Let me start with the most important points - Apple did not censor the content in this developer's application and Apple did not reject this developer's application for including references to common swear words. You accused Apple of both in your story and the fact is that we did neither.
Ninjawords is an application which uses content from the Wiktionary.org online wiki-based dictionary to provide a nice fast dictionary application on the web and on the iPhone. Contrary to what you reported, the Ninjawords application was not rejected in the App Store review process for including common "swear" words. In fact anyone can easily see that Apple has previously approved other dictionary applications in the App Store that include all of the "swear" words that you gave as examples in your story.
The issue that the App Store reviewers did find with the Ninjawords application is that it provided access to other more vulgar terms than those found in traditional and common dictionaries, words that many reasonable people might find upsetting or objectionable. A quick search on Wiktionary.org easily turns up a number of offensive "urban slang" terms that you won't find in popular dictionaries such as one that you referenced, the New Oxford American Dictionary included in Mac OS X. Apple rejected the initial submission of Ninjawords for this reason, provided the Ninjawords developer with information about some of the vulgar terms, and suggested to the developer that they resubmit the application for approval once parental controls were implemented on the iPhone.
The Ninjawords developer then decided to filter some offensive terms in the Ninjawords application and resubmit it for approval for distribution in the App Store before parental controls were implemented. Apple did not ask the developer to censor any content in Ninjawords, the developer decided to do that themselves in order to get to market faster. Even though the developer chose to censor some terms, there still remained enough vulgar terms that it required a parental control rating of 17+.
You are correct that the Ninjawords application should not have needed to be censored while also receiving a 17+ rating, but that was a result of the developers' actions, not Apple's. I believe that the Apple app review team's original recommendation to the developer to submit the Ninjawords application, without censoring it, to the App Store once parental controls was implemented would have been the best course of action for all; Wiktionary.org is an open, ever-changing resource and filtering the content does not seem reasonable or necessary.
Really, what would be the benefit for doing this? For one, not many people really -like- iTunes, it just happens to be the easiest way of syncing your iPod, if you could do the same thing in VLC, WMP, etc most people would. This opens up Apple to a lot more anti-trust suits. Apple had nothing to gain and everything to lose by doing this, so in the end what does it get them?
Not many people like iTunes but it is the number one music retailer in the US (on or offline)? Reality doesn't jibe with your opinion. Have you taken a survey of people's preferences?
No its not. Opera has never been number 1 in browsers and Chrome has Google's advertising, Firefox has the community, and both IE and Safari are pre-installed. The iPhone is a one-browser, one-phone, phone, when eventually a new smartphone takes over, Opera's mobile market will rebound.
Mobile Safari is one browser one phone but the underpinnings - WebKit -- is the basis of the browsers of both Android based phones and Palm based phones.
Cant use it cross platform, if you want to transfer songs from a PC and your ipod is mac formatted you are fucked, which is jsut plain retarded.
Then don't format the iPod using a Mac -- format using a PC. In fact, iPods come formatted by default using FAT. FAT formatted iPods can be used for both. iPod's (except for the Touch/iPhone) are just seen by the OS as a mass storage device. Windows doesn't support HFS natively. If you have a third party HFS driver then you can use a Mac formatted iPod with Windows.
THe ONLY real advantage Apple had this late inthe game was the Itunes DRM.
And we all know that the majority of people get their music from iTunes and not from their own CD's or from p2p networks.....
Cant just drag and drop files on it like almost any other good MP3 player
So exactly how do I subscribe to podcast, automatically sync only unplayed podcasts back and forth between the player, start listening to a track on my computer and finish on my player without losing the spot, set up smart playlist, set up multiple playlist with some of the same songs without the songs being duplicated on the player, etc.. using drag and drop?
So after all this I decided for Nokia's 5800XM [engadgetmobile.com] (cheaper now), which seems to do it just right. I am not bound to a specific carrier and added to that there was the recent announcement [slashdot.org] that they'll make the Symbian OS open source. I've installed Python [nokia.com] on it (which has a very alive [nokia.com] developer community) and now have easy direct access to the Bluetooth functions, phonebook, camera, music player, GPS etc.
So since the phone is GSM only you have the choice of two carriers in the US. Lucky you.
Uh, does anyone else find it a bit suspect that this is from a site called Apple Insider? For me that completely ruins the credibility of this story. I mean, any smartphone is miles less dull than the generic clamshells and candybars that the telcos keep pushing.
The Apple Insider article and the Slashdot summary also linked here:
What I'm talking about is that in UN*X you can start with the init process and trace through shell scripts and textual config files to see how every service is started; and if things get buggered, you can fix them with a text editor. With MacOS (as with NeXT Step before it, and with KDE and with Gnome), the users with their pretty pointy clicky tools can make messes that the pretty pointy clicky tools can't get them out of.
But more significantly, the OS actually works. Personally, I hate it - I intensely dislike the fact that when you get under the covers, it looks like UN*X but it isn't UN*X in a lot of ways that matter. It's essentially NeXT Step, and I hated that, too.
How is OS X which is certified Unix (http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/unix.html) not Unix?
...yes, because something as simple as a faster network card, faster version of USB or a video capture card is something that only "professionals" should want to or be interested in. Nevermind those cheap multi-terabyte hard drives.
A faster network card than Gigabit Ethernet? Video capture and multi-terabyte hard drives? That's what Firewire 800 is for.
Why does market share even matter to a publically traded company if it doesn't result in higher net income or a higher stock price? As of 2/20/2009, Apple's market cap (stock price x shares outstanding) is four times higher than Dell's, higher than HP's, Sony's, Toshiba's, and every other PC manufacturer and consumer electronic company in the world. Apple's reported net income is also higher than all of the above mentioned companies. If Dell sells 4x as many computers and is still much less profitable, who's doing better? Apple has enough cash in the bank to buy every single outstanding share of Dell stock and still have $10 Billion left over.
iTunes itself doesn't do anything special to non-DRMed music. It does organize the files if the user allows it; but all any other media program has to do is be pointed to the directories where these music files are located. iTunes also stores metadata like playlists in their own files which they are not likely to share with Palm. Palm doesn't need any of that really. They just need to know where the files are located.
iTunes stores a copy of all of its metadata in a simple xml file.
Well, they also completely missed the question (or rather dropped) the question of whether or not Obama is really even eligible to be president, or that one citizen tried to discover if he was through the courts and got thrown out for "having no standing to bring the lawsuit".
He was actually sued by two people. The first person Allen Berg also sued 50 members of the Republican party including President Bush, Rumsfield, Cheney, and a few others for causing 9/11 (911fortruth.com website has expired). He was an obvious nutcase. The other person Alan Byrd was denied entry into the NY bar because he had a "moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character." (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/us/politics/13martin.html?bl). Should the press cover ever bit of paranoia found on the web?
1. Since when was not owning a house considered not having financial acumen? I own my house but I know a lot of single people with the credit and the money to buy a house who chose not to buy one because they don't want to be tied down and want to keep their options open if they decide to move to another city or another part of the metropolitan area. Besides, a house comes with maintenance that you don't have to worry about if you rent.
2. When was making $25,000 - $50,000 necessarily considered "low income". If you're living in a smaller city or the suburbs in some major city you can easily afford a $200 cell phone and a $70 month plan.
Canalys has produced a report showing the iPhone has grown massively in North America. The study looked specifically at smartphone market share statistics in Q3, and the iPhone, in a surprisingly short time span, has managed to grab second position. A 27% market share is nothing to scoff at; what Apple has done in a few months, others have failed to do in years.
But, there's always two sides to every story. While RIM and Palm saw their market-share increase, Apple saw its market-share slide. The iPhone took a healthy US smartphone market-share of 26.7% in the fourth quarter last year. But, it seems that RIM and Palm's success has eaten in to the iPhone's niche. The iPhone accounted for just 19.2% of smartphones sales in the first quarter of 2008, compared to 26.7% of sales in Q4 2007.
The handset now accounts for 17 per cent of the market, second only to Motorola's RazR2. Before the iPhone 3G launch Apple's market share was 11 per cent..... Rubin noted that the iPhone is now outselling the BlackBerry Curve, BlackBerry Pearl and Palm Centro, making it the number one smartphone in the US.
But that clause is probably in place to prevent the bigger players from hijacking Apple's platform. Suppose Microsoft writes a "Zune Jukebox" app for the iPhone, then markets the bejesus out of it. Or more likely, a superior Exchange client that businesses scramble to adopt. Or Internet Explorer for the iPhone. Forced to choose between giving customers "what they want" and losing grip on the reins of its own platform to a direct competitor, Apple would choose the lesser evil.
That still makes no sense. Apple makes no money off of the included apps except for the App Store and the Wi-Fi music store. Why would Apple care that someone wanted to write an app that competed with their non-profit generating software? Part of the reason that people are buying more Macs now is because of the ability to run Windows. Apple has even advertised the ability to run Windows and ships Windows compatible drivers with Leopard.
It's Apple's platform, Apple's SDK, and Apple's store. Why should they allow any product on the shelf that competes with their own business? Why should they allow useless products? You don't get mad at Best Buy for not selling maps to Circuit City. You don't get mad at Circuit City for not selling empty cardboard boxes for $999. Why should Apple's store be any different?
I am an Apple fan to the highest degree, but this has to be the stupidest analogy I've ever heard. It's one thing for Apple to ban apps that violate privacy, harm the network, or even that go against AT&T's TOS (like the tethering app). But to ban an app that competes with Apple's free included apps? If Best Buy won't sell your software, you can always try getting Circuit City to sell it or if that doesn't work, sell it from your own site and pay for advertising. If Apple won't sell your app on the App Store, you have no alternative. I have a regular old Samsung flip phone on the Sprint network. The included web browser sucks. I went over to Operamini.com. downloaded it, and now I have a great browser. Apple would never allow a competing browser,
Apple recently became famous (or infamous) for stealing other people's ideas when they rolled out their Dashboard in Mac OS X, which had many similarities to a desktop widget program named the Konfabulator, which later became Yahoo widgets.
I guess no one realizes that Konfabulator idea was actually implemented in Apple's GS/OS for the Apple//gs that was introduced in the mid 80's.
I must say, I had more or less the same reacion. So, this says all things considered, they're spending about $121 million for Napster.
Napster has $67 million in cash and no debt. So while Best Buy is actually paying $121 million for Napster, they also get the $67 Million in cash -- that's where the $54 million fogure came from.
[quote] Apple cites an 80 gig iPod as holding 20,000 songs. At $1/song, that's $20k to fill. That's more than a year's salary, at minimum wage. And they make 160 gig iPods.
So no, it's not that they're cheap. It's that there's more available, more readily, and we have broader musical tastes -- and as a result, the perception of any one song has changed. [/quote]
And we all know.... 1. Everyone buys all of their music from iTunes one song at a time. 2. The iPod only holds music, not video, podcasts, games, etc. 3. No one had a CD collection prior to buying an iPod.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep.....
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/08/mac-os-x-leopard-receives-unix-03-certification.ars
http://daringfireball.net/2009/08/phil_schiller_app_store
Not many people like iTunes but it is the number one music retailer in the US (on or offline)? Reality doesn't jibe with your opinion. Have you taken a survey of people's preferences?
Mobile Safari is one browser one phone but the underpinnings - WebKit -- is the basis of the browsers of both Android based phones and Palm based phones.
It took me less than three seconds to type "getting music off of iPod Touch" in Google and to find this link.....
http://iphonetouch.blorge.com/2008/05/09/how-to-get-music-off-an-ipod-touch-iphone-in-windows/
Then don't format the iPod using a Mac -- format using a PC. In fact, iPods come formatted by default using FAT. FAT formatted iPods can be used for both. iPod's (except for the Touch/iPhone) are just seen by the OS as a mass storage device. Windows doesn't support HFS natively. If you have a third party HFS driver then you can use a Mac formatted iPod with Windows.
And we all know that the majority of people get their music from iTunes and not from their own CD's or from p2p networks.....
So exactly how do I subscribe to podcast, automatically sync only unplayed podcasts back and forth between the player, start listening to a track on my computer and finish on my player without losing the spot, set up smart playlist, set up multiple playlist with some of the same songs without the songs being duplicated on the player, etc.. using drag and drop?
So since the phone is GSM only you have the choice of two carriers in the US. Lucky you.
Yeah that's working out well for them.....
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=5y&s=DELL&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=aapl
The Apple Insider article and the Slashdot summary also linked here:
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/dell-phone-stalled-poor-reception/story.aspx?guid={E1450208-5E11-4A8F-B726-85A6AFF04E2A}
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchd
How is OS X which is certified Unix (http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/unix.html) not Unix?
A faster network card than Gigabit Ethernet?
Video capture and multi-terabyte hard drives? That's what Firewire 800 is for.
Why does market share even matter to a publically traded company if it doesn't result in higher net income or a higher stock price? As of 2/20/2009, Apple's market cap (stock price x shares outstanding) is four times higher than Dell's, higher than HP's, Sony's, Toshiba's, and every other PC manufacturer and consumer electronic company in the world. Apple's reported net income is also higher than all of the above mentioned companies. If Dell sells 4x as many computers and is still much less profitable, who's doing better? Apple has enough cash in the bank to buy every single outstanding share of Dell stock and still have $10 Billion left over.
iTunes stores a copy of all of its metadata in a simple xml file.
He was actually sued by two people. The first person Allen Berg also sued 50 members of the Republican party including President Bush, Rumsfield, Cheney, and a few others for causing 9/11 (911fortruth.com website has expired). He was an obvious nutcase. The other person Alan Byrd was denied entry into the NY bar because he had a "moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character." (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/us/politics/13martin.html?bl). Should the press cover ever bit of paranoia found on the web?
1. Since when was not owning a house considered not having financial acumen? I own my house but I know a lot of single people with the credit and the money to buy a house who chose not to buy one because they don't want to be tied down and want to keep their options open if they decide to move to another city or another part of the metropolitan area. Besides, a house comes with maintenance that you don't have to worry about if you rent.
2. When was making $25,000 - $50,000 necessarily considered "low income". If you're living in a smaller city or the suburbs in some major city you can easily afford a $200 cell phone and a $70 month plan.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/smartphones/iphone-greedily-eats-north-american-market-share-334516.php
This was during the quarter that Apple was basically not manufacturing 1st gen iPhones....
http://www.intomobile.com/2008/06/03/palm-centro-boosts-palm-marketshare-rim-sees-blackberry-market-share-rise-apple-loses-in-iphone-market.html
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2227601/apple-iphone-gains-market-share
Oct 7, 2008
To kill a competitor that had ambitions on making the browser a platform and making Windows irrelevant.
That still makes no sense. Apple makes no money off of the included apps except for the App Store and the Wi-Fi music store. Why would Apple care that someone wanted to write an app that competed with their non-profit generating software? Part of the reason that people are buying more Macs now is because of the ability to run Windows. Apple has even advertised the ability to run Windows and ships Windows compatible drivers with Leopard.
Software is not their core business. Service and support contracts are their core business.
I am an Apple fan to the highest degree, but this has to be the stupidest analogy I've ever heard. It's one thing for Apple to ban apps that violate privacy, harm the network, or even that go against AT&T's TOS (like the tethering app). But to ban an app that competes with Apple's free included apps? If Best Buy won't sell your software, you can always try getting Circuit City to sell it or if that doesn't work, sell it from your own site and pay for advertising. If Apple won't sell your app on the App Store, you have no alternative. I have a regular old Samsung flip phone on the Sprint network. The included web browser sucks. I went over to Operamini.com. downloaded it, and now I have a great browser. Apple would never allow a competing browser,
I guess no one realizes that Konfabulator idea was actually implemented in Apple's GS/OS for the Apple //gs that was introduced in the mid 80's.
Napster has $67 million in cash and no debt. So while Best Buy is actually paying $121 million for Napster, they also get the $67 Million in cash -- that's where the $54 million fogure came from.
Just an FYI, if you have Mac OS X 10.5, you can place the Video_TS folder into the Movies folder (or an alias) and use Front Row.
[quote]
Apple cites an 80 gig iPod as holding 20,000 songs. At $1/song, that's $20k to fill. That's more than a year's salary, at minimum wage. And they make 160 gig iPods.
So no, it's not that they're cheap. It's that there's more available, more readily, and we have broader musical tastes -- and as a result, the perception of any one song has changed.
[/quote]
And we all know....
1. Everyone buys all of their music from iTunes one song at a time.
2. The iPod only holds music, not video, podcasts, games, etc.
3. No one had a CD collection prior to buying an iPod.