By Graham K. Rogers

Opening Gambit

Apple Stuff

I had expected that if there was this change, the music would be local. Wrong again. On the first display page I saw Linkin Park and The Beatles as well as Jay Chou in a "featured" panel. And the Rolling Stones. Their first album was brought by a friend to my 14th birthday and changed everything. I am going to buy this one for sure. As well as a load of other music.

A press release from Apple tells us that the iTunes Store has been added to Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Macau, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. This is a massive expansion of availability in an area that has long been accused of piracy. The shrinking of the disk market (you could copy CDs anyway) and the controls that Apple has with accounts has finally brought the copyright holders to their senses. Perhaps.

We also found a new, free Podcasts app in the iTunes app store. This was prominently displayed in the first position in New & Noteworthy. The app had been anticipated for iOS 6 but it is ready now and indicates a bigger push by Apple on podcasting. We are ready here and have already resurrected the eXtensions podcast. The new app is also featured on the section for podcasts in the iTunes store. Logical really. Michael Rose of TUAW already has an outline of the app online as does Cody Fink on MacStories.

There was no update to iTunes, although there was one for Digital Camera Raw Compatibility (version 3.14) which adds RAW image compatibility for the following cameras to Aperture 3 and iPhoto '11:

• Canon EOS Rebel T4i / 650D / Kiss X6i
• Sony Alpha SLT-A37

The latest NYTimes tilt at Apple appeared at the weekend and I wrote a criticism of it on Sunday that I put online. Mark Gurman on 9 to 5 Mac was also interested in what the NYTimes article implied, so polled a number of former and current Apple employees with a series of useful opinion questions. He tells us that some of those polled agree with the NYTimes while some do not.

There are also some common themes about the benefits of actually having worked in Apple retail. The survey and analysis are included. With many of the responses, it seems my reactions were close on Sunday: NYTimes had a result they wanted and missed some overall points about why people work at Apple. My link for this was from MacDaily News.

Rumours of the iPhone 5 have been around for a while, and it is always worth carrying some of the better ones especially if they are old stories dressed up in new clothes. Simon Sage on iMore carries the idea that appeared on a number of sites this week (and in the past) about NFC (near-field communications). Only this time we hear that iPhone 5 prototypes apparently support this and the already-revealed Passbook would be the perfect complement.

While the NYTimes beefed about Apple's offices in Nevada as a way to avoid taxes in California, Apple is about to step up its investment in the state famous for desert, gambling and atomic weapons testing. A report by Mikey Campbell on AppleInsider indicates that Apple is to put $1 billion into a new data center there. This has been in the planning for a while and part of the deal includes a tax break.

When Tim Cook talked about the limits of convergence -- with compromise something has to go -- there were several funny comments on the ideas, with the best, to my mind the froaster video that I link to again here. This week, we are told by Nate Smith and Joe Aimonetti on SlackStory that Apple is introducing a fabulous new washing machine with Siri integration, Find my Socks, Retina Wash, the iTunes Detergent Store and much more all very much tongue in cheek.

Codeweavers who produce OS X software that allows a specific Windows program to run in what is called a bottle, has announced Crossover 11.2.0 which is for OS X and Linux. An advantage of the Mac version is that it is already primed for the next release of OS X: Mountain Lion. There is a free trial available.

I often discuss the reliability of Macs, so it would be remiss of me not to report when things go wrong. I put online an article about how, after about 5 years, the hard disk in my iMac failed when I woke it from its weekend sleep on Monday morning. Disk Utility on the Rescue partition told me that the disk was failing when the behaviour, unable to restart and other symptoms made this a probability: that was the confirmation. A new disk is on order and the local uStore has said they will put it in for me. Part two coming later, I hope.

Also on reliability, we have often likes to claim that there are no viruses for Macs. On the whole I think that pretty much holds, if the definition of virus includes self-spreading and self-installing vectors. However, perhaps in the light of the consumer organisation's actions on what constitutes 4G, Electronista (among others) tell us that Apple is rewording the "doesn't get PC viruses" on a page to "It's built to be safe"; "Safeguard your data. By doing nothing." Still no viruses but the advent of some serious Trojan horse malware has woken some people up.

In the light of the tablet project farce in Thailand, it was interesting to read about a school district in San Diego, CA, that had bought 26,000 iPads (thousand). The report is carried on the 10 News website, and my original link was via MacDaily News

An interesting development was reported by several sources this week, such as the NYTimes in an article by Brian X. Chen, who tells us that the publication has made a deal with Flipboard and subscribers will be able to access the content via that app. This is fairly significant for both and for online delivery systems in a wider context.

Related to this was the news from Frederic Lardinois on Tech Crunch that the Wall Street Journal is launching a service in conjunction with Pulse: an app that is comparable to Flipboard.

Half and half

And in the US Apple v Samsung case, Florian Mueller gives us a useful summary on the state of things as the case heads for a hearing on Friday, with a design patent dropped and another dispute on transparency.

Other Matters

However, Larry Dignan reports on the findings of an analyst who suggest that RIM is not just in trouble, but IN TROUBLE, with lots of financial problems expected for the future and a number of dire predictions including the one that it will have to cut 90% of the workforce.

Also rumoured to be splitting in two is News Corporation -- the Murdoch fiefdom currently under a cloud following serious allegations of phone hacking and a whole lot more. A report on TNW by Paul Sawyers examines this rumour and a future without Rupert Murdoch.

I have been looking at some of the government support for new legislation that has been appearing in the press in the UK, particularly and also in the support teams of Canada and the USA's FBI and DEA. Each has its own version of problems that can only be tackled if the agencies are allowed sweeping new laws that enable wider tracking -- phenomenally wide -- of communications: internet trawling in the hope that some criminal activity swims in.

Now the heavyweights are running interference, as the BBC reports, with the appearance of the head of MI5 -- his predecessor Stella Rimington recently lost a notebook computer -- bemoaning the state of online security that is being exploited by criminals. He threw in the Olympic Games and State-sponsored terrorism (which is a real threat with perhaps Israel, the UK and US being among the worst perpetrators).

Then after going through all the threats from external sources in his presentation, near the end of the article we were told, "the plan to allow greater collection of communications data - such as from social networks - was a "necessary and proportionate measure" to tackle crimes, including terrorism." He closes with a sort of warning: "The dog you haven't seen may turn out to be the one that bites you."

Dogs that you can see bite too.

Mind you, in the UK the damage is sometimes done not by outside attackers but by IT guys just updating the software as customers of two large banks found out last weekend. The repair team finally got it together late Saturday, with the result that the banks actually opened on Sunday: the public should come here where banks in the malls open 364 days a year. After the repairs, the governor of the Bank of England has grumbled a bit -- according to Martha Linden on The Independent site -- and wants an investigation. Heads will roll.

I noted on Monday that Microsoft has not announced prices for the Surface, although some have quoted $599 and $799 for the two units while Steve Sinovsky said in the video I saw that the pricing would be "compatible with ultrabook PCs" which are a lot higher than tablet computers. Neil Hughes on AppleInsider suggests that Microsoft is between a rock and a hard place with pricing. Undercutting the iPad (as if) would upset its OEM partners even more, while matching it would also cause problems as the device may not be able to compete, and pitching it too high, defeats the object of the exercise, although I am not really sure what that is.

In another article on the device, Bryan Chaffin suggests that Microsoft's unhappiness with its partners who had been slow to produce something -- anything -- that could challenge the iPad's success both in terms of hardware and software, as well as the wider infrastructure, may all have been part of the reason behind Redmond trying to do the job themselves.

I think they may find similar problems to their OEM partners and could walk away licking some wounds in a few months, like they did with that wonderful iPod challenger, the Zune.

Local Items

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.