512 Pixels

In the world of 24-hour news, Twitter accounts and blurrycam photos, it’s hard to be surprised by much anymore.

Sure, Apple pulls it off every once in a while — most recently with Mountain Lion — but usually, when an Apple event is about to be held, just about everyone has a good guess at what is under that black cloth.

This time around, every nerd I know is talking about the iPad 3’s Retina Display, its LTE chipset and the fact that the case is 0.8 mm thicker.

Apple, of course, hasn’t said a word on any of this. Until next Wednesday, the iPad 3 doesn’t exist.

It seems that I’m in the minority, though, judging form the number and size of sites that cover Apple rumors. Without these stories, the Apple new cycle would be much slower, and many sites would have far fewer page views.

But the events would be a lot more fun.

From the Verge’s live blog of the Google keynote at MWC:

For the wealthy, Schmidt says technology is only limited by “what we deem ethical.”

Call me crazy, but I don’t want Google — and especially not Eric Schmidt — deciding what’s ethical. Yikes.

It’s on March 7, in San Francisco.

Apple announced right in the middle of the Google keynote at Mobile World Congress. Classic.

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring the 512 Pixels RSS feed this week!

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Nilay Patel:

[Google’s Android boss man Andy] Rubin said that the biggest problem for Android on tablets is “there’s no organized way for consumers to recognize it as a viable platform,” and that Google wants consumers to see its tablets as part of the broader Android ecosystem. “The educated consumer realizes it now that they’re either picking the Apple ecosystem or the Microsoft ecosystem or the Google ecosystem… we’re going to do a better job at making people understand what ecosystem they’re buying into.”

I’ve got to hand it to Rubin, he seems to understand some of the problems Android — and not just the tablet end of things — is facing. But then, just then, he blows it. Again, Patel:

Of course, one of Android’s biggest challenges in the tablet market is the lack of high-quality apps designed for the larger screen, but Rubin was somewhat dismissive of those concerns.

Android’s fragmentation is a bad thing, and the lack of a cohesive consumer-facing strategy is bad, too. While Google may claim that Android is one ecosystem, walking in to a Best Buy doesn’t really portray that. In fact, it feels like the PC wars — OEMS facing off against each other, despite the mass similarities between their products.

But those things would matter far less if there were decent apps out there for Android.

Good news, Munchkins.

From Ron Swanson:

Never half-ass two things. Whole ass one thing.

Photographer Gerd Ludwig’s coverage of Chernobyl is stunning. At $7, this app is very much worth the photos and information it contains.

via Boston.com’s “The Big Picture”

Yikes.

Apple:

The Mac App Store is the safest place for users to get software for their Mac, but we also want to protect users when they download applications from other places. Developer ID is a new way to help prevent users from installing malware on their Mac. Along with Gatekeeper, a new feature in Mountain Lion, signing applications with your Developer ID certificate provides users with the confidence that your application is not known malware and has not been tampered with.

Get your applications ready for Gatekeeper today. It’s easy to get started with Developer ID using the automated certificate request tools in Xcode 4.3 or the Developer Certificate Utility.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

As cool as this seems, why would Apple not wait to show this off with a Retina Display iPad in a few weeks?

After listening to this week’s Hypercritical, on which John and Dan discuss file systems for about 17 hours, I realized that I didn’t know much about what came before the Hierarchical File System.

HFS, of course, is the grandfather of HFS+, which the Macintosh uses today. It was first released with the Hard Disk 20 for use with the Fat Mac in September 1985.

Apple dropped support for MFS in System 7.6.1.

The original Macintosh shipped with the Macintosh File System. Designed to run on the 400k floppy disks that Mac owners knew so well, it had several notable features:

Resource Forks

From Wikipedia:

A resource fork stores information in a specific form, such as icons, the shapes of windows, definitions of menus and their contents, and application code (machine code). For example, a word processing file might store its text in the data fork, while storing any embedded images in the same file’s resource fork. The resource fork is used mostly by executables, but every file is able to have a resource fork.

At first, the resource fork was used to store all graphic data for a file for being drawn on the screen of the Macintosh. These files helped the original Mac team run the machine with a measly 128 KB of RAM, down from the 1 MB the Lisa required for its GUI.

Today, resource forks are still a part of HFS+. They store icon information, program associations and more.

Character Limits

MFS supported file names with up to 255 characters. However, the Finder didn’t support file names longer than 63 characters. When Apple released HFS, the limit was dropped to 31 characters in the OS. With OS 8.1 (coupled with HFS+), 255 characters were supported, although Finder’s limit of 31 wasn’t changed until OS X.

Flat File System

The most dated feature of MFS is that it was a flat-file system.

The concept of folders existed under MFS, but they weren’t nested as we are used today — there was no hierarchy of directories on the original Macintosh. ¹ Here’s Wikipedia again:

They were visible in Finder windows, but not in the open and save dialog boxes. There was always one empty folder on the volume, and if it was altered in any way (such as by adding or renaming files), a new Empty Folder would appear, thus providing a way to create new folders. MFS stored all of the file and directory listing information in a single file. The Finder created the illusion of folders, by storing all files as a directory handle/file handle pair. To display the contents of a particular folder, MFS would scan the directory for all files in that handle. There was no need to find a separate file containing the directory listing.

Good times.