It's a bug in the font rendering component, which apparently lives in kernel space.
Another interesting side-effect of this of course is that any app which is accepted on the app store could also root your phone, so long as Apple doesn't notice at the approval stage, simply by loading a broken font. I imagine this is why @font-face is disabled in Mobile Safari right now.
It'd be funny if the jailbreak guys secretly did yet another flashlight app, or perhaps a bible app with fart noises, but one which does a full jailbreak as an easter egg, and then announced to the world that this app is already available for download on the app store.
It'd be an amusing critique of the pointless app store approval process at the same time as allowing a few more people to jailbreak.
OLPC did not bow down to Microsoft. They bowed down to the request of governments that demanded that they be able to run whatever they bloody wanted (Windows) on the machines they purchase. Why is that a bad thing?
Regardless of who the requests came from, trying to modify OLPC to run Windows pushed their devices up in price and put them in direct competition with netbooks, required them to run intel, etc, etc.
This was a very successful attempt by Microsoft to poison the well at OLPC, and Negroponte fell for it. It drives up the price of the hardware (low-end hardware won't run Windows), and drove away the very open-source developers that OLPC depended on, leaving us in the situation we have today, where no-one cares about OLPC, not even the governments he's trying to sell it to, because it's just as expensive as the Windows laptops it was initially trying to obsolete, the only USPs are geeky things like mesh networking, and it holds no appeal for the hackers who are *essential* for this sort of project to get off the ground.
Clearly Negroponte thinks his revolution can be sustained by hype alone. I'd be sad to see the Indian gov. fall for the same sort of charlatan. I'll ignore the gratuitous reference to Apple being evil, as it is irrelevant to OLPC or $35 tablets - those devices aren't even in the same ball-park.
Oh, BTW, I've been using the OLPC XO-1 I have with me as a PDF reader. A touchscreen would be amazing for scrolling, panning and zooming. The mousepad and gamepad arrow keys are pretty stifling. The touchscreen would be so intuitive for kids, and best of all, will allow them to take notes in traditional fashion and enable them to sketch diagrams for their notes, something a keyboard and trackpad won't allow you to do.
This fantasy device sounds great - if you were talking about a $200 tablet, and it was running Android on ARM it would perhaps be possible, if you're talking about a cheap tablet used for education, it's foolhardy to try to stuff it full of the latest tech, try to make it run Windows too (intel only, expensive), and then hope it would somehow hit a price point of $35, or even $100.
There's been a lot of hate thrown towards OLPC ever since the Windows thing, but really, everything they do is open source over there and nothing really came out of that Windows thing except negative public backlash.
Which is exactly why they should not have bowed to ms demands in the first place. Ms and intel were never serious but tecognised that co-opting is a great way to kill a project like this. Olpc is already sleepwalking to failure, as evidenced by the size of its dev crew and real world deployments. It died because they were too busy grandstanding and announcing vapourware and partnerships to make something cheap, useful and ubiquitous. Android is already further along than olpc will ever be, and partnering with negroponte would be the kiss of death for any Indian project. Why do they need negroponte when great software is available for free and they have a huge supply of programmers?
A touchscreen device for $35 would be great, but it is not close to reality- the Indian government, who have the money and manpower to really make a difference (unlike olpc), should take that lesson to heart and change the world rather than waste time promising the impossible. They can make it cheap and ubiquitous and truly useful (though limited) or expensive and full-featured and end up competing with all the commercial solutions out there and constantly sabotaged and undermined by companies like ms and intel. I know which I would choose.
It seems obvious how this might point the Indian project in the right direction,
What could India possibly learn from the rudderless OLPC project? They've lost their core software team, sold out to Intel then lost their support by foolishly trying to monopolise the low-end, sold out to Microsoft and then have been undermined by the MS drive for Windows netbooks, refused to deal with small deployments, *and* come nowhere close to their target price. About the only thing that has survived that project from inception is the glorious leader Negroponte. His promise today is worthless. The only thing they could learn from Negroponte is what not to do; over-promise and under-deliver, but unfortunately, given their silly promise of a $35 touchscreen tablet which they haven't got the tech for, it seems that boat has already sailed.
What India should be doing with this is creating a smart machine for $35, without a touchscreen (impossible to get a good one at that price), possibly with something like a trackpad, but the input method doesn't matter - make it a good ereader and mandate that it is used by all schools looking to buy tech for education.
That would give them the customer base to create a truly mass-market device, and the groundswell of interest and enthusiasm from bright young Indians to make it a success, and allow them to commission software for it that would really make a difference to education in a country which is dependent on it for its future. English is already the primary medium of instruction, and there are huge numbers of existing free texts in English which would make such a device incredibly useful to students everywhere, not just in India. Even just a web browsing device this cheap with a larger screen than a phone would be a breakthrough for many students.
THings like get-set commands can be handled by decorators rather than explicit coding.
While I agree that Objective-C is for the most part quite elegant, getters and setters are one area where the foundation of C leads to a less elegant syntax, which is a shame. You have to add two extra bits of syntax for getters and setters in two files.
@property(retain)id fu; and in the implementation @synthesize fu;
I much prefer the ruby (or other scripting languages) approach:
attr_accessor:fu
while it doesn't seem like much in isolation, lots of small warts like this do add up to a lot of time babysitting the language and environment when you want to just get on with the code. Iteration is something they've improved recently, so at least now you can use for(id x in y) rather than the cumbersome iterator syntax.
It is very nice that you can just drop down to C when required though, and have all the c-based libraries available too without glue of any kind.
In forty years, those slides will still be sitting in a box and will be viewable. However, it's not like you can put a DVD/CD in your attic and let it sit there, forgotten, for 40years.
I'll bet you can put pictures on the internet though, and be sure that they will last a lot longer than 40 years, *if* someone in the world finds them valuable. I reckon stuff on the internet will last longer than slides or DVDs, but it is too early to test that conjecture. Perhaps if you lock them into some companies website, they might disappear without your consent, but that would be stupid, wouldn't it?
I guess the other guy always "accidentally" hangs up on you.
When I say no dropped calls, I mean no calls have ended unexpectedly, everything worked as you'd expect over around 50 calls. The only criticism I have is that one call that I remember had mediocre voice quality (not breaking up, but fuzzy), but that's something I've experienced with many phones, on many networks, and could be caused by lots of things. So for me, coming from an iPhone 3G, this phone is a big step up in speed, reception, and aesthetics (I didn't particularly like the styling on the 3G).
If you've seen that video of the guy lightly touching the edge of his phone and data cutting off, you have to accept there is definitely a problem with some iPhone 4s in some conditions (which Steve adroitly misdirected as a 'death grip' problem, when in fact it was about a light touch). However that doesn't mean that all iPhone 4s exhibit this - I've tested extensively and can't reproduce it. YMMV.
Normally it's just the ego covering up for a decision that you desperately want to be right.
Apparently you have this problem with your internet posts, as you refuse to accept evidence to the contrary once you have decided that all iPhones must be flawed. As you don't even have an iPhone I wonder why you are driven to such lengths to demonstrate its clear inferiority - why do you even care?
The really sad thing is that all Apple need to do, was cover the damn aerial is a few mm of plastic or rubber and the signal loss would have been lessened to real world numbers (5-7 dBm). But Apple would not permit this, there have literally been dozens of studies on bare metal aerials and they have all concluded bare metal aerials are not suitable for phones due to interference cause by being touched.
That's not been my experience here. Sorry to disappoint you.
Why haven't they taken the device back for a refund? I know if I purchased a phone that didn't work properly I'd just take it back. This is the best way to teach Apple a lesson about quality control, if they are selling defective phones/phones which don't work with AT&T/phones you don't like/phones you can't hold normally - they should pay for it with a huge return rate. Take your pick of the list of purported reasons, whatever it is, if it's serious enough to lead to lots of dropped calls, why bother with the phone?
Luckily, I bought one of the magical iPhone 4s which isn't affected by any problem with dropped calls (0 over the last month), so I won't be returning mine.
Computers prompting user action in order to compute is never going to be the solution.
That's funny, ClickToFlash works well for me. If the desired default action is to not waste time/resources computing, it makes a lot of sense to require user input to enable something. Same goes for attachments in my mobile mail client - I click on them when I want to see them, otherwise, they're left un-downloaded.
In the case of javascript in emails, you'd have to think of a very good reason to make it worthwhile for me to turn it on - the attack surface opened up is just too great to justify having it on by default.
Sorry, my mistake, it supports fonts in OTF format using @font-face for local pages in a webview, but for some reason they have deactivated this support in Mobile Safari.
Weird. Works perfectly for local pages using a normal OTF font and UIAppFonts to load it, but as you say it requires SVG for mobile safari.
Hopefully they will fix this in an update, as I imagine a lot of people will be asking for it. Since the webkit bundled actually supports using normal OTF fonts, I've no idea why it is disabled when browsing - they were worried about the security of their font loading code perhaps?
Unless of course the school administrator is paid to look the other way or even register unauthorised devices, or fake schools are set up just to acquire these devices. That's leaving aside any technical solutions involving hacking the hardware.
The most sophisticated lock-down cannot work around human corruption - at some point in the chain you have to have people you trust. It's a game of cat and mouse with 1 cat and 10,000 mice.
That's not to say that XOs are not a good idea, but we should be realistic about the limits of technology - DRM always has a workaround.
The parent is not a troll, and frankly, you are flaming people more than him. I suggest you take a look at this video, which shows the problem clearly isn't one which affects every cell phone (or even every iPhone 4).
Yes, and it's not a refutation of the fact that every single radio device the size of a cell phone will have signal attenuation when a human hand covers the antenna. This is physics.
No other cell phone will be quickly loading a page using data, and then suddenly stop when touched lightly on just one part of the frame. I defy you to come up with evidence to the contrary. Show us a similar video for another phone. Bonus points for including physics.
This is not a demo of grabbing the phone (which could cause similar issues on any phone), it's lightly touching one part of the side of the phone, joining two antennae. I think it shows the problem clearly (or a problem). Apple's explanation does not fit at all with this video, given the speed of the initial load, and then the complete pause in loading.
For what it's worth, I think the problem displayed in the video is not a general one affecting all phones, it does not happen to all units in all conditions - I've tried it here on an iPhone 4 and cannot reproduce that result at all, can't even reproduce a noticeable slowdown. But that's on another network with another iPhone 4.
There might be some other unrelated issue with the bar formula being completely wrong and thus exaggerating signal on AT&T(I wonder if this is supplied by the carrier?). Apple's announcement certainly reads like a dig at some third party - 'we were astounded to find it was wrong'.
It may well be that Apple have been unable to reproduce the more serious problem, and can only see a huge perceived degradation rather than the real slight degradation, and think this is the only issue. I imagine they'll get all this sorted out as they get more evidence in from users, but it might require coating the antennae with some sort of sealant if it is to do with interference caused by joining the antennae (see above video). They do have those rubber bars down the side dividing the antennae for a reason after all : ).
Something which points to this, and which has not received as much attention as it should, is that the entire WWDC conference this year was given over to iOS.That is unprecedented, and gives an indication of where Apple's focus lies at the moment and how much they care about Mac devs.
Certainly iOS, AppKit in particular reads like a cleanup and rewrite of all the APIs from cocoa, something you wouldn't bother doing unless you were confident it would be used to replace Cocoa/AppKit.
Since the major difference between iOS and Mac OS X is cocoa (the underpinnings are the same, many core frameworks are the same), this would effectively mean replacing OS X with iOS. I expect to see a transition happen over the next few years. Note that UIKit doesn't at present support mouse events - will be interesting to see if they go all touchscreen or not with this transition. This will anger a lot of desktop devs who have sunk a lot of time into learning their APIs (some recently switched from carbon or Windows), but Apple have shown repeatedly that they don't give much thought to third party devs.
Imagine being Adobe though - you've just completed the transition to end all transitions (Carbon to Cocoa), after much pain getting your code-base up to date, and Apple tell you they have another bridge to sell you, even better than the last one.
This might be partly why Apple are so insistent on keeping people corralled into their dev tools and Obj-C - so that they can switch deployment targets, supported APIs and even architectures easily without worrying about leaving anyone behind or supporting glue other languages.
The signs are already there in Apple's neglect of the desktop, and it is likely to become more pronounced over the next few years. Turns out that invite with two bridges diverging was prophetic, you just have to be sure you're on the same bridge as Steve Jobs, or you may find the one you're on ends in mid-air when you least expect it.
Because they're choosing Macs, they're mandating hardware and software. The software is actually the more important part of the equation in my view, as it dictates how you will save and handle your data.
Accessibility: Blind and deaf children need to be able to use what you build. It should be at least as good as the accessibility features found in Mac OS or Windows.
Accessibility depends on the reader software. Using the web means more accessibility, not less, as users can switch between different reader software, and use their own specialist reader software (if you build your site correctly it will be accessible on all). In case you hadn't noticed, browsers include great accessibility features on both platforms you mentioned. The web is a bonus point in this regard, not a minus, as accessibility comes for free if you pay attention to it in the planning stages, and many many tools are already built with it in mind.
Consistency: Devices must be similar enough that directions a teacher reads to a class of students can not be misunderstood. If some students have a netbook, and some have an ipad, how do you say
If you have to give step-by-step instructions for a website like this, you're doing it wrong. Besides, if the experience isn't good enough of their device, students can switch to another. The whole point of the web is that it provides, at the very least a lowest common denominator which may not be pretty but is acceptable and useful. It gracefully degrades.
Standards conformance: Does your web app work on every device a student will have? How about what they will have five years from now?
Given we're working with the web, you have a good chance of them working yes, or if they don't you can make minor modifications and they will. Unlike binary applications, as I noted in the original post.
The people who write the web sites will not be school employees, so fixing issues as they come up is not going to be feasible.
Why wouldn't they be school employees? Why would binary software be in a better situation? Is it magically going to be updated to work with all platforms, to work with the newest platforms?
However, the key here is what _software_ the students will be expected to run in order to _author_ content.
I disagree, and respectfully I think that's an old-fashioned view point. The students can author content using the web quite easily - most of them will be happier doing that as they'll have grown up doing it on Facebook, twitter, blogs and sites like this.
The advantage to the web is that no matter what devices students pick now and in the future, your software will run (if it is architected carefully). That is a huge game-changing advantage for somewhere like a school which has a tight IT budget and limited resources. The disadvantages are the many small niggling failings of running a web platform, lack of performance compared to binaries, etc but compared to managing multiple binaries on any OS and trying to support student's hardware, they're trivial. Use the web and you don't even need to support hardware at all - that's up to students, or if you do choose to, you can give away some cheap netbooks switch hardware at any time (though I'd question whether this is really the best use of school resources).
Likewise with submission formats - use the web and suddenly students can submit using their phone, their tablet, their PC, or even their toaster (for certain values of toaster). Crucially, this also deals with any hardware/software developments you haven't even thought of yet.
Don't assume that everyone critical of this move do so because they're partisan. I happen to think OS X is a better operating system than Windows, and that mac hardware is better that most PC offerings, but it doesn't blind me to the clear dangers involved for a school (or any organisation) in standardising on a single hardware/software platform, imposing a monoculture, and tying themselves to the future direction of a single vendor. Quite apart from anything else it allows dependencies to creep in that you don't know you have till you need to switch - binaries which only run on OS X 10.x.x, websites which only work in browser x, file formats which cannot be opened by new software without glitches, etc, etc. Businesses have been discovering all this the hard way for the last decade after they standardised on Windows. Doing it with Windows was a stupid idea, and doing it with OS X is also a stupid idea.
The software platform chosen should be the web in this case.
This is just as bad as mandating all Microsoft software - I feel like I'm back in the 1990s.
They should be using the web to get any content out to students, and then students could use whatever sort of computer (or device!) they want, including ipads, thinkpads, or smartbooks or their latest phone which they use instead of a computer. Then in five years time when the next hot new thing comes along or their mac software is broken by a new OS, or Apple drops Mac OS completely (the last WWDC was almost entirely taken up with iOS), they will not be left stuck on an abandoned platform dealing with bit rot in old applications and wondering why they mandated that everyone must use this. You know, like those companies that still use Windows 2000 because they are tied to binaries on that platform and they don't want the hassle of moving on.
This is exactly what the web was made for. If they used platform-agnostic html to deliver their student content (no active-x, no binary plugins), they would have an always up to date resource which students could access from anywhere, and which did not mandate any particular technology to access it (every platform nowadays has a browser). Students could deal with their own tech support, and the school could issue free (far cheaper) web devices to those who needed them.
The question nowadays is not mac or PC, it should be binary or markup, and the answer is pretty obvious for the needs of a high school.
Slashdot Mirror
Another interesting side-effect of this of course is that any app which is accepted on the app store could also root your phone, so long as Apple doesn't notice at the approval stage, simply by loading a broken font. I imagine this is why @font-face is disabled in Mobile Safari right now.
It'd be funny if the jailbreak guys secretly did yet another flashlight app, or perhaps a bible app with fart noises, but one which does a full jailbreak as an easter egg, and then announced to the world that this app is already available for download on the app store.
It'd be an amusing critique of the pointless app store approval process at the same time as allowing a few more people to jailbreak.
Regardless of who the requests came from, trying to modify OLPC to run Windows pushed their devices up in price and put them in direct competition with netbooks, required them to run intel, etc, etc.
This was a very successful attempt by Microsoft to poison the well at OLPC, and Negroponte fell for it. It drives up the price of the hardware (low-end hardware won't run Windows), and drove away the very open-source developers that OLPC depended on, leaving us in the situation we have today, where no-one cares about OLPC, not even the governments he's trying to sell it to, because it's just as expensive as the Windows laptops it was initially trying to obsolete, the only USPs are geeky things like mesh networking, and it holds no appeal for the hackers who are *essential* for this sort of project to get off the ground.
Clearly Negroponte thinks his revolution can be sustained by hype alone. I'd be sad to see the Indian gov. fall for the same sort of charlatan. I'll ignore the gratuitous reference to Apple being evil, as it is irrelevant to OLPC or $35 tablets - those devices aren't even in the same ball-park.
This fantasy device sounds great - if you were talking about a $200 tablet, and it was running Android on ARM it would perhaps be possible, if you're talking about a cheap tablet used for education, it's foolhardy to try to stuff it full of the latest tech, try to make it run Windows too (intel only, expensive), and then hope it would somehow hit a price point of $35, or even $100.
Which is exactly why they should not have bowed to ms demands in the first place. Ms and intel were never serious but tecognised that co-opting is a great way to kill a project like this. Olpc is already sleepwalking to failure, as evidenced by the size of its dev crew and real world deployments. It died because they were too busy grandstanding and announcing vapourware and partnerships to make something cheap, useful and ubiquitous. Android is already further along than olpc will ever be, and partnering with negroponte would be the kiss of death for any Indian project. Why do they need negroponte when great software is available for free and they have a huge supply of programmers?
A touchscreen device for $35 would be great, but it is not close to reality- the Indian government, who have the money and manpower to really make a difference (unlike olpc), should take that lesson to heart and change the world rather than waste time promising the impossible. They can make it cheap and ubiquitous and truly useful (though limited) or expensive and full-featured and end up competing with all the commercial solutions out there and constantly sabotaged and undermined by companies like ms and intel. I know which I would choose.
What could India possibly learn from the rudderless OLPC project? They've lost their core software team, sold out to Intel then lost their support by foolishly trying to monopolise the low-end, sold out to Microsoft and then have been undermined by the MS drive for Windows netbooks, refused to deal with small deployments, *and* come nowhere close to their target price. About the only thing that has survived that project from inception is the glorious leader Negroponte. His promise today is worthless. The only thing they could learn from Negroponte is what not to do; over-promise and under-deliver, but unfortunately, given their silly promise of a $35 touchscreen tablet which they haven't got the tech for, it seems that boat has already sailed.
What India should be doing with this is creating a smart machine for $35, without a touchscreen (impossible to get a good one at that price), possibly with something like a trackpad, but the input method doesn't matter - make it a good ereader and mandate that it is used by all schools looking to buy tech for education.
That would give them the customer base to create a truly mass-market device, and the groundswell of interest and enthusiasm from bright young Indians to make it a success, and allow them to commission software for it that would really make a difference to education in a country which is dependent on it for its future. English is already the primary medium of instruction, and there are huge numbers of existing free texts in English which would make such a device incredibly useful to students everywhere, not just in India. Even just a web browsing device this cheap with a larger screen than a phone would be a breakthrough for many students.
While I agree that Objective-C is for the most part quite elegant, getters and setters are one area where the foundation of C leads to a less elegant syntax, which is a shame. You have to add two extra bits of syntax for getters and setters in two files.
@property(retain)id fu;
and in the implementation
@synthesize fu;
I much prefer the ruby (or other scripting languages) approach:
attr_accessor :fu
while it doesn't seem like much in isolation, lots of small warts like this do add up to a lot of time babysitting the language and environment when you want to just get on with the code. Iteration is something they've improved recently, so at least now you can use for(id x in y) rather than the cumbersome iterator syntax.
It is very nice that you can just drop down to C when required though, and have all the c-based libraries available too without glue of any kind.
I'll bet you can put pictures on the internet though, and be sure that they will last a lot longer than 40 years, *if* someone in the world finds them valuable. I reckon stuff on the internet will last longer than slides or DVDs, but it is too early to test that conjecture. Perhaps if you lock them into some companies website, they might disappear without your consent, but that would be stupid, wouldn't it?
http://musiclub.web.cern.ch/MusiClub/bands/cernettes/firstband.html
When I say no dropped calls, I mean no calls have ended unexpectedly, everything worked as you'd expect over around 50 calls. The only criticism I have is that one call that I remember had mediocre voice quality (not breaking up, but fuzzy), but that's something I've experienced with many phones, on many networks, and could be caused by lots of things. So for me, coming from an iPhone 3G, this phone is a big step up in speed, reception, and aesthetics (I didn't particularly like the styling on the 3G).
If you've seen that video of the guy lightly touching the edge of his phone and data cutting off, you have to accept there is definitely a problem with some iPhone 4s in some conditions (which Steve adroitly misdirected as a 'death grip' problem, when in fact it was about a light touch). However that doesn't mean that all iPhone 4s exhibit this - I've tested extensively and can't reproduce it. YMMV.
Apparently you have this problem with your internet posts, as you refuse to accept evidence to the contrary once you have decided that all iPhones must be flawed. As you don't even have an iPhone I wonder why you are driven to such lengths to demonstrate its clear inferiority - why do you even care?
That's not been my experience here. Sorry to disappoint you.
Why haven't they taken the device back for a refund? I know if I purchased a phone that didn't work properly I'd just take it back. This is the best way to teach Apple a lesson about quality control, if they are selling defective phones/phones which don't work with AT&T/phones you don't like/phones you can't hold normally - they should pay for it with a huge return rate. Take your pick of the list of purported reasons, whatever it is, if it's serious enough to lead to lots of dropped calls, why bother with the phone?
Luckily, I bought one of the magical iPhone 4s which isn't affected by any problem with dropped calls (0 over the last month), so I won't be returning mine.
Computers prompting user action in order to compute is never going to be the solution.
That's funny, ClickToFlash works well for me. If the desired default action is to not waste time/resources computing, it makes a lot of sense to require user input to enable something. Same goes for attachments in my mobile mail client - I click on them when I want to see them, otherwise, they're left un-downloaded.
In the case of javascript in emails, you'd have to think of a very good reason to make it worthwhile for me to turn it on - the attack surface opened up is just too great to justify having it on by default.
Sorry, I was wrong, Mobile Safari doesn't at present support loading fonts, only local webviews support this.
Sorry, my mistake, it supports fonts in OTF format using @font-face for local pages in a webview, but for some reason they have deactivated this support in Mobile Safari.
Weird. Works perfectly for local pages using a normal OTF font and UIAppFonts to load it, but as you say it requires SVG for mobile safari.
Hopefully they will fix this in an update, as I imagine a lot of people will be asking for it. Since the webkit bundled actually supports using normal OTF fonts, I've no idea why it is disabled when browsing - they were worried about the security of their font loading code perhaps?
Meant to say I'm sure weblog will support it, not weblog!
The iPad does not require fonts in svg. Like other modern browsers it supports @font-face using standard OTF fonts. iPhone does the same with ios 4.
Not sure if web open font is required personally, but if catches on I'm sure weblog will support it.
Imho finding them / being aware of them would be an advantage
That's assuming that the FSB (for example) chooses to inform Microsoft of any holes they find. Why would they do that?
Unless of course the school administrator is paid to look the other way or even register unauthorised devices, or fake schools are set up just to acquire these devices. That's leaving aside any technical solutions involving hacking the hardware.
The most sophisticated lock-down cannot work around human corruption - at some point in the chain you have to have people you trust. It's a game of cat and mouse with 1 cat and 10,000 mice.
That's not to say that XOs are not a good idea, but we should be realistic about the limits of technology - DRM always has a workaround.
The parent is not a troll, and frankly, you are flaming people more than him. I suggest you take a look at this video, which shows the problem clearly isn't one which affects every cell phone (or even every iPhone 4).
http://vimeo.com/12864890
Yes, and it's not a refutation of the fact that every single radio device the size of a cell phone will have signal attenuation when a human hand covers the antenna. This is physics.
No other cell phone will be quickly loading a page using data, and then suddenly stop when touched lightly on just one part of the frame. I defy you to come up with evidence to the contrary. Show us a similar video for another phone. Bonus points for including physics.
This is not a demo of grabbing the phone (which could cause similar issues on any phone), it's lightly touching one part of the side of the phone, joining two antennae. I think it shows the problem clearly (or a problem). Apple's explanation does not fit at all with this video, given the speed of the initial load, and then the complete pause in loading.
For what it's worth, I think the problem displayed in the video is not a general one affecting all phones, it does not happen to all units in all conditions - I've tried it here on an iPhone 4 and cannot reproduce that result at all, can't even reproduce a noticeable slowdown. But that's on another network with another iPhone 4.
There might be some other unrelated issue with the bar formula being completely wrong and thus exaggerating signal on AT&T(I wonder if this is supplied by the carrier?). Apple's announcement certainly reads like a dig at some third party - 'we were astounded to find it was wrong'.
It may well be that Apple have been unable to reproduce the more serious problem, and can only see a huge perceived degradation rather than the real slight degradation, and think this is the only issue. I imagine they'll get all this sorted out as they get more evidence in from users, but it might require coating the antennae with some sort of sealant if it is to do with interference caused by joining the antennae (see above video). They do have those rubber bars down the side dividing the antennae for a reason after all : ).
Those emails have now been rejected by Apple as fake.
http://www.macrumors.com/2010/07/01/apple-pr-latest-steve-jobs-email-exchange-is-fake/
Anyone can forge email headers.
Agreed. With over 35 labs enabled, my gmail tab in the latest version of Chrome
Don't do that then.
Something which points to this, and which has not received as much attention as it should, is that the entire WWDC conference this year was given over to iOS.That is unprecedented, and gives an indication of where Apple's focus lies at the moment and how much they care about Mac devs.
Certainly iOS, AppKit in particular reads like a cleanup and rewrite of all the APIs from cocoa, something you wouldn't bother doing unless you were confident it would be used to replace Cocoa/AppKit.
Since the major difference between iOS and Mac OS X is cocoa (the underpinnings are the same, many core frameworks are the same), this would effectively mean replacing OS X with iOS. I expect to see a transition happen over the next few years. Note that UIKit doesn't at present support mouse events - will be interesting to see if they go all touchscreen or not with this transition. This will anger a lot of desktop devs who have sunk a lot of time into learning their APIs (some recently switched from carbon or Windows), but Apple have shown repeatedly that they don't give much thought to third party devs.
Imagine being Adobe though - you've just completed the transition to end all transitions (Carbon to Cocoa), after much pain getting your code-base up to date, and Apple tell you they have another bridge to sell you, even better than the last one.
This might be partly why Apple are so insistent on keeping people corralled into their dev tools and Obj-C - so that they can switch deployment targets, supported APIs and even architectures easily without worrying about leaving anyone behind or supporting glue other languages.
The signs are already there in Apple's neglect of the desktop, and it is likely to become more pronounced over the next few years. Turns out that invite with two bridges diverging was prophetic, you just have to be sure you're on the same bridge as Steve Jobs, or you may find the one you're on ends in mid-air when you least expect it.
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This is mandating HARDWARE.
Because they're choosing Macs, they're mandating hardware and software. The software is actually the more important part of the equation in my view, as it dictates how you will save and handle your data.
Accessibility: Blind and deaf children need to be able to use what you build. It should be at least as good as the accessibility features found in Mac OS or Windows.
Accessibility depends on the reader software. Using the web means more accessibility, not less, as users can switch between different reader software, and use their own specialist reader software (if you build your site correctly it will be accessible on all). In case you hadn't noticed, browsers include great accessibility features on both platforms you mentioned. The web is a bonus point in this regard, not a minus, as accessibility comes for free if you pay attention to it in the planning stages, and many many tools are already built with it in mind.
Consistency: Devices must be similar enough that directions a teacher reads to a class of students can not be misunderstood. If some students have a netbook, and some have an ipad, how do you say
If you have to give step-by-step instructions for a website like this, you're doing it wrong. Besides, if the experience isn't good enough of their device, students can switch to another. The whole point of the web is that it provides, at the very least a lowest common denominator which may not be pretty but is acceptable and useful. It gracefully degrades.
Standards conformance: Does your web app work on every device a student will have? How about what they will have five years from now?
Given we're working with the web, you have a good chance of them working yes, or if they don't you can make minor modifications and they will. Unlike binary applications, as I noted in the original post.
The people who write the web sites will not be school employees, so fixing issues as they come up is not going to be feasible.
Why wouldn't they be school employees? Why would binary software be in a better situation? Is it magically going to be updated to work with all platforms, to work with the newest platforms?
However, the key here is what _software_ the students will be expected to run in order to _author_ content.
I disagree, and respectfully I think that's an old-fashioned view point. The students can author content using the web quite easily - most of them will be happier doing that as they'll have grown up doing it on Facebook, twitter, blogs and sites like this.
The advantage to the web is that no matter what devices students pick now and in the future, your software will run (if it is architected carefully). That is a huge game-changing advantage for somewhere like a school which has a tight IT budget and limited resources. The disadvantages are the many small niggling failings of running a web platform, lack of performance compared to binaries, etc but compared to managing multiple binaries on any OS and trying to support student's hardware, they're trivial. Use the web and you don't even need to support hardware at all - that's up to students, or if you do choose to, you can give away some cheap netbooks switch hardware at any time (though I'd question whether this is really the best use of school resources).
Likewise with submission formats - use the web and suddenly students can submit using their phone, their tablet, their PC, or even their toaster (for certain values of toaster). Crucially, this also deals with any hardware/software developments you haven't even thought of yet.
Don't assume that everyone critical of this move do so because they're partisan. I happen to think OS X is a better operating system than Windows, and that mac hardware is better that most PC offerings, but it doesn't blind me to the clear dangers involved for a school (or any organisation) in standardising on a single hardware/software platform, imposing a monoculture, and tying themselves to the future direction of a single vendor. Quite apart from anything else it allows dependencies to creep in that you don't know you have till you need to switch - binaries which only run on OS X 10.x.x, websites which only work in browser x, file formats which cannot be opened by new software without glitches, etc, etc. Businesses have been discovering all this the hard way for the last decade after they standardised on Windows. Doing it with Windows was a stupid idea, and doing it with OS X is also a stupid idea.
The software platform chosen should be the web in this case.
This is just as bad as mandating all Microsoft software - I feel like I'm back in the 1990s.
They should be using the web to get any content out to students, and then students could use whatever sort of computer (or device!) they want, including ipads, thinkpads, or smartbooks or their latest phone which they use instead of a computer. Then in five years time when the next hot new thing comes along or their mac software is broken by a new OS, or Apple drops Mac OS completely (the last WWDC was almost entirely taken up with iOS), they will not be left stuck on an abandoned platform dealing with bit rot in old applications and wondering why they mandated that everyone must use this. You know, like those companies that still use Windows 2000 because they are tied to binaries on that platform and they don't want the hassle of moving on.
This is exactly what the web was made for. If they used platform-agnostic html to deliver their student content (no active-x, no binary plugins), they would have an always up to date resource which students could access from anywhere, and which did not mandate any particular technology to access it (every platform nowadays has a browser). Students could deal with their own tech support, and the school could issue free (far cheaper) web devices to those who needed them.
The question nowadays is not mac or PC, it should be binary or markup, and the answer is pretty obvious for the needs of a high school.