By Graham K. Rogers

Opening Gambit:

Apple Stuff

Despite the problems with one Korean company (see below), Katie Marsal on AppleInsider writes that Apple has apparently been in talks with carriers in Seoul who are sort of ready to offer LTE (Long Term Evolution), which some call 4G for new iPhones. As the technology has become more focused, this may convince Cupertino the time is ripe.

I am not convinced still about the iPad mini or whatever this smaller device Apple is supposedly making is to be called, however John Gruber who knows a lot about Apple Land, thinks that there is more than a possibility now and he has a fairly interesting analysis about the device.

To add to the apparent proof that this device is on its way, Sarah Silbert on Endgadget has an item on parts for the device that have been seen and photographed: a dock connector flex cable that connects the smaller dock connector, headphone jack and home button connector.

The Apple TV rumours took a slight last week when it was decided by speculation that this was not a real television but a sort of set top box that delivered content from the cloud and that Apple was in talks with several companies about that content.

Many of the reports center on a claim by Jessica E. Vascellaro and Sam Schechner in Wall Street Journal that the box " includes features designed to simplify accessing and viewing programming and erase the distinction between live and on-demand content". Bryan Chaffin adds to this with, "Apple will be offering a DVR that stored TV shows in the cloud," and there would also be social media access. Steven Musil also comments that "Apple had been in talks with cable operators in the U.S. to pitch its $99 streamer as an alternative to the set-top boxes cable subscribers rent." While Sean Hollister on The Verge also had some input.

Of course, all this is irrelevant to those outside the United States although some deals might be made country by country at a later stage, particularly with European companies. Thailand? Forget it.

While I saw the news earlier in the week about the burglary of Steve Jobs's home, I decided not to put anything online then. However, Katie Marsal reports that the suspects arranged for themselves to be caught by turning on Steve's hardware (an iPad) and the location software (Find my iPad?) gave the game away.

You would think that thieves hitting the home of the late CEO of Apple would have an inkling that the boss would have things set up properly. What they took was two iMacs, three iPads, three iPods, an Apple TV and some other expensive stuff. The thief claims he did not know whose house it was, but among the stuff was the wallet with Steve's papers inside, so he sure knew by then.

I am working my way through system preferences and will sooner or later get round to Language & Text, but in the meantime, a couple of articles have highlighted an interesting feature that was there in 10.7 but a lot of people missed, including me. OS X Daily reports that in the text panel we can select shortcuts: that much I knew and put in my PDF of System Preferences last year. There is an ADD feature (the + icon) and with this we can define our own shortcuts. I do this already with a nice utility from Plum Amazing who also develop iWatermark, called yType. There is only one problem with the Apple preferences feature, it only works in certain applications. Text Edit is OK, the 3rd party TextWrangler is not.

Another useful hint comes from Topher Kessler who writes a lengthy explanation on how to manage Finder aliases. In another article, Topher Kessler also has a look at Flash -- that drag on my resources -- and makes some useful suggestions as to how users may optimise performance (apart from deleting).

More assistance, this time on opening apps that are not from approved developers, comes in an article by Allyson Kazmucha on iMore. I did mention this a couple of weeks ago, but this article has a full text and some useful screen shots.

A lot of people as well as all the iStudio stores in Thailand still have OS X, 10.7.4 on their Macs and a report on MacNN tells us that a version of 10.7.5 has been sent out to developers for testing prior to release.

Half and Half

An interesting development was reported by Daniel Eran Dilger on AppleInsider who learnt that Samsung was intending to call the same witness that Motorola had used in a case against Microsoft. With his testimony the idea of a One Bullet to Kill patent was brought in. However, Dilger's report includes the comments of Florian Mueller (Foss Patents) who wrote that he was "by far and away the worst 'expert witness' I've seen."

On Friday morning I read in an item by Mikey Campbell on AppleInsider that Samsung has now concluded its case in the trial with a suggestion that Apple owes it almost half a billion dollars for royalties on patents. Apple now gets another go and will bring in witnesses to rebut Samsung's experts.

A report from Microsoft, as detailed by MacNN, tells users that there are no plans to update the Office suite for Mac to deal with problems that are being found with the applications when used on Retina display computers. The item adds, "Microsoft has yet to add any recent OS X features to Office, including even Versions and Auto Save, which were first introduced with Lion." This tells you more or less all you need to know about Redmond and the advanced state (of decay?) up there.

While not willing to work for Apple users who have bought and paid for the software, Microsoft is ready to go against Apple in a suicidal attempt to claim some of the tablet market with its short on features Surface. There is however one glimmer of hope in the price -- remember the dying embers of the HP TouchPad were reignited when the price was dropped from the same as the iPad to a couple of hundred dollars; and that is where Ballmer's guys are starting: $199 according to a report by Jim Tanous on The MacObserver. A loss for every devices sold will be incurred, but so what if they can brag about numbers. Isn't this what they did with Bing too?

Apple is doomed again. I have lost count of the number of times that the imminent death of Apple has been reported, predicted, or otherwise foretold; but here we are again. John Fidelman on Forbes tells us that Microsoft's Enterprise App Store will be Apple's Demise again and there is nothing to be done. A little bit of denial here rather than from Apple methinks. My source for this was MacDaily News who have a suitably vinegary comment to end plus a load of links that might prove the opposite to what Fidelman thinks.

As a counterpoint to a couple of the items above, an interesting piece of speculation in a lengthy analysis from Taylor Jordan on Seeking Alpha looks at the ways a form of integration between Apple and Microsoft might confound (the common enemy) Google.

Other Matters

Last week the US landed an exploratory craft on the surface of Mars and it has created a lot of interest, although no Martians, nor amazing constructions have been found: at least not yet; although one view looks remarkably like a road or a river. We are told by Chris Oldroyd that those of us with iPhone can view the images from Curiosity including a 360 degree shot. But I was on the Mac when I read that and tried anyway. The page I went to has a Flash image, but that worked fine in Safari. Rotation, vertical motion and zoo, are all possible.

A new graphics card from Nvidia has been released: the GeForce GTX 660 Ti which Nate Ralph reports brings 28nm Kepler architecture down to quite a reasonable price with the cards being priced at $299

I occasionally look at internet freedoms on the internet and have been worried in recent times about the way the UK particularly and other countries seek to control the openness of the system; with some countries whining that the only way to protect us from ............... (insert favourite threat here) is to craft legislation that allows the security forces (a misnomer these days, surely, especially in the UK) total access to everyone's communications: a sort of policeman's wet dream.

Noe the UK looks as if it is overstepping the mark as the Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange who has just been granted political asylum by Ecuador (confirmed by Jeanne Whalen and Paul Sonne on All Things Digital), has been holed up in their London embassy for a few weeks and the UK government is getting cross. He jumped bail and there is an extradition warrant out for him for an alleged couple of misdeeds in Sweden involving large blonde women and broken condoms.

The opinion on the street (and in Assange's mind) is that once he is on a plane to Sweden, the US will step in an demand extradition across the Atlantic for spying and he will end up in darkened cells with Bradley Manning for ever and a day, like others who have disappeared into the black hole of extradition to the United States. As many have noted, it is not a two-way street.

Now the UK government (losing face with an impatient US) is upping the ante and are allegedly going to use some legislation that allows them to declare the Ecuadorian embassy not an embassy, which will allow the boys in blue to rush in with their special door breakers and grab Assange. Legal or not, bending the rules like that to make them apear to be acting legally, will not go down well in some quarters and may well backfire on the government -- and some of its citizens -- in the future.

Some of the background on this is in an item by Zack Whittacker who includes some useful information on just how legal (or moral) this possible decision by William Hague -- because it only needs a Minister's say-so -- might be. As no other country has ever broken into an embassy (to the best of my knowledge -- the US Iranian embassy was raided by zealots initially -- this may well set a dangerous precedent.

As a note, from Twitter messages, it looks as if the film director, Michael Moore may be on the scene, so we may expect some interesting footage and confrontational comments if things do turn sour.

Also on freedoms is a decision concerning tracking of criminals by using their cell-phones. While another court earlier decided that placing devices on a car was not lawful, Don Reisinger reports that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit says that if the GPS is in the phone, then the police are not overstepping the bounds by making use of it: " the feature is built directly into cell phones, and thus doesn't require physical interaction on the part of law enforcement." Another report on this by Adi Robertson was carried on The Verge.

There was a bit of a ripple a few months ago when the State Department announced it was buying lots of Kindles in a no-bid contest. The tablets were intended for use in overseas language programs and the cost was said to be $16.5 million. Now Electronista report that the no-bid contract has been canceled and there will be a more normal acquisition process. Part of the decision was due to excessive cost. Why does Amazon get so many breaks from the US government?

An oddity this week comes from Harvard Medical School who, Evan Rodgers reports, have managed to encode an entire book in DNA. The results suggest that, "DNA is not only a viable digital storage medium, but that it offers a much higher density than a conventional hard drive." It costs too much right now, but this is the stuff movies are made of and we already had one in which Keanu Reeves used his brain as a storage device: Johnny Mnemonic.

Late News

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.