It would be more accurate to say that Postscript malware exists, but viruses are almost impossible (or impractical) due to the nature and inherent limitations of most Postscript systems. Postscript contains no facility for accessing a network from code, for example, dramatically limiting its ability to autonomously spread over wide areas. Most Postscript devices contain no significant permanent storage; power cycling a printer returns it to baseline. Postscript programs are designed to be written to the device, one byte at a time, in sequence –there is no inherent need for bi-directional communication with the code transmitting the program, and often no bi-directional communication whatsoever, so there is little danger of code "leaking" from the Postscript program back into an external executable context.

Of course there are exceptions to these statements. Some Postscript interpreters, including Ghostscript, extend the language to add features that Adobe never found necessary. Some industrial devices include hard drives for long-term storage. But the vast majority of Postscript devices – small scale laser printers in homes and offices – adhere to the statements above.

To my knowledge, nothing that you would recognize or define as a virus has ever been widely deployed in Postscript. What malware has existed has taken advantage of systems external to Postscript; for example, whatever interface a printer manufacturer creates to accept Postscript jobs via a network. As a result, Postscript devices were just never attractive targets to create mischief any more sophisticated than overlaying your printed pages with the word "FART" in 48pt Helvetica Bold. :)

It's *his* typo...

I suggest you watch the episodes "Remember Me" and "Darmok" for a more expansive sense of how they use the Enterprise's computer. :)

I don't think the Toyota hybrid model WAS the wrong tech – for many years, after its introduction in 1997 (!), a Prius was the most energy efficient gas vehicle on the road. It used to be that you couldn't throw a stone in major west coast cities and not hit a Prius; they were astonishingly popular and ubiquitous. I drove mine for 10 years and it was phenomenally reliable, a little hollow toaster of a car that never had a moment's trouble. (That said, all it took was a low-speed [15 mph] direct frontal impact with a sidewalk light pole to total it. We weren't injured, but by the looks of it, Toyota subcontracted the front structure of the car to the same people who manufacture aluminum foil.)

However, the technology has indeed reached the end of it usefulness. It's disappointing to see such a leader in vehicle efficiency to not see the end of the road approaching for gas engines. They should have used those years of technological leadership to creating the car that would make the Prius obsolete.

They still come with cables. They just don't come with the thing that plugs into the wall.

Nah. iPhones always come with the USB-Lightning cable. Apple no longer includes the thing that plugs into the wall – because everybody has at least a zillion of these.

I believe the entire point of the article is that we need to start thinking about carbon footprints in more areas of our existence - and that there may be some things we do that are unexpectedly carbon-heavy compared to alternatives.

This is the way the future (preferably, the extremely near future) is going to look. The need to consider the environmental impact of our choices is going to have to trickle down from large infrastructure (power plants) into smaller and smaller domains (what food do I buy).

Apple currently uses Bluetooth for all their wireless headphone offerings. They have mentioned being interested in higher-bandwidth wireless, but haven't made any changes yet.

One of the big advantages of Apple's CPU/GPU shared memory architecture is that the system no longer needs to *move* big chunks of data between two pools of memory - this both conserves memory and sidesteps any bus latency that might be present between the two. So it's not really a split situation; it's a share situation. They're both working from the same data store.

Also, I think I need to correct you a bit on your Cube nostalgia. The problem with the Cube was yes, that it was overpriced, but more specifically it was quite a bit more expensive, less expandable, and *slower* than the tower G4s available at the time. It was a beautiful, innovative design and I saw a lot of them on executive desks; people who were looking for beautiful objects to sit on their desks and who didn't need the highest performance.

Or - stay with me here - maybe if we found ways to welcome these people into the programming fold, they would bring a fresh perspective and new ideas and we'd improve things.

There's not much accuracy in what you've said.

The Mac Plus (1986) had arrow keys on its standard (non-extended) keyboard, even if they were oddly arranged in a 'L' shape. This was long, long before Mac-based MS-DOS emulation was a twinkle in anyone's eye, and years before the Extended Keyboards were released. Every Mac keyboard after has had arrow keys.

And the impulse to leave the keys off the original Mac keyboards was, yes, to encourage users to use the mouse; but it was also to require developers to re-think their applications' user interfaces instead of simply blindly porting their text-based DOS apps over to the Mac.

How much was your 5DII new (if you got it that way)? Also - note that they make an adapter for your EF lenses to the new mount.

To replace your 5D, check out the conveniently named Canon R5. :)

That's demonstrably false. The Mac OS had TCP/IP in 1988 via a commercial product; by 1994 it was a standard part of the operating system. And AppleTalk became TCP/IP compatible (i.e., the protocol could run over IP instead of its proprietary packet scheme) in the late 90s, years before OS X was released.

Man, you've got a lot of unsupported assertions going on.

"Notebooks" vs "laptops" is semantics, not specifications or benchmarks. There is no implied performance differential between them.

"They only run MacOS software" - as the other poster noted, almost any open source UNIX-based software can be successfully compiled and run on MacOS.

"No Windows via emulation" - false, you can totally run ARM Windows via emulation. The licensing of this is another question.

"Not a lot of MacOS software out there" - I don't even know what this means. There is plenty of software that runs natively on MacOS.

"You must use their native language to access their native UI controls" - false, there are several languages that outright support native Mac UI elements and at least a dozen cross-platform frameworks that work in C-like languages.