Linked List: July 26, 2012

Thursday, 26 July 2012

New Apple Campaign Urges Consumers to Buy iPhone for Other Hand 

How wrong is it that this doesn’t seem like a complete joke to me?

‘The Proverbial “Really Good” Science-Fiction Movie’ 

Stanley Kubrick writes to Arthur C. Clarke.

Happy Birthday, Stanley Kubrick 

Celebrate with some great Kubrick links at Coudal.com.

Apple Claims Google Warned Samsung Against Copying iPhone and iPad 

John Paczkowski, on Apple’s brief for next week’s trial against Samsung:

In February 2010, Google told Samsung that Samsung’s “P1” and “P3” tablets (Galaxy Tab and Galaxy Tab 10.1) were “too similar” to the iPad and demanded “distinguishable design vis-à-vis the iPad for the P3.”

In 2011, Samsung’s own Product Design Group noted that it is “regrettable” that the Galaxy S “looks similar” to older iPhone models.

As part of a formal, Samsung-sponsored evaluation, famous designers warned Samsung that the Galaxy S “looked like it copied the iPhone too much,” and that “innovation is needed.” The designers explained that the appearance of the Galaxy S “[c]losely resembles the iPhone shape so as to have no distinguishable elements,” and “[a]ll you have to do is cover up the Samsung logo and it’s difficult to find anything different from the iPhone.”

Watch What Apple’s OS Update Did to One Network’s Traffic 

That’s a lot of ones and zeroes.

Vanity Fair: ‘How Microsoft Lost Its Mojo: Steve Ballmer and Corporate America’s Most Spectacular Decline’ 

Kurt Eichenwald’s feature-length takedown of post-’90s Microsoft:

Years passed. Finally, on November 14, 2006, Microsoft introduced its own music player, called Zune. Fifty-four days later, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, which combined a mobile phone, a music player, Internet capability, a camera, and other features not available on Zune. But the iPod was still around for customers who didn’t want a phone. In fact, Apple had already introduced its fifth-generation iPod, its less expensive iPod Mini, and was about a year away from marketing the least costly of its music players, the iPod Nano.

Zune was blown away. By 2009, iPod maintained an astonishing 71 percent of the market, the kind of numbers rarely seen anywhere outside of a North Korean election. Meanwhile, Zune limped along with less than 4 percent. Last October, Microsoft discontinued it, in hopes that customers would instead purchase a Windows Phone that, like the iPhone, has a music player.

Never thought about it that way: by the time Microsoft caught up to the iPod, Apple was on to the iPhone.

Charlie Miller Discovers NFC Exploit for Android and Nokia Phones 

Andy Greenberg, reporting for Forbes:

At the Black Hat security conference Wednesday, serial Apple and Android hacker Charlie Miller plans to present a grab bag of new tricks that allow him to take complete control of Android and Nokia phones simply by bringing another device or just a chip within a few inches of the target gadget.