Blackberry Outage Finally Explained (PIC)

From: http://blog.cagle.com

Cameron Cardow is the editorial cartoonist for the Ottawa Citizen, and a two-time winner of the National Newspaper Award, Canada's top award for editorial cartooning. Cam's cartoons are syndicated by Cagle Cartoons.

Confirmed: Steve Jobs Worked on Apple Until His Last Day

• By Adario Strange
  From http://www.pcmag.com/

As one might expect, following the death of Steve Jobs, many rumors and legends have taken on a life of their own. The most recent whispers are related to the notion, proffered by Rodman & Renshaw analyst Ashok Kumar in a recent research note, that Jobs worked on next year's iPhone 5. But while many tend to take the word of analysts with a grain of salt, especially when it comes to the hyper-secretive Steve Jobs, Apple partner Masayoshi Son, CEO of Softbank, recently recounted an anecdote that appears to confirm this speculation.

During an interview conducted last weekend by the U.S. Ambassador to Japan John Roos, Son talked about his relationship to Apple and Jobs. Son revealed an interesting series of events during the launch of the iPhone 4S.

Son said, "I visited Apple for the announcement of the iPhone 4S [at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California]. When I was having a meeting with Tim Cook, he said, 'Oh Masa, sorry I have to quit our meeting.' I said, 'Where are you going?' He said, 'My boss is calling me.' That was the day of the announcement of the iPhone 4S. He said that Steve is calling me because he wants to talk about their next product. And the next day, he died."

Recounting the episode, Son was visible touched by the Apple co-founder's passion and drive. He went on to say, "Even one day before he passed away, the first subject he wanted to call Tim Cook about…he wanted to talk about the next product… That's the kind of spirit a true entrepreneur would continue to have until they die. He was very sick, very ill. But the announcement of their newest product made him live longer. Physically he could have died much earlier. But his passion, his love for his own company and dream, about the next products, that made him energized."

Son didn't elaborate on which product Jobs discussed with Cook, but given this new information, the speculation that next year's iPhone 5 will be Jobs' final master stroke of product innovation now seems far more credible. You can check out the video here:

Bill Gates Talks To Steve Jobs In The Afterlife

From: http://socialspew.com/

Video: Wozniak remembers friend Steve Jobs

from: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Apple

AP Video

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak spoke with The Associated Press Thursday morning about his friend and former business partner Steve Jobs.

President Obama on the Passing of Steve Jobs: "He changed the way each of us sees the world."

The White House Blog

Posted by Kori Schulman on October 05, 2011 at 09:15 PM EDT 

 

Following the loss of visionary Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, President Obama released this statement:

Michelle and I are saddened to learn of the passing of Steve Jobs. Steve was among the greatest of American innovators - brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.

By building one of the planet’s most successful companies from his garage, he exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity.  By making computers personal and putting the internet in our pockets, he made the information revolution not only accessible, but intuitive and fun.  And by turning his talents to storytelling, he has brought joy to millions of children and grownups alike. Steve was fond of saying that he lived every day like it was his last.  Because he did, he transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees the world.

The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented. Michelle and I send our thoughts and prayers to Steve’s wife Laurene, his family, and all those who loved him.

RIP Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Thanks, Steve.

Steve Jobs gave Barack Obama an iPad 2 "a little bit early"

Being the "Commander in Chief" has its perks, like getting an iPad 2 directly from Steve Jobs a few weeks before launch

By Yoni Heisler

From: http://www.networkworld.com/

It's no secret that the Obama administration tends to be a bit Apple-centric. During Obama's 2008 Presidential campaign, for example, Macs were relied upon quite a bit by his staff and folks in his administration were famously disappointed when, upon moving into the White House, they saw a plethora of outdated PCs running Windows.

It's also no secret that Obama himself, though an avowed BlackBerry user, is also an iPad owner. During atownhall meeting back in March of this year, Obama admitted as much while joking with news anchor Jorge Ramos.

“I mean, Jorge, I’m the president of the United States,” Obama said. “You think I’ve got to go borrow somebody’s computer?” Obama said to bouts of laughter. “Hey, man, can I borrow your computer? How about you? You’ve got one?”

But what we didn't know was that Obama got his iPad 2 a little bit before the rest of us, from Steve Jobs no less.

In a recent interview with George Stephanopoulous of ABC News, Obama explained: “Steve Jobs actually gave it to me, a little bit early. Yeah, it was cool. I got it directly from him.”

So when might this transaction have gone down?

Well, the iPad 2 was released on March 11, 2011. And interestingly enough, you might remember that Obama in mid-February hosted a tech-centric dinner where he invited a who's-who of tech luminaries, including Jobs, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Larry Ellison, and Mark Zuckerberg.

This all begs the question - how long as Obama been in possession of an iPhone 5?

Below is the photo of the aforementioned White House dinner where Jobs can be seen sitting to Obama's left.

Apple’s Spaceship Office Complex to Land in Cupertino

By Daniel Ionescu, PCWorld

Cupertino City Council is likely to approve Apple's plans to build a new four-story spaceship-like HQ in the city, which would house around 12,000 staff. In response to Apple CEO Steve Jobs' presentation to the council, Cupertino Mayor Gilbert Wong said: "There is no chance that we're saying no [to Apple]. The Mothership has landed in Cupertino."

Jobs on Tuesday unveiled plans to build a new campus near Apple's existing headquarters in Cupertino, in a circular shape that looks like a spaceship. The new space would be used to accommodate Apple's growing staff numbers. "Apple's grown like a weed and as you know, Apple's always been in Cupertino," Jobs said in his presentation. "The campus we'd like to build there is one building that holds 12,000 people."

Cupertino City Council reacted positively to Apple's plans for a new HQ. Wong said: "Every time that we have a large company that has a large sales tax produced we are very accommodating to that company."

The four-story Apple mothership is expected to be completed in 2015, and would use self-generate energy, with the grid only used for backup power. In his presentation, Jobs empasized the green credentials of the upcoming campus, which will be built on land Apple originally bought from Hewlett-Packard while downsizing.

Parking at the Apple spaceship HQ will be underground, and 80 percent of the area currently used for parking will be landscaped, from currently 3700 trees to around 6000. A new research and development center will also be built, along with a new auditorium, so that Apple won't have to go to San Francisco for big k eynote events.

Follow Daniel Ionescu and Today @ PCWorld on Twitter

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Back in the old days

What I think Obama is meeting with Jobs, Schmidt, and Zuckerberg about

From: http://theoatmeal.com/

Tonight Obama is meeting with Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, and Mark Zuckerberg. There's been a lot of speculation about what they're going to discuss. Here's what I think.

What Steve Jobs Said During His Wall Street Journal iPad Demo

From: http://gawker.com

We know that Apple's CEO is no fan of Flash, the Web animation software. But it sounds like Steve Jobs really unleashed on the Adobe system to try and convince the Wall Street Journal to ditch it for the iPad.

Welcome to the nasty side of Jobs's famous Reality Distortion Field. The fun side had its turn when Jobs unveiled the iPad tablet computer in San Francisco last month. The dark side came several days later, when Jobs sat down with select Journal staff on the third floor of the News Corporation building in New York as part of a broader media tour.

Like other newspapers, the Journal is heavily invested in Flash as a way to deploy not only video but also slide shows and other interactive infographics and news applications. So when Jobs showed off his iPad, editors were sure to ask him about the device's lack of Flash, at least when they weren't pissing him off by posting to Twitter from the device.

Jobs was brazen in his dismissal of Flash, people familiar with the meeting tell us. He repeated what he said at an Apple Town Hall recently, that Flash crashes Macs and is buggy.

But he also called Flash a "CPU hog," a source of "security holes" and, in perhaps the most grievous insult a famous innovator can utter, a dying technology. Jobs said of Flash, "We don't spend a lot of energy on old technology." He then compared Flash to other obsolete systems Apple got people to ditch....

• ... like the floppy drive, famously absent in iMac,
  
• .... old data ports, including even Apple's own FireWire 400, gone from iPods and now all Macbooks,
  
• ....CCFL backlit LCD screens, now entirely replaced in Apple's lineup by LED-powered screens (except for this). (Correction: We originally said Apple replaced LCDs with LEDs; LEDs are a type of LCD backlighting.)
• ...and even the CD, with Jobs apparently crediting Apple's iPod, iTunes Store, CD-ripping software and "Rip, Mix, Burn" campaign with doing in the old music medium (sort of: though CD sales are in free fall, around 300 million were sold last year in the U.S. alone, 80 percent of all albums).

No doubt, Flash is a known CPU hog and security problem on Macs, a major source of system headaches that, infuriatingly for Apple, it can't control. Even factoring in the fact that Flash can't leverage graphics processors built into many Apple devices, it's a pig.

But let's compare apples to appples. At the Journal, Jobs claimed the iPad's battery performance would be degraded from 10 hours to 1.5 hours if it had to spend its CPU cycles decoding Flash, we're told. That sounds like an unfair comparison; the iPad would unlikely achieve its advertised 10 hours of maximum battery life while continuously playing video of any sort, iPad optimized or not.

But Jobs offered more than a thorough evisceration of Flash; he also used his Reality Distortion Field to sell the Journal on alternatives to the technology.

Ditching Flash would be "trivial," he suggested.

For one, he suggested the newspaper use the H.264 video compression system ("codec" in geek), which is compatible with both the iPad and the Flash Player installed on most Web browsers.

Jobs reportedly said the Journal would find "It's trivial to create video in H.264" instead of Flash. Depending on how the Journal handled the video conversion, that could be true, and for the moment H. 264 is a cheap and effective way to distribute Web video. But we assume Jobs didn't mention that H. 264 is patented, privately licensed and could get expensive fast.

Even setting that aside, H. 264 does not fully replace Flash. While it can handle video, it does not comprise a system for the rapid development of interactive graphics, as Flash does. Yet Jobs also reportedly said Flash would be "trivial" in this sense, as well — that it would be "trivial" to make an entire copy of the Journal website with the non-video Flash content also redone.

That's just not right; even assuming the Journal could duplicate its Flash slideshows, infographics and other news apps using iPad-friendly technologies like Javascript, it would take a decidedly nontrivial amount of time and effort to create or acquire such a system, hire staff who understand it as well as Flash, train staff on how to use it, and integrate it into the Journal's editorial workflow. It might be a great way to advance web standards like HTML5, and a great way to get the Journal on more devices, but it would hardly be "trivial."

It's not clear to us how assembled Journal honchos collectively reacted to these statements, but its worth noting that shortly after the meeting, on Feb. 10, editorial board member Holman Jenkins issued a WSJ op-ed comparing Apple to Microsoft and saying the company "is in danger of becoming preoccupied with zero-sum maneuvering versus hated rivals." His primary and lead example of this sort of "maneuvering" was Jobs' decision to keep Flash off the iPad.

Jobs' Reality Distortion Field may need a bit of fine tuning, then. But we have a feeling the Journal will swallow its objections and hop on the iPad gravy train. The Wall Street Journal editorial page has had its impressive moments of influence in the history of American conservatism, but these days that's little match for the power of Steve Jobs when he puts on a black turtleneck and strides onto a stage.

(Power aside, if you've got any informed opinions on how difficult it would be to replace Flash in the editorial workflow of a large newspaper or magazine, we'd love to hear them.)

(Update: Added some context on Flash's objectively sucky performance.)

(Top pic: Jobs speaking at Yerba Buna Center in San Francisco, Jan. 27. Getty Images.)

Send an email to Ryan Tate, the author of this post, at ryan@gawker.com.

Steve Jobs to stand for re-election to Disney's board

By Slash Lane

Although complicated health issues have forced Steve Jobs into a 6 month leave from Apple, he's seemingly confident in his ability to serve on Disney's Board of Directors, where he'll be standing for reelection come March.

Jobs has been a member of Disney's board ever since the entertainment conglomerate purchased Pixar back in the spring of 2006. At the time, his 50.6 percent controlling stake in the animation studio netted him more than $4 billion in Disney shares, making him the company's largest shareholder.

The Apple co-founder receives no compensate for his role at Disney, where he's also believed to serve as a special advisor to chief executive and close personal friend Bob Iger on technology-related matters.

However, Jobs’ decision to stand for re-election to the Disney board just days after stepping aside at Apple is drawing some concern from corporate governance experts, according to the Financial Times.

"A directorship is not an honorary position,” Charles Elson, professor of corporate governance at the University of Delaware, told the paper. "If he’s said he can’t run Apple, how on earth can he [stand for the Disney board again]?”

Elson added that non-executive directors of large public companies need to be able to devote at least 250 hours a year to the position.

Disney, which reportedly declined to comment on Jobs' decision to seek another term as a board member, has been one of Apple's stalwart allies in its efforts to push video content into the digital age.

Prior to purchasing Pixar, Disney inked a landmark deal to sell its hit ABC television shows over iTunes and later followed up as the first major Hollywood studio to commit its movie library to the digital download service. Since then, Disney has gone on to sell millions of movies and tens of millions of TV shows through iTunes.

In related news, Bloomberg on Friday cited "people who are monitoring [Jobs'] illness" as saying he is considering a liver transplant as a result of complications that followed his pancreatic cancer treatment in 2004.

When reached by phone, Jobs refused to comment further on his health and pleaded for some privacy.

"Why don’t you guys leave me alone -- why is this important?," he told Bloomberg.

Steve Jobs key to selecting tunes for Apple ads

By AppleInsider Staff

Ever wonder how those catchy tunes find their way into Apple's iPod commercials? You'll have to look no further than the ear of chief executive Steve Jobs.

In a SongFacts interview with the Asteroids Galaxy Tour, beatmaker Lars Iversen explains how his band's hyperkinetic track "Around The Bend" was selected as the jingle for Apple's second-generation iPod touch television ad.

The Danish band is represented in the United States by a little-known company called Synch, which managed to get in touch with Apple and arrange for a sit down meeting with Jobs himself.

While listening to some of the songs suggested by Synch, the Apple co-founder reportedly slammed on the brakes during a sample of "Around The Bend," declaring, "This is it, this is the new track for the iPod Touch."

"Apparently he just loved that track, but we never saw it as one of our singles," Iversen said. "We have some other songs that we thought would be great singles, and that would work cool on for the radio, but he really loved that song."

Iversen noted that the selection was made ahead of the September introduction of the new iPod touch, and therefore everything was kept hush, hush. The band was even kept in the dark about some edits Apple made to the flow of its song, which it wasn't too thrilled with initially.

"They keep it under wraps up to the release of the new product, so we were just told: 'You guys are going to be in this ad, and you have to be happy and smile about that,'" he said. "I kind of like it now when I've seen it a few times, it sort of works well with the pictures - you see two hands playing with the iPod and all these silly computer games and so on."