By Graham K. Rogers

Opening Gambit:

Apple Stuff

A somewhat odd item appeared from Henry Blodget this week who complained that the rumoured iPhone 5 -- we mentioned on Monday the pics circulating -- is going to be a dead duck. Not exactly those words, but the term "screwed" figured in the item. A lot of people took exception to this with MacDaily News pointing out that Blodget was permanently banned from the SEC, rounding on his record and pointing out some real facts about the iPhone 4 and 4S which looked identical at first glance. I checked on that point about the SEC and sure enough, part of the SEC report reads,

that Henry Blodget, a former managing director at Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Incorporated and the senior research analyst and group head for the Internet sector at the firm, will be censured and permanently barred from the securities industry, and will make a total payment of $4 million to settle the charges against him.

Would you buy a second-hand car from this man? Well, certainly not a used Internet company.

Also criticising Blodget's comments on the iPhone 5 was Steve Kovach who writes for the same Business Insider and disagrees with the analysis for the same reasons Blodget thinks it is wrong. I am with Kovach on this.

There has been a lot of negative comment on Apple's recent financial results which beat its own guidance, but not the guesses of the greedy Wall Street analysts. In a lengthy analysis of the short- and the long-term outlooks, Seeking Alpha looks at Apple in what it calls a "Fair and Balanced Analysis" and they like what they see, noting

Even with facing headwinds from a strong dollar, a weaker macroeconomic environment and increased sales of lower-margin products, the company still manages to deliver satisfactory performance.

Something some of us have suspected for a while was confirmed in a speech by Jony Ive at the British Embassy, which I presume was the one in Washington and not Bangkok. AppleInsider reports that the company was turned round because Steve Jobs did not focus on the money (compare Microsoft where it is all about the money) and instead concentrated on product quality. The idea that Apple likes to make great products has come through with the devices and software that we use and often they are a long way ahead of the competition. They also feel good in the hands.

Ive's comments are similar to those that were in the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson; and there I also read about some of the care Jobs and Ive used to take over the parts of products that the users never see. That paralleled a story about Jobs' childhood when his father took special care over the back of a fence that would always be out of sight.

While the internet reports that I have seen have been relatively quiet about Mountain Lion problems, the upgrade has not been 100% perfect. I had a Kernel Panic but am not unduly concerned as I know exactly what caused it and I will not be going down that street again. However, a local user was bemoaning the problems he had had and that he needed to download a second time using the Rescue partition (Command + R) and still had some doubts.

I thought this might be a one-off but on Tuesday I met a Mac-using colleague with considerable computing experience on several platforms and he was grumbling about the way Mountain Lion was not a good experience. Why? Drivers.

Drivers? He has a Windows installation and uses VMWare. The penny dropped, sort of as so does the other user, so there may be a difficulty with Macs that have VMWare. The first user was fairly OK as he had a full backup, but I am not sure about my colleague.

As part of my preparations last week and before for the arrival of the Mountain Lion update, I had cleaned up with a version of Disk Warrior. Finding that it was not the latest, I tried to download the most recent and burn a new disk, but the original disk I have -- which must be used to create the new one -- had a defect. I ordered a replacement disk online and that was in my mailbox on Monday afternoon. While the old disk was marked as REV 40 (for version 4.0), the newest disk is REV 1109 and (bless them) I see this is now a DVD. With the old version I needed a CD to make a new disk as the original disk was also a CD. DVDs will be easier to buy in the shops.

The disk contains version 4.4 of Disk Warrior (32-bit) as well as the usual read me files and a PDF manual. There is also a folder of AppleScripts and a brochure for MasterJuggler: a font-handling program.

I now have a new copy of Disk Warrior on my hard disk and will set about creating a new rescue flash drive with Mountain Lion at the weekend.

As a brief note, we are reminded by Steve Sande that yesterday (31 July) was the last day that users could sign into iWork.com and the new way to store or transfer documents is via iCloud. However, this is still experiencing problems and iPodN reports that a number of users are having problems with email: messages vanishing, notes disappearing, aliases gone.We are reassured (the report continues) that all will reappear.

Unrelated (perhaps) are disappearances in my version of Mail on my Mac. I wanted to save a message: specifically one about an iTunes purchase as I always do. I keep all of these in a folder marked iTunes and when I used the "Move to" item in the Message menu of Mail, there was nothing there. Checking in the sidebar I found that all the folders in which I save messages had been truncated under the "On my Mac" item. A click on the Show (Hide) text that appears when the cursor is waved near the item, revealed them all and I am now closer to working as I had been before Mountain Lion came a-prowling.

One of the decisions that I thought helped define the iPad, or at least had the potential to make it a device which would change how we work, was the announcement about The Daily from News Corp.. Brilliant idea, poorly executed, with limited availability at first, and when it was released world-wide, with limited content: a US newspaper might not be of interest to all of us, you know? The iPhone version which arrived later was updated this week I saw, but on Wednesday morning, a report in Electronista tells us that there are to be layoffs at the iOS-only publication and 50 people are to be "let go". From the looks of what is being cut in terms of content, this will not be long in being let go itself.

Apart from not wanting to read the poor content of this publication -- I tried and gave up in some disgust -- my main problem with iPad reading is time. I had to drop the subscription to the New Yorker because I rarely had time to read each issue, and I am finding the same with Motor Sport, a publication I urged to go digital, or at least to provide an iOS version for those of us who cannot find the print version easily. I have read two issues only and I saw that my first 6 months subscription was renewed automatically recently. I had a warning it would occur, but did not cancel. Perhaps I can find some time this weekend.

An interesting late item is the news from Patrix at Ask Different of several new Unix commands. These are listed and explained. As a lot of utilities in OS X are nice interfaces that access the Unix underneath, could we expect some new or refined utilities that make use of these new ones, like "caffeinate" that prevents a system sleeping for a specified amount of time.

Half and Half

In the disagreement between Apple and Samsung, which is going to trial this week in the US, one of the smokescreens from Korea was that they could not have copied from Apple as Sony had already made a device and Samsung says Apple copied from that. Bzzzt. Sarah Perez reports that Apple has produced documents that sow their first designs for the iPhone concept were from 2005, a year before the Sony idea appeared.

The opening statements by both sides in that trial have now been made Electronista reports with Apple showing slides of the similar devices, and Samsung trying to throw sand in the eyes of the jury, and as part of the lawyer's argument, said that while the iPhone did inspire the industry, everybody does it in industry, "and there's nothing wrong with that" which is a question the jury will have to decide.

Not happy that some of the evidence was to be excluded (Apple had some of its evidence excluded too), Samsung took the information to the press and was reprimanded by the Judge. Mikey Campbell on AppleInsider reports that "The judge was reportedly "audibly irritated."

Other Matters

The mistake Twitter claims he made was to circulate the private email of one of the NBC execs, only what he put in was a company email address and one that is available elsewhere, so is not private. A little more on this appeared in an item by Don Reisinger who seems as perplexed as many about the account suspension especially when it seems that rather than NBC complaining about Adams's Tweets, it was Twitter that alerted NBC which puts into doubt some of the claims about user privacy. There was also a lovely follow up from Adams in which he includes his somewhat sarcastic (justifiably so) letter to Twitter, grovelling for his account to be unsuspended.

But Twitter is big these days and Ingrid Lundgren reports that there are apparently more than 500 million users, with a surprising note that Jakarta is one of the cities that Tweets the most.

Having lost considerable market share in the US, HTC pulled out of that market not long ago but now it is withdrawing from South Korea as it is just unable to compete with the Samsung Behemoth there, Adi Robertson reports on The Verge. However, Roger Cheng rallies support by suggesting it is not all doom and gloom (his words) and that HTC is still a strong number 3, although he does mention Research in Motion, Nokia, LG Electronics, and Sony who flew and fell.

Although the report refers to the US, it could just as well have been Thailand and Gregory Ferenstein tells us that injuries to pedestrians that are distracted have increased by a factor of 4. The main problem is texting, but Facebook and video games are also causes of distraction. And that means people have accidents, by walking into poles, cars, ditches and even a black bear (I kid you not -- there is a video of this). Of course as well as pedestrians, the drivers here are notorious for not paying attention and accidents are caused. I have been close myself: not through texting, but being in taxis where the steering wheel is the least concern of the driver: phone in one hand, change gear with the other, steer with the knees.

On Monday we wrote of the awkward position Zynga is currently in, with a poor performance, and questions over insider information with the sale of some 43 million shares, just before those low figures were announced. A sale? Mike Stallings on Seeking Alpha looks at this and suggests that Facebook would be the front runner. However the headline adds a significant, "But . . ." and looks also about the possible sale to Google or Apple. I would add that I feel this is highly unlikely. He adds that if there is not a sale, the company is likely to go the way of the dodo.

Epson announced its financial results for its Q1 2012 period with what appears to be a loss on net sales of $2,349,776,000 for the period. I am not all that good about reading balance sheets.

Local Items

Just to keep everyone up to date, I see that DTAC has still not released any news in its English PR web pages and the last entry is for 13 June this year. Nothing happening at DTAC?

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.