Thushan Fernando Uncut

Yes, thats right, Apple fans everywhere rejoice, for your saviour has released the hugely anticipated iPad. While one Steve Bing’s Bings Bings, another whips out his iPad.

Thats right folks, it’ll be a hit with the ladies! But seriously, can’t wait to ArsTechnica to do a proper review about it.

I guess Bill’s vision of people using Tablets Slate’s is finally coming true. I still have a Compaq HP TC1000 which I scored from MSFT back in the days when TabletPC was all the rage -- but unfortunately it didn’t pickup. I remember Dr Neil Roodyn used to carry his TabletPC around everywhere he went.

For anyone who doesn’t mind not having the latest shiny toy from Apple, but still functional, beautiful and may not lock you in to the WWoA (Wonderful World of Apple), checkout the Tegra Android SmartPad.

Me likey, checkout the technical specifications.

Finally, a worthy competitor.

…you know it.

Here’s a video stream of CES 2010 with Steve Balmer launching Microsoft’s 2010+ products.

mms://wm.MS-STUDIOSMEDIA.COM/a10065/o9/presspass/1002811_CES_750k.wmv

Skip to about 6:00 because its all marketing blah – wait till you see Steves presentation!

We Bing, We Bing & We Bing, Bing Bing Bing. (12:30)

*sigh*

Ryan Asdourian from the Windows team comes in at about 27:00 which goes into touch devices.

• 28:38 – Dell’s new thin notebooks
• 33:20 – Bleo (?) book reader
• 35:10 – Live Drive & Office sharing
• 39:33 – TV, CableCard
• 48:00 – HTC HD2
• 49:30 – Slate PCs
• 51:00 -  HP Slate PC
• 54:40 – Robbie Bach – President of Entertainment & Devices (MSFT)
• 58:00 – Alan Wake
• 59:30 – Halo
• 01:09:22 – Natural User Interface
• 01:11:30 – Project Natal (awesome!) will be available Holiday 2010 (November?)

Enjoy!

Apple Propaganda, I mean PR

I posted about Microsoft’s four new Windows 7 commercials the other day and yes, they *are* commercials -- they tell you a bit about the product they’re advertising. Now let’s take a look at Apple’s attempts -- great PR btw! I think they were going for: ‘lets create the most douchebaggy thing to publicise our product and have people post blogs about it’. Well here’s some free PR work courtesy of Apple.

Bill Gates may go down in history for the BSoD for Windows 98 but lest we forget that little kid in school who was always jumping up and down for attention, teasing the smarter kids because he just wasn’t getting any attention.

“Now what is this? I dunno, but it works.” -- Steve Jobs

“It’s pretty awesome when it works.” -- Steve Jobs

It sure is Steve, it suuuuure is. Think Different. It just works. I wonder how they’ll cover having an ad-supported Mac OS X operating system in the future?

Linus Torvalds

Anyway I much prefer the suttle attitude that Linus Torvalds took at the Japan Linux Symposium.

He’s got a sense of humour (and coolness) and as a Linux user (#412328) I’m ever grateful for his operating system. Damn I miss Japan

Dude wheres my data? Well chances are you’ve logged into a Guest account on your shiny new Snow Leopard (the world’s most advanced operating system!).

As a confused veteran of the Mac informs us:

Ok accidentally clicked on “guest account” to log into my mac…was taking a while to log in so i walked away, came back a minute later and i was greeted with my normal login list again, my usual acc, and the guest user, this time i clicked on the correct one and when it started up i now have a VERY simple desktop, std snow leopard desktop (not my normal desktop pic) and cant see any HD.

Ive been using macs for decades.. what the heck have i done here? repeated restarts and logins never get me back to me usual user acc?… errrm panic kicking in

They should have a feature listing for that, finely tuned operating system level porn mode! Maybe for iSkeet Leopard 2.0!

But in all seriousness you should disable your guest account, its not worth loosing your /home over. Hopefully you’ve kept backups to revert to. QA much?

The only review you’ll ever need to read for the newly released Apple OS X 10.6 Leopard from Ars.

Having used 10.6 for a few days now (yes believe it or not I do have a couple of Macs at home!) I’ve felt it to be snappier than the original Leopard the Macbook and iMac shipped with. Still my main box is a Windows 7 machine But I’d highly recommend installing 10.6 if you’re running 10.5 *after* you’ve made sure all your software is compatible, unfortunately Adobe CS3 is not supported in 10.6 (I mean not working in Snow Leopard), so I went out and got CS4 for Mac.

[Update: No one said anything about CS3 being "not supported" on Snow Leopard. The plan, however, is not to take resources away from other efforts (e.g. porting Photoshop to Cocoa) in order to modify 2.5-year-old software in response to changes Apple makes in the OS foundation.]

Lovely.

I’ll let you decide if this is LOL worthy.

APPLE KEYBOARDS ARE vulnerable to a hack that puts keyloggers and malware directly into the keyboard. This could be a serious problem, and now that the presentation and code is out there, the bad guys will surely be exploiting it.

The vulnerability was discovered by K. Chen, and he gave a talk on it at Blackhat this year. The concept is simple, a modern Apple keyboard has about 8K of flash memory, and 256 bytes of working ram. For the intelligent, this is more than enough space to have a field day.

…

Nothing is encrypted, decrypted, and the process is simple. You then resume HIDFirmwareUpdaterTool, and in a few seconds, your keyboard is compromised. Formatting the OS won’t do you any good, the code is in keyboard flash. There are no batteries to pull, no nothing, the keyboard is simply compromised.

Then from the proof of concept document:

The application checks a number of properties of the keyboard and checks the validity of the ?rmware image ?le kbd 0×0069 0×0220.irrxfw in the bundle. The ?rmware validity checking routine is called CRC32: and is the 75 byte routine starting at 0×00003005. Despite the name, this routine does not do CRC32 at all and in fact, it simply just adds up the bytes of the ?rmware image ?le and the application veri?es that the sum is 0×252ed7.

EPIC FAIL. While the rest of the world has been working hard on securing the fabrics of their kernel, Apple have concentrated on painting the Lepoard with new stripes. Before you fall into a trap thinking this isn’t as big as they make it out to be – because you need physical (and root) access to update firmware (and the user would have to approve), think of malware or a Safari related exploit. How many security conscience Mac users are there do you think? Wasn’t the original deal move to Mac and forget all your troubles?

Surely Apple can’t be the only keyboard at fault, I’m sure my Razer Tarrantula (with a few modifications) can fall into the same trap – atleast you’d hope so, for Apple’s sake (or not!).

Anyway, woo WINdows 7 to Technet/MSDN guys this week!

Woo yeah! Partaye! Apple releases the 3.0 firmware for iPod and iPhones today. Go grab it from iTunes or download a copy for your particular setup from Felixbruns site.

Copy/Paste, MMS and tethering… Expect a bit of downtime, the forums are flooded with complaints.

Apple have got the spill on whats new in this release,

Opera has been making everyone itch the past few weeks after announcing that they’re about to announce something radical, revolutionary on the 16th (that was today for us in Australia). Well now we have it, and I’m not too sure what to make of it. Its Opera Unite.

So what is Opera Unite? In a nutshell, Opera Unite is a collaborative technology that uses a compact server inside the Opera desktop browser to share data and services. You can write applications — in the form of Opera Unite Services — that use this server to serve content to other Web users.

Why is this exciting? Well, it allows you to interact with contacts, sharing data and services without the need for any third-party Web sites/applications to be involved at all. Think of the possibilities:

• You could play games and chat to your peers directly using the service
• You could share photos and videos with peers, straight off your hard drive, without needing to use third-party Web applications
• You can work collaboratively with others on files such as data and images (think wikis or drawing applications), and then work with those files offline if you wish, before sharing them again at a later date
• You could even start creating some crazy hacks, like an application that controls a remote car across the Web (I’ve seen a rough prototype in action)

The above is from the Developer documentation, so essentially, the next major release of Opera will ship with a web-server that will allow you to serve up some content and share files, photos and notes. Theres also a primer on the Unite Developer area that helps you build a Blog engine. Theres lots more in their Opera Unite Services catalog.

From what I can gather at this stage, its Opera pushing us to control our content, so we dont need to put our doggy pictures on Flickr, upload your cool videos to Youtube, instead you host your own content.

This all sounds reallly radical and exciting – we’re essentially throwing the word cloud around round about now… But then you realise something. You have to leave your computer turned on for your stuff to be seen to others. Everything is also routed through their Unite Proxy as per the developer documentation.

To me it looks like Opera is trying to grab all this Web 2.0 Social sites by the balls and stick it into a browser – like Flock but lighter. This is exactly the thoughts – plus a lot better analysis by Chris Messner, an avid open-source activist.

Go on, get onboard the rage – download an alpha and try it out. You’ll find alot of people Flocking to it soon.

Whilst on the subject of Opera, whats with them a bit cheesed off at Microsoft’s decision to not offer Internet Explorer 8 for European users – they clearly pushed for it, but now that they’ve got it, they’re not happy jan.

Seems to me that whilst MSFT may have been anti-competitive in the past, the EU is just milking MSFT from its big utter and they want the butter for free. What about Apple, un bundle Safari, get rid of iTunes. I want to be able to use Firefox. OPEN UP THE GOD FAWKING API’s so we can make some decent software for Windows to manage our iPods and iPhones. Why are we locked into using smoking pile of poo that is iTunes? (dont deny it!)

Yes, I have issues. But I digress bashing Apple yet again, go checkout Opera Unite.

So you’d all know that Apple is having their WWDC is on right now, all those excited believers (NSFW or your eyes), evangelists, elitists, iPhone users and ‘cool folks’ turning up to get their:

in-depth technical information and hands-on learning about the powerful technologies in iPhone OS and Mac OS X from the Apple engineers who created them.

(from the WWDC website) They fail to mention the usual butt-wiping they include apart of the ‘festivities’. The guaranteed Microsoft .bash‘ing and the occasional pissing-all-over-Microsoft.

(Source: NeoWin -> Engadget )

Whats worse, the head poncho, Senior Vice Presidente of Software Engineering at Apple took the stage to claim that Windows 7 is the same old tech as Vista. Mr Apple man sir, may I remind you that your rotting iCandy contains parts of FreeBSD and NetBSD internally. Unix (which OS X is now certified for) predates Windows NT. Snow Leopard is also a refinement of Leopard no Señor?

Sure Microsoft may seem like one big evil company, but do you think Apple isnt? Google isnt? They’re all businesses, its all about the money, shareholders and making more moola. It’s All about the Benjamin’s buddy.

But I read an editorial written by Michael ‘Marshal’  Stanclift that screamed, YES DUDE, I AGREE. Instead of me ranting on, read what Marshal has to say. He sums it up pretty well and I back the man up.

Apple has a product that in some ways is superior to Windows, that does not have many of the problems that plague the Windows ecosystem. Apple can get away with a lot more than Microsoft can in terms of dropping support for older devices. But Apple needs to learn how to promote their technologies on their own merits, instead of acting like the pretty girl in high school that lobs insults at the ugly one to make itself feel better.

In the end though, if you want to give your support to a company who’s whole ethic seems to be bashing the competition – and quite poorly, go ahead. Give Jobs a job. They’ve got talent – cant deny that, they just dont know how to be professional about handling a bit of competition – just a bit.

Whilst on that same note, I was talking to someone at the station the other day, he was proudly showing me how his iPhone can surf the internet and I agreed that it was pretty awesome that we’re all heavily connected now. Just out of curiousity I asked him what he had before – because in his mind, the iPhone was the best thing since Xenu came and Elron Hubbard (who didn’t live in a cupboard it seems) gave us his cult relgion – and he told me he had a ‘crappy nokia from way back’. Just like people dont realise that there _were_ mp3 players before the iPod, it seems people didn’t know about SmartPhones.

Lesson? Apple knows how to sell things but it looks like they’re shitting Apples to be competitive – and you can be garanteed that the faithful will eat that right up. Windows 7 is picking up some press, what is a competitor to do?