Advertisement for a Tech product:
“It is so easy to use, even a 5 year old can use it.”
What an average user would say:
“They said it is so easy to use, but how? I’m not good with tech stuff.”
Marketing does not necessarily represent reality.
The search for Micro USB cable.
I’m out of town on an assignment for the holiday weekend, what an irony. Anyway, I thought I had packed a Micro USB cable with me which I would use a lot. The external hard drive and the phone use the Micro USB cable to connect to the computer. I apparently didn’t bring it.
So I decided to buy one at the store and was shocked to find out how much they are selling the Micro USB cable for. The cheapest I could find at Best Buy or Radio Shack was $20. I could buy one through MonoPrice.com for less than $1 each.
Since I really need one I ended up buying one. What a pain.
The Android in Peril.
There are a lot of people cursing Apple’s name for suing HTC over Android. The ITC sides with Apple and concludes that HTC violates 2 of Apple’s patent. Sean Ludwig of VentureBeat dares to scream the headline: “Why Apple’s ITC patent victory over HTC Android phones is scary“.
It is pretty apparent that Apple-hating is so trendy these days in lights of the Apple v. HTC lawsuit. Unfortunately a lot of people seems to forget that HTC has waived the white flag when Microsoft came knocking. HTC is paying royalties to Microsoft for every Android phone it sold. Hating Microsoft is apparently so 1998. Does anyone remember that Microsoft recently demands Samsung to pay $15 for each Android phone it makes.
Microsoft is asserting some ownership to Android, that’s a bigger threat. HTC is not the only company to pay Android royalties to Microsoft.
Blame it on how easy anyone can abuse software patent.
Spammer Alert: superdooperdeals.com
Readers sent us a few info about new round of spam from superdooperdeals.com. Do not give them your email addresses with hope you’d be unsubscribed from their spam bombardments. superdooperdeals.com site includes some fake testimonials that don’t even make any sense.
Whois info on superdooperdeals.com:
Registration Service Provided By: Namecheap.com
Contact: support@namecheap.com
Visit: http://namecheap.comDomain name: Superdooperdeals.com
Registrant Contact:
SuperDooperDeals
Liam Carroll ()Fax:
15500 SW Jay Street #38743
Beaverton, OR 97006
USAdministrative Contact:
SuperDooperDeals
Liam Carroll (liam@superdooperdeals.com)
+1.5033038404
Fax: +1.5555555555
15500 SW Jay Street #38743
Beaverton, OR 97006
USTechnical Contact:
SuperDooperDeals
Liam Carroll (liam@superdooperdeals.com)
+1.5033038404
Fax: +1.5555555555
15500 SW Jay Street #38743
Beaverton, OR 97006
USStatus: Locked
Name Servers:
ns1.superdooperdeals.com
ns2.superdooperdeals.comCreation date: 23 Mar 2011 03:15:00
Expiration date: 22 Mar 2012 22:15:00
Other Domain Registered by superdooperdeals.com:
- bingolikey.com
- carz-online.com
- luxuryhosting.net
- yourkeywords.net
- we-mean-business.org
- playwithusdaily.com
We will add more info whenever we get them.
eNom and namecheap are the DNS Registrar that superdooperdeal.com uses, but they are willing to resolve the issue.
This is a sample of namecheap.com reply to the complaints:
Hello,
Thank you for your email regarding researchsneeze.info domain name. The domain that you reported is registered with NameCheap but hosted with another company. Please contact the hosting company for help with investigating the incident of spam. You will need to forward entire email with full headers to them. Here are contact details of the company that owns IP address assigned to the domain:
http://who.is/whois-ip/108.60.156.10/
——————–
Regards,
Marta K.
Customer Support
http://whois.arin.net/rest/nets;q=108.60.156.10?showDetails=true&showARIN=false
Other good and responsible DNS Registrars would take the complaints seriously and actually do something to disable the offending domains.
File complaints to FTC: https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov/FTC_Wizard.aspx?Lang=en for the violation of CAN-SPAM Act.
Rage Against Patent Troll.
On Friday May 13th, 2011 some iOS App Developers revealed that they are being sued by Lodsys for In-App Purchases and Upgrade Links. This lawsuit baffles many developers since Developers are using API in iOS SDK provided by Apple for In-App Purchasing. Lodsys so far is suing the Developers, but not Apple.
Adam C. Engst provided a great analysis on the matter.
It’s entirely unclear why Lodsys has chosen this approach — their lawyers have undoubtedly read the iOS Developer Program License Agreement and know that the iOS developers can’t settle. And they’ve chosen such small targets that there’s no way they could even cover their legal fees with what they could squeeze out. The only strategy that makes sense is that by targeting small developers, they put additional pressure on Apple to settle quickly.
Apple should respond to this lawsuit even though it is not yet directed at them.
In the meantime, this is what the iPad think about Lodsys:
That makes a lot of sense.
Apple and Proprietary SATA Hard-Drive Power Connector.
Apple’s proprietary SATA Hard-Drive Power Connector in the 2011 iMac is something new. Apple may have caught vendors like Other World Computing off guard, but it is not unanticipated. Since the introduction of iMac G5 with built-in iSight camera in 2005, it has been a daunting task to replace the hard-drive on this all-in-one computer.
Having a thermal sensor on the hard-drive itself is nice. Would this become an industry standard? Apple does not act alone, at least one hard-drive manufacturer is in on it.
Locations, Locations, Locations!
Apple and Google are sued on separate occasions for the alleged location tracking.
Meanwhile, Tom Tom’s GPS data is being used to target speeders in Netherlands.
At least Windows Phone 7 does not store location data on the phone. They are collecting it on the fly.
Why are these companies tracking me? Before I finish my thought, I should check-in on Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, Google Latitude, … and geotagging this post.