I really thought all these big companies, finance guys had a better thinking/logic than our average "OMG Steve is dying!!!!" Web 2.0 guy.
Of course, when a financial news legend like CNBC has become a news outlet for semi-trolling mac blogs or nameless sources, it will happen. What happened to fact checking etc.?
It is like, 32.000 employees of Apple are there to make coffee to Steve Jobs while he writes OS X 10.6 and iLife 10 (X?) on XCode and design a new product on AutoCAD:)
Why don't they ship plugins for OS X XCode, MS Visual Studio along with that IDE? Portable Developers doesn't really like Eclipse for some reason as far as I have seen. People loved XCode for developing on iPhone for example and still there are Windows developers asking for MS Visual Studio support.
Is it really hard to make XCode/Visual Studio support?
Lets not forget that Adobe giant's Air framework and Flash 3 lite (free,installable) will make to all smart handsets one day. What will Palm only code do when it happens?
Air works offline, built on the frameworks web developers really know about and will have a gigantic userbase if Adobe really learned their lesson. Java is going to that point too.
If all industry decided on one standard, widgets have huge potential but what will a developer code for? Opera 9.5 Mobile? iPhone? Yahoo? Nokia? Here comes Palm now with another spec.
Well my Sony Ericsson P1i does have a very good working (benchmarked) OpenGL ES 1.1 but only some game programmers (not more than 2-3) and Opera 9.5 beta folks used it. Thing works great but somehow nobody used it.
What you should wonder these days in light of iPhone is, will Developers make use of it? Will they trust to Palm?
As a smart phone user, I am watching the Developer tools for a planned device way more than I used to do after iPhone. If I planned to buy Palm, I would really watch how they treat developers, what developers think of them etc.
Unanswered and legitimate posts staying on SE UIQ3 developer forum for months explains recent crash of UIQ3 way better than media.
I bet Sony Experia X1 does beat Nokia, iPhone, Palm in hardware specs but we don't even hear about it.
If you have any kind of smart phone, camera, video camera you will be formatting it with whatever vendor decides.
For years, I keep wondering why the hell Nokia uses FAT on internal boot drive of Symbian. I understand the external (SD) but can't understand the internal. They may have evil reasons (iTunes,App Store) but one of the outstanding features of iPhone/iPod Touch is the use of a modern filesystem such as HFS+. Unless you really push so hard, it doesn't break.
They should sit and decide on a native, optimised and neutral format first. All the SD/MMC/Memory Stick guys. It is getting really pathetic.
Well, it could happen if Sun was a consumer friendly company who would sit and write ZFS read/write driver _and_ get that WHQL etc. certificate, convince both Sony and Panasonic guys to use it and demo them Apple like idea of putting a small FAT16 partition which does auto install/update Windows ZFS driver.
They sure know FAT is junk but they can't get rid of it because they want their consumers see the memory card/camera on Windows/OSX desktop right after plugging it. Or consumer heads to their service centre.
So the most precious data of consumers, family photos etc. are stored in a format which even MS does everything to stay away. Lets not forget the "NTFS uses too much CPU" lobby out there too. Now they call NTFS a CPU hog, imagine what will they say about ZFS?
HFSPlus has journaling as a plugin option. It doesn't have to have journaling unless you use hard links (currently only Apple uses them on time machine). Theoretically it is even possible to add journaling to FAT under OS X as journal is just a plain file which can be any place on disk.
Apple does do very interesting things while enhancing their HFS+ but are wise to keep backwards compatibility same time. You can read more at TN article at http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1150.html
The real option to get rid of FAT is really ext2 though. Completely open, vendor neutral and basic. It is not a real big deal to add something like Apple did, it has "install macos9 drivers" option on its disk utility. So, with a basic partition hack. one can put ext2 drivers to a FAT16 partition in the SD card.
As a smart phone user, one thing really bothers me is the use of FAT junk. Now with a 2TB max standard, they still stick with exFAT, hack on hack on a thing that poor non techical users will put their private, non reproducible data.
I keep wondering how hard to remove that Intel GMA junk (or even soft enable-disable) and put a real GPU chip in it with a higher Mhz CPU.
It was very advanced topic back in time (PPC based/mot and IBM involved) but we all know the PC and Mini ATX stuff. The cases, chips, mainboards are all in end user market.
Back in time, it was "Stupid Freescale mainboard". Apple should be aware that we really know the x86 scene and there is no reason rather than incompetence not to ship a new Mini.
I think you were given a very badly infected "zombie" machines IP by your IP provider overnight.
If you give your IP to sites like http://http//www.completewhois.com or http://www.senderbase.org/ they may give very good clue since zombies mostly end up on such lists. Of course if you aren't victim of some sort of monopoly, it is best to find a better managed ISP with zero tolerance to both spammers and zombies on their subnet. Not every IP address/block is equal on web since the early dial up times. At one time, while I was using cable ISP, I had 5 kb/sec virus/worm traffic hitting me while I am using OS X. It really bugged me a lot and eventually sites like slashdot really went paranoid about my IP and I was disallowed from posting once.
"A leap second will be added to the clock at 12/31/2008 23:59:59 UTC tonight. Hopefully most IT folks will be otherwise occupied at that time and not focusing on their system clocks."
If you look at the reference URL you gave, it is actually AIX documentation. If they expect game developers code in mainframe or gigantic server style to get the power of a gaming chip, trouble begins right there.
To be more direct and give a clue about the true power of POWER family (which is at POWER6 level), the PPC 970, Apple G5 CPU is a POWER4 "light edition" chip. One can imagine how advanced POWER6 is.
I still think the issue is x86 (windows) compatibility, portable support and never to forget the lack of small time developer support from IBM as the reason of Apple's switch to Intel.
Programming issue as result of development tools? I am a Symbian user since Nokia 7650 (first S60) and I keep getting amazed at the developers love for iPhone, how a very advanced application like Fring can ship in matter of months without any kind of help from Apple and how wisely OpenGL (ES) acceleration was used while it is ignored on my poor UIQ3 Sony Ericsson P1i for years until Opera 9.5 beta.
People say SSE could just reach the point of Altivec after new Xeons and yet as a G5 owner, I kept wondering why Altivec was not used many times even by Apple themselves in certain parts. Or SMP (I got Quad G5) is just to be seen in full potential after OS X Leopard. It has easy answer. Intel and AMD does offer great support to developers, the entire gnu compiler family and OS developers.
If it is a programming issue and both IBM and Sony involved, I would look to Development tools. Somehow I suspect the development tools and support for them offered way better on XBox 360. Compare the Symbian UIQ3 market to way more premature (in terms of coding/ui) Nokia S60 and finally compare Symbian S60 to iPhone. Development tools really makes huge difference and Sony is a hardware company, IBM doesn't really have clue about end user etc.
Leopard (or any OS X) is really different from Windows in sense of programming. Even Firefox people which uses multi OS frameworks are forced to ship FF 3 as 10.4+. Opera uses a totally different concept starting with Trolltech Qt framework so they are happily shipping to 10.3.+ but if you notice, they had to drop pre 10.3.x support.
That is the thing which pushes Apple ahead of everyone but same time creating problems in enterprise/business World. Of course nothing says a goodly written application without any massive deep level hacks won't run in the future. E.g. if you just change the new mail sound of it (which is a bit hack), even Eudora will work under Leopard.
You would be surprised how many users lost their trust to MS because of that piece of junk named "WGA Check" installed without their consent and removed that from their start menu even. Well, there is still old school microsoft.com/ie option of course but MS stupidly pushes IE 8 on that page so it really confuses users.
Still, it is really unethical to push your own browser instead of telling them to update their system browser which would eradicate many of security risks.
MS Hotmail still displays "Update to MS IE for more features" or something like that to OS X Leopard Safari users. That is the latest Safari for you. I saw it when my friend checks his hotmail on my OS X and asked him to move to Yahoo mail.
As long as they give respect to my privacy and general end users privacy, I will be away from Google products as long as possible.
If IE did half of the things Google Toolbar or Google Chrome are possible to do, there would be lawsuits against MS. I am saying "possible", they don't come with such settings as default.
I also think Google Chrome shipped because the huge community of Firefox wouldn't allow such possibilities under their browser whether they donate money or not.
They should suggest to upgrade their default OS browser (Safari for OS X, IE 7 for Win) and put Safari, Firefox to list of alternatives with Chrome as last option. That is what ethics require.
Also if you keep IE 6 on your machine while IE 7 exists as a free update and use Firefox,Chrome, Safari you are still under big risk. Nobody has option to keep insecure default browser on their system since that is what 3rd party apps and system parts use. It is same deal on OS X. Whether use it or not, keep Safari (so the Webkit) up to date.
If Slashdot is broken under IE 7 (or even 8), it is IE 6's fault. How? The sites wrote thousands or even tens of thousands of hacks to make sure their content and advertisers content aren't broken under IE 6 and they are just slowly removing most of the part for more-sane-browser IE 7.
We speak about a browser needing a massive CSS hack just to display transparent PNG.
I am on OS X but I can easily guess the reason if Slashdot gets broken under IE 7. While on it, the entire site code is open at http://sourceforge.net/projects/slashcode/ . When Opera lost its mind with Slashdot after an update, that was the first place I went. It turned out to be an Opera bug (not security related) and got fixed by the Opera coders.
To this date, except I was in some very alpha tests, I didn't hear a single handheld device simply dying or refusing to boot. I speak about the various el cheapo music players, media players, gsm "dumb" phones, smart phones.
Don't blame people if they get interested or joke about it. Media players are known to be very stable. A bit dumb but stable.
The real viruses were famous for not showing off until the trigger date and do their evil job which generally is wiping the entire drive, making system unbootable etc.
When I read "Microsoft" I remember them. I must be old fashioned. What if there is no show off this time? Like the CIH virus?
Slashdot Mirror
I really thought all these big companies, finance guys had a better thinking/logic than our average "OMG Steve is dying!!!!" Web 2.0 guy.
Of course, when a financial news legend like CNBC has become a news outlet for semi-trolling mac blogs or nameless sources, it will happen. What happened to fact checking etc.?
It is like, 32.000 employees of Apple are there to make coffee to Steve Jobs while he writes OS X 10.6 and iLife 10 (X?) on XCode and design a new product on AutoCAD :)
You know, when you sell them, you sell them to someone buying them. Think a second about why that guy/institution buys that stock of yours.
What are the chances of taking a totally dead big company with no future products in hand and make it the Apple of today? :)
Browsing the Web archive, I have seen people seriously saying "Apple can't go chapter 11 since they can't afford it."
Why don't they ship plugins for OS X XCode, MS Visual Studio along with that IDE? Portable Developers doesn't really like Eclipse for some reason as far as I have seen. People loved XCode for developing on iPhone for example and still there are Windows developers asking for MS Visual Studio support.
Is it really hard to make XCode/Visual Studio support?
Lets not forget that Adobe giant's Air framework and Flash 3 lite (free,installable) will make to all smart handsets one day. What will Palm only code do when it happens?
Air works offline, built on the frameworks web developers really know about and will have a gigantic userbase if Adobe really learned their lesson. Java is going to that point too.
If all industry decided on one standard, widgets have huge potential but what will a developer code for? Opera 9.5 Mobile? iPhone? Yahoo? Nokia? Here comes Palm now with another spec.
Well my Sony Ericsson P1i does have a very good working (benchmarked) OpenGL ES 1.1 but only some game programmers (not more than 2-3) and Opera 9.5 beta folks used it. Thing works great but somehow nobody used it.
What you should wonder these days in light of iPhone is, will Developers make use of it? Will they trust to Palm?
As a smart phone user, I am watching the Developer tools for a planned device way more than I used to do after iPhone. If I planned to buy Palm, I would really watch how they treat developers, what developers think of them etc.
Unanswered and legitimate posts staying on SE UIQ3 developer forum for months explains recent crash of UIQ3 way better than media.
I bet Sony Experia X1 does beat Nokia, iPhone, Palm in hardware specs but we don't even hear about it.
PowerVR stuff can be called GPU, not? My SE P1i has PowerVR chip to do 3d.
If you have any kind of smart phone, camera, video camera you will be formatting it with whatever vendor decides.
For years, I keep wondering why the hell Nokia uses FAT on internal boot drive of Symbian. I understand the external (SD) but can't understand the internal. They may have evil reasons (iTunes,App Store) but one of the outstanding features of iPhone/iPod Touch is the use of a modern filesystem such as HFS+. Unless you really push so hard, it doesn't break.
They should sit and decide on a native, optimised and neutral format first. All the SD/MMC/Memory Stick guys. It is getting really pathetic.
Well, it could happen if Sun was a consumer friendly company who would sit and write ZFS read/write driver _and_ get that WHQL etc. certificate, convince both Sony and Panasonic guys to use it and demo them Apple like idea of putting a small FAT16 partition which does auto install/update Windows ZFS driver.
They sure know FAT is junk but they can't get rid of it because they want their consumers see the memory card/camera on Windows/OSX desktop right after plugging it. Or consumer heads to their service centre.
So the most precious data of consumers, family photos etc. are stored in a format which even MS does everything to stay away. Lets not forget the "NTFS uses too much CPU" lobby out there too. Now they call NTFS a CPU hog, imagine what will they say about ZFS?
HFSPlus has journaling as a plugin option. It doesn't have to have journaling unless you use hard links (currently only Apple uses them on time machine). Theoretically it is even possible to add journaling to FAT under OS X as journal is just a plain file which can be any place on disk.
Apple does do very interesting things while enhancing their HFS+ but are wise to keep backwards compatibility same time. You can read more at TN article at http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1150.html
The real option to get rid of FAT is really ext2 though. Completely open, vendor neutral and basic. It is not a real big deal to add something like Apple did, it has "install macos9 drivers" option on its disk utility. So, with a basic partition hack. one can put ext2 drivers to a FAT16 partition in the SD card.
As a smart phone user, one thing really bothers me is the use of FAT junk. Now with a 2TB max standard, they still stick with exFAT, hack on hack on a thing that poor non techical users will put their private, non reproducible data.
I keep wondering how hard to remove that Intel GMA junk (or even soft enable-disable) and put a real GPU chip in it with a higher Mhz CPU.
It was very advanced topic back in time (PPC based/mot and IBM involved) but we all know the PC and Mini ATX stuff. The cases, chips, mainboards are all in end user market.
Back in time, it was "Stupid Freescale mainboard". Apple should be aware that we really know the x86 scene and there is no reason rather than incompetence not to ship a new Mini.
I think you were given a very badly infected "zombie" machines IP by your IP provider overnight.
If you give your IP to sites like http://http//www.completewhois.com or http://www.senderbase.org/ they may give very good clue since zombies mostly end up on such lists. Of course if you aren't victim of some sort of monopoly, it is best to find a better managed ISP with zero tolerance to both spammers and zombies on their subnet. Not every IP address/block is equal on web since the early dial up times. At one time, while I was using cable ISP, I had 5 kb/sec virus/worm traffic hitting me while I am using OS X. It really bugged me a lot and eventually sites like slashdot really went paranoid about my IP and I was disallowed from posting once.
http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=5602
"A leap second will be added to the clock at 12/31/2008 23:59:59 UTC tonight.
Hopefully most IT folks will be otherwise occupied at that time and not focusing on their system clocks."
If you look at the reference URL you gave, it is actually AIX documentation. If they expect game developers code in mainframe or gigantic server style to get the power of a gaming chip, trouble begins right there.
To be more direct and give a clue about the true power of POWER family (which is at POWER6 level), the PPC 970, Apple G5 CPU is a POWER4 "light edition" chip. One can imagine how advanced POWER6 is.
I still think the issue is x86 (windows) compatibility, portable support and never to forget the lack of small time developer support from IBM as the reason of Apple's switch to Intel.
Programming issue as result of development tools? I am a Symbian user since Nokia 7650 (first S60) and I keep getting amazed at the developers love for iPhone, how a very advanced application like Fring can ship in matter of months without any kind of help from Apple and how wisely OpenGL (ES) acceleration was used while it is ignored on my poor UIQ3 Sony Ericsson P1i for years until Opera 9.5 beta.
People say SSE could just reach the point of Altivec after new Xeons and yet as a G5 owner, I kept wondering why Altivec was not used many times even by Apple themselves in certain parts. Or SMP (I got Quad G5) is just to be seen in full potential after OS X Leopard. It has easy answer. Intel and AMD does offer great support to developers, the entire gnu compiler family and OS developers.
If it is a programming issue and both IBM and Sony involved, I would look to Development tools. Somehow I suspect the development tools and support for them offered way better on XBox 360. Compare the Symbian UIQ3 market to way more premature (in terms of coding/ui) Nokia S60 and finally compare Symbian S60 to iPhone. Development tools really makes huge difference and Sony is a hardware company, IBM doesn't really have clue about end user etc.
Leopard (or any OS X) is really different from Windows in sense of programming. Even Firefox people which uses multi OS frameworks are forced to ship FF 3 as 10.4+. Opera uses a totally different concept starting with Trolltech Qt framework so they are happily shipping to 10.3.+ but if you notice, they had to drop pre 10.3.x support.
That is the thing which pushes Apple ahead of everyone but same time creating problems in enterprise/business World. Of course nothing says a goodly written application without any massive deep level hacks won't run in the future. E.g. if you just change the new mail sound of it (which is a bit hack), even Eudora will work under Leopard.
Isn't IE 7 100% backwards compatible with IE 6 on Intranet? What happened to legendary backwards support of MS which also kills them?
Well of course IBM admins know couple of things :) so that is why I got confused now.
You would be surprised how many users lost their trust to MS because of that piece of junk named "WGA Check" installed without their consent and removed that from their start menu even. Well, there is still old school microsoft.com/ie option of course but MS stupidly pushes IE 8 on that page so it really confuses users.
Still, it is really unethical to push your own browser instead of telling them to update their system browser which would eradicate many of security risks.
MS Hotmail still displays "Update to MS IE for more features" or something like that to OS X Leopard Safari users. That is the latest Safari for you. I saw it when my friend checks his hotmail on my OS X and asked him to move to Yahoo mail.
As long as they give respect to my privacy and general end users privacy, I will be away from Google products as long as possible.
If IE did half of the things Google Toolbar or Google Chrome are possible to do, there would be lawsuits against MS. I am saying "possible", they don't come with such settings as default.
I also think Google Chrome shipped because the huge community of Firefox wouldn't allow such possibilities under their browser whether they donate money or not.
They should suggest to upgrade their default OS browser (Safari for OS X, IE 7 for Win) and put Safari, Firefox to list of alternatives with Chrome as last option. That is what ethics require.
Also if you keep IE 6 on your machine while IE 7 exists as a free update and use Firefox,Chrome, Safari you are still under big risk. Nobody has option to keep insecure default browser on their system since that is what 3rd party apps and system parts use. It is same deal on OS X. Whether use it or not, keep Safari (so the Webkit) up to date.
If Slashdot is broken under IE 7 (or even 8), it is IE 6's fault. How? The sites wrote thousands or even tens of thousands of hacks to make sure their content and advertisers content aren't broken under IE 6 and they are just slowly removing most of the part for more-sane-browser IE 7.
We speak about a browser needing a massive CSS hack just to display transparent PNG.
I am on OS X but I can easily guess the reason if Slashdot gets broken under IE 7. While on it, the entire site code is open at http://sourceforge.net/projects/slashcode/ . When Opera lost its mind with Slashdot after an update, that was the first place I went. It turned out to be an Opera bug (not security related) and got fixed by the Opera coders.
To this date, except I was in some very alpha tests, I didn't hear a single handheld device simply dying or refusing to boot. I speak about the various el cheapo music players, media players, gsm "dumb" phones, smart phones.
Don't blame people if they get interested or joke about it. Media players are known to be very stable. A bit dumb but stable.
The real viruses were famous for not showing off until the trigger date and do their evil job which generally is wiping the entire drive, making system unbootable etc.
When I read "Microsoft" I remember them. I must be old fashioned. What if there is no show off this time? Like the CIH virus?