“After the very positive reception to the launch of the Nokia N9, the product is now being rolled out in countries around the world. At this time we will not be making it available in the US. Nokia takes a market by market approach to product rollout, and each country makes its own decisions about which products to introduce from those available. Decisions are based on an assessment of existing and upcoming products that make up Nokia’s extensive product portfolio and the best way in which to address local market opportunities” – Nokia.

Translation: We are not going to jeopardize the Microsoft powered N9 US sales by letting the customers compare a better MeeGo to a worse WP, given the exact same hardware premises.

Microsoft is desperate to first be a challenger in the US market, and only then to be preset in non-US markets. That’s the “market by market approach” Nokia is talking about.

Apart from this, that’s also a confirmation of a hunch: MeeGo powered N9 is by far a better competitor to Android and iOS than WP will ever be. Sometimes, the roots of failure are visible far before the seed is even sowed.

EDITED: Microsoft Nokia plans to launch the N9 with WP, as well, after MeeGo launch.

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Read on.

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BBC has run a test asking from its users to accept the tracking cookies: only 10% of them accepted the damn scripts.

Rory Cellan-Jones about this story: “More ammunition, then, for those who argue that the cookies directive could be fatal for the health of Europe’s web firms“.

Not Europe’s. US’ (Happy 7/4! btw)

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Remember the e-G8 summit in France? No?

How about this one: Whose business is heavily dependent on cookies? E-commerce? No. Users buying stuff don’t really mind being asked each time their username and password; on the contrary, AppStore proves the opposite.

It’s Google and Facebook, guys, how could you miss by that far?!

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“In eight years of operation, there has yet to be a credible claim of data hacking into iTunes or the Apple Store. What happened over the weekend was certainly not that [...]. It contains what appears to be a list 27 user names and encrypted passwords from an SQL database for an online survey  — since taken offline — at the Apple Business Intelligence website. “

He  also publishes the list of the “hacked accounts”:

[27 entries] +—————+ | User          | +—————+ | admin         | | backup        | | bnewcomb      | | bulkmail      | | leung         | | masuo         | | myapp         | | process_super | | rlinton       | | sharp         | | survey        | | web_csat      | | spbidb05      | | status_check  | | survey_slave  | | NULL          | | root          | | NULL          | | admin         | | backup        | | backup_user   | | bnewcomb      | | bulkmail      | | masuo         | | myapp         | | root          | | survey        | +—————+

+——————————————-+ | Password                                  | +——————————————-+ | *7AB8AAB1CB14C7997CE400CEA87B443A15FE72E6 | | NULL                                      | | NULL                                      | | NULL                                      | | *5DDF97914AE903CD933CFA428E6582A214E66339 | | *5DDF97914AE903CD933CFA428E6582A214E66339 | | *2447D497B9A6A15F2776055CB2D1E9F86758182F | | *2447D497B9A6A15F2776055CB2D1E9F86758182F | | *2447D497B9A6A15F2776055CB2D1E9F86758182F | | *2447D497B9A6A15F2776055CB2D1E9F86758182F | | *758A94318E1CCA45D996610F8A97E6BAA48C02FE | | *758A94318E1CCA45D996610F8A97E6BAA48C02FE | | 2bbe9f0c59e89c66                          | | *97757F6F08362A7CBA6F30E72EB90A73C79168EE | | *5B3643923A375B56250D11532289B2675C69AE62 | | *45930B494440B7335C3F98DB0FD14441166B57BB | | *FF642075DCA52A257F8DB745546F1E643D0B07DA | | *FF642075DCA52A257F8DB745546F1E643D0B07DA | | *35D14C41D95FA9DC79DF22641B7F9F98ECFDA55B | | *BAFD507E802E9B17D99E22A1360CECD386149822 | | *7AB8AAB1CB14C7997CE400CEA87B443A15FE72E6 | | *7AB8AAB1CB14C7997CE400CEA87B443A15FE72E6 | | *5B202DF112417035DF7A62DDC250A9ADB0F22BDD | | *8C69224DCDC9A8FB2122952DF5B57A4AB7FE456A | | *AEEE48760B9DCE2800776CE1FF6915FE91D8C894 | | *406E480B04BF741F3FB65E0C8976FC856BDBF418 | | *3D845C052A1D31F3D8D3E864735E84DF3E07C9D0 | +——————————————-+

This is a totally different story than Sony’s.

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But the next one is new; it shows a MacBook next to the new HP ProBook 5330m (via TechCrunch):

Samsung said the other day they don’t copy Apple, but they are offering what the users want. I guess the users want Apple design, therefore Samsung is building products that resemble Apple’s…

HP may have found the exact trend in their studies, that people want an Apple MacBook; therefore they are building MacBook-like laptops.

This not that dumb yet; it becomes dumb when they cut the R&D budget… Wait! Copying means they’ve already cut the R&D budget!

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You see, now it’s even worse, as one comment goes (its author is “ITS”):

“You must choose, either our property is ONLY our property – because you can’t do ‘any derivative works’ – on any circumstances, or you choose to make our property public without our explicit written consent on any item. For example I don’t wish my source code become public, it may be unique and, if I choose to back it up, that doesn’t mean I choose to make it public. Don’t play dirty or, you’ll screw your own business and reputation for good and forever. “

Their blog’s Disqus plugin returns a fatal error now.

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Mike Puchol on the same TOS: “[...] this smells of a lawsuit gone bad resulting in bulletproofing a service, maybe someone noticed his files were being served from servers in another country and sued the storage provider on non-permission to copy/distribute grounds. Then, every other lawyer copied the TOS to match. Remember that case with a woman spilling hot coffee on her lap, resulting in all take-away coffee cups showing large “this stuff is hot” labels? Yeah“

Reading this, it stroke me; the online storage is becoming something it should never be: some kind of a Facebook Directory, instead of a Swiss Bank.

The second you pay a dime for your online storage, it should transform into a Swiss bank account: it shouldn’t matter what’s in your box, it only matters that your stuff is secured and accessible only for you.

Any other definition of the online storage is either obsolete or wrong and you should not spend one bit of your life thinking about it; for sharing and publishing there are plenty of other services that don’t pretend to be secured storages in the clouds.

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1) “We sometimes need your permission to do what you ask us to do with your stuff (for example, hosting, making public, or sharing your files).“

False. There should not be any “we” implied. “We” is the service itself, not some humans asking for your permission and then passing it to the “Service”. Imagine Microsoft asking for your permission to translate the movements of your mouse into GUI actions.

2) “By submitting your stuff to the Services, you grant us (and those we work with to provide the Services) worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable rights to use, copy, distribute, prepare derivative works (such as translations or format conversions) of, perform, or publicly display that stuff to the extent we think it necessary for the Service.“

A short note here: where was this point when I started using Dropbox, last year? What you see here is plainly illegal: there is no automatic sub-licensing shit these guys dream of.

This paragraph says that whatever I’ve put in Dropbox servers, now it already belongs to the public.

On a second thought, why would you consider there’s something you think it’s “necessary for the Service” without me thinking the same?

3) “You must ensure you have the rights you need to grant us that permission.“

What? I don’t! Say I have already stored enterprise secrets in my Dropbox account, and that was in perfect conformity with the TOS I acknowledged one year ago. Now I have to let you make my secrets public because some stupid lawyer told you that you have to change the TOS? Or should I just delete my account because it’s no longer conforming with the TOS? Isn’t it too late, given the fact that I’ve read the new TOS only after you’ve published it?

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The only way to deal with people’s stuff should be this: Your stuff hosted on our servers is your responsibility and yours alone; we may grant access to a third party should that third party present us with a court of law written order. End of TOS.

Wake up, Dropbox, what you’ve published as a TOS update is worse than lame; you’re being advised by a person that’s putting you on a shortest course to lose your customers.

Update: What you witness is not Dropbox shooting themselves in the leg, but Dropbox firing three times at their own head… Do you still think it’s a suicide…?  

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Elephants can do collaborative tasks. The question is “Under what evolutionary pressures do different types of cognitive abilities tend to develop?”

The article continues with lots of examples of highly intelligent species solving puzzle and tasks in order to get food from humans…

Well, maybe it’s not pressure they need in order to evolve; maybe it’s the lack of it. Namely – humans’!

Imagine you’re captured by aliens, with absolutely no possibility of escape; they’d start showing you practical puzzles in order for you to reach to the food.

What would you do, take the floor and give them a speech about Kant, or would you keep solving the fucking puzzles until you’re dumbed down to a stone?

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“It may be time for the iPhone to more than just grow. It may be time for it to grow up and take on the whole market. Five billion people are waiting”.

The prepaid market usually means two certain things: cheap phones and low monthly service costs. I do think though the number of users that don’t want their hands tied for 24 months contracts is increasing, but not by that much.

A cheaper iPhone although possible, shouldn’t be a compromise compared to a full fledged one.

Now, let’s make an exercise of imagination; say you’re Apple: what would you get rid of from you iPhone 4 in order to make it cheaper, without compromising the quality or the functionality? Start naming software and / or hardware features.

Is it the camera? Maybe, but it’ll compromise the pictures quality. Is it the display? Maybe, but you’ll have to forget about retina display shout. Is it the RAM? It’d be like downgrading the iPhone 4 to iPhone 3G: forget about it running flawlessly the Infinity Blade… How about putting cheap plastic instead of Gorilla glass? Yeah, right, over Jobs’ dead body maybe.

The only thing a “prepaid iPhone” would have to do is to cope with the apps / iOS; this means: same display resolution, same CPU, same RAM, same connectivity, same interface; maybe not necessarily the same storage (I wonder whether that’d be enough to lower the price with 200$…). Altogether, let’s not forget the iCloud that can possibly act like a remote storage…

I don’t think lowering the specs is a solution; the only one I can imagine now is a dramatic change in iPhone’s architecture, which means a new production line, from scratch. The result could hardly be named “another iPhone”, but “another Apple product”. Wouldn’t that better be some kind of iPod, instead?

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[...] for all Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto, the company has now reached a point where the more it excels, and it often does, the more it is perceived as a threat by individuals and governments around the world.

I’d add a corollary: The more it tries to bring solutions to everybody and for everything, the more their “Each individual served with relevant ad” goal becomes just a mere byproduct.

There’s no difference between Google reaching its goal and an increasingly powerful and over-responsible government; they both can say they pursue the best for each and every individual, but never mention the cost that individual has to pay. That cost is very hard to measure until it’s already too late: it’s usually called freedom.

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The argument is easy: because French don’t have a culture of correcting what they have already published, the articles have to come out as good as they can get; there’s no second chance to correct and rectify them. Therefore, the government found appropriate to cut Twitter and Facebook from the sources of mass media because:  a) Those sources aren’t always reliable b) Social media is always an open door for abusers.

The government thus considers the new age social media cannot be made or hold responsible for the data it generates and transmits.

(Filloux says these are the arguments, not necessarily that he embraces them)

I like the argument; it expresses entirely my feeling that the main differentiator between socialism and capitalism (at their core) is that capitalist journalism lets you know what’s happening around you, while the socialist journalism tells you what you need to know about what’s happening around you. 

The tyranny of the accountability has its roots in the mindset that the public has to understand precisely and specifically only those certain things it’s told and nothing else. The socialist public is not allowed to see the picture and then let to form its own opinions about it; that’s way too risky. In the socialist countries the public is told what the official or “natural” opinion is about something or anything. You don’t taste the strawberries, you’re only told how they taste.

It’s only then the media gatekeepers get the feeling of “over-accountability”: when they feel responsible for what people might understand by their own.

In this line, besides accountability, I’d add a second argument for French government getting against Twitter and Facebook: these social networks differ from “curated” media maybe by being “unreliable”, but most important by being “un-curatable”. Which is “extremely hard to be censored”.

I am convinced this is not a correct or fair mindset, no matter which time, country or medium; after some more other years of decay, this usually ends up in bloodbaths, when hundreds of years of evolution are wiped out in hours.

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It turns out the N9 is just a dummy, a mere prototype of future WP powered Nokias. Elop carefully misses every opportunity to enter Nokia’s history; he’s busy building Microsoft’s with Nokia’s flesh and blood.

I wonder whether MeeGo could have become a solid technological and architectural competitor to iOS, both Android and WP being just simple hoaxes against it. I also wonder whether Jobs could use such a sound competitor as a secondary route.

(via Daring Fireball)

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Money is a symbol, the same way a word is a symbol. Money is also a mutual agreement saying “This is just a paper, but it certifies that this product has human value of X; I am, therefore, X”.

The similarity between money and words is that both are symbols and agreements. The difference, though, lies in how they are that “symbol”. A word says “I am a symbol which could never be substituted for the thing it means”. You never equal the word “horse” to the real animal. 

With the money, things are just the opposite: money is a symbol that stands more and more for the real value it symbolizes. The more “money” stands for “human value”, the more we’re driven away from reality. 

Skype was 8 billion. Apple has 60. None of these cash piles has any real connection to human value. If you’re looking for real values you have to look at people, and not at what stands for them, but at what they are standing for. 

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What I do know for sure is what I need to be improved: the AppStore app.  It needs a boost, a big one.

Right now, as I was saying, the AppStore is very close to becoming a pain in the ass: the more apps you have, the more difficult it becomes to search through, select or even order them.

Speed, speed, speed

Scrolling through 400.000 is quite impossible. Scrolling through 25 or 50 is acceptable for the average users, but it’s not fast enough. It has to be blazing fast. Half a million apps is such a big number to be contained in one single catalog, that this catalog has to be the quickest squirrel ever invented. Swapping categories or tabs lags a lot, no matter how large your bandwidth is. It shouldn’t happen.

Related apps

I want to see relevant related apps to those I’ve already bought. I never get to see any related app but in iTunes, which I usually use once a month. I need to be able to fine-tune my search and to be able to look for specific features other devs may have built in a better way. Therefore, I need to see related apps.

Split categories

I want to see one app in two categories, if this app shares two attributes and thus belongs to both categories.

Multiple select

I need to select several apps for installation. This would require either a total sum to be approved by the user, or a series of approvals, one for each app. Either way it’s OK, you just need to let the user select multiple apps for buying. That is “you need to let us buy more”!

Cloud consistency

Maybe a duplicate of my apps’ index should also stay in the client; I’m just saying. Awakening the dragon for any app I may remember I’ve bought and missed is a bit ugly, isn’t it?

Updates

They have the same marketing power as the apps themselves; one update can save a doomed app. I keep some 5-10% of the apps installed just to follow their evolution: enhancements, new features, addressed bugs and so on. Today I only see a few words about an update. I want the updates to be shouted, I want to see a list of updates with their details even if their corresponding apps are only in the cloud and not installed.

Feedback for devs

I hate when I cannot report a bug. Each dev should be forced to publish in the AppStore a feedback mail address. There should be a button that opens the mail app: “Feed me back, I’ve built the shit!”. Today I can only report to Apple, which is close to nothing for me. The users want their apps to work, therefore if they don’t, they start hating the devs and Apple, as a curator. It shouldn’t ever happen. The users should get along extremely well with the devs, and this can only be done with Apple support.

Conclusion

The AppStore was never an app; it is a very narrow window to an expanding  multiverse. The only correct way to conceive the AppStore app is to think of it as a laser beam. You’re the user, you’re looking out this windows at millions of things, tiny things, and you have this laser-beam-lantern-thingy in your hand to pinpoint what you like and beam it to you. As soon as Apple will perceive this image, they’ll instantly know what’s the correct architecture of the AppStore app, for both front-end and back-end sides.

update: A friend of mine tells me all of this is happening because AppStore is actually a webapp; too bad, it should be native. Another thing is related to split categories: any app is listed in how many categories the dev is declaring it. My bad, I never saw one sharing two categories.

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An ugly GUI is something you only use because you need the service behind that GUI. The companies that don’t care about it, they don’t care about their users. Or, worse, they are so lazy and are making so much money, that there’s no way they would change anything for their customers.

The uglier an interface, the more probable the developers forgot they were building things for human beings; instead, these developers are building things for… things.

The Silver Medal goes to Gmail:

The Gold Medal goes to Facebook settings panel:

The only problem is those two giants are spreading their “ugly love” in almost every digital soul of the WEB.

This is “Microsoft-ugly”.

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