I don't know where you get that from... but I can tell you for certain that we (Vodafone) charge every mobile network operater a hefty roaming fee whenever their customers cross into any of our extensive data networks - nobody gets a free ride, not even blackberry users. Since RIM have not built an alternative internet, i am pretty certain that, each time you roam, somebody pays.
I suspect that what you are considering free email, is probably built into your blackberry package... and since RIM has always prided itself with how little data their devices use, I suspect that the roaming data costs are so small that it does not make for a significant reason to break out the email roaming costs separately.
Lets see some data for such a claim.
If they really were such a big buyer they would be stuck with buying from samsung since they produce most of the flash.
FTA: Apple’s surge to leadership in semiconductor spending in 2010 was driven by the overwhelming success of its wireless products, namely the iPhone and the iPad. These products consume enormous quantities of NAND flash memory, which is also found in the Apple iPod. Because of this, Apple in 2010 was the world’s No. 1 purchaser of NAND flash.
Without belabouring the point... I think that it is common knowledge in the semiconductor industry that Apple is buying up all the semiconductor factory capacity they can get their hands on - more than even HP, Dell, Samsung, Nokia, Sony, etc. Apple has created a global shortage of certain components (not always because Apple has bought up the supply for that component, but often because Apple has bought up the chip fab capacity for its own custom components) leaving smaller oems without the off-the-shelf components that they need for their products.
The chatter that I am getting in the industry is that Samsung will (not may) loose more by pissing Apple off than they could ever hope to gain because they don't own the Android market and can never hope to replace the revenue generated from Apple with Android phone/tablet sales. Toshiba and Sony are lobbying Apple to get more of their chip business as we speak.
FTA: "The applications took advantage of known vulnerabilities which don’t affect Android versions 2.2.2 or higher..."
So if a malware writer takes advantage of a vulnerability in an old or unpatched instance of Windows its Microsoft's fault... but if they take advantage of an exploit in Android its not Google's fault.
Yes! This would be great to have. I have media centers attached to all my TV's, but still need the TV remotes just to turn them on and off. A wake-on-lan for my TV would keep it down to one remote (or phone, web interface, etc.).
I thought all modern TVs could do this... The last two flat screens I have bought (a 46" Sansui and more recently a 52" Samsung) both have serial ports that can wake up the TV. The Sansui came with a command manual and I used to wake it up whenever my MVix media centre woke up by running a batch file that pipes the output to the com port with the wake up command to the Sansui.
My Samsung did not come with a command manual, so I haven't tried this on it.
I think that you will find that you are probably able to wake up your TV through the USB port... after all it is just a glorified serial port
Are you nuts... have you ever been to Johannesburg... there are over 100,000 (yes, over one hundred thousand traffic lights in Johannesburg alone). Johannesburg is not a little village... it is a massive city with over 5 million people living and working there. The networking costs would be huge. Far cheaper to simply use the existing GSM network... remember, the lights are not sending monitoring data (i.e. they do not need a sophisticated data link like GPRS), they are just sending status or fault alerts which are better send using SMS or USSD
This was negligance on the part of the JRA... I have just rolled out over 8000 point of sale machines fitted with SIM cards... and during planning questions around "... what happens whens should the retailers staff start to pull the SIM cards out every night to make private calls..."
There are two options... and we are using both:
1) a. get the network to turn off voice capability so that the cards are data only
1) b. limit the data bill to R20 (about US$3) per month (which we calculated would be adequate for most transaction volumes)
2) migrate the SIM base to a private APN so that the SIMs become point to point VPN data SIMs (i.e. can only connect to our servers)
In the case of the JRA, the traffic lights had to be vandalised to get to the SIMs... so the cost to the city is going to be a lot more than just simply replacing the SIMs. In our case we did not care because we did not think that staff would vandalise their own terminals (it would be known who did it) and we deliberatly spread the word that the SIMs are useless for anything but what they were intended for because they were locked down to our private APN.
From Apple's web site (http://www.apple.com/hotnews/):
Apple today announced that it expects sales of its new Apple TV to top one million units later this week. The new Apple TV offers the simplest way to watch your favorite HD movies and TV shows and stream content from Netflix, YouTube, Flickr, and MobileMe — all on your HD TV, for the breakthrough price of just $99. iTunes users are now renting and purchasing over 400,000 TV episodes and over 150,000 movies per day. the emphasis is mine
It may have taken Apple a while to get to this formula... but that still trumps Microsoft which is still advocating an HTPC in the living room or using an expensive gaming console as a media server and Intel and Google who are advocating putting an embeded computer inside the TV (whether it be Android or Meabo powered) and then using a keyboard and track pad/ball to navigate one's TV [yish]
Most news articles comenting on the 1 million units milestone have made a point of comparing it to the 74 days it took for the original iPhone to reach the same milestone. That is a phenominal achievement by anyone's yard stick. However, I doubt that the Apple TV will follow the same trajectory as the iPhone.
That's a load of sh*t and you know it. Why not put out the fire and then bill him for the $75? Having them show up but refuse to put water to flame is just plain mean on a level I don't quite have the words to describe.
And they *did* have to show up - to make sure the neighbor's houses didn't burn down. I'd say the FD should be on the hook for the cost of the house, reckless endangerment, and cruelty to animals.
Wow! I love this logic!
I should try this with my motor insurance company... Tell them that I am not prepared to pay any of my monthly premiums... until I have an accident; then they must just fix my car and bill me later for a single months premium... I'll start paying once I have satisfied myself that I really need the insurance cover/s
There was an article about the sterility of most testing environments and how a sterile environment (i.e. no sweaty palms, for instance) would have failed to reproduce the real world experience that users experienced.
The result was that by the time field testing began, laboratory testing had already shown the design to be viable and the design set in stone.
Further compounding this was that early field testing would have been done in mule enclosures designed to disguise the final design.
Even after the final product was fabricated, field testing always disguised it in a case (the Gizmodo-gate handset for example was in one such case designed to make it look like an iPhone 3GS).
So by the time the new designed was being tested openly (out of the public eye, I'm sure) by ordinary people with sweaty hands that would exacerbate the attenuation problem, it was already so close to launch date. The design has already been laboratory tested and finalised as long ago as late 2009, from what I have heard... with field testing in early 2010 confirming that the external aerial was not a problem - without realising that by disguising the iPhone 4 as a 3GS, they were inadvertently masking the attenuation problem)
Did you even do any research about the rumored alternative to Flash that Apple is supposedly building... if the rumors are to be believed, it already exists, and it turns out pure HTML5, CSS and JavaScript... all open technologies
As the CTO of a major global tier one financial services and banking group I manage tons of different software technologies (not to mention the various computing platforms that software has to run on), ranging from Cobol and Java on mainframes to C and TCL on point of sale and EFT terminals through to Java, C# and Visual Basic on servers and ATMs... and of course all the scripting and interpreted languages in between.
I am a dyed in the wool Java person (I personally developed the group's core banking frame work in Java when I still headed up the groups IT architecture division).
I am now a strong advocate for data centre simplification by standardising on.NET for customer facing and branch teller systems (all our teller systems still run on a custom build of OS/2, would you believe)
In my personal capacity (I run a successful independent software development firm as a hobby), I am sold on Embarcadero RAD Studio 2010. To be fair I have been a Delphi fan since version 1 (well since Turbo Pascal 6.0, if you really must know). But switched professionally to Java when JBuilder took off.
Delphi will never enjoy the market position it enjoyed in its heydays... but it remains the staple of the ISV. Lots of software that we use every day is developed using Delphi, ranging from Skype, the Winter Olympics 2010 Rings, Macromedia HomeSite, QuickBooks Point of Sale, Total Commander, Installaware, Yahoo! Go for TV, MySQL Administrator, Dev-C++, TurboCASH , StarUML, SharpE , Cobian Backup, PocoMail, Jabber, XPlite, DynDNS Updater, MultiEdit, SQL Litspeed, CoffeeCup HTML Editor, Windows Shell Extension for M4A music files, PL/SQL Developer and thousands of other software systems that we use every day and take for granted.
So when I started playing with RAD studio 2010, I was impressed at the versatility of the suite. I can do everything from full on.NET (framework 3.5) software development using Microsoft Visual Studio and the Delphi Prism personality to traditional Win32 development. I can even do high performance stuff by taking advantage of the inline assembler and inter-mingling assembly code with my Delphi code. Last night I was impressed that Microsoft tools such as WSDL.exe and XSD.exe were able to generate Delphi code for me to create.NET web services using Delphi directly in Microsoft Visual Studio.
So with Delphi, I have the best of all worlds, and it shouldn't be surprising that as the climate for the independent software developer is getting brighter, we should see a resurgence of those tools that give small development teams platform and technology optionality.
Yes, you're correct, of course. I think I just got carried away because this is a common bug bear of mine with some technology columnists.
Either way, I think that your review and that of many other people shows that the Pre will hold its own and is a pretty good first effort. There has been a common refrein about the fantastic quality of the screen display. The multitasking appears to be receiving mixed reviews (in terms of its effect on performance and battery life); but like most people, I'd rather have it and not use it to preserve battery and performance than have that choice taken away from me by not having it [multitasking] at all
The Pre can and will get better from here. Palm are in this business for the long haul; they know how to make great phones; and they know what it feels like to be at the top.
Apple, did the port in 2002 and announced WebKit in 2003. Nokia (yes you are correct, not Symbian) started their work after Apple open sourced WebCore and JavaScriptCore (the corner stones of WebKit at the time). By this stage, WebKit was at the heart of all Apple web products, such as Safari.
Remember, the iPhone was not Apple's original target for WebKit, it was their desktop platform for which Microsoft had stopped enhancing its IE browser for.
Yes... iPhone OS actually does have a memory swap file. It uses the flash memory as a "disk" (notice that this is in quotes).
I think that you may not realise that the iPhone applications do not actually run in the flash memory store. The 8/16GB of flash memory is actually used as a persistant storage (or a flash disk, in simple terms). The iPhone actually has 128MB of RAM, which is where the OS and applications run.
The iPhone OS, like any other well behaved Unix derived operating system, will create a certain amount of virtual [RAM] memory. This is called a swap file, in simple english, because the operating system swaps out parts of the memory contents that do not fit into the physical RAM to the virtual RAM it has created on the disk (or flash [disk], for you simple folks) and swaps them back when it needs to address the locations in memory that they are virtually sitting in.
Yes of course the original KHTML code was the original constituent that was used to create WebKit... but WebKit is a lot more than just html rendering (which is all that KHTML was) and Apple's engineers significantly refactored both the original KHTML and the KJS scripting engine (in fact there is no longer any trace of the original KJS scripting engine in WebKit, that is why everyone only makes reference to the original KHTML now). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#History. This was the original bone of contention - Apple built completely new engines and was trying to force these back into the main KDE streams
What many people do not realise is that Apple didn't publish their folk for a year, while they worked on it. By the time Don Melton (the lead engineer at Apple) announced it to the KDE community on 7 Jan 2003, over half the original KHTML and KJS code had been replaced because it required other components from KDE and Qt. Don informed the KHTML/KJS teams in an email http://lists.kde.org/?l=kfm-devel&m=104197092318639&w=2 saying: "Both WebCore and JavaScriptCore, which account for a little over half the code in Safari [WebKit], are being released as open source today." The idea was for the KDE team to incorporate WebCore back into the KHTML project. This was only a partial success as some of the WebCore and JavaScriptCore code was never successfully incorporated into the KDE branch.
On 7 June 2005 Apple announced that it was open sourcing all of WebKit [Safari rendering and scripting engines] and not just the abstraction frameworks.
So, already by 2005 (as of Jan 2003, actually) the vast majority of WebKit was already Apple code!
A few months later in 2008 the WebKit team announced that they had rewritten JavaScriptCore as "SquirrelFish", a new bytecode interpreter http://webkit.org/blog/189/announcing-squirrelfish/, which was later advanced to SquirrelFish Extreme by the end of that same year. SquirrelFish Extreme compiles JavaScript into native machine code, eliminating the need for a bytecode interpreter and thus speeding up JavaScript execution http://webkit.org/blog/214/introducing-squirrelfish-extreme/. My tip for the future is to watch this space for Apple to out-Pre the Pre with respect to natively compiled HTML5/JavaScript applications that run at machine speed within WebKit.
Keep in mind the fact that there are lots of other bits and pieces that were never part of the original KHTML rendering engine or the KJS scripting engine that now make up WebKit, such as the Drosera a JavaScript debugger, etc.
By this stage, it was clear that Apple's platform abstraction framework and adapter library called KWQ (and pronounced "quack") that replaced the KDE and Qt components that KHTML and KJS relied upon made WebKit the most platform versatile and standards compliant web client; having passed the Acid3 test "with pixel-perfect rendering and no timing or smoothness issues on reference hardware" http://webkit.org/blog/280/full-pass-of-acid-3/. This is when Google, Nokia, Palm, et al started looking in at the true cross platform potential of WebKit.
Now keep in mind that all these developments and innovations to WebKit, since 2003 (at which time half the code was already Apple's code) were added almost entirely by Apple engineers.
It is a common misconception that the iPhone does not have multitasking. This falsehood has been spread by tech columnists who do not know anything about technology. So, lets get the multitasking myth dealt with first: The iPhone sports a full multitasking operating system which and fully supports multitasking and running background applications - that is why your mail continues to download and your iPod continues to play music even after you "close" them and move on to using other applications. In that same vein, Safari on the iPhone will continue to download a web page in the background even after to open a new "tab" to go to another page/site or leave safari to use another application.
However, please note, the iPhone OS only accords certain privilaged applications and functions the right to run in the background after focus shifts to another foreground application or function. This privilage is not extended to third party applications, hence the myth that the iPhone does not support multitasking. The lack support for background third party applications definately limits the versitility of certain applications (and the phone itself, some might say).
The problems that you describe with Safari, however, are real. Not withstanding the fact that all mobile browsers are slower than their desktop counterparts, Safari on the iPhone can be glacial. The problem is not one of multitasking, as you have proffered, but is probably attributable to the prossessor and memory performance/speed/capacity. I cannot go into all the intracacies of mobile CPUs and the effects that optimising for low power consumtion has on performance, sufice to say that, mobile phone CPU's are designed to provide a balance of performance without requiring a battery change every 2 or 3 hours or a large cooling fan for that matter. The iPhone has a further handicap: only 128MB of RAM. After loading the OS into memory, there is very little left for applications and their data. Although the iPhone OS will start to kill background applications such as mail and Safari, should it start to run out of resources, quite often, by the time one gets to Safari, there is probably lots of swapping to "disk" going on.
My big gripe on the iPhone is that everything begins to slow down after using it for a few days. I get these really irritating pauses when I go to my calendar or mail. In fact, I'd dare to say that Safari is the best performing application on my phone... alway predictable - even if that means that it predictably stutters (as you have described) from time to time. Running Remote Desktop to access Windows servers always elicits a message informing me that my iPhone has run out of resources; the application continues to run, but only just; forcing me to switch off the phone and "reboot" which then allows me to load Remote Desktop without any warnings and runs it fast-er (definitely not something you want to do on the iPhone unless you have no other choice).
That is an interesting observation, considering that Apple is the primary WebKit contributor... "WebKit began in 2002 when Apple Inc. created a fork of the KDE projectâ(TM)s HTML layout engine KHTML and KDE's JavaScript engine (KJS)" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit
WebKit was released into open source by Apple in 2005 after the relationship with KHTML had irrevocably broken down (i.e. the Apple changes couldn't/wouldn't be integrated back into the KHTML project). Apple remains the biggest WebKit contributor because virtually all its software platforms rely on WebKit, not just Safari (almost like TWebBrowser in the Windows ecosystem).
To date, WebKit has been ported to a number of platforms and a number of organisations are pitching in, such as Palm, Google and even Symbian (aka Nokia). It is highly unlikely that any of these organisations will risk orphaning themselves with a further branch of WebKit that contains optimisations unique to their own proprietory platform. So it is a safe bet that whatever Palm has running on the Pre, came largely from Apple developers as well as the broader open source community who had already ported WebKit to the Linux platform.
That is good news... I was not aware of the Japanese cargo vessel. The point I was making was around the regularity and dependability of a regular cargo shipment, of which there is currently only the Russian unmanned cargo vessel.
The European vessel shows a lot of promise because of its size, capacity (upon a modified Ariane-5 launcher) and completely autonomous docking capability... but alas, the one and only instance we have seen was launched just over a year ago, with no word on any follow ups.
So, for now it looks like we are stuck with the Russians for a regular human ferry (once the shuttle retires) and cargo vessell. Maybe the Chinese will come on board the program and offer rides up. The ISS cannot run on the European and Japanese cargo vessels whose launches are so far apart (over a year in both cases, I think). The station needs to be regularly and reliably fed with supplies, fuel, and people.
The russians? I mean the summary says quite clearly the russians started it and if they did I'd also start charging right back at them...
I doubt that that will be a wise move for any nation, considering that the Russians will be the only way to and from the station for several years; they also have the only regular cargo shuttle (the Europeans managed a single experimental trip that promisses a significant improvement in cargo capacity); and the emergancy evacuation shuttle is a Russian soyuze attached to the station.
I'd say that nobody is in a position to dictate terms to the Russians, at least for the next 8-odd years.
I remember when I was younger and my wife and I were first planning to have kids; we went to a parenting course and the guy giving the course (a pastor from some church or something) was explaining why corporal punishment was bad and tantamount to assaulting one's own kids.
He said that toddlers will always be toddlers; they will always do things that they have been warned against, and perhaps been punished for before, over and over again. The reason, he said, was because toddlers only remember the consequences of their actions after the action. "They don't look ahead at the consequences of the action that they might be about to commit, but rather look back after the action and realise what the likely consequence is going to be."
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know where you get that from... but I can tell you for certain that we (Vodafone) charge every mobile network operater a hefty roaming fee whenever their customers cross into any of our extensive data networks - nobody gets a free ride, not even blackberry users. Since RIM have not built an alternative internet, i am pretty certain that, each time you roam, somebody pays. I suspect that what you are considering free email, is probably built into your blackberry package... and since RIM has always prided itself with how little data their devices use, I suspect that the roaming data costs are so small that it does not make for a significant reason to break out the email roaming costs separately.
Lets see some data for such a claim.
If they really were such a big buyer they would be stuck with buying from samsung since they produce most of the flash.
Spurred by booming demand for the iPhone and iPad, Apple Inc. in 2010 became the largest buyer of semiconductors among original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) for the rst time ever, new IHS iSuppli research indicates. http://www.isuppli.com/Semiconductor-Value-Chain/MarketWatch/Pages/Apple-Becomes-Worlds-Largest-OEM-Semiconductor-Buyer-in-2010.aspx
FTA: Apple’s surge to leadership in semiconductor spending in 2010 was driven by the overwhelming success of its wireless products, namely the iPhone and the iPad. These products consume enormous quantities of NAND flash memory, which is also found in the Apple iPod. Because of this, Apple in 2010 was the world’s No. 1 purchaser of NAND flash.
Without belabouring the point... I think that it is common knowledge in the semiconductor industry that Apple is buying up all the semiconductor factory capacity they can get their hands on - more than even HP, Dell, Samsung, Nokia, Sony, etc. Apple has created a global shortage of certain components (not always because Apple has bought up the supply for that component, but often because Apple has bought up the chip fab capacity for its own custom components) leaving smaller oems without the off-the-shelf components that they need for their products.
The chatter that I am getting in the industry is that Samsung will (not may) loose more by pissing Apple off than they could ever hope to gain because they don't own the Android market and can never hope to replace the revenue generated from Apple with Android phone/tablet sales. Toshiba and Sony are lobbying Apple to get more of their chip business as we speak.
FTA: "The applications took advantage of known vulnerabilities which don’t affect Android versions 2.2.2 or higher..."
So if a malware writer takes advantage of a vulnerability in an old or unpatched instance of Windows its Microsoft's fault... but if they take advantage of an exploit in Android its not Google's fault.
This logic does not compute.
I'd sure like to add wake-on-signal...
Yes! This would be great to have. I have media centers attached to all my TV's, but still need the TV remotes just to turn them on and off. A wake-on-lan for my TV would keep it down to one remote (or phone, web interface, etc.).
I thought all modern TVs could do this... The last two flat screens I have bought (a 46" Sansui and more recently a 52" Samsung) both have serial ports that can wake up the TV. The Sansui came with a command manual and I used to wake it up whenever my MVix media centre woke up by running a batch file that pipes the output to the com port with the wake up command to the Sansui.
My Samsung did not come with a command manual, so I haven't tried this on it.
I think that you will find that you are probably able to wake up your TV through the USB port... after all it is just a glorified serial port
Are you nuts... have you ever been to Johannesburg... there are over 100,000 (yes, over one hundred thousand traffic lights in Johannesburg alone). Johannesburg is not a little village... it is a massive city with over 5 million people living and working there. The networking costs would be huge. Far cheaper to simply use the existing GSM network... remember, the lights are not sending monitoring data (i.e. they do not need a sophisticated data link like GPRS), they are just sending status or fault alerts which are better send using SMS or USSD
This was negligance on the part of the JRA... I have just rolled out over 8000 point of sale machines fitted with SIM cards... and during planning questions around "... what happens whens should the retailers staff start to pull the SIM cards out every night to make private calls..."
There are two options... and we are using both:
1) a. get the network to turn off voice capability so that the cards are data only
1) b. limit the data bill to R20 (about US$3) per month (which we calculated would be adequate for most transaction volumes)
2) migrate the SIM base to a private APN so that the SIMs become point to point VPN data SIMs (i.e. can only connect to our servers)
In the case of the JRA, the traffic lights had to be vandalised to get to the SIMs... so the cost to the city is going to be a lot more than just simply replacing the SIMs. In our case we did not care because we did not think that staff would vandalise their own terminals (it would be known who did it) and we deliberatly spread the word that the SIMs are useless for anything but what they were intended for because they were locked down to our private APN.
From Apple's web site (http://www.apple.com/hotnews/):
Apple today announced that it expects sales of its new Apple TV to top one million units later this week. The new Apple TV offers the simplest way to watch your favorite HD movies and TV shows and stream content from Netflix, YouTube, Flickr, and MobileMe — all on your HD TV, for the breakthrough price of just $99. iTunes users are now renting and purchasing over 400,000 TV episodes and over 150,000 movies per day. the emphasis is mine
It may have taken Apple a while to get to this formula... but that still trumps Microsoft which is still advocating an HTPC in the living room or using an expensive gaming console as a media server and Intel and Google who are advocating putting an embeded computer inside the TV (whether it be Android or Meabo powered) and then using a keyboard and track pad/ball to navigate one's TV [yish]
Apple TV 2 was launched in October 2010 http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/Apple-TV-Sells-1-Million-Units-297554/. That is less than 3 months ago. By comparison, Roku, an arguably superior offering, is yet to reach its 1 millionth sale (across all models), after 2 years!
Most news articles comenting on the 1 million units milestone have made a point of comparing it to the 74 days it took for the original iPhone to reach the same milestone. That is a phenominal achievement by anyone's yard stick. However, I doubt that the Apple TV will follow the same trajectory as the iPhone.
Looking forward, even Roku CEO, Anthony Wood, acknowledges that Apple TV will only become even more compelling as he expects Apple to launch an App Store for Apple TV, which would bring along many more content sources, more games, and more attention to the Apple TV http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/12/20/businessinsider-roku-2010-12.DTL
I'm not sure that Google's data centres could qualify as a single super computer with each node solving a different part of the same problem...
That's a load of sh*t and you know it. Why not put out the fire and then bill him for the $75? Having them show up but refuse to put water to flame is just plain mean on a level I don't quite have the words to describe. And they *did* have to show up - to make sure the neighbor's houses didn't burn down. I'd say the FD should be on the hook for the cost of the house, reckless endangerment, and cruelty to animals.
Wow! I love this logic! I should try this with my motor insurance company... Tell them that I am not prepared to pay any of my monthly premiums... until I have an accident; then they must just fix my car and bill me later for a single months premium... I'll start paying once I have satisfied myself that I really need the insurance cover /s
There was an article about the sterility of most testing environments and how a sterile environment (i.e. no sweaty palms, for instance) would have failed to reproduce the real world experience that users experienced.
The result was that by the time field testing began, laboratory testing had already shown the design to be viable and the design set in stone.
Further compounding this was that early field testing would have been done in mule enclosures designed to disguise the final design.
Even after the final product was fabricated, field testing always disguised it in a case (the Gizmodo-gate handset for example was in one such case designed to make it look like an iPhone 3GS).
So by the time the new designed was being tested openly (out of the public eye, I'm sure) by ordinary people with sweaty hands that would exacerbate the attenuation problem, it was already so close to launch date. The design has already been laboratory tested and finalised as long ago as late 2009, from what I have heard... with field testing in early 2010 confirming that the external aerial was not a problem - without realising that by disguising the iPhone 4 as a 3GS, they were inadvertently masking the attenuation problem)
That story was also debunked and discredited
Did you even do any research about the rumored alternative to Flash that Apple is supposedly building... if the rumors are to be believed, it already exists, and it turns out pure HTML5, CSS and JavaScript... all open technologies
Oh... forgot to add my citation: http://delphi.wikia.com/wiki/Good_Quality_Applications_Built_With_Delphi
As the CTO of a major global tier one financial services and banking group I manage tons of different software technologies (not to mention the various computing platforms that software has to run on), ranging from Cobol and Java on mainframes to C and TCL on point of sale and EFT terminals through to Java, C# and Visual Basic on servers and ATMs... and of course all the scripting and interpreted languages in between.
I am a dyed in the wool Java person (I personally developed the group's core banking frame work in Java when I still headed up the groups IT architecture division).
I am now a strong advocate for data centre simplification by standardising on .NET for customer facing and branch teller systems (all our teller systems still run on a custom build of OS/2, would you believe)
In my personal capacity (I run a successful independent software development firm as a hobby), I am sold on Embarcadero RAD Studio 2010. To be fair I have been a Delphi fan since version 1 (well since Turbo Pascal 6.0, if you really must know). But switched professionally to Java when JBuilder took off.
Delphi will never enjoy the market position it enjoyed in its heydays... but it remains the staple of the ISV. Lots of software that we use every day is developed using Delphi, ranging from Skype, the Winter Olympics 2010 Rings, Macromedia HomeSite, QuickBooks Point of Sale, Total Commander, Installaware, Yahoo! Go for TV, MySQL Administrator, Dev-C++, TurboCASH , StarUML, SharpE , Cobian Backup, PocoMail, Jabber, XPlite, DynDNS Updater, MultiEdit, SQL Litspeed, CoffeeCup HTML Editor, Windows Shell Extension for M4A music files, PL/SQL Developer and thousands of other software systems that we use every day and take for granted.
So when I started playing with RAD studio 2010, I was impressed at the versatility of the suite. I can do everything from full on .NET (framework 3.5) software development using Microsoft Visual Studio and the Delphi Prism personality to traditional Win32 development. I can even do high performance stuff by taking advantage of the inline assembler and inter-mingling assembly code with my Delphi code. Last night I was impressed that Microsoft tools such as WSDL.exe and XSD.exe were able to generate Delphi code for me to create .NET web services using Delphi directly in Microsoft Visual Studio.
So with Delphi, I have the best of all worlds, and it shouldn't be surprising that as the climate for the independent software developer is getting brighter, we should see a resurgence of those tools that give small development teams platform and technology optionality.
Yes, you're correct, of course. I think I just got carried away because this is a common bug bear of mine with some technology columnists.
Either way, I think that your review and that of many other people shows that the Pre will hold its own and is a pretty good first effort. There has been a common refrein about the fantastic quality of the screen display. The multitasking appears to be receiving mixed reviews (in terms of its effect on performance and battery life); but like most people, I'd rather have it and not use it to preserve battery and performance than have that choice taken away from me by not having it [multitasking] at all
The Pre can and will get better from here. Palm are in this business for the long haul; they know how to make great phones; and they know what it feels like to be at the top.
Mine shows as:
Model: MB496SO
Version: 2.2.1 (5H11)
Wanna compare?
Apple, did the port in 2002 and announced WebKit in 2003. Nokia (yes you are correct, not Symbian) started their work after Apple open sourced WebCore and JavaScriptCore (the corner stones of WebKit at the time). By this stage, WebKit was at the heart of all Apple web products, such as Safari.
Remember, the iPhone was not Apple's original target for WebKit, it was their desktop platform for which Microsoft had stopped enhancing its IE browser for.
Yes... iPhone OS actually does have a memory swap file. It uses the flash memory as a "disk" (notice that this is in quotes).
I think that you may not realise that the iPhone applications do not actually run in the flash memory store. The 8/16GB of flash memory is actually used as a persistant storage (or a flash disk, in simple terms). The iPhone actually has 128MB of RAM, which is where the OS and applications run.
The iPhone OS, like any other well behaved Unix derived operating system, will create a certain amount of virtual [RAM] memory. This is called a swap file, in simple english, because the operating system swaps out parts of the memory contents that do not fit into the physical RAM to the virtual RAM it has created on the disk (or flash [disk], for you simple folks) and swaps them back when it needs to address the locations in memory that they are virtually sitting in.
Yes of course the original KHTML code was the original constituent that was used to create WebKit... but WebKit is a lot more than just html rendering (which is all that KHTML was) and Apple's engineers significantly refactored both the original KHTML and the KJS scripting engine (in fact there is no longer any trace of the original KJS scripting engine in WebKit, that is why everyone only makes reference to the original KHTML now). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#History. This was the original bone of contention - Apple built completely new engines and was trying to force these back into the main KDE streams
What many people do not realise is that Apple didn't publish their folk for a year, while they worked on it. By the time Don Melton (the lead engineer at Apple) announced it to the KDE community on 7 Jan 2003, over half the original KHTML and KJS code had been replaced because it required other components from KDE and Qt. Don informed the KHTML/KJS teams in an email http://lists.kde.org/?l=kfm-devel&m=104197092318639&w=2 saying: "Both WebCore and JavaScriptCore, which account for a little over half the code in Safari [WebKit], are being released as open source today." The idea was for the KDE team to incorporate WebCore back into the KHTML project. This was only a partial success as some of the WebCore and JavaScriptCore code was never successfully incorporated into the KDE branch.
On 7 June 2005 Apple announced that it was open sourcing all of WebKit [Safari rendering and scripting engines] and not just the abstraction frameworks.
So, already by 2005 (as of Jan 2003, actually) the vast majority of WebKit was already Apple code!
Later in 2005 Apple engineers ported support for Scalable Vector Graphics into WebKit http://dot.kde.org/1121021917/
By the end of 2007, Apple had incorporated HTML 5 Media features http://webkit.org/blog/140/html5-media-support/
A few months later in 2008 the WebKit team announced that they had rewritten JavaScriptCore as "SquirrelFish", a new bytecode interpreter http://webkit.org/blog/189/announcing-squirrelfish/, which was later advanced to SquirrelFish Extreme by the end of that same year. SquirrelFish Extreme compiles JavaScript into native machine code, eliminating the need for a bytecode interpreter and thus speeding up JavaScript execution http://webkit.org/blog/214/introducing-squirrelfish-extreme/. My tip for the future is to watch this space for Apple to out-Pre the Pre with respect to natively compiled HTML5/JavaScript applications that run at machine speed within WebKit.
Keep in mind the fact that there are lots of other bits and pieces that were never part of the original KHTML rendering engine or the KJS scripting engine that now make up WebKit, such as the Drosera a JavaScript debugger, etc.
By this stage, it was clear that Apple's platform abstraction framework and adapter library called KWQ (and pronounced "quack") that replaced the KDE and Qt components that KHTML and KJS relied upon made WebKit the most platform versatile and standards compliant web client; having passed the Acid3 test "with pixel-perfect rendering and no timing or smoothness issues on reference hardware" http://webkit.org/blog/280/full-pass-of-acid-3/. This is when Google, Nokia, Palm, et al started looking in at the true cross platform potential of WebKit.
Now keep in mind that all these developments and innovations to WebKit, since 2003 (at which time half the code was already Apple's code) were added almost entirely by Apple engineers.
Then in June 2007 Ars Technica in
It is a common misconception that the iPhone does not have multitasking. This falsehood has been spread by tech columnists who do not know anything about technology. So, lets get the multitasking myth dealt with first: The iPhone sports a full multitasking operating system which and fully supports multitasking and running background applications - that is why your mail continues to download and your iPod continues to play music even after you "close" them and move on to using other applications. In that same vein, Safari on the iPhone will continue to download a web page in the background even after to open a new "tab" to go to another page/site or leave safari to use another application.
However, please note, the iPhone OS only accords certain privilaged applications and functions the right to run in the background after focus shifts to another foreground application or function. This privilage is not extended to third party applications, hence the myth that the iPhone does not support multitasking. The lack support for background third party applications definately limits the versitility of certain applications (and the phone itself, some might say).
The problems that you describe with Safari, however, are real. Not withstanding the fact that all mobile browsers are slower than their desktop counterparts, Safari on the iPhone can be glacial. The problem is not one of multitasking, as you have proffered, but is probably attributable to the prossessor and memory performance/speed/capacity. I cannot go into all the intracacies of mobile CPUs and the effects that optimising for low power consumtion has on performance, sufice to say that, mobile phone CPU's are designed to provide a balance of performance without requiring a battery change every 2 or 3 hours or a large cooling fan for that matter. The iPhone has a further handicap: only 128MB of RAM. After loading the OS into memory, there is very little left for applications and their data. Although the iPhone OS will start to kill background applications such as mail and Safari, should it start to run out of resources, quite often, by the time one gets to Safari, there is probably lots of swapping to "disk" going on.
My big gripe on the iPhone is that everything begins to slow down after using it for a few days. I get these really irritating pauses when I go to my calendar or mail. In fact, I'd dare to say that Safari is the best performing application on my phone... alway predictable - even if that means that it predictably stutters (as you have described) from time to time. Running Remote Desktop to access Windows servers always elicits a message informing me that my iPhone has run out of resources; the application continues to run, but only just; forcing me to switch off the phone and "reboot" which then allows me to load Remote Desktop without any warnings and runs it fast-er (definitely not something you want to do on the iPhone unless you have no other choice).
That is an interesting observation, considering that Apple is the primary WebKit contributor... "WebKit began in 2002 when Apple Inc. created a fork of the KDE projectâ(TM)s HTML layout engine KHTML and KDE's JavaScript engine (KJS)" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit
WebKit was released into open source by Apple in 2005 after the relationship with KHTML had irrevocably broken down (i.e. the Apple changes couldn't/wouldn't be integrated back into the KHTML project). Apple remains the biggest WebKit contributor because virtually all its software platforms rely on WebKit, not just Safari (almost like TWebBrowser in the Windows ecosystem).
To date, WebKit has been ported to a number of platforms and a number of organisations are pitching in, such as Palm, Google and even Symbian (aka Nokia). It is highly unlikely that any of these organisations will risk orphaning themselves with a further branch of WebKit that contains optimisations unique to their own proprietory platform. So it is a safe bet that whatever Palm has running on the Pre, came largely from Apple developers as well as the broader open source community who had already ported WebKit to the Linux platform.
Just my 2 cents worth...
That is good news... I was not aware of the Japanese cargo vessel. The point I was making was around the regularity and dependability of a regular cargo shipment, of which there is currently only the Russian unmanned cargo vessel.
The European vessel shows a lot of promise because of its size, capacity (upon a modified Ariane-5 launcher) and completely autonomous docking capability... but alas, the one and only instance we have seen was launched just over a year ago, with no word on any follow ups.
So, for now it looks like we are stuck with the Russians for a regular human ferry (once the shuttle retires) and cargo vessell. Maybe the Chinese will come on board the program and offer rides up. The ISS cannot run on the European and Japanese cargo vessels whose launches are so far apart (over a year in both cases, I think). The station needs to be regularly and reliably fed with supplies, fuel, and people.
The russians? I mean the summary says quite clearly the russians started it and if they did I'd also start charging right back at them...
I doubt that that will be a wise move for any nation, considering that the Russians will be the only way to and from the station for several years; they also have the only regular cargo shuttle (the Europeans managed a single experimental trip that promisses a significant improvement in cargo capacity); and the emergancy evacuation shuttle is a Russian soyuze attached to the station.
I'd say that nobody is in a position to dictate terms to the Russians, at least for the next 8-odd years.
I remember when I was younger and my wife and I were first planning to have kids; we went to a parenting course and the guy giving the course (a pastor from some church or something) was explaining why corporal punishment was bad and tantamount to assaulting one's own kids.
He said that toddlers will always be toddlers; they will always do things that they have been warned against, and perhaps been punished for before, over and over again. The reason, he said, was because toddlers only remember the consequences of their actions after the action. "They don't look ahead at the consequences of the action that they might be about to commit, but rather look back after the action and realise what the likely consequence is going to be."
That was about 9 years ago!