail 2 cannot read Mail 1 mbox files or will they be converted?"

    Mail 2.0 comes with an easy-to-use, stable even in the early alphas, automatic converter.

    I am not aware of any current backwards conversion, however. The emlx format should be trivial enough for people to disassemble and write tools for, though.

  10. Prices inaccurate, principle the same. by abb3w · · Score: 2, Informative
    When I pay a buck for a 24 oz. Coke in a cup at the local convenience store I know their cost was about three cents, and two of those were for the cup.

    Closer to ten cents, depending on how much ice and how stingy they are with the syrup dilution ratio control. Usually these drinks are about half ice (cost ~$0.01/cup in icemaker operation capital costs). Standard coke 5:1 syrup runs about $25ish for a 5 Gallon box (marginally cheaper for corporate bulk than non-chain restaurant purchase, made up for by my last purchase being four years of inflation ago), producing 3840 floz of soda, or 320 servings of 12floz to finish filling the cups, for a cost of about $0.08 per. Cups run about $0.02 each in 24 oz size. Total cost $0.11.

    Still a heck of a markup for a $1.00 soda. "The perfect product costs a dime, sells for a dollar, and is both legal and addicting." Pretty durn close.

    --
    //Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.