"Apple Inc. has pulled its security engineering team out of a planned public discussion on the company's security practices, which had been set for next week's Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas."
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2006-01-16
"Linux will never be the big player for Desktop as long as Desktops require a GUI and a consistent user experience."
Never say never ;-)
Seriously: What you describe presents the current state of the art. But this industry is a very rapidly evolving one. Sometimes it helps to look at the past to see the possible future. If you compare current Linux installs with them five years ago, you will see a huge amount of progress being made in regards of desktop usability. And there are no signs of this progress to be declining, quite the opposite is happening these years.
And btw, I find my Linux-based graphical environment to be far more consistent compared to the Windows machine I have to work with lately. I see lots of potential -- for the future.
You don't know what happens in another five years. If Desktops (including OS X) will still work the same as today, that would be a sad story. Wouldn't it?
Edit: I have to add something. Your perception of the past is not right, it's quite the opposite. It's the big iron companies who jumped on the train after they watched GNU/Linux eating their market. Exactly the same can happen with the Desktop or not. Microsoft is very good at missing out opportunities to keep their position strong lately. Time will tell.
Edited 2008-08-03 21:42 UTC
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2008-06-03
Member since:2005-06-29
Well I never sold any body parts to buy my Mac, I just bought refurbished and was content with a G4 in an Intel world. The reason I'm headed away from OS X in the near future has nothing to do with cost, and everything to do with security and usability. Not that I have any government-clearance level stuff on my computer, but I'd rather not have my box even more prone to black hats than a Windows machine. Combine that with some nagging issues with the OS itself, and SELinux or OpenBSD is definitely in my future.
Member since:2005-07-08
Someone needs to fix the quoting mechanism here. I'll try to quote with italics.
Keep dreaming. If you think Linux has an easier time of converting people to Linux over OS X you truly are dreaming.
Focus on making Linux as consistent and user friendly as OS X and you'll accelerate more Windows people to Linux just as they are moving to OS X. They won't switch from OS X to Linux as they already have the GUI paradigm and they also have familiar applications under that paradigm.
Linux will never be the big player for Desktop as long as Desktops require a GUI and a consistent user experience.
Linux has made huge inroads in the server space against traditional big iron companies because these companies have dumped billions into helping it mature.
If Linux Community lost the funding/support from IBM, Novell, Google and Sun you'd see advancement of the OS go from a tidal wave to a stream.
Oh, I know they won't convert many OS X users, but I suspect they'll get to the point where the GUI in Linux is Good Enough, on the level of say Windows with some of the eye-candy of OS X. It's never going to be as elegant as OS X probably, simply because open source development resists that level of consistency and the Linux desktop is too fractured with multiple desktop environments and toolkits, much less applications that adhere to interface guidelines. Many users, however, are used to some inconsistency already.
If Linux can get to the point where it doesn't need much command line intervention, and gets included in more OEM systems, then it will make progress. There is already a large market of people who would get a computer running Linux in a user-friendly fashion at a low price, netbooks are filling some of that market - ASUS's EEPC is a large percentage of new notebook sales now. Remember what the largest selling computer in history is? Not anything from Apple or the PC. The Commodore 64. When computers are available at blue-color prices again, there will be a shift.
As for corporate funding, it helps, but a lot of the progress has been made by Ubuntu and others on the desktop, though with some help from Novell, IBM, Google, and a "consortium" of other companies that have a grudge against Microsoft. ;-)
Incidentally, I don't say this as an Apple-hater. I use a Mac, but am very disappointed at what they're doing with security and secrecy. I still recommend Macintosh to people, but if this keeps up Apple is asking for trouble. What happens to their image of being less virus-ridden than Windows when the first malware outbreak comes? Security-through-obscurity isn't enough. I believe OS X is the best for my needs, else I wouldn't be running it, but they really need to work on this - especially if they intend to crack the enterprise market they need to be more professional about security.
Edited 2008-08-03 22:45 UTC
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about."This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Member since:
2005-11-21
Venezeuela has a perfect analogy this time. :-) Macs *are* great, but Linux will eat Apple's lunch if they don't watch it. "
Keep dreaming. If you think Linux has an easier time of converting people to Linux over OS X you truly are dreaming.
Focus on making Linux as consistent and user friendly as OS X and you'll accelerate more Windows people to Linux just as they are moving to OS X. They won't switch from OS X to Linux as they already have the GUI paradigm and they also have familiar applications under that paradigm.
Linux will never be the big player for Desktop as long as Desktops require a GUI and a consistent user experience.
Linux has made huge inroads in the server space against traditional big iron companies because these companies have dumped billions into helping it mature.
If Linux Community lost the funding/support from IBM, Novell, Google and Sun you'd see advancement of the OS go from a tidal wave to a stream.