Mary J Foley (Microsoft blogger) buys an iPad
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
In general, I think it's unlikely Windows 7 will gain much adoption as a tablet OS, since it's not designed for touch. Some evolution of Windows Phone 7 is more likely.
At first read I thought it was saying she was a paid evangelist for Microsoft.
Gruber isn't a blind fanboy. Daniel Eran Dilger, on the other hand, while really insightful, can't seem to find anything wrong with anything Apple does.
Just my personal opinion, but I find Gruber to be far worse than a blind fanboy: He just comes across as someone who raised their flag and damnit, he's sticking with it hell or high water, like some small town sports fan railing to anyone who'll listen why their chosen team is the best and everyone else is second rate. Over and over again.
Where he takes on anything other than the official corporate line of Apple he does so only under incredible duress, when he's the only one against an industry and his fanaticism is too obvious.
He made a jibe recently about how he'll be getting a big payola check from Cupertino for all of his defenses of Apple lately: Honestly, I would think 100x more of the guy if he did.
Just went there for a moment to see the first item is "Android 2.2 Handily Beats iOS4 in JavaScript Benchmarks". Great, even handed, right? Yet in true Gruber style he adds "which isn’t possible under iOS 4.0 because of a security feature where once a page in memory is marked writeable, it can never be made executable. It’s a nice security feature, but one that comes at the expense of significant potential performance gains.".
Android makes very heavy use of the NX bit as well. Only, just like with iOS, they can and do circumvent that when the need arises. Saying that iOS can't do this is utterly asinine. And you can be sure that iOS will do this, it's just that web performance hasn't been a top priority for the platform.
The next n-stories are all pretty much the same thing -- Apple is maligned and unfairly trodden upon. Android is stinky poo-poo, and on and on. It's unpalatable to all but the faithful.
But I never wanted to be part of the Apple community because I have had so many negative, hostile and condescending interactions with not just Apple fanboys, but regular Apple users. If that’s what “thinking different” was, I wanted no parts.
And she's bemoaning the lack of Internet Explorer on the iPad. Why, exactly?
I’d love to see Internet Explorer, Firefox and the Zune software (Microsoft’s iTunes equivalent) be ported to the iPad.
She has been following Microsoft exclusively for years. I think she was the one who broke the scandal a few years back about Microsoft having designated "minders" for journalists that said things they didn't like. But back when Linux broke into the mainstream in the late 90s she was one of the few tech journalists who "got" it pretty quickly. (She made the mistake of regurgitating Microsoft's position once, quickly got corrected, and then demonstrated learning and insight thereafter.)
I have no interest in Microsoft so I haven't read anything she's written recently. But she at least used to be on my short list of journalists who I could assume were more likely to have a clue than not.