when the iPhone4S eventually came, it came late and was a major disappointment
Er, no. Firstly, it wasn't late. Apple don't announce far-off release dates for the iPhone. People speculated that Apple would release June-July time, but that speculation was wrong. That's not the same thing as "it came late".
Secondly, it wasn't a disappointment. They are selling them as fast as they can make them. The trouble is that supposed "analysts" were trumpeting the iPhone 5 that could grant wishes and came with a free unicorn. Those analysts had to turn around and call it a disappointment to avoid saving face. It happens for every Apple product launch. They sold 4 million in their first three days on sale. In what world is that a disappointment?
Similarly, iOS 5 brought nothing new to the table, and contained mostly updates that simply copied long held Android features.
iOS 5 had Newsstand, which gets Apple a piece of the magazine industry, iCloud, which nets them subscription fees and improves apps across the board, and it can now be used without any computer at all, which appeals to the people who want a phone but don't care about computers. I have an Android phone, and that's not true for any of it (it's supposed to be usable without a computer, but after about six months, an update arrived that could only be installed through Windows).
Many fanboys will tell you it's different, many will tell you that I'm wrong to suggest Apple product X wasn't lacklustre as I've claimed - that's fine, but I'm merely talking from a point of view of the markets
The market has spoken and the market adores the iPhone 4S. Sales are fantastic and share price is steadily rising. You don't have to be a fanboy to see that.
No, that's not what I said. How about you try to discuss things rationally instead of jumping at the opportunity to misinterpret my comment in a stupid way?
When I can search for 4 different unrelated terms and have the same site show up in each, you know that SEO is only a scumbags game.
I know. There's this one scumbag SEO company that comes up for an absolute load of unrelated terms, it's that obvious, I don't know why Google haven't blacklisted them yet. The SEO company even has a silly name, Wiki something I think.
I can imagine the SEO service sellers being delighted about this, new customers will still be buying their services to gain ranks and since old approaches will now be penalised they can start to sell again to those who'd bought their services before the change.
Companies that provide SEO tend to work for a monthly retainer, not as one-off payments. I doubt many of them will like this because it eliminates one of the things that differentiates their service from simply "build a good site and add good content". The people who don't "over-optimise" make more money by simply doing a good job of building websites, and they have no need to define themselves as SEO companies.
It's quite apparent that these companies don't want to be DDoSed yet anonymous don't respect those wishes.
Yes, and companies don't like to be picketed either. The point at which it becomes a crime in the real world is when you ask the person to leave your property and they don't. These companies have the exact same facility available to them - they can "ask the DDoSers to leave" by giving them a 403. Typically, they don't, they just keep giving out 200s, which is the equivalent of saying "yes you can stay".
Women enter supermarkets near where I live wearing niqabs all the time. Plenty of anti-scientology protests have involved people wearing masks.
and all of those people can be arrested for trespassing or committing any other crime. Wearing a mask doesn't remove your accountability.
Nor does it automatically become a crime just because you are anonymous. It becomes a crime when you are asked to leave private property and you don't. This is true regardless of whether you are wearing a mask or not.
Because the Supermarket can ask you to leave and you can be arrested and charged with a crime for failing to comply.
This is also true for websites. When an HTTP client requests a resource from a server, there are a number of responses it can give. The most usual is 200, which basically means "Okay, here's the content". There are other responses the server could give, such as 403, which basically means "No you can't have it and stop asking". Using your analogy, the server can "ask them to leave" at any time by responding with a 403.
Also you can't do it anonymously without consequence.
Women enter supermarkets near where I live wearing niqabs all the time. Plenty of anti-scientology protests have involved people wearing masks.
Grandparent is correct, what you are describing is only one of the points TMM makes. It also argues that development doesn't scale linearly with manpower. As you add more people to a project, the communication overhead goes up so you get diminishing returns with each additional developer. You can mitigate this to some degree by splitting efforts into multiple, loosely coupled projects, but the book doesn't really go into that in detail, probably because those kinds of practices weren't established at the time.
I think I recall Stallman likening DDoS to a picketing. There do seem to be parallels. I wonder what the ethical and practical implications would be if there were a tool that requested a web page over and over again that only worked when it was visible on screen, only ran one instance per computer, and prompted the user every five minutes? As far as I can tell, that would be as close to an equivalent to a picketing as you could manage online, and it would represent the people who are willing to get involved rather than the computer time people are willing to throw at it. It's true that such a tool would be easily hacked to get around its limitations, however it would be easier to use an illegitimate DDoS tool instead if that's what you wanted.
It's not really a good example. Mother Theresa is not a case of a minority hating a saint, it's a case of somebody totally undeserving that simply has good PR. She did things like deliberately withholding pain medication from people she was supposedly helping because she thought it brought them closer to Jesus. The money she received to help people wasn't spent improving their conditions, they were neglected and died in squalor.
No, they aren't. Attachments are multipart/related, HTML email is multipart/alternative. Both are implemented with MIME, but it's wrong to say that HTML emails are just attachments.
Are you kidding? I'm sure there are some people who would use a tablet as a phone, but do you really think there are enough to worry Apple? I'm pretty sure most iPhone owners aren't going to want to walk around with their iPad all day so that they can receive calls. Mobile phones can fit in your pocket. You can carry them round with you all day long without even thinking about it. That's pretty much the entire point of them. You can't get that from a tablet.
The first drafts for Back to the Future had a fridge for a time machine, but it was changed to a car because they were worried about kids climbing into fridges.
And in the meantime, you've launched three more copies, because the computer didn't acknowledge your first attempt.
Sounds like a bug in your windowing system. On OS X, when you launch an application, the icon appears in the dock and bounces up and down until the application has finished launching. As I recall, similar things happen on Windows, GNOME and KDE. Which system are you using that doesn't provide instant feedback upon launching an application?
Also provides diagnostic information as to progress too
Diagnostic information should be provided when there's something to diagnose, not every time the application is launched. Diagnostic information is a debugging aid, not something to impress the end-user.
It is fairly surprising. There's no doubt Apple are prototyping such an iPad and that it will get here eventually, but even with this news, I'm still mildly skeptical Apple can pull it off for the iPad 3.
It does make things a lot easier for developers that it's an exact quadrupling of the screen resolution, but this comes at a penalty of having to push around four times as many pixels. Bear in mind that this resolution is larger than the resolution of any display Apple have ever shipped - and they are doing it on one of their least powerful devices.
It's not just the raw processing power either. It makes things easier for app producers in one way, but it makes it harder in another way. How do you suppose graphic designers are going to cope when they have to design content for screens charger than the computer they are designing on? How do you expect developers to work on laptops when they can only show a small section of the app at any one time?
Some of these things are of course solvable by increasing the resolution of the Mac displays as well. This is also on the cards, as evidenced by HiDPI artwork in the new Messages beta. But most of the current version of OS X isn't currently decked out for HiDPI yet.
There's also the cost consideration. This will raise the cost to produce iPads considerably. Why would Apple do that? iPad 2s are currently selling just about as fast as Apple can make them, and they are still vastly outselling the competition. Apple don't need to throw money away by reducing their margins yet. They can produce a slightly improved iPad 2S and still stay ahead of everybody else.
My guess would be that HiDPI Macs will be introduced alongside Mountain Lion as a flagship feature. Once that's seen some market penetration, they can introduce the iPad 4 or whatever with the tools in place to properly support them.
Why do you think that's a priority for Apple? The number of people who don't have an iPad is far greater than the number of people who do. The more people using an iPad of any version means more money for them through iTunes, the App Store, etc.
If you look at their historical behaviour, they tend to support devices for at least a couple of major iOS revisions. When the iPad 1 was first launched, it was running iOS 3.2. They released iOS 4.2 towards the end of the year, and they've not long released iOS 5.0. Presumably iOS 6 won't run on your iPad.
When iOS 6 is released, people with iPad 2s and 3s will upgrade. When enough of them have upgraded, developers will start to drop support for iOS 5.0. That's when it will start affecting you - there will be apps you won't be able to run, updates to your existing apps won't install, your options will slowly become more and more limited.
Apple also removes support for legacy versions of iOS from their SDK fairly quickly too, so when iOS 7 rolls out, all the developers that have been supporting you won't have the choice any more. At that point, which is probably 2-3 years away, you'll get very little out of the App Store, several of your existing apps will have stopped working, and you'll be eyeing up the iPad 4 or 5.
Apple's business model doesn't rely on people upgrading every year or two. It's true, vast numbers of people do so, but they can quite happily sell new devices to newcomers without relying on you upgrading.
This is another annoying grey area with Apple's rules. When you submit an app to the App Store, it asks you if you use encryption, and if you do, you have to have an export license from the USA government. I don't believe there's anything that specifically addresses SSL/TLS in Apple's documentation. If you contact Apple, they usually tell you that you need a license for it, even if you use the features built into iOS. If you don't contact Apple and say that you don't use encryption, sometimes you can get through the approval process. I think it's a case of the Apple employees who you contact playing it safe while reviewers can be a bit sloppy.
I've personally been involved with an app that transmits personal information including GPS coordinates, names and telephone numbers, and it does so without using SSL/TLS for precisely this reason - the company wanted to release as quickly as possible without waiting to get an export license. I didn't like that, but unfortunately, the decision was out of my hands.
I think the best thing Apple could do, assuming that there is no way around the law, is to make it more clear to developers that this is required in their rules, to automatically scan apps for SSL/TLS use to reject apps without a license consistently, and to reject apps that don't use SSL/TLS to transmit personal information.
There's a big difference between threats or statements that might endanger the safety of others and someone stating their feelings towards a religious figure.
Okay, so let's use an example other than that. The USA invented the concept of an illegal number.
I find it hard to believe they would do something as stupid as introducing a third chipset (Intel, A4/A5, ARM)
Apple didn't design the A4 from scratch. They licensed ARM. The A4 and A5 are ARM processors. What you are seeing is Apple ensuring that their own operating system runs on their own processors. Still sound stupid?
Famous Open Source project leadership is 99.9% male. It IS news, what other distro has woman leading?
Albinos are even rarer project leaders than women. If an albino happened to become project leader of a "famous" open source project, would you expect to see similar "Holy shit, an albino!" news stories with prominent mention of it in headlines? I don't think that would happen. Certainly in the comments, but not in the headline. This isn't just about how rare female project leaders are.
The Skype app crashes all the time, and it's almost always iOS's fault. If you go through the diagnostic logs, you'll see that almost every time that Skype "crashed" it's because it's either using "too much memory" or because it "didn't respond fast enough."
I wouldn't call that iOS' "fault". Mobile devices have very limited resources. This isn't like a desktop machine where you've got several gigabytes of memory to play with. If an application is badly behaved and it uses too much memory, that has an effect on the rest of the system. There's only so much memory to go around. Also, if using lots of memory becomes normalised, there's pressure to add more memory to newer models, which will result in lower battery life.
I'm an app developer, and if I ever see that one of my projects is killed for not responding fast enough, I know that there's something very, very wrong somewhere. Usually it's a sign that a junior developer decided to do something processor or network intensive synchronously on the main thread, which is a big mistake. You do what is necessary to get an interface up, and you push everything expensive into the background and update the UI when it finishes. There's no excuse for an application not responding quickly enough, it's easy to do.
If you really think Skype is not at fault, how do you explain the fact that it crashes all the time on other platforms as well?
iOS is very aggressive in killing misbehaving apps, while Android seems content to let them carry on until it simply can't continue. I wonder how much of the difference can be attributed to Android giving apps more leeway rather than a difference in app quality?
On a side note, that was a horribly written article. It sounded like somebody who wasn't familiar with technology was repeating something they didn't understand. GPS, cameras, and language support can crash apps? What?
Slashdot Mirror
Er, no. Firstly, it wasn't late. Apple don't announce far-off release dates for the iPhone. People speculated that Apple would release June-July time, but that speculation was wrong. That's not the same thing as "it came late".
Secondly, it wasn't a disappointment. They are selling them as fast as they can make them. The trouble is that supposed "analysts" were trumpeting the iPhone 5 that could grant wishes and came with a free unicorn. Those analysts had to turn around and call it a disappointment to avoid saving face. It happens for every Apple product launch. They sold 4 million in their first three days on sale. In what world is that a disappointment?
iOS 5 had Newsstand, which gets Apple a piece of the magazine industry, iCloud, which nets them subscription fees and improves apps across the board, and it can now be used without any computer at all, which appeals to the people who want a phone but don't care about computers. I have an Android phone, and that's not true for any of it (it's supposed to be usable without a computer, but after about six months, an update arrived that could only be installed through Windows).
The market has spoken and the market adores the iPhone 4S. Sales are fantastic and share price is steadily rising. You don't have to be a fanboy to see that.
No, that's not what I said. How about you try to discuss things rationally instead of jumping at the opportunity to misinterpret my comment in a stupid way?
I know. There's this one scumbag SEO company that comes up for an absolute load of unrelated terms, it's that obvious, I don't know why Google haven't blacklisted them yet. The SEO company even has a silly name, Wiki something I think.
Companies that provide SEO tend to work for a monthly retainer, not as one-off payments. I doubt many of them will like this because it eliminates one of the things that differentiates their service from simply "build a good site and add good content". The people who don't "over-optimise" make more money by simply doing a good job of building websites, and they have no need to define themselves as SEO companies.
Yes, and companies don't like to be picketed either. The point at which it becomes a crime in the real world is when you ask the person to leave your property and they don't. These companies have the exact same facility available to them - they can "ask the DDoSers to leave" by giving them a 403. Typically, they don't, they just keep giving out 200s, which is the equivalent of saying "yes you can stay".
Nor does it automatically become a crime just because you are anonymous. It becomes a crime when you are asked to leave private property and you don't. This is true regardless of whether you are wearing a mask or not.
This is also true for websites. When an HTTP client requests a resource from a server, there are a number of responses it can give. The most usual is 200, which basically means "Okay, here's the content". There are other responses the server could give, such as 403, which basically means "No you can't have it and stop asking". Using your analogy, the server can "ask them to leave" at any time by responding with a 403.
Women enter supermarkets near where I live wearing niqabs all the time. Plenty of anti-scientology protests have involved people wearing masks.
Grandparent is correct, what you are describing is only one of the points TMM makes. It also argues that development doesn't scale linearly with manpower. As you add more people to a project, the communication overhead goes up so you get diminishing returns with each additional developer. You can mitigate this to some degree by splitting efforts into multiple, loosely coupled projects, but the book doesn't really go into that in detail, probably because those kinds of practices weren't established at the time.
I think I recall Stallman likening DDoS to a picketing. There do seem to be parallels. I wonder what the ethical and practical implications would be if there were a tool that requested a web page over and over again that only worked when it was visible on screen, only ran one instance per computer, and prompted the user every five minutes? As far as I can tell, that would be as close to an equivalent to a picketing as you could manage online, and it would represent the people who are willing to get involved rather than the computer time people are willing to throw at it. It's true that such a tool would be easily hacked to get around its limitations, however it would be easier to use an illegitimate DDoS tool instead if that's what you wanted.
Yup. Government also produces the least buggy software. I believe NASA holds the record for fewest bugs per line of code.
It's not really a good example. Mother Theresa is not a case of a minority hating a saint, it's a case of somebody totally undeserving that simply has good PR. She did things like deliberately withholding pain medication from people she was supposedly helping because she thought it brought them closer to Jesus. The money she received to help people wasn't spent improving their conditions, they were neglected and died in squalor.
No, they aren't. Attachments are multipart/related, HTML email is multipart/alternative. Both are implemented with MIME, but it's wrong to say that HTML emails are just attachments.
Are you kidding? I'm sure there are some people who would use a tablet as a phone, but do you really think there are enough to worry Apple? I'm pretty sure most iPhone owners aren't going to want to walk around with their iPad all day so that they can receive calls. Mobile phones can fit in your pocket. You can carry them round with you all day long without even thinking about it. That's pretty much the entire point of them. You can't get that from a tablet.
Fox News went to court to fight for the right to legally lie.
The first drafts for Back to the Future had a fridge for a time machine, but it was changed to a car because they were worried about kids climbing into fridges.
Sounds like a bug in your windowing system. On OS X, when you launch an application, the icon appears in the dock and bounces up and down until the application has finished launching. As I recall, similar things happen on Windows, GNOME and KDE. Which system are you using that doesn't provide instant feedback upon launching an application?
Diagnostic information should be provided when there's something to diagnose, not every time the application is launched. Diagnostic information is a debugging aid, not something to impress the end-user.
It is fairly surprising. There's no doubt Apple are prototyping such an iPad and that it will get here eventually, but even with this news, I'm still mildly skeptical Apple can pull it off for the iPad 3.
It does make things a lot easier for developers that it's an exact quadrupling of the screen resolution, but this comes at a penalty of having to push around four times as many pixels. Bear in mind that this resolution is larger than the resolution of any display Apple have ever shipped - and they are doing it on one of their least powerful devices.
It's not just the raw processing power either. It makes things easier for app producers in one way, but it makes it harder in another way. How do you suppose graphic designers are going to cope when they have to design content for screens charger than the computer they are designing on? How do you expect developers to work on laptops when they can only show a small section of the app at any one time?
Some of these things are of course solvable by increasing the resolution of the Mac displays as well. This is also on the cards, as evidenced by HiDPI artwork in the new Messages beta. But most of the current version of OS X isn't currently decked out for HiDPI yet.
There's also the cost consideration. This will raise the cost to produce iPads considerably. Why would Apple do that? iPad 2s are currently selling just about as fast as Apple can make them, and they are still vastly outselling the competition. Apple don't need to throw money away by reducing their margins yet. They can produce a slightly improved iPad 2S and still stay ahead of everybody else.
My guess would be that HiDPI Macs will be introduced alongside Mountain Lion as a flagship feature. Once that's seen some market penetration, they can introduce the iPad 4 or whatever with the tools in place to properly support them.
To be fair, it does host Microsoft software ;)
Why do you think that's a priority for Apple? The number of people who don't have an iPad is far greater than the number of people who do. The more people using an iPad of any version means more money for them through iTunes, the App Store, etc.
If you look at their historical behaviour, they tend to support devices for at least a couple of major iOS revisions. When the iPad 1 was first launched, it was running iOS 3.2. They released iOS 4.2 towards the end of the year, and they've not long released iOS 5.0. Presumably iOS 6 won't run on your iPad.
When iOS 6 is released, people with iPad 2s and 3s will upgrade. When enough of them have upgraded, developers will start to drop support for iOS 5.0. That's when it will start affecting you - there will be apps you won't be able to run, updates to your existing apps won't install, your options will slowly become more and more limited.
Apple also removes support for legacy versions of iOS from their SDK fairly quickly too, so when iOS 7 rolls out, all the developers that have been supporting you won't have the choice any more. At that point, which is probably 2-3 years away, you'll get very little out of the App Store, several of your existing apps will have stopped working, and you'll be eyeing up the iPad 4 or 5.
Apple's business model doesn't rely on people upgrading every year or two. It's true, vast numbers of people do so, but they can quite happily sell new devices to newcomers without relying on you upgrading.
Chiming in here to agree with spac.
This is another annoying grey area with Apple's rules. When you submit an app to the App Store, it asks you if you use encryption, and if you do, you have to have an export license from the USA government. I don't believe there's anything that specifically addresses SSL/TLS in Apple's documentation. If you contact Apple, they usually tell you that you need a license for it, even if you use the features built into iOS. If you don't contact Apple and say that you don't use encryption, sometimes you can get through the approval process. I think it's a case of the Apple employees who you contact playing it safe while reviewers can be a bit sloppy.
I've personally been involved with an app that transmits personal information including GPS coordinates, names and telephone numbers, and it does so without using SSL/TLS for precisely this reason - the company wanted to release as quickly as possible without waiting to get an export license. I didn't like that, but unfortunately, the decision was out of my hands.
I think the best thing Apple could do, assuming that there is no way around the law, is to make it more clear to developers that this is required in their rules, to automatically scan apps for SSL/TLS use to reject apps without a license consistently, and to reject apps that don't use SSL/TLS to transmit personal information.
Okay, so let's use an example other than that. The USA invented the concept of an illegal number.
Apple didn't design the A4 from scratch. They licensed ARM. The A4 and A5 are ARM processors. What you are seeing is Apple ensuring that their own operating system runs on their own processors. Still sound stupid?
Albinos are even rarer project leaders than women. If an albino happened to become project leader of a "famous" open source project, would you expect to see similar "Holy shit, an albino!" news stories with prominent mention of it in headlines? I don't think that would happen. Certainly in the comments, but not in the headline. This isn't just about how rare female project leaders are.
What more confirmation do you need from the government than the fact that they changed the law so it is no longer illegal?
A pardon is pointless posturing. It doesn't change anything. Changing the law was what they needed to do, and they already did it.
I wouldn't call that iOS' "fault". Mobile devices have very limited resources. This isn't like a desktop machine where you've got several gigabytes of memory to play with. If an application is badly behaved and it uses too much memory, that has an effect on the rest of the system. There's only so much memory to go around. Also, if using lots of memory becomes normalised, there's pressure to add more memory to newer models, which will result in lower battery life.
I'm an app developer, and if I ever see that one of my projects is killed for not responding fast enough, I know that there's something very, very wrong somewhere. Usually it's a sign that a junior developer decided to do something processor or network intensive synchronously on the main thread, which is a big mistake. You do what is necessary to get an interface up, and you push everything expensive into the background and update the UI when it finishes. There's no excuse for an application not responding quickly enough, it's easy to do.
If you really think Skype is not at fault, how do you explain the fact that it crashes all the time on other platforms as well?
iOS is very aggressive in killing misbehaving apps, while Android seems content to let them carry on until it simply can't continue. I wonder how much of the difference can be attributed to Android giving apps more leeway rather than a difference in app quality?
On a side note, that was a horribly written article. It sounded like somebody who wasn't familiar with technology was repeating something they didn't understand. GPS, cameras, and language support can crash apps? What?