Tag Archives: AppleInsider

But it’s open! Part XI.

In today’s installment:
Google and Facebook try to change the meaning of “Do not track”, plus Motorola (read: Google) wants more from it’s FRAND patents than the whole patent pool gets.

AppleInsider via The New York Times.

Totally open.

Florian Mueller for FOSS Patents:

This relates to the H.264 video codec standard. On the left side of that chart, Microsoft highlights that it pays to the MPEG LA pool (which contains 2,339 patents on H.264, contributed by 29 different companies) an annual royalty that is capped at $6.5 million. If the cap didn’t exist, the amount would be $60 million. By sharp contrast, Motorola holds only 50 such patents but has made a royalty demand that would, even in the most conservative (!) estimate, amount to $4 billion.

Open.

ZDNet’s Jason D. O’Grady: Damn, that guy get’s on my nerves.

ZDNet’s Jason D. O’Grady is at it again…

In his usual fashion he points out the iPad’s biggest miss: No Siri.

One of the biggest omissions in the new iPad is Siri. It was a virtual shoe-in for inclusion in Apple’s third-generation iPad but it didn’t make the cut and it’s a curious omission. Siri runs on the iPhone 4S which has an A5 processor, but the new iPad has an A5X processor which is faster. So it isn’t a technical issue, at least specs-wise.

See what he did there? “One of the biggest omissions” is insinuating that there are more…although, he never mentions all the others. He’s probably saving them for about a dozen more link-baiting articles he plans to haunt us with…
Setting aside that we don’t know if there is a technical reason – there may very well be, isn’t it a little bit of bad reporting if you talk about stuff you couldn’t possibly know about?

I’m not saying that this is the reason. We won’t know until iFixit, or some other site, actually guts the new iPad, but I am saying that there is a reason.

I imagine it’s much simpler than what Jason fantasizes about, namely user experience.

Think about it: Would you actually use Siri, the way it is intended to be used, on an iPad? Right.

What Apple did is they added part of Siri, voice dictation, because that actually makes sense. Touch the microphone button on the keyboard and tweet, reply to an email, etc.

Apple’s not about what can be done. It’s about what makes sense.

WTF, Google?! Google reportedly ignoring Safari users’ privacy settings to better track its ads.

This is completely unacceptable!

In the above article, Apple Insider’s Daniel Eran Dilger reports on an investigation by The Wall Street Journal, about Google tracking OS X, and iOS users, who use Safari by “purposely overriding Safari’s browser privacy settings using code that misrepresents its ads as being a user-initiated form submission.”

From the report:

“Google added coding to some of its ads that made Safari think that a person was submitting an invisible form to Google. Safari would then let Google install a cookie on the phone or computer.”

Read the full articles at Apple Insider, and The Wall Street Journal.

If I hadn’t kicked Google to the curb weeks ago, I would now.