Posts by Ian Joyner

The Steve Jobs of supercomputers: We remember Seymour Cray

Bob Barton was the original 'Think Different' computer architect

Bob Barton was the architect of the Burroughs B5000 - a computer so far ahead of its time, that it is still ahead in 2015 (as Unisys ClearPath Libra MCP systems).

In the early 1960s, Barton was sick of seeing electronic circuit designers design instruction sets and turn them over to programmers to make something out of this mess. He this had the software people design the instruction set and they turned that over to the electronics people. Thus they had things like good support for high-level languages (ALGOL was the system programming language, long before the lower-level C came along as a backward step), automatic memory management. The most significant thing is probably single-level memory, where registers, cache, RAM, and virtual memory all looked as one level of memory to the programmer (even most system programmers). This was the first commercial implementation of virtual memory - the idea having come from Manchester University where Turing worked - and Turing machines have one level of durable memory.

We can also attribute Reverse Polish Notation to Barton, as used by Hewlett Packard, which employed a lot of ex-Burroughs engineers.

Bob Barton was certainly a model for Steve Jobs' Think Different. Barton went on to teach at University of Utah, where he taught among others Alan Kay, who went on to invent the window and other things at Xerox PARC, which was then integrated with Apple's efforts, since Xerox dropped the ball.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_S._Barton

http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/afips/1961/5058/00/50580393.pdf

http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/afips/1963/5062/00/50620169.pdf

Got an Apple Mac, iThing? Update it right now – there's a shedload of security holes fixed

Strange - you will find the next man does not have some irrational and pathological dislike of Apple. Apple has done so much for this industry, like invent it (at least the part that says computers are for everyone, not just hobbyist geeks) and still lead it today. Android and Windows before it have just copied.

US Treasury: How did ISIS get your trucks? Toyota: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Most ISIS equipment is American

The US started ISIS in Iraq. They left most of their equipment behind which ISIS used to get started. Calling Toyota into question is really hypocritical.

https://www.facebook.com/BenSwannRealityCheck/videos/882104321854519/?pnref=story

Miss Brittany dethroned for posting 'nude' Facebook pics

Immature attitude

Society has a completely immature attitude to the human body (I won't even call it nudity).

The more we restrict being able to go natural, the more the pornographers and paedophiles own the body. Those who have a prudish attitude to the body are just encouraging these sick industries. It is natural to delight in the form of the body, but we replace that with disgust, repressing the delight and that turns to deviance.

Since when was the body unstylish, needing to be covered by board shorts, and when did it become pornographic.

We need to stop being so childish and be accepting. People might have nothing to show off, but nothing to be ashamed of either.

Linux kernel dev who asked Linus Torvalds to stop verbal abuse quits over verbal abuse

Computers first - people last

Alas this kind of attitude comes from those who put computers first and people last. I have frequently had arguments with so-called 'engineers' who want to squeeze the last CPU cycle out of a system, but will make a system more inconvenient for people to use to save cycles.

Why we must keep stating the philosophy that computers are just tools for people to use, not the domain of hobbyists, hackers, and nerds.

How to evade Apple's anti-malware Gatekeeper in OS X and really ruin a fanboy's week

Myth?

"The myth that Macs are inherently more secure than Windows PCs has taken another hit."

The myth takes a hit because it is not a myth. It is difficult for anything to be as insecure as Windows. Like many products, Windows base is insecure. This is fixed by putting security layers on top of it.

OS X however, starts with a much more secure base, so is inherently more secure.

However, it is true that most of OS X is, like Windows, also written in C. C is the cause of most of our security woes, so even Apple must work to overcome this, but not to the extent of Windows. Problem with C is it makes it too easy to subvert systems written in C. It is an old language with many flaws (flaws which weren't in other languages of the 1960s) and it is about time it was retired.

Apple CEO: We've hoovered up your cash faster than ever before

Re: More childish reporting from Register

>>Yes, and Range Rover has done a good job making light trucks useful for the average person and not just to farmers, livestock dealers and small builders.<<

Your comparison is invalid. Computers work because of a small set of simple ideas with a few instructions (sequence, branch, loop, recursion) on a very small data set (0 and 1). Their power comes because they can do those things very fast. They are thus mostly about ideas, not about the physical form of computers. That makes them quite different to any other hardware comparison.

Re: More childish reporting from Register

Nice spin - but that is all. The same old people who were knocking Apple all the way through from the 1970s are still at it. Since the Register posts such snotty articles about Apple - no wonder Apple does not give the Register first-hand access to their news.

It all just smacks of those who have resented any success of Apple because they represent the counter-culture of Silicon Valley, putting people in control of computers and out of the hands of nerds and business people who wanted to use computers to control people and just make them be a part of the huge business machine.

If the Register wants to make points against Apple, then they can do so, but in a mature fashion, not just insulting it's Register-reading Apple buyers by calling them fanbois and implying we are falling for some kind of line from Apple. The counter-culture is too ingrained than to be controlled by any one corporation, including Apple. But Apple have done a good job of making computers useful for the average person and not just to computer scientists (of which I'm one), enthusiasts, and hobbyists.

And if you did not notice - all stock markets everywhere have been routed today, not just Apple on Wall Street.

More childish reporting from Register

Apple literally invents a market by asking "How will people use this product", rather than the hardware engineers approach of "Let's have fun making hardware and try to sell it without it being useful". (Not an original by Apple, but they do share a lineage via Alan Kay and others to Bob Barton who designed the Burroughs B5000 which was designed with programmers in mind, not hardware engineers).

Apple make a high-quality product which people want to buy - Register characterises them as 'mindless fanboys' who can't think for themselves, but are duped in someway by an evil Apple.

Apple sells very well - which in business terms would give them a good report, but Register makes out this to be bad as well.

Grow up Register.

'To read this page, please turn off your ad blocker...'

Advertising is the scourge of modern society.

Says it all really. These companies are trying to shove their message down your throat all the time, and since most of what they advertise is junk they are wasting my time. I don't thank them for that.

Samsung’s consumer IoT vision – stupid, desperate, creepy

What you have described is the old view of computing that computers are in control of people. The revolution of Silicon Valley, Doug Englebart and others was that people are in control of computers - computers are made to help the intellect of people by magnifying it. But the ideas come from people in the first place - computers can't have them.

There is a third view that comes out of John McCarthy and the AI crowd - that computers will replace human intellect. But that is a fraud as well.

Seems Samsung is very much copying the look of 'people in charge of computers' paradigm while throwing out the core of it and going with the 'computers control people' paradigm. I like Samsung less and less, if you have reported accurately on their view of IoT.

Man in India claims his new iPhone 6 combusted in his car

Re: Samsung exploding washing machines

Nothing to do with your silly dismissive 'fanboi' word. Samsung had a serious problem due to design affecting a large percentage of units. Apple - and the truth of what actually happened here is not established - has a very small percentage of failure. It is the people here who have very quickly come out criticising Apple. Get some perspective.

Samsung exploding washing machines

One could draw attention to Samsung's washing machine debacle which is far more common than 1 in 10 million.

If you haven't heard and have a Samsung washing machine - check if it's part of the recall - a lot of houses have burnt down.

Yep, it's true: Android is the poor man's phone worldwide

People who want a general-purpose programming and computer hobbyist environment should get a general-purpose computer where they can play to their hearts content.

Devices like smartphones, etc are used by the masses who don't care about that stuff. Apple has that right. Most programmers I know choose Mac anyway for their experiments. Google just fools programmers into thinking programming on a little handheld device has some benefit - it doesn't - except as a benefit to hackers.

How to hijack MILLIONS of Samsung mobes with man-in-the-middle diddle

It's easy - mobile devices are end-user devices. They should be locked down. Apple gets this right.

If you want to program to your hearts content, buy a general-purpose computer. That's what I do if I want to program at that level. I have programmed at that level and even lower:

http://www.textfiles.com/bitsavers/pdf/burroughs/B1700/MIL_MicroImplementationLang.pdf

I don't need to program a specific-purpose device for that thrill. The only people that want that level of control are malicious hackers.

Chrome on Mac sucks (electrons), says Google, so we'll fix it

Chrome based on Safari anyway

Well - to be more accurate based on WebKit which was developed by Apple as the HTML rendering engine of Safari.

I got really sick of Safari's memory management - continually leaking memory and chewing it up, requiring a quit about every five days. So I thought I'd try out Firefox which crashed a lot anyway and then Chrome which was even worse. So I'm back at Safari, hoping that some day Apple will make its memory management better (although I'm not convinced that automatic reference counting will ever do that).

Apple to tailor Swift into fully open-source language – for Linux, too

Re: VICTORY !

Further to my previous post saying that Eiffel's exceptions were subtle because they were baked into the language and runtime, rather than explicit like try-catch, I just saw this rather nice quote:

"GOOD DESIGN IS OBVIOUS. GREAT DESIGN IS TRANSPARENT"

at http://www.alivemobile.com/approach/#ourapproach

Re: VICTORY !

Exactly - C has been the biggest problem in the industry costing billions per year just because you can point a pointer anywhere and overrun the end of arrays, etc. I think younger programmers are being better taught these days to appreciate type-safe language.

While a lot seems based on Eiffel (which Apple certainly knew about), there do seem to be C-style explicit kludges making it in like try-catch, etc. Eiffel's exception handling is so much more elegant, being a part of the language from the base up, you don't need explicit try-catch.

And why do they have to stick to the old-looking C syntax? Oh I'll answer that myself - because most of the industry is not ready to move past it. Something that used some beautiful typography to really expose the structure of programs in an intelligent editor would have been nice, but programmers usually are the last to accept such things.

Apple and IBM foist fondleslabs on Japanese elders in Big Data snatch

Re: Stop insulting our intelligence

It's not that the guy at the top of the heap always takes a bashing - it's how he got there, and IBM got there by very dubious means, mostly by the strategy of putting competition out of business by whatever means. It was all very anti-competitive.

I agree with your HP/Compaq assessment - same thing happened to Burroughs with Michael Blumenthal bought out Sperry to create Unisys and make his retirement package a lot bigger.

Stop insulting our intelligence

The Register should stop insulting the readers' intelligence with silly anti-Apple headlines. It really brings out all the Apple bashers to make comments in this section. You are all trying to hold on to yesterday's computing with computer people who have an inordinate amount of power over the computer user.

I have very low opinions of IBM, but I don't bash them in such an inane way. The computers they made were not so good (360 made Dijkstra depressed), and they had dreadful business practices as written about in Richard DeLamarter's "Big Blue: IBM's Use and Abuse of Power".

Microsoft's business model (particularly under Ballmer) is that competition means putting the others out of business by similar dirty tricks to IBM. A large amount of the dirty tricks is to use people's hatred by putting around negative stories and being seemingly knowledgeable and trendy by bashing companies like Apple. That is ignorance. That is negative competition, rather than compete by making better products. Apple has been a champion of positive competition by making better products. Seems a lot still resent Apple's success at that and would prefer to return to the fat old lazy industry of yesteryear.

Really Register - you need to lift the tone of discourse in this industry, not keep fuelling the flames of the trolls.

C++ Daddy Bjarne Stroustrup outlines directions for v17

To really understand OO

People should look at Eiffel:

https://www.eiffel.com

and read any of Bertrand Meyer's writings:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_11?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=bertrand+meyer&sprefix=bertrand+me%2Caps%2C864

especially Object-Oriented Software Construction:

http://www.amazon.com/Object-Oriented-Software-Construction-Book-CD-ROM/dp/0136291554/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1430269534&sr=1-3&keywords=bertrand+meyer

Your mastery of software development will improve out of sight.

Of course for functional (reactive) programming you should look at Haskell.

Re: C++

I said: "Software development is not engineering. It is abstraction."

Moonshine replied: "Well that's killed of 1000,0000+ software engineers in one stroke!"

That's a lot of software developers who are calling themselves 'engineers' falsely. Software development is not engineering. There are some things that can be borrowed from engineering to help run projects, but mostly not - that's what Agile is about (although flawed itself, test-centred development rather than axiomatic development (contracts) for e.g.).

The wish to apply 'engineering' to software development is to give software some 'credence'. But it is false credence. Software needs it's own discipline (what I call AMAR analysis for Abstraction, Manipulation, Axiomatization, Representation - a technique espoused by Tony Hoare in Structured Programming).

Even David Parnas (one of the greatest software people of the 20th century, and a qualified engineer) when he was asked to teach software engineering said he really didn't understand what the term meant and he was sure it was not right.

Software is a fundamentally different entity to hardware. Hardware needs long design cycles and then the design is fixed. Software is what it is because it is not fixed and flexible. That makes it a very different process.

Thus software development is NOT engineering.

Re: C++ haters: What about performance?

Blotter: >>"Assembler? What, your joking right?, lots of development time, no portability, hard to maintain."

Compilers can't do everything. Some specific operations have to be done in assembler even if that assembler is wrapped up in a C function. Eg: interrupt calling, processor ring level switching

Buy yourself a ticket on the clue train sometime.<<

Assembler is only needed on machines with flawed architectures that expose implementation details like CPU registers. Everything you might want to in assembler could be built into a HLL and compiler. But on the best machine I know, there is no assembler - all system software is built in ALGOL-based languages with interrupt handling, event handling for multiprocessing, etc. There is a special language for OS (NEWP), which provides specific constructs for specific instructions like context switching, but that is still ALGOL-based and never low-level like assembler or even C.

It's time for the computing community to think different and challenge the very foundations and assumptions on which it is built.

Re: The problem are different sensible subsets

Christian: >>Yes, the best way to deal with C++ is to throw out everything but a small sensible subset of it.<

That's what Java did. A lot of the garbage of C and C++ gone. But did they end up with the best subset? I don't think so.

Re: C++

Long John Brass: >>You know who I mean ... Dijkstra and the reset of the evil language elves.<<

What a silly thing to say. Your complete ignorance is on display for everyone. The rest of your posts is just the usual platitudes swallowed by the gullible trying to justify their own existence and narrow-minded approach to computing. It is why the profession of programming is in such a mess now.

Writings on C++

http://ianjoyner.name/Files/ACritiqueOfC++.pdf

http://ianjoyner.name/C++.html

http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/defective.html

http://users.jyu.fi/~sakkinen/publ.html

Re: C++

>>C is a language built by engineers for engineers; to get things done<<

Software development is not engineering. It is abstraction. K&R built C on very limited hardware with very limited compiler technology. We have moved way past that. We don't need the deficiencies of C or C++ any more.

Way before C there was ALGOL and ALGOL is still a far superior language (and the first used for high-level OS development in an OS that still survives and is still the best in the industry).

Re: C++ haters: What about performance?

>>If you have performance-critical systems then C++ is a sound choice.<<

Performance is not an excuse for C++'s complexity. Good clean languages can also be compiled to perform very competitively with C++.

Re: Will anyone really understand the language?

Software development is an essential complexity. The complexity in C++ is self-inflicted accidental complexity.

Re: Direction number one

joeldillon >>The other guy kind of covered this, but what do you think that web browser and back end database are written in? People writing stuff in high level languages that don't require deep understanding isn't exactly a new thing, it's just a couple of decades ago it was Visual Basic. There will always be 'hard' systems languages and 'easy' scripting languages because they address different areas of development.<<

No - C and C++ are full of accidental complexity not essential complexity. C++ exposes all of this accidental complexity. Some people mistake this for being comprehensive and 'deep understanding'. It's quite the opposite - those with real deep understanding of computing realise what a horrendous mess C++ is. Those with deep understanding keep things simple, elegant, and complete without resorting to the mess of C++.

Revealed: The AMAZING technology behind Apple's $1299 Retina MacBooks – a lot of glue

Aussie (Ed): >>I hate apple, its business practices, its hipster fan boi fanbase and so on.<<

What specific business practices don't you like? The ones I don't like are pretty much shared across the industry. But in contrast, IBM and Microsoft business practice and model is pretty much drive any competition out of business by whatever means you can. This was Ballmer's vision and has pretty much failed now. By contrast Apple's business practice (as you pretty much admit) is to build great products, show the rest of the world how to do it.

What of the 'fan boi base'? Well, that is a figment of those who - like you - hate Apple for illogical, silly reasons. It is your brigade who are really the fan bois of IBM and Microsoft, who do their bidding trying to put competition out of business any way they can by bad mouthing the competition. Apple and many other companies in the industry have been recipients of this treatment. Most of the others succumbed, but Apple survived by sticking to their 'quality product' initiative.

If you like to tinker - that is good, but the industry has moved on from hobbyists a long time ago. Apple led the charge. That might be a reason for you technical geek 'fan bois' to hate Apple, but you are living in the past.

It's the non-technical customer

Let's look at this from the overall picture. Apple has not made devices for the computer hobbyist - they have made them for the end user. IBM also had this philosophy wrt business (the B in IBM) and that made them very successful, even though there were much better machines around.

What is in your laptop is the most complex machine man has ever devised. To get that in a really small package takes very advanced technology. Remember just 20-30 years ago when cars were much more serviceable by the home mechanic, but no longer. But with cars back then, the home mechanic was always having to fix something - now you hardly have to fix anything, but to service and if anything does go wrong you need a specialist. Same now with computers. This actually serves the interest of both the customer and the vendor better. Your article only focuses on the negative aspects - mostly for the hobbyist.

For example, the fact that things are soldered onto the motherboard makes things more reliable - no need to open lid and make sure that chips are seated correctly with your thumb - so like the home car mechanic, you just don't need to do this kind of maintenance anymore. Most devices you buy these days void the warranty if you open the box - sounds draconian, but it works better for everyone since manufacturers time is not wasted trying to work out what mods an end user has made.

Upgrades - you very rarely need to, you buy a machine with plenty of RAM and plenty of storage (although memory hierarchy should not be visible to user).

You also don't need to adapt machines for different applications anymore. This was the main task of the hobbyist who needed to add this or that. Apple just build everything in Bluetooth, WiFi, Ethernet, it's all there.

I've just taught a course to masters students on adapting computer architectures for different purposes, particularly Network Processors. These need chips that are better at passing packets across than a general purpose CPU can provide, since it is better to build silicon for these purposes, rather than provide floating-point arithmetic and other general purpose functions. So I really understand what you can do with flexible architectures (Burroughs architectures of Bob Barton should really be studied for system-oriented design rather than computer-oriented design).

So in summary, today's computers are built for non-technical end users, not computer hobbyists.

Australia finds $1 BEELLION to replace No-SQL DATABASE

They should consider Burroughs

Oh, I mean now Unisys. ClearPath MCP are most solid machines ever. Proof - they are not built on C, but a proper HLL.

Benefit all Australians?

Morrison: "Coalition Government is getting on with the job of building a new system that will benefit all Australians." Hah, all this government want to do is benefit the rich and multinational corporations. They believe in the trickle-down effect. It is actually a bubble-up effect - money rises to the top, where it should be taxed and put back in at the bottom - that way it bubbles up again and everyone benefits.

Pre-order consumergasm will leave Apple Watches out of stock for months

More Troll feeding

You can see from most of the comments here, this is just more troll feeding from Register.

Apple is like HITLER says Chinese billionaire

Re: Hitler is a bit extreme.

>>Communisim is just the nanny-state<<

I don't think you could make the case that Stalin or Mao implemented a nanny state. Quite the contrary.

Apple have been done over before

When Apple was more open Microsoft and Bill Gates stole the technology (they stole Quickdraw which was Jef Raskin's work, not Xerox as Gates likes to claim).

Since then Apple has been more careful. Others still steal the work that Apple has developed. That is bad competition. But they can do that because Apple also bases its work on open standards. Note that IBM did use monopolistic practices by trying to control those open standards. (Richard Delamarter Big Blue: IBM's Use and Abuse of Power.)

Becoming Steve Jobs biography: ‘Much of it was chutzpah and self delusion’

Thank goodness Jobs was the way he was. He needed real strength of character to change the computing industry the way he did. So many computing engineers just stick to the same old line. They do this because computing is complex and they hide behind it. There is a power in it. Jobs broke that down. He had to stand up against so many who have fixed ideas in computing, like Bob Barton had done in an earlier generation (and he also was known for being difficult).

Barton designed a completely different system rather than computer architecture. This came out of an innovative period where designers knew what the elements were and could arrange them how they liked. But we seem to have become stuck on the von Neumann architecture, which was ok for the time of costly hardware, but now hardware is much cheaper, we should be able to be more innovative in how processors are arranged instead of being wedded to the same old thing.

Jobs also changed marketing. Too often marketers, grabbing for power, would try to be in control of what got put into products under the pretence that it was they who spoke to the customer and knew what was needed. Jobs put marketing in its right place as well.

Sure this might have upset a lot of people, but thank goodness for the strength of character of Jobs.

Re: @ Ian Joyner

True many CPUs are embedded systems controlling all sorts of things. Yes a lot of computers are still purchased by business and government. IBM and Microsoft would have kept it that way, but Apple and Jobs let the genie out of the bottle. And yes it was done by changing the paradigm from computers controlling people to work for the company to people in control of people.

>>(The OP's screed about "computers controlling people" versus "people controlling computers" is equally ridiculous, but who has time to take that mess apart?)<<

It's not ridiculous at all. It is the basis of modern and widely available and used computing. See Doug Englebart's "Mother of all presentations", etc. You need to see the wood for the trees. You keep coming here and looking at individual trees. You won't have time to take anything apart because you won't be able to - it's not an intractable problem, it's impossible, so the only way you can do it is attempt to bury it in nonsense.

Re: @ Ian Joyner

>>Unless you have some citations I am just going to assume that this is bullshit.<<

So where are your citations to the contrary? It is an undeniable FACT that Apple has prospered, others have copied that success trying to get into that market, and been quite successful themselves. IBM has greatly waned, and Microsoft is not doing so well since their main business model is putting competition out of business rather than innovation.

>> (And yes, I know that a smart phone is a computer but they are being purchased as glorified phones, not as computers.)<<

No mobiles (pads and phones) are very much computers. As John Gage at Sun pointed out "the network is the computer" and all of these mobiles are part of it.

>>//But Gates trounces Jobs in hardware by understanding that corporates want speed and reliability//

...seriously?<<

See my other comment further down, that it is true that is what corporates want. They want uninspiring machines that control workers. Jobs and Apple changed that and now more users who want computers to work for them are buying computers thanks to Apple.

My other post is longer on that subject and I don't want to repeat it.

Re: What's the fascination?

>>The National Socialist party was the German Workers' party and on paper, was very similar to the Australian Labor Party of today. The main difference was the ALP plans to borrow money to bribe voters and leave it for our grandchildren to pay back<<

What complete and utter nonsense. Do you believe the inane Liberal scaremongering?

Reg needs to lift its game on Apple reporting

>>Katie Cotton, Head of communications at Apple for 18 years retired in 2014. She decided who got to talk to Steve. She probably made sure The Reg stopped getting invited to events too.<<

I'm not surprised. The Reg needs to report on Apple in a better, more mature fashion, instead of being a 'fanboy' basher.

The key is the computing philosophies

>>But Gates trounces Jobs in hardware by understanding that corporates want speed and reliability, not innovation, and the rising tide of Wintel capability will wash away the high-end workstation market<<

The IBM philosophy was that people went to work and the computer was in control of the work and people. Microsoft and Gates inherited this view of computing. (It is the 'Business' in the middle of IBM.) Since business in the 80s and 90s accounted for most computing purchases, their model won. (In fact, IBM had been a major player in machines to help the Nazis control people in the 30s and 40s.)

Contrary to its tag of 'Personal' (Apple used the phrase 'Personal Computer' before this), the IBM PC was still a business machine, not personal at all, except for the fact that it was used by one person.

Apple and Jobs' philosophy is that people are in control of machines and use them for creative purposes. Of course Apple and Jobs did not invent this view - it can be traced back to Doug Englebart and others in the early 1960s, taken to Apple by Jef Raskin and others.

Now the majority of computers are purchased by end users for personal and creative purposes. That is why Apple is on the rise and IBM and Microsoft are in decline.

Apple Safari update BORKED private browsing

Re: More rubbish coding

>>Sorry, Windows users don't get to whine about Safari. Internet Explorer on the Mac was a fucking travesty that we had to endure for far too long.<<

IE is a travesty on Windows. Microsoft only developed it to kill Netscape. Once they'd achieved that goal they have not been interested ever since. It's the Ballmer business model.

Network competition? Puh-lease. It's all about the Apple-Android Axis of Fondle

Competition Mantra

>>>“Competition is the best protector that a consumer and the best friend that an innovator ever had,” the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler told Mobile World Congress last week.<<<

That is more an article of faith. Competition does not set out to protect consumers, nor to encourage innovation. In some cases competition affects these positively, in many cases it does not.

This mantra seems to be more about not having government regulation to protect consumers, or government spending to encourage innovation. Not everyone is motivated by trying to put the other guy out of business. Some people really are motivated by the intellectual interest and the desire to improve things.

Apple Pay a haven for 'rampant' credit card fraud, say experts

"Apple is known for making things easier to use, even for fraudsters."

Wong making things easier for your legitimate users does not necessarily make things easier for fraudsters. In fact, most often it makes it harder for fraudsters. Fraudsters in fact love complicated systems because they have more holes in them.

The phrase is that "security by obscurity" is not good security.

Re: ApplePay is very secure

"Apple Pay uses secure tokens to ensure that your credentials are never divulged to anyone. Ergo: more secure."

That's exactly right Mike. When you put a credit card in a reader, your numbers can be skimmed. With ApplePay, the iPhone does the job of the reader, validates you by your finger print, only unique numbers to do with the transaction are passed to the bank encrypted.

Much safer than using your credit card. These stories really are FUD against ApplePay (and by that I could probably say Google Wallet and others).

In the US they still use magnetic stripes and not even on-card chips, which are much harder to copy than mag stripes. So the US is way behind in security.

Re: ApplePay is very secure

Did you just say anything? No just the spurious and wrong claim that I don't know what I'm talking about.

Re: Google Wallet FUD

Google uses the same banking systems. The problem is with the banking systems. Google could also be subject to this attack if someone steals you credit card numbers from a site and sets up wallet on their own Android.

Misinformation and attacking Apple gets old and annoying.