By Graham K. Rogers

Opening Gambit:

Apple Stuff

With Apple data centres beginning to appear all over the place, the plans for the one in Texas took a step nearer this week when it was reported by Sam Oliver on AppleInsider that land has been bought by Apple in Austin, TX. Electronista also reports on an expansion of the existing facilities at Malden, North Carolina.

Those nasty employers Apple and Foxconn are at it again. . . Hiring people I mean. There is some expansion taking place at Foxconn's Chengdu plant Chris Oldroyd reports on iMore, ostensibly for the iPhone 5 and maybe for a mini iPad that has been rumoured for so long. The meat of the story was not the devices, but the lines of people desperate for jobs at the factories: all wanting to work for companies that some news outlets insist treat the workers so badly.

We reported on a number of points last week and early this concerning the cheating Russian hack for in-app purchases. We were made aware that Apple was working on a fix and Eric Slivka reports on MacRumors that they appear to have got round this by the use of unique identifiers in validation receipts. My link for this was MacDaily News. Another report on this was from Mikey Campbell on AppleInsider.

There was an update for some fairly recent Macs because of power draining problems, Topher Kessler wrote this week: "a 76.64MB download that includes new versions of I/O kernel extensions and frameworks, the Dock application, and some shared resources including desktop pictures, user icons, and system sounds"

Also updated this week was iTunes producer: something for those sending work up to the online stores. Version 2.7.1 now has a localized user interface for German, Japanese, French, Dutch, Italian, Korean, Spanish, and Traditional and Simplified Chinese.

While a note on MacDaily News tells us that iTunes Movies in the Cloud has been expanded to another 35 countries including Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Macau, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand.

A helpful article from Rene Ritchie on iMore explains how to set this up.

Another problem that keeps appearing in Europe concerns Apple's warranties and recently in Italy Apple was fined for the 1 year warranty when the laws require 2 years. Now Portugal is taking action against Apple as it clams the way that AppleCare is sold is misleading to the consumer, Justin Rubio reports on The Verge.

Everyone got excited on Wednesday afternoon when the Apple store went down, some even noting that there were now multi-language Coming Soon stickers, but when the store came back on line, there was much disappointment as nothing appeared to have changed: Apple keeping us on our toes I expect.

This week of course (today, 20 July) the iPad goes on sale in China: delayed because of Proview who claimed they owned the iPad name. Apple was forced to pay over some money and everyone was happy (sort of). Previous releases of Apple products have seen fighting, windows broken, and all manner of unpleasantness because some want to get there first, buy as many as they can, then sell at inflated prices. This time, Mikey Campbell reports on AppleInsider there is a new ticketing system that it is hoped will keep the undesirables at bay and only sell to real customers. There may still be problems as the message may not have got through.

A while back we were not very happy with the US DOJ who seemed to be taking the side of a monopolist Amazon because Apple and some booksellers had got together and decided that a different method of supply might be beneficial all round. Amazon was immediately forced into changing its methods of payment (some books were getting round about zero) and did not like the way they had apparently been trumped (real use of the term, nothing to do with the property magnate who destroys natural resources to build golf courses). Charles Schumer, a Democrat Senator has written an editorial for the Wall Street Journal, Bryan Chaffin tells us, in which he castigates the DOJ and warns of the consequences if they prevail.

There was an odd little footnote that came out of the interviews Walter Isaacson conducted with Steve Jobs. Emil Protalinksi among others is reporting that Jobs apparently admired Mark Zuckerberg too much to compete with him. That needs digesting for a minute or two.

A local user complained on Wednesday that his new 3 TB Western Digital would not format properly and rather than the 3 TB he wanted, OS X was only recognising about 800 MB. I had a look at the photograph he posted and noticed that WD had posted a warning about partitions larger than 2.19 TB which was coincidentally about the remainder when 800 MB was subtracted.

I also looked at the links that WD put on the label: these names must have been created by computer engineers and not by normal users with links such as http://products.wdc.com/largecapacitydrives which is about as unimaginative as you can get. I thought about this and with the information on the label suggested either settings needed changing with jumper switches, the specific disk type was a problem; certain options needed selecting when formatting; or there was a problem with the enclosure and its firmware.

It turns out the last one was the problem and the firmware for the disk docking station, which links to the Mac via Firewire 800, would not allow it to see 3TB drives. The user bought a new dock and all was well. WD have been forgiven.

In the meantime, I confirmed my Disk Warrior disk is damaged and set about ordering a replacement from Alsoft.

One of my favourite sites has a couple of interesting tips this week and I always like learning new things. First, I did not know that it was possible to convert a DMG file into something else. The something else is CDR or ISO should these be needed.

What I found a little more interesting (on a personal level) was the way that by using Preview we can view an application's graphical resources & GUI elements. Some apps have a lot of images so may need some patience for the file to load. I also found (as you can see here) that with an image displayed I could use the Export function of Preview and save the file as a JPG instead of the normal ISNC file type.

Half and Half

Needless to say, among others MacDaily News did not take this lying down, but commented more on Apple's legal team than the judge, even though there were some sarcastic comments reserved for him. A report I saw later from MacNN tells us that the case is to be appealed.

While we are on Apple legal and Judge Koh, Electronista reports that she has slapped Samsung about a bit concerning witnesses and evidence that is to be admitted to the case.

As part of an earlier set of decisions by Judge Koh, Tim Cook has his second set of meetings with the head of Samsung this week, Matt Brian reports, and it is noted that the two companies are "very important business partners" which I take to mean that Apple holds multi-billion contracts in its hands.

There was a bit of a fanfare early in the week when the new Office suite was released by Microsoft. I ignored this other than a mention late last week that I think most users are wasting their time in buying or installing it. It is so well endowed that only a few users will ever need all it has to offer, and the bloated nature also has a spin-off with the way the computer runs. And don't get me started on Microsoft approved fonts: installing another set alongside those already available.

Well, users of Macs won't have to suffer the vagaries of the latest release, as there isn't one for the Mac and AppleInsider reports that "Office 2013 . . . is reserved for Windows 7 and Windows 8 machines only." So the many users on XP and the wunnerful Vista are out of luck: so much for legacy. And as for an iPad version? Vaporware perhaps. About time iWork was updated though (maybe this is reserved for Mountain Lion machines).

Other Matters

As expected, Nokia have reported a loss. A massive loss. A $1 billion operating loss for Q2 according to Aaron Souppouris on The Verge, although their cash reserves did go up $125 million. I guess that will be good for a couple of golden parachutes. We are also told that the 3rd quarter will be a challenge. Reassuring.

Also making a loss, although this was expected because of the write-down, is Microsoft with a deficit of $492 million on $18.06 billion revenue which is up slightly when compared with other quarters. Frederic Lardinois writes about this and explains about the $6.19 billion write-down for "its failed aQuantive acquisition." And who decided on that?

Google on the other hand are making a healthy profit Sarah Perez reports. With a Q2 income of $12.21 billion, net income is up slightly at $2.79 billion.

A lot of companies are having problems with insecurities, not the least of which is Apple with the attempted exploit that allowed in-app purchases for free. Dropbox too, which I am finding really useful, and which recently increased its allowances for users, reported a possible security breach this week. As they are taking it seriously, they are having outside experts assist, Sarah Perez reports on Tech Crunch.

My students are doing presentations for me right now and I leave the subject up to them pretty much: I just check to make sure the subject is appropriate. One presented on installing Windows 7 this week and I was just appalled at what poor Windows users have to suffer compared with the comparative ease of an OS X installation.

I have been writing in the last month or so about the ghastly ways in which the UK and its allies want to take control of the internet, in terms of reading all messages, in the hope of catching one or two who are too stupid not to encrypt or use other methods of transmission. There is also an attempt in the UK to let the big data users steal images belonging to ordinary users with only a cursory check of ownership. Lots of protests on both of these balloons being floated.

No such problems in the land of the steppes. Bryan Bishop reports on The Verge that the upper house, "passed a controversial draft law . . . that would give the government far-reaching power over the internet in the country". There were criticisms, but this is not Europe or the US. President Putin will be signing this soon and the return to autocracy will have almost come full circle.

Another thin end of a wedge was passed this week when it was announced that there will be mandatory lie detector tests (polygraph) for sex offenders in the UK, the BBC reports. An easy target -- pornography is often rolled out for reasons of Internet laws -- it of course makes absolute sense to test such bad people. But a couple of years down the line, when this is statistically shown to have been a success, the dice will be rolled and this will be expanded to other areas. And so it goes.

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.