MacEdition Pro News : June 7, 2002: New appearances, disappearances, and corporate gouging
by MacEdition Staff (feedback)
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Welcome to the neighborhood!
A hearty “Hail!” and “Well met!” goes out to a recent partnership in the Professional Mac community: Mac Professional (http://www.macprofessional.de, not the .com version which is being speculated by a domain sales company) and MacNews.de.
Here’s the scoop in their own words:
The first printed issue of Mac Professional, a new German-language magazine for professional Apple Macintosh users, reaches readers July 10.
Mac Professional’s Web site is live at http://www.macprofessional.de.
Mac Professional will appear monthly under the auspices of PPH Publishing Port Hamburg GmbH i. Gr., a publishing house founded by former editors of Germany’s oldest Macintosh magazine. Mac Professional serves the markets of Germany, Austria and Switzerland, targeting more than 100,000 potential readers.
The editorial staff led by Editor in Chief Volker Riebartsch includes Executive Editor Irina Leichsenring and Senior Editors Matthias Zehden, Alex Milsmann and Uwe Vieths. Barbara Herpich has assumed the title of Advertising Sales Director, while Editorial Assistant Carolin Prohl will support the team. With this lineup, the new magazine benefits from the years’ experience and excellent industry contacts of a world-renowned and experienced team.
If you’re looking for a European perspective, these guys have the pedigree.
Dropping off the radar
Regular readers of MacSlash may have been a bit surprised last week to find themselves redirected to MacMall. It’s quite a long bizarre story with more twists than a Quentin Tarentino movie, but the gist it is this:
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The folks at MacSlash gave an @mac.com email contact address to Dotster, the DNS provider they originally registered with.
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Some dimbulb at Apple decided Dotster was spam and blocked it without telling users they are filtering their mail. That is, Apple doesn’t inform you they filter mac.com mail period.
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As a result, the MacSlash domain name expired, allowing an opportunistic unsavoury individual to snap it up and arrange a redirect to MacMall, presumably to earn a faustian commission.
A bit of a bunfight then ensued, the full details of which you can get here and here. The long and the short of it is that while YMMV with trying macslash.com, you should get through using either macslash.org or macslash.net
Yes, perhaps one can say that the folks at MacSlash should have kept better records and the problem would never have happened, but unplanned outages do happen. And yes, Mr. Vicente Peiro Crespo, the (arguably) unsavoury character at the center of this bunfight, is (probably) correct when he claims he did nothing illegal – although there could be issues regarding the MacSlash registered trademark. But just because something’s not illegal doesn’t mean you should do it. Mr. Peiro would have a hard time arguing he didn’t knowingly swoop on the domain name purely to benefit from the trademarked brand built up by the proper owners, and an even harder time justifying the ethics of it.
On a related but much happier note, the folks at As the Apple Turns are now back in action churning out daily episodes. Welcome back guys, we missed you!
UMAX to US customers: BOHICA
Well, given the recent shenanigans of the US division of UMAX, it now seems quite karmic that they had their cloning business abruptly “Steved”. (Some prefer the phrase “Jobbed”, as the practice often leads to the loss of many jobs, but we digress.)
What shenanigans are we talking about? Well, as noted on the Register, UMAX has decided to charge customers up to $60 for, wait for it, drivers. That’s right, that normally free bit of software that often comes with many hardware devices to enable it to work with a computer, is now for fun and profit according to UMAX US.
If you think that stinks, the feeble excuses offered by UMAX US when quizzed by the Register are even more on the nose. The CDs are apparently necessary because the drivers are quite big, which still doesn’t explain why the drivers couldn’t be left online for those who choose to download them. The CDs are apparently so expensive because of the “bundled software” royalties. In short, it’s a load of crap and they’re just hoping to squeeze users who’ve upgraded their operating system and don’t want to throw away their hardware investment.
The farcical nature of this sorry episode is only enhanced by the fact that the drivers are freely available on many of UMAX’s international websites. One note of caution however, there is some anecdotal evidence that the drivers on overseas sites may have problems if installed on the US version of OS X. If readers have successfully installed the drivers from overseas sites let us know in the feedback section below.
Finally, it’s not often that you see corporate antics that put Microsoft or the RIAA to shame so all we can say is bear these antics in mind before buying from UMAX. And while we’d never go so far as to openly advocate or encourage software piracy (there’s probably some law against it), antics like this make it sorely tempting...
Looking for old ProNews segments? Check out our index at http://old.macedition.com/news/. Do you have news releases or tidbits of interest to the Macintosh professional? Send them to pronewsnotes@macedition.com.