Without taking sides on whether this justifies the design decision (there are many factors to consider), I have heard some point to phishing as a rationale for hiding the icon. If a phishing site had a convincing lock icon or copied a logo (e.g., Facebook's) as its favicon, some users could mistakenly believe the site had TLS or was associated with a different company. Hiding the icon and defaulting to the base URL helps users know that if they see a lock in the browser UI (not in the page), it's encrypted and encourages them to check the domain to ensure they're on the correct site.
There have been regular rumors that Amazon will be raising Prime subscription fees. It seems plausible that they would include the set top box for free with increased Prime fees to control PR and incentivize renewal. Amazon already treats other devices (e.g., Kindle) as loss-leaders.
Brick and mortar stores are legally barred from overtly providing different pricing for customers based on age or gender. They can't have a price tag on an item that reads:
Women Over 35 - $32.99 Women 35 And Under - $29.99 Men 38 And Over - $28.99 Men Under 38 - $26.99
However, common loyalty programs at stores profile customers by age, gender, purchasing habits, and all sorts of other demographic criteria and selectively issue coupons and promotions that have the same result (e.g., a drug store might print out a coupon for a male customer for lady's perfume to incentivize a purchase before Mother's Day, but wouldn't issue such a coupon to female customer who is inherently more likely to buy the product).
Cloud/Software-As-A-Service/Web Apps are obvious wins for the Googles/Microsofts/Adobes of the world. They
1. eliminate piracy
2. guarantee a steady revenue stream
3. allow vendors to data-mine user behavior
4. avoid App store sales fees
Adobe's move is not just about locking-in customers, it's about ensuring that they don't have to give Apple and Microsoft a cut of all their sales. Gatekeeper on the Mac and Windows RT are harbingers of Apple's and Microsoft's long-term strategies: force everything through the App store and skim off the top. All the major software vendors are fighting a war and the consumers caught in the crossfire.
None of the Massachusetts delegation voted on the bill. Here is the roll call.
Why didn't any of the 9 representatives from the state vote? Because the President was in Massachusetts following a terrorist bombing earlier in the week.
The bill has been in Congress in some form since 2011. If the sponsors and supporters of the bill truly believe that this bill is necessary to enable "integrated operational actions to protect, prevent, mitigate, respond to, and recover from" threats to security, wouldn't it make sense to schedule a vote on passage of the bill for a day when at least some representatives of the state most recently victimized by a terrorist attack could vote? Is there any opportunism at work here, given that the entire Massachusetts delegation voted against the bill the last time it was up for passage?
It's worth reading the full text of the bill. It contains statements such as "The Director of National Intelligence shall establish procedures to allow elements of the intelligence community to share cyber threat intelligence with private-sector entities and utilities and to encourage the sharing of such intelligence."
As a strong financial and moral supporter of PBS, I am simultaneously appreciative of PBS's even-handed coverage of the Aereo story and disappointed by their participation in the suit.
There's much to dislike about Aereo's business model. The company's technical and legal maneuverings allow them to excessively monetize an otherwise low-cost service. Like so many water bottling companies, they provide a small convenience, and they should be allowed to, but there are good philosophical and financial reasons not to buy what they're peddling.
The larger story is that the trajectory for all broadcast media is obvious: consumers will always push for free, accessible content. Aereo's service is just a stopgap and will ultimately fizzle out along with Viacom, News Corporation, and their peers.
That's what makes PBS's position in this all the more troubling. PBS actually has one of the only viable and worthwhile models: viewer-supported broadcasting. Given that PBS survives on the generosity and goodwill of its viewers and that its viewers clearly want accessibility, they should focus on delivering what viewers want - open, free, accessible content - directly to their audience. They've made huge inroads over the past few years with their online services but come on, go for broke and put everything that you can online. That's the best way to cut out the middlemen, outpace the hamstrung big medias, deliver uncompromised programming, and win the hearts, minds, and support of the public.
I've long wanted a large reflective display for coding. While I typically set a dark background in whatever editor I'm using, staring at a backlit display all day can be harsh. As reflective LCD technology improves, I continue to hold out hope that someone will make a desktop monitor with the technology (it would be a great second display for coders or anyone doing basic text entry, and doesn't need to have especially fast pixel response time, etc.).
Evidently, the new Chromebooks don't have a physical dev mode switch (the old ones used to break a lot), but can be put into dev mode via a firmware switch.
The price and combination of expansion ports (USB 3.0, HDMI, etc.), make this a pretty appealing target for hacking, although the ARM architecture means that lots of software will have to be recompiled, as the original post mentions.
While it seems like the early versions of the iOS App may limit voice input to search, it makes sense that Google's angling to compete with Siri's personal assistant functionality by integrating with Google Calendar, Gmail, etc. Using the Google's iOS Voice App to "book an appointment" on an iPhone configured with Google's ActiveSync/Exchange Gmail and Calendar connector could appear to behave identically to Siri.
Siri would presumably trigger a calendar event creation directly on the phone after receiving data from Apple's server, while Google's Voice App could transmit the appointment creation command to Google's server and add the appointment to the user's Google Calendar. The appointment would immediately be fetched by the iPhone's Calendar App, so the two actions would appear the same to the user.
Amazon also reduced pricing for the service yesterday, which may be good for future subscribers, but is really annoying for those who already had subscriptions and just renewed for more money. Anyone who spent several weeks uploading music files one year ago likely didn't want to let their subscription lapse and have to repeat the entire process. Amazon waited a couple of weeks until everyone up for renewal was billed for a new year, then, less than a month later, they fundamentally changed the service's functionality and lowered the pricing.
I completely understand that Amazon's terms and conditions for the service give them the right to do this, and I also expect that early adopters often pay more for goods and services as prices drop. However, it's clear that Amazon was being quite coy here. They also issued an iPhone cloud player app shortly before "unlimited music" subscribers had to decide whether to renew, incentivizing re-subscribing.
It's clear that the new service is great for Amazon, as it allows them to de-duplicate their data and significantly reduces their bandwidth costs. It also may be a good thing for many customers who can get sanitized versions of their music files. As my original post mentioned, however, some users of the service saw the appeal of uploading and unlimited number of their personal music files (e.g., with meticulously edited album artwork, tags, and the exact compression they wanted). Without notice, Amazon is essentially replacing all these files for paid subscribers with different files, which sets a really bad precedent not just for music, but for cloud storage services in general. While I'm sure some users prefer the new functionality, others don't and it would have been better to allow users to opt in/out.
The other big story here is that at least some of the labels seem to have offered Amazon similar terms to Apple, showing that Apple's agreement for Match is not exclusive. In Netflix v. Amazon (video streaming) and Apple v. Amazon (music stores/matching), Big Content seems reluctant to let any one player dominate.
Regarding the press release: yes, it's official, it's linked from Amazon's more recognizable Amazon.com domain; for whatever reason, they post their press releases on a different domain.
Google has been using eye tracking technology in internal product testing for years. If they included electrooculography (EOG) sensors in the glasses, such as those demonstrated in this prototype from ETH Zürich, they could allow wearers to manipulate real world objects just by staring at them.
Some more thoughts on this (think: virtual telekinesis) here.
Well, it looks like a lot of what I expected was announced. What's really impressive is how brazenly Apple has dictated terms and cut into other companies' business models.
The terrible notification system in iOS to this point has actually benefited Apple in 2 major ways: it appeased the iPhone wireless carriers by allowing archaic, expensive text messaging to still seem relevant (email alerts didn't appear on the lock screen, but text messages did), and it provided Apple with a future selling point.
Now that they're updating the notification and messaging systems, it's likely that text messaging volume will very, very gradually begin to dwindle for iPhone users. The carriers can't be too happy about this since texting services are their cash cows.
On the web browsing front, integrating Reader into iOS Safari is likely to frustrate a lot of advertisement-subsidized sites. The strength of its implementation will also push publishers into their News Stand platform (the choice will be: "no revenue for you through the web since we'll strip out all your ads or revenue with a commission to Apple through News Stand").
The iTunes Match service is going to trick lots of people into paying for access to music they already have. It'll be interesting to see how Apple authenticates music via Match: will it use some fingerprint analysis from the actual sound stream (à la Shazaam), or will it simply read through tags? Either way, it'll be easy for someone to log into Match once on a system with a huge library to get access to thousands of songs. I wonder if people with huge libraries will sell services to help you "unlock" lots of music on iTunes Match and/or if there will be frequently updated "master" iTunes databases with proper tags and placeholder files posted all over the internet? Apple's basically selling an all-you-can-eat music subscription service (comparable to Napster's) at a low annual rate and making its users jump through hoops or pay more to get access to the whole library. This is going to further kill CD sales and record stores; once Apple moves to Lossless audio, there'll be very little reason for Apple customers to access digital music any other way (perhaps unlimited access to the whole library and lossless quality will be available in a couple of years for a higher subscription price).
Finally, iCloud is going to hurt Dropbox and Google's bottom lines. Google's going to be implementing most of the same functionality once they get Chrome OS off the ground, but Apple's lead is formidable.
Barring any major technical or privacy failures and given the appetites of their fans/customers, it's hard to see Apple failing to pull all of this off. Apple's waving the stampede through their velvet rope and right into their club. Once inside, though, it's going to be awfully hard to get out.
Hi, everyone. Reading articles about Apple's Post-PC outlook (such as this one), it's interesting to think about where Apple is headed, as it provides a good context for their recent announcements.
First, it should be clear that Apple wants to extend their walled-garden approach to their entire line of products. This would allow them to provide a consistent user interface and good interoperability (something they'll continue to tout to sell consumers on their Post-PC products). It will also allow Apple to translate success in one area (e.g., strong iPad sales) into other markets (e.g., stronger Mac sales with Lion's interface echoing the iPad's). Finally, it will allow Apple to monetize other services (as they already have with 3rd party application and subscription sales).
At the iPad 2 announcement, Jobs gleefully boasted that Apple has the largest number of registered user accounts with credit cards of any online vendor, and Apple's certainly interested in billing those accounts as much as possible.
One obvious area where Apple could try to pull ahead is in data storage and synchronization. Apple is actually worse at this right now than many other vendors (e.g., using iTunes to get a Word document onto an iPad), as they've avoided implementing simple, consumer-centric solutions (e.g., WiFi syncing to iPhones, iPods, and iPads from Macs/PCs) so they could build the infrastructure necessary to implement an Apple-centric approach. The $1 billion data center they're building in North Carolina is obviously for something bigger than just music streaming.
It's likely that Apple will try to pull more customers into Ping and MobileMe. Whereas Google has to implement roundabout connectors to allow users to synchronize their calendars and office documents, Apple actually controls the OS and APIs used on Macs, iPhones, and iPads. Apple could simply force all applications, including 3rd party applications on the iPad and iPhone, to use Apple's cloud data store by changing the SDKs and development agreements for their iOS devices.
In iOS and in Mac OS 10.7 Lion, a multitasking application is supposed to gracefully "suspend" when a user switches to another application. If the application isn't used for a while, iOS/Lion actually can save its state and reallocate its resources for other applications to use. In Lion, this has even lead Apple to remove the open application indicator lights from the dock. In Apple's new computing paradigm, applications merely have a "state," they're never "closed" or "opened."
Now, imagine Apple extending this paradigm to applications running across devices. An end user could open a document for editing in Pages on her office Mac, then, without doing anything, could leave work, open Pages on her iPad on the train home, continue editing the same document, and so on. If data and application states are synchronized through the cloud, users don't have to worry about file versioning, backup, etc. The possibilities become even greater when multiple applications and file sharing with multiple users are involved.
Apple is in the best position to make this sort of computing paradigm possible, since they already have such large markeshare across multiple devices.
Having wireless carriers' cooperation in providing lots of cheap bandwidth to customers will be critical in enabling their vision. In this regard, Apple has recently moved from being at the mercy of a single carrier (AT&T) to having leverage over two carriers (AT&T and Verizon). The WiFi hotspot feature that Apple has just added to the
Slashdot Mirror
Without taking sides on whether this justifies the design decision (there are many factors to consider), I have heard some point to phishing as a rationale for hiding the icon. If a phishing site had a convincing lock icon or copied a logo (e.g., Facebook's) as its favicon, some users could mistakenly believe the site had TLS or was associated with a different company. Hiding the icon and defaulting to the base URL helps users know that if they see a lock in the browser UI (not in the page), it's encrypted and encourages them to check the domain to ensure they're on the correct site.
There have been regular rumors that Amazon will be raising Prime subscription fees. It seems plausible that they would include the set top box for free with increased Prime fees to control PR and incentivize renewal. Amazon already treats other devices (e.g., Kindle) as loss-leaders.
Brick and mortar stores are legally barred from overtly providing different pricing for customers based on age or gender. They can't have a price tag on an item that reads:
Women Over 35 - $32.99
Women 35 And Under - $29.99
Men 38 And Over - $28.99
Men Under 38 - $26.99
However, common loyalty programs at stores profile customers by age, gender, purchasing habits, and all sorts of other demographic criteria and selectively issue coupons and promotions that have the same result (e.g., a drug store might print out a coupon for a male customer for lady's perfume to incentivize a purchase before Mother's Day, but wouldn't issue such a coupon to female customer who is inherently more likely to buy the product).
Cloud/Software-As-A-Service/Web Apps are obvious wins for the Googles/Microsofts/Adobes of the world. They
Adobe's move is not just about locking-in customers, it's about ensuring that they don't have to give Apple and Microsoft a cut of all their sales. Gatekeeper on the Mac and Windows RT are harbingers of Apple's and Microsoft's long-term strategies: force everything through the App store and skim off the top. All the major software vendors are fighting a war and the consumers caught in the crossfire.
None of the Massachusetts delegation voted on the bill. Here is the roll call.
Why didn't any of the 9 representatives from the state vote? Because the President was in Massachusetts following a terrorist bombing earlier in the week.
The bill has been in Congress in some form since 2011. If the sponsors and supporters of the bill truly believe that this bill is necessary to enable "integrated operational actions to protect, prevent, mitigate, respond to, and recover from" threats to security, wouldn't it make sense to schedule a vote on passage of the bill for a day when at least some representatives of the state most recently victimized by a terrorist attack could vote? Is there any opportunism at work here, given that the entire Massachusetts delegation voted against the bill the last time it was up for passage?
It's worth reading the full text of the bill. It contains statements such as "The Director of National Intelligence shall establish procedures to allow elements of the intelligence community to share cyber threat intelligence with private-sector entities and utilities and to encourage the sharing of such intelligence."
As a strong financial and moral supporter of PBS, I am simultaneously appreciative of PBS's even-handed coverage of the Aereo story and disappointed by their participation in the suit.
There's much to dislike about Aereo's business model. The company's technical and legal maneuverings allow them to excessively monetize an otherwise low-cost service. Like so many water bottling companies, they provide a small convenience, and they should be allowed to, but there are good philosophical and financial reasons not to buy what they're peddling.
The larger story is that the trajectory for all broadcast media is obvious: consumers will always push for free, accessible content. Aereo's service is just a stopgap and will ultimately fizzle out along with Viacom, News Corporation, and their peers.
That's what makes PBS's position in this all the more troubling. PBS actually has one of the only viable and worthwhile models: viewer-supported broadcasting. Given that PBS survives on the generosity and goodwill of its viewers and that its viewers clearly want accessibility, they should focus on delivering what viewers want - open, free, accessible content - directly to their audience. They've made huge inroads over the past few years with their online services but come on, go for broke and put everything that you can online. That's the best way to cut out the middlemen, outpace the hamstrung big medias, deliver uncompromised programming, and win the hearts, minds, and support of the public.
I've long wanted a large reflective display for coding. While I typically set a dark background in whatever editor I'm using, staring at a backlit display all day can be harsh. As reflective LCD technology improves, I continue to hold out hope that someone will make a desktop monitor with the technology (it would be a great second display for coders or anyone doing basic text entry, and doesn't need to have especially fast pixel response time, etc.).
Evidently, the new Chromebooks don't have a physical dev mode switch (the old ones used to break a lot), but can be put into dev mode via a firmware switch. The price and combination of expansion ports (USB 3.0, HDMI, etc.), make this a pretty appealing target for hacking, although the ARM architecture means that lots of software will have to be recompiled, as the original post mentions.
While it seems like the early versions of the iOS App may limit voice input to search, it makes sense that Google's angling to compete with Siri's personal assistant functionality by integrating with Google Calendar, Gmail, etc. Using the Google's iOS Voice App to "book an appointment" on an iPhone configured with Google's ActiveSync/Exchange Gmail and Calendar connector could appear to behave identically to Siri.
Siri would presumably trigger a calendar event creation directly on the phone after receiving data from Apple's server, while Google's Voice App could transmit the appointment creation command to Google's server and add the appointment to the user's Google Calendar. The appointment would immediately be fetched by the iPhone's Calendar App, so the two actions would appear the same to the user.
Amazon also reduced pricing for the service yesterday, which may be good for future subscribers, but is really annoying for those who already had subscriptions and just renewed for more money. Anyone who spent several weeks uploading music files one year ago likely didn't want to let their subscription lapse and have to repeat the entire process. Amazon waited a couple of weeks until everyone up for renewal was billed for a new year, then, less than a month later, they fundamentally changed the service's functionality and lowered the pricing.
I completely understand that Amazon's terms and conditions for the service give them the right to do this, and I also expect that early adopters often pay more for goods and services as prices drop. However, it's clear that Amazon was being quite coy here. They also issued an iPhone cloud player app shortly before "unlimited music" subscribers had to decide whether to renew, incentivizing re-subscribing.
It's clear that the new service is great for Amazon, as it allows them to de-duplicate their data and significantly reduces their bandwidth costs. It also may be a good thing for many customers who can get sanitized versions of their music files. As my original post mentioned, however, some users of the service saw the appeal of uploading and unlimited number of their personal music files (e.g., with meticulously edited album artwork, tags, and the exact compression they wanted). Without notice, Amazon is essentially replacing all these files for paid subscribers with different files, which sets a really bad precedent not just for music, but for cloud storage services in general. While I'm sure some users prefer the new functionality, others don't and it would have been better to allow users to opt in/out.
The other big story here is that at least some of the labels seem to have offered Amazon similar terms to Apple, showing that Apple's agreement for Match is not exclusive. In Netflix v. Amazon (video streaming) and Apple v. Amazon (music stores/matching), Big Content seems reluctant to let any one player dominate.
Regarding the press release: yes, it's official, it's linked from Amazon's more recognizable Amazon.com domain; for whatever reason, they post their press releases on a different domain.
Google has been using eye tracking technology in internal product testing for years. If they included electrooculography (EOG) sensors in the glasses, such as those demonstrated in this prototype from ETH Zürich, they could allow wearers to manipulate real world objects just by staring at them.
Some more thoughts on this (think: virtual telekinesis) here.
Well, it looks like a lot of what I expected was announced. What's really impressive is how brazenly Apple has dictated terms and cut into other companies' business models.
The terrible notification system in iOS to this point has actually benefited Apple in 2 major ways: it appeased the iPhone wireless carriers by allowing archaic, expensive text messaging to still seem relevant (email alerts didn't appear on the lock screen, but text messages did), and it provided Apple with a future selling point.
Now that they're updating the notification and messaging systems, it's likely that text messaging volume will very, very gradually begin to dwindle for iPhone users. The carriers can't be too happy about this since texting services are their cash cows.
On the web browsing front, integrating Reader into iOS Safari is likely to frustrate a lot of advertisement-subsidized sites. The strength of its implementation will also push publishers into their News Stand platform (the choice will be: "no revenue for you through the web since we'll strip out all your ads or revenue with a commission to Apple through News Stand").
The iTunes Match service is going to trick lots of people into paying for access to music they already have. It'll be interesting to see how Apple authenticates music via Match: will it use some fingerprint analysis from the actual sound stream (à la Shazaam), or will it simply read through tags? Either way, it'll be easy for someone to log into Match once on a system with a huge library to get access to thousands of songs. I wonder if people with huge libraries will sell services to help you "unlock" lots of music on iTunes Match and/or if there will be frequently updated "master" iTunes databases with proper tags and placeholder files posted all over the internet? Apple's basically selling an all-you-can-eat music subscription service (comparable to Napster's) at a low annual rate and making its users jump through hoops or pay more to get access to the whole library. This is going to further kill CD sales and record stores; once Apple moves to Lossless audio, there'll be very little reason for Apple customers to access digital music any other way (perhaps unlimited access to the whole library and lossless quality will be available in a couple of years for a higher subscription price).
Finally, iCloud is going to hurt Dropbox and Google's bottom lines. Google's going to be implementing most of the same functionality once they get Chrome OS off the ground, but Apple's lead is formidable.
Barring any major technical or privacy failures and given the appetites of their fans/customers, it's hard to see Apple failing to pull all of this off. Apple's waving the stampede through their velvet rope and right into their club. Once inside, though, it's going to be awfully hard to get out.
Hi, everyone. Reading articles about Apple's Post-PC outlook (such as this one), it's interesting to think about where Apple is headed, as it provides a good context for their recent announcements.
First, it should be clear that Apple wants to extend their walled-garden approach to their entire line of products. This would allow them to provide a consistent user interface and good interoperability (something they'll continue to tout to sell consumers on their Post-PC products). It will also allow Apple to translate success in one area (e.g., strong iPad sales) into other markets (e.g., stronger Mac sales with Lion's interface echoing the iPad's). Finally, it will allow Apple to monetize other services (as they already have with 3rd party application and subscription sales).
At the iPad 2 announcement, Jobs gleefully boasted that Apple has the largest number of registered user accounts with credit cards of any online vendor, and Apple's certainly interested in billing those accounts as much as possible.
One obvious area where Apple could try to pull ahead is in data storage and synchronization. Apple is actually worse at this right now than many other vendors (e.g., using iTunes to get a Word document onto an iPad), as they've avoided implementing simple, consumer-centric solutions (e.g., WiFi syncing to iPhones, iPods, and iPads from Macs/PCs) so they could build the infrastructure necessary to implement an Apple-centric approach. The $1 billion data center they're building in North Carolina is obviously for something bigger than just music streaming.
It's likely that Apple will try to pull more customers into Ping and MobileMe. Whereas Google has to implement roundabout connectors to allow users to synchronize their calendars and office documents, Apple actually controls the OS and APIs used on Macs, iPhones, and iPads. Apple could simply force all applications, including 3rd party applications on the iPad and iPhone, to use Apple's cloud data store by changing the SDKs and development agreements for their iOS devices.
In iOS and in Mac OS 10.7 Lion, a multitasking application is supposed to gracefully "suspend" when a user switches to another application. If the application isn't used for a while, iOS/Lion actually can save its state and reallocate its resources for other applications to use. In Lion, this has even lead Apple to remove the open application indicator lights from the dock. In Apple's new computing paradigm, applications merely have a "state," they're never "closed" or "opened."
Now, imagine Apple extending this paradigm to applications running across devices. An end user could open a document for editing in Pages on her office Mac, then, without doing anything, could leave work, open Pages on her iPad on the train home, continue editing the same document, and so on. If data and application states are synchronized through the cloud, users don't have to worry about file versioning, backup, etc. The possibilities become even greater when multiple applications and file sharing with multiple users are involved.
Apple is in the best position to make this sort of computing paradigm possible, since they already have such large markeshare across multiple devices.
Having wireless carriers' cooperation in providing lots of cheap bandwidth to customers will be critical in enabling their vision. In this regard, Apple has recently moved from being at the mercy of a single carrier (AT&T) to having leverage over two carriers (AT&T and Verizon). The WiFi hotspot feature that Apple has just added to the