By Graham K. Rogers

Opening Gambit:

Apple Stuff

With some publishers running scared and settling with the DoJ, Apple and a couple of others refused to do this and a fight was expected. However Aaron Souppouris on The Verge writes about a shift from Apple and friends that will make changes to the way pricing is done and this may satisfy the EU. Perhaps.

I wonder what it would take to have the EU or DoJ take a real look at Amazon pricing, especially as it relates to purchases made by those outside the EU and US? Maybe because some people who buy from Amazon are outside these legislative centers, it is easy for Amazon to slap extra charges on them and just get away with it. For more on this, see Local Items below.

Although we are used to the rumours about the iPhone 5 and whatever it may be, Peter Ha reports on Tech Crunch about a new story that has appeared from the direction of Vietnam -- Foxconn has a factory there -- about redesigned earbuds. Try and copy these, Samsung.

I also see the same rumour in an article on AppleInsider and like the Tech Crunch item there is a video, but more pics: rather convincing too.

We are told in a report from Megan Lavey-Heaton that Apple has added a form in the Developer site so that any examples of intellectual property infringement may be reported.

There are also more reports on what may be coming in iOS 6 which should be with us by the end of this month. Rene Ritchie writes about the Do Not Disturb and Remind me Later features

I like learning new things. I often use the Console, a utility that can be found in the Utilities folder of Applications on OS X. There is lots of information in the logs that are available there to assist with some troubleshooting. Perhaps too much. Melissa Holt on The MacObserver has made me aware of a feature I did not know existed, the "Ignore Sender" feature. This is not someone communicating, but something: some specific app that created data that goes into the logs. By using this feature, the specific items from one (or more) app can be ignored and a simpler log read.

I learned something else a while back: after years of having a sort of grudging compatibility between file types and disks, a change over at Microsoft (albeit somewhat belated and necessary) meant that the NTFS formatted disks they now used were less compatible for Macs with OS X and were read only. FAT 32 was limited to 4 GB and that is getting thin these days.

Not that I have tried it yet but Paragon Software has developed NTFS for Mac OS X 10 (I presume that is version 10 and not a redundant number) that seems to get round the problem rather neatly and will even allow the formatting of a disk for NTFS.

I mentioned late last week about a fix for a Java insecurity that Oracle rolled out. According to Neil McAllister on The Register, there is a critical flaw in the fix. . . .

Half and Half

However, Samsung is not going to take the defeat easily and is priming lawyers for more action while still churning out lookalike Apple products, which suggests they will have to go a lot further before Cupertino is happy. I also wonder when Apple will cut Samsung adrift in terms of using it as a supplier.

But of course to do that, there has to be a reliable substitute supplier and so far this is looking a bit thin. With the Foxconn investment in Sharp, this was thought to be one area in which Apple might move ahead, but Reiji Mural on Reuters suggests that output is not up to it right now and this may affect the suplies of the iPhone 5. My source for this was MacDaily News.

It seems now to be 2 - 1 to Samsung with the decision by a Japanese court (not known for being great fans of Korea) that Samsung did not infringe on an Apple patent that covers media synchronization between a device and servers, Kelly Hodgkins reports on TUAW. This is actually quite small in the grand scheme of things, but coming after the Korean and San José cases, was pounced on with some glee by certain sections of the press.

Last week we mentioned an item on the Verge about some new Samsung computers and I wrote then about these "Slate computers, which David Pierce [on The Verge] describes as part tablet, part computer. They look remarkably like the MacBook Air in the photo. Why am I not surprised?" John Gruber on Daring Fireball also noticed this and wrote, "how do you run an article about these things without even mentioning that the industrial design is a blatant rip of the MacBook Air?"

With dissembling being a fact of life, we have news this week of more Amazon porkies to join those above (Apple Stuff) and below (Local Items) this time. Amazon are prepping a new Kindle apparently and if it goes as well as the Kindle Fire did when that was announced, this will be as spectacular as the match my dad accidentally dropped into a box of fireworks on 5 November 1960: spectacular but brief.

The headline of the article by Laura Hazard Owen has an implied, "but" hanging there: "Amazon says Kindle Fire makes up 22% of U.S. tablet sales". The "but" is not long in coming and has the flavour of the "whispernet" charge for free downloads that it levies (seriously -- see below).

An interesting opinion piece appeared over the weekend from Tim Bajarin on Time's Techland concerning why Apple has been pushing so many cases in court (although Apple has said it tries to persuade first). Like me he thinks that the Samsung loss is good for us as Samsung will be forced to think for itself (for once?) and maybe new ideas will come from that. However, the interesting part of the article is further down when he tries to understand the reasons Samsung copied, and why Jobs thought Google's Eric Schmidt had betrayed him. MY source for this was MacDaily News.

Other Matters

Simply put, the response was No, and that was Foundation policy. I must admit I would have liked a free one, both from the point of view of writing and to see if there were a chance (slim at best) of orders at our place. I never gave this a thought and ordered mine, joining the queue like everyone else.

The thread is horrifying in one way as the writer wriggles and squirms, all for $35 dollars, but he changes from professor, to student, to newspaper columnist on the way and when things get desperate, out of the blue, brings up anti-semitism. No one saw that one coming.

Something else I bet few saw coming was the way some bloggers from India were flown to the event in Berlin last week by Samsung ostensibly to cover the announcements and the event itself, as Apple had done when I attended MacWorld a couple of times in San Francisco and later a couple of Developers' Conferences too. I would have been ready to cancel, the moment they asked me to measure for clothes as happened to the bloggers, we are told by Brad McCarty on TNW and the real purpose was not to cover the event but to act as Samsung demonstrators.

The kick in the teeth was that having been flown to Germany if they did not do what was wanted, their hotel bills were not covered and there was no flight home. Nice way to garner support from bloggers.

Whatever I wrote about Apple when I went to the conferences or when I had devices or software provided for test, was completely up to me and Apple never grumbled even if I wrote negatives.

Local Items

A bit more news on Richard occurred on Sunday as one of his sites Thailandqa.com was inaccessible from inside Thailand. It could be a host problem, but like others running sites here, sometimes True blocks them for no fathomable reason.

This Monday's Cassandra is a little more brief than usual as I was away at the weekend and part of the reason was a trip to make donations to a school for the blind. I wrote briefly about the trip down and the lack of tech for the weekend, for example while the hotel Wi_fi worked OK in a way, the problem was the broken signal from the IP making downloads a test of patience. The second part for the home leg, the visit to the school and the mega-ride for lunch in the back of beyond, is still cooking

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.