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Greenpeace: Apple falling short of sourcing clean power
Environmental reports can be all over the place these days -- at times, it seems like these reports tend to be more about politics than the environment. But while Apple has always said it's leading the charge on being environmentally friendly, Greenpeace apparently isn't so sure. The group has called out Apple in a recent report for not using environmentally friendly sources to power Apple's North Carolina data center. Google, Yahoo, and Facebook all got good marks from Greenpeace's report, because their buildings are in areas that use "clean" power like wind and solar power. But Apple's center uses mostly coal and nuclear electricity, which Greenpeace looks negatively on. Apple does deserve some credit. It leads the industry in using green power, even if this specific plant, according to this report, isn't doing what Greenpeace wants. Apple also got bad marks for transparency. The company says it uses clean power, but apparently it doesn't always share the specific evidence that Greenpeace wants. At any rate, there's probably fair points on both sides here. Apple does a lot to use "green" energy in all of its work, and of course, as Greenpeace suggests, there's always more that can be done. The North Carolina data center, as you know if you've ever used iCloud or Siri, is nice to have. But it would be even nicer if it was run on power that did not as negatively affect the environment.
Vlingo co-founder explains data-collection issues
With Carrier IQ and O2's most recent data-snooping, people's vigilance about what information cellphones transmit is increasing. Using a Galaxy Note, AndroidPit found that every four minutes, Vlingo's voice-recognition app was sending a packet of data to an unencrypted server. The packet contained your GPS co-ordinates, IMEI (unique device identifier), contact list and the title of every song stored on your device -- without proper warning in the privacy policy you agree to when starting up the app. We spoke with co-founder John Wynn, product marketing head TJ Leonard and communications manager Erin Keleher, who gave us a full and frank discussion about what's going on and the steps it's taking to remedy the situation, which we've got for you after the break.
The elephant in the room: Apple pulls a Microsoft, delays Leopard past original promise
The first bell that rung in my ear when Steve announced Mac OS X 10.5's ship date of Spring 2007 was: "Apple just pulled a Microsoft". I know, I know: those words might be nails on the chalkboard in your head, but it's true. Leopard was originally promised for Fall 2006, and now it's been bumped back to 2007.Now don't get me wrong, if they need the time to work on it and bang out all the new features (including those secret ones they couldn't even show today) then by all means the company should take their time. I'm simply interested in the ramifications, if any, of a delay like this.Microsoft has received boatloads of criticism from every media outlet imaginable for continually delaying Longhorn Vista for the last 4 years. Some have postulated that today's modern and feature-packed OSes might be getting too big for their britches. Even those recent prominent un-switchers in the media also cited buggy software and wonky Mac OS X problems as part of their reasoning for jumping ship.I'm not trying to Pull a Dvorak™ and invent some crisis here or anything, but could some of these complications be making their way into the Apple side of the fence? Each new version of Mac OS X has brought incredible innovation with it (and these 10 new Leopard features are no exception), but also slightly more instability and 'growing pains' as well. Mail.app is widely harped on for a good number of reasons, namely instability and flakiness. GarageBand rocks, but only until you try to use the fancy podcast recording features. Even the cutting-edge new Spotlight is a great concept with a decent implementation, but it too suffers problems of inaccuracy, sluggish performance (even on recent machines like my MBP) and over-activity.What do you TUAW readers think though? Is the new Leopard ship date cause for alarm? Do you think you'll pick up the 1.0 release, or wait for initial reports and the subsequent updates? Sound off![UPDATE: For clarification, many reports since the introduction of Leopard have changed their tune for a release of 'late 2006/early 2007', but plenty of them, at least around the original announcement, specified Fall 2006.]
