I agree

To the extent that I wanted to put my (Register login) name to it.

Yes, I agree

Please don't allow anyone who doesn't agree with raidet's opinions to post from now on. Ideally, just get his opinion on every story and post that alone.

Suggest you reread the article and comments

Apple are charging very close to the same price, though it ends up seeming to be more because VAT is quite a bit more than most US sales taxes. Apple are not treating UK consumers appreciably worse than US consumers.

According to the article, yes

Since it's built on HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. And 'yes' implicitly, since the mechanism Apple use to support HTML5 and CSS is WebKit, which is also the mechanism used by Android. I think they differ in Javascript implementations, but only so that each week one or the other can claim the new fastest Javascript engine ever.

In the past where Apple has created a proprietary extension to the DOM, such as the canvas element which was originally implemented for Dashboard widgets, they've fully documented it and it has quickly spread into the other non-Microsoft browsers. And even into the HTML5 spec in that case.

Same comment for up and down on comments

You know, while you're looking into the topic. Having to go through several pages to achieve an action rather than having the actions occur while you're still on the page is very 2000.

How I'd play it if I were a Lib Dem, assuming the poll numbers are correct

(1) become a coalition partner with whichever party will agree to any of the floated ideas for electoral reform;

(2) get the electoral reform passed based;

(3) find a suitable moral issue such as Trident to act as a pretext for walking out of the coalition;

(4) wait for the inevitable early election and grab a hundred or more extra seats under the new rules.

The Lib Dems with just about 100 more seats are as large as the Conservatives were post-1997 and post-2001.

Fanbois

U r a IT news fanboi hahahaha.

There you go, now this reads like some of El Reg's recent articles and most of the comments posted after any story that involves that fruity company.

Or...

... he's making the point that the iPhone is actually putting this technology into the pockets of ordinary consumers, being a watershed device whether fairly or not.

Just a generic rant?

The iPhone system libraries and primary development language is Objective-C, which grafts the method passing object orientation of Smalltalk onto C. It's a fully reflective runtime with complete dynamic dispatch, and you can write in a completely typeless manner if you want.

C++ and, I believe, Object Pascal, are from the Simula school of statically bound, typed languages.

It's a strict superset of C and C++ code is fully callable (and may call Objective-C, and the languages may intermingle within methods and functions), but it's not the way Apple would prefer you proceed.

In practice, you pretty much never directly manipulate memory in the memcpy style in Objective-C unless you've chosen to do some low level optimisation work or are dealing with a C library such as OpenGL.

Re: the Nexus One

I'm confused as to how Flash was demoed on the Nexus One somewhere every close to its launch, igniting another round of "obviously Flash works on mobiles" chat, but apparently still isn't available?

Ogg Theora isn't open according to the document you cite

Per Florian Mueller in the article, "there's no such thing as a video standard 100% unencumbered by patents". Per the EU definition you point to, a requirement of an open standard is that "The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty- free basis." (Page 9 of the European Interoperability Framework for Pan-European eGovernment Services).

He means application crashes

Not operating system crashes. He is alleging that most experiences of anything crashing while using a Mac are of Safari, Firefox, Opera or whatever being force terminated by the OS due to a bug in the Flash plug-in.

That matches my personal experience. In six years I've known the OS crash maybe three times, which is about even with the modern Windows experience for 99% of users, I think.

Ad hominem

To quote wikipedia, if I dare:

An ad hominem, also known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin: "argument toward the person" or "argument against the person"), is an attempt to persuade which links the validity of a premise to a characteristic or belief of the person advocating the premise.[1] The ad hominem is a classic logical fallacy.[2]

For Safari, read WebKit

As Steve's letter notes, WebKit is used on all mobile devices except Microsoft's. It's also used in Google Chrome. And Adobe AIR. You don't have to be anti-Flash to want better website compatibility with WebKit; even Adobe want it. In fact, according to your post, even you want it.

Just on point (1)

(2)–(4) being conceded, all BES does is connect to Exchange or equivalent and pipe the data over to Blackberrys. The iPhone connects directly to Exchange servers for mail, calendars and contacts.

Having thought about it a bit more...

... since my previous post, I guess they mean fend off Apple like a farmer might fend off foxes. He's not expecting them to lose his house, his sheep or his cows to them but he would be better overall if he also managed to keep his chickens. Ummm, or something.

I guess quarterly figures also tend to favour companies like Blackberry that release products all year round over companies like Apple that seem to have a yearly release cycle that yields product at the end of Q2, giving them a huge surge each Q3.

On the BeOS issue...

... I think people are a little revisionist on that one. It was technologically ahead, but lacking quite a lot of spit and polish on the user interface. For example, those funny window titlebars could be positioned anywhere along the top of their respective window so that you could easily create a stack of windows with the tabs working like real, physical folder tabs. But then the system would save the window positions but not the tab positions, so next time you'd have switched from each access to everything in the stack to no access to anything else in the stack without moving everything about all over the place. And that's just one example.

Though I guess their biggest mistake was trying to charge Apple double what they ended up paying for Next.

They're not that near

Adobe, to having a Linux port ready, that is.

OS X is an operating system with a POSIX layer. The system libraries are primarily Objective-C, with those that need to operate at a lower level or are imported standards (eg, OpenGL) being in C. The full POSIX stuff is in there, but it's not the only way through to things and most of the time it's not even the 'real' way to things that the other stuff sits on top of.

Key point: Creative Suite was a Carbon application. So lots of Apple proprietary C stuff. Apple have deprecated Carbon and declined to port it to 64bit, so now Creative Suite is a Cocoa application. Which means lots of Apple proprietary Objective-C stuff.

Either way, they're nowhere near having a Linux version.

I think he's missing the point

But not in the sense that people don't care about OS stability, security and features because they've a vested interest in a particular OS, more because they don't care much about the OS, they care more about the applications on top. And the various Linux applications either don't exist or are functionally worthless (such as for video editing, desktop publishing) or are stuck behind 90s-style user interfaces (OpenOffice, GIMP). Plus, you never get any decent fonts in a Linux distribution, so the typography everywhere always looks horrid.

I'm expecting the following: (i) the usual Linux diehards to shout that I'm wrong on a subjective level; and (ii) in a year, still nobody from wider society to want Linux on their desktop.

I think they mean Steve circa 1998

You know, ditching ADB, Mac-style serial ports, etc, OpenDoc, Appletalk, Quickdraw 3d, etc and transitioning the Mac to USB, an OS with an open source kernel and lots of other bits of open source in the stack that talks SMB and OpenGL and draws in PDF, and specifically courting Microsoft to ensure a new and continuing commitment to Office:Mac. So that, generally speaking, Macs talk to the same peripherals and the same networks and work with the same files as PCs.

You know, company saving, pre-iPod Steve.

Shush!

You'll ruin El Reg's habit of making fun of a group for as long it remains funny to do so. And then for about two years afterwards.

Let's just say whatever we want, the readers will blindly upvote anyway

"Currently, Windows 7/Vista is more advanced than OS X in regards to APIs, GPU acceleration, SSD and power management."

That's some good preaching to the choir, but it isn't actually true. Apple's 2008 approach to a GPU acceleration API is OpenCL (subsequently standardised through Kronos, but Apple's originally). It adds closures to the programming language and adds a few C calls to issue them. The OS is responsible for figuring out available hardware and distributing tasks. It will distribute automatically to any available GPUs or CPUs, applying normal OS scheduling rules.

Microsoft's 2008 approach is DirectCompute. It sites within DirectX, so what you have to do is go through the normal DirectX API, query for available GPUs, query for GPU capabilities then explicitly issue your blocks to the GPUs you want to execute them. They're never executed on the CPU regardless of how a system is configured.

You're also accusing the company that sells the laptops with independently verified ten hour battery life of having poor power management?

Apple are way behind on developer relations but not on technologies.

Nokia are just awful at software

Without having read it, I imagine El Reg's recent article on why Nokia should buy Palm covers much this ground: they've no straightforward strategy in terms of a software platform and their development kits and developer support are awful, starving them of the sort of high profile games that are helping to sell the iPhone and, to a lesser extent, the Android to teenagers and children.

But that they were

Cheap that is.

Repealing would require an explicit act though

As the title says. The courts have recognised a category of 'constitutional' law, the difference being that you can repeal it only explicitly. So while a normal act may be implicitly repealed in part or in whole later on when another act says something contradictory, the HRA overrides subsequent legislation unless the subsequent legislation explicitly overrides the HRA (or is itself also constitutional).

Key difference is that if they even if they have crazy backbenchers running around wanting to ban gay people from B&Bs (yes, yes, a gross exaggeration of the facts, bear with me), and they manage to slip a few provisions to that effect into the parliamentary roll, it doesn't mean anything unless they go the whole hog and spend a great deal of political capital on doing it properly. Though in practice, with the way the tabloids are, they could pass the exact text of the HRA and get applauded on the content, just provided they didn't admit anybody else had written it first.

Not sure I'm with you on the Strasbourg point, could you explain exactly what you mean? Obviously Strasbourg isn't the highest authority for e.g. criminal law, but I'm not sure exactly what area you're applying your argument to.

Labour have a 4,787 majority here

In 2005 they received 45% of the vote, with the Liberal Democrats in second place with 26%. Our MP is a former cabinet minister (and was in 2001 and 2005). I suspect that whoever I vote for, my ward is getting Labour.

Judging by their desktop browser...

... they're running around now half-implementing controls that look a little like the OS's built in ones and writing their own duplicates of any OS-wide services that people find helpful, so that they can claim full integration in whatever press release space they have spare between their ongoing complete reinventions of the web.

There's an SD card reader coming...

though obviously it pushes you ever further from your ideal $200. And, being Apple, I expect it won't work exactly the way you want it to.

Probably I should have said: pretty much my mother uses her computer for email, web browsing and listening to podcasts (no, really). She does sometimes email out, but much less often than she receives email in.

Her actual laptop suffers from the same maladies as most computers run by ordinary, normal people; it gets a tiny little bit slower every few months as the OS and most of the built-in software automatically updates itself and dramatically slower about once a year when the anti-virus software updates itself. In this context, Apple's approach is actually a benefit: it's a fixed hardware platform so new versions of all software are explicitly tailored to the device she is holding rather than an ever-shifting notional average machine and Apple's micromanagement of permitted software saves her from the anti-virus vendor school of software sales that involves trading on fear and misinformation and coming up with ever more inventive ways to shove slow, bloated junk deep into your OS, whichever one it is.

I really think this thing's going to be a hit with the casual audience.

I agree entirely

"The health system is a social service, not a company selling services in a market place."

Yes, I was making the point that when the coward said "I want to give my money to a monopoly who we know are a monopoly, not one that does monopolistic practises but never gets slammed for it" he or she clearly wasn't saying what he or she actually meant. You've been willing to take a guess at a distinction that might have been intended, I wasn't willing to.

It's the same as WebOS

Your multitasking app gets woken to deal with events that it has an interest in, but isn't allowed to run constantly. I'm sorry that's insulting for you, but isn't it how every well-behaved GUI application is written?

I guess probably you mean the list of specific events is too restrictive? You want to be able to use software that while invisible does something other than (i) produce audio; (ii) provide location-aware info; (iii) provide voIP functionality; or (iv) alert you to something at specified intervals? That's definitely some limitations and restrictions, but hardly a ton — I bet it covers 80% of the software you want and 99% of the software that an average user wants.

There's nothing illegal or inherently wrong with being a monopoly

The NHS is a state monopoly. Does it upset you that they have monopolistic practices but never get slammed for it?

I'd suggest you mean a monopoly that is using its weight to artificially suppress competition.

True, except that PageMaker was an Aldus product at the time

And Aldus were bought by Adobe only long after they'd started losing in the marketplace to Quark.

Not that Jobs is in the right as a result.

Adobe would lose too much by walking away from OS X

I'm sure I read somewhere that more than 50% of CS sales are to OS X users. I'm sure Jobs calculated that Adobe can't afford to walk away from OS X before embarking on his anti-Flash crusade. Say what you want about his methods, but his history with Microsoft suggests that he's willing to swallow his corporate pride — when he returned to Apple they took a huge wedge of money from Microsoft in return for an IP cross-licensing deal and a five year commitment by Microsoft to provide Mac versions of Office and Internet Explorer. Safari appeared only after Microsoft announced the winding down of IE for Mac development and Apple quietly put Appleworks out to pasture, implicitly accepting that Microsoft own the office market.

That said, Adobe have done a lot to lock out the competition, especially since buying Macromedia and killing Freehand. About ten years ago Corel tried to reposition CorelDraw as a Photoshop/Illustrator rival, rolling in a photo editor and rebranding as "CorelDraw Graphics Suite".

I think the calculation ends up being that if Adobe walk away from OS X they lose more than 50% of their customers in the short to medium term and in so doing they at least open the door to rivals. Even if it made Apple lose 100% of their desktop customers that's less than 50% of their income stream. So if Adobe walks away there's a real risk it'll hurt Adobe more than Apple.

It's not a technical barrier

It's a licensing barrier that, per El Reg's other story, stipulates that "Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs". So if you originally write an application in ActionScript then submit it to Apple, they can reject it for not being originally written in Objective-C, no doubt by looking for other traces of the Flash runtime support stuff rather than at the quality of the application itself.

Without actually knowing US law, I wonder how enforceable it would be if it ever came to trial given the sort of things that tend to matter in legal systems about the proportionality of a measure compared to the relative bargaining power of the parties involved. In practice I wouldn't be surprised if it is actually legal and, in any case, whether anyone will ever even bother to take it to court. I guess there's an anti-competition angle since Apple could in practice be distorting competition in the wider market by using its iPhone platform to limit software support for other platforms (in that Objective-C is Apple specific in practice and in any case has no ANSI or even K&R-style definitive spec), but it's probably a bit vague for a government body to actually step in, given that you can just write 90% of your cross-platform app in C++ and use Objective-C just for the front end.

You're singling that out?

It's a substantial step up the conversational ladder from Slappy's effort.

At a guess...

... the older devices have less RAM and a much slower SSD, which would likely make anything they may have done with virtual memory unusable (or, at least, within their own criteria of not slowing the device down substantially and not killing the battery). The devices themselves have a virtual memory system but no swap file — so you generally have to write your program to fit in the available memory, but can memory map large files that are already on the SSD.

At least, that's my charitable interpretation.

Though apparently not yet

I've just tried it on one of the iPads here in the [London-based] office — iPlayer is returning the standard website rather than the mobile one and then complaining about the lack of Flash. Hope they'll fix that before the UK iPad launch, to give an iPlayer experience at least as good as the iPhone.

It doesn't require Flash

It also supplies ordinary, industry-standard H.264 MP4 to iPhones and iPod Touches. No doubt it'll do the same to iPads.

Great argument

I'm sure you'll win the world over with your fantastic argument that Apple products aren't better just because they have rounded corners.

Agree and disagree

I'm sure these phones and Microsoft's motivation to produce non-full OS phones will vanish into the aether leaving no lasting impression whatsoever, but they did quite well shouldering into the games business, didn't they? So it's not completely beyond them to add new competences.

Me? I'm an iPhoner. Sorry.

At the time of replying

It's 11 upvotes to 4 downvotes. Could be a perception issue at your end?

That's not really true

Unless you also intend to licence your fonts, code your own scrollbar, etc. To my knowledge, both of the significant commercial OSs ship with H.264 decompressors which can be leveraged by applications to whatever end they see fit.

Opera the company are too aggressive

Probably they've earnt it though, seeing as how they reinvented the Web last June (see: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/12/opera_freedom/).

How so?

Microsoft fell foul of the EU for using their existing dominant position in one market in order to distort competition in another. They used money from the desktop to push the price of browsers down to zero, killing Netscape's primary revenue stream, then pushed them from the market completely through bundling.

How is that like this at all? It may be morally equivalent, but factually and legally it's not even slightly similar.

Could be an Apple/Microsoft distinction?

You know, with Apple having a historical willingness to switch hardware architectures and aggressively dump old APIs and OSs, possibly it just doesn't look as bad when someone says that supporting a five year-old Apple OS is a lot of effort as it does when they say that supporting a near-decade old Microsoft OS is a lot of effort?