Posts by ThomH

@thecakeis(not)alie

On the contrary, the original post opens "Honestly, with growing examples of this, it's a wonder any developer wants to take the risk on the platform." — it therefore takes one factor in the decision process and proceeds to a conclusion with no further evidence. The post alone doesn't make a complete argument and I guess that somebody (not me, by the way) didn't like that.

If I were to suggest that because Oracle are suing Google over Java, it's a wonder any developer wants to take a risk on the platform then I would much more obviously be talking biased rubbish but would have stated exactly as much of an argument.

One question that we do know the answer to

"Can a 1.5Ghz Atom run Windows 7 acceptably?"

As above

Reread the article. Bids on the intimate notes went significantly higher than those on the electronic tinkering.

Is anybody talking about Apple?

I really don't see how Apple are at all relevant to this discussion. I can also think of other major OS owners that admit defects, making this not refreshing or different at all. Microsoft are one such.

Ummm...

... at £850, the cheapest MacBook Air is only £10 less than double the price of the cheapest iPad.

You're out of date

Apple did charge for iPod updates in the past on the cited grounds of accounting regulations. They've subsequently said that they've found an accounting way to avoid having to do that. iPod owners have received recent major version upgrades for free, just like iPad owners.

On the other hand...

Apple's multitasking tablet is still on the market before most of the big name competitors and they've managed to grab a 95% market share from their eight months on the market so far.

But I'm sure things would have been better if they'd done them your way around.

Apple always support at least the current and previous generation device

So I'd suggest your definition of a legacy device is someone excessive. At any point that you buy an iOS device, you're guaranteed at least a year of software support from Apple — which is a year more than 99% of other phone manufacturers. Though it's difficult to guess what the other tablet manufacturers will do.

*cough*

It was Toki! Also pretty much the only decent platform game for the Atari Lynx.

Nope, sorry

The simulator can't download applications.

I know people that want an Android phone

I mean normal, non-technical people. Reasons tend to be that they're cheap, have a pretty good browser and can run Angry Birds.

The article doesn't seem to discuss the way that this market differs from that of the 80s: the increasing delivery of functionality through browsers. If you bought an MSX then you were in an entirely different ecosystem to someone with a Commodore 64. But if you buy an Android phone then you're probably going to use it to interact with 80% of the same material as someone with an iPhone. Ditto a bada, webOS or Windows 7 phone.

Both copied Delicious Library

Or possibly a real bookshelf.

And they don't even have to try

In this case all they did was replace the front page on their website for 24 hours. That's what really galls.

Similarly relevant possible announcements

Apple to buy a newspaper! And to set up a phone number you can call to get cinema listings! They're putting a 6502 coprocessor in every Mac! They're adding Snake as a built-in app to the iPhone! iWork is finally going to be able to open WordStar documents, with most formatting correct!

You fell for semantics

All Jobs has ever said is that Macs don't have any viruses since OS X. And he hasn't said that in a while. It's the people with vested interests who have extrapolated this to argue that the OS has no security holes.

Apple last released a security update on the 12th, admitting to the need for 100+ security patches. That was the seventh security update this year.

Generally the argument tends to be one side claiming the OS is uncrackable, the other arguing that it's just that nobody can be bothered cracking it. The reality is probably in between. See the fantastic run of 64bit Windows for evidence that mere market share does not determine the number of successful attacks, see the existence of a few bits of known Mac malware, all of them based on social engineering, for evidence that the OS at least isn't a Windows 95 knockover.

@Geoff Campbell

That's really odd. Though maybe Dixons are like the phone shop you attempted, and have come to the conclusion that they need to drop the price because sales are lower than expected — never mind that it's only because every time someone tries to buy one some sales idiot obstructs them. Which obviously isn't the case on Amazon.

So the rule is...

... if you can download it from the Apple App Store, you can definitely run it. I don't see how that's a bad thing. In fact, I think it's probably the only rational way to run a consumer facing store.

This story clearly states: "Now it turns out Java developers are invited to the Mac Apps Store party, after all." and mentions that Java will remain in OS X for the next few years. Lots of time for someone to create a packager that bundles a JVM with an app.

Except that seeing the Geniuses is free

And, where possible, the fixes they perform are free. They're one of the reasons that Apple always tops customer service satisfaction polls.

Not sure how likely they are to play the "it's third party software, you deal with it" card though.

My understanding is that...

... ENIAC was Turing complete, whereas Collosus wasn't. Though that would make it "the world's first Turing complete electronic computer", both electronic and Turing complete having already been done elsewhere.

@Alternatives

Expecting to incur the wrath of the rabid gang, I think an issue may be that Apple, Microsoft and Palm all have tight control over software updates in the sense that they can publish an update and be confident it'll be available to all users almost immediately. Google are in the unfortunate position that they don't control software updates further down the channel. So the position is, for many Android phones, that the source code is available allowing people an extra means to find one or more of the many faults that are all but unavoidable in a project of that size, but that pushing fixes is extraordinarily difficult. Look at the number of handsets for which manufacturers have so far failed to supply 2.2. Even high profile devices like the Galaxy S have yet to receive it (next week, apparently), though it hit the Nexus One in June.

Being extremely generous,

I've decided that the author just thinks that, being a report about physical products sold, manufacturers are more interesting than software stacks.

What effect Android is having on smartphones versus feature phones would be interesting. Forget the high end stuff where Android also plays and iOS plays exclusively, to what extent has Android put smartphones into the same price categories and so into the hands of the same consumers as feature phones?

@Tony Chandler

Shush! You're ruining their straw men.

Yes, you can

But if you're not willing to accept remote content kill switches then you'd also better avoid Android and iOS phones.

In the 1984 case, Amazon had supplied content they didn't have a licence to supply — a free edition had been uploaded in a country where it is out of copyright (Australia, I think?) and then offered for download in a country where it remains in copyright (the US). That's unlikely to occur with newspaper content.

And in real space, too

NASA sent a Mac Portable into space for one of their missions - check YouTube for the video evidence. Since it has a mechanical eject floppy mechanism like all Macs of the era, they seem to be having some fun with it in zero gravity.

It's strongly implied in this case...

... that the periodic alarm sounds at 24 hour intervals irrespective of the length of the day in between or whether the time it is now sounding at matches the time it represents itself as sounding at. So I'd imagine that setting the clock within the double hour or missing hour wouldn't be that interesting.

Still though, this is really basic stuff. I don't see how it can be portrayed as anything other than extremely embarrassing for Apple.

Don't worry, they paid for them

"iPad’s honeymoon will be shorter than iPhone’s."

The current exchange rate is one buzzword for two definite articles. By sticking with the amateurish prose of an American blogger elsewhere, lots of extra buzzwords became within budget.

It would be interesting to know...

... whether Angry Birds produces more average revenue per user on Android (where it's free but includes adverts, albeit very unobtrusively) or iOS (59p, no adverts).

On reflection

Since relevance correlates with newsworthiness, I think there's good evidence to raise a presumption that Apple are relevant on the desktop.

It'd be extraordinarily difficult to argue that they're relevant in the server space. Given the number of iPod socks they've sold, they're probably more relevant in clothing.

The theory is...

... that a native app better fits the native user interface paradigms (eg, most iOS apps are navigated as a sort of branching decision tree, whereas web pages tend to have a much more vague hierarchy), and can make better use of local resources. Of course, the point is largely moot if the initial thing was a web page that already fits quite well on the screen.

Quite often they're just a bad idea though. For the worst of both worlds see the Ars Technica app that just launched (http://itunes.apple.com/app/ars-technica/id393859050?mt=8 — and don't worry, Apple don't springboard you straight into loading iTunes with links like that any more). It's basically an HTML viewer that justifies itself on its offline reading capabilities. However, it attempts to ape normal iPad controls in HTML (for portability to other future tablets) and gets most of them quite wrong while also performing very poorly. So the app is a lot worse than the web experience, giving it a 1.5 star average at present on the US store.

Deciding they need an app, doing it in HTML and making it a much poorer user experience than just using the device's web browser has to be the epitome of poor app strategy.

@petur, don't believe the hype

Firstly, Apple doesn't violate anything. It has been granted the licence to distribute VLC in exactly the manner it does. The question is whether the VLC developer who granted Apple that licence violated the GPL by doing so. Apple explicitly aren't implicated.

Secondly, there isn't agreement amongst the other VLC developers that distributing VLC via the app store is contrary to the licence. See http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/vlc-devel/2010-November/077457.html — "tl;dr version: lawyers are boring, FSF is FUDing, AppStore terms have changed, answer is not simple."

Oh, go on then, I'll bite

More likely to be on Jobs' mind: iPhone sales are up 95% year on year. If he worries about them at all, then probably the observation that the lion's share of Android growth is at the expense of RIM and Symbian makes him feel better.

Or, given that it's a business, if we expand to look at all mobile phones rather than just smartphones (putting all of the iPhone, Android, etc in a tiny minority position), then Apple's ability to wring a 39% of all industry profits from just 2.8% market share probably makes him able to sleep at night.

Further entries at the wafer-think profit end of the market are unlikely to worry him, as are your invented or misunderstood statistics. Per the NPD press release used by this story (http://www.npd.com/press/releases/press_101101.html): "Apple iOS held relatively steady versus last quarter, rising one percentage point to 23 percent;". That's up 1% from 22% share last year. They most recently commented on the Mac in May as far as I can make out, reporting that Mac sales were up 39% year on year for January and February (secondary source only, sorry: http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/15/npd-mac-sales-up-39-percent-in-january-and-febuary-as-ipod-sale/).

So, the headline is: in the real world, more than one technology-deliminated group can do well at the same time. Who'd have thought it?

I think this one's only from June

Well, Wikipedia thinks that anyway. Which would make a refresh unlikely, and in any case Apple seem to be sticking with basically these specs for their physically tiny machines across the board. The choice of CPU is all to do with space, heat and Intel's bundling of CPUs and GPUs if you believe Ars, but I don't suspect that's much consolation.

The ribbon, of course

I suspect they'll never give up that one.

Me? I'm most impressed that IE9 is, per the tests, more conformant to the canvas spec that Safari.

@AC, Renalto

Your points would appear to be contradicted by Apple's ongoing employment of Chris Lattner to construct Clang and LLVM — a new compiler system designed to replace GCC on the basis that it's now an extremely convoluted and difficult codebase. Or, rather, LLVM was a research project designed to work as a back-end to GCC that was open source already and came with Chris Lattner when he gained employment at Apple. During his time at Apple, manifold issues with the GCC front end have led to the development and open source release of Clang, a purely Apple-originated codebase that they have voluntarily released as open source software and which is likely to cross pollinate to other platforms and targets. And this is all since the launch of the iPhone.

You can easily argue that Apple are an overall negative force without having to deny them any positive effect on anything.