There MS goes again...

...showing just how much they know and care about their customers.

"Why on earth would I live there?" Wow, SERIOUSLY, Adam?!

You may not want to live there, and you may think no one should, but your customers live there.

You know, the poor fools you rely on to pay for that fat internet connection you obviously think is the norm...

Sure, he stated that that's his own opinion and not Microsoft's, but it sounds just a little too eerily familiar

from the company that claims to be willing to help open source developers with signed keys for secure boot, but never quite manages to do that, with their support always promising to "get back to you" and never actually doing so.

The fact is that Apple violated patented IP

Troll or not, Apple has infringed patents held by someone else.

And this isn't the first time. A while back, they had to cough up money for using the patented intellectual property of a Swiss photographer, the Swiss railways, and a company called VirtnetX.

And it came out in the VirtnetX trial that Apple's engineers and designers develop Apple shiny without a single care about other people's IP.

You said it's wrong to steal, Mr. Cook?

Then you won't have any trouble with the courts agreeing to that against you.

And regarding the "Revelation" rant...

...as a Christian, I don't quite see how that can be applied to these lanyards. They are not trying to make them wear them on their right hands or foreheads, nor are they trying to make them worship anything that could be construed to be "the beast" (there are actually two beasts, one out of the land and one out of the sea; and the word "antichrist" does not appear in the book of revelation, it appears on the letters of John, referring to people who deliberately distort the Gospel, which would describe someone/something trying to become an object of worship).

Well, the US government IS...

...planning to unleash those predator drones to keep an Eagle Eye (dun dun dun) on their own people. And I'm sure there will be ones armed with "less-lethal" crowd control measures in case the people of the "land of the free and home of the brave" get a little too free and brave.

Heck, officials in the Pentagon have already ordered...I mean...obtained restraining orders against protesters unhappy at being monitored as if they live in a police state. I'm a foreign observer to all this, and it worries me. America is supposed to be a democracy. Every one on the street makes up the "DEMO" in "DEMOCRACY" and yet the government wants to use technology honed by the armed forces to...make sure they're safe.

I'm not going to try paint the current government there with TOO much of a sinister shade, but once the technology is in place...and more technology on top of that...what then? It'll be an awful lot of power to just deliver into the hands of the next bunch of politicians and bureaucrats. When all they have to do to enforce legislation will be to click a mouse a few times...what laws will they pass? And who will protest when that is deemed to be against the interests of "the people" by...those who are less and less "of the people".

Does this sound a little too paranoid? I know, but I've watched things come to pass that I thought would never happen. So will I see the people of America, and Europe, for that matter, having to take drastic measures to remind their democratically elected leaders who put them in the seat of power?

"Green" technology?

Well what about Linux taking top spot then? It has been installed on a potato after all... (http://www.bbspot.com/news/2008/12/linux-on-a-potato.html)

Hopefully they're serious about protecting this data properly...

...But I do think this is quite a serious concern. Not just about the data falling into the wrong hands, but about the hands that currently holding it. They seem very eager to make money out of it. Hopefully the Pound symbols in their vision aren't large enough to cloud their view of their stated commitment to safeguard this information. They will need to hold the applicants for such data to very high standards of security, under pain of very severe penalties. We are talking about CHILDREN, and Britain will be in a sadder state than some think if they let ill come to them trying to make money off of data collected about them.

This is the great thing about Linux...

If you don't like a desktop...install another one :)

Fedora can be had with KDE, XFCE, and LXDE, besides GNOME, all interchangeable at the click of the mouse :)

I've personally been liking KDE for a while now, even before the changes in GNOME. Sure its been through a couple changes but nothing so drastic and disturbing as GNOME 3. I tried GNOME, and the changes look good I suppose, but it doesn't seem such a great actual IMPROVEMENT.

So I hope the GNOME people can do something to rescue the situation. Maybe just work on the UI and focus on making it better to use until people love it again and flock back. But I will carry on using KDE and trying out others...

I laughed.

I laughed all the way through this story. How arrogant of Apple to march into another country, and for "Apple's lawyers decided iFone's Mexican Class 38 mark wasn't being actively used, and they filed a lawsuit to try and get it canceled so they could register their own pending Class 38 mark on 'iPhone.' " (as per the article referenced by darkpill, comment 22).

Who cares if the don't use their brand name? They registered it! It's THEIRS! I'm sure if some company started selling something in the US, and they wanted to use a name for it similar to one of Apple's trademarked names, Apple would soil their pants and start yelling.

As it has been pointed out, Apple clearly thought they could get away with whatever they wanted, until a judge with little regard for Apple's PERCEIVED "coolness" (I've never found Apple to be especially cool...) smacked them down: "But the petition was denied after authorities found that iFone - a provider of software for call centers - had registered its trade name in Mexico in 2003, four years before Apple did. Read more: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2012/11/01/apple-loses-iphone-case-in-mexico/#ixzz2B9m5xeD6).

Clearly being nurtured in Steve Jobs' reality distortion field hasn't prepared Apple for the realities of doing business in coutries that don't think America is the be-all-and-end-all...

Yawn

Tim Cook dismisses the competition and promotes Apple products as better?! Really?! No way!

Of course the he would say so. I don't expect him to say anything else. And I don't much mind anything he says, all he's trying to do is sell more Apple stuff, which will get more cash flowing into his pocket. Tim Cook isn't omniscient, and that means that whatever he said isn't the final word. The final word is yours and mine when we strip away all the subjective promotion of products by measuring everyone' products against the others and Thinking Different to what Qpple would have you think.

Wow. A CEO praising his company's products. amazing.

"I think people, when they look at the iPad versus competitive offerings," he said, "are going to conclude they really want an iPad."

They don't always, Mr. Cook. That's why the competition exists...

It seems that Apple soesnt like competition it seems, that they feel once they walk into a market, all the current players there should just leave. But Apple claims that they want innovation in the market, just not the way Apple has always innovated, by "stealing great ideas." Grab someone else's IP, make it shiny, and patent it as your own. They didn't patent it, so its fair game. Apple patents it, so anything anyone else does better not even RESEMBLE it. The shiny won't win everyone over. It won't win over people who "Think Different," since Apple is now the major influence to differentiate from (no wonder we don't hear that slogan anymore).

It won't win over people who can't afford it. That's why Android and even Symbian dominate the market in China, for example.

It won't win over all the people who have just never been big fans of Apple. As Apple's lawyers claimed a while ago to an Australian court, once a customer uses a Galaxy phone or tablet, Apple feels they've "lost them forever." As El Reg pointed out, that sounds like Apple doesn't believe their product will withstand competition. This reveals something important: Apple isn't a company that makes something vastly superior and more advanced. They make tech that's appealing to people who couldn't be bothered to understand tech. That's why Steve Wozniak said he gets more out of Android because you can configure it more, whereas iPhone is for people who just want it to work.

What is all this about? Just that people shouldn't be taken in by the shiny just because Tim Cook says its the best. He isn't going to say anything else.

This is a sad day.

I have experienced Symbian a few times, such as on my 5800 Xpress Music. It wasn't awesome, but it was simple, it worked, and I enjoyed it. I'd love to see Symbian, or its successor rise from these ashes and become something that will truly challenge Apple, Microsoft and Google, because then 1.) we'll have another good smartphone OS, and 2.) those manufacturers will be under more pressure to give us better software experiences, which will be good for everyone.

I really hope this isn't the last we see of an OS that has more potential than Nokia seems to have credited it with.

The vendor has simply identified a way to "make more money"?!

Really, is that what they were trying to do?! How novel! Like MS has never tried to milk their customers before, like when they sold us the SAME TRASH TWICE with Windows 98 and ME!

And is anybody really falling for "These CAL changes include a user-based option that offers MORE VALUE in support across unlimited devices and SIMPLIFIES LICENSING MANAGEMENT and compliance as devices in the workplace proliferate," stated Microsoft"?!

They're only more valuable now because MS sells more of them and has inflated the price to make money they weren't making on device access CALs.

Of course it isn't illegal for a company to raise a price to try maximize profit, but I just get very annoyed when they do. Especially after introducing the product at a lower price (without saying its an "introductory offer").

I've had no trouble with Windows 7, I'm using it now as I type, but Windows 8 is imminent, and I wonder if that's got something to do with the sudden price increase.

I can imagine the appeal exchange:

Apple: "How can you deny us a win here after we won in California?!"

Tokyo Court: "What does a ruling in the United States have to do with Japan?"

Apple: "It should set precedent in all US states..."

Tokyo Court: "Japan is not a US state..."

Apple: "Is the court certain of that? And is the court willing to risk...thermonuclear war to prove it?!"

Tokyo Court: "That red, Apple-shaped button in your brief case isn't even connected to anything! I charge you with contempt of court!"

Apple: "And I charge you with contempt of Apple!"

Yet another example...

...Of Apple taking something someone else has done (once again, as per Steve Jobs in 1996, "shameless about stealing great ideas") and using it as their own without a care for the true owners of that IP. They did it with the SBB clock, and they did it here...and they did it at Xerox way back when. The difference here is that the creators of these items of IP made sure they owned the rights to them.

Now Apple is getting some of their litigious medicine. Good.

I agree with Mr. Wozniak.

Apple is obviously arrogant (for example, the back-pedal on 7 inch (or at least sub-10 inch) display size). The iPhone 5 is not the leap forward everyone was expecting. Apple's map app has quickly achieved notoriety for being legendarily bad. The increase in screen size stikes me as being a concession to the popularity the large screens of other phones.

The iPhone 5 was the phone Apple HAD to bring out to try compete with the Galaxy S3 and other excellent Android driven iPhone challengers by other manufacturers. So to tighten the screws on their customers, they introduce a new connector size. Why? What was wrong with the old one? But now everyone who buys the iPhone 5 will have to buy all new spare chargers and cables.

Oh well...

...Samsung will hopefully be able to use their chips in their own phones and tables, with at least some of the injunctions against which being set to be overturned by the US Court of Appeals...

Thank you US Court of Appeals!

Common sense has prevailed in Apple's "thermonuclear" war of litigation, and an innovation-stifling nuclear winter of Apple's shiny-shiny selling in a competition-free environment has been avoided :D

Now, all that needs to be done is for tech companies to truss up their IP withpatents so that their are no "great ideas" for Apple to "shamelessly steal" (as per a 1996 interview with Steve Jobs: so its ok for Apple to take other peoples ideas, not ok for anyone else...) And Apple will find thenselves really having to invent something on their own.

Another Patent Land-grab...

...This time covering technology to prevent their precious shiny-shiny phones from looking like...phones ;)

Also, how much electricity do these PDLC windows use?

Because there will be at least three or four on a phone, and they'll be used quite often, so unless power consumption is truly minute, you'll see a further measurable drain on battery charge. Great idea Apple ;D

Appears to be unique?

I was going to point out that IBM has loaded high end code onto lower end hardware with the Storwize V7000 (running SVC code), but I see I've been beaten to it :)

And regarding IBM's storage sucking...they were contracted to build a 120PB, 200,000 disk storage array for an unnamed customer (probably the military or some such), and they're also getting the business for the Square Kilometre Array storage, which will have to ingest AN EXABYTE A DAY (and sift through that to figure out WHAT to store, and what to get rid of, and THEN possibly deduplicate and/or compress what it WILL store). No tenders or bids were put out, they just went straight to IBM...so how much do they really suck then?

Ridiculous.

This is exactly the kind of thing that has prompted me to resolve never to buy an Apple product. Apple became what they are through stealing a great idea from Xerox way back when, and passing it off as their own. And that's what they've done with the iPhone. The same design elements can be observed in other products by other manufacturers before the iPhone was launched, but Apple patented them, and now wants to hold the entire smartphone and tablet industry to ransom over it.

The Register ran quite a funny April Fools Day story, reporting that Apple was trying to patent the rectangle. The fact that I wondered for a few minutes whether it really was true is a measure of how ridiculous Apple's hyper-litigious activities are. The Register also reported elsewhere (not in jest) that a market analyst was warning that Apple's legal "thermonuclear war" would prompt other tech firms and manufacturers to innovate and engineer away and around Apples patents and IP, in effect DEVALUING them. Apple really is begging for this to happen with this ridiculous legal overkill.

And I think the rest of the smartphone and tablet industry should do just that: engineer, innovate and do the same patent land-grab that Apple has until they have nowhere to go with their design except the same old thing, until it hits the eyes of consumers like the shape of a bar of soap. And when they complain and ask why, we can just remind them that that's what they asked for.