The clue is in the word "Retina". And, yes, you can get 16GB of RAM. I don't know about the graphics card, I stopped playing video games when I left school.

I love Linux but the Retina is probably the best laptop ever sold precisely because of the unusually high level of harmony between the top-notch hardware and the OS it was designed to run. That is the whole point of Macs - complete focus on the best possible user experience, and complete disregard of the opinions of zealots who call the lack of support for an entirely diffferent OS to be a "snafu".

"The Winklevii".

Best movie line I've heard in years. Had me rolling in my seat.

Also, the only good thing about these guys, as near as I can tell (yes, based on more than The Social Network). They fed meat to a shark and then complained when they had no dinner. Better luck next time.

Stay classy, Australia!

The rear trackpad is wonderful. Before the iPad was introduced, I suspected that Apple would use two rear trackpads to allow users to type while gripping the pad, I thought that was what the rumors about a "surprising" input method meant. Whether for cursor movement or the more advanced idea of text entry, using the back of a pad - where our fingers will be most of the time anyway - if such an obviously good idea. When you have a small screen, why obscure it with your hands? I had also hoped that the iPad would use the Pixel Qi screen. Apple decided to build upon their previous iPhone innovation rather than introduce new innovation - Apple are remorselessly focused upon creating a mainstream, "appliance" product and, to be fair, that makes a lot more business sense than trying to delight techies like us. Congratulations, though, to Notion Ink for creating a truly innovative tablet.

Automattic are doing some of the most interesting stuff in Open Source these days and have some serious nerve backing up their vision, reportedly turning down a $100m cash + $100 stock deal a couple of years ago, I think possibly from Facebook. Smart move, they are worth a lot more today and no owner would let them do game-changing stuff like this.

Definitely a company to watch.

I have a gene variant linked to tickling policemen and, yet, they throw the book at me every time.

Wow, you completely missed his point.

He is saying that increased ownership adds inherent value to the app store because a larger market attracts increased developer attention and more apps, some of which will be better or will address previously neglected niche needs. That, by extension, adds inherent value to the device.

It is interesting to observe how many tech enthusiasts are completely missing a major shift occurring right in front of them, because they have developed reflex reactions to certain companies. In the case of Apple, some people can't get past the idea that there might be something more to their products than cool branding and snob appeal.

Hmmm, I'm not sure that there actually is any way for the other manufacturers to catch up, not within the next 5 years anyway. The iPhone came in at a high end price 2 years ago and, since then, Apple has steadily reduced the price and imporved the technology, just as it did with the iPod.

The iPhone's secret sauce is the app store. The iPhone is the only gadget that becomes more useful, not less, the longer you own it, because you build up a highly personalized collection of apps that you integrate into your daily workflow. The money and, more importantly, the time you invest into those apps cannot be transferred to another type of smartphone.

To draw users away from the iPhone, a competitor would have to produce a significantly better phone AND a selection of apps as diverse as those available on the app store. Apple's monopoly boils down to the fact that there is almost no way to persuade a massive number of independent developers to drop all the time they've already invested into learning how to create iPhone apps and move to a market with far fewer customers than the combined iPhone + iPod Touch market.

You've been using Windows for decades, right?

Another example of a technology that has been dominant for decades would be gas pumps - you drive a car, right?

Steve Jobs was in a perfect position to see how Microsoft created a monopoly, he learned a painful lesson.

Now, almost three decades later, he is putting that hard-earned knowledge to good use and could very well end up with a far bigger monopoly than MS ever had. It seems likely that billions of humans will have their first experience of being connected to the Internet not via desktop or laptop computers, but via cheaper smartphones. In this case, the hype is right: the world is clearly shifting to mobile computing.

Microsoft never controlled or received a percentage of third-party applications on the Windows platform, Apple does. Microsoft never really managed to establish a widespread subscription model, Apple has achieved precisely that via the telcos. Looking at it from any angle, Apple is set to dominate computing for quite a while.

Although Japan is an important market in it's own right, success in Japan is more important for the ripples in creates in the rest of Asia. Trends in Japan remain an important influencer in the region, with Asians generally paying far more attention to Japanese fashion, pop stars, gadgets and movies than American equivalents. Apple has negotiated an initial sale of 5 million iPhones to Unicom in China, the news that it is now the No. 1 phone in Japan (and ripple affects such as more Japanese pop stars and actors using them) will make that first 5 million sell even faster. With North America, Europe and, now, key parts of Asia on board, the rest of the world will follow. What we are looking at here is the emergence of a global computing standard that will be with us for decades.

FAIL.

This Slashdot article, referring to the so called "World's First Formally-Proven OS Kernel",was brought to my attention by a colleague who is aware of my experience with formally proven OS' in the 1980's. What follows is my response to the claim of being first, and the value of proving the correctness of an OS:

I am aware of at least two instances of operating system kernels that were built in the late 1970's / early 1980's using formal proofs of correctness. I will talk about my experience with one of them.

One of them, produced in the late 1970's was a kernel designed for a specialized environment. This kernel/OS was a reasonably functional kernel complete with multiprocessing, time-sharing, file systems, etc. Unfortunately while the formal proof for this kernel was solid, the axiomatic set on which this formal proof was based did not perfectly match its operating environment. This mismatch proved to be fatal to the OS security.

This formally proven OS took years to create and prove its correctness. Those who developed and maintained the OS were very proud of their work. There were plans underway to create a commercial version of their work and to market it through a certain hardware vendor on which their OS ran.

When I was a student intern working for the organization where that developed this OS worked, I worked in their OS environment from time to time. I came in from the outside where my OS experience was with a wide variety OS' such as MVS, NOS, KRONOS, TOPS-10, RSTS/E, VMS, Multics, and Unix (5th/6th/7th edition). I had enough experience in jumping into new OS environments that I felt comfortable as a user in this one, even though it was unusual.

An important point to observe here is I was one of the first people who enter this OS environment from the outside. I was not steeped in the development world of the OS. I brought with me, ideas that differed from the OS developers. As a young student, I believed that the OS should work for me instead of getting in my way. To help come up to speed, I ported over my collection of OS-independent tools and soon began coding away on my assigned tasks.

Then one day, working within my OS-independent tools, something very odd happened. By mistake, I did something that produced an unusual result. I quickly realized that something was very wrong because the result was "impossible" according to the formal proof of OS correctness. Under the rules set down by my employer I immediately contacted the appropriate security officer and the next thing I knew, I was in a long sequence of meetings with people trying to figure out what in the hell happened.

In the first meeting after my mistake, I learned that I had been reassigned to a new team. I was assured that I was not being disciplined, far from it: I had made a number of people very happy and they moved paperwork mountains to move me into their team. This team was given a task of attempting to repeat my previous "mistake" as well as to discover if exploits that are more general were possible against this OS. We were assigned to work âoeundercoverâ as developers under test/QA installations using this OS. In the end, the team was successful in discovering a much more general form of the OS hole I accidentally found.

What went wrong with the OS formal proof? Well the mapping from the formal logic world to the real world of hardware, physics, people, and the environment was flawed. In other words, when you added in the "real-world", the proof was incomplete. Attempts by the OS developers to expand their proof to address the "real-world" only produced a set of inconsistent theorems. I believe the OS project was abandoned after the OS developers failed multiple times to expand their formal proof to deal with âoereal-worldâ environments.

During this experience I was introduced to two "Security Camps": One, "the absolutists" as they called themselves, included people who worked on this formally proven OS. The opposing camp called themselves "the relativists" as a sign of opposition to the ideas put forward by "the absolutists". While there were many who saw value in both camps, some zealots saw their way as the only true way.

Allow me to state the extreme positions of both camps:

The extreme members of "the absolutists" believed that perfection in security could be obtained by starting with a small and provably secure axiomatic environment. The level of security could be maintained while the environment expanded through formal disciplines and procedures that were controlled by the security of the lower levels. In other words, they believed you could start with a small secure core and formally build on that core while maintaining provable security.

The extreme members of âoethe relativistsâ believed nothing was secure. They believed the products of "the absolutists" were, inconsistent (due to flaws in their proofs), incomplete (as I unknowingly demonstrated in my OS exploit), or trivial (to be so constrained as to be of limited practical value). I recall one member of the OS exploit team to which I had been reassigned, a particular zealot of "the relativists" camp would often say:

"All security is ultimately FUBARed. So for those things your security cannot prevent, try to mitigate the damage. All mitigation systems are ultimately FUBARed. So for those events your security cannot mitigate, try to at least detect attacks. All detection systems are ultimately FUBARed. For those situations that your detection systems cannot detect, life's a bitch." [ See FUBAR ]

Yes, he was a cheery fellow. :-)

Both camps have their good points. The zealots of both camps take things too far. Nevertheless, given the choice, I prefer to stay away from the absolutist camp.

I believe history shows that the relativists often are able to break systems constructed by the absolutists. Allow me to site a few examples/legends:

• The absolutists built the impenetrable walls of the City of Troy [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_VII ]. The relativists hacked Troy's defenses resulting in the sacking of the city. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_War#Trojan_Horse ]
• The absolutists built the Maginot Line of defense [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maginot_Line ]. The relativists hacked this line of defense [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maginot_Line#German_invasion_in_World_War_II ].
• The absolutists believed the Enigma machine was unbreakable [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine ]. The relativists, and in particular Marian Rejewski et al. and later Alan Turing et al. hacked the cipher. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma#Polish_breakthrough and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Cryptanalysis ]

I will not be surprised to learn sometime in the future that a relativist minded hacker has managed to instruct the absolutists who have created the so-called "World First Formally-Proven OS Kernel".

chongo (Landon Curt Noll) /\oo/\

p.s. What about that other OS instance (that was proven in the late 1970's / early 1980's)? When I left, I was not aware of any successful attack on that other OS. It might be that the lack of a documented successful attack on that other OS was due the to fact that its capabilities was so limited as to be almost useless.

The link on the GIMPS home page points to where one may obtain the decimal digits of the new Mersenne Prime. Other forms of this prime are available:

• Digits of 2^42643801 - 1 with dot separators (instead of commas)
• English name of 2^42643801 - 1 using the American system
• English name of 2^42643801 - 1 using the European system
• English name of 2^42643801 - 1 using the American system with dashes
• English name of 2^42643801 - 1 using the European system with dashes

The dashed form of the English name is available at assist those who might actually want to read all or part of the +324 Megabyte name. :-)

Look, I'm not trying to get at your personally, just as I couldn't give a damn if the corporate entity known as Apple exploded into a million pieces. What I'm observing is that they have somehow integrated existing technologies into a package that becomes more useful to ordinary users over time, more useful than they thought it would be when they made the original decision to purchase. That is a pretty special achievement for any gadget and what it means is that it is changing it's users' habits. That is why it was worthy of a specific mention - not because it is a mainstream device yet, but because it is the only such device which, today, is making headway into the mainstream and is evidently changing the habits of it's users, and changes of that type will affect the future.

Twitter and Facebook are good examples, I know tons of people to who would never have used either if the iPhone didn't make it so simple and convenient. On the desktop, they always seemed like a waste of time but, as something you can quickly check while out and about, they make sense.

Games are also a good example: I stopped buying games ten years ago and stopped playing them about five years ago. I assumed that they were something I had grown out of and I was plenty busy with other stuff. When I bought the iPhone, games were the last thing on my mind and, anyway, I presumed that it would not be a very capable gaming platform. Somehow, the app store lured me back into gaming, first with free games, then a couple of dollar games and, now, I'm playing often enough to justify buying the occasional five dollar game, such as Peggle.

That sort of spending may not seem like much when the gaming industry deals in billions but, you have to remember, I am just one of hundreds of millions of people who had left gaming behind and who certainly would never have considered buying a handheld gaming device. Yes, so far, Apple have only sold 24 million iPhones, so, those hundreds of millions of people have not yet been drawn back into gaming but, just as with the iPod, Apple will ruthlessly pursue market share. Yes, there will be other phones but, think about it: a key part of value for the consumer is the app store, and no other manufacturer is going to be able to catch up with the momentum it has already generated. Developers are making far more than they originally anticipated, certainly more than they've made on any other mobile platform, and that windfall will only grow as the price of the base iPhone model drops and it enters more territories. The Palm Pre might be an amazing phone but, as a developer, am I going to invest my time into it when I've already got million of potential customers on iTunes? As a customer, am I going to buy a Pre if it can't run my favorite apps? We've already seen how this plays out with Windows, what's the point of denying reality?

No, the iPhone reference was important: the keynote was about "Extrapolating the Near Future of Gaming". When you extrapolate, you pull from what is happening today. The iPhone has shown that many normal, non-techie folks will use technology in unexpected way, and to an unexpected extent, if you make it easy enough for them.

It doesn't matter if hardcore techies think that the iPhone is "childish" or if they think it is a badge of honor to continue using their Motorola V980, it really doesn't matter at all.

What matters is what the mass of ordinary consumers move towards and, right now, today, Apple are creating a mobile platform and eco-system that could very well remain dominant for the next couple of decades, just as MS did on the desktop.

But the key point is that the iPhone shows that good design can pull mainstream users towards technologies that were previously adopted only by relatively small niche groups, such as /. readers - our use of technology in twenty years will depend not only upon what is possible but, also, upon the good design and implementation that packages the possible and persuades the mainstream to integrate it into their lives.