at my sphere

The politics of global production: Apple, Foxconn and China's new working class

An Abstract

iPhone 6 and 6 Plus has start shipped around yesterday on first batch. A real thing comes to hands of many people who have been in waiting. The thing they had waiting for once has pulled some story up for a highlight.

Why did Apple decided to once again be still in their comfort playground? Considering the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus sports the same amount of DRAM as last year's iPhone and settle in a-long-run of CPU cores number. Despite two new display sizes advertised as "Bigger than bigger", both sizes come as a catch up feature to the larger 4 to 5+ inch display that other OEM's had playing comfortly.

The widespread expectation that Apple would unveiled many huge improvement on specification and feature of the latest release iPhones to compete other phones is natural and a bit driven by today's smartphone race. As far i know, these days we have seen some smartphone utilize octa-core CPU and some with 3GB of DRAM attached. Whoah!

In contrast iPhone 6 and 6 Plus show what Apple have been put their concern around, choose to not directly response to market's numbers. Take a bet on another way, Apple's way in taking care every task to be done.

The A8 chip built on 20 nanometer process which deliver 50x faster CPU performance than the original iPhone and 84x at GPU performance while being 50 percent more energy efficient than the A7.

Have another fact that iPhone 6 and 6 Plus A8 chip is a dual-core CPU with clockspeed at 1.4 GHz slightly above last year's A7 at 1.3 GHz. If many report we have heard were true that A8 chip was designed to be more power efficient, then what is make sense for Apple to deliver that focus?

Apple's approach to come up with 20 nanometer process based on a boosted ARMv8 Cyclone along with 1GB LPDDR 3 RAM is not surprisingly as an effort to push their engineering advancement. Apple choose to did not address more CPU cores because it might considered to be less power efficient. However this does strongly suggest that Apple has made some unknown revisions to Cyclone to further boost its single-threaded (Instruction Level Parallelism) performance. The way they took to solve problems either conservative or practically a forward thinking.

Through all told story, its seems like "There are a thousand "No's" for every "Yes" for Apple.

The heat of the keynote is still up, with many announcements that may or may not fit our expectation. Tim Cook and team had delivered such noticeable enormous update on their software side. The first day keynote divided in 3 sections, they were: OS X, iOS and developer.

OS X - The operating system got an overhaul like iOS did a year ago.

First thing first, OS X 10.10. The second edition of California landmark theme has landed on Yosemite, as previous rumors believe it would be. The operating system got an overhaul like iOS did a year ago.

The UI

The UI got polished in many aspects. Icons redrawed. Translucent is in liberal use, Finder, Calendar, Maps are few containing this effect among other Apple pre-installed apps.

Spotlight

Spotlight get a grand stand now. Taking in the center estate of Mac, advanced to deliver information even before you need a web browser through grabbing feed from Wikipedia and Bing.

Safari. The rise of DuckDuckGo

Talking a web browser, there are many improvements embedded on new Safari both on Mac and the mobile operating system.

Apple is surely trying to put Safari back to competition against Chrome and Firefox. One interesting here, DuckDuckGo a search service that is private by default and does not track cookies or save your search history, is going to be a built-in option in Safari on iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite in favor of Google, Yahoo and Bing which are already there.

Handoff

Now your Mac knows the last thing you were doing on your iOS device and vice versa. So you can start something on one device and instantly pick it up on another.

Instant Hotspot

Turn on the personal hotspot on your iPhone with just a few clicks on your Mac. So as long as your iPhone is nearby, you can get online with your Mac.

Phone Calls and SMS. Yes, from your Mac

Now you can make and receive iPhone calls on your Mac. So if you’re working on your Mac and your iPhone rings in another room, you can leave it there and still take the call.

The text messages on your iPhone — including SMS and iMessage — are now available on your Mac. Send and receive. Read and reply. All without picking up your iPhone.

iOS 8 - A giant release.

Expanded Appbilities

Communication between apps now has improved as well. iOS and OS X previously brought up Twitter and Facebook as their social media service stock and that was still in limited actions. 

For iOS 8, They have opened the sharing options to all developers, which means you’ll have more places to share what matters to you.

Health and HealthKit for developers

iPhone is already a wearable with iOS 8. With Health app, it now can aggregates data from other wearables you may already use such as Misfits Shine and Adidas miCoach Smart Ball.

With M7 co-processor embedded in iPhone 5S, dedicated to process information from movement, Apple is ready toward the bright future of health and medical world in hand.

Optional keyboard 

For you who desperately in years looked out for an opt of iOS own keyboard, you can now finally use third-party keyboard such as Fleksy as of which to fit your style of typing.

Apple has also introduced QuickType, an intelligence method to suggest words or phrases by predicting what is you're typing. It's a context-aware, in short it means it can suggests suitable words in separate conversation manner between the formal one in business email or just casual conversation in Messages.

Siri

Apple introduced "Hey Siri" to fire up Siri in hands-free way, just like "Ok, Google" on Android. This feature stand as an addition to Apple CarPlay, a in-driving mode experience with your iPhone when you hit the road in your car. The con is, your iPhone have to be plugged-in in order to do so.

Oh, and Siri now can listening to a song and show you what is the song's title and the artist after an initial collaboration with Shazam.

Apple now is more open than before. Developer and user are happy.

Frankly to say, Apple is now more open on their products and services, and it something many of us, or few have waiting for.

A faster WebKit API for all

Third-party apps – which were struggling in slower version of WebKit on previous version of iOS – now will get the access to faster Safari Nitro engine to deploy Javascript and other improved browsing methods to adopt.

HomeKit

Apple wants to make it easier to manage your home automation devices, so that you can lock doors, dim lights, and adjust your thermostat from your iPhone or iPad. HomeKit, is a software platform, to integrate control for door locking, light dimming, and other home automation gadgets and features to iOS devices.

Apple is also planning to run a certification program for HomeKit that will help ensure that products leveraging the HomeKit software will support new features enabled by iOS.

Touch ID

Would you mind to find out first what the DTD says about a webpage before giving a shout out such a phrase like the title above?

I will, for the sake of won't taking back my word later...hahaa

Sure HTML 5 is now happening on the internet universe. So, how to find out?

First, what is DTD? Its an acronym of Document Type Definition/Declaration. This is a set of markup declarations that define a document type.

Simple way is just to look up the markup document of a webpage or site you are currently on. You may first open up the debugger console of your active browser and find the source code.

On the very first line, if it says.. <!DOCTYPE html>

Researchers on Friedrich-Alexander Universitãt Erlangen-Nürnberg have found a way to bypass an encrypted Android 4.0 phone (specifically on Nexus phones with Android 4.0 installed) for now. Since Google's Android Ice Cream Sandwich provides a disk encryption feature which of that scrambles user partitions, thus protecting sensitive user information such as contact lists, visited web sites, and photos, directly from RAM.

This is an ease yet tricky method to perform. Why? Encryption is irreversible. The only way to revert to an unencrypted phone is to perform a factory data reset, which may erases all your data.

FROST: Forensic Recovery Of Scrambled Telephones

Yes, that is the acronym of the method here, which by perform cold boot attacks against Android smartphones and retrieve disk encryption keys from RAM, a.k.a your system memory. The unique part is, you should put the phone into a freezer. Cooling the device down under 10 degree Celsius to increases the success of cold boot attacks considerably (as they noted: because RAM contents fade away more slowly if RAM chips are cold).

If you are cool enough to give it a try by any cause happened to your phone, they put the tool set download link too.

"Maaf ya, saya belum bisa bantu sekarang, mungkin lain kali, gpp kan?"

Kalimat ini diutarakan oleh seorang teman ketika saya meminta bantuannya. Sangat sopan sikapnya, mungkin dia tidak ingin saya kecewa. Tentu saja saya sedikit kecewa karena dia tidak bisa membantu, dan juga cukup lega karena dia, bagi saya, sangat sopan mengutarakannya.

Satu hal yang mengusik di benak, kenapa dia harus minta maaf.

Dia tidak perlu melakukan itu (kepada saya) karena tidak ada yang salah dengan apa yang dia ucapkan. Kesopanan itu perlu, tapi tidak mutlak. Maksud saya, skenarionya bisa saja seperti ini:

Dia menolak permintaan saya dengan menyelipkan kata 'maaf' agar tidak membuat saya kecewa, marah dan sebagainya untuk menghindari muncul rasa bersalah. Kalau akhirnya saya kecewa dan marah karena penolakannya, maka ada yang harus direnungkan kembali: Mengharapkan bantuan orang lain juga harus menerima kemungkinan ditolak kan?

Mungkin dalam pola yang lebih praktis, jika saya adalah dia, kalimat yang akan keluar adalah:

"Saya nggak bisa bantu untuk hal itu, ada hal lain yang bisa saya bantu yang berkaitan?"

atau,

"Saya nggak bisa bantu."

Sesimpel itu. Kalimat tersebut (yang jelas tanpa embel-embel) terasa kurang sopan. Namun sebenarnya tidak ada yang kurang sopan dalam kalimat itu.

The scent of an Apple product, sourcing the Macbook Pro fragrance.

Greatest Hits is an artistic collaborative group comprising of Melbourne based artists Gavin Bell, Jarrah de Kuijer & Simon McGlinn. A few months ago these young artists approached Air Aroma seeking assistance with creation of a unique fragrance for their upcoming art exhibition. The aroma requested for the project was the scent of an Apple product being opened for the first time.

Caine's Arcade, Caine who built an elaborate cardboard arcade inside his dad's used auto part store - is about to have the best day of his life. I awed by his idea to use calculator to check out the Fun Pass, plus he got some fans too. May you willing to know him more at cainesarcade.com