About 18 months ago I was driving on the 101 near Mountain View, headed north at 10pm or so, when a white Mercedes with no plate zoomed past me. I was doing 70, it must have been going over 100.
It's a common rumor that Jobs doesn't have plates on his car. This article speculates that it's not legal, but Jobs (or his staff) just pays the $250 fine if he's ever ticketed for it. Some of the comments also speculate that Jobs' car has suffered repeated vandalism due to people stealing his plates, and that the DMV has made an exception for him.
In Pennsylvania, you can look up summary offense level driving/parking tickets for everyone via a convenient online form. I tried looking Jobs up, but California seems to wisely keep such information off of the internet.
Edit: There are 5 random cases with Steve Jobs in San Mateo that are the matter of public record, but California seems to keep all traffic information off of the internet. Compare to PA where a parking ticket doesn't go on the internet, but driving without a license plate does.
Surprisingly, yes. In California, apparently, there is a provision in the motor-vehicle code that allows 'celebrities' (for some definition of 'celebrity') to drive around without license plates.
Yeah, that's presumably the last time McGraw-Hill get to do any pre-release deals with Apple. It's not clear to me how that stunt is a net gain to them.
On the contrary. The text book industry views 2nd hand text books as theft.
Currently they do everything in their power to devalue 2nd hand sales, such as pointlessly churning the edition every year or two or even integrating course notes and syllabus for a specific professor. Once they go to e-readers there will be no 2nd hand sales and they can stop wasting resources on pointless editing and profit skyrockets!
Until MIT OpenCourseWare puts them all out of business. Good riddance.
On the contrary. The text book industry views 2nd hand text books as theft.
Legitimately so, effectively. 2nd-hand sales net them nothing. That said, it frees up more money for the person who was the early-adopter, who is more likely to buy more of the same, but that's not money "in their hands".
That said, making new versions each year is effectively stealing from students who are already strapped for cash. I'd argue that's less ethical than any stretch involving 2nd-hand sales. If they'd put out good books, students would keep them (I keep my good ones), and encourage others to buy them, increasing their sales. * gasp * unthinkable!
I'm with you on this. None of these "leaks" actually have any information that hasn't been well-established by other sources who are outside of the NDA.
In fact, Apple as much confirmed all these details themselves when they allowed the device to run with an internet connection earlier in the week and that analytics company (I'm forgetting the name) started seeing a 10-inch iPhone OS 3.1 device. That was no accident. Neither is this.
As pissed as he was at all the other "leaked" rumors and quotes that led to Apple filing lawsuits and firing a bunch of people? Nah. It's most likely a controlled leak. It's the day before the launch after all and a little "bit" on a news channel at the end of launch eve is only going to do the eventually launch good.
I have a variant on Hanlon's Razor that I find particularly appropriate when dealing with telephone companies, utility companies, government bureaucracies, etc.: Never attribute to benevolence what can be explained by incompetence.
Conveniently, this principle also gives the same answer to the question of why McGraw said what he did.
I have to disagree: have you seen the money students drop on textbooks lately? The whole market has consolidated and now makes books worthless after only a year or two (hence small secondary market) by releasing new revisions with different exercises in them. Maybe publishing at large doesn't know their business, but the textbook companies are minting money.
Yeah, $0 for my latest comp sci class. Someone found a pirated pdf of the book and offered to hand it out to the class. The professor made no objection.
Sure there's an upside. Now that the market knows media companies are involved, they all will spike tomorrow morning when the market opens.
You also prime the hype pump one more time. Remember that the financial types don't read tuaw, gizmodo, and engadget all day long looking for Apple rumors. I consider it the noisemaker they shoot off before the real firework show starts.
That is a pretty outrageous claim. The upside is more press. The 'news' agencies/tabloids hate repeating material and need fresh information to talk about tonite before the big launch.
You have to throw some meat out to the lions, even if you are intentionally leaving them hungry.
While I agree on the automative industry I don't think the CEO's of the banking industry are incompetent. Unfortunately, I wish their actions could be excused by incompetence.
He did say "based on iPhone OS", but I wonder if he mis-spoke especially given that he's not necessarily tech-savvy.
In all likelihood, the tablet OS will be based on OS X in the same way that iPhone OS is - many of the same architectural underpinnings, but a completely different presentation layer that's optimized for the hardware.
Over the weekend, Flurry detected iPhone apps with their analytics embedded running on a device with a tablet-sized screen. That makes it very likely the tablet is running iPhone OS.
I'm pretty sure he meant "looks a lot like the iPhone OS". Most non-tech people cannot differentiate between the look of a desktop and the underlying OS. If it looks and acts like the iPhone, do you really think he's going to be wondering what kernel and low level libraries are actually running?
I was thinking the same thing.
Perhaps he misunderstood Apple telling McGraw-Hill that 'your e-books will work on iPhone and iSlate' as '[the tablet is] based on the iPhone operating system and so it will be transferable'.
Look down at the prosecution history entries. There's a new entry for appointing a new attorney, just filed about a week and a half ago. Could be a coincidence, but then again...
It's registered to GlaxoSmithKline and limited to class 051
"Cosmetics and toilet preparations", specifically described as PILLS. So probably a coincidence.
I think I will probably avoid Hacker News tomorrow. At least one story every day has been ridiculous, I can't imagine what it will be like after the announcement.
It's interesting because a) it's the first confirmation we have from a first-party source and b) the way the guy did it most likely just screwed his company out of any future Apple dealings.
I don't see how it's anything other than a net positive, you gain in security and ease of use for consumers.
If you're more hacker minded like this audience is, it's extremely trivial to jailbreak - the distinction being that it is totally independent and not sanctioned by Apple whatsoever. This is an important point.
After working in user support I can totally empathise with Apple's decision to keep the platform closed via the App Store. A large majority of the people buying these phones (ie, normal users - not geeks) are the ones who voluntarily install spyware on their PC's, click yes to every dialog box they see and execute random email attachments without thinking twice. The iPhone by far has the biggest mindshare, and a very hefty market share of any mobile communications device yet, and probably one skewed toward people with a large disposable income. It's constantly connected to the internet, has a connection to the phone network with an unlimited tab conveniently linked to your credit card, knows where you are and even in which direction you're facing. It knows who you talk to, who your contacts are...etc. I could go on. The point is this device and it's associated popularity is a fucking goldmine for the sort of people who write malware.
The App Store and it's uncompromising restriction is the final solution to keeping this cesspool of a software "ecosystem" off the platform.
Even if Apple provided an "Advanced" setting which gains you root access on your device the malware writers would simply instruct the clueless user to enable it, and I KNOW that 99.9% of people would do it without hesitation, for the promise of nothing more than a cheap thrill. It's based on the same psychology as that study where an alarming majority of people would tell you their password for a chocolate bar.
Oooh, kittens!!! cue screaming and convenient lawsuits targeting high-profile Apple when their phone bill arrives with a $50,000 total
I don't think there was ever a reasonable chance of anything else. I mean, if you're Apple, why do anything else? For the most part consumers clearly love to use the App Store. It has serious review process and barrier to entry issues, but those can be fixed over time (hopefully) and as long as there is an active audience, vendors will continue to come.
Well, it's the problem for maybe 1% of developers (to pull a "sufficiently tiny to make my point, but still made up" number out of thin air). There is still plenty of money to be made that doesn't conflict with the default functionality of the iPhone.
Don't get me wrong, I'd rather there was no filtering at all and there was instead a sort of "paid apps have the option of getting Apple Certification and being listed at the top of all lists" option instead, but I don't think the App Store problems outweigh the benefits for users.
As the adage goes, "The plural of anecdote is not data."
Neither you nor your parent have any statistical basis for your estimates. As of early this month [1], there are over 100,000 applications in the app store. If 1% were rejected, that means that 1,010 apps were rejected. Your two apps could easily fall into that category.
Basically, all we can know is that many apps get accepted, but not all of them do. Any more clarity than that requires Apple's intervention (which I don't expect to see any time soon).
It may not be when you consider the large number of low-quality but harmless games and distractions out there. It's when you try to do something interesting - to push what the device can do that you run a high risk of not being approved.
The problem is that there is a hell of a lot of general purpose software out there already that's never going to be worth the effort to port to a single device.
The iPhone has some nice apps, but runs nothing important to me in my professional life. And if the new tablet isn't going to be a useful work tool, why would I want it?
I honestly don't see the value proposition either. Oh wait. That's because Steve hasn't taken the stage yet to show us that Apple has created something of value that we didn't know we wanted until we were shown. Some call this fanboyism. It's really just creativity at its best. Creating new things to make life better. That's what apple does, and they are handsomely rewarded for it.
Dude, get over it. Let me guess: you grow all your own food and you abstain from all media (oh, hey, wait a second..)? Apple devices are useful problem-solving technology, and they bring a lot of joy to people's lives.
