I was walking past the Apple store recently and wondering if as a heretic I was going to burst into flames as I walked in. After no signs of combustion I wandered round looking at the goodies.
I'm the first to admit that Apple's gear looks good. Nice designs, lots of colours, all great eye candy. Financially however, the stocks have been falling as the newness of the Apple offerings have faded away. Being as objective as possible I don't see how they can recover unless they come out with a new product equivalent of the iPhone when it was first released. What this could possibly be is hard to say but a new input peripheral of some kind would be a great start. Another option is a fully open broad CODEC based media player like those of say A.C. Ryan but from a major brand name like Apple. Of course the concept of "open" has eluded Apple for most of its life.
Then there is the upcoming Galaxy S4, due out within about a month of when you read this. The certainties so far seem to be the 13mp camera with a 2mp front facing one, a full 1080p 4.99-inch screen with Android 4.2.2. The CPU will either be a quad core CPU with 2GB of RAM or becoming more likely an Exynos 5 8-core CPU and perhaps a Mali T-678 8-core GPU. The announcement could be as early as March 14. It is shaping up to be a market killer of a product.
Apple released iOS 6.1.2 recently but it does not address the finger-dancing hack that allows someone to bypass an iPhone's passcode, launch the Phone app, and access all of its contacts, phone-history information, and most other things. It does however fix an Exchange calendar bug that could drain some battery life and increase network activity. Seems that the priorities were a bit confused.
On the subject of updates, how well should you test one before releasing it? I would guess a little bit more than Nasa did for a recent software update for the International Space Station that took down the main communications system. Luckily the 1960s backup technology still worked. This allowed them to get back up via direct ground station communication each time they passed in range. Next time you do an upgrade at work that causes problems you can point out that even Nasa gets it wrong occasionally.
As the people at Burger King found out recently, it's good to have a strong password and "whopper123" is not all that good. Some wags hijacked Burger King's official Twitter feed and converted it into an advertising feed for McDonalds. They also included links to rap videos and announcements for Anonymous. It took an hour for the account to be finally suspended.
I sense a new court case coming. Sony has announced their new EyePad, a tablet controller that glows and could be used for the Playstation 4. The device is designed to be a motion-tracking controller. It will use sensors to track its position, orientation and any nearby objects with the glowing edges there to aid the PlayStation pick out the controller's outline using the cameras.
A Chinese army unit has been identified by a private security organisation in the US as being the source of a number of cyber-attacks on US interests. Assisted by Anonymous, they tracked the source of the attacks back to a single government building in China. Reporters who tried to get a picture of the building were detained and their materials erased but Reuters managed to get one image out. If the claims were false I would imagine the Chinese government could not care less if someone took a picture of a nondescript building. Instead, based on their actions, all they seemed to have accomplished is confirm people's suspicions. There are a number of lessons here, the least of which is that just because it is a hacker group, doesn't mean that it can't do some good.
One of the regular problems I have when browsing are PDF files. Sometimes they come up, sometimes they don't and other times I get a plug-in notice that something is wrong. This also happens with Flash. The latest version of Firefox 19.0 now includes a built in PDF viewer so you don't need Adobe of Foxit as a plug-in any more. Another problem with the add-ins is the security holes that keep popping up. Unlike the add-in, the plug-in is an open source product written in JavaScript and HTML5. It is multi-platform and will work on your tablets and mobile phones. Hopefully Flash is next.
Finally for this week, if you are wondering about what specialities are needed in IT these days then top of the list is Linux. Apparently managers all over the planet are having a hard time finding qualified people. Other skill sets in demand are as usual good networking people, SharePoint and the Business Intelligence Suit from Microsoft and in particular for some reason the Reporting Services side.
James Hein is an IT professional of over 30 years' standing. You can contact him at jclhein@gmail.com.