People signed in to use the service, entered in their credit card in order to buy things, used their real info because not only is it honest (and not fraud, which you seem to be recommending--how moral of you!) and easier to remember, but necessary, as you admit, when you use a credit card.
I'm unaware of any Sony service which is commonly used to store private documents in the cloud.
Certainly Sony has some major responsibility here...
But when will people stop trusting the Intertubes security implicitly and just blindly dumping all their personal info into various "secure" web sites and Internet connected systems?
People are just blind...
Blind? That implies they could have looked into Sony's security and made an informed and rational decision as to the quality of their security.
It's not that people are stupid or blind or anything else. There's this thing called "trust". It's at the very heart of society. It's wholly unfeasible to expect people to be able to verify for themselves the quality and security of everything they do in the world. You can't check the farm where you get your lettuce, you can't test every electronic component for hazards, you can't check the purity of your medication, and you can't check the security of the web sites you interact with.
That's why we have public and private organizations like the FDA, FCC, UL, USDA, etc. Of course some of these have become something of a sham, but the idea is sound. If these things have become inept, it's not because it is their nature to become so, but because people like you who put too much responsibility on those least able to bear that responsibility coupled with a blind eye to corruption.
What do you expect of people? That they verify the unverifiable? Or simply eschew participation in our culture? If so, you are right about one thing, at least SOME people really are blind...
Aside from the last sentence, you just rephrased part of what I wrote.
The fact that Lodsys has chosen to sue small developers without the resources to fight in court, rather than Apple, suggests that Lodsys is aware that their case is weak, and are hoping to extort some money from the little guys before Apple shuts them down.
This, however, I don't think is the case. I don't think this is a quick smash-and-grab. At worst, even assuming that Lodsys doesn't think they have a strong case (and I think they think they do, but who knows?), this is a gambit. The end game is that Lodsys gets a small cut from every in app sale for doing absolutely nothing other than having purchased a patent and filing some lawsuits.
This is their business model. This is the very reason for patent trolls to exist. They are true parasites.
There's no reason it can't be. In terms of consumer impact, FaceTime for Windows would be much more noticeable than an open Skype protocol.
It's really disappointing that Apple hasn't either ported FaceTime over to Windows, or done what they said last year and published the protocol so third parties could implement it. WWDC would be a good place to announce something like this, though. I guess we'll know in a few days.
Ease of use might have something to do with it, but ease of development is entirely unrelated.
Thank you for so succinctly summing up the single greatest problem with Linux and most other open source software.
Ease of use *IS* part of development. It's just as much a requirement as any other technical aspect.
Also, like most nerds, you have vastly underestimated the difficulty in developing an application. It's easy to whiteboard a simple voice chat app, and *fairly* simple to create some sort of intercom-type chat program. But once you start adding things like central directories, low-latency variable bandwidth calling over the internet, and the like, you end up with difficulty even coming up with a reasonable whiteboard outline, and the actual implementation becomes quite difficult. By no means impossible, but it's not something you'll bang out over a weekend and be on par with something like Skype.
As awful as Skype may be, just because you understand the idea behind how it works doesn't mean it's easy to duplicate. This is a classic nerd mistake.
So you say, "Look, after this date, if you still want to call me, either pick up the phone or use XMPP." Set that date two or three months down the road so people have a transition window. By the way, this works for legacy IM systems like MSN, AIM, ICQ and Yahoo Messanger as well.
Forever Alone...
What, do you think your friends and family are just going to switch to something they don't even understand just to talk to someone who acts like he's the Queen of England? Of course not. They'll still use the phone, but if they are heavy Skype/MSN/AIM/etc. users, they simply won't do so as much. Maybe that's what you really want anyway?
Yeah, you end up with all that freedom, and no way to use it. Brilliant!
You only give up a nominal amount of "freedom" by using Windows or Mac OS X, yet you gain much more capability in terms of being able to actually make use of your computer. You've traded "freedom" (rights) for "freedom" (things you can do).
It's your computer, so obviously whatever floats your boat, but you clearly overestimate the appeal having a "freedom compatible system" will have on others. Hell, you can't even meet that ideal yourself!
You're right, there is nothing in the agreement that forces Apple to do this. However, you may be surprised to know that corporations always do things that they aren't forced to do. Generally, these would be things that are reasonably seen as "in their own best interest", but they even do things that the people running the company think is "the right thing to do" (there are definitely some industry leaders for whom this phrase is meaningless, but there are undoubtedly more for whom it does come up at least occasionally).
Anyway, in this particular case, Apple has already gone to bat for the developers to a small, but absolutely unrequired extent. If Apple truly believes their license covers third party developers, it's quite likely they will fully step into the legal battle. Maybe the result would be Lodsys loses completely, maybe Apple ends up licensing directly with Lodsys to pay the license directly as part of the 30% cut (the same as they do currently for things like credit card fees).
There are plenty of possibilities, but one thing is certain: it's in Apple's best interest to make sure developers don't have to worry about being gnawed at by third parties for developing for the App Store.
Life is full of risks. The odds of being hit with a patent lawsuit are low, and generally even if you lose, the impact is minimal (not that I agree with Lodsys at all, but even worst case, they are asking for a very small percentage). After all, what good is a parasite that kills its host? Better to keep it alive to milk indefinitely.
Anyway, my point is if you are shying away from doing something because you *might* meet with adversity, you are doing it wrong.
Except that resume does not seem to work for non-cocoa applications -- like X11 applications, terminal programs, etc. That is essentially what KDE3 had -- KDE applications could be resumed, but other programs could not (actually, some non-KDE programs could be resumed, because of KIO).
First off, I don't believe KDE does this. It saves sessions, but does not save the actual running applications themselves. This is significantly more difficult to do in KDE than it is in Mac OS X due to the design of the two systems. I'll be glad to be proven wrong however.
Second, "X11 applications, terminal programs, etc."? Do you really think these make up even 0.1% of running user apps at any given moment? That's why I'm saying KDE is not like Cocoa in practical terms.
No. They didn't invent shit, and no one is saying they did. It's only the trolls who keep acting like that's what Apple (or anyone else) is claiming.
They implemented a feature that has been available in a much more limited scope all the way back to Nextstep and, I'm sure, before in a much more impressive and useful manner.
And it's quite innovative to find a feature like this in a consumer OS. The only other consumer OS I'm aware of with this feature is iOS. Care to cite any examples of another consumer OS that does this automatically across the board?
Then how about you say "So that most people can use them," or "So that everyone is skilled enough to use them." Then it'd actually be true. As it is, I'm calling you on your hyperbole.
You're just being obtuse. The very point is you don't have to be high up on the "skilled" list to use them. AND TWO OF THE FEATURES REQUIRE ABSOLUTELY NO KNOWLEDGE WHATSOEVER TO USE. The only feature that requires any sort of interaction is Versions, and it's very intuitive. It's even easier than the normal Open/Save idea. Silly me for only meaning "people who know how to open or save a file" when I say "everyone"!
I'm sorry, but that's not an automatic win. Consider the number of people for whom Macs are a non-starter if they don't have anti-virus, not because they actually understand how anti-virus works, but because that's what happens on Windows. They will look for the interaction.
Two points here:
1. I really did think you couldn't possibly think I meant that Windows users will get to use Mac features on Windows. When I say "anyone can use these features", I mean it like, "anyone can use a pair of scissors". By which I mean they are simple enough for anyone to use. Obviously if you don't have any scissors around, you can't use them, but that isn't relevant to the claim that the person in question would be able to were they available. 2. That's the single-dumbest argument I've ever heard for not buying a Mac. I've never heard a single person say, "Macs don't have antivirus? Then I won't buy one!" (in fact, there are antivirus software for the Mac, but that doesn't detract from the absurdity of your argument)
And assuming you're correct, they've now converted rebooting, a way a user knows to get into a known state, into not-quite-rebooting. Any user who's ever rebooted to solve a problem must now figure out where the "reboot without resume" option is.
Tinker-nerd talk. People don't reboot to put a computer "into a known state". Those few that do will know how to do that on Lion.
In other words, if an application gets itself into a screwy state, quit and reopen is no longer a viable option, as it has been on every desktop OS for decades.
It most certainly is an option. For a tinker-nerd, you sure are obtuse.
And how do you know this is how it works? The Apple website isn't entirely clear about that, though it is clear about one thing: You can only Resume applications which are written with Lion in mind. That sounds suspiciously like saving a session -- and that Firefox saves URLs or maybe HTML contents, rather than entire memory dumps, is a design decision of Firefox, there's no reason a session-saving API like KDE's would require such a thing.
It's saving the actual objects that make up the application to disk. It's not "saving a session". When you restart such an app, it restarts EXACTLY the same objects (which is to say, the exact program as it was running before).
Saving a session means reinitializing an app just like normal, then loading a bunch of saved documents and windows. Firefox, for example, will start up just like normal, initialize all the plugins and such, then reload any windows and tabs from before by loading them again from the internet.
Safari on Lion will, instead, just reload every single object it had, including every web page, and Safari itself. Nothing initializes, it doesn't go through the normal startup methods, it doesn't re-request the pages. Everything is exactly as it was, including any partially typed in text fields. Everything. It's as though you never quit the app in the first place.
Apple almost NEVER claims to be the first to come up with these features.
That's a distinction without a difference. Apple does claim to be innovative, or that these are innovations. They don't cite where these ideas are actually coming from.
the actual problem is the users' lack of discretion in installing junk!
How, exactly, are people supposed to know what's malware and what's not?
I get the feeling that it's an attempt to condemn the security model of the Android OS
That's exactly what it does, whether it's an actual attempt or not. Google's security model is awful. This is by deliberate design. If Google (and fandroids) want to beat Apple over the head for having a closed App Store, you also have to take the good with the bad.
There's another system, one with significantly more apps and with a larger user base, which does not have this problem. If that doesn't illustrate the difference in security between iOS and Android, I don't know what does.
C'mon, you won't find a more dense hive of Android fans anywhere on the net outside of actual Android sites than Slashdot. Reading Slashdot, you'd think everyone uses Android, Linux, Firefox and hacks their own Arduino kits. That everyone hates Sony, think Steve Jobs wants to control people, hates Oracle, and wants to tinker with their hardware.
But your claim is untestable, because there's no such link an Android user could provide. That's a key difference between iOS and Android. And, as of the time of my posting, his post is "-1, Troll", so I guess part of your claim can be tested anyway.
How sad, and how far this site has sunk. Now go back to jacking off to Youtube videos of Lord Steve introducing magical products.
Yes, with such insightful commentary as yours, how sad this site has sunk indeed!
And actually, as it turns out, we're both wrong. I looked into pwn2own's rules for 2011. You sign up for 30 minute time slots, and you win the prize for a successful hacking, not for which order the systems go down in.
I've been going on second-hand information before, and it always made sense (I assumed it was a set of boxen all set up and whichever got hacked first one first place, and so on, which in hindsight does seem more Hollywood than reality).
The technical details are, as far as I know, still under NDA. However, it's the same as what iOS does, so you could look into that if you are interested.
All Cocoa apps are collections of objects. For this feature, the OS just serializes them and writes them to disk. This has been done for parts of programs since Nextstep (primarily, the UI). Also, you can serialize and deserialize your own objects from within a Cocoa app. The Resume feature is just the OS itself serializing and deserializing the entire program, it seems (based on how it's described).
That's one of the ways "multitasking" works on iOS, and is now being brought over to Mac OS X as an additional feature.
Wouldn't we be better off detecting the viruses, not the antivirus?
Well, if Norton on the Mac is anything like on Windows, removing it would probably provide a greater overall benefit than detecting and removing actual malware.
First off (and I only make this point because you seem to be trying to make this distinction), there are absolutely NO viruses for Mac OS X. None.
Second, there were plenty of viruses for classic Mac OS. This, however, has absolutely nothing to do with whether Mac OS X has viruses (for the rest of this post, I'm using a more broad term for virus, to include trojans and worms, and the like).
Third, there is a small handful of malware for the Mac, including (almost exclusively) trojans. No one is claiming otherwise, not even the people you are replying to.
Fourth, in White Hat conventions, *ALL* the systems fall. They tend to fall after certain restrictions have been removed. Macs often fall first (by mere seconds) because people want to win the Mac more than they want to win the PC.
Even knowing this I still don't use a virus scanner at present as I simply don't see a need. That said I am not foolish enough to believe that it will remain Virus free indefinitely.
Who is this imaginary person you think is saying that Macs will remain "virus free indefinitely"? This last line pretty much describes every single Mac user, from those that worry the Virus Armageddon is pending, and those that think they have nothing to worry about. No one claims this is a permanent state of things, just that it's how it is now, and tomorrow is another day.
So every virus for Macs will get killed in the next update? Very nice work for Apple if it happens that way.
'It's reasonably trivial to remove MacDefender,' said Wisniewski. 'It's not burying itself in the system, not compared to some of some of the crap that we see on Windows.'
Pity it won't always be that way, survival of the fittest applies to viruses too.
Actually, the way Mac OS X works, it's very difficult to construct a program that "buries" itself in the system. It's even somewhat more difficult to do than it is in Linux. On Mac OS X, every single program can be found by dropping to a bash shell. The places that get called on startup are few and easily managed.
That's not to say it's impossible or anything, but these sort of pithy responses that amount to "well, on Windows it does this, so it's only a matter of time until this happens on OS X, too" generally end up being empty claims many years later.
It's a bit disingenuous to compare Cocoa with KDE. KDE is just one of many user-facing layers on an OS, while Cocoa is *the* user-facing layer. There are a few others around for compatibility, and games bypass even these altogether, but adding a feature to Cocoa has much wider system benefits than adding a feature to KDE does.
Except that the use-case for KDE is exactly that: you are using KDE, and nothing else (with the possible exception of Firefox). Yes, an educated user might be running non-KDE applications, but I can say the same about Cocoa: an educated user might be running X11 applications. Adding a feature to KDE would have a pretty wide impact for KDE users, and I would argue that this is comparable to Cocoa. The whole point of a desktop environment is be exactly that: your environment.
Linux distros install all sorts of apps that aren't part of the particular desktop environment of choice and put them into the default menus, and aside from the cases where a program starts with an oddly-placed K or G, it's not generally clear whether an app is native to the current environment or not.
I do agree that it's similar (and I tried to make this point in my original post), but it's not comparable in terms of impact to the user. The main reason for this is that in Linux, "choice" permeates every part of the system. This is good in many ways, but very poor when it comes to making system-wide advances.
Or put differently, to the user Cocoa *IS* Mac OS X. There are a handful of other built-in APIs, but they are all in the process of being deprecated (Carbon) or are part of the Unix underpinnings that few users will ever see (X11). On Linux, KDE is *NOT* the system, it's just an optional part of the system (that's even true of KDE-oriented systems, like kubuntu).
Their entire state is saved, so restarting a program just reloads the memory
Can you cite a source here?
Apple's Lion page. Also, the keynote where this was announced, as well as that's exactly what iOS does. Cocoa apps are just objects. Resume simply serializes them, and then reloads them when you start the program again. Mac OS X (and Nextstep before it) did exactly this with many parts of a program. For example, the user interface is usually built in Interface Builder, where you load a bunch of actual objects, customize them, then save them to a file to include in your Xcode project.
That is a very complex thing for an OS to do, on the level of a live kernel upgrade (i.e. upgrading a kernel without having to reboot). If this is what the OS is doing, and if the OS is doing it without requiring the application to make any special system calls to enable that functionality, it would be impressive.
Yes, it is both complex and impressive.
These three features stand to basically make normal people's lives better. Two of them help against "oh shit" moments (Versions and Autosave) and the third pretty much invisibly makes the computer work more like a person would expect as a persistent system, even across reboots. You might notice that Lion does away with the light that indicates running vs not running apps (a toggle-able option for those that really care).
No, Hibernate (which already exists in OS X) is a full memory dump to disk. This is serializing the objects in individual running programs. In terms of restarting the computer, it's almost exactly like restoring from hibernate, but without the long delay in shutting down and a similarly long delay in booting.
This also means that whenever you quit a program, when you start it again, it will be just as you left off. This can dramatically speed up application launching, as well as making it appear to the user similar to as if the program had never been quit in the first place.
First of all, I strongly doubt that Apple has written an OS that adds autosave or resume to every running application. If they did, I will be impressed; more likely, applications must use specific OS hooks to get these features.
Just every Cocoa application that is recompiled for 10.7. You don't have to do anything to take advantage of it, it's part of the OS. However, you can disable it if it doesn't make sense for your program.
Resume was in KDE3, and to the best of my knowledge KDE4 supports it; all KDE programs benefited from it, and even a few non-KDE programs. Considering how broad KDE was, KDE/GNU/Linux should qualify as an "operating system." You may disagree, but then the argument boils down to "what constitutes an OS?"
No, it doesn't. You can't handwave away the differences by playing word games. It doesn't matter if you want to call it an OS or a Desktop Environment (hmm... I wonder what the two letters after "K" originally stood for?), the point is simple:
1. KDE does not have the same resume feature that Lion has. Not even close. 2. In actual use, KDE tends to be much more of a mixed environment than Mac OS X. Even if it was the same as the Resume feature in Lion (it's not), there would be much more in the way of rough edges. This is not a trivial distinction, and is in fact one of the reasons Linux is such a poor choice for a consumer desktop OS.
Autosave -- again, the KDE example, but not as extensive as resume. All KDE applications for which autosave was relevant had autosave.
No one ever claimed applications do not have the ability to autosave. In Lion, this just happens.
Versioning -- this goes all the way back to ITS, so do not even try to claim that no OS before OS X had it. We are not talking about revision control; this was built into the filesystem and it was automatic.
Hmm... You must have missed the part where I wrote:
"Aside from some snapshotting filesystems"
Anyway, this is not something has ever been in a consumer OS, and the front-end to it is LIGHT YEARS beyond anything that has ever existed in any OS, other than Time Machine in OS X.
As for it being built into ITS, that's interesting, I honestly would like to hear more about it. But if it's just a form of filesystem snapshotting, it's cool (especially for such an old OS), but still quite different from how Versions works.
Again, if autosave and resume are truly available in every application, even applications that are not specific written for OS X (e.g. X11 applications), I will be impressed.
No one is claiming this, just you. And if you aren't impressed by how these features work in Lion, you either don't know how these features work in Lion, or you're just being deliberately obtuse in a fanboy sense. These are fantastic for a desktop OS, they are unparalleled by any other desktop OS, and they are implemented in such a way that anyone can easily use them (hell, TWO of the three don't even require the user to do anything differently!).
I doubt that this is the case, because of the technical complexity involved in creating such a system, but I am open to the possibility of being wrong here.
Yes, there is a lot of technical complexity involved. That's why these things haven't been implemented before in such user-friendly fashions (and in the case of Resume, I don't know of any OS outside of iOS that has this, although I'm sure there must be something, either an experimental OS like Plan 9, or a mainframe OS, etc.).
Using the most mundane example of the three, Autosave is something that can be part of the OS because of how Cocoa works. It's all objects. Apple can change how their Frameworks work, and all applications suddenly gain new capabilities. It's much more difficult to add to something like Windows or Linux (or KDE), because of how saving is done on those sy
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What does any of this have to do with Sony?
People signed in to use the service, entered in their credit card in order to buy things, used their real info because not only is it honest (and not fraud, which you seem to be recommending--how moral of you!) and easier to remember, but necessary, as you admit, when you use a credit card.
I'm unaware of any Sony service which is commonly used to store private documents in the cloud.
You are raving.
Groan...
Certainly Sony has some major responsibility here...
But when will people stop trusting the Intertubes security implicitly and just blindly dumping all their personal info into various "secure" web sites and Internet connected systems?
People are just blind...
Blind? That implies they could have looked into Sony's security and made an informed and rational decision as to the quality of their security.
It's not that people are stupid or blind or anything else. There's this thing called "trust". It's at the very heart of society. It's wholly unfeasible to expect people to be able to verify for themselves the quality and security of everything they do in the world. You can't check the farm where you get your lettuce, you can't test every electronic component for hazards, you can't check the purity of your medication, and you can't check the security of the web sites you interact with.
That's why we have public and private organizations like the FDA, FCC, UL, USDA, etc. Of course some of these have become something of a sham, but the idea is sound. If these things have become inept, it's not because it is their nature to become so, but because people like you who put too much responsibility on those least able to bear that responsibility coupled with a blind eye to corruption.
What do you expect of people? That they verify the unverifiable? Or simply eschew participation in our culture? If so, you are right about one thing, at least SOME people really are blind...
Aside from the last sentence, you just rephrased part of what I wrote.
The fact that Lodsys has chosen to sue small developers without the resources to fight in court, rather than Apple, suggests that Lodsys is aware that their case is weak, and are hoping to extort some money from the little guys before Apple shuts them down.
This, however, I don't think is the case. I don't think this is a quick smash-and-grab. At worst, even assuming that Lodsys doesn't think they have a strong case (and I think they think they do, but who knows?), this is a gambit. The end game is that Lodsys gets a small cut from every in app sale for doing absolutely nothing other than having purchased a patent and filing some lawsuits.
This is their business model. This is the very reason for patent trolls to exist. They are true parasites.
There's no reason it can't be. In terms of consumer impact, FaceTime for Windows would be much more noticeable than an open Skype protocol.
It's really disappointing that Apple hasn't either ported FaceTime over to Windows, or done what they said last year and published the protocol so third parties could implement it. WWDC would be a good place to announce something like this, though. I guess we'll know in a few days.
Ease of use might have something to do with it, but ease of development is entirely unrelated.
Thank you for so succinctly summing up the single greatest problem with Linux and most other open source software.
Ease of use *IS* part of development. It's just as much a requirement as any other technical aspect.
Also, like most nerds, you have vastly underestimated the difficulty in developing an application. It's easy to whiteboard a simple voice chat app, and *fairly* simple to create some sort of intercom-type chat program. But once you start adding things like central directories, low-latency variable bandwidth calling over the internet, and the like, you end up with difficulty even coming up with a reasonable whiteboard outline, and the actual implementation becomes quite difficult. By no means impossible, but it's not something you'll bang out over a weekend and be on par with something like Skype.
As awful as Skype may be, just because you understand the idea behind how it works doesn't mean it's easy to duplicate. This is a classic nerd mistake.
And when one of them says, "So what app can I use to video call you from my iPhone?", do you reply, "You shouldn't have got an iPhone!"?
He did mention "pick up the phone", although one could be forgiven for forgetting that the iPhone actually is a phone...
(not to mention there are plenty of XMPP apps on the App Store)
The biggest hurdle will be to convince people to use them simply to talk to one oddball.
So you say, "Look, after this date, if you still want to call me, either pick up the phone or use XMPP." Set that date two or three months down the road so people have a transition window. By the way, this works for legacy IM systems like MSN, AIM, ICQ and Yahoo Messanger as well.
Forever Alone...
What, do you think your friends and family are just going to switch to something they don't even understand just to talk to someone who acts like he's the Queen of England? Of course not. They'll still use the phone, but if they are heavy Skype/MSN/AIM/etc. users, they simply won't do so as much. Maybe that's what you really want anyway?
Yeah, you end up with all that freedom, and no way to use it. Brilliant!
You only give up a nominal amount of "freedom" by using Windows or Mac OS X, yet you gain much more capability in terms of being able to actually make use of your computer. You've traded "freedom" (rights) for "freedom" (things you can do).
It's your computer, so obviously whatever floats your boat, but you clearly overestimate the appeal having a "freedom compatible system" will have on others. Hell, you can't even meet that ideal yourself!
iOS is the larger target. More apps, more users, and disproportionately more revenue in iOS apps. It also makes a bigger splash in the news.
You're right, there is nothing in the agreement that forces Apple to do this. However, you may be surprised to know that corporations always do things that they aren't forced to do. Generally, these would be things that are reasonably seen as "in their own best interest", but they even do things that the people running the company think is "the right thing to do" (there are definitely some industry leaders for whom this phrase is meaningless, but there are undoubtedly more for whom it does come up at least occasionally).
Anyway, in this particular case, Apple has already gone to bat for the developers to a small, but absolutely unrequired extent. If Apple truly believes their license covers third party developers, it's quite likely they will fully step into the legal battle. Maybe the result would be Lodsys loses completely, maybe Apple ends up licensing directly with Lodsys to pay the license directly as part of the 30% cut (the same as they do currently for things like credit card fees).
There are plenty of possibilities, but one thing is certain: it's in Apple's best interest to make sure developers don't have to worry about being gnawed at by third parties for developing for the App Store.
Life is full of risks. The odds of being hit with a patent lawsuit are low, and generally even if you lose, the impact is minimal (not that I agree with Lodsys at all, but even worst case, they are asking for a very small percentage). After all, what good is a parasite that kills its host? Better to keep it alive to milk indefinitely.
Anyway, my point is if you are shying away from doing something because you *might* meet with adversity, you are doing it wrong.
Except that resume does not seem to work for non-cocoa applications -- like X11 applications, terminal programs, etc. That is essentially what KDE3 had -- KDE applications could be resumed, but other programs could not (actually, some non-KDE programs could be resumed, because of KIO).
First off, I don't believe KDE does this. It saves sessions, but does not save the actual running applications themselves. This is significantly more difficult to do in KDE than it is in Mac OS X due to the design of the two systems. I'll be glad to be proven wrong however.
Second, "X11 applications, terminal programs, etc."? Do you really think these make up even 0.1% of running user apps at any given moment? That's why I'm saying KDE is not like Cocoa in practical terms.
No. They didn't invent shit, and no one is saying they did. It's only the trolls who keep acting like that's what Apple (or anyone else) is claiming.
They implemented a feature that has been available in a much more limited scope all the way back to Nextstep and, I'm sure, before in a much more impressive and useful manner.
And it's quite innovative to find a feature like this in a consumer OS. The only other consumer OS I'm aware of with this feature is iOS. Care to cite any examples of another consumer OS that does this automatically across the board?
Then how about you say "So that most people can use them," or "So that everyone is skilled enough to use them." Then it'd actually be true. As it is, I'm calling you on your hyperbole.
You're just being obtuse. The very point is you don't have to be high up on the "skilled" list to use them. AND TWO OF THE FEATURES REQUIRE ABSOLUTELY NO KNOWLEDGE WHATSOEVER TO USE. The only feature that requires any sort of interaction is Versions, and it's very intuitive. It's even easier than the normal Open/Save idea. Silly me for only meaning "people who know how to open or save a file" when I say "everyone"!
I'm sorry, but that's not an automatic win. Consider the number of people for whom Macs are a non-starter if they don't have anti-virus, not because they actually understand how anti-virus works, but because that's what happens on Windows. They will look for the interaction.
Two points here:
1. I really did think you couldn't possibly think I meant that Windows users will get to use Mac features on Windows. When I say "anyone can use these features", I mean it like, "anyone can use a pair of scissors". By which I mean they are simple enough for anyone to use. Obviously if you don't have any scissors around, you can't use them, but that isn't relevant to the claim that the person in question would be able to were they available.
2. That's the single-dumbest argument I've ever heard for not buying a Mac. I've never heard a single person say, "Macs don't have antivirus? Then I won't buy one!" (in fact, there are antivirus software for the Mac, but that doesn't detract from the absurdity of your argument)
And assuming you're correct, they've now converted rebooting, a way a user knows to get into a known state, into not-quite-rebooting. Any user who's ever rebooted to solve a problem must now figure out where the "reboot without resume" option is.
Tinker-nerd talk. People don't reboot to put a computer "into a known state". Those few that do will know how to do that on Lion.
In other words, if an application gets itself into a screwy state, quit and reopen is no longer a viable option, as it has been on every desktop OS for decades.
It most certainly is an option. For a tinker-nerd, you sure are obtuse.
And how do you know this is how it works? The Apple website isn't entirely clear about that, though it is clear about one thing: You can only Resume applications which are written with Lion in mind. That sounds suspiciously like saving a session -- and that Firefox saves URLs or maybe HTML contents, rather than entire memory dumps, is a design decision of Firefox, there's no reason a session-saving API like KDE's would require such a thing.
It's saving the actual objects that make up the application to disk. It's not "saving a session". When you restart such an app, it restarts EXACTLY the same objects (which is to say, the exact program as it was running before).
Saving a session means reinitializing an app just like normal, then loading a bunch of saved documents and windows. Firefox, for example, will start up just like normal, initialize all the plugins and such, then reload any windows and tabs from before by loading them again from the internet.
Safari on Lion will, instead, just reload every single object it had, including every web page, and Safari itself. Nothing initializes, it doesn't go through the normal startup methods, it doesn't re-request the pages. Everything is exactly as it was, including any partially typed in text fields. Everything. It's as though you never quit the app in the first place.
Apple almost NEVER claims to be the first to come up with these features.
That's a distinction without a difference. Apple does claim to be innovative, or that these are innovations. They don't cite where these ideas are actually coming from.
the actual problem is the users' lack of discretion in installing junk!
How, exactly, are people supposed to know what's malware and what's not?
I get the feeling that it's an attempt to condemn the security model of the Android OS
That's exactly what it does, whether it's an actual attempt or not. Google's security model is awful. This is by deliberate design. If Google (and fandroids) want to beat Apple over the head for having a closed App Store, you also have to take the good with the bad.
There's another system, one with significantly more apps and with a larger user base, which does not have this problem. If that doesn't illustrate the difference in security between iOS and Android, I don't know what does.
C'mon, you won't find a more dense hive of Android fans anywhere on the net outside of actual Android sites than Slashdot. Reading Slashdot, you'd think everyone uses Android, Linux, Firefox and hacks their own Arduino kits. That everyone hates Sony, think Steve Jobs wants to control people, hates Oracle, and wants to tinker with their hardware.
But your claim is untestable, because there's no such link an Android user could provide. That's a key difference between iOS and Android. And, as of the time of my posting, his post is "-1, Troll", so I guess part of your claim can be tested anyway.
How sad, and how far this site has sunk. Now go back to jacking off to Youtube videos of Lord Steve introducing magical products.
Yes, with such insightful commentary as yours, how sad this site has sunk indeed!
Considering not a single piece of "infected" software has been found on the App Store, these claims seem fairly sound.
And actually, as it turns out, we're both wrong. I looked into pwn2own's rules for 2011. You sign up for 30 minute time slots, and you win the prize for a successful hacking, not for which order the systems go down in.
I've been going on second-hand information before, and it always made sense (I assumed it was a set of boxen all set up and whichever got hacked first one first place, and so on, which in hindsight does seem more Hollywood than reality).
Anyway, full details direct from the source: TippingPoint - Pwn2Own 2011
The technical details are, as far as I know, still under NDA. However, it's the same as what iOS does, so you could look into that if you are interested.
All Cocoa apps are collections of objects. For this feature, the OS just serializes them and writes them to disk. This has been done for parts of programs since Nextstep (primarily, the UI). Also, you can serialize and deserialize your own objects from within a Cocoa app. The Resume feature is just the OS itself serializing and deserializing the entire program, it seems (based on how it's described).
That's one of the ways "multitasking" works on iOS, and is now being brought over to Mac OS X as an additional feature.
The summary mentions:
the rudimentary antivirus detection engine
Wouldn't we be better off detecting the viruses, not the antivirus?
Well, if Norton on the Mac is anything like on Windows, removing it would probably provide a greater overall benefit than detecting and removing actual malware.
First off (and I only make this point because you seem to be trying to make this distinction), there are absolutely NO viruses for Mac OS X. None.
Second, there were plenty of viruses for classic Mac OS. This, however, has absolutely nothing to do with whether Mac OS X has viruses (for the rest of this post, I'm using a more broad term for virus, to include trojans and worms, and the like).
Third, there is a small handful of malware for the Mac, including (almost exclusively) trojans. No one is claiming otherwise, not even the people you are replying to.
Fourth, in White Hat conventions, *ALL* the systems fall. They tend to fall after certain restrictions have been removed. Macs often fall first (by mere seconds) because people want to win the Mac more than they want to win the PC.
Even knowing this I still don't use a virus scanner at present as I simply don't see a need. That said I am not foolish enough to believe that it will remain Virus free indefinitely.
Who is this imaginary person you think is saying that Macs will remain "virus free indefinitely"? This last line pretty much describes every single Mac user, from those that worry the Virus Armageddon is pending, and those that think they have nothing to worry about. No one claims this is a permanent state of things, just that it's how it is now, and tomorrow is another day.
So every virus for Macs will get killed in the next update? Very nice work for Apple if it happens that way.
'It's reasonably trivial to remove MacDefender,' said Wisniewski. 'It's not burying itself in the system, not compared to some of some of the crap that we see on Windows.'
Pity it won't always be that way, survival of the fittest applies to viruses too.
Actually, the way Mac OS X works, it's very difficult to construct a program that "buries" itself in the system. It's even somewhat more difficult to do than it is in Linux. On Mac OS X, every single program can be found by dropping to a bash shell. The places that get called on startup are few and easily managed.
That's not to say it's impossible or anything, but these sort of pithy responses that amount to "well, on Windows it does this, so it's only a matter of time until this happens on OS X, too" generally end up being empty claims many years later.
It's a bit disingenuous to compare Cocoa with KDE. KDE is just one of many user-facing layers on an OS, while Cocoa is *the* user-facing layer. There are a few others around for compatibility, and games bypass even these altogether, but adding a feature to Cocoa has much wider system benefits than adding a feature to KDE does.
Except that the use-case for KDE is exactly that: you are using KDE, and nothing else (with the possible exception of Firefox). Yes, an educated user might be running non-KDE applications, but I can say the same about Cocoa: an educated user might be running X11 applications. Adding a feature to KDE would have a pretty wide impact for KDE users, and I would argue that this is comparable to Cocoa. The whole point of a desktop environment is be exactly that: your environment.
Linux distros install all sorts of apps that aren't part of the particular desktop environment of choice and put them into the default menus, and aside from the cases where a program starts with an oddly-placed K or G, it's not generally clear whether an app is native to the current environment or not.
I do agree that it's similar (and I tried to make this point in my original post), but it's not comparable in terms of impact to the user. The main reason for this is that in Linux, "choice" permeates every part of the system. This is good in many ways, but very poor when it comes to making system-wide advances.
Or put differently, to the user Cocoa *IS* Mac OS X. There are a handful of other built-in APIs, but they are all in the process of being deprecated (Carbon) or are part of the Unix underpinnings that few users will ever see (X11). On Linux, KDE is *NOT* the system, it's just an optional part of the system (that's even true of KDE-oriented systems, like kubuntu).
Their entire state is saved, so restarting a program just reloads the memory
Can you cite a source here?
Apple's Lion page. Also, the keynote where this was announced, as well as that's exactly what iOS does. Cocoa apps are just objects. Resume simply serializes them, and then reloads them when you start the program again. Mac OS X (and Nextstep before it) did exactly this with many parts of a program. For example, the user interface is usually built in Interface Builder, where you load a bunch of actual objects, customize them, then save them to a file to include in your Xcode project.
That is a very complex thing for an OS to do, on the level of a live kernel upgrade (i.e. upgrading a kernel without having to reboot). If this is what the OS is doing, and if the OS is doing it without requiring the application to make any special system calls to enable that functionality, it would be impressive.
Yes, it is both complex and impressive.
These three features stand to basically make normal people's lives better. Two of them help against "oh shit" moments (Versions and Autosave) and the third pretty much invisibly makes the computer work more like a person would expect as a persistent system, even across reboots. You might notice that Lion does away with the light that indicates running vs not running apps (a toggle-able option for those that really care).
No, Hibernate (which already exists in OS X) is a full memory dump to disk. This is serializing the objects in individual running programs. In terms of restarting the computer, it's almost exactly like restoring from hibernate, but without the long delay in shutting down and a similarly long delay in booting.
This also means that whenever you quit a program, when you start it again, it will be just as you left off. This can dramatically speed up application launching, as well as making it appear to the user similar to as if the program had never been quit in the first place.
First of all, I strongly doubt that Apple has written an OS that adds autosave or resume to every running application. If they did, I will be impressed; more likely, applications must use specific OS hooks to get these features.
Just every Cocoa application that is recompiled for 10.7. You don't have to do anything to take advantage of it, it's part of the OS. However, you can disable it if it doesn't make sense for your program.
Resume was in KDE3, and to the best of my knowledge KDE4 supports it; all KDE programs benefited from it, and even a few non-KDE programs. Considering how broad KDE was, KDE/GNU/Linux should qualify as an "operating system." You may disagree, but then the argument boils down to "what constitutes an OS?"
No, it doesn't. You can't handwave away the differences by playing word games. It doesn't matter if you want to call it an OS or a Desktop Environment (hmm... I wonder what the two letters after "K" originally stood for?), the point is simple:
1. KDE does not have the same resume feature that Lion has. Not even close.
2. In actual use, KDE tends to be much more of a mixed environment than Mac OS X. Even if it was the same as the Resume feature in Lion (it's not), there would be much more in the way of rough edges. This is not a trivial distinction, and is in fact one of the reasons Linux is such a poor choice for a consumer desktop OS.
Autosave -- again, the KDE example, but not as extensive as resume. All KDE applications for which autosave was relevant had autosave.
No one ever claimed applications do not have the ability to autosave. In Lion, this just happens.
Versioning -- this goes all the way back to ITS, so do not even try to claim that no OS before OS X had it. We are not talking about revision control; this was built into the filesystem and it was automatic.
Hmm... You must have missed the part where I wrote:
"Aside from some snapshotting filesystems"
Anyway, this is not something has ever been in a consumer OS, and the front-end to it is LIGHT YEARS beyond anything that has ever existed in any OS, other than Time Machine in OS X.
As for it being built into ITS, that's interesting, I honestly would like to hear more about it. But if it's just a form of filesystem snapshotting, it's cool (especially for such an old OS), but still quite different from how Versions works.
Again, if autosave and resume are truly available in every application, even applications that are not specific written for OS X (e.g. X11 applications), I will be impressed.
No one is claiming this, just you. And if you aren't impressed by how these features work in Lion, you either don't know how these features work in Lion, or you're just being deliberately obtuse in a fanboy sense. These are fantastic for a desktop OS, they are unparalleled by any other desktop OS, and they are implemented in such a way that anyone can easily use them (hell, TWO of the three don't even require the user to do anything differently!).
I doubt that this is the case, because of the technical complexity involved in creating such a system, but I am open to the possibility of being wrong here.
Yes, there is a lot of technical complexity involved. That's why these things haven't been implemented before in such user-friendly fashions (and in the case of Resume, I don't know of any OS outside of iOS that has this, although I'm sure there must be something, either an experimental OS like Plan 9, or a mainframe OS, etc.).
Using the most mundane example of the three, Autosave is something that can be part of the OS because of how Cocoa works. It's all objects. Apple can change how their Frameworks work, and all applications suddenly gain new capabilities. It's much more difficult to add to something like Windows or Linux (or KDE), because of how saving is done on those sy