Greg Joswiak answers some questions about OS X. In particular, it’s “optimized but full” and uses “considerably less” than half a gigabyte of the built-in flash memory – not incompatible with my previous guess of between 64 and 256MB.

“Optimized but full” probably means that most of what makes Mac OS X be, uhm, “OS X” is present – like the keynote slide, it means Cocoa, multitasking graphic GUI, animation, etc. Since most of Cocoa runs atop Carbon and BSD APIs these must be present also. However, Darwin/XNU and the whole IOKit are a little hefty for an embedded environment and no doubt a new, much smaller kernel and driver model were slid underneath. Direct Mach calls are certainly still used in some places but no doubt were recoded or faked out with a compatibility shim. And the BSD subsystem/command line tools will certainly be absent.

The Apple-hating crowd seems to be out in full array. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much people calling “liar” or “bullshit” on almost every sentence of the keynote, or of often barely literate commenters saying such-and-such decision or feature are “brain-dead”; at least not since the iPod launch. It’s certainly easy to tell in retrospect where Apple or Jobs have been wrong – sometimes even egregiously so – in past years, but calling this in advance is a little foolhardy. Especially in light of the ROI for recent investors.

I just found an interesting post over at the ever-interesting Language Log:

…But it’s important to note that these people are not lying, exactly. They simply don’t care one way or another about what the facts are, and this shifts their work out of the category of lies and into the category for which Harry Frankfurt has suggested the technical term bullshit:

What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.

So, while I don’t think Steve Jobs is lying about anything regarding the new products or Apple’s plans, he certainly is “deceiving about… his enterprise” in several places. And rightly so, as the competition’s watching and analyzing every word too. While as a developer I’m certainly miffed about all the secrecy, as a stockholder I approve.

Speaking of stock, here’s a nice quote from Jerry Pournelle:

If ever there were an indication that America has gone greedily insane and needs ways to curb the rapacious Trial Lawyers, the story of minority stockholder suits against Apple charging that in 1997 Steve Jobs manipulated options dates in order to keep key executives from bailing out has got to be it. The minority stockholders cleaned up because Jobs pretty well single-handedly saved the company; had he not done so, the stock would have become worthless. So in return for this, the stockholders let some contingency fee lawyers talk them into fronting for these suits. Any sane judge would throw all those out on the grounds of standing: “You weren’t damaged, so how can you sue for damages?”