Posts by Ian Joyner

Apple's 16GB iPhones are a big fat lie, claims iOS 8 storage hog lawsuit

Re: CRT screen sizes and viewing area

Apple has been the one company to lead against sizzle, not steak. They build a really steak first - it naturally sizzles. Others start from the sizzle down.

Steve Jobs was once asked about design (pre his return to Apple). His response was most revealing: "you know some people think that design is just how something looks, but if you go deeper, design is really how something works".

Even deeper, that is the core of computing - we are not building static objects in a stuck state, we are building fluid things where state changes in millions of ways. That is the complexity of computing.

Please Register - can you use some AJAX to record the like/don't like votes.

Re: What? No lawsuit about RAM?

>>but it does have another curious one: "1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less." I am not sure what it means<<

Not curious. When you format a (disk) device, the formatting software is likely to find bad areas on the magnetic medium and to remove them from the allocation list. This reduces the actual capacity of the device. It's not any software overhead, just imperfect manufacture, and the integrity of your data is more important than device capacity.

The basis of this is that programs and data live in an idealized software environment - that environment is provided by the system software since hardware can be faulty. The OS will even avoid bad areas of RAM if it finds them.

All smart devices must be a big fat lie. Who is suing Google over the same issue in Android, and Microsoft over Windows phone. In fact, every computer with an operating system comes with storage overhead for the system software.

A non story. Yet another anti-Apple beat up by those old IT people who still can't get over IBM's downfall and have passed their anti everything-not-IBM venom onto others.

Security holes in iOS? We've heard of them, says Apple (as it fixes vanishing ringtones)

Have you analyzed all updates to prove that assertion?

18 million iPHONE USERS HAVE NEVER BONKED to ApplePay

Re: Re the Need For Standards

Not at all. What people fail to appreciate about Apple is that they see a problem - like how hard it is to use computers, then work out how this could be useful for people.

Thus they work out how something will be used and then design a system around it. Hobbyists who love soldering bits together don't like that - they like the inconvenience and to them that is part of the fun. But if computers are to be really useful, that inconvenience must be removed. This is exactly what has been done with ApplePay that makes it so impressive. They have also enumerated and evaluated all the problems with current payment systems and mostly solved them.

Security always means some inconvenience and Apple has made it as convenient as possible for legitimate users and as hard as possible for crooks.

OK, if you don't want to use ApplePay - don't. But don't try to stop others who see the benefits, speed, and security of it.

Re: Re the Need For Standards

You don't understand - if your wallet gets stolen immediately thief can start using your cards. If they steal your iPhone, they have not got your fingerprint to operate it, thus it is useless to them. It is like a thief would have to steal a safe with money in it. Until they can open the safe they can't get the money. And by that time, iPhone would have been remotely disabled and maybe erased.

What a ridiculous article. ApplePay is only available in the US so overseas users can't use it yet. It has only been out less than two months, so people are cautious in adopting it. Just like any technology.

In fact, the system is very safe - your credentials (fingerprint and pin) are checked on your own device - no need to trust someone else's device with that. The pin you put in on any other device could be stolen.

Similar discussion came up on the Register yesterday. For those reading here who did not see that article, this is what I wrote:

Apple's security is very strong:

http://www.networkworld.com/article/2174973/smartphones/apple-reveals-unprecedented-details-in-ios-security.html

and the referenced guide:

https://www.apple.com/br/privacy/docs/iOS_Security_Guide_Oct_2014.pdf

I had my third year and masters students analyze different aspects of this and they came up with loads of web references on the subject.

There will be a lot of negative comments made about ApplePay, mainly by those who stand to lose their power over the consumer. ApplePay actually protects the consumer:

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2014/10/how-corporate-greed-is-trying-to-kill-apple-pay/

Taiwan: Top tech giants must stop playing fast and loose with privacy

Apple's security is very strong:

http://www.networkworld.com/article/2174973/smartphones/apple-reveals-unprecedented-details-in-ios-security.html

and the referenced guide:

https://www.apple.com/br/privacy/docs/iOS_Security_Guide_Oct_2014.pdf

I had my third year and masters students analyze different aspects of this and they came up with loads of web references on the subject.

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2014/10/how-corporate-greed-is-trying-to-kill-apple-pay/

Re: Phone makers too ?

See my reply above. Apple has also taken on US government in this respect. Apple devices encrypt your data with a password that only you know. That gives security on the device and on iCloud. The others want to be able to read your information so encryption is not nearly so secure.

http://www.cnet.com/au/news/apples-imessage-encryption-trips-up-feds-surveillance/

Re: These phones should all be free

It is not Apple's business model to collect your information - it IS the business model of Google (thus Samsung, etc) and Facebook. Doesn't necessarily mean that Apple are perfect in this regard, but they should probably not be lumped with these others in reports like this.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-weinstein/apple-vs-google-the-priva_b_5898168.html

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2014/06/30/apple-vs-android-privacy/

And that's what ApplePay is about - making purchases that neither the retailer, nor Apple gets information about, not even your credit card number. That's why so many of these organizations will hate it and try to disparage it at every opportunity.

Hey, iPhone 6 fanbois: Apple's bonk to 'Pay' app IS GO

Re: Sounds bloody insecure

Stop trying to spread FUD and do a proper analysis.

Why?

The Register's journalism would be much more credible if you drop this bad habit of labelling just about every story about Apple with 'fanbois'. It is time someone at the Register grows up.

Apple gives fanbois The Sweetest Thing: A delete button for that U2 album

Such umbrage over a free album. If you don't want it or like it - simple solution don't download and listen to it! It's hardly intrusive.

Why not complain about the increasing intrusiveness of advertisements? Like U2 or not, their album is a result of their own work. Advertisements are just similar "hey look at me", but at a much lower level.

I would have preferred Yes's just released "Heaven and Earth", but I'm not going to get all bent out of shape like the Register or some here, making another pathetic attempt to mobilize the masses against Apple.

Apple's iWatch? They cannae do it ... they don't have the POWER

Your articles on Apple would read a lot better if you knocked off the anti-Apple hubris in using terms like 'fanbois', etc.

YES YES YES! Apple patents mousy, pressure-sensing iVibrator

A very poorly written article.

Climate: 'An excuse for tax hikes', scientists 'don't know what they're talking about'

Sounds like the survey has found a lot of people who don't understand climate change at all and have projected their own confusion about it onto scientists. There has been a lot of propaganda from the climate denialists to confuse people. So what does that say about the survey.

It doesn't matter whether people like it or not, we can be fairly certain man-generated climate is happening. That is an inconvenient truth to many.

Apple: We'll tailor Swift to be a fast new programming language

The claim is that it is a modern 21st century language. In some ways yes, but disappointingly, they have not ditched a lot of C baggage that should have been. Should not Apple lead the way into languages that ditch monospaced fonts. C syntax looks terrible in other fonts so needs to be in courier or monaco or similar. C syntax looks old now so Swift also looks dated.

However, it is not artefacts of syntax. It's things like the auto-increment and decrement operators - known horrors from C (side effects). Why have enums and structs, when they could be unified with class? Inclusion of this stuff so as not to upset C programmers is "tasteless". Use of CamelCase - we do have underscores on our keyboards now (CamelCase came about because Xerox did not have underscores on their keyboards - that really makes programs look dated).

On the other hand, Python-like lists, tuples, dictionaries are nice, in fact the unification of lists and dictionaries is nicer than Python. Optional values might be nice - do they give void-safe programming though?

And they could have done garbage collection right. It was done in Obj-C many years ago, but dropped for iOS. So programmers will still have to deal with memory issues with ARC, which is bookkeeping that programmers should not have to deal with. ARC seems to cause a whole lot of issues and is frequently discussed in programming groups.

Swift is a move in the right direction, but overall, I'm disappointed. It's quite a long way short of Eiffel.

Re: Leaky

Lack of true GC is a disappointment. Objective-C does have it, but it was ditched for iOS. ARC still has many problems, and non-GC is a nightmare in multiprocessing environments.

Bill Bumgarner even had the good book on GC by Boehm which I'm pretty sure went into GC in obj-C. I think it must have only be left out of Swift because GC still frightens C and C++ programmers.

But GC is now widely deployed in Eiffel, Java (not such a good implementation), Python, Ruby, etc.

Not having GC means Swift really can't be counted as a modern 21st century language.

Re: No need to be so special, Apple

Semicolons were introduced in ALGOL to make multiline statements possible.

JavaScript might have made a mess of removing them, but it is entirely possible to have such a regular syntax in a language that they are not needed.

Look at Eiffel for a decent language where semicolons are not needed.

C is an old language with holes so big you can drive a truck through them. C was developed on the very limited PDP8 architecture and it shows. Time to move on folks.