Posts by Andrew Rennard

The Year in Operating Systems: No battle of big ideas

OS X is Unix

@Chris iverson : nope, OSX is fully certified UNIX, as of 10.5:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/unix.html

@Charlie stross: with Apple developing technologies like Open CL & Grand Central, 10.6 introducing full ZFS support, FSEvent enabling powerful features like Time Machine - I think you're mistaken in not seeing the innovation that's taking place in OS X.

The omission of OS X from this article is pretty glaring. Millions of people will be unwrapping christmas presents this year that are OS X powered (iPod Touches, as well as iPhones and Macs). OS X might not be a big hitter in the enterprise space - yet - but that's the enterprises' loss really.

2008's top three touchscreen phones

Credibility Zero

The Reg's credibility seems to take a nosedive every time you write an article that in any way references the iPhone. Please, stop calling it the 'Jesus phone' for a start - you're the only people left doing it, and you just make yourself look like idiots when you do.

As for ranking that HTC touch as better than the iPhone - you are kidding ? Have you actually used it ? A thin veneer of UI ontop of Winblows mobile does not a great OS make.

Anyway, I'm off to remove the Reg from my RSS feed reader, as you've not published anything of any quality all year. Bye.

Google voice still not on iPhone

Android ?

Instead of ragging on Apple yet again, why not ask why this application will appear on the iPhone first, BEFORE Google's own phone OS.

iPhone squares up to Android

Push email works in background in 2.1

Unless I've gone totally barmy, push email works in the background now under iPhone OS 2.1...

What seems to happen though is that after a (long) period of inactivity (eg overnight) the service shuts down until you start using the phone again.

Vodafone to offer Nokia 'Tube' iPhone rival

Stylus ?

WTF is that thing - I thought styluses went out of fashion with kipper ties and flares.

Apple's MobileMe plays into hands of spammers

bogus

Well I get 10 x as much spam on my gmail account as I do on .mac - and I've never distributed the gmail address - so I say this is yet another bogus Apple security story. Sorry the sky isn't falling, yet again.

The Top Ten 3G iPhone beaters

Strange definition of 'beaters'..

I'm just wondering how you're defining 'beat' here ? Perhaps it's as-in 'with the ugly stick' ?

Seriously, you put a Palm Treo in there . HAhahaha. That's funny.

Swede packs off GPS to make world's biggest sketch

I beat this.

I have gone one better, and have dispatched a Galactic Positioning Device into a UFO flown by friendly Altarians, and they are going to draw a self portrait of my ass over the Milky Way.

(I have just as much basis in reality as this BS story too).

Mac OS X Leopard - Time Machine

Time machine more elegant than 'Find'

To those people who seem to think that you can write a one-line cron job in Linux to do the same thing as Time Machine.. well, good luck with that.

What you probably don't realise is that when TM runs it's is informed by the OS which files have changed since it last ran, and it backs up those, and only those, files. Running 'find' every hour will probably result in your disk thrashing for a considerable portion of that hour - whereas my TM activity takes about one or two minutes, with very minimal CPU involvement.

And no, Windows Shadow Copy is not the same thing either. TM makes clever use of hard links in the backup set, so that each hourly backup can be browsed from any normal file manager tool (eg the Finder) and appears exactly like a complete backup in it's own right. They should have called it 'SpaceTime Machine' for the way it apparently squeezes 24 backups a day of your entire hard drive onto a disk that might be no bigger than the source.

More details on the tech behind this can be found in Ars Technica's review. I suggest you read it before post any more inane 'Linux can do this' comments.