Ungenius

Turbine publishes Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online. This makes absolutely no sense to me.

Leave it to Nate Silver to develop a fast food unhealthiness index. Double points for naming it the Double Down, too.

It’s quite simple. Make two leagues, the American and National, with no geographical split. The AL has 14 teams and the NL 16 or, for true equitability, each league goes with 15 and baseball turns interleague play into a season-long event. Either way, the teams with the four best records in each league make the playoffs.

Make it so, Number 1.

IFOAppleStore is reporting that nearly a dozen employees were fired when they didn’t follow procedures when backing up and restoring customer data, leading some customers to access other customers’ private data.

The story includes this snippet:

According to sources, the store’s video surveillance tapes revealed that 10 employees had not followed Apple’s procedure for making backups and performing restores on customer computers.

This sounds suspicious to me. Even in my second store, which had a fairly snazzy video system, there’s absolutely no way management would have been able to catch something like this on the tapes. The quality of video from your typical security system, and Apple’s not using anything special here, is only barely enough to place specific people in specific rooms and, perhaps, identify what’s in their hands. Video surveillance is also rather notorious for having trouble capturing what’s on a computer’s screen. There’s simply no way that video surveillance factored into this.

Plus, there’s plenty of other ways for management to have gotten to the bottom of this without having to go to the tapes. This sounds like a bit of paranoid thinking on behalf of the terminated tipster.

I’ve just been soaking in the details on the great iPhone 4 Caper of 2010. Latent in all of the hooplah is the simple, cynical question: Is this an intentional leak?

My guess is that no, it’s not. This type of leak – if it were one – is inherently cheap, and if there’s anything I learned while I worked for the Fruit, it’s that they don’t do anything public-facing that’s cheap.

I worked for an ad agency several lifetimes ago that was big on what they called “spherical branding.” They viewed a client as a sort of planet, or perhaps an onion, with each layer successively more exposed to the public but also successively more under the direction of the corporate brand. It’s hard to explain in type, but the end result is uniformity of message, uniformity of brand, and uniformity of customer experience. Great effort was made to ensure that all areas of the company behaved consistent to the overall brand.

Apple may not have been one of our clients, but Apple is a strong believer in spherical branding even if I never heard the term mentioned while I worked there. In fact, I’m not even sure if Apple was consciously on the wagon, as it seemed to be something more innate. Other companies had to work and strive to achieve uniformity, while Apple just is.

A stunt like this is anathema to everything that is the Apple brand identity. It just doesn’t fit. This alone is enough to convince me that the device truly was either lost or stolen, and this isn’t an Apple Marketing plant.

This happens to some Maxtor drives when their bearings fail. According to the technician specs, this is not intentional.

Oops.

If only people still made ads like these…

“There are good means of communication, I have close contacts with my office all the times, and there are a lot of activities in Norway where we try to reduce the consequences of the volcano in Norway,” Stoltenberg told CNN.

We’ve been working on some volume licensing deals for Grackl, but for some reason every time I get any traction on this front the trail goes suddenly dead. A little bit of sleuthing uncovered a disturbing fact: there is no volume licensing of iPhone Apps.

I find this particularly unfathomable. Apple’s a major player – perhaps the major player – in K12 and Higher Education technology sales. This is a market that exists exclusively in volume licensing terms. This means that all those every-student-gets-an-iPod-Touch deals are coming either completely bare of any software, can only utilize free software, or are going exclusively to schools which have the budgets for custom development.

Every day, Apple is getting calls from schools who want hundreds iPod Touches and iPads, along with hundreds of copies of apps like KidCalc, Graphing Calculator, and Word Magic. Right now, Apple’s answer is simple: No. This is bad for everyone from the customers to the developers to Apple itself. Apple’s internal sales reps are even being told that they can only recommend free App Store solutions to their customers and they’ve been specifically told not to help their customers find workarounds for this.

My sources reported several months ago that Apple was working on it and that it was a priority. However, when I verified this information with other sources this morning, I was told that nothing has changed.