WORLD REVIEW
Apple CEO Steve Jobs announces the new Apple 3G iPhone at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference
in San Francisco earlier this month. |
Steve "President for Life" Jobs of Apple Inc rubbed the new, consumer-friendly, anti-snob iPhone in the faces of last year's loyal buyers; His Steveness dropped the price from $700 to $200, made the thing work with 3G, included the GPS he left off last year, and upgraded the Internet connection to "near-broadband" speed; true Appoholics will love being humiliated again, and the mass-market phone gives Apple a small chance of actually selling 10 million of the phones in their first 18 months, something that the snob appeal of a 22,000 baht phone was never going to achieve - but it still has fewer sales worldwide than Nokia's Thailand market.
Singapore Telecoms eased the street rage with the announcement it will have the second-generation iPhone.
But seriously, Steveaholics, the most important technology development of the week was actually a US Supreme Court decision that a patent holder can only collect royalties once; LG licensed patents to Intel, which sold stuff to other producers, who made and sold more stuff using the patented technology; LG demanded a patent payment from everyone in this manufacturing line; luckily for us, the top US judges laughed and told LG it had no right to hold up (if you catch that drift) the entire supply chain, and that it should take its own royalty payment from Intel and walk away, because "patent exhaustion," like first-sale doctrine in copyright is the best they can demand.
Finally the big-business elite at Google agreed to create a Google interface that runs like a Unix shell; how to make your browser look like a 1985 mainframe at goosh.org.
For three weeks, Microsoft made offers to buy the Yahoo! search and advertising business for $9 billion; once again, Yahoo! explained that the Microsoft people were cheap, chiselling, cherry-picking bottom feeders. After escorting Microsoft to the door, Yahoo! signed a deal to run Google ads alongside Yahoo! search results because after all, what better way could show your independence in advertising than to sign a deal to out-source your advertising to Google?
Microsoft announced it will shut down its classified advertising site at Windows Live Expo on July 31, ending a two-year attempt to compete with Craigslist.com; this immediately raised the question, Microsoft was competing with Craigslist?
Mickey is still a mouse, Donald is still a duck, but Pluto, no longer a planet, is now officially a plutoid, the new word for "a dwarf planet beyond the orbit of Neptune."
Do you remember Metallica? You do? Wow, you're really old, although one hopes not nearly as addled and out of touch as the members of that Luddite rock band, which brags it helped to put Napster out of the file-sharing business way back in the last century; now these old musicians want to force bloggers to take down positive reviews of their upcoming album - after they held a listening party for the bloggers; it is somehow sad, watching old people unable to adapt to a young people's world; by contrast, Barack Obama is two years older than Lars Ulrich and he is running for president of Ullrich's country.
And then there was the former news agency Reuters, which decided that enough was enough. The agency's reports at Reuters.com were being cut and pasted on that Internet thingmy, and not only that they were being quoted by blogs, many of them from the right wing (Shock! Horror! Disgust!).
So the modern, with-it, hip, brainy, thoughtful Reuters leaders called in the boffins and said (paraphrasing), "Make us like a book - readable but not capable of being easily quoted in dollops." And the boffins put in some Java scripts that seemed to 20th century minds to make it impossible to mark and copy portions of Reuters.com stories. And The Leaders were so happy, briefly. The boffins then reported a double setback. First, they apparently found the spine to inform The Leaders that it's the 21st century, that you can't get there from here, and that doing a cut-and-paste on a page that "cannot be cut and pasted" is trivially easy, in several different ways. In the words of Bill Clinton, "It's the Internet, stupid." But in "fixing" the pages so that it was impossible for a few people including Reuters executives to cut and paste their own stories, the boffins had rendered many Mac owners helpless. The new code not only made it impossible for Macoholics with the new Firefox browser to read the Reuters pages, it put those browsers into an eternal loop, meaning that they had to terminate the browser session or the entire Internet log-in just to regain control of their own computers.
After a really bad weekend, the Javascript went away and most readers could again cut and paste stories from Reuters.com directly, in addition to all the other ways.
Eight years into the 21st century, 15 years into the height of the commercial Internet, there still are People In Charge who actually, really "think" and act like the men and women who have made the Reuters news agency into what it is today.
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