Category: Uncategorized

Things we don’t yet know about the iPhone:

• The processor (likely ARM of some sort, apparently – my guess of low-voltage Intel was right for Apple tv, wrong for iPhone, it seems)
• The graphics subsystem (Nvidia?)
• The type of touchscreen (Synaptics?)
• Pretty much anything else about the hardware, come to think of it.

Things iSuppli claim to have worked out, based on their analysis of the above:

• 4Gb iPhone to carry a $229.85 hardware cost, $245.83 total expense, 49.3% margin.
• 8Gb iPhone to carry a $264.85 hardware cost, $280.83 total expense, 46.9% margin.
• a ‘high degree of confidence’ in their conclusions, though:
• …they’re preliminary ‘until we perform an actual physical teardown and analysis’ (code for: ‘find out what’s inside the thing’)

Things one might conclude about iSuppli:

• They have no idea what ‘5 significant figures’ means.
• They think ‘high degree of confidence’ means ‘we reckon that’s about right. Look, we added it up on the back of a fag packet, and everything.’

To be fair – and as their own article rather than the truncated press release points out – they’ve done lots of this sort of thing before. However, I’d believe them much more if they quoted “~$245±15%”, or whatever. But if they said that, all we’d be able to take from their analysis would be that Apple’s possibly going to make roughly the same margin on iPhone as they do on their other hardware. Which… isn’t particularly surprising. Nor interesting.

Damien’s picked up the blogging again, telling us not-quite-enough about his exploits behind the scenes of basically every film that’s being made in Europe. Or so it seems. But come on, man, we more more!

Nicked from Boing Boing, but still: logic goats? Genius! What a pity there isn’t a NAND-goat, though. Tsk.

I’m fine, thanks for asking – just been rather busy. Oh, well, actually, I did go away – a glorious weekend in Wicklow, of which more anon – but mostly I’ve simply been busy. Scope is somewhat improbably staging a comedy gig tonight, which has been a bit of a challenge to set up, and we’re still reeling a little from the whole ‘Vegas’ insanity.

Speaking of which – forget 1080p TVs, the hit of the show sounds like it was the radio-control dragonfly. Which completely out-does the otherwise fabulous PicooZ helicopter, as mentioned here a short while ago. Damn, and I just got one of those for Christmas, and everything.

But while I’m here: does anyone have any recommendations for group calendaring systems? Hosted, self-hosting, running on an internal server, whatever – are there any systems out there that actually work? All suggestions welcome.

Buying carbon offset is a bit of a minefield, in that it’s an unregulated industry and it’s hard to know that what you’re buying makes either sense or a difference. Tree-planting is all well and good, but does it have a long-term impact? And would the development projects in which you can invest happen without you anyway, in which case what is your money achieving?

Then there are the sharks in the water – I heard a lovely interview with a chap from HSBC a while back, in which he related that when word got around that the bank was planning to go carbon-neutral, he had calls from people offering to sell him swathes of the Amazon rainforest. He expressed… shall we say ‘polite suspicion’? – that the land was theirs to sell in the first place.

It’s somewhat surprising that, as far as I can tell, there’s no accreditation scheme for offset projects. If the RSPCA can manage the ‘Freedom Foods’ project, the Soil Association can do the whole organic thing, and there are more standards in the electronics world than you can shake a USB cable at – you’d think somebody with a recognisable brand would have this covered. But evidently not, or at least, not yet.

It’s encouraging, then, that the Commons environmental audit committee is to investigate personal air travel offset schemes. Compulsory accreditation or regulation at the UK or European level is on the agenda, as is requiring flyers to offset the emissions they cause. Hurrah!

I’ve avoided bitching much about Clearwire here, mostly because their bandwidth is so shite it’s rather hard to get the message out.

On the face of it, it’s a remarkable service: near-2Mbit near-WiMax service across Dublin. And indeed, from the Trinity College Sourceforge mirror I’ve seen over 150Kb/sec – which is great. However, beyond Ireland things aren’t so rosy. I see up to about 20Kb/sec from the BBC website, which is OK. From big US sites I get reasonable enough speeds, though still something like 20Kb/sec total – browser session reloads are painful.

But they’re clearly traffic shaping something chronic. If I had to make an educated guess, I’d say they’re prioritising all web traffic, and then traffic from popular sites, in a crappy attempt to mask inadequate peering arrangements. Case in point: from my blog server, in Los Angeles, I get about 10Kb/sec. To the same server, via FTP, I can just about sustain 5Kb/sec on a good day. On a bad day, there’s not even enough bandwidth to sustain an FTP control connection, which is an error I haven’t seen since I was doing FTP over a shared 9600baud serial link. Seriously.

Peer-to-peer apps like BitTorrent are completely nixed, and they’re doing really horrid things to Skype whereby the incoming data stream is excellent, but the outgoing sees 98% packet loss on a 12Kb/sec link, with 8 seconds round-trip latency.

Support are friendly, helpful, and responsive… until you quote any of this stuff at them. At which point they stop claiming it’s your configuration/firewall/router and just clam up.

Upshot: Clearwire Ireland: pile of poo. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

Chrysler’s chief economist has reportedly revealed his strategy on dealing with global warming: stick his fingers in his ears and shout ‘lalalalalala!’:

“He said that he had been surprised by how much support there had been in the Daimler office in Stuttgart for these [the Stern report’s] “quasi-hysterical” policies that smacked of “Chicken Little” politics – referring to the US children’s story in which Chicken Little runs around in circles saying “the sky is falling”.” (BBC News)

Yikes.

You have to picture me squinting hard here as I peer into the murky middle-distance… OK, so the iPhone runs OS X, right? Now, we don’t know what processor it’s packing. Note that the OLPC XO packs an AMD Geode x86 compatible, clocked at 400MHz, claimed to be equivalent to a PIII-500, and the whole machine rocks in at 20W. Plenty of people are assuming iPhone runs on an ARM of some sort, and OS X is demonstrably architecture-portable (heck, it just moved from PowerPC to x86, and there used to be SPARC and HP-whatever versions of its ancestor OPENSTEP) – so it could run on ARM. But does it need to? I’m rather assuming it runs on an ultra low-voltage Core Solo variant, but what do I know?

Whatever, it’s running enough of OS X to have Core Image and Core Animation, WebKit, the Security bits, and so on: which I guess means a chunk of Cocoa is there. Which other bits of OS X does it run, and how do developers get at it? It’s not clear if they’re going to be allowed to (sharp intake of breath), but one has to speculate:

Inkwell, right? Apple’s handwriting recognition software. It’s surprisingly good, and it’s integrated into OS X – plug in a graphics tablet and you can scribble all over the screen. We know Inkwell is portable too, since it’s also made it from PowerPC to x86… and because it started out on ARM. Er… huh?

Yeah, see, Inkwell used to be called ‘Rosetta,’ back in the day when it ran on – da-da-daaaa! – Newton.

Is anybody else amused by the prospect of running a 12 year-old ex-Newton handwriting recogniser on an all-new handheld from… er… Apple? Cracks me up, anyway.

Steven Frank of Panic nails it:

“AAAAAHHH AAAAHHH AAAAAHHH AAAAHHH AAAHHBB GGG LL AAAAA”

A few miscellaneous thoughts:

• Knowing that this was just around the corner, the folks at Apple must have looked at Zune last November and… laughed.
• The Flash demos on Apple’s iPhone pages are amazing, and give a very clear indication of where the Leopard user interface is heading – lots of smooth animation, a very ‘fluid’ feel, many dynamic elements. Looks at Phone → Photos, and wait until it gets to the part where you’re emailing the photo – how cute? And yet, not gratuitous. This is animation with a point, and with taste. Very classy indeed.
• Is anyone else thinking ‘Newton didn’t die. It just went away for 10 years?’
• 8Gb isn’t enough. Already. Bah! 🙁