Vox News Magazine

Steve Jobs' favourite artist

David Hockney’s contribution to the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition this year is a feat of technological endurance, but the artist is hoping that making his future works will be much easier — with the help of an iPad.

The photographs that go on display to the public on Monday are so large that an iPad would be unable to cope, but Hockney believes that the new Apple touchscreen computer will have a transformative effect on art.

“The iPad is many things, but one is a very useful new visual tool,” he told The Times. “There is of course a dark side to it. It doesn’t take too much imagination to see it will get thinner, perhaps even like a piece of paper, and then they might be compulsory — an iPad passport with your whole life story in it, a more sinister form of control.”

via entertainment.timesonline.co.uk

Hockney must be Steve Jobs' favourite artist. Be that as it may, Hockney's use of the iPhone and now the iPad to create works of art is just one more example of the endless possibilities created by Apple and its gadgets.

He's also right when he predicts that the future iPad will be paper-thin. Technology tends to evolve quite quickly in our day and age, so an iPad as thin as paper could be less than ten years away. And the idea of an "iPad passport" is actually less "sinister" than it is appealing.

Solar storms coming

The sun is about to get a lot more active, which could have ill effects on Earth. So to prepare, top sun scientists met Tuesday to discuss the best ways to protect Earth's satellites and other vital systems from the coming solar storms.

Solar storms occur when sunspots on our star erupt and spew out flumes of charged particles that can damage power systems. The sun's activity typically follows an 11-year cycle, and it looks to be coming out of a slump and gearing up for an active period.

via www.csmonitor.com

The sun is said to be particularly active and could very well be the real reason behind global warming. At any rate, this makes more sense than any of the (manipulated) "science" behind "man-made" global warming.

AT&T security breach

AT&T Inc. acknowledged Wednesday that a security hole in its website had exposed iPad users' email addresses, a breach that highlights how corporations still have problems protecting private information.

via online.wsj.com

That's quite embarrassing for AT&T, especially after the recent changes to its iPad plans. While the iPad itself is secure, or as secure as any computing device can be, the weak link here was the 3G provider.

Let's hope Rogers in Canada does a better job of keeping its customers' information safe.

Safari 5 is out

Apple on Monday shipped the latest version of its Safari browser, patching a record 48 vulnerabilities, including one that a pair of hackers exploited in March to win a $US15,000 prize.

The new browser debuted the same day as Apple unveiled the iPhone 4 at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference.

Safari 5, the first major upgrade to the Mac OS X and Windows browser in a year, fixed four dozen flaws, most of them in WebKit, the open-source engine that powers not only Apple's browser but also Google's Chrome. Apple also updated the previous edition to version 4.1 on Monday.

via www.techworld.com.au

The new Safari 5 browser is out, and updates have already been sent out to existing users. It works like a charm, and it comes with HTML5 capability, that is, it's ready for viewing videos without Adoble Flash.

When companies try to gag the public

After a towing company hauled Justin Kurtz’s car from his apartment complex parking lot, despite his permit to park there, Mr. Kurtz, 21, a college student in Kalamazoo, Mich., went to the Internet for revenge.

Outraged at having to pay $118 to get his car back, Mr. Kurtz created a Facebook page called “Kalamazoo Residents against T&J Towing.” Within two days, 800 people had joined the group, some posting comments about their own maddening experiences with the company.

T&J filed a defamation suit against Mr. Kurtz, claiming the site was hurting business and seeking $750,000 in damages.

via www.nytimes.com

This is what’s known as a SLAPP lawsuit – threat of devastating legal action is used to shut up opponents, or generally anyone who tells inconvenient truths.

Justin Kurtz has every right not only to tell his story, but also to vent. If the company comes off looking bad, so be it. Any company acting in foolish ways deserves to and must be exposed publicly.

Besides, the “clean hands” principle should apply in this case. Apparently, the company in this case has several complaints against it that have been filed with the Better Business Bureau. That is to say, any negative remarks about the company are likely the truth and nothing but the truth.

But the truth hurts, and the company is trying to suppress it. How un-American, yet so Canadian.

One million iPads a month

Apple is raking in big sales in the United States alone:

Apple announced Monday that it had reached a new milestone with its iPad, selling two million devices in less than 60 days.

The latest announcement shows that Apple is selling one million iPads a month, an average of nearly 35,000 a day. The iPhone, which went on sale in mid-2007, took 74 days to reach one million sales.

In a news release, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, said customers around the world who are buying the iPad “seem to be loving it as much as we do.” Mr. Jobs also said, “We appreciate their patience, and are working hard to build enough iPads for everyone.”

Add to this the roughly two million people who bought an iPad on May 28, when the gadget was released in Canada and most European countries as well as Japan and others, and it’s not hard to see why Apple has now topped Microsoft in market capitalization.

iPad not a replacement, but an enhancement

Now that the iPad is widely available almost everywhere after the May 28 launch in Canada and most of Europe and Japan, the big question now is how people will use this great device.

One of the key questions about the iPad is that, once the initial flurry of excitement and sales to technology enthusiasts is over, whether or not large numbers of consumers will choose to buy tablets instead of laptops or to replace their wireless smart phones.

Perhaps they will do neither. According to a Solutions Research Group Consultants Inc. survey of 1,000 respondents during the first quarter of this year, only about half had any interest in the device. But 70 per cent of those surveyed who said they would purchase the device said they would make it a third electronic device – that is, an addition to, rather than as a replacement for, a laptop or a smart phone.

That’s exactly the right attitude. The iPad cannot replace your desktop, laptop or smartphone; it merely becomes yet another key tool in our lives. In Canada, pre-ordered sales of the iPad amounted to 277,000, while the Brits bought 585,000 and the French 805,000 iPads. Not bad for a single day of sales.

Bret Michaels wins Celebrity Apprentice: A sympathy vote?

Against all odds, Bret Michaels won The Celebrity Apprentice finale on Sunday night.

Just days after returning to hospital with what was diagnosed as a warning stroke, the 47-year-old U.S. rocker appeared on the live last episode of Donald Trump's reality TV show in New York.

via www.cbc.ca

What do you think? Was Bret really the most qualified of all the candidates or did he merely win on sympathy?

And an aside: Why did Sharon Osborne stay away from the finale of Celebrity Apprentice? Was she still miffed or felt ashamed for the spectacle she made of herself when The Donald fired her?

Looks like Sharon is a bit on the petty side.

Wired on the iPad

The irony that Wired, a magazine founded to chronicle the digital revolution, has traditionally come to you each month on the smooshed atoms of dead trees is not lost on us. Let’s just say the medium is not always the message.

Except that now it is. I’m delighted to announce that Wired’s first digital edition is now available for the iPad and soon for nearly all other tablets. We have always made our stories accessible online at Wired.com, but as successful as the site is, it is not a magazine.

via www.wired.com

Wired is now available on the iPad with its own app. It costs US$4.99 per monthly issue. Like the TIME magazine app, there is no option to subscribe yet, which is kind of strange, because people can subscribe to entire seasons of TV shows through Apple's iTunes store.

Both TIME and Wired seem to indicate that the lack of a subscription option is the fault of Apple, but the example of TV show subscriptions proves that this is not the case. I think it's the magazine publishers that are hesitant for some reason.

Finding love

I used to have fairly firm views about getting married: that is, never to get married. Throughout my teenage years and well into my late twenties, getting a good education and building a career for myself was more important. But as I learned, your special someone may be waiting for you just around the corner … or just a few keystrokes away.

Today many people work from home and in isolation, or they work such long hours that they don’t really have the time to go bar-hopping in the hopes of finding Mr. or Ms. Right. As a result, the number of single people keeps growing in the Western world year after year.

While I never tried to find my better half through online dating, I cannot discount the value of such sites and services, as I myself found love via the Internet. My future wife-to-be and I met online in a discussion forum for translators. Within months we met face-to-face for the first time. A few weeks later, we moved in together, followed by our moving across the country, all the way to Calgary. Not long after that, we got married. We have now been married several years and are still going strong – in fact, our bond grows with each passing year.

So, if the bar scene is not your cup of tea or if your lifestyle and/or work doesn’t leave you any time to date, let the Internet help you out. And if you don’t want to leave things to chance, as I did, why don’t you try an online dating service like LavaLife?

This post is a sponsored article.