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Apple's Life After Steve Jobs 405

Posted by CmdrTaco from the cut-the-turtleneck-budget-in-half dept.
animusCollards writes "Slate ponders a post-Steve Jobs Apple, including possible successors, and the future is... boring. '..it's certainly true that Jobs' style is central to the company's brand and the fierce connection it forges with its customers. His product announcements prompt hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free press coverage and whip up greater and more loyal fans, generating ever-greater interest in the company. ... At some point, all that will end. Jobs will eventually leave the company. There are no obvious plans for succession; in addition to Schiller, observers finger Tim Cook, Apple's COO, and Scott Forstall, who helped develop Mac OS X and the iPhone's software, as contenders for the job. But Tuesday's keynote illustrated how difficult it will be for any of those guys to replace Jobs.'"
Government

Concerns About ACTA In EU, Canada 75

Posted by kdawson from the back-rooms-and-dark-alleyways dept.
Elektroschock writes "An EU document on the Anti-Counterfeiting Treaty was leaked. The main purpose of the trade agreement is to impose the European enforcement measures for IPR infringements on the US and emerging economies, widen the enforcement measures to include criminal sanctions for patent infringements, and introduce internet content filtering measures. Civil society groups such as the FFII criticize the ACTA process because negotiation documents are not made publicly available by the governments. The EU document ('fact sheet') from the EU Trade Commissioner explicitly mentions: 'Internet distribution and information technology — e.g. mechanisms available in EU E-commerce Directive of 2000, such as a definition of the responsibility of internet service providers regarding IP infringing content.'" And an anonymous reader adds Michael Geist's push for more transparency around ACTA negotiations in Canada.

Comment Re:What? (Score 1) 562

by Myddrin (#18940637) Attached to: Dell to Sell Machines with Ubuntu Pre-Loaded
This is a common approach.

Both Apple and Microsoft got their start selling to the consumer/early adopter market, and then their products (Apple II and MSDOS) started trickling into the business world. Back in the late 70's/early 80's the business world was dominated by minicomputers, with "microcomputers" (the PC/Apple II/etc) largely being marketed towards hobbyists. Then as the hobbyists started using them to do business work, companies started buying them. (Sometimes to the chagrin of the established technical staff.) There is (and I couldn't find it) an old Apple ad about sneakily doing your work on an Apple.

Of course, it doesn't always work. This was also Netscape's original approach, get the user hooked on the browser at the consumer level and sell the browser and server software to the corporate clients as consumers start wanting to use the software at work. The quality of the free apache server and the browser war with MS screwed this approach completely.

While there is obvious risk (as exemplified by Netscape), you get to save on sales & marketing, as your hobbyist/early-adopter users start pitching your product for you at a grass roots level.

Heck, some additional anecdotal evidence, back in the late-90's a company I was working at was thinking about switching to Exchange (which pretty much meant a move from Novell to Windows NT) simply because one user insisted on using Outlook. And his reason? That's what he used at home.
Space

Journal Journal: Hawking weightless in space

Journal by vakibs
Noted physicist Stephen Hawking is given the opportunity to try zero gravity. This experience will be doubly nice for the great scientist as he has suffered for a long time from paralysis. I wish space science has already developed to something nicer, such as to be able to offer him a weekend vacation in the Andromeda galaxy :)

Feed 0wning Vista from the boot (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed
The VBootkit authors speak out

Interview Federico Biancuzzi interviews Nitin and Vipin Kumar, authors of VBootkit, a rootkit that is able to load from Windows Vista boot-sectors. They discuss the "features" of their code, the support of the various versions of Vista, the possibility to place it inside the BIOS (it needs around 1,500 bytes), and the chance to use it to bypass Vista's product activation or avoid DRM.

Feed It Takes A Court To Explain That Downloads Aren't Public Performances? (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
It's no secret that copyright law is a bit out of step with the times these days, and probably could use a massive rewrite. The problem is that Congress is continually retrofitting it with changes and additions that tend to lead to even more problems and certainly don't make the system any better prepared to deal with ongoing changes in the content marketplace. Take, for example, the latest court battle, where performing rights organization ASCAP tried to claim that music downloads from online services should count as "public performances." Why? Because copyright law allows for performance rights, meaning that if downloads are performances, ASCAP can collect more royalties for each download. This is mainly because performance rights can be negotiated (or denied), while other rights are compulsory. Luckily a federal judge had a bit of common sense and pointed out that downloads are not public performances, though there will likely be a series of appeals on this issue. The key point is that the inability of copyright law to flexibly deal with digital music and networks means we're only going to see more attempts like this one where stakeholders try to squeeze more money out of the system through legal loopholes, rather than through providing more value to music consumers.
Censorship

Submission + - Fair use in scientific blogging?

Submitted by
GrumpySimon
GrumpySimon writes: "Recently, a well-read science blog, Retrospectacle posted an article on a scientific paper. This blog post reproduced a chart and a table from the original article and everything was fully attributed. When the publishers, the mega-science publishing house Wiley found out, they subsequently threatened legal action unless the chart and table were removed. Understandably, this whole mess has stirred up quite a storm of protest, with many people seeing this as falling under fair use, and calling for a boycott of Wiley & Wiley's journals."
Linux Business

10 Years of Pushing For Linux — and Giving Up 857

Posted by kdawson from the one-thing-after-another dept.
boyko.at.netqos writes "Jim Sampson at Network Performance Daily writes about his attempts over a decade to get Linux working in a business/enterprise environment, but each time, he says, something critical just didn't work, and eventually, he just gave up. The article caps with his attempts to use Ubuntu Edgy Eft — only to find a bug that still prevented him from doing work." Quoting: "For the next ten years, I would go off and on back to this thought: I wanted to support the Open Source community, and to use Linux, but every time, the reality was that Linux just was not ready... Over the last six years, I've tried periodically to get Linux working in the enterprise, thinking, logically, that things must have improved. But every time, something — sometimes something very basic — prevented me from doing what I needed to do in Linux."
Microsoft

Get on the 'Gates for President' Bandwagon 654

Posted by Zonk from the jobs-for-vice-president dept.
netbuzz writes "Dilbert's Scott Adams kicked off the idea in his November 19th blog post, saying there isn't anything wrong with this country that President Bill Gates couldn't cure in less time than it takes to get a new operating system out the door. Today, the idea is moving forward with a brand-new 'Bill Gates for President' Web site. Adams is also back on the campaign trail, flogging the site and Gates' candidacy." A blog post at Network World includes a lot of eye-rolling about this idea, but neither Adams nor the folks at the 'Gates for President' website seem to be taking this lightly.

Dvorak On Microsoft/Novell Deal 218

Posted by CmdrTaco from the they-all-wear-party-hats dept.
zaxios writes, "John C. Dvorak has weighed in on the recent Novell-Microsoft pact. Among his insights: 'Microsoft has been leery of doing too much with Linux because of all the weirdness with the licenses and the possibility that one false move would make a Microsoft product public domain at worst, or subject to the GPL at best.' But now, 'the idea is to create some sort of code that is jammed into Linux and whose sole purpose is to let some proprietary code run under Linux without actually "touching" Linux in any way that would subject the proprietary code to the GPL.' According to Dvorak, it's only a matter of time before Linux is 'cracked' by Microsoft, meaning Microsoft figures out a way to run proprietary code on it."

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