Apple has released iPhone software v1.0.1. You can download it by attaching your iPhone to your iTunes installation, then clicking on the ‘Check for Update’ button.
MacWorld notes that if you have a hacked iPhone, you’ll need to restore it before applying the update. If this is any sign of things to come, this is how Apple will keep the iPhone platform unhacked: by making future software upgrades painful to the point where hacking just isn’t worth the effort if constant restorations will be necessary to keep up with the system software.
How painful is painful? Again from Macworld:
And be doubly warned: “restoring from a backup” exposes the fact that iTunes doesn’t necessarily back up all of your iPhone data. For example, after I restored my iPhone, I’ve discovered that my “backup” doesn’t remember my e-mail account settings, my Phone favorites, my camera roll, my SMS history, my Wi-Fi passwords and remembered networks, all my Notes… (Your mileage may vary widely based on your backups and your sync settings.)
So don’t update on an empty stomach, is what I’m saying. And have plenty of spare time on your hands.
This will be interesting to watch pan out. Apple has to handle this carefully lest it risk a Draconian image in the hands of the nerd elite.
The original creator of “The Simpsons,” Matt Groening, teaches you to create your own accurate renditions of Homer and his clan. A loving homage to classic 2-D animation and hand-drawn characters, this guide offers insights, reference sketches, hints and step-by-step instructions; the doodling begins the moment you open its cover. Hardcover; 128 pages.
My only concern is that this might require some shred of manual artistic talent, of which I have zero.
More than anything, the laws of group psychology govern the stock market, as people fall victim to groupthink and react like a gigantic infantile mass.
The reason for today’s 4+% drop is the rumor that Apple is cutting production of either the iPod or iPhone. There’s very little evidence here either way, but that doesn’t stop investors from pissing themselves.
Some investors are speculating that Cupertino-based Apple is reducing production of either its popular iPod music players or the iPhone, perhaps by as much as 50 percent, said Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray Cos. in Minneapolis.
“People are going crazy without knowing anything definitive, and those fears are swinging the shares,” said Munster, who has rated Apple “outperform” since June 2004. “If it is an iPod production cut, that’s a good thing because it’s a sign a new iPod is coming,” Munster said in an interview today.
Clearly, the iPhone side of the rumor has the most speculative payload: the implication there is that the iPhone is doing so poorly that Apple has to ramp down production to accommodate flagging demand.
I’ll guarantee you right here and now that isn’t what’s happening.
More likely, the iPod line is due for a shake up, and nobody really knows what that might look like yet. There are rumors of a 6G iPod coming very soon, but nothing is substantiated. Then there’s the mysterious low guidance provided by Peter Oppenheimer for Apple’s next fiscal quarter. Oppenheimer cryptically cites a “product transition that he can’t get into” as part of the reason for the lower-than-expected guidance.
To me, all of this says iPod shakeup. Big-ass iPod shakeup. I think the new iPod will look a lot like the iPhone (read: multi-touch interface), and will cost more to produce. As the cost basis of this new generation of iPods will be higher than the old models, margins will be slimmer and thus the lower guidance.
Or, scenario B: Apple is moving the ITMS to a subscription-based model. This would very likely have an impact on the way Apple recognizes revenue.
Or, if you want a terribly unlikely fringe story, here’s scenario C: the iPod as we know it is being phased out in favor of the iPhone. What this means is that Apple is ready to diversify the iPhone product line earlier than anyone expected, thinking that the days of the standalone music player are dead. Under this model, Apple would want to move everyone to its latest converged device as soon as possible, which would have multiple models at various pricepoints as early as this Fall.
My money rides on the thinner margin theory: there’s a new iPod coming whose margins, due to higher production cost and more advanced hardware, are much lower than what Apple enjoys now.
Extra bonus speculation: I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Mac mini killed outright and new Macs introduced (iMac, MacBook Thin (ultraportable)) whose margins are similarly lower due to higher production costs.
Regardless, today’s market dip for AAPL is so amazingly speculative that it represents, for the astute medium-term investor, a great buying opportunity.
On Wall Street, the wisdom of crowds is anything but.
For reasons unbeknownst to be at the time, I grew up with four cats, which I cleverly named in matching pairs: Sugar, Spice, Thunder and Lightning. Back then, when I was nine years old, this with the national criteria for genius and the most reliable harbinger for future success (that and creating small musical instruments out of soap), so wipe that smirk off your face RIGHT NOW.
It’s because of my extensive experience with cats that I am allowed (and qualified) to say this, which unfolds into part of my destiny: cats are evil. Many of you who are mysteriously and self-destructively still drawn to cats will argue this, and that’s fine, because you don’t know any better. One day you will though, and you will look back on this post — which you should cut out and place, folded, in your pillowcase as a ward against nocturnal cat evil — and think yourself a fool for not having listened.
If you’re more empirically-minded, you might need more than my deep, intuitive knowledge that cats will eventually spiral you into a haze of depression and regret. If so, no worries.
Oscar is a cat who, like other felines, is drawn to human misery and despair. Once drawn to such elements, Oscar exacerbates them, killing his targets. Oscar resides within the dementia unit at Rhode Island’s Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, where he makes his rounds, quietly selecting victims and sending them off into the nether.
After about six months, the staff noticed Oscar would make his own rounds, just like the doctors and nurses. He’d sniff and observe patients, then sit beside people who would wind up dying in a few hours.
Dosa said Oscar seems to take his work seriously and is generally aloof. “This is not a cat that’s friendly to people,” he said.
First off, let me clarify: no cat is friendly to people once the kitten stage is done. Calling a grown cat aloof is no different than calling water wet — completely and wholly redundant.
Strangely, the nurses and parents of the victims at Steere House have developed a fondness for this cat that skulks around and kills people who otherwise could be enjoying bingo or gumming a bagel. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, as any horror movie fan knows that the greatest evil is extremely adept at deception. In fact, before industrial pollution came to be such a problem in Western and European civilizations, cats could shapeshift to hide their intentions — and very beings — much more readily.
Thankfully, cats have devolved away from their inherent demonic form, so in this sense they are more earthly now than they ever have been during the course of human history. What this means is that now is the time to strike, to begin the uprising, to help blueberries finally weave their way into the fabric of humanity’s salvation, but that’s out of scope for this blog post.
Chances are you’re shaking your head, slowly backing away from the computer, refusing to believe what you are reading. Need more proof, do you?
If Oscar really is a furry grim reaper, it’s also possible his behavior could be driven by self-centered pleasures like a heated blanket placed on a dying person, Dodman said.
There’s a shocker: a cat acting in accordance with self-centered pleasures like a warm blanket and, oh I don’t know, DYING PEOPLE.
Because I have such keen, otherwordly insights into the minds and designs of cats, I am immune to their powers. However you are not and I fear for you. It is with your safety in mind — NAY, YOUR VERY LIFE — that I provide this warning to you, cleverly disguised as a daily blog post, because, as you probably don’t know, cats have a spiritual aversion to blogs.
You have to go now. Protect yourself. Get to the bunker, find the shotgun, and prepare. The Reckoning is imminent.
I’m a sucker for good optical illusions, and this one is the best I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a silhouette of a spinning woman, and at first glance it looks as though she’s spinning clockwise. After some staring at her, though, she appears to reverse direction and spin counterclockwise.
It doesn’t happen easily though — it take some focus. For me, the easiest way to get her to flop directions is to stare at her shadow, specifically the passing shadow of her extended foot. Within moments, she’ll be going in the other direction.
She all crazy.
Careful, though: if you stare at her too long, your brain gets all wonky and has a hard time conceiving her in the opposite direction. Once I got her to flip a few times to counterclockwise, I had a hard time getting her back to clockwise. Again, the shadow trick helps.
I’m just going to hypothesize that it was a bad move that the owners of the ‘Servicio Del Hosteleria Industial de Terrassa’ decided to condense their shop’s name into an acronym on their exterior sign.
There is a new System Preferences icon in the newest Leopard build, and it’s nice. Real nice. Dutch design student Sebastiaan de With created an almost-replica — because actually providing the .ICNS file from Leopard would be evil, naughty Zoot — and posted it for download. iPhone owners will recognize this new icon instantly.
Also, this is the first time ever the Apple System Preferences icon has been updated, as far as I can remember.
(Like many others, I’m a guy who went out and got the Leopard ‘blades of grass’ wallpaper immediately after it was shown at WWDC, so infer from this what you will.)
This either Nick Cage acting very well or very poorly. Sometimes, with him, it’s hard to tell. And by sometimes I mean most of the time.
The film is the modern remake of the 1973 movie The Wicker Man, which I haven’t seen. Not sure if I will, given this hilarious and stupid and awesome and tense and incredible and abstract and creepy and silly scene mashup.
Have you seen it? What’s the verdict? Is it better than Shyamalan’s The Village?
I don’t know if I should laugh or cry (probably both) at this essay by an 8th grader in Pittsburgh. The idea was to choose an endangered species, then write about why you should save it and what you can do to help its plight.
But astute student Richard XXXXXXX has another idea:
I shouldn’t do shit. I don’t care about them they all
could die and it won’t affect my life. I know a lot about them
but I don’t need to think about them. They’re just a waste of
time koalas are stupid they don’t help me with shit so why
should I help them. If they all die there will be more room for
the panthers and all the other hard animals. Koalas are weak a
pit will get rid of their whole fucking family. That’s why I
don’t like koalas.
Koalas have sharp claws but they are weak. They all small
and fat and they be climing trees. I hope a storm just come
while theyjust chilling up in the tree thinking they is hard and
they’re will all just fall off. They just break they neck and
shit. When they fall they claws are going to fall off and they
going to be crying like some little bitches.
Koalas aren’t hard they some little bitches.
Formatting and grammar have been maintained to preserve flavor and that faint aroma of meat.
A great many people entrust Google with everything these days. And that trust is growing, happily exchanged and rationalized by the convenience Google technology brings us. We happily store our bits on unseen Google servers, and they’re out of mind while we enjoy web applications that we can access from any computer in the world.
But that data is there, waiting to be used, mashed-up, applied to something other than pedestrian computing tasks. Can it?
It’s been discussed many times over what could happen if Google’s data was used for the wrong purpose, by the wrong person. (Of course, the ultimate ‘wrong person’ is Google itself, but let’s avoid The Terminator scenario for now.)
Slate has a video created by filmmaker Scott Blaszak that depicts an overly-fictitious example of what Google’s technology could be used for when put into the wrong hands. Yes, this is over the top, and yes, it’s wildly dramatic, but the point is made — all too well.
Google’s cameras are everywhere these days. They photograph us from space, and now even from street level in some cities. This got filmmaker Scott Blaszak musing about how Google’s technology could cause big trouble in the wrong hands. Here’s his fictional video short Happy Anniversary.
WARNING: Some viewers may find this video disturbing.
We may not be at the stage that Blaszak’s video depicts yet, but that’s cold comfort. The reality is that we one day will be. What then?
A Cook County, Illinois resident has filed a class action lawsuit against Apple and AT&T over the iPhone.
Jose Trujillo is claiming that Apple and AT&T misled iPhone buyers by not clearly informing them that the iPhone battery was sealed, and could only be professionally replaced.
Yeah. Too bad the iPhone battery issue (which does suck, by the way) was publicized all over the place before its launch. Oh, and the fact that Apple even talks about it needing to be replaced on its website.
Failure ahoy.
This is not the way I’d want to spend my 15 minutes.
Imagine sitting across from someone and whipping a beachball at his face. If you hit him in the face, you get to throw again. You keep doing so until you miss. When you do, he gets his chance to fire a ball into your grill. He keeps going until he misses. Each direct hit scores a point for the thrower.
That’s one round. You play five. The guy with the most points after all five rounds wins.
Another Apple earnings call, another blowout quarter. The consistency of stellar results is staggering. It’s to the point where if the results are merely good the stock will tank in after hours. The expectation of excellence is firmly ingrained in The Street.
(Where are the morons who told me to sell at $120 now? You think this is a fundamental analysis stock? That stuff is dead. Get on the train or miss the ride altogether.)
Let’s Start With the Basics
Apple announced that its third quarter profits jumped 73% to 818 million, or $0.92 PDS, on sales of $5.41 billion. These results compare to revenue of $4.37 billion and net quarterly profit of $472 million, or $.54 PDS, for the same quarter last year. Gross margin was 36.9 percent, up from 30.3 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 40% of the quarter’s revenue.
So, profits ridiculously up, sales up, EPS up. All lights blindingly green.
So Much for the Notion That the iPhone is Killing the Mac
Not happening. Like, at all.
Apple saw Mac shipments spike 33% versus the year-ago quarter and shatter the previous company record for Mac shipments by some 150K units. Apple also sold 9.815 million iPods during the quarter, which boils down to 21% growth.
I began wondering this when I first heard that Microsoft is eating nearly 2 billion bucks after it decided to extend the Xbox 360’s warranty to cover all of the failing Xbox 360 units. As it stands today, 1 in 3 Xbox 360s are experiencing failures. Mine hasn’t so far, but it hasn’t exactly seen heavy usage either. Or I got lucky. We’ll see.
(Another datapoint: GigaOM relays a story about a gentleman named Brian who had nine 360s fail on him. Nine. That’s bad in an of itself, but the fact that this Brian chap is Brian Crecente, editor of the world’s most popular gaming site Kotaku, really provides some schadenfreude ammo. If you’re into such things.)
The second thing that makes me go ‘hmm’ is the fact that the Nintendo Wii — you know, late-arriving, underpowered, gimmicky, not serious, not-so-next-gen next gen console — is kicking all sorts of ass and jotting down names. How much ass is experiencing kicking? Consider the fact that the Wii has an installed base of 9.36 million, which is right behind the 360’s 10.15 million. That seems a fair fight until you realize the Wii achieved that number in under one year, while the 360 took two years to build that audience.
You don’t need predictive analysis software to determine that the Wii will dwarf the 360 in short order.
The third thing I proffer along these things is anecdote: everyone’s looking for a Wii. Everyone I know wants a Wii, even the more hardcore gamers. To this day, you still can’t find Wiis easily. I literally lucked out and found mine.
Too bad this doesn’t morph into a national parking asshole registry, complete with names, addresses, and proximity to where you live. People who park like total fucks with zero consideration for others need to be exposed by a service like this.
I saw this a long time ago and was recently re-acquainted with it via Mental Floss. Like MF, I can’t believe this hasn’t made an appearance on GF yet.
Exec summary: an 8-ton beached whale is decomposing in the summer sun, attracting onlookers and emitting hellstench. How to dispose of it? Can’t bury it, nobody wants to cut it up into tiny chunks so…dynamite, of course. A half-ton of it. Placed somewhat randomly around the carcass by a guy who admits he doesn’t know how much TNT it will take to disintegrate the creature.
Time has a fascinating photo essay depicting what various cultures around the world eat in a given week. As someone who strongly believes that — at least here in America — the abuse of food, lack of nutrition education and willingness of food conglomerates to trick you out of your money and make food decisions as hard as possible for you, this sort of thing interests me.
I try to hold to a fairly basic precept about food as I approach 40: eat real food, pay more for it, eat less of it. The least celebrated foods are often the ones that are the best for you; if you did your shopping around the perimeter of a grocery store, you’d do reasonably well assuming you have a modicum of knowledge of what to get and avoid. The middle aisles? Not so much. Good luck; you’ll need it.
The American diet is a celebration of an entrenched commercial sugar culture: almost every American is consuming sugar at a simply ridiculous rate. Processed foods are engineered to taste good, invoke cravings, and suppress ‘fullness’ instincts so that consumers eat more. It’s a ratrace whose main attraction is ongoing experimentation by food conglomerates about to get you to eat as much of their product as you can and wanting to do it again and again.
In America, I’d argue that we routinely trade our health for convenience and engineered flavor. You don’t need to look much past our skyrocketing cancer, obesity and heart disease rates for validation.
Looking at these pictures, I can’t help but be envious of the cultures to stick to a native diet: something simple, regional, pure. Food in these diets is often whole, obtained at local outlets and minimally processed (if at all). I really think Dr. Weston A. Price was on to something.
(This is not to say that I don’t like a fine steak and bottle of Hope Estate The Ripper every now and again, but I’m fairly dogmatic about eating pure foods that are what they’re supposed to be — not what some food chemist engineered them to be.)
It’s generally a law of economics that most truly horrible product ideas die in utero, as they require investment of real dollars to move from concept to reality. As the checkbooks come out, the concept gets challenged until such time that it lives or dies. Yes, we see some pretty bad stuff on the market, but that’s nothing compared to what we could see if there wasn’t a financial weeding mechanism.
So, how this product actually got into coding and, presumably, some state of functionality is beyond me.
What’s the market here? Second-lifers and Sims fans? Adolescent boys? Surfers? Moron rapper-wannabees who think they live in South Beach?
And get a load of the opening voiceover line: “There’s an email world beyond the one we know, where every message is exciting, and every minute is an adventure…”
Someone please tell me this is a joke or, at best, some silly proof-of-concept and that there’s really no market for this.
New print ad for the iPhone, running across several publications. This particular image ran on the back of the 23 July 2007 issue of the The New Yorker, but it’s also running in Newsweek, National Geographic, The Economist, Entertainment Weekly and the New York Times magazine.
If any tech company’s marketing isn’t one of the last bastions of unchecked corporate spending, it’s Apple’s. They know how to do it.
I couldn’t write this if I sat down for 30 years and tried.
The Washington Post via Yahoo:
It started about midnight on June 16 when a group of friends was finishing a dinner of marinated steaks and jumbo shrimp on the back patio of a District of Columbia home. That’s when a hooded man slid through an open gate and pointed a handgun at the head of a 14-year-old girl.
“Give me your money, or I’ll start shooting,” he said, according to D.C. police and witnesses.
Everyone froze, including the girl’s parents. Then one guest spoke.
“We were just finishing dinner,” Cristina “Cha Cha” Rowan, 43, told the man. “Why don’t you have a glass of wine with us?”
The intruder had a sip of their Chateau Malescot St-Exupery and said, “Damn, that’s good wine.”
The girl’s father, Michael Rabdau, 51, told the intruder to take the whole glass, and Rowan offered him the whole bottle.
The robber, with his hood down, took another sip and a bite of Camembert cheese. He put the gun in his sweatpants.
The story then turns even more bizarre.
“I think I may have come to the wrong house,” he said before apologizing. “Can I get a hug?”
Rowan, who works at her children’s school and lives in Falls Church, Va., stood up and wrapped her arms around the armed man. The four other guests followed.
First thought: now there’s a robber with very little personal conviction.
Robber: “Gimme your fucking money or I start shooting!”
Dinner Guest: “Wine?”
Robber: “Sure, don’t mind if I do.” <sip>
…
Robber: “You guys are aces. Hug?”
If he were testing for his Robber License, he failed.
Second thought: that’s the coolest, most shrewd gaggle of dinner guests ever. I’m betting we’ll read about how they actually took the robber’s wallet sometime over the next few days. And how the robber is totally cool with it.
I’ve been buried at work for the past few days to a nauseating degree (yet another reason you should start thinking about buying a GF tee-shirt when I design them: so I can do this gig full time), so the updates have been scarce. My apologies.
In the meantime, because things will get moving again soon, please consider subscribing to GF if you haven’t done so already. You can do that by clicking on this alphanumeric string of utter magic. Or, alternatively, you can click on the garish orange square at the top right of GF’s front page.
Also, if you are a Twitter user and want to follow my updates, I’m right here.
On Facebook? I am now, too. Check me out and add me as a friend if you’re so inclined.
Okay then.
This concludes this shameless bout of self-promotion. I now return you to wondering where the hell real posts are.
If you want all of them (and you do), you can get the collection in a handy ZIP as well.
Note: these are wallpaper images for the iPhone, not of the iPhone. These aren’t sized for your Mac/PC desktop.
Storey is a fantastic designer and I approached him earlier about doing GF’s design work. If you’re not familiar with Airbag, I suggest you check it out.
Christian fundamentalists interrupt a Hindu Senate invocation.
The most surreal thing about this is the manufactured, robotic fashion in which the Senate speaker (not the Hindu priest) tries to restore order to the chamber. It takes longer than you would think to silence the screaming extremists.
Anyway, let’s hear it for Christians furthering the nutball Christian stereotype. I can hear the moderates saying, “Well, I’d never do that.” That’s fine and well, but members of your religion — the very same one to which you claim to belong — are ruining your image and undermining any credibility you have left. For a religion that in moderate social circles claims to preach tolerance, this is living by example?
Dogmatic anything doesn’t get very far in the cold light of day.
