Over the years this idea has surfaced a number of times. In fact I used to sell something of this sort. When computers costed five thousand dollars there was a financial reason to do this. Sharing one computer for two users taxes the CPU resources and causes sluggish operation. Much of the cost of such a rig is the two monitors and keyboards and mouses and audio. These days with computers that cost only several hundred dollars, and less used, it is just as well to use separate computers. There are lots of slightly down-level computers laying around. Try a computer recycling center near your home.
It is just like them to take something that is a standard and modify it in such a way that transportable software will not compile. They will not be happy until they get us all using their single source language technology and software will run only on Windows and impossible/impractical to port. They have been moving this way for years, what's new.
Apple has hired a lot of people over the years. This guy will get to sit in at some meetings with the really smart people that are currently architecting OS X and his ideas will be considered. If he cannot convince people his ideas are important, his presence will have very little effect on what is shipped in the box. I bought an OLPC machine and disliked the security because it kept me from doing what I wanted with the machine I purchased. I have no reason to believe Apple is going to radically change the security methods in the operating system unless they can be absolutely sure it is the right way to go. They may not want to fix MAC OS if it isn't broken. The potential liability and Q/A overhead is very high. Let's see how long this guy stays around at his new job. If he doesn't walk on water, it will be hard to get the respect of the existing engineering staff. IMHO.
One of the more obvious ones was the opera browser which competes with safari. Apple wants to compete with Internet Explorer on Windows by porting safari there, but is unwilling to allow alternative mail or browsing programs. Since AT&Ts TOS only allow email and browsing and Apples developer license doesn't allow you to compete with programs they already supply, just what are you supposed to write that uses Internet or GPS?
In regard to the question of why a developer would put up with Apple's desire to censor apps submitted to the app store, I for one have put my foot down. Although I signed up and learned what I needed to to write an app, I decided I was unwilling to invest the time to design and develop a piece of software when it could be arbitrarily denied. I am not a hacker, and the time it takes to use due diligence in the creation of software is non-trivial. If I invested 3-6 months of my time at normal software engineering pay rates on an app, and Apple denied it, I would be so mad it would be bad for my heart and blood pressure. "That's the breaks", would not do it for me. I cannot stomach the business model. I love my iPhone because of what it does, but as a platform for development, it is not for me. Apple has been a huge disappointment to me where the iPhone is concerned. I bought mine with development in mind. I will develop for the Apple Mac instead. I dislike Microsoft mored than Apple though.
It is not so much about the OS as in that year the user will be installing applications and becoming dependent on the solution (hardware,OS,software,training). After a year's worth of data, shortcuts, email, and data, people may not want to change and buying a license may seem easier than the alternatives. A year goes by fairy fast, then its credit card time. You buy the license, and shortly thereafter, a new OS appears. Brilliant.
Microsoft has spoken publicly about how their need to run legacy software has complicated their ability to produce a secure operating system. Everyone I know understands that the virus situation on Windows is way out of control, hence the netbots...
While there would be difficulty, a new generation of operating system could bring some control over viruses that assume the old WIndows system architecture. The inclusion of the virtual XP mode means that all the old malware and viruses will find a happy home in the new operating system. Although walking away from the legacy software is dramatic, Apple has done it and survived, and Windows users would consider it if it would cleanse our machines of this unwanted infection that compromises our ability to depend on our systems.
I would have thought that business users would have had enough by now of the security problems and were looking forward to something better.
I believe that Microsoft is not capable of bringing about this needed change to more secure architecture. They just care about the easy bucks and the status quo. There days will pass.
I thought I was one of the last holdouts for assembly, but I must ask... Just what do you want to do today in assembly that is not more easily done in C. The C code generators have been better than hand coding for over a decade. Only once in a blue moon can you actually benefit from a hand optimized routine. With millions of bytes of ram, is it really a compactness of code issue?
I bought a copy on the first day and after the restraining order, it didn't work any more. It seems it calls home before operating so it will not function on a machine attached to the Internet. For me that means I can't use it because my machine is always connected. It is a shame because I have always thought that shifting the content to my computer for my own use was a very useful thing. I am a little unhappy that I paid the money and I can't use the software.
I did work with ATM machines long ago, and they were heavily dependent on the Data Encryption Scheme. As I remember the important transactional packets were encrypted at least three times (not triple des) and packets traveled over SNA networks using SDLC which is a synchronous method (a long stream of bits without obvious boundaries and zero insertion to protect flags. I thought at the time that this was very secure and never heard otherwise until much later when massive horsepower became available to anyone. DES was still in use as recently as a decade ago, although triple-des was an improvement. SInce then NIST has made significant progress on better encryption methods. What is true is that in the old days, those packets traveled over point to point leased lines, and not a packet switched network, and that was by definition more secure.
Well the AT&T TOS says you can use the network to browse the web and use email. The Apple iPhone developer program does not allow you to write applications that compete with programs they already supply, and since Apple already supplies a web browser and an email program... I believe this means that we are not allowed to write programs for the iPhone that uses network communication capabilities for any purpose whatsoever. As a developer who is a communications engineer (and who had planned to write iPhone apps) I find this disappointing.
Sometimes when a big company settles like this, it is to keep the technology within a pool of deep pocket players and out of the hands of small players that cannot pony up huge amounts up front during their startup phase. Apple computer paid off a company recently that had a patent on navigating music databases and I believe Microsoft did also, and maybe Creative. The result is that anyone wanting to bring out a music device has to pay the huge royalty just to get started. This whole patent thing and the setting up of mutual licensing between large companies with patent portfolios is not taking us to a good place. It is killing off startup activity of those without immense wealth.
hyper-threading is subject to certain security problems that are not present in multiprocessing. Security researchers have noted that it is possible to peek at encryption keys in memory within the HT environment.
See http://www.daemonology.net/hyperthreading-considered-harmful/
I have been watching this for years now. Intel came out with hyper-threading. HT required chipset and BIOS support to work, and although I paid top dollar for a high end Toshiba notebook, the processor in which should have supported hyper-threading, Toshiba dropped the ball and it didn't work on my machine. The same thing happened to me with an expensive HP desktop machine. A while later, Intel and Microsoft announced HT wasn't the silver bullet and multi-core would be. Manufacturers rushed to build machines around dual-core processors and Intel/AMD competed to provide dual core processors for desktop and server use. The machines hit the street, and for the most part, Microsoft Office and a small handful of other applications actually were optimized to make use of the cores.
Programmers like myself were waiting for a clear direction in terms of language and compiler support for multi-core development, and of course multi-core debugging is a challenge.
Now we have quad processors from multiple vendors and there are plenty of choices for hardware, but there is still not a clear winner when it comes to development tools and methodology. Intel has a threaded toolbox, and beyond that we can roll our own. The only support I have seen that made me smile was the multi-core support in Python, which only exists in the more recent versions, and those versions are not ubiquitous yet.
It is really easy for Intel to unilaterally make a decision to stop processor development at 3GHz and put it on the programmers to reorganize their code in a parallel manner. It is something else again for each software engineer to choose how to do this and commit their clients to those decisions, and the fall out that will last the lifetime of this code. Companies that paid to migrate their applications to hyper threading only got to benefit for a year or two before the environment went away. I am frightened to make a decision today about multi-core that depends on Intel (and AMD) to keep multi-core stable far enough into the future to make development worthwhile.
It is fairly obvious at this point that multi-core is here to stay, but it will be nothing more than a way to sell more expensive hardware until the powers that be provide a cohesive set of tools and methodologies that make multi-core useable to address our current problems.
A friend of mine told me of his experiments configuring a multicore Windows box for gaming using process affinities. He indicated that the Windows operating system used about 1.5 cores itself, which in the case of a dual core machine left about a half core for the game. My experience has shown that we have little control over the way tasks are assigned to specific cores, and multi-core seems to do more for the operating system and environment than the threads of a specific application After years of effort addressing this problem, it is still not clear to me which tools and methods will be the most stable over time. It looks to me that there has been very little progress on the software side in the last two years.
I was an early adopter of the unbreakable linux. I had serious support issues just trying to get my Dell SC1420 to use it's SATA drives in my desired configuration, and despite my service contract, was unable to get either support for that, or reliable updates from oracle and their bastardised version of up2date never worked for me. I had high hopes for their version, but they were all talk and no action when it came to keeping up with the upstream provider. When their system boots, it still identifies itself as Red Hat and they never even properly customized the system enough to cover up that fact. They (Oracle) just used the open source situation to grab Red Hat's product and try to run away with it. I dislike Oracle and will never use their products again.
Despite their promises to be the best 3G network, my 3G performance map shows full speed here in Santa Maria, but I haven't seen it. My iPhone spends a lot of time spinning the little icon and I wait dozens of minutes for simple things like finishing the download of an email message.
The iPhone does work, but the $30 a month data package is a sham. I am still impressed with the iPhone from a software perspective, but the reality of the device as rolled out is plagued with other problems such as the unreasonable control Apple keeps over software developed for the iPhone, and the lack of a tethering application.
After buying an iPhone and paying for the data package, there is no money left in my budget for another $60 a month to pay for a dongle that has to compete for data rate at the cell towers. AT&T needs to get it together and decide to give us some real service at a reasonable rate. If they did that, they would become seriously competitive.
There is no hope in expecting bailout money to improve the network. They have been spending our tax money for years to run fiber, but my neighborhood doesn't have fiber yet and may not until the next millenium. The best DSL I can get in my home is 1.5 and Verizon still wants 38 dollars a month for that. I live in a city but still can not get fast internet except from my cable provider COMCAST, and there are known problems with using cable based Internet, especially when the neighbors are torrenting their asses off.
AT&T does claim they had to change their voicemail system to accomodate the iPhone and that is probably true, but I think other networks would be willing to change for a piece of the action. The iPhone will become much more successful of the allow it to be used widely instead of locking it down with AT&T.
Thank you. That is one of the few posting I have read that gets to the heart of the matter. Unfortunately, IT is a job a large responsibility and built in conflict. The IT worker is in close contact with all levels of the enterprise. Requests made of them come from hopeful low level employees and powerful high level employers. All want what they want as soon as possible, and usually without any understanding of the big picture. More and more it looks like computer professionals need legal training as well.
In one project, I was the Software Engineering Director with the responsibility to safeguard the source code. After the release of a product, I quit my job. The next day police arrived and took me into custody. They demanded all copies of the source code and materials in my possession. I was accused of taking the only source code disks. They left me in a cell for a few hours. Then they marched me into my ex-job site in handcuffs where I walked over John Draper's desk and in several seconds located the source disks sitting in plain sight. I was released after signing a piece of paper indicating I had only been administratively detained. I should have declined to sign that paper and hired a lawyer. That is what I get for working with an asshole like John Draper. The software project was Easywriter for the IBM-PC, written for IBM and the employer was Captain Software and Information Unlimited Software (IUS). John Draper couldn't find the disks after a few seconds and started yelling, "Doug stole the code, Doug stole the code..." IUS called the police, and my rights were trampled on. I don't see any way I could have prevented this except maybe by showing better judgement in who I worked for. But any employer can lose their mind and start making accusations at any time, and the average employee does not have the resources to hire qualified representation.
My sister found that her cat likes the iPhone touch screen. She saw the phone was calling a friend, and when she touched the cancel button, the cat knocked her hand away with its paw. It seems the cast noticed that when he touches the screen, the colors change, and it is his new toy. This explains some of those midnight calls from 'sis
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Like DLL Hell, getting the correct collection of shims to run multiple legacy apps sounds just like the situation we call DLL Hell.
Over the years this idea has surfaced a number of times. In fact I used to sell something of this sort. When computers costed five thousand dollars there was a financial reason to do this. Sharing one computer for two users taxes the CPU resources and causes sluggish operation. Much of the cost of such a rig is the two monitors and keyboards and mouses and audio. These days with computers that cost only several hundred dollars, and less used, it is just as well to use separate computers. There are lots of slightly down-level computers laying around. Try a computer recycling center near your home.
It is just like them to take something that is a standard and modify it in such a way that transportable software will not compile. They will not be happy until they get us all using their single source language technology and software will run only on Windows and impossible/impractical to port. They have been moving this way for years, what's new.
Apple has hired a lot of people over the years. This guy will get to sit in at some meetings with the really smart people that are currently architecting OS X and his ideas will be considered. If he cannot convince people his ideas are important, his presence will have very little effect on what is shipped in the box. I bought an OLPC machine and disliked the security because it kept me from doing what I wanted with the machine I purchased. I have no reason to believe Apple is going to radically change the security methods in the operating system unless they can be absolutely sure it is the right way to go. They may not want to fix MAC OS if it isn't broken. The potential liability and Q/A overhead is very high. Let's see how long this guy stays around at his new job. If he doesn't walk on water, it will be hard to get the respect of the existing engineering staff. IMHO.
Which was helpful when passing mis-typed parameters was a common source of bugs.
One of the more obvious ones was the opera browser which competes with safari. Apple wants to compete with Internet Explorer on Windows by porting safari there, but is unwilling to allow alternative mail or browsing programs. Since AT&Ts TOS only allow email and browsing and Apples developer license doesn't allow you to compete with programs they already supply, just what are you supposed to write that uses Internet or GPS?
In regard to the question of why a developer would put up with Apple's desire to censor apps submitted to the app store, I for one have put my foot down. Although I signed up and learned what I needed to to write an app, I decided I was unwilling to invest the time to design and develop a piece of software when it could be arbitrarily denied. I am not a hacker, and the time it takes to use due diligence in the creation of software is non-trivial. If I invested 3-6 months of my time at normal software engineering pay rates on an app, and Apple denied it, I would be so mad it would be bad for my heart and blood pressure. "That's the breaks", would not do it for me. I cannot stomach the business model. I love my iPhone because of what it does, but as a platform for development, it is not for me. Apple has been a huge disappointment to me where the iPhone is concerned. I bought mine with development in mind. I will develop for the Apple Mac instead. I dislike Microsoft mored than Apple though.
It is not so much about the OS as in that year the user will be installing applications and becoming dependent on the solution (hardware,OS,software,training). After a year's worth of data, shortcuts, email, and data, people may not want to change and buying a license may seem easier than the alternatives. A year goes by fairy fast, then its credit card time. You buy the license, and shortly thereafter, a new OS appears. Brilliant.
While there would be difficulty, a new generation of operating system could bring some control over viruses that assume the old WIndows system architecture. The inclusion of the virtual XP mode means that all the old malware and viruses will find a happy home in the new operating system. Although walking away from the legacy software is dramatic, Apple has done it and survived, and Windows users would consider it if it would cleanse our machines of this unwanted infection that compromises our ability to depend on our systems.
I would have thought that business users would have had enough by now of the security problems and were looking forward to something better.
I believe that Microsoft is not capable of bringing about this needed change to more secure architecture. They just care about the easy bucks and the status quo. There days will pass.
I thought I was one of the last holdouts for assembly, but I must ask... Just what do you want to do today in assembly that is not more easily done in C. The C code generators have been better than hand coding for over a decade. Only once in a blue moon can you actually benefit from a hand optimized routine. With millions of bytes of ram, is it really a compactness of code issue?
I bought a copy on the first day and after the restraining order, it didn't work any more. It seems it calls home before operating so it will not function on a machine attached to the Internet. For me that means I can't use it because my machine is always connected. It is a shame because I have always thought that shifting the content to my computer for my own use was a very useful thing. I am a little unhappy that I paid the money and I can't use the software.
I did work with ATM machines long ago, and they were heavily dependent on the Data Encryption Scheme. As I remember the important transactional packets were encrypted at least three times (not triple des) and packets traveled over SNA networks using SDLC which is a synchronous method (a long stream of bits without obvious boundaries and zero insertion to protect flags. I thought at the time that this was very secure and never heard otherwise until much later when massive horsepower became available to anyone. DES was still in use as recently as a decade ago, although triple-des was an improvement. SInce then NIST has made significant progress on better encryption methods. What is true is that in the old days, those packets traveled over point to point leased lines, and not a packet switched network, and that was by definition more secure.
I don't suppose you read that nine days ago on April 1st?
Well the AT&T TOS says you can use the network to browse the web and use email. The Apple iPhone developer program does not allow you to write applications that compete with programs they already supply, and since Apple already supplies a web browser and an email program... I believe this means that we are not allowed to write programs for the iPhone that uses network communication capabilities for any purpose whatsoever. As a developer who is a communications engineer (and who had planned to write iPhone apps) I find this disappointing.
This looks to have been about fraud involving AT&T and Verizon and may not have had anything to do with a movie. See http://cbs11tv.com/technology/Core.IP.Networks.2.975776.html
http://cbs11tv.com/technology/Core.IP.Networks.2.975776.html
Sometimes when a big company settles like this, it is to keep the technology within a pool of deep pocket players and out of the hands of small players that cannot pony up huge amounts up front during their startup phase. Apple computer paid off a company recently that had a patent on navigating music databases and I believe Microsoft did also, and maybe Creative. The result is that anyone wanting to bring out a music device has to pay the huge royalty just to get started. This whole patent thing and the setting up of mutual licensing between large companies with patent portfolios is not taking us to a good place. It is killing off startup activity of those without immense wealth.
hyper-threading is subject to certain security problems that are not present in multiprocessing. Security researchers have noted that it is possible to peek at encryption keys in memory within the HT environment. See http://www.daemonology.net/hyperthreading-considered-harmful/
Programmers like myself were waiting for a clear direction in terms of language and compiler support for multi-core development, and of course multi-core debugging is a challenge.
Now we have quad processors from multiple vendors and there are plenty of choices for hardware, but there is still not a clear winner when it comes to development tools and methodology. Intel has a threaded toolbox, and beyond that we can roll our own. The only support I have seen that made me smile was the multi-core support in Python, which only exists in the more recent versions, and those versions are not ubiquitous yet.
It is really easy for Intel to unilaterally make a decision to stop processor development at 3GHz and put it on the programmers to reorganize their code in a parallel manner. It is something else again for each software engineer to choose how to do this and commit their clients to those decisions, and the fall out that will last the lifetime of this code. Companies that paid to migrate their applications to hyper threading only got to benefit for a year or two before the environment went away. I am frightened to make a decision today about multi-core that depends on Intel (and AMD) to keep multi-core stable far enough into the future to make development worthwhile.
It is fairly obvious at this point that multi-core is here to stay, but it will be nothing more than a way to sell more expensive hardware until the powers that be provide a cohesive set of tools and methodologies that make multi-core useable to address our current problems. A friend of mine told me of his experiments configuring a multicore Windows box for gaming using process affinities. He indicated that the Windows operating system used about 1.5 cores itself, which in the case of a dual core machine left about a half core for the game. My experience has shown that we have little control over the way tasks are assigned to specific cores, and multi-core seems to do more for the operating system and environment than the threads of a specific application After years of effort addressing this problem, it is still not clear to me which tools and methods will be the most stable over time. It looks to me that there has been very little progress on the software side in the last two years.
I was an early adopter of the unbreakable linux. I had serious support issues just trying to get my Dell SC1420 to use it's SATA drives in my desired configuration, and despite my service contract, was unable to get either support for that, or reliable updates from oracle and their bastardised version of up2date never worked for me. I had high hopes for their version, but they were all talk and no action when it came to keeping up with the upstream provider. When their system boots, it still identifies itself as Red Hat and they never even properly customized the system enough to cover up that fact. They (Oracle) just used the open source situation to grab Red Hat's product and try to run away with it. I dislike Oracle and will never use their products again.
After buying an iPhone and paying for the data package, there is no money left in my budget for another $60 a month to pay for a dongle that has to compete for data rate at the cell towers. AT&T needs to get it together and decide to give us some real service at a reasonable rate. If they did that, they would become seriously competitive.
There is no hope in expecting bailout money to improve the network. They have been spending our tax money for years to run fiber, but my neighborhood doesn't have fiber yet and may not until the next millenium. The best DSL I can get in my home is 1.5 and Verizon still wants 38 dollars a month for that. I live in a city but still can not get fast internet except from my cable provider COMCAST, and there are known problems with using cable based Internet, especially when the neighbors are torrenting their asses off.
AT&T does claim they had to change their voicemail system to accomodate the iPhone and that is probably true, but I think other networks would be willing to change for a piece of the action. The iPhone will become much more successful of the allow it to be used widely instead of locking it down with AT&T.
In one project, I was the Software Engineering Director with the responsibility to safeguard the source code. After the release of a product, I quit my job. The next day police arrived and took me into custody. They demanded all copies of the source code and materials in my possession. I was accused of taking the only source code disks. They left me in a cell for a few hours. Then they marched me into my ex-job site in handcuffs where I walked over John Draper's desk and in several seconds located the source disks sitting in plain sight. I was released after signing a piece of paper indicating I had only been administratively detained. I should have declined to sign that paper and hired a lawyer. That is what I get for working with an asshole like John Draper. The software project was Easywriter for the IBM-PC, written for IBM and the employer was Captain Software and Information Unlimited Software (IUS). John Draper couldn't find the disks after a few seconds and started yelling, "Doug stole the code, Doug stole the code..." IUS called the police, and my rights were trampled on. I don't see any way I could have prevented this except maybe by showing better judgement in who I worked for. But any employer can lose their mind and start making accusations at any time, and the average employee does not have the resources to hire qualified representation.
My sister found that her cat likes the iPhone touch screen. She saw the phone was calling a friend, and when she touched the cancel button, the cat knocked her hand away with its paw. It seems the cast noticed that when he touches the screen, the colors change, and it is his new toy. This explains some of those midnight calls from 'sis