sipefree

The real point is that in any security architecture, at some point you end up trusting someone.

The same goes for if an SSL provider stops providing mozilla.com with a cert.

> Graphene is fundamentally vanilla Windows Phone, except with all Windows/Microsoft branding removed in favour of Facebook

Not a chance. Microsoft would never compromise their branding. They're not THAT desperate yet, and their still in a stronger position than Facebook in terms of having money to throw around.

> phone functionality swapped with a custom Skype UI (integrated with Facebook contacts)

You'll never get the carriers to agree with that. Not yet. Even Apple couldn't do it.

> For data service, Facebook makes a deal with one carrier in every region on Earth to become a "dumb pipe" of unlimited 4G/3G, negotiates a reasonable globally consistent rate, and handles billing with users (acting as a middleman between users and carriers, effectively becoming its own carrier with borrowed infrastructure).

Again, for the same reason, it's extremely unlikely that carriers would agree to this on any level. Not yet. They've still got a few dying gasps yet.

> In the end, we get a Facebook-controlled and Facebook-powered "Facebook Phone" which shuns legacy telephony technology and seamlessly moves between regional 3G/4G and Wi-Fi networks (and makes Facebook, Microsoft, and Nokia a ton of money).

I still disagree that Facebook are in any position to heavy-hand away the branding of either Microsoft or Nokia. Especially Microsoft. They're not going to hand over the OS they spent a lot of effort developing for no recognition, even if it makes them tonnes of money in licensing.

It's a good idea, but I don't think it's likely at all in this climate.

The header: "Apple 2.0 - Covering the business that Steve Jobs built" shows the category that this blog post is in.

While it doesn't point out in big letters that this is an opinion piece, this article is in the category of a well established Apple opinion blog in their tech blogs category.

It's also pretty clear from the writing style that this is an opinion piece.

According to the original thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2973301), the creator is a 17/18 year old.

If people have access to Facebook 24/7, in their pockets, they are more likely to become dependent on it in their daily lives.

The mobile app fuels the addiction which keeps people logged in and coming back every day on their browser.

There's no one standard definition of "4G". A myriad of differing technologies all claim to be 4G, which is why it's just about impossible for a vendor to produce a device compatible with every one worldwide. If "4G" had a solid definition, and everybody was using it, but iPad didn't support it, then it would be understandable.

I've been trying to get people I know at Apple to start referring to it internally as Mountain Goat.

It's working.

Ingenious.

I can't wait to see what other iMessage-based services pop up now that the AppleScript bindings are exposed.

$ git mergetool

Opens FileMerge.

Then just keep tapping the down/left/right keys to choose changes.

> most of their applications are NOT being coded in Obj-C

Yeah I'm going to call bullshit on that.

Bullshit.

You fail to account for the variables involved in "calories out".

Metabolism is controlled in a large way by hormones. For example, extremely undernourished people will slow their metabolism way down in order to preserve what fat reserves are left. A diet that significantly increases blood sugar will, in many people, cause a high insulin response and cause fat to be stored and only glucose to be burned.

Essentially you're looking at this from the wrong way. For the body to grow in any manner, hormones are required (c.f. growth hormones during puberty). And for the body to have grown, excess calories must have been consumed. What forces people to eat so many calories that they grow in size is triggered by their hormones generally telling them that they are starving, even if they are not. See Metabolic Syndrome, Diabetes, Insulin Resistance, etc.

So yes, calories in/calories out, but you're not even considering _why_ those calories were consumed in the first place.

Disclaimer: I've been eating Low-Carb/High-Fat diet that brought my steadily worsening weight issue to a much more healthy level (91kg to 75kg) through control of my blood sugar and appetite.

That's not true at all.

Interpreted code is perfectly legitimate to use in an iOS app, under certain restrictions.

The first is that you cannot JIT it, because the OS prevents execution of memory that has been writable (this is true for every app except for MobileSafari and it the reason why the only arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities have been found through MobileSafari).

The second is that you're not allowed download executable code to increase or change the functionality of the app. The reasoning for this I see as a little bit of selfishness on Apple's part, in that you can't really build a native app that acts as a platform for other people's fully-fledged 'apps' bypassing the app store, and the second being that the user's expectation of an app is that it be pretty much self contained in terms of functionality.

There have been exceptions to this though. CouchDB for iOS runs interpreted on the Erlang VM, but its database queries are executed by Mozilla's command line javascript engine. The code that runs on this query engine is actually downloaded through the database's syncing functionality, and it IS allowed in the app store.

So there does seem to be some leeway in terms of what is actually banned in that case. It seems that if downloading something technically turing-complete is REQUIRED as part of an essential function of the app, and cannot by necessity actually _change_ the main functionality of the app through running in a very limited sandbox (no I/O of any kind or indeed anything but data processing in this case), then it's allowed.

To get back to your original point, if someone wanted to build a bit of middleware that bridged the CocoaTouch libraries with python, then distributed that and allowed people to compile apps with it, it would be perfectly legal on iOS.

That takes a lot more effort. Besides, most apps will be signed by the time it's released.

It's still months away from release, we might see an option to put trusted certs in the keychain.

You're kidding, right? It sounds like you don't know how the GPL applies to them or you think Apple is really dumb.

There is absolutely no reason to move those apps. They're binaries. The GPL only threatens them if the use free code in a nonfree program and don't distribute the source.

The only other option is Apple doing it out of spite, which would be stupid on all accounts.

It's free to get a cert from Apple to sign your app, but you have to be a registered developer (which is also free).

Essentially, you have to be a real person who can be identified if they produce malware.

There's a reason for that. U.S. accounting law requires that non-subscription devices that are upgraded have a fee associated with the upgrade under Apple and many analysts’ interpretation of the law.

This is why iPod Touch owners have to pay for upgrades while iPhone users do not.

I think Apple may have relaxed that recently though, and I wouldn't be surprised if they release Mountain Lion for free.

I'm a dev. I carry an iPhone 4 and a Galaxy S.

I hate the Galaxy S.

Disproven by counterexample.

Looks like you can't pass a function as an argument to any of the functions in a Sugarless chain.

Seems like a pretty glaring oversight to me.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that 5.4 introduced closures, I was more speaking on a long-term level on that note.

> I don't think that PHP referring to hash maps as an array is a bad thing, in fact I've always loved the flexibility of the overloaded array implementation in PHP.

But they're not arrays. JavaScript and Lua do the same thing, allowing you to assign numeric or hashed keys on objects (or tables in Lua), but they don't call them Arrays, because they aren't. Arrays have expected behavior and implementations. So do hash maps. It's fine to amalgamate them, just give it the right name.

> PHP is normally very good that way, does anyone know of any backwards incompatible changes that have been made?

I haven't looked at any in this version, but recently there was an article (I think on HN) complaining about severe ABI changes that required all compiled modules to be recompiled, leading to adoption problems.

> Yes you're right, it is quite fashionable to hate PHP and has been so for the ~10 years I've been using it, but who cares it gets the job done (a language for the pragmatists not the purists).

I used PHP for many years as well, and for that reason I don't think it's a language for the pragmatist at all. It's not expressive enough, it encourages bad coding, and it doesn't have an ecosystem comparable to Ruby, Python, or even the amazing one Node.JS has managed to garner in the past year or so.

It's been a long time since I had any interest at all in PHP, and these new features make me feel uneasy once again.

The development server seems like the only good thing about it.

Traits looks like a silly implementation of multiple inheritance mixins, with a 'use' keyword that doesn't really fit in with the language itself. And the whole 'insteadof' thing looks weird. It will lead to hackish code for many people, encouraging weird monkey-patching.

The author says "when stored in an array", then proceeds to use "$functions['anonymous']". That's not an array. Sigh. I know PHP likes to call them that, but I just find it weird that they would continue to insist on mis-naming two of the fundamental data types of computer science.

The introduction of closures can only be a good thing, and a lot better than the passing of a string name of a function as a callback argument from before.

As usual though, it's expected that most servers and frameworks won't get the update for some time, due to whatever backwards incompatible changes have been made.

I know it's all the rage to hate on PHP these days, but even giving an objective look at the state of the language, given the thriving ecosystems of its competitors, makes it look to me like something I would never touch.

They don't control the rest of Europe (though right now with the Euro situation they probably just about do), however there are provisions for legal precedent in one Member State to apply in every. I have no idea how it works and when it applies, though. It's definitely not so direct as in the U.S.

Ad hominem attacks aside, let me address your points.

Firstly, destruction upon leaving scope in Objective-C would add some magic unexpected behavior that doesn't conform to what we expect from standard C stack-based functions.

In C++, when an object is normally declared, it exists on the stack, therefore it will disappear when the scope ends. The fact that the destructor is called is nice.

In Objective-C, all objects exist solely on the heap. All object-orientation is done at runtime, not at compile time, which leaves it open to be a lot more dynamic and open to fiddling at run time than C++ is. This of course loses a lot of the speed that C++ has, but it's not a big deal in most standard applications.

Since creating an object requires specifically allocating it on the heap, having it destruct when the pointer leaves scope is no good. That kind of magic behavior is exactly what would lead to awful bugs in Obj-C. If you want short-lived objects, you call their autoreleased constructors, which means they will self-destruct next time the thread's event loop ticks. It's an extremely common pattern, and happens so often in code that you don't, as you claim, 'have to understand the details of the implementation'.

And there's absolutely no need for the derision in your post. Please make your points and defend them like a civilized person.

Because in 99.9999% of use cases it won't break.

That, and mDNS already being used as a psuedo-standard with things like Avahi.

Yuck!

The browser and server should work together elegantly in a modern asynchronous application, not force a paradigm that doesn't fit.

I disagree, though based on the attitude of your comment I'm not sure if you'll take my point.

Here in Dublin, at least, iPhones are becoming extremely popular, even with the losertechnicians of the world. Businessmen with no tech skills are replacing Blackberries with them, teenagers are flocking to get them, and there are even dodgy-looking iPhone accessory shops in bad neighbourhoods.

Over here, since around the start of this summer, the iPhone 4 has been available for free on a 40 euro per month contract with unlimited data and enough minutes/texts for the vast majority of people, on pretty much every network. That's a really good deal, and a huge number of people bought into it, figuring that they spend at least that on credit anyway.

When the iPad 2 launched over here, there was a period of 8 months where you could not find ANY, at all, even in the authorized resellers that Apple likes the most. At any one time there might have been one for sale in the whole city.

Android is gaining momentum here too, and I don't know figures for any of this, but I definitely haven't seem them on as many non-hackers as I have iPhones.

In conclusion, no, the people who have iPhones are not the Apple-savvy hipsters. At least in this city.

> But I'm glad to see someone holding him accountable for his life and the consequences of his actions.

Have you been on the internet for the past month? There are at least 5 highly upvoted threads on Reddit per day calling him an asshole.

> Devoid of any kind of feelings towards anyone else, he shouts, screams, cries and sulks his way through his petulant life

Sounds like full-on Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Various people who knew Steve have also said that he must have had this.

As far as I can see, it's probably true.

I don't think it's right to attribute malice to the man if it's the case. Neither is it right to insist that someone be prevented from being successful in business because they have something wrong with their brain.