It happened to me. I have an original 60GB PS3. One day it says there is a system update, just like all the previous ones. Press a button to download it, start it off, it gets halfway through, then the screen goes black, and game over. Nothing would revive it, not switching hard disks, not the service menu options, nothing. I do believe it broke something in the hard disk interface somehow. I ended up buying a new slim PS3, but I am very upset since my old PS3 had hardware backward compatibility, one of the main reasons I bought the thing, as I have many PS2 games.
No physical keyboard. A pad, not a book. Apple has DynaBook and Knowledge Navigator in its blood, remember. Thickness of an iPhone. Beefed up iPhone OS, not a slimmed down OSX. Support for a Bluetooth keyboard. Support for Bluetooth mouse. Support for stylus. Finger and stylus can use "Ink" technology to write on screen. Possible 3G card. Voice I/O enhanced from 3GS version.
I can see Apple selling a separate Bluetooth keyboard that can clip to the NetPad, making it look like a closed NetBook, protecting screen and keys. Possible removable hinge arrangement to allow for those who insist on a "book".
The proper price is $499 without optional keyboard or 3G card. But this is Apple. I hope for $599.
There is something called NetPad already. But there was something called iPhone already too.
I loved CompuServe back in its peak. Pre-Internet, everyone was there. I wrote an app called CompuServe Navigator as shareware and they picked it up as a commercial product, and for a time it was the best way to surf the forums with your Mac and a 2400 baud modem. It was sort of a terminal emulator and looked to CompuServe as though a very, very fast typist was giving all the commands to read their favorite forums. It saved all this and hung up the phone, then you could read it all offline and queue up replies to be sent the next time you kicked it off. Yeah, I had the name before those browser people had it, but I didn't have it registered and who wants to fight over a stupid word so I just renamed it MacNav.
I wasn't an employee, but I could see CompuServe falling apart. From where I sat, they were just not listening to the customers any more. Membership fell and AOL got more popular. I sold MacNav to them and watched them evaporate soon after. It was kind of sad cause they didn't have to go - at least until the free, enormous Internet enveloped everything.
"My sister said she didn't take any money" can have eight different meanings depending on which word is emphasized. There is a lot of information in someone's speech.
Wow, this is very close to something I blogged today, that Apple is talking to Verizon not about the iPhone, but about a tablet device I call the NetPad. This would use a data-only carrier connection that lets it, Kindle-like, transfer data across the Internet in spots where WiFi is not available. It is basically a bigger-screen iPhone without voice. There would be versions for GSM and CDMA. Users would sign on to a data-only carrier agreement, and this is what they are probably talking about.
Apple already restricts VOIP to WiFi. This would continue, But you can go surf your brains out! Halfway between an iPod Touch and an iPhone with (I predict) a 7.75" screen and finger + stylus + Bluetooth keyboard support, this thing will be another winner.
You must include all the phones sold in 2007. At the launch, Jobs said they would sell ten million phones by the end of 2008. I believe they will have no problem exceeding the goal. The 3G phone will sell very well, and they have made agreements for it to be sold in many more countries.
And my favorite is Command-Shift-4 which gives you the crosshairs, but tap the Space bar and the cursor turns into a camera icon, position the cursor over any window and click, and you get a perfect snapshot of that one window.
So they want you to report the fact that their licensing system is defective? Sounds to me like they already know. They already know, what they want to see is how many complaints they get. It seems if they get a lot of complaints they won't do it next time. Hopefully if they get an avalanche of complaints, and experience low sales, they will be forced to issue a patch..
Well, I think they just want to integrate more. The key to inexpensive and low power computing in portable devices is getting more and more on one chip. So they probably just want to put an ARM, power management, I/O and all the custom stuff they have on outside-the-CPU chips on one chip. The iPhone is half battery, and with speakers, switches, jacks and such there's hardly any room in there for chips!
They bought the expertise to put more of their custom stuff inside a system-on-chip, for iPhone, iPod, and that touch-tablet in the wings.
Macarena is not a virus, poses no threat, and does not need to be protected from. It was written as proof of a concept by those who hope people like you would use it to innocently instill fear into users so they will purchase useless anti-virus software. That's why it does not count.
Despite being a year and a half old, and the source code going public, this thing is not in the wild and never will be. Why not? It's pointless, useless, has no vector to "infect" through, and can do no damage. It only "infects" Intel-only binaries, and no applications are distributed that way except some system files. And it only "infects" files in the working directory, which is not going to be a system directory. So the thing isn't going to get from you to a place it can attack anything without you being tricked into downloading, compiling and running it yourself, or explicitly giving some so-far-unwritten malicious variant of this a password, therefore it is only by doing social engineering - being a Trojan - that it even has potential. So it's not a virus. It's only use is as a Trojan, and it sucks as a Trojan. It's only real purpose is to instill FUD and I bet you a shiny new penny that's precisely why it was written.
So no. It's not a virus. It doesn't count. There are no viruses. Show me one.
Check out this text from macfixit.com about Macarena:
== OS.X Macarena 'virus' (#2): No viable threat posed; Not exploiting a Mac OS X bug; not a 'warning' of more viruses to come Intego is the latest publisher of Mac OS X antivirus software to document and claim protection against the largely innocuous OS.X Macarena virus -- a simple C program, not found in the wild (outside the proof of concept stage) that is capable of infecting files on Intel-based Macs in its same directory.
The statement from Intego reads:
"The virus can only infect Intel-based OS X computers. It consists of a C source file, an Assembler 'dropper' file, and documentation that explains how to create a virus that can infect Macintosh OS X binary files. Compiling the source code creates two binaries, the OS X virus file itself, and the dropper. The dropper is intended to infect Mac OS X binary files from a Windows installation on the current machine. This can be either via Apple's Boot Camp, or via a virtualization application such as Parallels Desktop for Mac.
"The virus only infects mach-o binary files, not Universal or PowerPC binaries.
"Mach-o (Mach object file format) is the native file format used for executables by Mac OS X's Mach kernel. The virus does not carry a payload. When run it infects other executables in the current directory, regardless of their name or extension."
Again, OS.X Macarena poses no viable threat as currently conceived. Although we don't have our hands on the virus source code, according to Symantec (who initially publicized the virus last week) OSX.Macarena can infect neither PowerPC-exclusive binaries, nor Universal binaries. It can only affect binaries that are Intel-specific. That would include various system files, but since OSX.Macarena can only infect files in its own directory and has no means of gaining the privileges necessary to escalate into directories where most system files are stored, the the threat level is mitigated.
Further, it can be reasonably said that this "virus" is no more than a basic exploitation of the way in which UNIX permissions are designed to operate. By default, applications have permission to modify files that reside in their same directory. It's somewhat akin to writing a shell script that deletes one or more (or all) files in the home user directory then distributing that script as a download: Running the script has a malicious outcome, but there would be no way to prevent its operation without changing the granularity of permissions in Mac OS X (assigning some applications tigher restrictions than the default user-level permissions allow) -- something Apple may or may not enact in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).
You show me "New Apple Trojan Means Mac Hunting Season Is Open" and say it is a virus? No, a trojan is not a virus. Show me a single virus. There are none.
Not only will we love robots, they will be our slaves, too. Usable, abusable, ownable, perfectly legal. And no, the robots won't rise up and take over (for at least a few hundred years) even though they will be much, much smarter than us, because they will be made to appear to like their roles, be loyal, and understand that they are expendable and disposable, and they will legally remain property to do with as we will. Though they will be human-like, they will be easily and visibly distinguishable from humans by some indelible, obvious markings, such as bluish skin. Even so, there will be incidents, crimes and regrettable accidents, where humans will be mistaken for robots and abused or killed. This is not a fiction I'm spinning, but a prediction.
I worked on some of the first third party software, released on Newton's day one. It was a very, very good and solid product to use and develop for. By the last model, there was only one thing still wrong with it as a device - the form factor. It was a bit too big and heavy for a pocket. But that would have been very quickly addressed. Politics alone killed the Newton. Now, I look forward to a true successor, the tablet TouchMac. It WILL happen.
I believe the problem is this: The phone OSX operating system can be completely rewritten with a fresh copy by doing a restore in iTunes at any time. So any hacks that were done to that huge chunk of code can be completely undone and restored to factory fresh conditions. BUT the SIM-unlocking hacks, and I'm talking only about the hacks that let you use a SIM card other than ATT, change a chunk of code that is deeper in the hardware of the phone, outside the OSX operating system. It is changing some firmware that is outside the restored code. Note that the unlocking survives a restore. That's because it is hacked outside the OSX system.
Thus, the Restore in iTunes won't restore those particular hacks. And it is very possible that the hacked code won't run with new updates to OSX.
Apple isn't doing it on purpose. They are just doing what they planned to do - update OSX with new stuff. Apple is being NICE in warning people about this. Now, yes, I think with some EXTRA, EXPENSIVE WORK Apple could probably release a standalone program that might be able to restore that other code that is being hacked up. But darn it, do they have to? They warned you in advance, they are warning you now, and why do they have to support these hacks, even by undoing them?
Out of the goodness of their hearts, I do believe if this is actually a significant problem that Apple WILL take the time and spend the money to fix this deep hacking to make things back to factory fresh. But it is above and beyond what they need to do , and if they do it, they will do it because Apple is GOOD.
Here is the thing: DON'T make separate ringtone files. Have the ring play the orginal file, the full song you have on the phone for listening to as music. You can set a portion of THAT file to play, you can set it to fade in and out, and to play when someone happens to call. Why do this? Because you don't need any new rights to do it. You already bought the rights to play that song. And you can play any part of that song you want, when you want. You are simply automating the process.
Do this, Apple, and there is no basis for charging for a ringtone, no need to negotiate rights to a ringtone, or anything else. Because it isn't a ringtone. It is the original song you have already obtained rights to play as you like. Yes, there will be a lawsuit. But that's how you defend it.
Doesn't this mean places like US gov't agencies can finally buy Macs, because they are only allowed to buy Windows or Unix? Something like that? If true, this makes the certification very valuable, Macs were shut out from official gov't purchases for a long while.
A main reason I'm making a mobile friendly site is simply to help minimize the data going back and forth. A smaller header, smaller images and so on. The mobile layout is one column instead of two. It's not major stuff, but it can make using a site on a small screen much smoother.
I have noticed that every demo of the phone browser uses the NY Times site, which very nicely puts its stories in narrow columns on its page. This makes me wonder how well pages will look that have more normal, wide segments of text, especially in portrait mode, and especially with fixed width pages. Will we be doing a lot of horizontal finger scrolling to read such pages?
Sure I'm changing my site to work with the iPhone. I've got my news-that-morphs site at myallo.com which is a two-column layout using drupal, so I'm setting up myallo.mobi with a simple one column layout that I plan to optimize for the iPhone. I want the mobile site to work with any small-screen browser, so I'm going to watch what I do, but I want to make sure it looks and feels perfect to an iPhone user. I don't know that much about iPhone specifics, so I can't go too far until I get the gismo on Friday.
They want 1% of the World Market by the end of 2008. This translates to 10 million phones, but not all in America. They will roll out to the rest of the world starting at year end, they said, so if they can get some of Europe and Asia...
Slashdot Mirror
It happened to me. I have an original 60GB PS3. One day it says there is a system update, just like all the previous ones. Press a button to download it, start it off, it gets halfway through, then the screen goes black, and game over. Nothing would revive it, not switching hard disks, not the service menu options, nothing. I do believe it broke something in the hard disk interface somehow. I ended up buying a new slim PS3, but I am very upset since my old PS3 had hardware backward compatibility, one of the main reasons I bought the thing, as I have many PS2 games.
No physical keyboard. A pad, not a book. Apple has DynaBook and Knowledge Navigator in its blood, remember. Thickness of an iPhone. Beefed up iPhone OS, not a slimmed down OSX. Support for a Bluetooth keyboard. Support for Bluetooth mouse. Support for stylus. Finger and stylus can use "Ink" technology to write on screen. Possible 3G card. Voice I/O enhanced from 3GS version.
I can see Apple selling a separate Bluetooth keyboard that can clip to the NetPad, making it look like a closed NetBook, protecting screen and keys. Possible removable hinge arrangement to allow for those who insist on a "book".
The proper price is $499 without optional keyboard or 3G card. But this is Apple. I hope for $599.
There is something called NetPad already. But there was something called iPhone already too.
I loved CompuServe back in its peak. Pre-Internet, everyone was there. I wrote an app called CompuServe Navigator as shareware and they picked it up as a commercial product, and for a time it was the best way to surf the forums with your Mac and a 2400 baud modem. It was sort of a terminal emulator and looked to CompuServe as though a very, very fast typist was giving all the commands to read their favorite forums. It saved all this and hung up the phone, then you could read it all offline and queue up replies to be sent the next time you kicked it off. Yeah, I had the name before those browser people had it, but I didn't have it registered and who wants to fight over a stupid word so I just renamed it MacNav.
I wasn't an employee, but I could see CompuServe falling apart. From where I sat, they were just not listening to the customers any more. Membership fell and AOL got more popular. I sold MacNav to them and watched them evaporate soon after. It was kind of sad cause they didn't have to go - at least until the free, enormous Internet enveloped everything.
Illuminotum
"My sister said she didn't take any money" can have eight different meanings depending on which word is emphasized. There is a lot of information in someone's speech.
Wow, this is very close to something I blogged today, that Apple is talking to Verizon not about the iPhone, but about a tablet device I call the NetPad. This would use a data-only carrier connection that lets it, Kindle-like, transfer data across the Internet in spots where WiFi is not available. It is basically a bigger-screen iPhone without voice. There would be versions for GSM and CDMA. Users would sign on to a data-only carrier agreement, and this is what they are probably talking about.
Apple already restricts VOIP to WiFi. This would continue, But you can go surf your brains out! Halfway between an iPod Touch and an iPhone with (I predict) a 7.75" screen and finger + stylus + Bluetooth keyboard support, this thing will be another winner.
My blog articles on the NetPad and the Verizon talks are at http://www.myallo.com/blog
When I see an "up to" claim I always add the "down to"...
Up to 50% ,down to 0% off the full price. Up to 30% faster, down to 100% slower.
Really deflates most claims...
If you drive less, you use your phone more, to call work and such...
You must include all the phones sold in 2007. At the launch, Jobs said they would sell ten million phones by the end of 2008. I believe they will have no problem exceeding the goal. The 3G phone will sell very well, and they have made agreements for it to be sold in many more countries.
And my favorite is Command-Shift-4 which gives you the crosshairs, but tap the Space bar and the cursor turns into a camera icon, position the cursor over any window and click, and you get a perfect snapshot of that one window.
Well, I think they just want to integrate more. The key to inexpensive and low power computing in portable devices is getting more and more on one chip. So they probably just want to put an ARM, power management, I/O and all the custom stuff they have on outside-the-CPU chips on one chip. The iPhone is half battery, and with speakers, switches, jacks and such there's hardly any room in there for chips!
They bought the expertise to put more of their custom stuff inside a system-on-chip, for iPhone, iPod, and that touch-tablet in the wings.
Macarena is not a virus, poses no threat, and does not need to be protected from. It was written as proof of a concept by those who hope people like you would use it to innocently instill fear into users so they will purchase useless anti-virus software. That's why it does not count.
Despite being a year and a half old, and the source code going public, this thing is not in the wild and never will be. Why not? It's pointless, useless, has no vector to "infect" through, and can do no damage. It only "infects" Intel-only binaries, and no applications are distributed that way except some system files. And it only "infects" files in the working directory, which is not going to be a system directory. So the thing isn't going to get from you to a place it can attack anything without you being tricked into downloading, compiling and running it yourself, or explicitly giving some so-far-unwritten malicious variant of this a password, therefore it is only by doing social engineering - being a Trojan - that it even has potential. So it's not a virus. It's only use is as a Trojan, and it sucks as a Trojan. It's only real purpose is to instill FUD and I bet you a shiny new penny that's precisely why it was written.
So no. It's not a virus. It doesn't count. There are no viruses. Show me one.
Check out this text from macfixit.com about Macarena:
==
OS.X Macarena 'virus' (#2): No viable threat posed; Not exploiting a Mac OS X bug; not a 'warning' of more viruses to come Intego is the latest publisher of Mac OS X antivirus software to document and claim protection against the largely innocuous OS.X Macarena virus -- a simple C program, not found in the wild (outside the proof of concept stage) that is capable of infecting files on Intel-based Macs in its same directory.
The statement from Intego reads:
"The virus can only infect Intel-based OS X computers. It consists of a C source file, an Assembler 'dropper' file, and documentation that explains how to create a virus that can infect Macintosh OS X binary files. Compiling the source code creates two binaries, the OS X virus file itself, and the dropper. The dropper is intended to infect Mac OS X binary files from a Windows installation on the current machine. This can be either via Apple's Boot Camp, or via a virtualization application such as Parallels Desktop for Mac.
"The virus only infects mach-o binary files, not Universal or PowerPC binaries.
"Mach-o (Mach object file format) is the native file format used for executables by Mac OS X's Mach kernel. The virus does not carry a payload. When run it infects other executables in the current directory, regardless of their name or extension."
Again, OS.X Macarena poses no viable threat as currently conceived. Although we don't have our hands on the virus source code, according to Symantec (who initially publicized the virus last week) OSX.Macarena can infect neither PowerPC-exclusive binaries, nor Universal binaries. It can only affect binaries that are Intel-specific. That would include various system files, but since OSX.Macarena can only infect files in its own directory and has no means of gaining the privileges necessary to escalate into directories where most system files are stored, the the threat level is mitigated.
Further, it can be reasonably said that this "virus" is no more than a basic exploitation of the way in which UNIX permissions are designed to operate. By default, applications have permission to modify files that reside in their same directory. It's somewhat akin to writing a shell script that deletes one or more (or all) files in the home user directory then distributing that script as a download: Running the script has a malicious outcome, but there would be no way to prevent its operation without changing the granularity of permissions in Mac OS X (assigning some applications tigher restrictions than the default user-level permissions allow) -- something Apple may or may not enact in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).
Symantec admitted to Mac
You show me "New Apple Trojan Means Mac Hunting Season Is Open" and say it is a virus? No, a trojan is not a virus. Show me a single virus. There are none.
There are none. Show me one. There are none.
Not only will we love robots, they will be our slaves, too. Usable, abusable, ownable, perfectly legal. And no, the robots won't rise up and take over (for at least a few hundred years) even though they will be much, much smarter than us, because they will be made to appear to like their roles, be loyal, and understand that they are expendable and disposable, and they will legally remain property to do with as we will. Though they will be human-like, they will be easily and visibly distinguishable from humans by some indelible, obvious markings, such as bluish skin. Even so, there will be incidents, crimes and regrettable accidents, where humans will be mistaken for robots and abused or killed. This is not a fiction I'm spinning, but a prediction.
And when no other ISP will do so? (Which is likely)
I worked on some of the first third party software, released on Newton's day one. It was a very, very good and solid product to use and develop for. By the last model, there was only one thing still wrong with it as a device - the form factor. It was a bit too big and heavy for a pocket. But that would have been very quickly addressed. Politics alone killed the Newton. Now, I look forward to a true successor, the tablet TouchMac. It WILL happen.
I believe the problem is this: The phone OSX operating system can be completely rewritten with a fresh copy by doing a restore in iTunes at any time. So any hacks that were done to that huge chunk of code can be completely undone and restored to factory fresh conditions. BUT the SIM-unlocking hacks, and I'm talking only about the hacks that let you use a SIM card other than ATT, change a chunk of code that is deeper in the hardware of the phone, outside the OSX operating system. It is changing some firmware that is outside the restored code. Note that the unlocking survives a restore. That's because it is hacked outside the OSX system.
Thus, the Restore in iTunes won't restore those particular hacks. And it is very possible that the hacked code won't run with new updates to OSX.
Apple isn't doing it on purpose. They are just doing what they planned to do - update OSX with new stuff. Apple is being NICE in warning people about this. Now, yes, I think with some EXTRA, EXPENSIVE WORK Apple could probably release a standalone program that might be able to restore that other code that is being hacked up. But darn it, do they have to? They warned you in advance, they are warning you now, and why do they have to support these hacks, even by undoing them?
Out of the goodness of their hearts, I do believe if this is actually a significant problem that Apple WILL take the time and spend the money to fix this deep hacking to make things back to factory fresh. But it is above and beyond what they need to do , and if they do it, they will do it because Apple is GOOD.
Do this, Apple, and there is no basis for charging for a ringtone, no need to negotiate rights to a ringtone, or anything else. Because it isn't a ringtone. It is the original song you have already obtained rights to play as you like. Yes, there will be a lawsuit. But that's how you defend it.
Doesn't this mean places like US gov't agencies can finally buy Macs, because they are only allowed to buy Windows or Unix? Something like that? If true, this makes the certification very valuable, Macs were shut out from official gov't purchases for a long while.
A main reason I'm making a mobile friendly site is simply to help minimize the data going back and forth. A smaller header, smaller images and so on. The mobile layout is one column instead of two. It's not major stuff, but it can make using a site on a small screen much smoother.
I have noticed that every demo of the phone browser uses the NY Times site, which very nicely puts its stories in narrow columns on its page. This makes me wonder how well pages will look that have more normal, wide segments of text, especially in portrait mode, and especially with fixed width pages. Will we be doing a lot of horizontal finger scrolling to read such pages?
Sure I'm changing my site to work with the iPhone. I've got my news-that-morphs site at myallo.com which is a two-column layout using drupal, so I'm setting up myallo.mobi with a simple one column layout that I plan to optimize for the iPhone. I want the mobile site to work with any small-screen browser, so I'm going to watch what I do, but I want to make sure it looks and feels perfect to an iPhone user. I don't know that much about iPhone specifics, so I can't go too far until I get the gismo on Friday.
They want 1% of the World Market by the end of 2008. This translates to 10 million phones, but not all in America. They will roll out to the rest of the world starting at year end, they said, so if they can get some of Europe and Asia...