After taking the prescribed pills, notonly have the nefarious Italian disinformation transmissions stopped coming from my espresso maker and shampoo bottles, but I also have become importent, which has sadly caused mearly half ofmy girlfriends, wives and mistresses to desert me. Good riddance,they were probably secret Italina agents anyway who left when they could no longer program my toaster-oven to hypnotically deceive me. Better fewer but better, I say.
"mearly half ofmy girlfriends, wives and mistresses"? Yeah, Silvio, I know you got tossed out of office; is that why you're so angry at Italy?
This fellow seems to be intentionally misleading gullible reporters for self-aggrandizing purposes.
Well, more like attempting to mislead anybody who reads his site.
Specifically, he's IMPLYING he invented classical email, and letting the reporters INFER that he did in fact create classical email. When confronted with the truth, he will say he was referring to his program called "EMAIL." It would be like me telling a reporter that I invented THE INTERNET, which is a program which prints "Hello World" seven times, and a reporter then reporting that I invented the Internet.
Well, more like reporting on your web site that you invented "THE INTERNET", which is a BBS program that lets you send email, upload and download files, do chat, and the like, and letting everybody infer that you invented the Internet. It's not as if his program "EMAIL(R)(TM)(LSMFT)" had nothing to do with electronic mail.
But it's still a bit misleading for him not to explicitly note, when he refers to "EMAIL", that it's the name of his program, not electronic mail in general. (The program's name was chosen back in 1978, so I wouldn't assume he named it that in order to mislead people.)
coining a term isn't the same as inventing technology.
When it comes to the term, perhaps he was the first to combine "e" and "mail", which would make him not only the creator of "EMAIL", in the sense of the program he wrote, apparently named "EMAIL", but also perhaps the creator of the term "email" if he was the first to use it and anybody else who used it got the idea from him rather than independently coining it without having seen his use of the term as the name for his software.
When it comes to the technology, no, he clearly didn't invent the technology, but, apparently, he did implement the idea in his system - which, again, wasn't the first implementation of the concept.
So perhaps he could claim to be the inventor of the term "email" (but his claim might be challenged), and could claim to be the creator of a program called "EMAIL" that provided a system for sending, reading, and storing electronic mail, but, while both of those might technically make his claim to be "the inventor of EMAIL" valid, with "EMAIL" being the name of his software system, the way it's stated makes it easy for somebody to misread it as claiming that he invented electronic mail, and perhaps it's stated that way intentionally to encourage people to misread it that way and give him credit where it's not due.
He als says "Every software system needs a User's Manual, so did the world's first E-MAIL system. At that time, Shiva was everything on the project: software engineer, network manager, project manager, architect, quality assurance AND technical writer.", so maybe "the world's first E-MAIL system" was the first system that "handled it all" - ARPANET e-mail involved different mail user agents and mail transfer agents on different operating systems, so there wasn't a single "COMPUTER PROGRAM FOR Electronic Mail System".
Electronic Mail. Noel Morris and I wrote a command, suggested by Glenda Schroeder and Louis Pouzin, called MAIL, which allowed users to send text messages to each other; this was one of the earliest electronic mail facilities.[11] (I am told that the Q-32 system also had a MAIL command in 1965.)
The news article he cites says he "created an electronic mail system", which may well be the case. It doesn't say he created the first electronic mail system, and "created an electronic mail system" suggests that the notion of an "electronic mail system" wasn't a Shiny New Idea (and, in fact, it wasn't).
OS X and Linux really DO have NOTHING in common other than supporting POSIX.
...and supporting a whole bunch of other libraries that come with OS X and a lot of Linux distributions. That's actually rather a lot, given, for example, the amount of code that builds and runs on OS X and various Linux distributions and *BSD and Solaris and HP-UX and....
Linux is FAKE Unix.
Linux is a UN*X-compatible system that happens to be quite widely used. Whether it's "fake" or not depends on how emotionally attached you are to AT&T's implementation.
OS X, by virtue of it's BSD heritage, isn't a "fake" Unix; but arguably far closer to a "real" Unix (whatever THAT is...).
OS X, by virtue of its BSD heritage, had almost all of its AT&T-derived code replaced by independently-written code (and the few bits of AT&T-derived code either got an AT&T notice stuck on it or also got replaced - I don't remember what those bits were). (You're not a member of AT&T's legal team, are you?:-))
As for the comments to which I was responding:
Why are you comparing Android to a robust computer operating system based on Free BSD? Android is not an Apples to Oranges comparison. Android to iOS is.
well:
Is the poster in question asserting that Android isn't robust? If so, what evidence does he or she offer to support that assertion?
Is the poster in question aware that iOS is also "based on FreeBSD"? If so, why is FreeBSD relevant here?
Does "Android to iOS is" mean that comparing OSes that run on mobile phones and tablets with OSes that run on desktop and notebook computers is bogus? If so, why?
But I fail to see why one would optimize (or even care about) the boot time of a phone.
Given that the last time I rebooted my phone was to find out how long it took in order to have the right number for my post, and the time before that was to un-stick a stuck application because I didn't remember the right button sequence to kill -9 the frontmost app, I don't see much reason to do that, either.
Then again, given that the last time I rebooted my laptop was to install a security update, and before that it was to unjam a problem that turned out to be a jammed-up video adapter, and it'd been up for 78 days or so before that, I'm not sure there's a good reason to worry about optimizing its boot time, either.
I would prefer to have a splash screen with a progress bar than to sit and wait with no notification at all that my app is loading components into memory while I wait.
Exactly. (Others have noted it in this thread.)
Thomas says
When I fire up Photoshop (or OpenOffice, or any other pathetically oversized mountain of bloatware), it should just violently start, before I've even raised my coffee cup to my mouth. Or appear to start, at least. Show me a screenshot that looks like Photoshop. Trick me into thinking it's running. Cache my UI gestures until the world has finished bootstrapping. Run my gestures against an image in the cloud. Make my gestures appear to do something interesting. Fool me into thinking the damn thing is running. Better yet, make it so.
About the only non-bogus part of that is "Better yet, make it so." I don't want the gestures to "do something interesting", I want them to do what they're intended to do; if they're cached and replayed later, I'm not getting immediate feedback, which is going to Really Suck if I find that, once all my cached gestures have been replayed, I've done stuff to the document that I didn't expect to have been done. If your app can really respond to input that quickly, no splash screen is needed, problem solved. Otherwise, I want at least some sort of feedback, even if it's just "this is going to take a while, be patient". Effort spent on "[appearing] to start quickly" is better spent speeding up startup.
But the author is also confused when he says
When I turn my computer on, it should just be on. Ready to go. Kind of like—well, like my phone, for example. Which is, after all, my real computer.
When I "turn my phone on", I'm not booting it from scratch, I'm just waking it up. Yes, waking up happens pretty quickly, but it happens pretty quickly on my laptop, too. Booting my phone takes, well, 44 seconds or so (and it takes a while to shut down and power off) - maybe that's what I get for running iOS 3.x on an original iPhone (yes, the original model), and a newer phone would boot faster, or maybe Android boots faster than iOS (from "Which is, after all, my real computer.", he presumably has a smartphone, so I won't discuss featurephones, but they might not come on instantly - I seem to remember some old Nokia phones taking a little while to boot). I.e., his phone might like that because he's not booting it, he's just waking it up, and if he left his computer up and running and just let it go to sleep, he might have the same experience when waking it up.
Then comes the walled garden, I wonder what the default will be for new machines coming with Mountain Lion?
If you're referring to Gatekeeper, the default is "allow apps from the App Store and apps signed by an identified developer", with the other options being "only allow apps from the App Store" and "allow anything". The pane in System Preferences says "Allow applications downloaded from:", so it might be that none of that applies to apps installed from somewhere other than the Intertubes.
If I get it the main win for me would probably be getting rid of that fucking two-pane version of Address Book. (I don't know what drugs the people who came up with the Lion version of Address Book were on, but if it left 5% of their brain cells still functioning, I'd be amazed....) I can probably tolerate all the social networking integration crap, especially if it makes using GOOD OLD FASHIONED EMAILING OF URLS easier (no, I have no interest in "sharing" stuff with 500 of my closest friends).
I chuckle when I imagine Linux fanboys going crazy over impending releases of kernel revisions
The equivalent wouldn't be a new kernel revision, it'd be something like Ubuntu 13.01 "Wonder Warthog", but I'm not sure there's even as much hyperventilation about new distribution releases or even new desktop environment releases (most of the new features being touted here are at layers of software closer to KDE or GNOME than at the kernel layer; I really doubt anybody was jumping for joy because, say, Lion finally correctly supported select()/poll() on BPF devices...).
So I wouldn't be surprised to find out that say, a Lion Mac has trouble connecting to a Windows 2000 server using their samba replacement.
I've been wondering for a now if there is a project somewhere to come out with a BSD-licensed replacement for bash.
Presumably by "Windows 2000 server" you mean "domain controller", given that Samba is an SMB server and file sharing clients connect to it; Samba connects to servers such as WINS servers and domain controllers. (Yes, pet peeve of mine. Samba is an SMB server; it is not a generic term for all software that does SMB on UN*X. Mac OS X's SMB client, smbfs, is not "Samba", it's a descendant of Boris Popov's (BSD-licensed) FreeBSD SMB client VFS, with a lot of additional work done by folks at Apple. What got replaced in 10.7 was Samba, the SMB server, not smbfs, the SMB client.)
...which is why you might want Rosetta if you're using, for example, the last full-featured version of Quicken for Mac rather than Quicken Lite^WEssentials. (I'm now using Quicken Essentials because Quicken 2007 for Mac reproducibly shat all over one of my accounts and I figured I was more likely to find myself pooping out gold bricks than getting any support for that bug.)
Do they make enough money for them to bother getting rid of the "identified developers" option?
They make tons of money on the iOS store,
[Citation needed]
I could go as far as to say that they might go default to App Store Only and drop the unsigned option. But I think the end goal is to get all client software to go through the App Store.
The goal is probably to get most client software to go through the App Store. I suspect that the last 10% of the software would take 90% of the work, and that they don't consider that last 10% worth the effort.
I imagine that difference between signed and App Store is fairly small for most developers.
Most, perhaps - the bad news is that they have to make sure it survives sandboxing and that not having to maintain their own store is worth Apple's fee for using their store; the good news is that you don't have to maintain your own store. (My guess is that you could sandbox the software without going through the App Store, so it's not as if the App Store gives you the good side of sandboxing, namely that even if you've missed something there are limits to the damage your software can do.)
1) Apple now has a kill switch. Part of the point of pushing application-signing is so that they can disable signed apps which turn out to be malicious. Only one has to wonder if that's all it will be used for. It's not that I'm particularly distrustful of Apple--I'm distrustful of companies with a lot of power. Amazon's used their kill switch to remotely delete content, promised not to do it again, then did it again. If a company is big enough to survive the publicity of using their kill-switch, then it is in their interest to use it when locking out that software benefits them.
Heck, merely having the ability to do such a thing invites having some patent lawyer ask for a court order requiring that they use it against allegedly infringing third-party works, even if Apple itself were inherently trustworthy. Kill-switches from software vendors are a horrible idea. Apple almost certainly wants the ability to disable any software running on their hardware, which partially leads into...
I have the same concern, although it'd be nice to have some way to block stuff that turns out to be bad; yeah, it closes the barn door after some horses have already escaped and shit all over some machines, but at least it might stop them from doing more damage.
2) There's no doubt that Apple would love for all software to be sold through the App store. They make money that way,
Do they make enough money for them to bother getting rid of the "identified developers" option?
and they get people accustomed to relying on them for software. I don't think it's inherently bad to run an app store, however requiring people to use it would be bad. Unfortunately, I'm beginning to think that's the future for Apple.
My prediction is that 10.10 will remove the ability to run unsigned content (after all, it's free to get a signing key.) And 10.11 will probably require all precompiled applications to be acquired through the App store (except on the Server version of the OS, for which the option to run unsigned binaries will almost certainly remain.) 10.9 will keep the defaults, as it will take some time to get a critical mass of non-App store developers signing their work.
OK, you're on the record; I'll go on the record as predicting that the most they'll do is default to "App Store only", and they may well not even do that. (I wish I could also predict that the OS X model will go "back to the iPhone/iPad", as that'd squelch a lot of the complaints about the "walled garden", and make the frog in the pot complain that the hot tub is getting a bit cool, but we'll see what happens in iOS 6.)
3) Virtualization. I expect it to be built into the OS at some point, based upon point 2 above. Maybe they'll acquire Parallels or Virtualbox from Oracle. Maybe they'll write their own. It will be a concession to the fact that they still live in a heavily-Windows world, and interoperability is still sometimes required.
There might be some hooks in the kernel in the future for doing some of the virtualization stuff, to replace any kexts that Parallels/VMware Fusion require, but I don't expect them to build it into the OS, based on my expectation that they won't do the stuff you predict in point 2, so no need to do it themselves, and on virtualization not being as core to desktop/notebook machines as it is to servers. Only if it looks as if all the virtualization projects will go away, or if there's some way they can do virtualization a lot better than anybody else can, do I think they'd bother.
if your an "administrative user", apple does not like you, they never wanted you, and in all probability they hate you.
If you're an "administrative user", you are what Apple would call "the first user account on the system", as the initial user account is created, by default, with admin privileges (which means "your default group set includes the "admin" group").
OK so if it is app store only then only sandboxed apps can run.
If it's App Store-only, you have to control-click on a non-sandboxed app and use Open to run it, if overriding that setting is supported.
If it is appstore or signed then I'd assume that signed ones don't have to run sandboxed.
if it's App Store-or-signed, non-App Store apps don't, as far as I know, run sandboxed (unless there's an option for the developer to choose to sandbox it, which there might well be - maybe they want to do something that would keep it out of the App Store but still want to block it from being tricked into doing things the user doesn't want it to do).
If it is anything then can they remotely kill?
They can't kill unsigned apps. I don't know what happens if you run a signed app and it's been killed - it might just drive on, it might say "we think this might be malware, are you sure you want to run it?" and let you launch it anyway, or it might just refuse to run it.
Impossible, the last time this came up on Slashdot we were assured by legions of fanboys that Apple would never do that.
And they haven't done that. Hell, the default isn't App-Store-only. I'd be happier if the "I didn't launch that app because it's not from an identified developer" dialog directly told the user how to override it or flip the switch (as that'd squelch the "but the switch isn't obvious so it might as well not be there" complaints). (I'd be even happier if iOS adopted the same model, as that'd squelch a lot of complaints....)
Slashdot Mirror
After taking the prescribed pills, notonly have the nefarious Italian disinformation transmissions stopped coming from my espresso maker and shampoo bottles, but I also have become importent, which has sadly caused mearly half ofmy girlfriends, wives and mistresses to desert me. Good riddance,they were probably secret Italina agents anyway who left when they could no longer program my toaster-oven to hypnotically deceive me. Better fewer but better, I say.
"mearly half ofmy girlfriends, wives and mistresses"? Yeah, Silvio, I know you got tossed out of office; is that why you're so angry at Italy?
Eh. There's not much of a difference. We're still using the same hardware and architecture as 1995.
(Modulo, for most of us, 32 extra bits, 8 extra registers, and a PC-relative addressing mode.)
This fellow seems to be intentionally misleading gullible reporters for self-aggrandizing purposes.
Well, more like attempting to mislead anybody who reads his site.
Specifically, he's IMPLYING he invented classical email, and letting the reporters INFER that he did in fact create classical email. When confronted with the truth, he will say he was referring to his program called "EMAIL." It would be like me telling a reporter that I invented THE INTERNET, which is a program which prints "Hello World" seven times, and a reporter then reporting that I invented the Internet.
Well, more like reporting on your web site that you invented "THE INTERNET", which is a BBS program that lets you send email, upload and download files, do chat, and the like, and letting everybody infer that you invented the Internet. It's not as if his program "EMAIL(R)(TM)(LSMFT)" had nothing to do with electronic mail.
But it's still a bit misleading for him not to explicitly note, when he refers to "EMAIL", that it's the name of his program, not electronic mail in general. (The program's name was chosen back in 1978, so I wouldn't assume he named it that in order to mislead people.)
coining a term isn't the same as inventing technology.
When it comes to the term, perhaps he was the first to combine "e" and "mail", which would make him not only the creator of "EMAIL", in the sense of the program he wrote, apparently named "EMAIL", but also perhaps the creator of the term "email" if he was the first to use it and anybody else who used it got the idea from him rather than independently coining it without having seen his use of the term as the name for his software.
When it comes to the technology, no, he clearly didn't invent the technology, but, apparently, he did implement the idea in his system - which, again, wasn't the first implementation of the concept.
So perhaps he could claim to be the inventor of the term "email" (but his claim might be challenged), and could claim to be the creator of a program called "EMAIL" that provided a system for sending, reading, and storing electronic mail, but, while both of those might technically make his claim to be "the inventor of EMAIL" valid, with "EMAIL" being the name of his software system, the way it's stated makes it easy for somebody to misread it as claiming that he invented electronic mail, and perhaps it's stated that way intentionally to encourage people to misread it that way and give him credit where it's not due.
As he says on his Web site, he's the "inventor of EMAIL".
He does not, however, say he's the inventor of email or e-mail or electronic mail, so I guess he means he's the inventor of a system named "EMAIL". the copyright he got was for a "COMPUTER PROGRAM FOR Electronic Mail System", which suggests that "EMAIL" was a program that implemented, err, umm, email.
He als says "Every software system needs a User's Manual, so did the world's first E-MAIL system. At that time, Shiva was everything on the project: software engineer, network manager, project manager, architect, quality assurance AND technical writer.", so maybe "the world's first E-MAIL system" was the first system that "handled it all" - ARPANET e-mail involved different mail user agents and mail transfer agents on different operating systems, so there wasn't a single "COMPUTER PROGRAM FOR Electronic Mail System".
Or not. A historical overview of the CTSS system, from its fiftieth anniversary, quotes Tom Van Vleck (also cited in another posting):
Reference 11 is to Van Vleck's The History of Electronic Mail (which mentions the copyrighting of "EMAIL" in a parenthetical note at the top of the page) and Errol Morris's New York Times Opinionator blog post "Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck?" (my head asplode when I learned that Errol Morris was Noel Morris' brother).
The news article he cites says he "created an electronic mail system", which may well be the case. It doesn't say he created the first electronic mail system, and "created an electronic mail system" suggests that the notion of an "electronic mail system" wasn't a Shiny New Idea (and, in fact, it wasn't).
And, in fact, the article to which the "to defend his standing as email's creator" link takes you quotes him as saying "I did not claim that I created electronic communications," so at least give him credit for that.
OS X and Linux really DO have NOTHING in common other than supporting POSIX.
...and supporting a whole bunch of other libraries that come with OS X and a lot of Linux distributions. That's actually rather a lot, given, for example, the amount of code that builds and runs on OS X and various Linux distributions and *BSD and Solaris and HP-UX and....
Linux is FAKE Unix.
Linux is a UN*X-compatible system that happens to be quite widely used. Whether it's "fake" or not depends on how emotionally attached you are to AT&T's implementation.
OS X, by virtue of it's BSD heritage, isn't a "fake" Unix; but arguably far closer to a "real" Unix (whatever THAT is...).
OS X, by virtue of its BSD heritage, had almost all of its AT&T-derived code replaced by independently-written code (and the few bits of AT&T-derived code either got an AT&T notice stuck on it or also got replaced - I don't remember what those bits were). (You're not a member of AT&T's legal team, are you? :-))
As for the comments to which I was responding:
well:
But I fail to see why one would optimize (or even care about) the boot time of a phone.
Given that the last time I rebooted my phone was to find out how long it took in order to have the right number for my post, and the time before that was to un-stick a stuck application because I didn't remember the right button sequence to kill -9 the frontmost app, I don't see much reason to do that, either.
Then again, given that the last time I rebooted my laptop was to install a security update, and before that it was to unjam a problem that turned out to be a jammed-up video adapter, and it'd been up for 78 days or so before that, I'm not sure there's a good reason to worry about optimizing its boot time, either.
I would prefer to have a splash screen with a progress bar than to sit and wait with no notification at all that my app is loading components into memory while I wait.
Exactly. (Others have noted it in this thread.)
Thomas says
About the only non-bogus part of that is "Better yet, make it so." I don't want the gestures to "do something interesting", I want them to do what they're intended to do; if they're cached and replayed later, I'm not getting immediate feedback, which is going to Really Suck if I find that, once all my cached gestures have been replayed, I've done stuff to the document that I didn't expect to have been done. If your app can really respond to input that quickly, no splash screen is needed, problem solved. Otherwise, I want at least some sort of feedback, even if it's just "this is going to take a while, be patient". Effort spent on "[appearing] to start quickly" is better spent speeding up startup.
But the author is also confused when he says
When I "turn my phone on", I'm not booting it from scratch, I'm just waking it up. Yes, waking up happens pretty quickly, but it happens pretty quickly on my laptop, too. Booting my phone takes, well, 44 seconds or so (and it takes a while to shut down and power off) - maybe that's what I get for running iOS 3.x on an original iPhone (yes, the original model), and a newer phone would boot faster, or maybe Android boots faster than iOS (from "Which is, after all, my real computer.", he presumably has a smartphone, so I won't discuss featurephones, but they might not come on instantly - I seem to remember some old Nokia phones taking a little while to boot). I.e., his phone might like that because he's not booting it, he's just waking it up, and if he left his computer up and running and just let it go to sleep, he might have the same experience when waking it up.
In fact, several commenter pointed that out.
Other commenters indicated that one way to "make it so" is to run with an SSD.
I'm just waiting for the bots to start commenting on the movie....
It makes sense as a transition. It's hardly different from the signing required to put an application on the App store.
But it's quite different from the sandboxing and the passing-it-through-Apple's-approval-board required to put an application on the App Store.
Then comes the walled garden, I wonder what the default will be for new machines coming with Mountain Lion?
If you're referring to Gatekeeper, the default is "allow apps from the App Store and apps signed by an identified developer", with the other options being "only allow apps from the App Store" and "allow anything". The pane in System Preferences says "Allow applications downloaded from:", so it might be that none of that applies to apps installed from somewhere other than the Intertubes.
If I get it the main win for me would probably be getting rid of that fucking two-pane version of Address Book. (I don't know what drugs the people who came up with the Lion version of Address Book were on, but if it left 5% of their brain cells still functioning, I'd be amazed....) I can probably tolerate all the social networking integration crap, especially if it makes using GOOD OLD FASHIONED EMAILING OF URLS easier (no, I have no interest in "sharing" stuff with 500 of my closest friends).
I chuckle when I imagine Linux fanboys going crazy over impending releases of kernel revisions
The equivalent wouldn't be a new kernel revision, it'd be something like Ubuntu 13.01 "Wonder Warthog", but I'm not sure there's even as much hyperventilation about new distribution releases or even new desktop environment releases (most of the new features being touted here are at layers of software closer to KDE or GNOME than at the kernel layer; I really doubt anybody was jumping for joy because, say, Lion finally correctly supported select()/poll() on BPF devices...).
I've been wondering for a now if there is a project somewhere to come out with a BSD-licensed replacement for bash.
Well, there's a non-GPLed Bourne-compatible shell with history and job control (well, yeah, I think AT&T finally added job control to the Bourne shell in SVR4, if I remember correctly) and some other enhancements, and it even comes with Mac OS X (and has since at least Leopard, maybe further back). It's not a Bash clone (especially given that it antedates Bash...), but sometimes that's a feature (control-O FTW!).
So I wouldn't be surprised to find out that say, a Lion Mac has trouble connecting to a Windows 2000 server using their samba replacement.
I've been wondering for a now if there is a project somewhere to come out with a BSD-licensed replacement for bash.
Presumably by "Windows 2000 server" you mean "domain controller", given that Samba is an SMB server and file sharing clients connect to it; Samba connects to servers such as WINS servers and domain controllers. (Yes, pet peeve of mine. Samba is an SMB server; it is not a generic term for all software that does SMB on UN*X. Mac OS X's SMB client, smbfs, is not "Samba", it's a descendant of Boris Popov's (BSD-licensed) FreeBSD SMB client VFS, with a lot of additional work done by folks at Apple. What got replaced in 10.7 was Samba, the SMB server, not smbfs, the SMB client.)
There are no MacBook Airs with a PowerPC.
...which is why you might want Rosetta if you're using, for example, the last full-featured version of Quicken for Mac rather than Quicken Lite^WEssentials. (I'm now using Quicken Essentials because Quicken 2007 for Mac reproducibly shat all over one of my accounts and I figured I was more likely to find myself pooping out gold bricks than getting any support for that bug.)
I know you're trying to be funny, but Linux originally didn't support anything older than a 386, which was fairly new at the time.
"Fairly". Linux: 1991. 80386: 1985, so "fairly new" presumably means "within the past 5-6 years". (Oh, and 80486: 1989.)
Do they make enough money for them to bother getting rid of the "identified developers" option?
They make tons of money on the iOS store,
[Citation needed]
I could go as far as to say that they might go default to App Store Only and drop the unsigned option. But I think the end goal is to get all client software to go through the App Store.
The goal is probably to get most client software to go through the App Store. I suspect that the last 10% of the software would take 90% of the work, and that they don't consider that last 10% worth the effort.
I imagine that difference between signed and App Store is fairly small for most developers.
Most, perhaps - the bad news is that they have to make sure it survives sandboxing and that not having to maintain their own store is worth Apple's fee for using their store; the good news is that you don't have to maintain your own store. (My guess is that you could sandbox the software without going through the App Store, so it's not as if the App Store gives you the good side of sandboxing, namely that even if you've missed something there are limits to the damage your software can do.)
Why are you comparing Android to a robust computer operating system based on Free BSD?
Comparing an OS based on the Linux kernel with an OS with a BSD-flavored OS? Why, the two have nothing in common! :-)
By being default-enabled
Which improves security. App-store provided apps are less likely to contain malware.
Less likely, probably. It's still not perfect, though, as per the Path problem; Apple had to decide to require apps to ask permission before snarfing stuff from the address book.
and no doubt coming with scary warnings about how you'll get hacked if you disable it.
Which is an unwarranted assumption.
Actually, no. (Not quite "you'll get hacked", but "makes your Mac less secure".)
A few points to consider.
1) Apple now has a kill switch. Part of the point of pushing application-signing is so that they can disable signed apps which turn out to be malicious. Only one has to wonder if that's all it will be used for. It's not that I'm particularly distrustful of Apple--I'm distrustful of companies with a lot of power. Amazon's used their kill switch to remotely delete content, promised not to do it again, then did it again. If a company is big enough to survive the publicity of using their kill-switch, then it is in their interest to use it when locking out that software benefits them.
Heck, merely having the ability to do such a thing invites having some patent lawyer ask for a court order requiring that they use it against allegedly infringing third-party works, even if Apple itself were inherently trustworthy. Kill-switches from software vendors are a horrible idea. Apple almost certainly wants the ability to disable any software running on their hardware, which partially leads into...
I have the same concern, although it'd be nice to have some way to block stuff that turns out to be bad; yeah, it closes the barn door after some horses have already escaped and shit all over some machines, but at least it might stop them from doing more damage.
2) There's no doubt that Apple would love for all software to be sold through the App store. They make money that way,
Do they make enough money for them to bother getting rid of the "identified developers" option?
and they get people accustomed to relying on them for software. I don't think it's inherently bad to run an app store, however requiring people to use it would be bad. Unfortunately, I'm beginning to think that's the future for Apple.
My prediction is that 10.10 will remove the ability to run unsigned content (after all, it's free to get a signing key.) And 10.11 will probably require all precompiled applications to be acquired through the App store (except on the Server version of the OS, for which the option to run unsigned binaries will almost certainly remain.) 10.9 will keep the defaults, as it will take some time to get a critical mass of non-App store developers signing their work.
OK, you're on the record; I'll go on the record as predicting that the most they'll do is default to "App Store only", and they may well not even do that. (I wish I could also predict that the OS X model will go "back to the iPhone/iPad", as that'd squelch a lot of the complaints about the "walled garden", and make the frog in the pot complain that the hot tub is getting a bit cool, but we'll see what happens in iOS 6.)
3) Virtualization. I expect it to be built into the OS at some point, based upon point 2 above. Maybe they'll acquire Parallels or Virtualbox from Oracle. Maybe they'll write their own. It will be a concession to the fact that they still live in a heavily-Windows world, and interoperability is still sometimes required.
There might be some hooks in the kernel in the future for doing some of the virtualization stuff, to replace any kexts that Parallels/VMware Fusion require, but I don't expect them to build it into the OS, based on my expectation that they won't do the stuff you predict in point 2, so no need to do it themselves, and on virtualization not being as core to desktop/notebook machines as it is to servers. Only if it looks as if all the virtualization projects will go away, or if there's some way they can do virtualization a lot better than anybody else can, do I think they'd bother.
The *are* distinctly different things. Phones are designed to do a very limited number of things well.
So my phone was designed to:
etc.? It does a decent job of the first three of those (I haven't done much with iSSH).
Phones, on the other hand, are NOT very flexible, but I've never seen a phone crash (note: I use a Windows Phone... I can't vouch for other phones).
I don't think XNU's ever panicked on my phone, but I have seen app crashes.
if your an "administrative user", apple does not like you, they never wanted you, and in all probability they hate you.
If you're an "administrative user", you are what Apple would call "the first user account on the system", as the initial user account is created, by default, with admin privileges (which means "your default group set includes the "admin" group").
I'm not following sorry I'm probably being dense.
OK so if it is app store only then only sandboxed apps can run.
If it's App Store-only, you have to control-click on a non-sandboxed app and use Open to run it, if overriding that setting is supported.
If it is appstore or signed then I'd assume that signed ones don't have to run sandboxed.
if it's App Store-or-signed, non-App Store apps don't, as far as I know, run sandboxed (unless there's an option for the developer to choose to sandbox it, which there might well be - maybe they want to do something that would keep it out of the App Store but still want to block it from being tricked into doing things the user doesn't want it to do).
If it is anything then can they remotely kill?
They can't kill unsigned apps. I don't know what happens if you run a signed app and it's been killed - it might just drive on, it might say "we think this might be malware, are you sure you want to run it?" and let you launch it anyway, or it might just refuse to run it.
Impossible, the last time this came up on Slashdot we were assured by legions of fanboys that Apple would never do that.
And they haven't done that. Hell, the default isn't App-Store-only. I'd be happier if the "I didn't launch that app because it's not from an identified developer" dialog directly told the user how to override it or flip the switch (as that'd squelch the "but the switch isn't obvious so it might as well not be there" complaints). (I'd be even happier if iOS adopted the same model, as that'd squelch a lot of complaints....)