Long strings of digits pasted into the Notes app on an iPhone are not necessarily phone numbers. Do not immediately start autodialing when I select them. That’s fucking stupid.

In this specific case, they were product serial numbers pasted from a barcode scanning app (of which the only useful one appears to be ZBar; all the rest auto-search shopping web sites and refuse to just give you the contents of the goddamn barcode).

Apparently no one told you that cellular bandwidth isn’t free and unlimited. Perhaps they thought you already knew, what with this being the sixth major release of your phone OS.

As usual for a new release, Apple is demonstrating how not to do QA. This time the results are more hilarious than crippling, since they made a huge fuss about dumping Google Maps for their own solution, “the most beautiful, powerful mapping service ever”.

Yeah, about that…

Maybe you should Think a little less Different, and put some checkout counters back in your stores. Then perhaps you wouldn’t need to have undercover security constantly scanning the crowd for incomplete PoS transactions that may or may not be shoplifting.

Arresting a customer because you can’t manage basic retail sales technology is not the work of a Genius.

Calculate the offset required to convert from Mac OS X Core Data timestamps to Unix timestamps.

date -uj 010100002001 +%s

Better than just saying “add 978307200” or “add 11323 * 86400”.

The publishers are not looking good here, and in fact are looking exactly like corrupt racketeers. I love the quote from Steve Jobs:

"you set the price, and we get our 30 percent, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that's what you want anyway"

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg; lots of juicy quotes, and the DoJ is serious enough to have acquired the various CEOs’ phone records. Even without this investigation, though, the publishers are screwed in the long run, and they deserve to be. They think they’re pushing back at an uppity online discount bookstore, and have failed to notice that Amazon is not only far more popular than they are, but has become the best place to shop for damn near anything.

Where else can you get two-day free shipping for polearms, diesel generators, gym-grade fitness equipment, gourmet foods, and fishing boats? I was honestly surprised to find that they’re not selling cars and motorcycles yet, but that’s probably just because the red tape for title transfers is too much of a hassle to navigate.

When the iPad first came out, I answered Jeff’s question by describing the <a href-”/archives/003544.html”>killer app that would get me excited about it as a tool and not just a toy. The newly-launched iPhoto for iPad is not that app (emphasis added):

When you import a RAW image to your iPad, iPhoto will display only the JPEG version of the image embedded in the RAW file. When editing a RAW image in iPhoto, the edits are derived from the embedded JPEG, and saved in JPEG format.

...

If you import RAW+JPEG images, iPhoto will display and export the JPEG version.

The JPEG embedded in most RAW files is a tiny little thumbnail, so this is pretty useless. It detects RAW+JPEG, which is nice, but any edits you make are to the JPEG version, and you can’t replay them against the higher-quality image once you’re on a real computer.

So, great for casual users or for serious photographers who just want to dink around on throwaway images, but don’t waste your time copying RAWs to it. You can play with your JPEGS on the road, but leave the good stuff on the memory cards until you get back to a computer.

Oops. Seems the Department of Justice doesn’t care for price-fixing and collusion, even when you put lipstick on it and call it the “agency model”.

Of course, it’s hard to take publishing spokesmen seriously when they claim that the physical printing costs were never a significant part of the cost to make a book, when they start selling e-books of thirty-year-old SF novels at the same price as new releases. (hint: some of us know how much work is actually involved in scanning, OCRing, and proofreading an old paperback)