Linked List: August 5, 2008

Tuesday, 5 August 2008

AT&T’s iPhone Data Plan Terms and Conditions Forbid Tethering ★

From AT&T’s iPhone Terms and Conditions:

Furthermore, unlimited plans (except for DataConnect and BlackBerry tethered) cannot be used for any applications that tether the device (through use of, including without limitation, connection kits, other phone/PDA-to-computer accessories, Bluetooth or any other wireless technology) to laptops, PCs, or other equipment for any purpose.

The question is whether Apple is obligated to enforce this.

WSJ Backtracking From Sketchy ‘Beanpole’ Obama Story ★

The Wall Street Journal ran the following “correction” for that shoddy “Is Obama Too Fit to Be President?” story from a few days ago:

A Weekend Journal article Friday about Barack Obama’s weight included a quote from a Yahoo bulletin board that was posted in response to a question from a Wall Street Journal reporter who initiated the discussion. The article should have disclosed that the reporter used the bulletin board to elicit the comment, “I won’t vote for any beanpole guy.”

It’s not so much a correction as it is an admission that the story never should have run.

Om Malik on MobileMe’s Infrastructure ★

Om Malik:

One of my sources opined that Apple clearly wasn’t too savvy about all the progress made in infrastructure over the past few years. If this insinuation is indeed true, then there is no way Apple can get over its current spate of problems. It needs a crash course in infrastructure and Internet services. Apple’s problem is that it doesn’t seem to have recognized the fact that it’s in the business of network-enabled hardware.

But the iTunes Store does gangbuster traffic and has a terrific track record for uptime. The message I read from yesterday’s reorg that put MobileMe under Eddy Cue (Apple’s VP for iTunes) is that MobileMe could and should be as responsive and reliable as the iTunes Store.

Throwing the Baby Out With the Bath Water ★

Rene Ritchie reviews MagicPad, the $4 iPhone notes app that offers text selection, styled text, and copy/paste, and gives it a rating of 4.5 out of 5. Here’s his list of pros and cons:

Pros

Working cut, copy, and paste on the iPhone, come on!

Rich text styling

Did I mention CUT and PASTE

Cons

No auto-correction for spelling

Uses 3rd party email server

I bought and have been testing MagicPad for the last few days, and I’d pretty much create the same list of pros and cons. But for a rating, I’d assign it a zero. Without auto-correction, the app is utterly useless. Half the words I type are misspelled, some beyond recognition. It’s an interesting test of how important the iPhone’s auto-correction is in making its on-screen keyboard usable. The answer is “utterly essential”.

The text selection UI works pretty well and copy/paste is nice to have, but you still can’t copy/paste between different applications. So you can change the font and text size, but you can’t actually type.

NetShare Coming Back to App Store? ★

Nullriver:

We’ve finally gotten in contact with Apple. Looks like the lack of communication was due to automated e-mail systems being employed on both ends, which resulted in e-mails being lost in transit. We’re working with Apple to get NetShare back up on the AppStore.

The NPD Group: iTunes Continues to Lead U.S. Music Retailers ★

The only two download stores that matter are iTunes and Amazon. And CD stores are mattering less and less.

Update: From the description of the methodology used to compile the list: “NPD only tracks digital music sold by the song or album, not music purchased under subscription from services like eMusic, or subscription revenues from Rhapsody and Napster.” Thanks to reader Eduardo Leoni for catching this.

Larrabee: Intel’s Biggest Leap Since the Pentium Pro ★

Jon Stokes on “Larrabee”, Intel’s forthcoming big-deal new product:

Indeed, if a computer maker who controls the whole OS and firmware stack for its desktop systems were to support symmetric multiprocessing over the PCIe bus, and if that computer maker had some kind of cooperative task system that let it assign threads to specific cores, then it could probably make very good use of Larrabee as a many-core x86 coprocessor with robust media processing capabilities.

It seems likely we’re going to be hearing a lot more about Larrabee soon.