Just a few weeks ago I had recommended his book to my dad. Today, I learned Dennis Ritchie, designer of C, co-designer of Unix, and co-author of the classic book The C Programming Language, has passed away a few days ago. His creations are some of the foundations of where computing today stands.
Month: October 2011
A lot of people are disappointed by the iPhone 4S. I’m not, so I tried to understand the disparity. The easiest thing to do is to look at the numbers. Numbers tell a lot, but not everything. As can be seen from the CPU clock speed wars and later the camera megapixel wars. So with that in mind, I laid out a side-by-side for comparison against the de facto Android flagship, the Samsung Galaxy S2.
What the numbers tell me is that the Galaxy S2 has set the bar and that the iPhone 4S merely matched it. But that’s by the numbers. People who are numbers fixated were disappointed because of this. But the previous generation Galaxy S more or less matched the iPhone 4 in specs. Yet, in sales it was pretty far behind. This can be attributed to marketing and the merits of the phone. How much of each, or even simply which one, depends on your particular bias. Other people were caught up in the hype and were disappointed. They practically set themselves up for it.
Yesterday, Jeanne and I were on the bed playing with her Duplo blocks when she decided she wanted to go to out the room. I wasn’t looking when she slid off the bed and out. Then I remembered she had closed the door before going up the bed to play! To check, I carried her back inside the room, closed the door, and asked her to open it. And she did!
This morning, when I got to my desk and checked the iPhone, I read the news: Steve Jobs has passed away. Just a day after the launch of Apple’s latest iPhone, just a few months after he resigned as CEO of Apple. His passing is the end of an era for Apple, the industry, even the world. He is a visionary whose ideas, principles, and philosophies (much influenced by Zen) are what formed Apple and its products to what they are today: less technical and more functional. Or more simply put: simple and works. He will be missed.
I tried to guess how Apple’s Let’s Talk iPhone event would go. Boy was I so wrong!
Of course, they will announce the iPhone 5. It’s not the iPhone 4S or 4+ because it makes marketing sense to have the iPhone 5 match iOS 5. And just one phone because the notification badge says 1.There’s no need for a low-end phone because iPhone 4 will, after the announcement, become the lower-end phone. Maybe they will come up with an iPhone 4 with lower memory but it will still be an iPhone 4. There’s no marketing sense in calling it iPhone 4-.
The iPhone 5 will be a taller, wider phone with an aluminum back following the general design pattern of the iPad 2. Although the display is bigger,resolution remains the same as the iPhone 4 because they want to leverage the current existing Retina apps. It will have a dual-core processor, 1GB RAM, and 64GB storage in line with current smartphones specifications. But these will not be highlighted or maybe even mentioned.
Yet, I’m actually glad I was.
I wasn’t even considering getting the supposed iPhone 5 because it was bigger and, frankly, the iPad 2 design isn’t that great. So I was thinking of just maintaining the iPhone 4 upgraded to iOS 5. But by upgrading the internals and retaining the form-factor, you get a premium compact smartphone with up-to-date specs. And I could even reuse my iPhone 4 cases (I have three). Now I’m actually considering getting one.