You do not "NEED" a file system for OBEX, hence why even many Feature Phones (including the Sony Ericsson T68i from 2002, which had niether file system or External Card) support it well.
iPhone simply does not support OBEX due to copyright issues, nothing else.
I was referring to BT OBEX file transfers, not the actual BT FTP stack since OBEX is all people really know about.
And while you don't "NEED" a file system, you're simply trolling when you say "iPhone simply does not support OBEX due to copyright issues, nothing else." You've addressed none of the issues I've mentioned as to why it would not work.
Why? 1) Your example is invalid. The T68i had a file system or else it can't store the individual files uploaded via OBEX, nor store the individual camera pictures the camera attachment takes. Just because it probably isn't a FAT/NTFS/ext2-deriviative doesn't make it "not a file system." Support for external cards also have no relevance. 2) Sure, OBEX file transfers don't require a underlying file system. I've met devices which expose a root folder, where all file operations except upload do absolutely nothing. Works great for printers. How's that supposed to be useful for a phone? Where are you going to upload this to on an iPhone? Like I said before, you can't filter the data on the way in without make it an awkward experience. And there is no common generic shared folder for applications. Nor should you expose every individual app's sandbox to the world.
(I have implemented OBEX file transfers for personal use on an jailbroken iPhone.)
I think the difference might actually be that myWi can only do WEP/Adhoc with any jailbroken iPhone. While Personal Hotspot might be WPA/infra on the iPhone 4.
Apple's (and presumably Microsoft's as well) response to Google's "awesomeness" is probably laughter.
Believe me, even with a "software update that doubled battery life" the battery life is still shit.
My point is, while you're busy cheerleading Android and Google, it's obvious you haven't used any of the other phones you deride.
Ranking of battery life on my phones from best to worst: 1) Motorola Q9 (winmo6.1) 2) iPhone 4 3) iPhone original (jailbroken) 4) Nexus S (ASOP 2.3- Flash not installed)
While Microsoft could possibly have more fragmentation than iOS, it's likely to be nowhere near the scope of Android since they have hardware requirements that dictate 1Ghz ARMv7 and DirectX9 minimum. Whether they use bytecode or compiled binaries, CPU arch shouldn't matter. DirectX will take care of the rest of the GPU abstraction in a way devs already understand.
Thanks, glad to know that some people will hear me out. Of course, I could be wrong, but I think I got a pretty good case right there.:)
The canned responses make me a bit sad though; it's kinda like being in denial that these devices are pretty complex and not recognizing what goes into make a smartphone platform.
Oh right, everybody here seemed to have missed the fact that the Settings thing defaults to asking for permission every time any location data is requested.
Depending on the icon only means you explicitly told the OS to stop asking me everytime XYZ wants to get my current location (both coarse-grained wifi and fine-grained AGPS).
(To be honest, I don't even think the icon distinguishes between coarse/fine. I thought it's "any")
Let's see... Bluetooth file transfer is basically like FTP: You see a directory from the other device and can arbitrarily send/receive files.
You have an iPhone; so ponder this: where would Bluetooth FTPs go?
There isn't a shared storage space on the iPhone accessible by all applications. There is no SD card.
Each app has it's own sandboxed home directory. In fact, this is why there is no SD card. On the upside, this is why backups/restore/uninstalls are so clean.
The only shared area is reserved by the system for photos and videos only (the camera roll). You can't enforce the type of file that is received when you're the BT FTP server, so what do you do if people try to stuff the wrong type of file into the camera roll? It just seems wrong to take the file, try to verify it fits the photo/video qualification and delete it if it doesn't. Extensions arn't good for that either. Neither is accepting a bad file.
Now, one could say it'd be all right if they could only send files via bluetooth.... but how big would the media backlash be if your iPhone could only send and not receive? What's the point of sending via BT FTP if no other iPhone could get it? At that point, it's better just to leave it out completely than to draw attention to a half-assed implementation.
My recollection of the "rise of iPod" is a bit different.
Yes, the actual release events are as you said. The significant rise in sales did happen in 2004. But I don't see it being because of the iTunes Music Store. All the signs pointing to success came much earlier.
But by the 2nd Gen release in 2002, it was already beating out most other MP3 players in popularity. Not in sales, but popularity. People talked about it much as people talked about the iPhone being locked to AT&T, when no SDK was available.
In fact, as an early firewire advocate, I was already amazed at the effect the firewire-only iPods had on the market. I started seeing Dell, Gateway, HP, and Toshiba laptops with firewire in 2002, which is completely unexpected in the PC market because of the costs associated with adding the chipsets and in buying the products that use it. Most people who wanted firewire weren't using it for hard drives, but video editing. And many of those back then would use cardbus cards. It was rare, unless you had a Sony, to see an integrated Firewire port on a PC.
You'd see in the comments in the Apple Store that some people even went out of the way to buy a cheap iMac/eMac in order to run iTunes for their iPod. It was bizarre. MusicMatch and various open source clients for Linux and Windows were out. http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2002123002126PSHLSW
Napster had risen as the king and fallen as it got hit by legality issues; people had relatively massive repositories of music. Gnutella/Limewire was the next place. Direct Connect networks were popular in colleges.
Stories of people getting mugged for white earphones already hit the news.
All of this was well before the iTunes Music Store. All of this was well before the iPod had USB2.0 as an option.
You're right that sales didn't really take off until the release of the music store. But I'm inclined to believe that it wasn't the music store that was compelling. It was that the iPod got USB2.0 and that Windows got iTunes. To me, it was more likely that the Music Store was helped by the iPod than the iPod helped by the Music Store.
(In 2001-2003, I was enrolled in a university, working part time for the university to help people fix their computers and obtain an internet connection. In appointments in August 2002, I'd see ~80 computers per day for the first 2 weeks of school (weekend overtime pay was awesome), many of them laptops. There exists a picture from that week where you'd see my coworkers and I running antivirus scans or windows installers on about 18 laptops in one room. So my sample size is small on the grand scheme of things, but unusually large for a single person's experience. I purchased my 1st iPod, a 2nd Gen 10GB, exactly 2 weeks after launch, on the last day of my internship at Apple, and the first day it was available for employee discount. It replaced my MiniDisc player.)
Failure in the PC marketspace doesn't mean that having great hardware gets you nowhere. It simply means that the Mac wasn't better than a Wintel PC by a large enough margin for people to consider switching.
The way you say that it has little to do with hardware implies that you think that if their hardware sucked more, they'd still be successful. This is absolutely not true. You're right in that what makes them successful is the ecosystem. But from their ecosystem, it is the end to end integration on the focus of the user experience that makes them successful, not from the consumer lockdown.
Why do I say that?
Because when the iPod came out of nowhere and took over the market, there were three parts: The Mac (desktop), iTunes (the app), and the iPod (device). There was no walled-garden. There was no lockdown. There was no iTunes Music Store. There was no DRM. There was only the bare necessities: A host with music, a program to arrange/sync your music, a device that plays your music on the go. In fact, it was so tuned to working with Macs that it only had Firewire, and no USB (because USB would have been an awful sync experience with 5GB at 1.5MB/sec).
What did it compete against? The Rio and the Creative Nomad. The Rio was over parallel port and limited to around 32MB. The Nomad devices were mostly USB1 and limited to around 256MB.
When I worked as the sole IT guy for a small flash memory design firm, they wanted more computers for workstations. They went out and bought a bunch of piece of shit Dells and then asked me for help. So I asked them why they bought it and their reasons were the following: 1) It had a decent sized clock speed. 2) There's too many options, so I sorted by price on their web site, and picked the cheapest one with a decent clock speed.
So I asked, why Dell? Response: Too much trouble to compare other vendors.
In other words, people want the best, but it takes too fucking long to figure out what's the best. Choice is good. Researching amongst an assload of choices is a waste of time. Nobody wants to do it. They want to get back to doing whatever they want to do.
If us techies keep trying to preserve the multitude of options, we're directly working against what the rest of the people in the world actually want: something that does the job and does it well.
(Story continuation: I ended up building the next machine they wanted in 2002, with RAID-0 and linked to the company backup server. The engineer who got it was amazed at how much faster it was, while the manager who had to pay for the parts was amazed at how cheap it cost, not thinking about how much time the company had to pay me to actually spec it out and put it together.)
Here's the funny thing, after watching the guy for so long, I've noticed something interesting. Yeah, Jobs is into the walled-garden approach right now. But it's weird. It's NOT to own people in a Microsoft-esque way. It's because people CAN'T SEEM TO TAKE CARE OF THEIR OWN SHIT.
Fundamental reason why the App Store is locked the way it is? Because too many people try to fuck it up. Sure, it's inconvenient to not have full control of your hardware. But most people can't handle it. See Google's Market? See Google's Market's malware recalls? Yeah, the App Store has had some malicious software too, but it's so much more limited. My Nexus S has shit battery life because something keeps my radios running all the time. This wouldn't be a problem if Google restricted how much resources apps can take in the background.
We're talking about Steve Jobs here. The guy who released a MP3 player with no lockdown or walled-garden and made it a success. And when he wanted to make it easier to get music, managed to gnaw at the RIAA to finally allow removal of DRM despite the piracy boogieman. The guy who helped create a phone which is relatively easy to maintain, relatively easy to develop on, and relatively easy to use without knowing what the word "rootkit" means.
Abridgment of consumer rights isn't the issue, it's protecting the user from themselves. If you're smart enough to not need the digital handholding, you can buy something else. But for my parents, it's iPad all the way.
They're actually Sandforce SSDs with a SATA to PATA converter. Given Sandforce appears to be in the lead for garbage collection, I'm sure these should do you well.
Indeed a human reviewer isn't going to catch everything. Nor will an automated one. But those two are quite a bit different than malware. Flurry was picking up on the OS version and device type, it's nothing like rooting your phone. The flashlight with a web proxy embedded was still bound by the sandbox.
The reason isn't what you said. Here's the reason.
On an non-jailbroken iOS device: 1) it's extremely hard to root the phone by installing an app. (I haven't seen a recent way except for the freetype exploit used for the jailbreakme.com PDF) 2) Apple vets the application before it reaches the app store, mostly by some sort of function blacklist which includes all functions built into the device that you're not supposed to call. (this also explains why tethering apps go through, it's not like a static analyzer will know it's a tethering app hidden inside a flashlight) 3) The sandbox kills attempts to call system functions that arn't allowed by either nicely rejecting your call or killing your app's process space. MMU cleans up the rest. 4) Given the sandbox and above requirements, the only personal information you can steal without the user's knowledge is the user's addressbook. You can't force a call, a force a text, or force the phone to give you the location without user intervention. So sure, you can write malware, but it's easier for the user to find out something's fishy, except for the addressbook. 5) Oh, and it's likely that if you set the flags to allow backgrounding, Apple's review process will be curious why your app's requesting background time.
So yes, it's possible to make iOS malware, but the extent of maliciousness is limited to the addressbook unless you want to be obvious... and this is assuming you make it through the app store review process.
On the other hand, it seems an APK can root your Android phone, despite the sandbox.
Between rooting the phone versus getting an addressbook, which one do you find more useful as a malware hacker?
I had read very early on from some Intel guys that USB was actually heavily based off ADB (Apple Desktop Bus). Given that this was well over 12 years ago, I can't seem to find articles mentioning it anymore. And I don't know to what extent either.
But I do still find it interesting that USB to ADB converters worked so perfectly with no drivers necessary when the iMac first came out.
That said, although without further evidence at hand, I'd be a little careful in discounting Apple's role in the establishing USB standard itself.
Ah yes, the Ming. I've encountered one so far, and the girl who owned it had no clue how unique it was.
Nevertheless, if you want to see failure in the mobile marketplace, GNU/Linux is a pretty damn good example: The Ming, OpenMoko, Maemo/Meego, and to a certain extent, netbooks. If it runs x11/xorg/Qt, history seems to imply that its doomed already.
While Linux kernel has certainly gotten a boost from Android in terms of "number of people using the linux kernel", it'd be unfair to discount the millions of handheld devices using Windows CE just because they're designed to run one and only one application: GPS units.
Anyhow, I've veered off topic.
Nokia going with the WP7 platform might not be ideal, but it's not like they had any choices that were definitively better. Continuing Symbian would be disastrous since insiders acknowledge it wasn't designed to be used for the type of smartphones people expect these days. Going with Android without a carrier to back them would lead to minimal sales and being stuck as just another phone manufacturer since there's so many out there. They'd have no unique selling point. There's no value add. It's akin to becoming Dell in the Dell/MS relationship. Going with Meego is just dumb. It has taken how long? It has been delayed how many times? Its got no developer community and a phone wouldn't be ready until 2012? Might as well run out of money by then. If I were making the decisions, I would have tried to partner with HP and use WebOS. WebOS seems like a well built platform. It was built on top of a knowledge base of iPhone engineers defecting from Apple. It's got a UI that has more polish than Android, and a development community and SDK that certainly looks more usable than Android's SDK. (I have not tried WebOS' SDK, but I have tried Android's.) Aside from WP7, it's the only option that doesn't lead to running out of money with no product nor becoming just another phone manufacturer with no reason to live.
Actually, until the iPhone, WinMo6 was doing decently well.
Back in 2006, your main options were fairly simple: 1) WinMo 2) A used Palm Treo (since Palm was switching to WinMo) 3) Blackberry 4) Symbian
While Blackberry was definitely selling faster than Windows Mobile, Windows Mobile was not a failure by a long shot. Windows Mobile was the only one of those 4 options that ran on handhelds used in industry. So when you needed a handheld to do stuff, you got a Windows Mobile 2003 device.
GPS units of all sorts, including the majority of integrated navis in cars used the same core as Windows Mobile phones.
Meanwhile, the Symbian of then is roughly the same Symbian of now. And Linux for mobiles was OpenMoko.
How do I know who HTC is? It wasn't because of Android, it was because HTC made Windows Mobile phones with UMTS.
When it comes to smartphones before the iPhone, Windows Mobile was clearly not a failure. Sure, it's sucking ass right now. But that's what happens when you reboot your ecosystem from scratch.
(Yes, I have used this stuff before. I own a WinMo6 phone. I also own a Nexus S. And an iPhone. And a Windows Mobile 2002 handheld. And a Palm 3. And an even older Palm Pilot. And a Newton... or 3. And I had a Blackberry too.)
I feel Visual Studio is more mature of an IDE, but I'd rather use the Objective-C language. Oh, and Eclipse pisses me off with its workspace model and poor/no-polish UI.
VLC for Android? Just need bugs shaken out? Are you freakin' kidding me?
You obviously have no idea that all that project has right now is a baseline engine port that compiles, spews distorted garbage on the screen, and has only a single button (load hardcoded mp4 file path) as its interface.
(Yes, I built it and ran it. Saying it "just needs the bugs shaken out" is kinda like saying Hurd just needs its bugs shaken out.)
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You do not "NEED" a file system for OBEX, hence why even many Feature Phones (including the Sony Ericsson T68i from 2002, which had niether file system or External Card) support it well.
iPhone simply does not support OBEX due to copyright issues, nothing else.
I was referring to BT OBEX file transfers, not the actual BT FTP stack since OBEX is all people really know about.
And while you don't "NEED" a file system, you're simply trolling when you say "iPhone simply does not support OBEX due to copyright issues, nothing else." You've addressed none of the issues I've mentioned as to why it would not work.
Why?
1) Your example is invalid. The T68i had a file system or else it can't store the individual files uploaded via OBEX, nor store the individual camera pictures the camera attachment takes. Just because it probably isn't a FAT/NTFS/ext2-deriviative doesn't make it "not a file system." Support for external cards also have no relevance.
2) Sure, OBEX file transfers don't require a underlying file system. I've met devices which expose a root folder, where all file operations except upload do absolutely nothing. Works great for printers. How's that supposed to be useful for a phone? Where are you going to upload this to on an iPhone? Like I said before, you can't filter the data on the way in without make it an awkward experience. And there is no common generic shared folder for applications. Nor should you expose every individual app's sandbox to the world.
(I have implemented OBEX file transfers for personal use on an jailbroken iPhone.)
I think the difference might actually be that myWi can only do WEP/Adhoc with any jailbroken iPhone.
While Personal Hotspot might be WPA/infra on the iPhone 4.
Somebody who actually has will have to confirm.
Apple's (and presumably Microsoft's as well) response to Google's "awesomeness" is probably laughter.
Believe me, even with a "software update that doubled battery life" the battery life is still shit.
My point is, while you're busy cheerleading Android and Google, it's obvious you haven't used any of the other phones you deride.
Ranking of battery life on my phones from best to worst:
1) Motorola Q9 (winmo6.1)
2) iPhone 4
3) iPhone original (jailbroken)
4) Nexus S (ASOP 2.3- Flash not installed)
While Microsoft could possibly have more fragmentation than iOS, it's likely to be nowhere near the scope of Android since they have hardware requirements that dictate 1Ghz ARMv7 and DirectX9 minimum. Whether they use bytecode or compiled binaries, CPU arch shouldn't matter. DirectX will take care of the rest of the GPU abstraction in a way devs already understand.
Thanks, glad to know that some people will hear me out. :)
Of course, I could be wrong, but I think I got a pretty good case right there.
The canned responses make me a bit sad though; it's kinda like being in denial that these devices are pretty complex and not recognizing what goes into make a smartphone platform.
Oh right, everybody here seemed to have missed the fact that the Settings thing defaults to asking for permission every time any location data is requested.
Depending on the icon only means you explicitly told the OS to stop asking me everytime XYZ wants to get my current location (both coarse-grained wifi and fine-grained AGPS).
(To be honest, I don't even think the icon distinguishes between coarse/fine. I thought it's "any")
Jailbreak, download all the apps from Cydia, setup wireshark, and let us know.
App Store apps can't get the IMEI.
Let's see... Bluetooth file transfer is basically like FTP: You see a directory from the other device and can arbitrarily send/receive files.
You have an iPhone; so ponder this: where would Bluetooth FTPs go?
There isn't a shared storage space on the iPhone accessible by all applications. There is no SD card.
Each app has it's own sandboxed home directory. In fact, this is why there is no SD card.
On the upside, this is why backups/restore/uninstalls are so clean.
The only shared area is reserved by the system for photos and videos only (the camera roll).
You can't enforce the type of file that is received when you're the BT FTP server, so what do you do if people try to stuff the wrong type of file into the camera roll? It just seems wrong to take the file, try to verify it fits the photo/video qualification and delete it if it doesn't. Extensions arn't good for that either. Neither is accepting a bad file.
Now, one could say it'd be all right if they could only send files via bluetooth.... but how big would the media backlash be if your iPhone could only send and not receive? What's the point of sending via BT FTP if no other iPhone could get it? At that point, it's better just to leave it out completely than to draw attention to a half-assed implementation.
My recollection of the "rise of iPod" is a bit different.
Yes, the actual release events are as you said. The significant rise in sales did happen in 2004. But I don't see it being because of the iTunes Music Store. All the signs pointing to success came much earlier.
But by the 2nd Gen release in 2002, it was already beating out most other MP3 players in popularity. Not in sales, but popularity. People talked about it much as people talked about the iPhone being locked to AT&T, when no SDK was available.
In fact, as an early firewire advocate, I was already amazed at the effect the firewire-only iPods had on the market.
I started seeing Dell, Gateway, HP, and Toshiba laptops with firewire in 2002, which is completely unexpected in the PC market because of the costs associated with adding the chipsets and in buying the products that use it. Most people who wanted firewire weren't using it for hard drives, but video editing. And many of those back then would use cardbus cards. It was rare, unless you had a Sony, to see an integrated Firewire port on a PC.
You'd see in the comments in the Apple Store that some people even went out of the way to buy a cheap iMac/eMac in order to run iTunes for their iPod. It was bizarre. MusicMatch and various open source clients for Linux and Windows were out.
http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2002123002126PSHLSW
Napster had risen as the king and fallen as it got hit by legality issues; people had relatively massive repositories of music. Gnutella/Limewire was the next place. Direct Connect networks were popular in colleges.
Stories of people getting mugged for white earphones already hit the news.
All of this was well before the iTunes Music Store. All of this was well before the iPod had USB2.0 as an option.
You're right that sales didn't really take off until the release of the music store. But I'm inclined to believe that it wasn't the music store that was compelling. It was that the iPod got USB2.0 and that Windows got iTunes. To me, it was more likely that the Music Store was helped by the iPod than the iPod helped by the Music Store.
(In 2001-2003, I was enrolled in a university, working part time for the university to help people fix their computers and obtain an internet connection. In appointments in August 2002, I'd see ~80 computers per day for the first 2 weeks of school (weekend overtime pay was awesome), many of them laptops. There exists a picture from that week where you'd see my coworkers and I running antivirus scans or windows installers on about 18 laptops in one room. So my sample size is small on the grand scheme of things, but unusually large for a single person's experience. I purchased my 1st iPod, a 2nd Gen 10GB, exactly 2 weeks after launch, on the last day of my internship at Apple, and the first day it was available for employee discount. It replaced my MiniDisc player.)
You could just use it as it is. Or install Linux or FreeBSD/ppc.
I have a Sawtooth G4 and gave it to my mom just to use it for web browsing and mail.
Whoever that loser is, he's wrong.
http://market.android.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=112622
Failure in the PC marketspace doesn't mean that having great hardware gets you nowhere. It simply means that the Mac wasn't better than a Wintel PC by a large enough margin for people to consider switching.
The way you say that it has little to do with hardware implies that you think that if their hardware sucked more, they'd still be successful. This is absolutely not true. You're right in that what makes them successful is the ecosystem. But from their ecosystem, it is the end to end integration on the focus of the user experience that makes them successful, not from the consumer lockdown.
Why do I say that?
Because when the iPod came out of nowhere and took over the market, there were three parts: The Mac (desktop), iTunes (the app), and the iPod (device).
There was no walled-garden. There was no lockdown. There was no iTunes Music Store. There was no DRM.
There was only the bare necessities: A host with music, a program to arrange/sync your music, a device that plays your music on the go.
In fact, it was so tuned to working with Macs that it only had Firewire, and no USB (because USB would have been an awful sync experience with 5GB at 1.5MB/sec).
What did it compete against? The Rio and the Creative Nomad.
The Rio was over parallel port and limited to around 32MB. The Nomad devices were mostly USB1 and limited to around 256MB.
Problem is, many of the other options suck balls.
When I worked as the sole IT guy for a small flash memory design firm, they wanted more computers for workstations.
They went out and bought a bunch of piece of shit Dells and then asked me for help. So I asked them why they bought it and their reasons were the following:
1) It had a decent sized clock speed.
2) There's too many options, so I sorted by price on their web site, and picked the cheapest one with a decent clock speed.
So I asked, why Dell?
Response: Too much trouble to compare other vendors.
In other words, people want the best, but it takes too fucking long to figure out what's the best. Choice is good. Researching amongst an assload of choices is a waste of time. Nobody wants to do it. They want to get back to doing whatever they want to do.
If us techies keep trying to preserve the multitude of options, we're directly working against what the rest of the people in the world actually want: something that does the job and does it well.
(Story continuation: I ended up building the next machine they wanted in 2002, with RAID-0 and linked to the company backup server. The engineer who got it was amazed at how much faster it was, while the manager who had to pay for the parts was amazed at how cheap it cost, not thinking about how much time the company had to pay me to actually spec it out and put it together.)
Here's the funny thing, after watching the guy for so long, I've noticed something interesting.
Yeah, Jobs is into the walled-garden approach right now.
But it's weird. It's NOT to own people in a Microsoft-esque way.
It's because people CAN'T SEEM TO TAKE CARE OF THEIR OWN SHIT.
Fundamental reason why the App Store is locked the way it is? Because too many people try to fuck it up. Sure, it's inconvenient to not have full control of your hardware. But most people can't handle it. See Google's Market? See Google's Market's malware recalls?
Yeah, the App Store has had some malicious software too, but it's so much more limited.
My Nexus S has shit battery life because something keeps my radios running all the time. This wouldn't be a problem if Google restricted how much resources apps can take in the background.
We're talking about Steve Jobs here.
The guy who released a MP3 player with no lockdown or walled-garden and made it a success.
And when he wanted to make it easier to get music, managed to gnaw at the RIAA to finally allow removal of DRM despite the piracy boogieman.
The guy who helped create a phone which is relatively easy to maintain, relatively easy to develop on, and relatively easy to use without knowing what the word "rootkit" means.
Abridgment of consumer rights isn't the issue, it's protecting the user from themselves.
If you're smart enough to not need the digital handholding, you can buy something else. But for my parents, it's iPad all the way.
"little to do with actual hardware".... Seriously? Before the iPad, who made a tablet that lasts 10 hours on a single charge?
Who makes one now? Motorola.
What took so damn long?
Let's try this again...
When it was the iPod launch... who made an mp3 player with more than a gig of space? Apple. Who else? No one.
What took so damn long?
Look at OWC for their Legacy SSDs.
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Mercury_Legacy_Pro
They're actually Sandforce SSDs with a SATA to PATA converter.
Given Sandforce appears to be in the lead for garbage collection, I'm sure these should do you well.
Indeed a human reviewer isn't going to catch everything. Nor will an automated one.
But those two are quite a bit different than malware.
Flurry was picking up on the OS version and device type, it's nothing like rooting your phone.
The flashlight with a web proxy embedded was still bound by the sandbox.
Considering the exploit was against freetype, which Android versions are vulnerable to it too?
The reason isn't what you said. Here's the reason.
On an non-jailbroken iOS device:
1) it's extremely hard to root the phone by installing an app. (I haven't seen a recent way except for the freetype exploit used for the jailbreakme.com PDF)
2) Apple vets the application before it reaches the app store, mostly by some sort of function blacklist which includes all functions built into the device that you're not supposed to call. (this also explains why tethering apps go through, it's not like a static analyzer will know it's a tethering app hidden inside a flashlight)
3) The sandbox kills attempts to call system functions that arn't allowed by either nicely rejecting your call or killing your app's process space. MMU cleans up the rest.
4) Given the sandbox and above requirements, the only personal information you can steal without the user's knowledge is the user's addressbook. You can't force a call, a force a text, or force the phone to give you the location without user intervention. So sure, you can write malware, but it's easier for the user to find out something's fishy, except for the addressbook.
5) Oh, and it's likely that if you set the flags to allow backgrounding, Apple's review process will be curious why your app's requesting background time.
So yes, it's possible to make iOS malware, but the extent of maliciousness is limited to the addressbook unless you want to be obvious... and this is assuming you make it through the app store review process.
On the other hand, it seems an APK can root your Android phone, despite the sandbox.
Between rooting the phone versus getting an addressbook, which one do you find more useful as a malware hacker?
I had read very early on from some Intel guys that USB was actually heavily based off ADB (Apple Desktop Bus).
Given that this was well over 12 years ago, I can't seem to find articles mentioning it anymore. And I don't know to what extent either.
But I do still find it interesting that USB to ADB converters worked so perfectly with no drivers necessary when the iMac first came out.
That said, although without further evidence at hand, I'd be a little careful in discounting Apple's role in the establishing USB standard itself.
Ah yes, the Ming. I've encountered one so far, and the girl who owned it had no clue how unique it was.
Nevertheless, if you want to see failure in the mobile marketplace, GNU/Linux is a pretty damn good example:
The Ming, OpenMoko, Maemo/Meego, and to a certain extent, netbooks.
If it runs x11/xorg/Qt, history seems to imply that its doomed already.
While Linux kernel has certainly gotten a boost from Android in terms of "number of people using the linux kernel", it'd be unfair to discount the millions of handheld devices using Windows CE just because they're designed to run one and only one application: GPS units.
Anyhow, I've veered off topic.
Nokia going with the WP7 platform might not be ideal, but it's not like they had any choices that were definitively better.
Continuing Symbian would be disastrous since insiders acknowledge it wasn't designed to be used for the type of smartphones people expect these days.
Going with Android without a carrier to back them would lead to minimal sales and being stuck as just another phone manufacturer since there's so many out there. They'd have no unique selling point. There's no value add. It's akin to becoming Dell in the Dell/MS relationship.
Going with Meego is just dumb. It has taken how long? It has been delayed how many times? Its got no developer community and a phone wouldn't be ready until 2012? Might as well run out of money by then.
If I were making the decisions, I would have tried to partner with HP and use WebOS. WebOS seems like a well built platform. It was built on top of a knowledge base of iPhone engineers defecting from Apple. It's got a UI that has more polish than Android, and a development community and SDK that certainly looks more usable than Android's SDK. (I have not tried WebOS' SDK, but I have tried Android's.) Aside from WP7, it's the only option that doesn't lead to running out of money with no product nor becoming just another phone manufacturer with no reason to live.
Actually, until the iPhone, WinMo6 was doing decently well.
Back in 2006, your main options were fairly simple:
1) WinMo
2) A used Palm Treo (since Palm was switching to WinMo)
3) Blackberry
4) Symbian
While Blackberry was definitely selling faster than Windows Mobile, Windows Mobile was not a failure by a long shot. Windows Mobile was the only one of those 4 options that ran on handhelds used in industry. So when you needed a handheld to do stuff, you got a Windows Mobile 2003 device.
GPS units of all sorts, including the majority of integrated navis in cars used the same core as Windows Mobile phones.
Meanwhile, the Symbian of then is roughly the same Symbian of now. And Linux for mobiles was OpenMoko.
How do I know who HTC is? It wasn't because of Android, it was because HTC made Windows Mobile phones with UMTS.
When it comes to smartphones before the iPhone, Windows Mobile was clearly not a failure. Sure, it's sucking ass right now. But that's what happens when you reboot your ecosystem from scratch.
(Yes, I have used this stuff before. I own a WinMo6 phone. I also own a Nexus S. And an iPhone. And a Windows Mobile 2002 handheld. And a Palm 3. And an even older Palm Pilot. And a Newton... or 3. And I had a Blackberry too.)
So, if they're unhappy as shareholders... why not sell?
Yes. Yes you do.
You won't necessarily get your data back, but there's a chance you can find something in there.
I feel Visual Studio is more mature of an IDE, but I'd rather use the Objective-C language.
Oh, and Eclipse pisses me off with its workspace model and poor/no-polish UI.
VLC for Android? Just need bugs shaken out? Are you freakin' kidding me?
You obviously have no idea that all that project has right now is a baseline engine port that compiles, spews distorted garbage on the screen, and has only a single button (load hardcoded mp4 file path) as its interface.
(Yes, I built it and ran it. Saying it "just needs the bugs shaken out" is kinda like saying Hurd just needs its bugs shaken out.)