I was chatting to a developer from a competing phone company at JavaOne, and he was telling me how annoying the competition found Apple's ability to turn the negatives of their platforms into positives.

The example he gave me was security. Other phone manufacturers have to go to great lengths to sandbox third-party applications, building a complex security model to defend against malware. Apple instead said ‘screw that’ and moved the security model up a level into the app store. I'm sure it's possible to get a malicious app approved, but it would involve registering as a developer and writing a potentially commercially viable app that would pass Apple's quality control, and Apple could throw the kill switch on it the moment they discovered it was malware.

This is the root of the ‘no emulators’ provision. Apple needs to control the code running on the iPhone. Emulators open the door to unapproved code. Hence emulators can not be approved.

It is likely a C64 emulator would itself protect the iPhone from malicious apps, since emulated apps already run in the sandbox of emulated hardware. Sure, Apple wants to control the content on the phone, but given the new capabilities of iPhone 3.0, how are downloadable games different from any other kind of in-app purchasable content pack? This is what happens to rules once they are written down and removed from the reasoning behind them.

Certainly, Apple could go the extra mile and build a better application sandbox for the iPhone. But this just turns into the classic software development scheduling problem: ‘Sure, we can do that. We can do anything you want. Just tell me which three features I should cut from the next release to get it done.’

Interestingly enough on the same trip I ran into a developer who was dipping his toe in Android development. He told me his second biggest frustration¹ was the hardware. He was developing some cool graphical/physics demos, but even being sure that they could run smoothly on arbitrary Android phones, or even run without crashing, was turning out to be far too much work.

Once more, it's turning a weakness into a strength. Apple controls the iPhone hardware and the software that runs on it, against all the ‘hey, didn’t the open PC platform win?’ logic of the industry. Turns out that's the same logic that attracts games developers to the predictable hardware and software of consoles, despite the license hassles and limited hardware, over trying to tame the beast of PC gaming.

Originally a reddit comment

¹ The first, apparently, being the primitive implementation of the Java Virtual Machine. These performance tips read like the sort of advice you'd give a 1990’s era Java developer, which makes sense once you discover the VM lacks a JIT compiler.

I guess it could just be another case of “Thanks for coming in today” vs. “HTFU”.

A recent comment on an internal Atlassian blog sums up the subtle social dynamics involved in maintaining offices in San Francisco and Sydney.

According to the Center for Disease Control, swine influenza A (H1N1) is a flu virus that normally infects pigs. Occasionally the virus mutates so that it can infect humans, and since the human immune system is not properly equipped to deal with the virus it can be quite a serious infection.

Is swine flu dangerous?

The exact danger is not known. On one hand, existing flu vaccinations are unlikely to protect against swine flu. On the other, so far it seems that swine flu can be treated with common retroviral medication. In the USA, the CDC has released a quarter of its stockpile of these drugs to treat the current outbreak.

What are the symptoms of swine flu?

At first the virus presents with normal flu symptoms: a cough, fever, sore throat, body aches, chills and fatigue. As the disease advances sufferers may experience diarrhea or vomiting. Once the disease reaches its final stages, sufferers will experience hair loss, gradual pinkening of the skin, facial swelling that causes the patient's nose to widen and flatten, and an intense urge to roll in mud.

Are there other variants of swine flu?

Most, if not all of the fatal cases related to swine flu have been in Mexico, but it is not yet known if these deaths were caused by a more dangerous strain of the flu, or just because of differences in available medical treatment. In addition, some cases of swine flu outside of the USA have been reported to be thicker and less crispy than the American counterparts. (This variant has been named “Canadian Swine Flu”).

How did H1N1 pass from pigs to humans?

The CDC are performing an in-depth study to attempt to trace the flu back to its original source. So far they have been unsuccessful, but they have come up with the following composite drawing of “Patient 0”. Anyone who knows someone who fits this description who may have recently visited Mexico should immediately contact the authorities.

…is not like the other.

It’s cute and pithy to say “Well, good fucking riddance to Geocities”.… Many pages are amateurish. A lot have broken links, even internally. The content is tiny on a given page. And there are many sites which have been dead for over a decade. But please recall, if you will, that for hundreds of thousands of people, this was their first website. This was where you went to get the chance to publish your ideas to the largest audience you might ever have dreamed of having.… In a world where we get pissed because the little GIF throbber stays for 4 seconds instead of the usual 1, this is all quaint. But it’s history. It’s culture. It’s something I want to save for future generations. – Jason Scott

First Ashton and Demi were like, OMG Twitter! and then Larry and Ashton were like, OMG, Twitter! and then Oprah was like, OMG Twitter and then Twitter was like, OMG Oprah!.

Or, to put it another way:

There are legitimate reasons to fear sudden popularity. A site where users collaborate on a shared resource, say a Wikipedia or a Reddit (not to mention Usenet) have good reason to fear an influx of new users who “don't understand” the site, and might change its character.

Twitter's not like that, though. It's like the web itself: a loosely connected accumulation of linked communities. You only ever have to see the people you want to see. So if Oprah brings all her viewers on to Twitter, you never have to see a single one of them if you don't want to. The community that you are a part of changes not one jot.

So the only real reason to care you were #herebeforeoprah would be the same reason you liked that indie band before they were featured in an iPod advertisement.

I hate to break it to you, but Twitter was never that cool.

(On the other hand, Twitter seems to be revisiting its old habits as far as uptime goes, but pretty much every popular Internet service has experienced those kind of growing pains. They either reach a point where the growth curve flattens out and settle down, or they collapse under their own weight and are replaced by something that can handle the load.)

The DiggBar from the point of view of a website owner:

(For background information, start with this Daring Fireball article, then if you're still vaguely interested the next two days of link archives, and possibly my article about how to many people, URLs are an opaque browser feature, and possibly my rant about how it's Google's job to map the web, it isn't the web's job to design itself around how Google happens to map it today.)

Exact same exposure, aperture, ISO and perspective (except for somebody nudging the tripod) as previous shot, after all the lights that were going to go out had gone out:

Half an hour after the lights came back on:

(Note for keen observers: on top of the bridge there are two flags. The one on the right is a special “Earth Hour” promotional flag. This flag remained illuminated throughout.)

I have nothing against my namesake, but I must say I find the premise of the competition annoying.

It is incredibly hard to believe that any security researcher is going to find a new exploit against a given operating system and set of applications over the course of a few hours of competition. It is far more likely, and has been the case so far, that competitors show up with exploits already prepared. This year's competition came down purely to a roll of the dice: which researcher would get the chance to pull their “here’s one I prepared earlier” from the oven first?¹

Or to put it more bluntly, Pwn2Own provides a cash incentive for security researchers to keep vulnerabilities secret in the hope they will remain unpatched until competition day.

¹ The cynic in me wonders how random the process was that selected the most headline-friendly result: “Last year’s winner hacks Safari again!”

To change the subject slightly, Merlin Mann: (via John Gruber)

Bullshit or no, good conferences attract good people for one reason; they know other good people will be there. You don’t go to act like a hero; you go to meet the people who are heroes to you. And, to me, there are 100-year opportunities for awesome in the hallways and bars and hotel rooms and even at the horseshit parties where loud music and free liquor turn a lot of people who should know better into retards and mooks.

For what it's worth, I'm going to be at the Atlassian Summit. I'm looking forward to meeting a lot of cool people doing cool shit with our software who I've only previously encountered over the Internet.

I'd just appreciate it if you didn't live-tweet the panels.

The story of Watchmen is rooted in this tale of nuclear superpowers and imminent armageddon. To me this is the movie's greatest flaw. In sticking to the original story so closely it fails to acknowledge that the human race did find a way to survive, and even the conceit of an alternate history doesn't protect the plot from being constantly informed by the fact the whole audience knows we made it through in the end, on our own, without any glowing blue men to help us.

Still, that said, the movie has a lot to recommend it. It is ambitiously nuanced, telling the stories of a group of masked vigilantes coaxed out of retirement, as they might exist outside of the convention that a costume and a mask will either turn you into a force for good or a villain intent on ruling the earth. Refreshingly it is not shaped like a traditional movie plot, allowing the stories of its characters to unfold through the course of the film. It is not a superhero movie as much as a collection of character studies spotted with occasional ultra-violence.

And ultra-violence there is. I am not particularly squeamish, but there were a few occasions during the movie where even I was wondering if perhaps some particular mutilation might have better been implied than shown. Once again, we can marvel at the amount of media attention Dr Manhattan's oft-seen large blue penis is receiving, with no mention at all of the relentless, graphic depiction of a man having his hands cut off with a circular saw.

The direction is occasionally inspired, giving a complicated plot that is obviously not built for the motion picture format room to tell its story, but more often trips over itself looking for the most obvious shot, slow-motion sequence or musical accompaniment to drive home its point.

I'd give Watchmen a reasonably solid A−. I was entertained, it made me think, I was inspired to one day get around to reading the comic books, and I'll watch it again when it comes out on Blu-Ray.