What did I do today?
•Woke up congested
•Got nitric acid on a paper cut (boy that hurts).
•Burned 3 of my fingers on my right hand while soldering.
But, I also got to
•Hear a fantastic political lecture by Fred Barnes.
•Participate in a fantastic Bible discussion.
•Talk about Daring Fireball with my chem lab instructor.
Overall, I’d say that’s not bad.
From The Verge:
We’ve got broad initiatives driving Windows down to the phone with Windows 8.” The choice of words is incredibly (if unintentionally) telling, but also a little vague. Like with tablets, Microsoft would rather cram a desktop OS “down” into mobile form, than build off of a simple mobile platform into something more complex. Of course, that’s the least favorable interpretation[.]
I myself find that WM7 (or whatever the heck it’s called) is a very compelling mobile OS. It’s not enough to make me switch from the iPhone (integration is too deep), but I think the layout looks phenomenal.
And Ballmer (yet again) doesn’t seem to get it. Look at Windows 8; it looks really good… until they bring in all the paradigms from Windows Past. The clutter present in their own demo of Excel under Windows 8 seems to be in direct clashing conflict with everything else in Windows 8.
Sometimes you need to kick out old ideas that will never work. Sometimes, that includes your CEO.
(Review from The Verge).
This is what people don’t get about Apple; they won’t sacrifice something as crucial as the screen just to make it a bit thinner. Honestly, with a full touchscreen phone, where’s all the interaction going to be? The screen! If the screen is crap, the entire experience is going to be less than satisfactory.
I’m not going to lie- I really was pretty disappointed to find that all Apple updated today was iOS- and just a measly 4.3.4 update too. What does it do? It only patches the PDF vulnerability that jailbreakme uses.
Yeah, that’s worthy of a groan- indeed, I did so when I first saw it. After all, I’m jailbroken myself. But here’s the key:
No one will force you to update. Heck, I doubt that devices will be sold with 4.3.4 until mid next week at the earliest. Your jailbreak, if you want one, is safe. Unless of course you have to restore, but you should have your SHSH blobs backed up anyways.
In all honesty, what does jailbreakme do? It exploits a hole in the security of iOS. Something that could be used by people with far less noble purposes than creating a jailbreak. Ultimately, Apple’s patching a pretty serious risk (which, oddly enough, is once again due to Adobe formatted stuff).
Less than 2 weeks to fix a security hole? That’s pretty impressive in the mobile OS world. Seriously, when was the last time you heard about Android or webOS getting a security patch that quickly?
I don’t think this is a big deal: iMac hard drives are not considered user-serviceable at all, since accessing the bay requires the extremely risky removal of the screen (and the dust-free reattachment afterward). This is something that Apple only wants authorized service centers to do, understandably, because otherwise they’d have a bunch of people botching the repair and then complaining to unfortuate Genius Bar workers that their now-much-more-broken iMac should be replaced at Apple’s expense.
This is the same reason I don’t have a problem with Apple using pentalobe screws on the iPhone 4. It keeps idiots from opening it, but I can easily order a screw driver to replace them.
Real quick here, I wanted to just briefly mention the possibility of Microsoft buying Skype. For some reason (be it bias or actual well-grounded thought), the Apple community is absolutely flipping out about such an acquisition. I’ve got a couple of points. 1. First, I think we can all agree that this is better than Google buying Skype. Let’s face it, Google’s already creepy enough. 2. Microsoft has a great chance here to really knock this out of the park. The GUI in Skype 5 for Mac frankly, well, it sucks. Too much wasted space and ugly gradients. If Microsoft goes the Metro route, it could be awesome. Mac users are already disgruntled with Skype’s interface, so it wouldn’t be too hard to make something that is better. Now, if they go the route of Aero, it’s gonna be bad. 3. Heck, at least Yahoo isn’t buying it… it’s not dead yet. -Josh