Cody Taylor

theodp writes “PC Magazine’s John C. Dvorak offers his curmudgeonly take on the 30th anniversary of the spreadsheet, which Dvorak blames for elevating once lowly bean counters to the executive suite and enabling them to make some truly horrible decisions. But even if you believe that VisiCalc was the root-of-all-evil, as Dvorak claims, your geek side still has to admire it for the programming tour-de-force that it was, implemented in 32KB memory using the look-Ma-no-multiply-or-divide instruction set of the 1MHz 8-bit 6502 processor that powered the Apple II.” On the brighter side, one of my favorite things about Visicalc is the widely repeated story that it was snuck into businesses on Apple machines bought under the guise of word processors, but covertly used for accounting instead.

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r2k writes “Apple’s iTunes Plus files are DRM-free, but sharing the files on P2P networks may be an extremely bad idea. A report published by CNet highlights the fact that the account information and email address of the iTunes account holder is hidden inside each and every DRM-free download. I checked, and I found I couldn’t access the information using an ID3 tag editor, but using Notepad I found my email address stored inside the audio file itself.”

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Jan 12 – LG Display signed deal to supply Apple with liquid crystal display panels for five years. The world’s second-biggest maker of LCD screens did not disclose the total size of the deal but said it would receive 500 million dollars advance from…

jehovajerieh writes to us in the time-honored tradition of rampant Apple speculation, pointing to an article over on IBTimes suggesting that while the iPhone Nano may be on the way, the US might not be the first to experience this gadget bliss. “Despite limited information in the supplier channels and typical secrecy with new Apple products, insiders have confirmed that the iPhone nano is not yet in the testing labs at AT&T, Marshal says, leading him to believe that the launch will most likely be with a non-US carrier. ‘Obviously, the best-case scenario here would be a China launch (~600mil+ wireless subscribers total in the country), but we have no definitive knowledge of this and are working on identifying the [locale] of launch and other pertinent details,’ he said.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Consumer Electronics Association has confirmed plans to host a Mac-centric area at CES 2010, but Apple has still not commented on whether it plans to participate.

Apple has unveiled its greenest Macs yet, it’s cut down on bulky packaging, it’s removed some of the worst nasties from its products and it’s now happy to take old computing kit when you buy new Apple kit.So how green is Apple – and is there anything we can do to make it greener still?

On the heels of announcing its plans to bail on Macworld Expo next year, Apple will be instead attending the more generic Consumer Electronics Show in 2010, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs has addressed rumors concerning his weight loss in a statement to the press. In a statement, Jobs said, “after further testing, my doctors think they have found the cause–a hormone imbalance that has been ‘robbing’ me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy.” This is sad, but better than a relapse!

Mono, an open source implementation of the .NET runtime, is being used to build games for the iPhone and Wii. Ars looks at how static compilation has made it possible for Mono applications to meet Apple’s requirements for inclusion in the App Store.