Posts by ThomH

I think it's the sandboxing that makes the story

The story is quite clear, as you point out, that ASLR and full disk encryption are areas in which OS X has now caught up with Windows and Linux (or Ubuntu as it seems to call it). It then suggests that sand boxing processes and designing the applications (and daemons) that come with the system to isolate different logical parts into different processes within different sandboxes constituted a step in advance of any of the competing operating systems. So that's the leapfrog jump — the fact that the supplied browser, email app, PDF viewer, etc are all now aggressively using sand boxing, for which there is now high level API support.

Whether or not that's a valid assessment is one thing; just repeating what the article already says about areas where Apple have played catch up is quite another.

Re: pre-emptive multitasking, citing Apple's failure to transition to a modern OS until around 2000 feels a bit disingenuous as a comment on the OS they transitioned to.

Re: 64bit, that's been a feature since 2005. The difference in approaches has been that Apple have uncharacteristically gone for a gradual transition, though I think that's because the hardware has made a gradual transition.

Is it usable outside of Windows?

The Steam system requirements list Windows 2000/XP/Vista but also "Sound Cards Supported: AdLib compatible cards, SoundBlaster compatible cards and the Roland LAPC-1". So does it come in a form where I could transfer it to DosBox on another platform?

You're not allowing for the separate educational store

"University and college students or students accepted to university or college" qualify, and educational pricing for the MacBook Air is "from £730" (though I'm not sure exactly what you get for being in the student category, as you can't access the store other than from your campus network).

The original MacBook also lives on for bulk educational purchasers, much as they had exclusive access to the eMac for quite a few years back in the early-to-mid 2000s.

Not quite right on the facts

Small correction: Mini DisplayPort and Thunderbolt have the same physical connector and any Thunderbolt-equipped Mac can use the exact same accessories as a Mini-DisplayPort-equipped Mac for connection to external displays.

Obviously you can also connect any old DVD drive you want, no need to buy an Apple-branded one.

I'm a hawk on eliminating the optical media drive from all computers on the grounds that I barely use mine and don't recall ever having used one away from my home. So investing in a single, external drive and keeping that with the USB floppy drive on my shelf feels like an acceptable way to reduce the cost and size of any future computers I buy. You know, across the whole industry, irrespective of whether specific individual manufacturers pass savings on.

It's not a video port; it is backwards compatible

The new port, codeveloped with Intel, can be used to interface to displays, storage (at better-than-eSata speeds), peripherals, external graphics cards, etc. That's why it has been developed. The objective is to further shrink the number of ports on computers, and a secondary benefit taken advantage of by this monitor is that the monitor can act as a break-out box since it provides USB, Firewire, ethernet and Thunderbolt ports while connecting to the computer via a single cable.

If you have any mini-displayport peripherals, you can plug those directly into your Thunderbolt port instead. It's backwards compatible.

@Jolyon

I think some people can be oversensitive, given how often Flash support is used as a proxy by those that determine in advance that they want to say something negative for its own sake and only subsequently pick through the feature list to find something specific to say.

I also don't think the comment deserved any down votes.

Allowing for VAT...

... UK prices are actually cheaper. 69p - VAT = 57.5p. 57.5p converted to USD is 92 cents. The 99 cents doesn't include sales tax because there is no national US tax; if you live in a state that collects tax on digital downloads then it'll be added to the $0.99.

Not sure where the £120 comes from...

... but you can upload e-books from any source to your Kindle, subject to file format restrictions. Its most native format is mobi, not the more common epub, with plain text and PDF support also available, though panning and zooming on a PDF is very, very painful due to screen response times so you ideally want one formatted for A5 or smaller.

It'll confirm everything you secretly suspected about open source user interface design, but Calibre (and others I've forgotten the names of) can do conversions for you if you have any suitably non-DRMd epubs about. Project Gutenberg will give you mobi files directly, but that's generally unnecessary since Amazon seem to have grabbed them all and put them into their shop already. Though you often have to navigate thirty chancers who have opportunistically uploaded the same content with a price tag.

Not such a great plan

In that it would create unpredictability for every other party wanting to use HTML5 that has played properly and hence doesn't have patents to trade with W3C.

But, yes, I support the sentiment that Apple's hand should be forced somehow.

Wishful thinking

Android devices have been on the market for about 75% as long as iOS devices, Android phones outsell iPhones in several major markets, yet they manage only about 50% as much traffic per this article. And that's seemingly discounting the iPod Touch.

My feeling is that because Android is flexible and open, a lot of people are getting Android phones with expensive data plans, and in terms of quantities shipped it's still primarily a phone operating system. So there's no real one versus the other conclusion to be drawn, other than - as I say in my title - claiming pretty impressive market share based on little time in the wild doesn't add up.

My guess...

... they probably had someone much cheaper doing the ordinary "social networks, telephones and other social-engineering vectors" testing, or already had them done. Or the point was to prove to somebody that those aren't the exclusive points of attack rather than that the system is safe.

To be fair though...

... Android has probably just reached its stable share, having reached it very quickly because growth was so incredible last year. Apple will obviously want to try to chip away at that because gain from anyone is good for them, but it's not a fight to the death. Markets can contain more than one leading brand and market share generally doesn't operate like a game of Risk. While we're talking the realities of the real world, is it also safe to point out that open versus closed ideologies are basically a fringe debate?

Pros and cons though

While I'd prefer to keep myself insulated from News International, The Telegraph Group, etc, and Apple already have my details, I'm quite against Apple for imposing the price match condition. Fair enough if they want to impose a 30% charge on subscriptions, if that's what they've calculated the market will tolerate then good luck to them, but to then say that even if the iOS App Store isn't the most cost effective way to deliver to consumers then the extra costs can't be passed on puts far too much of a burden on producers.

Disagree on a bunch of points, but by no means all

Specifically:

(c) and (h): these extra features tend to be things that people don't actually care about, outside of a tech blog niche, and in any case can generally be found on Android phones too — with similarly few people particularly interested.

(e): I attended a Nokia development day recently, where we were given free phones and lots of information, and told about the latest cash prize development competitions. The Nokia employees were very nice and are clearly trying very hard.

(g): actually, I think quite a lot of people can tell you that Nokia phones come with Carl Zeiss lenses. They just also (very erroneously) think that it's a made-up brand ala Matsui. So this hits the (c)/(h) point of people not being particularly interested. On screens they're not really any better. The iPhone still has the leading DPI, and I think that Samsung's AMOLED screens provide the best overall colour. I have the feeling Nokia use a similar OLED technology at the top of the range, but they're definitely not ahead on that front.

On the purely technical/internals front (which I think people definitely don't care about at all, whereas I accept that some people do care about whether they can connect up via HDMI), Nokia are almost alone in being yet to produce an ARMv7 phone, and tend to go with the less powerful Broadcom GPUs rather than the good PowerVR stuff. So I wouldn't say they're technically brilliant.

That said, you're completely right that they do the phone stuff brilliantly. I used a Nokia phone up until 2008 and was very often the only person able to get a signal, especially when I lived in Cumbria. However, I find the OS a bit confused and inconsistent (eg, on the N8, just talking about built-in apps, some scroll areas require you to touch and pull a scroll bar, some are direct manipulation with no inertia, some have inertia but it varies from app to app), have never understood their holy devotion to having just one slightly peculiar font — especially as it makes web pages look really awful.

So, ummm, conclusion: hardware very good in some areas, good enough in all others, software definitely needed a change.

@Jolyon

It'd just look like the TV is constantly halfway between a fade from one to the other, surely?

@AC

If it follows the normal App Store rules, then you can have unlimited downloads for as long as the product is available. Which, I appreciate, answers only one of your very minor concerns, but there you go.

Might be smart to do a completely clean install, grab a Time Machine backup right then, and any time you want to refresh just chose 'restore from Time Machine backup' via the recovery disk that came with your machine (which was also the OS disk, at least up until now).

Who are you talking about?

You seem to have some sort of confirmation bias. Scroll up the screen and look at the comments posted before the 31st of May at 13:28 and there's nothing like a flock of anyone in particular, and almost no whining.

It's 70% of those returned

Since the overall proportion returned is probably, I don't know, 10% at the absolute worst, the average smartphone punter isn't imputed at all. What they're probably trying to do is put pressure on Google by stating publicly that Marketplace policies have given them a dramatic increase in returns.

Like you, I suspect that this isn't much of a problem at all to most people.

Fingers crossed for new development tools

Javascript isn't very nice, but quite a few people are working on that without any need to change the infrastructure underneath. The specific examples may not be to your liking, but e.g. Objective-J and CoffeeScript are both languages that attempt to improve on and compile down to Javascript.

Microsoft do some of the best development tools in the world and have in-house language design expertise. They've also got a pretty good HTML engine nowadays. So if they decide to go with HTML+CSS+Javascript as a replacement for native code, I'm optimistic they'll be able to deliver a fantastic toolset that isn't in any way limited by the semantics of Javascript, and retain good end-user performance.

You're probably quite safe

Demographic differences are the most relevant thing I think - amongst the Mac demographic is a significant group of people with no technical grounding. A desktop Linux user is unlikely to believe that there's some magical piece of antivirus software installed that they didn't know about, and weirdly never saw before becoming 'infected', or alternatively that you can virus scan from within a browser, and is very unlikely to act without secondary confirmation (by manual inspection of the filing, possibly) and without first checking the web for suitable open source tools.

At a guess...

... they'll adapt the x86 emulation code they bought with Virtual PC and deploy on the XBox 360 when running XBox games. Obviously it'll need some work because the target processor is ARM rather than PowerPC but it's probably easier than starting from nothing.

One more difference

Apple got out of its funk by abandoning the existing software platform, bringing in external management and merging in an external development team, then segueing into a brand new market and then several other new markets.

Nokia already switched management and are outsourcing a large part of the software stack. But they're effectively ceding a significant part of their destiny, something Apple have always managed to avoid.

That said, I agree with the article. Nokia's nothing like finished, its old strategy was on a crash course long before Elop turned up, and the platform switch gamble is the only workable way forwards. You can argue about the decision to use Windows Mobile versus other comers, but its hardly the most significant of his decisions.

There's a difference in approach though

Apple assume everything to be malevolent until they've discovered it to be otherwise. Google assume everything to be benign until they've discovered it to be otherwise. And that's without getting into the tests each applies to determine what they think shouldn't be made available to customers.

@Rich 30

... or you could just copy and paste the file URL from the 'Activity' window to the 'Downloads' window. No need to include bit.ly or anything similar, whatever happens. Or install the ClickToFlash extension (from about halfway down the page you go to if you click 'Get Extensions'), right click on the youtube video and select 'Download Video'.

Then go back to doing whatever you were really browsing for in whatever browser you like.

@Levente

You're accusing iTards of ad hominem attacks? Surely some sort of satire?

I'm of the opinion that the 'i' has outlived its welcome, but I guess it makes it very easy to come up with brand names that are legally protectable and which associate new products with a person's existing perceptions of Apple.

I was sort of hoping that MobileMe indicated a move away from iEverything, with the iPad getting the name because the similarity to iPod was just too alluring, but I guess that wasn't the case. Oh well, they're just names.

@AC

From the article, Apple's complaints — and my guesses at the reasoning behind them are:

"infringed upon patents and violated its trademark", i.e. manufactured (if he was painting them himself as other commenters allege) and sold equipment with the Apple logo on without permission.

"using deceptive practices in the creation and sale of the product", presumably by making some sort of claim that these were authentic Apple parts for genuine white iPhones rather than genuine black parts, repainted.

Though it's ironic that Apple appear to be using (amongst others) laws with the purpose of allowing a company to protect is reputation to sue a 17-year old who through significant initiative managed to fill a gap they'd created when they failed to ship a simple product for an extended period of time. I think they're being really stupid on this one.

@Cameron Colley

The "rabid fanboi" of your imagination doesn't exist. It's just a cheap caricature, calculated to inflame, that you've conveniently picked upon to be a scapegoat.

See above

The default user is an Administrator in OS X parlance. Such privilege is not the same as and is significantly less than root.

I agree and disagree

Agreed: the important asynchronous fetch parts behind AJAX originated at Microsoft, IE6 didn't hit standards very well but it was an era before anybody did and before most of the standards it ended up living alongside, Microsoft's enterprise software — whatever else you may say — sets a high bar of entry for competitors, Gates was preaching the tablet before anyone actually wanted one and before the form factor really worked for technological reasons.

Disagreed (but not refuted as these are just opinions): much of the Apple stuff. Innovation just means to make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products. So it's actually a really easy test to satisfy — taking a good idea from one field and transplanting it into another so as to change perceptions of the market would seem to be enough, so multitouch on phones will do. They also have some genuinely novel manufacturing processes that create very robust enclosures, and Thunderbolt is very interesting.

On CPUs they use the latest Intel parts in the computers and design their own ARM-based silicon for the tablets, phones and MP3 players. Pixel densities are lagging on computers, but if pixel density were the test then you'd have to give them innovation for the latest iPhone, having jumped at least 50% ahead of the competition at launch and still being ahead almost a year later.

The thing with consumer products is that it's artificial to separate hardware and software when trying to pinpoint innovation. Which is why comparing Apple to Dell and Microsoft separately is a little silly and I think that's part of the point the article was making.

But on the other hand...

... the conclusion was drawn by comparing the proportion of people who saw the movie that watched it in 3d to the proportion of people who saw those other movies that watched them in 3d, to reach the conclusion that — amongst films with a large enough release and sufficient success — the proportion of people opting for 3d was lower than previously.

There are then a bunch of possible counterarguments about why the specific nature of the film didn't cause the drop, albeit that they're speculative.

So I don't think it's franchise sickness, since the comparison isn't to other films in the same franchise or to any numbers that may have been affected by the popularity or quality of other films in the franchise.

Or...

The phone manufacturer singular already producing them. Let's not take away from Samsung just because Apple are rumoured to have copied their idea.

Re: subtitles

You've probably got your DVD player or Freeview player or Sky+ box or whatever set to output a 4:3 picture, so it's letterboxing the 16:9 then putting subtitles on at the bottom. Probably things would improve if you set the box to 16:9, adjusting your TV's picture stretching setting accordingly.

@AC

You could post the counterexamples if you think evidence is important.

I think I generally agree with you though, as it stands to reason. Some manufacturers lower costs by accepting money to install the Norton Tools or whatever trial versions on their machines. Apple don't. So even if Apple and those manufacturers spent exactly as much on production and applied the same markup, the Apple machine would be more expensive. You don't have to allege that Apple are charging higher margins or in any other way pumping up prices to get to the conclusion that the Apple machine should cost more.

@E 2

Technically he's making that allegation only if you think the Linux box is a cheap imitation of an Apple box. And I don't even agree with him that markets prefer things that are cheaper and less efficient; generally they prefer cheaper and more efficient.

I'm of the opinion that desktop computers long ago became pretty generic, though I tend to buy Macs still because they have a small physical footprint, a tiny electrical footprint, operate silently and usually last a decent amount of time. I'm also quite familiar with the software stack. However, I accept that I'm putting myself into a straightjacket in terms of customisation and I'm not under the illusion that I couldn't get better benchmark results for less money, or that because I like the OS it must be objectively better.

The best computer is the one you like the most, and the competition is what keeps all the vendors on their toes.