Full Unicode support is vital. It permits people who don't speak the same language as you, to programme in the language natural to them. Not all code is, or should be, in English.
Yes, some idiot might code emoji into method names because they think it's fun, use Klingon Just Because, or whatever. If they're coding professionally, that's what peer review is for. If they're coding personally, then why not, if that's what they want to do?
Couldn't disagree more with most of it - because as usual, what we each personally value most is a personal decision.
I emigrated from the UK about 4 years ago. I was born in the North West but studied and subsequently lived in Cambridge - ostensibly a beautiful, historic city, in the South East with good weather compared to the national average, a very diverse and liberal outlook and endless opportunities in the tech sector. I worked for Acorn in my first job - that same Acorn who spun out ARM, albeit before I joined.
In comparison, Wellington is architecturally often ugly, but also sometimes very architecturally special. The hills and green spaces are outstanding. Public spaces and services are comparatively well maintained and curated. Having sea around so many areas due to the complex coastline is awesome and there are numerous beaches within walking distance, or a short bus or car ride. Speaking of buses, they're great - nothing like the disaster in Cambridge. Traffic gets bad, but it's practically empty compared to the UK. Lots of unique houses and apartments rather than grim mass-produced housing estates; not cheap in these boom times, but still great value compared to Cambridge, even in the CBD. The weather is for sure very windy - one of the windiest cities on Earth - and it can spoil a warm day, but it also means pollution levels are spectacularly low (even though it's not all that bad to start with on a still day) and at times it's just amazing, energising and dramatic as the entire landscape goes into motion.
Of course it rains, like anywhere; but compared to Manchester UK or Auckland the average rain days per year is, surprisingly, the same. Compared to Cambridge it is temperate - not as hot in summer, nor as cold in winter (rarely below freezing) - suits me very well. North West birthright in the blood I guess. The sun when it's there is amazing, but yes, wear good sunscreen - as you should do anywhere, sunburn or not. Thanks to the specific latitude of NZ and atmospheric filtering the light quality countrywide is spectacular with many days looking like real life has turned the saturation dial "up to 11". NZ really can put on just the most spectacular light shows for dawn or dusk. Flora and fauna are unique and beautiful, the population laid back and sociopolitically engaged, the coffee just about the best in the world, the food not far behind and the on-your-doorstep travel opportunities both up in the North Island, drive-on-drive-off to the South Island via ferry, are amazing. It's up there with world leader in renewable energy, one of the best wine producing countries in the world, organic/biogrow (for the sake of the environment, not because "it's healthier") is strong and well applied, "buy local" is easy and diverse... Just incredible for such a small country population. It really, really punches above its weight.
If you love the USA, don't move. But the UK got Brexit and May; you got Trump and Brannon; I got a great deal of unfortunate separation from old friends and family in the UK and that hurts, but I traded it for modern, progressive politics (as much as one can really hope for) with mixed-member proportional rep., a truly stunning city, great new friends and a wealth of opportunities I'd never have had in the UK, a wonderful husband and a kick-ass 1900-1909 two storey villa just 20 minutes walk or less than 10 minutes bus from the CBD. Post-brexit, the NZD pay actually now exceeds the best I ever got in the UK too, thanks to the GBP being devalued so far.
I've never looked back. If you're a strong, competent software engineer that wants to try a few years of something refreshing and new, without much of the heavy cynicism and corruption of "the traditional West" - of course it's there, this place is far, far from perfect, but it's far less invasive or pervasive - then a free pass to Wellington is an astonishing gift. Do it!
Yes, you're completely right, it's a disaster and people will have their porn coming up on their kids' iPads left right and centre. Apple are idiots and you're a champion for being the only person to notice this obvious security issue.
I'll grant its not as bad as I feared, but this is still a whole series of accidents waiting to happen.
Which is another way of saying "damn, I've received a response explaining the technology and it doesn't work at all like I thought, but this is the internet and I refuse to be wrong about anything so I'll complain about imaginary edge cases that haven't happened and are so fringe that even comp.risks hasn't bothered with it".
The TL;DR of this means that the devices must be on the same iCloud account, cooperate with Handoff, be in close proximity geographically and it'll only leave data available for a short period of time after being copied.
Obviously a fan site, but contains useful details on the actual implementation and behaviour. As with any online system there is a security concern, but it doesn't strike me as anymore of a "security disaster" than anything else in iCloud, especially things like the super-useful, but clearly risky, iCloud Keychain. Apple's accounts must be extraordinarily attractive to hackers, a major goldmine; one day there will doubtless be an extremely serious breach; but so far, it's all been infrequent and minor. They've a poor track record with stability of their "cloud enabled" software, but the iCloud security track record is quite alright compared to the rest of the industry.
Others have already pointed out how bizarre the original story is, but there seems to be no mention of AppleScript. If you're on OS X, you get the Unix command line plus scriptable applications through AppleScript with raw scripts or GUI-built actions through Automator. It's all built in to a clean installation of the OS. Amiga afficionados should be familiar with the concept via ARexx.
Many third party application support AppleScript, though as the environment seems to gain more and more inexperienced and/or lazy programmers, proper integration into the OS X framework environment seems to get worse and worse. That includes code from Apple. Given the extremely sharp decline in Apple's software quality over the last couple of years across all of their platforms, it's currently rather hard to recommend any of it. Probably needs to be filed under "a very good idea, destroyed by the incompetence of the modern software industry".
You realise there are three pages to that list, right? And you realise that the Galaxy Tab has the same problems with mysteriously cloned icon styles and colours as the Galaxy S? And you did get to the packaging bit on the third page, right? Right?
Yet your nonsense gets scored 2, while I'm modded to zero, troll. Apparently it isn't Apple with the reality distortion field, it's Slashdot. Once again, moral issues aside the fact is that a court of law found in Apple's favour and ruled in favour again on appeal. Only the 10.1N - the redesigned version - has not been blocked, when Apple were asshats and tried to block that too.
No; it wasn't about a round cornered rectangle. It was the shape, and the materials, and the colour scheme of the device; and the arrangement, colour and design of the icons; and the style of the packaging; and a whole lot more besides, all in one go.
People keep talking about the LG smartphone that predated iPhone by a month to "prove" that Apple copied LG. Yet LG's icons were minimalistic and monochrome, quite unlike Apple's. And that matters because it is all part of the court case; it was about all of these points taken as a whole. We look at Samsung's earlier F700 smartphone and see a grid of icons in black/white outline minimalist style, just like LG... Suspiciously similar one might say. Then iPhone comes along with full colour, glossy icons - e.g. green with an old-school style phone handset for Call; purple with two joined eighth notes for music; that kind of thing. And lo, the next thing you know, Samsung's phones suddenly have the same thing.
For example: Green with an old school handset for call. Purple with two joined eighth notes for music. Not black and white / minimalist, or a single colour theme across all icons. Not an icon representing, say, the smartphone itself for 'call' - their old F700 did that, but suddenly it's an old school handset post-iPhone - or a picture of a person with lines radiating out as if shouting; or a bazllion other icon designs that have existed over the years Not a single note, or a different note type for music. They even changed from the first note being higher pitched than the second in the F700, to the first note being lower pitched, which just happens to be the same as the iPhone. Suddenly, Samsung's using the same icons and even the same damned colours as Apple were - they even had to redesign the standard Android icons to do it. Default Android 2.0: Blue phone icon, old-school handset, pointing down and to the right. iPhone: Green, old-school handset pointing up and to the right. Samsung: Green, up and to the right. Android music icon: A speaker with a treble clef in a sort of 3D style. iPhone and Samsung: Purple, musical notes, as discussed. Why? Why did Samsung feel the need to redesign the icons this way? Was this all just by random chance and accident on Samsung's part?
So it's not just about a round cornered rectangle, or a grid of icons. As often pointed out, things like the Palm Pilot (and the Newton!) did that kind of launcher style years and years ago. But not with so many near-identical icons just appearing "by accident", to the point where a casual non-geek shopper might well mistake one device for the other. Regardless of Apple's moral obligations - which are a different matter entirely - legally it was clear. They won. The 10.1 was blocked. The judgement was upheld on appeal. Samsung redesigned the device and, even if the box and the icons were just the same, that was enough for it to no longer infringe on all of the points in the trade dress suit when taken together, so the 10.1N couldn't be blocked.
According to the court, legally - if not morally - Apple were right and Samsung were wrong. Samsung had to change their design. Apple tried again (definitely gaining asshat points) but failed, because now, Samsung had changed the design enough to be legally in the clear.
I'm not saying I agree with Apple, just that I'm tired of the inane tirades. Samsung are apparently saints, with no prior history of ripping off other people's products at all and want to hand out rainbows and unicorns to everyone. Apple are clearly evil money grabbing tyrants who eat babies. It's just ridiculous. Both are enormous capitalist corporate entities with shareholders and a legal imperative to make as much money as possible in any way they can get away with. Neither are saints.
Anyway, this isn't about one company making a product with the basic form. Or same basic colour. Or having icons that just happen to use the same colours and styles. Or having very similar packaging. It is, amongst other things, a trade dress suit concerning a company that simultaneously introduced products that did all of those things at once and did so after a very similar looking product line became a success.
People sometimes say "but how different could it look?" - which just goes to show how deeply Apple have become embedded in the public psyche! We apparently can't even imagine how a tablet or smartphone might differ. How sad. I like the link I posted because it shows some examples of just precisely how they could differ! For that matter, so does Windows Phone 7 - a genuinely different take on a smartphone GUI.
Personally I much prefer innovation to imitation.
Apple might be wrong to pursue the action on several levels (for one thing, it seems to have raised the public profile of the products from Samsung and may have done Samsung more good than harm!). But the court agreed with them and that wasn't a bunch of armchair lawyers on an internet forum, that was a collection of professional lawyers (on both sides) and a courtroom of other skilled professionals who came to the conclusion that Apple had a case, so they blocked the 10.1. But not the 10.1N, because it was judged that this product differed sufficiently.
Morally right? Very questionable. Legally right? A judgement was made and upheld on subsequent appeal.
Moral rights versus legal rights are very different questions. Sadly much of the coverage of the Apple/Samsung spat on SlashDot seems to conflate the two issues. Evil Apple, suing Samsung? Legally, the court thought it was Samsung who were in the wrong.
2009: Your article talks about people being able to run the app still. The app which therefore hasn't been remote wiped. It doesn't work because the head-end it talks to was taken down. That was owned and run by the app vendor, not Apple. This is clearly not remote-kill; this is the risk of any head-end reliant app from any vendor anywhere. See also: http://www.pcworld.com/article/167383/update_apple_pulls_hottest_girls_porn_app_from_itunes.html?tk=rel_news
See? We can both cherry pick random unsubstantiated Google search results.
TTBOMK there has been not one single verified, independently documented, uncontested example of a remote-kill on iOS. Numerous apps have been pulled from the store, though.
A 1.2GHz dual core CPU is all very nice, but you can run full-on Desktop Linux with considerably more frugal resources and produce a device that's considerably cheaper as a result. It seems bizarre to have over-specified the hardware and under-specified the software stack.
Completely agree. There are so many obtuse and confusing design decisions that it's hard to tell bugs from features. What a mess. The usual burden of Google nomenclature that I'm supposed to absorb is annoying too. Streams, sparks, circles, hangouts... Just get over yourselves already and stop making up names for stuff! I suspect there's some strong North American tunnel vision contributing to the issue.
Another great example of the horrid GUI: A friend invited me to Google+ via Google+. I get that message via GMail. I cannot reply to it. I sign up and want to say "thanks". How do I send them a message that says "thanks"? It's a disaster area.
On the plus side, it's made me appreciate more of how Facebook's oft-maligned GUI is actually doing a surprisingly good job of presenting an awful lot of features and complexity in a relatively successful way.
I hope it improves. For now, I'm happy enough with Facebook, since I don't have some screwed up idea of compartmentalising all my friends into little cliques that are isolated from each other and since neither Google nor Facebook have a great track record with privacy, I'll stick with the provider that only has access to my profile - rather than (as many other commentators have pointed out) my profile, my e-mail, my search history and my purchase history.
But opening up a new window for each PDF you display really sucks as a user experience.
Having "defected" from Win XP to Mac OS X back when Vista was released, it's been many years since I used Windows or Linux for long periods of time, rather than temporarily in VMs for work purposes. Now and then, stories like this, or even entire pieces of technology like the renderer in question, remind me just how awful things still are on other platforms.
Another poster asked if the PDF renderer was integrated into the browser, rather than the OS. What a bizarre question. My PDF renderer is integrated into both, because it's part of an OS framework that understands how to render to and from a whole bunch of stuff, PDF included. Adobe's PDF reader is not installed, has never been installed and will never be installed. PDF is just another datatype that the OS already understands.
I can open a PDF in the same window or a new window if I want, or download it directly, or open it into a new tab, just in the same way as I can open any link in the same window, a new window, a tab, or download it - the right-click / Ctrl+Click context menu. There's nothing special going on. It's just another resource that my browser can handle. Quite why other browsers and operating systems insist upon treating PDFs as some incredibly hard, exotic, special and magical thing that must be treated differently from other page content in this day and age is beyond me.
It's not a kludge, it's not a bodged add-on, it's an extensible, intelligent, well integrated piece of technology that's part of a wider architecture that makes more sense than any other OS architecture I've seen above kernel level. It goes hand in hand with other excellent ideas like Core Audio, Core MIDI, Core Image, Core Animation and Core Data. It's one of many technical reasons why I chose Mac OS X - not some turtleneck wearing barely-existent clichéd stereotype of a technologically illiterate individual who doesn't know better. I made an informed choice based on the technology, despite my dislike then and dislike to this day of the company that makes it; a computer is a tool, not a religion.
I can see why this JS renderer is needed, even though it'll make the web worse for Mac users by making their PDF experience suck more - non-integrated, slow, PDF trapped in the page by the JS renderer... But it's necessary for all the other operating systems or browsers that think PDF is just Too Hard. While we can all laugh at Microsoft's ineptitude, the open source community hasn't managed to get this kind of architecture level stuff sorted out across Linux distributions either, so Mac OS X is your only mainstream alternative. And that's really quite sad.
I wonder how many people know their phone is reporting this activity back to Motorola.
Amen. Amazing how the vast majority of comments here have skipped right over that.
If TFA is accurate, Motorola Android phones run software that tracks every application you use, the resource consumption and how long you use it for. It's all sent back to Motorola for analysis and the information is linked to specific phones so that Motorola can (in future) send messages back.
When people "discovered" the location database cache in the iPhone, they went crazy at Apple. Here we have Motorola tracking in great detail every single thing you do on your phone, with that information collected, collated, processed and stored, all of it linked to individual phones - and nobody seems to even raise an eyebrow?
So the consensus seems to be that Apple has convinced its users that they can't get viruses and don't need anti-virus, which is bad.
In fact, these users are apparently so convinced that they don't need anti-virus and can't get a virus, that the minute a web page tells them they do have a virus (which they believe they can't get), they download the fake anti-virus package (possibly paying for it first even though they believe they don't need it), double-click on the installer, click on "OK" to get past the "this may be malware" warning, click through the installer prompts and finally type in the administrator account user name and password to allow installation to proceed. You know, proceed to install that anti-virus package that Apple, being evil, convinced them they didn't need to install.
Seriously, is this some kind of new low? Asserting that people are convinced they don't need anti-virus and that's why they're installing anti-virus?:-)
Apple are indeed *so* desperate to deny that anti-virus is needed that they allow Intego AntiVirus to be sold through the Mac App Store of all places. That app's description even has headlines warning about this particular trojan, so it's up to date.
(1) Snow Leopard includes a crude trojan detector ever since that pirate iWork installer trojan. Its recogniser patterns should have been updated by now via Software Update. If Apple are going to include such a feature, they should keep it up to date. IMHO this is the area where they should be receiving the most criticism and pressure, not all this useless hot air about internal memos to support staff.
(2) It would be useful if administrators could lock down non-adminstrator accounts so that only Mac App Store applications could be installed (in practice you'd probably widen this to insist that only *certificate signed* applications could be installed). That might even be a sensible default, provided of course that there was an option to override it. Similar to the Android store security model AIUI.
Wrong. That may have been the case in America, but elsewhere in the world numerous alternative networking technologies were developed.
In Britain, Acorn developed Econet. It dates back to around 1981. This was eventually deployed in many schools, for example, as a school-wide network long before they moved over to Ethernet. My own (large) school had it and I even had fun writing a sort of simple e-mail like program on their BBCs that me and my friends used for a while. ISTR it was called AMP (Another Mail Program - classy name, eh?:-) )
Having read through the original article, all of its comments, the linked article on TRIM and performance degradation and the score-over-3 comments herein, I'm surprised that nobody has pointed to this:
The description of the mechanisms HFS+ uses to avoid fragmentation are reminiscent of TRIM's operation from the drive's perspective and the garbage collection scheme used in Samsung's ARM controller, assuming bit-tech.net's description of these is accurate. It therefore comes as little surprise to read anecdotes from numerous users with both factory and third party ("fast" / "non-Apple firmware") SSDs where little performance drop is seen in OS X, along with a series of tests showing similar results and importantly, so far, no anecdotes or test results showing the opposite.
The absence of claims of degrading SSDs under OS X is a surprise and suggests that there really is a performance advantage with SSDs and HFS+ where TRIM is not in use. Adopting TRIM support might improve matters further, of course.
The bit-tech.net tests did still have numerous annoying omissions; this doesn't invalidate them but it does leave questions hanging. It would have been worthwhile partitioning most of the factory drive for NTFS and re-testing under Boot Camp. It would have been even more worthwhile getting one of the SSDs which showed the worst non-TRIM "dirty" performance under Windows and testing that under Mac OS X; if this wasn't possible on the Air hardware for some reason, they could've done it on the Macbook Pro they used as an HDD baseline in the first series of tests.
BTW, Singh's OS X Internals is a great book if you want to learn more about the innermost parts of the OS.
I agree that MacOS has its problems; I have a laptop which works really well and a new Mac Pro tower which has serious problems with (at least) the nVidia graphics driver and has been a pain in the rear from the start. That said, quite a lot of what you say is inaccurate or at least highly debatable; I comment on those points below. On the others, I agree with you.
...OS is so slow it's nearly unreponsive... Very strange; I've not used iMacs, so maybe they're really bad, or perhaps they're old PPC machines - never used PPC-based Macs myself. Both my 10.5.2+Intel-based laptop and tower respond more or less instantly; they're at least as quick as any Linux installation I've used and in my experience to date far less prone to random delays and stalls than Windows, but I guess YMMV.
...iMac makes no hard drive noise... Too quiet? An interesting complaint! If bouncing dock icons, launch animations, hourglass indicators and so-on aren't sufficient for you, install something like iStat Menus (donationware) so that your menu bar will tell you what the machine's doing at any given time. Personally, I prefer the peace and quiet.
...file sharing... System Preferences -> Sharing -> tick 'File Sharing' and follow the on-screen instructions. A pain to figure out? I think not.
...uninstall Garage Band et al... Drag the application to the trash. Really - that's it. That's all you do. If you're worried about run-time preferences files etc. being left behind, install a freeware solution like AppTrap to ask you if you want to tidy those up too.
...move windows between desktops... Spaces is new to OS X and rough in places. 10.5.3 promises some improvements; we'll see. In the mean time, to move windows between spaces, you jump out to the Spaces view (e.g. press F8) and drag them from one space to another, or start a drag on the window title bar (click&hold) and activate a space-change keyboard shortcut (finger gymnastics ahoy). There isn't a way involving, say, some title bar menu or similar - and that's lame.
...third party software to have an automatically changing desktop wallpaper. System Preferences -> Desktop & Screen Saver / Desktop tab -> Tick the 'Change picture' checkbox and select the rate of change from the pulldown menu.
...drag windows around by alt-clicking... No, though there are all sorts of 3rd party extensions for this and the behaviour you describe is specific to the window manager you're used to under Linux; plenty others don't do it. You can at least press F8 and move the window within the Spaces overview.
I've not found the need to drag windows from odd corners. My guess is that you're used to window managers which let windows obscure one another (raise on focus) but don't provide an easy way to get at the windows underneath, so you use alt+click on a protruding bit of window to get around that. MacOS has a solution I find much better, but that's strictly IMHO and it took me a while to start using it - get used to Expose on F9 and F10.
Overall I prefer a window manager with a simple 'send to back' icon and no forced raising, because I grew up with RISC OS and I'm used to using windows that way, but such beasts are few and far between.
All that I am saying is that if I, a power user of several decades, couldn't figure out how to do it over the last year it didn't "just work.@ I'd never used OS X in my life prior to acquiring a Macbook and it didn't take me more than 5 minutes to figure out where the wallpaper changer is, but I guess one man's obvious is another man's obscure;-)
Ultimately, if you want an OS to work the same as Linux with your preferred window manager, then you may as well just run that. It's a lot cheaper.
256kbps listening tests are not really useful in this context. The Sony device has a small hard disc drive, but claims to be able to store more songs than an iPod because the Atrac3Plus compression allows much lower bitrates for equivalent quality (they claim 13,000 songs on the 20GB HDD, which means they'll be calculating based on the lowest standard Atrac bitrate, IIRC about 44kbps).
We should really be concentrating on whether circa-44kbps Atrac3Plus is better or worse than AAC, MP3 or Ogg Vorbis at that bitrate, if we're to take Sony at their word on capacity. I mention Vorbis as this player is not just competing against the iPod - it competes against devices like the Rio Karma [1] and Neuros players too.
A codec showing itself to be almost transparent at 256kbps is hardly cutting edge in this day and age - even MP3 would achieve this as far as most listeners are concerned. Having tried the double blind testing software from the Hydrogen Audiotests, I'm also fairly confident of their listening test results.
[1] (BTW, I'm biased; I went for a Karma. Great so far, just waiting for the HDD to die;-)
I agree it's a nice vision in theory. Unfortunately, if you RTFA you'll see:
Despite speculation about the benefits of a ubiquitous fibre network, BT has no plans to lay it throughout the UK, concentrating instead on areas where new houses are being built.
So nice idea though it might be, we won't all be running on a countrywide fast fibre network at all.
Anyway, if you're supposed to just be able to plug a computer straight into the hole in the wall and get broadband access, that means (1) "wild" internet traffic must be present on the network, so it's not some closed, safe, virus-free thing, (2) bandwidth for VOIP will be reduced if I'm using the same connection for other data, and therefore (3) unless there's some remarkable new QOS stuff handling all of those disparate comms protocols being carried over the grand new TCP/IP network, it simply won't work properly.
It's right in line with the IT industry as a whole's approach to upgrades, mind you: make it bigger than it used to be, more complex than it used to be, slower than it used to be, and less reliable than it used to be. Can't wait;)
Actually, things like this are done in some devices. However, if the device is capable of downloading entire new firmware images, having the whole of the firmware copied into a ROM-like region would be silly. What some people do is include a small recovery ROM, which has a subset of functions that enable the device to retrieve a last-known-good Flash image from some predefined location.
This isn't done in many mass market devices because the cost of extra Flash or a mask ROM is relatively large compared to other components. Larger companies are often ecstatic if they find they can shave off 1 cent from the Balance Of Materials because they're anticipating unit sales in 6 or 7 figure quantities. That 1 cent multiplies up into large chunks of cash. Adding extra ROM or Flash chips, with costs in the dollar range, is not acceptable. Factor in the development and testing cost for the exta software and things get even worse. So, however technically sound the idea might be, an economic argument often wins out.
A final consideration is that device copying is rife, particularly in the far East; some companies go to extraordinary measures to try to protect their software and hardware designs from being cloned. The more devices or device partitions you have, the more points of attack you potentially present for someone intending to break into the physical hardware and the software of the unit.
Slashdot Mirror
Full Unicode support is vital. It permits people who don't speak the same language as you, to programme in the language natural to them. Not all code is, or should be, in English.
Yes, some idiot might code emoji into method names because they think it's fun, use Klingon Just Because, or whatever. If they're coding professionally, that's what peer review is for. If they're coding personally, then why not, if that's what they want to do?
I emigrated from the UK about 4 years ago. I was born in the North West but studied and subsequently lived in Cambridge - ostensibly a beautiful, historic city, in the South East with good weather compared to the national average, a very diverse and liberal outlook and endless opportunities in the tech sector. I worked for Acorn in my first job - that same Acorn who spun out ARM, albeit before I joined.
In comparison, Wellington is architecturally often ugly, but also sometimes very architecturally special. The hills and green spaces are outstanding. Public spaces and services are comparatively well maintained and curated. Having sea around so many areas due to the complex coastline is awesome and there are numerous beaches within walking distance, or a short bus or car ride. Speaking of buses, they're great - nothing like the disaster in Cambridge. Traffic gets bad, but it's practically empty compared to the UK. Lots of unique houses and apartments rather than grim mass-produced housing estates; not cheap in these boom times, but still great value compared to Cambridge, even in the CBD. The weather is for sure very windy - one of the windiest cities on Earth - and it can spoil a warm day, but it also means pollution levels are spectacularly low (even though it's not all that bad to start with on a still day) and at times it's just amazing, energising and dramatic as the entire landscape goes into motion.
Of course it rains, like anywhere; but compared to Manchester UK or Auckland the average rain days per year is, surprisingly, the same. Compared to Cambridge it is temperate - not as hot in summer, nor as cold in winter (rarely below freezing) - suits me very well. North West birthright in the blood I guess. The sun when it's there is amazing, but yes, wear good sunscreen - as you should do anywhere, sunburn or not. Thanks to the specific latitude of NZ and atmospheric filtering the light quality countrywide is spectacular with many days looking like real life has turned the saturation dial "up to 11". NZ really can put on just the most spectacular light shows for dawn or dusk. Flora and fauna are unique and beautiful, the population laid back and sociopolitically engaged, the coffee just about the best in the world, the food not far behind and the on-your-doorstep travel opportunities both up in the North Island, drive-on-drive-off to the South Island via ferry, are amazing. It's up there with world leader in renewable energy, one of the best wine producing countries in the world, organic/biogrow (for the sake of the environment, not because "it's healthier") is strong and well applied, "buy local" is easy and diverse... Just incredible for such a small country population. It really, really punches above its weight.
If you love the USA, don't move. But the UK got Brexit and May; you got Trump and Brannon; I got a great deal of unfortunate separation from old friends and family in the UK and that hurts, but I traded it for modern, progressive politics (as much as one can really hope for) with mixed-member proportional rep., a truly stunning city, great new friends and a wealth of opportunities I'd never have had in the UK, a wonderful husband and a kick-ass 1900-1909 two storey villa just 20 minutes walk or less than 10 minutes bus from the CBD. Post-brexit, the NZD pay actually now exceeds the best I ever got in the UK too, thanks to the GBP being devalued so far.
I've never looked back. If you're a strong, competent software engineer that wants to try a few years of something refreshing and new, without much of the heavy cynicism and corruption of "the traditional West" - of course it's there, this place is far, far from perfect, but it's far less invasive or pervasive - then a free pass to Wellington is an astonishing gift. Do it!
Yes, you're completely right, it's a disaster and people will have their porn coming up on their kids' iPads left right and centre. Apple are idiots and you're a champion for being the only person to notice this obvious security issue.
Happy now? Good. Let's move on.
And you've immediately chosen to selectively forget what you already replied to earlier, proving you're just a troll.
CLOSE PROXIMITY. As in, order of a metre.
Which is another way of saying "damn, I've received a response explaining the technology and it doesn't work at all like I thought, but this is the internet and I refuse to be wrong about anything so I'll complain about imaginary edge cases that haven't happened and are so fringe that even comp.risks hasn't bothered with it".
No dirty jokes please!
The TL;DR of this means that the devices must be on the same iCloud account, cooperate with Handoff, be in close proximity geographically and it'll only leave data available for a short period of time after being copied.
https://www.macstories.net/stories/macos-sierra-the-macstories-review/#universal-clipboard
Obviously a fan site, but contains useful details on the actual implementation and behaviour. As with any online system there is a security concern, but it doesn't strike me as anymore of a "security disaster" than anything else in iCloud, especially things like the super-useful, but clearly risky, iCloud Keychain. Apple's accounts must be extraordinarily attractive to hackers, a major goldmine; one day there will doubtless be an extremely serious breach; but so far, it's all been infrequent and minor. They've a poor track record with stability of their "cloud enabled" software, but the iCloud security track record is quite alright compared to the rest of the industry.
Others have already pointed out how bizarre the original story is, but there seems to be no mention of AppleScript. If you're on OS X, you get the Unix command line plus scriptable applications through AppleScript with raw scripts or GUI-built actions through Automator. It's all built in to a clean installation of the OS. Amiga afficionados should be familiar with the concept via ARexx.
Many third party application support AppleScript, though as the environment seems to gain more and more inexperienced and/or lazy programmers, proper integration into the OS X framework environment seems to get worse and worse. That includes code from Apple. Given the extremely sharp decline in Apple's software quality over the last couple of years across all of their platforms, it's currently rather hard to recommend any of it. Probably needs to be filed under "a very good idea, destroyed by the incompetence of the modern software industry".
You realise there are three pages to that list, right? And you realise that the Galaxy Tab has the same problems with mysteriously cloned icon styles and colours as the Galaxy S? And you did get to the packaging bit on the third page, right? Right?
For the hard of thinking: http://peanutbuttereggdirt.com/e/custom/Apple-vs-Samsung-3-Package-Design.html
Yet your nonsense gets scored 2, while I'm modded to zero, troll. Apparently it isn't Apple with the reality distortion field, it's Slashdot. Once again, moral issues aside the fact is that a court of law found in Apple's favour and ruled in favour again on appeal. Only the 10.1N - the redesigned version - has not been blocked, when Apple were asshats and tried to block that too.
No; it wasn't about a round cornered rectangle. It was the shape, and the materials, and the colour scheme of the device; and the arrangement, colour and design of the icons; and the style of the packaging; and a whole lot more besides, all in one go.
People keep talking about the LG smartphone that predated iPhone by a month to "prove" that Apple copied LG. Yet LG's icons were minimalistic and monochrome, quite unlike Apple's. And that matters because it is all part of the court case; it was about all of these points taken as a whole. We look at Samsung's earlier F700 smartphone and see a grid of icons in black/white outline minimalist style, just like LG... Suspiciously similar one might say. Then iPhone comes along with full colour, glossy icons - e.g. green with an old-school style phone handset for Call; purple with two joined eighth notes for music; that kind of thing. And lo, the next thing you know, Samsung's phones suddenly have the same thing.
For example: Green with an old school handset for call. Purple with two joined eighth notes for music. Not black and white / minimalist, or a single colour theme across all icons. Not an icon representing, say, the smartphone itself for 'call' - their old F700 did that, but suddenly it's an old school handset post-iPhone - or a picture of a person with lines radiating out as if shouting; or a bazllion other icon designs that have existed over the years Not a single note, or a different note type for music. They even changed from the first note being higher pitched than the second in the F700, to the first note being lower pitched, which just happens to be the same as the iPhone. Suddenly, Samsung's using the same icons and even the same damned colours as Apple were - they even had to redesign the standard Android icons to do it. Default Android 2.0: Blue phone icon, old-school handset, pointing down and to the right. iPhone: Green, old-school handset pointing up and to the right. Samsung: Green, up and to the right. Android music icon: A speaker with a treble clef in a sort of 3D style. iPhone and Samsung: Purple, musical notes, as discussed. Why? Why did Samsung feel the need to redesign the icons this way? Was this all just by random chance and accident on Samsung's part?
So it's not just about a round cornered rectangle, or a grid of icons. As often pointed out, things like the Palm Pilot (and the Newton!) did that kind of launcher style years and years ago. But not with so many near-identical icons just appearing "by accident", to the point where a casual non-geek shopper might well mistake one device for the other. Regardless of Apple's moral obligations - which are a different matter entirely - legally it was clear. They won. The 10.1 was blocked. The judgement was upheld on appeal. Samsung redesigned the device and, even if the box and the icons were just the same, that was enough for it to no longer infringe on all of the points in the trade dress suit when taken together, so the 10.1N couldn't be blocked.
According to the court, legally - if not morally - Apple were right and Samsung were wrong. Samsung had to change their design. Apple tried again (definitely gaining asshat points) but failed, because now, Samsung had changed the design enough to be legally in the clear.
I'm not saying I agree with Apple, just that I'm tired of the inane tirades. Samsung are apparently saints, with no prior history of ripping off other people's products at all and want to hand out rainbows and unicorns to everyone. Apple are clearly evil money grabbing tyrants who eat babies. It's just ridiculous. Both are enormous capitalist corporate entities with shareholders and a legal imperative to make as much money as possible in any way they can get away with. Neither are saints.
Anyway, this isn't about one company making a product with the basic form. Or same basic colour. Or having icons that just happen to use the same colours and styles. Or having very similar packaging. It is, amongst other things, a trade dress suit concerning a company that simultaneously introduced products that did all of those things at once and did so after a very similar looking product line became a success.
People sometimes say "but how different could it look?" - which just goes to show how deeply Apple have become embedded in the public psyche! We apparently can't even imagine how a tablet or smartphone might differ. How sad. I like the link I posted because it shows some examples of just precisely how they could differ! For that matter, so does Windows Phone 7 - a genuinely different take on a smartphone GUI.
Personally I much prefer innovation to imitation.
Apple might be wrong to pursue the action on several levels (for one thing, it seems to have raised the public profile of the products from Samsung and may have done Samsung more good than harm!). But the court agreed with them and that wasn't a bunch of armchair lawyers on an internet forum, that was a collection of professional lawyers (on both sides) and a courtroom of other skilled professionals who came to the conclusion that Apple had a case, so they blocked the 10.1. But not the 10.1N, because it was judged that this product differed sufficiently.
Morally right? Very questionable. Legally right? A judgement was made and upheld on subsequent appeal.
Moral rights versus legal rights are very different questions. Sadly much of the coverage of the Apple/Samsung spat on SlashDot seems to conflate the two issues. Evil Apple, suing Samsung? Legally, the court thought it was Samsung who were in the wrong.
This tired old rounded corners whine again?
It's about much, much more than that: http://peanutbuttereggdirt.com/e/custom/Apple-vs-Samsung-1-Hardware-Design.html
2009: Your article talks about people being able to run the app still. The app which therefore hasn't been remote wiped. It doesn't work because the head-end it talks to was taken down. That was owned and run by the app vendor, not Apple. This is clearly not remote-kill; this is the risk of any head-end reliant app from any vendor anywhere. See also: http://www.pcworld.com/article/167383/update_apple_pulls_hottest_girls_porn_app_from_itunes.html?tk=rel_news
2010: Note the "Update: No" in http://www.razorianfly.com/2010/07/08/did-apple-just-use-the-ios-kill-switch/
See? We can both cherry pick random unsubstantiated Google search results.
TTBOMK there has been not one single verified, independently documented, uncontested example of a remote-kill on iOS. Numerous apps have been pulled from the store, though.
This isn't a new idea, it's a "me too". What, suddenly nobody on /. has heard of Raspberry Pi?
http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=raspberry+pi
http://www.raspberrypi.org/
A 1.2GHz dual core CPU is all very nice, but you can run full-on Desktop Linux with considerably more frugal resources and produce a device that's considerably cheaper as a result. It seems bizarre to have over-specified the hardware and under-specified the software stack.
Completely agree. There are so many obtuse and confusing design decisions that it's hard to tell bugs from features. What a mess. The usual burden of Google nomenclature that I'm supposed to absorb is annoying too. Streams, sparks, circles, hangouts... Just get over yourselves already and stop making up names for stuff! I suspect there's some strong North American tunnel vision contributing to the issue.
Another great example of the horrid GUI: A friend invited me to Google+ via Google+. I get that message via GMail. I cannot reply to it. I sign up and want to say "thanks". How do I send them a message that says "thanks"? It's a disaster area.
On the plus side, it's made me appreciate more of how Facebook's oft-maligned GUI is actually doing a surprisingly good job of presenting an awful lot of features and complexity in a relatively successful way.
I hope it improves. For now, I'm happy enough with Facebook, since I don't have some screwed up idea of compartmentalising all my friends into little cliques that are isolated from each other and since neither Google nor Facebook have a great track record with privacy, I'll stick with the provider that only has access to my profile - rather than (as many other commentators have pointed out) my profile, my e-mail, my search history and my purchase history.
But opening up a new window for each PDF you display really sucks as a user experience.
Having "defected" from Win XP to Mac OS X back when Vista was released, it's been many years since I used Windows or Linux for long periods of time, rather than temporarily in VMs for work purposes. Now and then, stories like this, or even entire pieces of technology like the renderer in question, remind me just how awful things still are on other platforms.
Another poster asked if the PDF renderer was integrated into the browser, rather than the OS. What a bizarre question. My PDF renderer is integrated into both, because it's part of an OS framework that understands how to render to and from a whole bunch of stuff, PDF included. Adobe's PDF reader is not installed, has never been installed and will never be installed. PDF is just another datatype that the OS already understands.
I can open a PDF in the same window or a new window if I want, or download it directly, or open it into a new tab, just in the same way as I can open any link in the same window, a new window, a tab, or download it - the right-click / Ctrl+Click context menu. There's nothing special going on. It's just another resource that my browser can handle. Quite why other browsers and operating systems insist upon treating PDFs as some incredibly hard, exotic, special and magical thing that must be treated differently from other page content in this day and age is beyond me.
It's not a kludge, it's not a bodged add-on, it's an extensible, intelligent, well integrated piece of technology that's part of a wider architecture that makes more sense than any other OS architecture I've seen above kernel level. It goes hand in hand with other excellent ideas like Core Audio, Core MIDI, Core Image, Core Animation and Core Data. It's one of many technical reasons why I chose Mac OS X - not some turtleneck wearing barely-existent clichéd stereotype of a technologically illiterate individual who doesn't know better. I made an informed choice based on the technology, despite my dislike then and dislike to this day of the company that makes it; a computer is a tool, not a religion.
I can see why this JS renderer is needed, even though it'll make the web worse for Mac users by making their PDF experience suck more - non-integrated, slow, PDF trapped in the page by the JS renderer... But it's necessary for all the other operating systems or browsers that think PDF is just Too Hard. While we can all laugh at Microsoft's ineptitude, the open source community hasn't managed to get this kind of architecture level stuff sorted out across Linux distributions either, so Mac OS X is your only mainstream alternative. And that's really quite sad.
OS X can be navigated entirely using the keyboard.
System Preferences -> Universal Access -> Mouse Keys: On
I wonder how many people know their phone is reporting this activity back to Motorola.
Amen. Amazing how the vast majority of comments here have skipped right over that.
If TFA is accurate, Motorola Android phones run software that tracks every application you use, the resource consumption and how long you use it for. It's all sent back to Motorola for analysis and the information is linked to specific phones so that Motorola can (in future) send messages back.
When people "discovered" the location database cache in the iPhone, they went crazy at Apple. Here we have Motorola tracking in great detail every single thing you do on your phone, with that information collected, collated, processed and stored, all of it linked to individual phones - and nobody seems to even raise an eyebrow?
So the consensus seems to be that Apple has convinced its users that they can't get viruses and don't need anti-virus, which is bad.
In fact, these users are apparently so convinced that they don't need anti-virus and can't get a virus, that the minute a web page tells them they do have a virus (which they believe they can't get), they download the fake anti-virus package (possibly paying for it first even though they believe they don't need it), double-click on the installer, click on "OK" to get past the "this may be malware" warning, click through the installer prompts and finally type in the administrator account user name and password to allow installation to proceed. You know, proceed to install that anti-virus package that Apple, being evil, convinced them they didn't need to install.
Seriously, is this some kind of new low? Asserting that people are convinced they don't need anti-virus and that's why they're installing anti-virus? :-)
Apple are indeed *so* desperate to deny that anti-virus is needed that they allow Intego AntiVirus to be sold through the Mac App Store of all places. That app's description even has headlines warning about this particular trojan, so it's up to date.
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/virusbarrier-plus/id430337549
Two obvious suggestions:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/apple-adds-malware-blocker-in-snow-leopard/4104
Wrong. That may have been the case in America, but elsewhere in the world numerous alternative networking technologies were developed.
In Britain, Acorn developed Econet. It dates back to around 1981. This was eventually deployed in many schools, for example, as a school-wide network long before they moved over to Ethernet. My own (large) school had it and I even had fun writing a sort of simple e-mail like program on their BBCs that me and my friends used for a while. ISTR it was called AMP (Another Mail Program - classy name, eh? :-) )
That is startling!
Having read through the original article, all of its comments, the linked article on TRIM and performance degradation and the score-over-3 comments herein, I'm surprised that nobody has pointed to this:
http://www.osxbook.com/software/hfsdebug/fragmentation.html
The description of the mechanisms HFS+ uses to avoid fragmentation are reminiscent of TRIM's operation from the drive's perspective and the garbage collection scheme used in Samsung's ARM controller, assuming bit-tech.net's description of these is accurate. It therefore comes as little surprise to read anecdotes from numerous users with both factory and third party ("fast" / "non-Apple firmware") SSDs where little performance drop is seen in OS X, along with a series of tests showing similar results and importantly, so far, no anecdotes or test results showing the opposite.
The absence of claims of degrading SSDs under OS X is a surprise and suggests that there really is a performance advantage with SSDs and HFS+ where TRIM is not in use. Adopting TRIM support might improve matters further, of course.
The bit-tech.net tests did still have numerous annoying omissions; this doesn't invalidate them but it does leave questions hanging. It would have been worthwhile partitioning most of the factory drive for NTFS and re-testing under Boot Camp. It would have been even more worthwhile getting one of the SSDs which showed the worst non-TRIM "dirty" performance under Windows and testing that under Mac OS X; if this wasn't possible on the Air hardware for some reason, they could've done it on the Macbook Pro they used as an HDD baseline in the first series of tests.
BTW, Singh's OS X Internals is a great book if you want to learn more about the innermost parts of the OS.
...iMac makes no hard drive noise... Too quiet? An interesting complaint! If bouncing dock icons, launch animations, hourglass indicators and so-on aren't sufficient for you, install something like iStat Menus (donationware) so that your menu bar will tell you what the machine's doing at any given time. Personally, I prefer the peace and quiet.
...file sharing... System Preferences -> Sharing -> tick 'File Sharing' and follow the on-screen instructions. A pain to figure out? I think not.
...uninstall Garage Band et al... Drag the application to the trash. Really - that's it. That's all you do. If you're worried about run-time preferences files etc. being left behind, install a freeware solution like AppTrap to ask you if you want to tidy those up too.
...move windows between desktops... Spaces is new to OS X and rough in places. 10.5.3 promises some improvements; we'll see. In the mean time, to move windows between spaces, you jump out to the Spaces view (e.g. press F8) and drag them from one space to another, or start a drag on the window title bar (click&hold) and activate a space-change keyboard shortcut (finger gymnastics ahoy). There isn't a way involving, say, some title bar menu or similar - and that's lame.
...third party software to have an automatically changing desktop wallpaper. System Preferences -> Desktop & Screen Saver / Desktop tab -> Tick the 'Change picture' checkbox and select the rate of change from the pulldown menu.
...drag windows around by alt-clicking... No, though there are all sorts of 3rd party extensions for this and the behaviour you describe is specific to the window manager you're used to under Linux; plenty others don't do it. You can at least press F8 and move the window within the Spaces overview.I've not found the need to drag windows from odd corners. My guess is that you're used to window managers which let windows obscure one another (raise on focus) but don't provide an easy way to get at the windows underneath, so you use alt+click on a protruding bit of window to get around that. MacOS has a solution I find much better, but that's strictly IMHO and it took me a while to start using it - get used to Expose on F9 and F10.
Overall I prefer a window manager with a simple 'send to back' icon and no forced raising, because I grew up with RISC OS and I'm used to using windows that way, but such beasts are few and far between.
All that I am saying is that if I, a power user of several decades, couldn't figure out how to do it over the last year it didn't "just work.@ I'd never used OS X in my life prior to acquiring a Macbook and it didn't take me more than 5 minutes to figure out where the wallpaper changer is, but I guess one man's obvious is another man's obscureUltimately, if you want an OS to work the same as Linux with your preferred window manager, then you may as well just run that. It's a lot cheaper.
256kbps listening tests are not really useful in this context. The Sony device has a small hard disc drive, but claims to be able to store more songs than an iPod because the Atrac3Plus compression allows much lower bitrates for equivalent quality (they claim 13,000 songs on the 20GB HDD, which means they'll be calculating based on the lowest standard Atrac bitrate, IIRC about 44kbps).
;-)
We should really be concentrating on whether circa-44kbps Atrac3Plus is better or worse than AAC, MP3 or Ogg Vorbis at that bitrate, if we're to take Sony at their word on capacity. I mention Vorbis as this player is not just competing against the iPod - it competes against devices like the Rio Karma [1] and Neuros players too.
A codec showing itself to be almost transparent at 256kbps is hardly cutting edge in this day and age - even MP3 would achieve this as far as most listeners are concerned. Having tried the double blind testing software from the Hydrogen Audio tests, I'm also fairly confident of their listening test results.
[1] (BTW, I'm biased; I went for a Karma. Great so far, just waiting for the HDD to die
So nice idea though it might be, we won't all be running on a countrywide fast fibre network at all.
Anyway, if you're supposed to just be able to plug a computer straight into the hole in the wall and get broadband access, that means (1) "wild" internet traffic must be present on the network, so it's not some closed, safe, virus-free thing, (2) bandwidth for VOIP will be reduced if I'm using the same connection for other data, and therefore (3) unless there's some remarkable new QOS stuff handling all of those disparate comms protocols being carried over the grand new TCP/IP network, it simply won't work properly.
It's right in line with the IT industry as a whole's approach to upgrades, mind you: make it bigger than it used to be, more complex than it used to be, slower than it used to be, and less reliable than it used to be. Can't wait ;)
That'll teach me to try and expand acronyms for people... ;)
This isn't done in many mass market devices because the cost of extra Flash or a mask ROM is relatively large compared to other components. Larger companies are often ecstatic if they find they can shave off 1 cent from the Balance Of Materials because they're anticipating unit sales in 6 or 7 figure quantities. That 1 cent multiplies up into large chunks of cash. Adding extra ROM or Flash chips, with costs in the dollar range, is not acceptable. Factor in the development and testing cost for the exta software and things get even worse. So, however technically sound the idea might be, an economic argument often wins out.
A final consideration is that device copying is rife, particularly in the far East; some companies go to extraordinary measures to try to protect their software and hardware designs from being cloned. The more devices or device partitions you have, the more points of attack you potentially present for someone intending to break into the physical hardware and the software of the unit.