lurch_mojoff

I wouldn't exactly classify Apple's response to questions, which they were explicitly asked by the Copyright Office, as "fought hard". Fighting hard would be Apple spending millions of dollars lobbying against the exemptions or taking the case to court.

And the kill switch in questions is one "that allows Apple to remotely delete malicious or inappropriate applications stored on the device". One that they haven't yet used, I might add, unlike some other mobile OS vendors. It's not a nefarious device to prevent jailbreaking.

I'm not arguing that it's not in Apple's interest to prevent jailbreaking. I'm not arguing that it is not that they are not making it easy to jailbreak iOS. All I'm saying is that it doesn't look like they are actively fighting jailbreaking. All the hurdles to jailbreaking thus far seem to be coincidental rather than the goal.

Unless things have changed with the iPhone 4, the only case in which downgrade is not possible is if the upgrade modifies the baseband firmware. At least that has been my experience. I've downgraded iOS on my phone a number of times, most recently from the latest beta of 4.1 to 4.0.2.

You may argue otherwise, but from where I stand, preventing downgrading and thus preventing jailbreaking has been a (fortunate for Apple?) side effect, rather than a goal.

As Chairman Gruber already replied [ http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/08/30/holwerda ] Thom is misrepresenting or at least misinterpreting his statement and its context. In order to say that Apple are "fighting" jailbreaking we'd have to see them taking active steps in preventing it - e.g. putting an e-fuse, like the one in some Motorola Droid phones, in the iPhone or at least have something on the device verify the origin and integrity of iOS images before allowing them to be installed or run. Just because Apple are patching the vulnerabilities used in jailbreaking and have stated that they won't support jailbroken iPhones, I would not say they are fighting it - not enabling or encouraging it, certainly, but not fighting it.

I also want to take exception to Thom's statement that Apple "fought hard to maintain jailbreaking as an illegal activity". It might not have been "[a] figment of our collective imagination", but without a shred of support provided in the post, it might very well have been. And I don't think Apple care too much about its legality. Yes, we love to poke fun of how litigious Apple are, but I can't remember them picking a fight that they don't have a good chance of winning. Certainly the folks at Apple realize they won't be able to stop the practice of jailbreaking by pulling a RIAA and carpet bombing jailbreakers with lawsuits. As I said, if Apple wanted to prevent jailbreaking, they would have come up with an effective technical measure to do so, not a legal one.

Ironically, today Apple announced the App Store Volume Purchase program, targeted specifically at education institutions. Apple don't provide much information precisely how it works from the point of view of a school, but from the 5 sentence blurb on the developer connection site it seems volume purchases and discounts on volume purchases are in the mix.

Well, it's quite simple really - the license is not GPL and there is no reciprocity requirement - that alone in the minds of some GNU fanatics, amongst which obviously Moglen is, is a crime against freedom and all that's holy.

Maybe I'm getting old, senile and cranky, but thing's didn't use to be this kooky in the open source movement, did they? I mean, there was always the political component to it, the strife for influence, the "stick it to the man" thing, but things didn't use to get this out of hand - smearing another open source project, simply because it's kicking your ass while having a more liberal license.

The whole story is very skimpy on details but it seems this guy is trying to pull off quite a bit of hacky and "clever" tricks (I'm gathering this from the posts about two previous rejections). Considering this, this doesn't seem to be as frivolous act of Apple as it is made to be.

On top of this, the complaint that Apple do not respond doesn't ring true with me. In my experience, at the very least in the past 6 months Apple have become very prompt in responding, especially to rejection issues, and have provided a contact phone number to further expedite the process.

To me this looks like some guy venting his frustration that Apple are calling his bluffs and is a good excuse for people to gratuitously bag on Apple.

According to an anonymous Gizmodo reader here [ http://gizmodo.com/5570963/apple-white-iphones-more-challeng... (see update 2)] the display glass is not painted but screen printed, presumably so it can be translucent for the sensors beneath it. It seems that Apple want to achieve both the required translucency and an even, saturated white, which is quite tricky.

I believe the issue is not in the shade of white but in the degree of translucency of the coating. On all Apple phones up to now the black frame around the screen (or at least parts of it) lets light through for the proper functioning of the ambient light and proximity sensors. At the same time these sensors are invisible for the user - it's a flat black frame. The iPhone 4 is the first one with white front and it seem that Apple and the manufacturer of the screen glass are having hard time achieving the same effect.

MacRuby is not on the iPhone because there is no garbage collected Objective-C runtime on the iPhone, NOT because it is banned.

Measuring and comparing the "fastness" of a language is a tricky thing in general, but I think it is safe to say that for most intents an purposes we can consider MacRuby just as fast as Objective-C. The point you seem to be missing is that both run on top of the same runtime and both use the same foundational classes. So the same operation performed on a MacRuby String and Objective-C NSString should take exactly the same amount of time.

The only thing that prevents MacRuby from being fully compatible with Apple's "embedded platforms" is the lack of garbage collector on said platforms. By the time MacRuby is sufficiently stable and optimized Apple's portable devices will be capable of comfortably running memory managed code.

As for the "LLVM API", for one, I don't really understand how is that supposed to work - there is no "native" LLVM language and so on; for two, such an API will be lower-than-objc, not higher; and for three, reimplementing Cocoa and CocoaTouch as some new supposedly more abstract (whatever that's supposed to mean) API is going to be a monumental and almost certainly very disruptive task - and all of it for no good reason.

A lot of the comments, I'd say yours included, seem to be coming from the presumption that Apple's adoption of a higher level than Objective-C language is inevitably going to be a huge overnight change. But the beauty and genius of MacRuby is precisely that it does not require a huge overnight change. You can mix and match Ruby and Objective-C as you need or like. You can write high level, terse code using the HotCocoa wrapper or you can fall down to the nitty-gritty OS X C APIs, for a good number of which there are MacRuby bindings.

Although it would have been best if Topolsky et al. had figured this out before they posted the poll, the reason for pulling it is quite sensible. Comparing a device that has sold not that many units yet with a device that is yet to go on sale, serves no purpose at all, except for providing a tribune for "fanboy" circle-jerking.

It is a "true".

If you go to the developer page (here http://developer.apple.com/safaridemos/ ) you can attempt to run the demos in any browser you fancy.

On the consumer accessible page Apple are requiring Safari because they can guarantee that the demos will work and they can guarantee they will have reasonable performance. And that's what's important. That's an advocacy page, a PR thing, not "look at this cool code we wrote". Presentation is everything.

In other words, different goals - different implementations.

Regardless of the merits of Lala's service, I highly doubt that the biggest music retailer in the U.S. had a reason to be afraid of any competition from them. Certainly not reason enough to be forced to buy them. Apple are infamously frugal when it comes to M&A, so this must be either "buying technology" or "buying talent". I guess we'll see which once the iTunes "cloud" service is launched.

There is a meta-ticket tracking just that - http://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=4068

Google's issue with h.264 is that they are not part of MPEG LA. They don't have a say on licensing fees or terms and as result it becomes theoretically possible for the companies part of MPEG LA (amongst which are Apple and Microsoft, direct competitors to Google) to fuck'em over. That happening is extremely unlikely, if not outright impossible, but google could be playing it extra safe.

How will this pan out I have no idea, but the closest thing to a resolution that I see is Google will try to make MPEG adopt VP8 or the whole WebM in some way and join MPEG LA.

Of course they could be hoping to fight the patent allegations and not lose, but I doubt that Google have become so carelessly cocky.

But isn't this pretty much what Jobs said in his rant. To quote: "We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it." The way I see it, "we have ... asked" implies Apple were at least somewhat open to the idea to include Flash support.

"Nothing" and shame will always go hand in hand. But you can always reevaluate what "nothing" means to you. "I created a great family and brought up great kids." "I helped the people in my community." "I managed to stay a decent person." These are all "somethings" one can be proud of, even if they are not things that have changed the world at large.

True, but Woz, after his initial contribution - Apple][, called it quits on the industry and dedicated his life to hobbies and personal projects. Jobs stayed in the industry and eventually returned to Apple to turn a dying company into one of the titans of technology.

OK, let's be realistic here - this a little bit like saying that since there is GNUstep and GCC, you don't really need a Mac to develop for the iPhone. The bulk of Flash content online is developed with Adobe's authoring tools. That's why they are so protective of Flash.

Unfortunately I cannot off the cuff cite a source (if I find one I'll add a link to it, though). I can tell you the context in which I came across this. A couple of months ago there was a story that Adobe were "sabotaging" HTML5 - in reality it was Larry Masinter, Adobe's representative in the HTML WG, arguing that the canvas API falls outside of the charter of the working group. In one of the blogposts in defense of Adobe's position the author quoted similar objections that Apple and Microsoft have made regarding <audio> and <video> codec support when HTML5 was still in transition from WHATWG to W3C.

Apple have most certainly expressed concerns about Theora's performance and patent situation and I'm sure they still have them. However, those concerns were pertinent when HTML5 was being developed by WHATWG, because WHATWG are not limiting the scope of any work they do. That's not the case with W3C's HTML WG.

The working group tasked with creating HTML5 has a charter that defines what are they supposed to work on and deliver. The codec of the content served through the video tag is outside of the scope defined in said charter. Apple, among others, have argued only that. What Microsoft could have done might have had impact on the outcome of h.264 vs. Theora, but it would not have changed the HTML5 specification.

W3C is in no way, shape or form "allowing H.264 to infiltrate its way". The HTML5 spec does not require or endorse h.264 or any other codec. Opera's, and Mozilla's I believe, attempt to sneak a codec requirement in the spec (Theora) was shot down, and rightly so, because it falls outside of the scope of HTML5, just as the encoding of image files displayed through the img tag is outside of its scope.

First, this is mostly a rehash of an Engadget article - little to no original content here. And second, it doesn't really answer the stated question. It enumerates the specs of the device and comes to the tired old conclusion that based on them "...the number one iPad-Killer seems to be Aigo N700."

As you were everyone - "...sources say..."

It would have been awesome if you had put the effort to state your position instead of slapping two links to Wikipedia and leaving us to infer what you're trying to say.

If you are implying that Apple removed the page because they are ashamed of it, I'd say bubkes. I don't think Apple's position has changed in any way. In fact in last week's Steve-rant, Jobs reiterated basically the same thing.

There is no deep conspiracy behind Apple's and Microsoft's support for HTML5 video and h.264.

They are adopting HTML5 for video because video is becoming more and more essential part of the web and an open standard for it makes the browsers of both companies independent of any particular plugin. No sane company wants to be dependent on others.

As for them choosing h.264 - that's simple too - h.264 is open standard (as in, no single company or other entity has the ability to change it at some random point in some random way) and is widely used already (i.e. there is a lot of software and hardware support). On top of that the patent situation with h.264 is much clearer and safer (e.g. given h.264's huge use, the longer no submarine patents surface, the higher the likelihood that there aren't any).

edit: fixed typos

More importantly they can control how well it does what it does.

Looking gifted horse in the teeth. Apple/Lala are giving him a 100 bucks, despite not being obligated the slightest to do so. But obviously for some people even free is not good enough.

edit: seriously people, read todd3834's comment bellow [ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1307514 ]; unused credits can be refunded - USED credits (i.e. the money one had spent to practically rent the music) are given back as iTunes store credit;

Why do you think we'll never see it compiling iPhone apps? Neither the technical reasons - i.e. garbage collection in the iPhone Objective-C runtime, not the political reasons - the infamous 3.1.1, I presume, it doesn't do so already seem to me insurmountable. Especially since it is an Apple run project and one of its main goals is to be a first class Obj-C equivalent.