FLASH: Apple Declares Bankruptcy

In a surprise move,  Apple today declared moral bankruptcy (financially, of course, they are doing quite well):

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/27/apple-seeks-order-blocking-sale-of-samsung-products/?ref=global-home

This, in addition to socking Samsung for a billion bucks.

Pride goeth before .... well, an appeal, at any rate.

[More here:

 http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/08/apple-vs-samsung.html ]

[Update 20 IX 12]  Too funny:

http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/09/21/us-apple-maps-backlash-idINBRE88J19U20120921

Welcome to the new world of Apple Maps that greeted iPhone and iPad users when they downloaded the highly anticipated update to the consumer giant's mobile software platform, iOS 6.

Apple Inc's home-grown Maps feature was introduced with much fanfare in June by Apple's software chief Scott Forstall and is a direct challenge to the same service offered by ally-turned-rival Google Inc.

But the app is already facing criticism from users globally for a number of geographical errors, missing information and because it lacks features that made Google Maps so popular, including public transit directions, comprehensive traffic data or street view pictures.

Apple Maps has replaced Google Maps, which is no longer available on iOS 6.

Many users who downloaded Apple's iOS 6 software, released on Wednesday, took to Twitter and online forums to express their frustration at the glitches.

"The people who thought the world was flat were more accurate cartographers than Apple Maps," @RayneBradley said on Twitter.

"Apple Maps also have errors in business listings. I went to call a local taxi driver and it was a taxidermist (seriously)," said @TomDavenport on Twitter.

Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller said the company launched the new service knowing it was a major initiative.

"We are continuously improving it, and as Maps is a cloud-based solution, the more people use it, the better it will get," she said. "We're also working with developers to integrate some of the amazing transit apps in the App Store into iOS Maps."

"We appreciate all of the customer feedback and are working hard to make the customer experience even better," she added.

The criticism comes as Apple's iPhone 5 hits stores around the globe. The iPhone 5 comes pre-loaded with the new iOS 6 software and Maps.

Users have created a Tumblr blog sarcastically dubbed "The Amazing iOS 6 Maps" where many have posted screen shots of the errors (theamazingios6maps.tumblr.com/). Pictures showed the Norwegian town of Leknes in the Norwegian sea, the entire city center of Stratford-upon-Avon is labeled as a hospital.

Some of the errors have even irked politicians. Irish Minister for Justice Alan Shatter said he was surprised to discover that Airfield - a 35-acre estate with working farm and café in center of his constituency in Dundrum, on the outskirts of Dublin - has been labeled with the image of an aircraft.

He said this could be dangerous for pilots and suggested in a statement that Apple use the image of "a cow, a goat, a sheep, a flower" instead, and that an "aircraft is an entirely inappropriate flight of imagination".

Users in Asia were surprised to see two sets of the disputed islands known by Japan as the Senkaku and by China as the Diaoyu. Some joked that this was Apple's effort at providing a diplomatic solution to Japan and China, both of which claim the islands.

I've never really understood this "Cloud-based" mantra;  at my workplace, it is used in a way that makes no sense at all.  Is Apple saying that, say, what country Paris is in, should be decided by a consensus of user opinions?  -- Well if so, my ten billion penguin friends  are about to weigh in with the information that the Center of the Universe is in Antarctica ...

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

Relief for beleaguered Nook lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

[Update 30 Nov 2012]
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/11/itunes_11_it_s_time_for_apple_s_horrible_bloated_program_to_die.html

A lost sonnet of St. Augustine

A Lost Sonnet of Saint Augustine

This fragment, never published, was found among the late Saint’s papers.

 It appears here for the first time,  translated by your servant  from the original Latin.
Remarkably for a medieval work, it treats of the topic -- a favorite of the ancients, but much neglected since -- of the place of the woodchuck, in God's scheme of things.

Sanctus Augustinus Cantuariensis

Instructed readers will immediately recognize this as the work of Saint Augustine of Canterbury, the Apostle of England, where woodchucks -- or something very like them -- wondrously abound;  and not that of his name-mate, late of Hippo,  where God’s humblest creature, the groundhog, is seldom to be found.

It treats of the thesis of the Scala naturae -- the Great Chain of Being  -- and indeed seems destined to become the definitive statement of that worthy doctrine.  Specifically it asserts the notion  later put thus by Pope:

            From Nature’s chain  whatever link you strike,

            tenth, or ten-thousandth, breaks the chain alike.

Or,  more analytically:

The chain of being … made vivid  the idea of a related universe  where no part was superfluous.  It enhanced the dignity of all creation, even of the meanest part.

-- E. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (1942)

Hi ma its me  down there at the bottom somewhere! -- Mr Bug

And so to the sonnet -- and the linguistic sensation of this century.

Not by Pride

‘Twas not by Pride he sank to ’s low Estate,

the Humble Woodchuck  lowly  hugs the ground,

not curs’d to limblessness for serpent’s sin,

for he was thus   since e’er the world began.

Not for him the proud cock’s rooftop crow,

nor raptor’s roar :  all mute  he chews the weeds.

No rainbow like the peacock's  bears our friend,

though he, like him, was once hand-crafted too.

From ants to angels  reacheth Nature’s scale.

Each creature decks the rung that him befits.

Aloft, the sounding choirs of Seraphim;

Beneath, the groundhog  creeps along the mold.

Yet this I say to you, and speak it true:

Not Solomon in all his glory  was e’er arrayed like one of these.

~

Testimonial:

“I have examined this sonnet in every detail, and concluded, without a doubt, that it is genuine.”

-- Prof. Ernest “Ern” Malley,  gentleman and scholar

Update:   The extraordinary scholarly controversy that has arisen over this remarkable poem  is given a judicious summary here.

[Update April, 2014]  Note:  The greatly overrated Appalachian poet J. Francis Shade  cribbed extensively, shamelessly, from St. Augustine’s unpublished works.  We won’t detail his many “borrowings” (larcenies, would be more like it);  we merely wish to set the record straight.

De musicâ; de gloriâ (Finis)

[continued from this]

And now we come to the brunt of the anecdote.  Something I have harbored within my bosom, smoldering;  something spoken to no-one,   lo  for half a century and more.  Even now I can scarcely bring myself to tell it -- even now, with grey hair framing a weathered visage, even now I blush to think upon it …   It’s not that it was exactly shameful;  it’s just… it was  … just …well…  all …. so…. :   stooopid…. ;  and so lame….

Ah well.  Worse things shall be bared to the vision of every adjudicating angel, upon Judgment Day.   Worse things -- far worse;  but yet nothing, quite, so … embarrassing…

(Perhaps you are by now -- conditioned by a churlish media -- expecting something overtly gross.  Nothing of the sort.  The media flattens and demeans.   For the true searing sense of mortification, and its paradoxical sources…. Look into your heart... look into your heart…..)

Well I… okay… one day…  I   ad-mit it!!  I --  just : went  :

                        up  :  to  her,           and,

without comment and without so much as a by-your-leave,

I,

…

…  …

… handed her a dime.  

(??)       (!!???)

(Did that register?   Do you grasp the full pathos and horror of this?)

                        I:     Handed;   her;   a :        dime…..    (…..)  

And then skedaddled.

Well.  That much is bad enough.

But the saga     does not end    there.

Eheu!   Would that it did….

You need to understand:

This was 1956;  more than half a century has passed,

since those dim distant times.

And in 1956, in our own little household,

ten cents was  two weeks    of my allowance!

And that meant a hard and flinty choice between:

One (1) Mickey Mouse comic book (about the only sort of literature/art/culture  we at that epoch  took in).

bzw.

Two (2) candy-bars @one nickel each  (and ye  who now treat these  as nothing:    Know :

never were we casually granted candy-bars, back in Ike-time, save as we saved;

so that, for us little ones, the savor of a Tootsie roll,

was as water from a clear spring, to the fawn…)

So this…dime…. which, to you, is nothing more than an annnoyance,

mixed in with the lint of your pocket-litter,

which you might    --  fling!   to a beggar,

in complete  contempt…

This thing was, to us, like… the Symbol,

the summary and the symbol

(FDR on it -- not that we knew him -- but he saved gramps and grandma  from

starving to death )  --

Yea much as the wafer -- round as a dime -- doth prefigure the mystery of the Eucharist --

the symbol of  two whole weeks  of our young lives…

(: our smallsweet    lives    which

came,  we knew not Whence,

and knew not, Whither tended….)

:  An incalculable commitment.

For:  from thence, unto  

    >  Death Us Depart  <

is but a skip  and a hop

across  the yawning chasm     of   godhumbled   Time ….

And so.  Myself, I might well have left it at that.   Already ashamed;  and yet,

Time  Heals all Wounds.   (Does it Not? --  No it Doesn’t.)

But yet:   She.   She came up to me, the very next day.

and said:  :   :       ((said))     :

with a chipmunk-facies of nut-lust

(wince ye, as though anticipating a blow)

=>   “How about  if,  tomorrow ,  you give me a quarter?” ?!!??!!!

(The auditorium rocks, as with the groans of the damned.

In time they die down; and we resume.)

Ah!  Carol, Carol,  wherever you are,

No doubt but, by God’s grace, thou hast repented --

bitterly repented.

Bitter as colocynth,  or the salt of the sea.

Indeed I pray that thou hast done so, and found relief;

for hast thou not… It does not bear thinking.

For what I here -- for me! -- recount in shame,

this -- thou, for thee  --…. ‘tis unimaginable.

The incident was almost laid to rest (being after all unknown,

to any but our own two stupid selves;  and between us, never alluded to),

when,  perhaps a week later, perhaps a month --

ah, but why try even to guess at metric time,

when for us, durée filled up all of empty space --

for all I know  it was the   very next day ….

but anyhow… 

One of my classmates told me, or else I overheard him saying it to another boy

(there was really little distinction between these two scenarios, at that time of our group-mind pupation):

“Stay away from that Carol:   she’s a …. gold-digger!”

(Ah,  Carol!  Carol!  Such sleepless nights  thou must have passed,

as that epithet -- shared by the group-mind among every child on the planet,

looking suddenly up alertly from the drinking-fountain,

irrespective of any actual participation in that particular exchange of words --

as that cruel blade of an epithet  did repeatedly slice 

| slice |

 down  !           

through the epidermis, the dermis, the underlying tendons,

For our health and our sanity,

Repentance is needful,

more than bread.

De profundis clamavisti, Carolina! )

*

It is finished.   My quill is dry.

She, as I,

has felt the stroke of sixty.

God willing, she is a grandmother.

God grant that her white hair,

now covered with a modest cap,

its simple white contrasting  with the black or brown of her plain woolen gown

-- her hair turned white     in a single night,          at the age of eight,

when she   in a soul-stroke    realized   the full horror,  of what she had done --

God grant that it did, in the fullness of time,

miraculously regain its full true color,

as it was stroked by her sweetheart, the pastor,

in the simple woodland setting   where they dwelt with the rest of the Bruderhof:

praying and praising, thinking and thanking,  feeling and fasting --

joining in a sweet embrace of an intensity the yet more shattering,

as it was unmixed by any base concerns

of Lust, or Greed, or Pride…

Her face weathered, but still fair, after years of poverty

gratefully embraced,

with no wealth to bequeath

her children   save the Truth

as it was nourished in a mother’s breast.

And having once passed through the flame,  annealed and anointed,

with faith now fortified,

they could with the more fortitude behold

as their own offspring sped   tumbling  into life,

to repeat all the same, all the agèd mistakes,

the same heart-breaking, unhappy-making, mistakes and missteps,

that ever our proud cotton-headed wool-gathering distracted folly has concocted,

again and again, down all the generations and in every age,

since our blessèd and unhappy race  was first engendred:

since we all splashed   miraculously    into being,

brightbloodiedbrilliantly,

from the loins of Adam,

and the womb of Eve …