Linked List: July 23, 2012

Monday, 23 July 2012

Jack Healy, reporting for the NYT:

With a few keystrokes, the suspect, James E. Holmes, ordered 3,000 rounds of handgun ammunition, 3,000 rounds for an assault rifle and 350 shells for a 12-gauge shotgun — an amount of firepower that costs roughly $3,000 at the online sites — in the four months before the shooting, according to the police. It was pretty much as easy as ordering a book from Amazon.

Totally legal.

‘Dead Trigger’ Game Now Free on Android Due to ‘Unbelievably High’ Piracy Rate ★

Aaron Souppouris, writing for The Verge:

Dead Trigger, a zombie FPS for smartphones from the makers of Shadowgun, is now free to download on Android thanks to rampant piracy on the platform. In a statement on Facebook, developer Madfinger Games says that even at $0.99, the piracy rate on Android devices was “unbelievably high.”

The iOS version costs just one buck — let’s make this a good day for Madfinger and buy it.

Update, 2 August 2012: It’s now free on iOS, too.

Reuters: Apple to Shrink Dock Connector for Next iPhone ★

Clare Jim and Lee Chyen Yee, reporting for Reuters, “What’s Up Dock? Apple to Shrink Connector for iPhone 5”:

Apple Inc’s new iPhone will drop the wide dock connector used in the company’s gadgets for the best part of a decade in favor of a smaller one, a change likely to annoy the Apple faithful but which could be a boon for accessory makers.

Regarding the headline: awful pun, and it’s a mistake to call the next iPhone the “iPhone 5”. We learned that last year.

Regarding the article: Apple is already abandoning its own only-a-decade-old proprietary adaptor for something better and smaller; PC notebooks still ship with huge 25-year-old VGA ports. Every time I bring this up, the VGA defenders argue that of course notebooks need to ship with VGA ports, added thickness be damned, because the world is full of VGA-only projectors. But the world is also full of Apple 30-pin dock connector cables and accessories. This is how progress is made.

Update: And “Apple faithful”? Really? What other company has its customers described as “faithful”? Seriously.

Justice Department Slams Apple, Refuses to Modify E-Book Settlement ★

Jeff John Roberts, writing for PaidContent:

The Justice Department released a document today that characterized criticism by Apple and publishers of a controversial price-fixing settlement as “self-serving” and ill-founded. The Department also pointed to recent ventures by Google and Microsoft as evidence that the e-book market is thriving and that Amazon’s dominant position has been overstated.

I’ll bet Amazon sells more e-books in a day than Microsoft and Google combined do in a month. Not that sales numbers alone disprove the DOJ’s argument, but let’s not kid ourselves that Microsoft or Google have yet made a dent in the e-book market.

Google Debuts Its First Nexus 7 Commercial ★

Nicely done, and cleverly works around the fact that the Nexus 7 only networks with Wi-Fi. I wonder, though, how many people will be left with the wrong impression — that the Nexus 7 does support cellular networking?

iOS 6 Fonts ★

Michael Critz has updated his list of fonts to include those added in the (still in beta) iOS 6. Notable additions: Avenir and Symbol. (Avenir is the typeface used throughout the new Maps app. And it’s worth noting that Palm used (uses?) a custom version of Avenir as the system font in WebOS.)

Why Does the IT Industry Continue to Listen to Gartner? ★

Ed Bott:

Gartner is getting more than its fair share of attention today for a controversial series of blog posts on Windows 8 from research director Gunnar Berger, who argues that the Windows 8 experience will be “bad” on a non-touch-enabled device.

I have one question. Why does anyone pay attention to Gartner, which has been trolling IT professionals for as long as I’ve been in the industry?

Just for grins, I went back and looked up some of Gartner’s more spectacularly confident and wrong-headed predictions. Here are some of their greatest hits. Er, I mean misses.

Best claim chowder you’re going to taste all day. One of the gems Bott cites is this one from 2006: “Apple Should License the Mac to Dell”, which called for Apple to abandon the hardware business (and which earned them Jackass of the Week honors). Clearly, they smoke the good stuff at Gartner.