GCC is quite portable and generates very good code on many architectures, especially X86, but often chip vendors ship highly optimised compilers for their own processors, even when they fund GCC as well.
Also, Microsoft has some special internal compilers that they don't ship (sometimes they take a very long time to compile, but generate very tight code. I don't know if they use any of them for shipping products but I wouldn't be surprised. These wouldn't really be productisable, but are appropriate for this sort of in-house use.
I only use GCC myself, because it's really good, but I don't kid myself that it's the best in every situation.
Once NeXT realised they couldn't keep the objc runtime proprietary they did work with us to help us port it over, and made changes so that it would fit into the ain line. They realised they benefited from being in the main line as well. It's not like they were jerks about it.
Thanks for the thoughtful note.
[...]I think Mac OS X 10.5 is going to be a very solid release. Perhaps it is not as end-user feature laden as some would like, but it has plenty of useful features that will make it worth the $129 upgrade. More importantly, the features and functionality added for developers means that there will be some very cool apps coming down the pipe. Yeah, I think most people, and the mainstream press in particular, don't understand what to look for (the mainstream press doesn't cover Oracle's feature set, nor Dell's, but Apple has decided to play in that area and so that's part of the deal.)
I also hope (for my own sake, as a Mac user) that 10.5 stresses robustness and solid under-the-hood foundations. I don't need for Apple to spend much energy at all on showy stuff -- I want the results, showy or not, in the apps I use.
[...]Copland failed because it was much too ambitious. They wanted 100% backward compatibility + protected memory and other modern OS goodies.[...]
[...]Apple is changing the [mobile phone] game here. It is putting emphasis on the end user experience -- something that's apparently new to the industry -- and I think they will be successful because of it. To be fair, Nokia in particular tried to do that too, so it's not new to the industry. The problem is that the carriers have had too much control, even in Europe.
What's different is two things, I think:
Apple may have enough market clout to change the dynamics of the business. In the 90s Nokia had that much clout too, but by then the dynamics of the market had been set, and making an aggressive change would have fukt their market position in the short term (and fatally in the long term if it failed). Apple's a new entrant and though they're making a huge bet, there's a better chance it wouldn't be company killing for it to fail. It also builds on an existing tail (iPod biz) that Nokia didn't have.
What OS X showed is that Apple is not afraid to make a change that kills backwards compatibility. Copeland tried too hard to accommodate users' needs; OS X said (to the anguished cries of many) "sorry, anything before OS 9 will probably not work and even many OS 9 things won't either....just enough of the ones you have to help you transition". (an inability to do this, by the way, is responsible for at least the majority, and likely 90%, of the problems in Windows. It's not because people who work for Microsoft are idiots).
In the case of the phone, I suspect that the OS on it is not really that OS X-like -- likely less like OS X than Windows Mobile 3 is like Vista. Perhaps they will gradually move more functionality into it, as they do with OS X releases, as the platform matures. But again, they appear unafraid to tell developers "hey, you get limited extension capability" which for any other company would be risky. I don't know how they manage to get away with that but somehow they do.
"Why should you care if I'm cancelling? All I'm buying is the service, you've got nothing at risk but a couple cents worth of plastic."
"Everyone has to sign a contract."
I think it's an anti-privacy thing. The gov't (who can take away their business) wants to be able to identify every customer.
I don't carry a drivers license but did have my passport; Cingular wouldn't sell me service unless I had a valid united states driver's license! Oh yeah, and like you I was happy to pay for two years of service plus their stupid deposit right up front.
BTW you can call yourself to verify these stupid policies. The person in the shop have me this number to call; it's not on their web site: Cingular's compliance office 800 635 6840). I was unable to find out how, if at all, they protect the personal info they collect.
I used to buy phones at the grocery store in Europe (procedure: pay for your service, open box, discard packaging responsibly, switch on phone, call your friend). Is this still possible anywhere?
The reality is, compared to offerings like this and like Nokia's offerings the iPhone looks really dated... The iPhone is essentially, to us Europeans/Asians at least the kind of thing we'd have expected at the low end of the market around 3 - 4 years ago... You answered your own question. The American phone market is stunted.
What potentially saves the iPhone is that there's a tough trade-off between features and usability, which Apple does work hard to get right and which few others do (in particular Nokia, who used to be OK at it but somehow lost the thread). This is a big reason why iPods sell well and more featureful MP3 players, frankly, suck. Apple might get it right with their phone, and maybe it will be rev 3 that finally is of value to people in more developed (phone-wise) countries.
Two disclaimers
Apple isn't the only UI-intensive company of course. But the best of them, Handspring, neglected to make a phone that was actually usable as a phone.
I live in the USA right now, but my years in Europe, Australia and Japan made it depressing to use the infrastructure here. The USA excels in other things (else why would I be here?) -- this is not intended as a flame
Back around 1990 we got an ad in the mail for a product (presumably a VMS database book) called "RMS Expert"!
Even funnier -- our marketing director got the joke!
(ob explanation to avoid whooshing sounds: in the "ol days" RMS was a kind of VMS structured file, Stallman was not an international celebrity and people thought we were loons for trying to make a business around software we gave away).
...unless I'm mistaken, a Church is private property... In fact, in this case you are mistaken, as the CoE is an established church and as such its land and the like cannot be, by definition, "private property." Now in England (at least) copyright is a little strange in that the crown can hold copyright, so its possible that CoE could get away with this claim, but it's pretty damned (as it were) unlikely.
More likely this lawsuit is an attempt to exploit the Streisand Effect since the CoE has become so uninteresting to most people that people are starting to forget it's even around.
...expecting parents....could discard the bad ones and keep the good ones, thus producing healthy children...Imagine a world full of healthy people. The cost of healthcare would reduce greatly, thus allowing us to spend more on education and furthering the advancement of the human race....
Sounds great, but...on a macro scale it's impossible to say what the "good" and "bad" ones are. For example there's a suggestion (or, if you prefer, implication or possibility) that depression is correlated with creativity, or that possibly that creative people are more likely to be depressed (in which case which is causative and which consequential? Who knows?). Surely there are other examples: for example asperger's is fashionably (and perhaps correctly?) believed to be correlated with certain forms of creativity as well.
And of course all of this this is apart from the technical, statistical, and ethical issues.
Fortunately none of this worries me in the slightest. If certain groups or societies use this technology on themselves, in the long run they'll just build a vulnerable monoculture and wipe themselves out. The process may be nasty for bystanders, but on a global scale it's no big deal.
And if you think these monocultural societies aren fun, consider re-reading Brave New World.
of steve balmer lurking, hunched over, and furtively whispering, "developers.....developers....developers...develop ers..."
(OK, joking aside, though I rather dislike Ballmer, that was a really great video of a truly great attitude for him to have had and it's really unfair that gets slagged for it. It's especially unfair that he gets slagged for it on/., where so many of us are programmers. I hope he's ticked off about canceling the PDC, whatever the reason. And maybe I go to heck for making that joke).
Carl Fenman's dad won the nobel prize while Carl was still a little boy. He told me once that when he was little, when his friends said that their father's had "gone to work" he thought they meant their fathers did what his dad would do: make a cup of tea, sit down in the kitchen, and think.
On the other hand, in some ways you have it easy: I have tried to explain to my kid that his dad is a Geschaeftsfuehrer...he cannot understand. Finally I gave up and told him I dig up the road and he seemed to find that more satisfying.
No, it's not just you; blinking lights were always cool at MIT and it had become a bit of a shame that the machines of the day (e.g. DEC-20s, Vaxes, various workstations and PCs) had lost their lights. A lot of the early AI work was done on PDP-6s and PDP-10s (KAs and KLs). The PDP-6s and KA-10s had (incandescent!) lights to show the register state.
The CM-1 was even cooler in this regard: it was constructed as a 2x2x2 cube each cube of course containing a mass of 1-bit CPUs (arguably just ALUs). So for each of them an LED could show the processor state.
Unfortunately I can't find a photo but (I believe it was Steve Strassman) wrote a program to map the connection-machine status array into workstation video RAM. So as you moved the mouse across your screen you'd see it move hugely magnified across the room on the computer!
I'm going to quote a couple of things you said out of context. I hope it makes the argument clearer and that you don't feel it misrepresents you.
The reason I chose your message is that it clearly illustrates two "obvious" lines of argument supporting national ID which, in fact, aren't obvious, or even relevant. They are disjoint, which is good (as opposed to many messages which just cite example after similar example supporting the poster's position).
The first is how a mythical magic ID would help people in extremis:
Having a federal ID... would, in my opinion, be a requirement for something like a true national healthcare system, in order to verify your exact identity at any health care provider.
Actually, if you walk into an emergency room you need assistance regardless of who you are. If the health care system is truly universal, what matters it who you are (except perhaps in cases in which you want to tie to other care records and can't refer to them yourself, for instance because you're incapacitated). Oddly enough this is a case where the biometric would be valuable but your identity irrelevant: how about a system that says "the person with this fingerprint is allergic to penicillin" but doesn't say who you are? How about "person with this fingerprint though unconscious, needs XXX or they'll have a seizure." Do you want that info tied to your name (perhaps it already is in your state)?
Your identity is not related to provision of care if coverage is universal. In fact your identity is irrelevant for all sorts of things where identity is leaked today (ability to drive, proof of age, etc). Just think of all the ways that people ask for ID today and consider "but what if I didn't have ID to go with this?"
Here's an important issue relating to privacy itself:
If every database query is logged, it would be possible to track those who are accessing the information illegally.
First of all, such systems already exist for various police and tax databases and have been frequently shown to fail. More importantly, this site is "news for nerds" and I think it should be clear to denizens of this board that the kinds of controls you describe only work in Hollywood.
More broadly: technology isn't a fix for a policy problem. Setting up a big fat target raises the value of attack out of proportion to the value of the defense.
Kind of sad. Reminds me that, for some decades, civilians...could cross the north atlantic in less than for hours, and now, well, only the military can do it that fast.
Well of course. They don't have to go through the pointless pseudosecurity the way the rest of us do.
It prevents the obvious, trivial risk (petty theft). It's the perfect biometric app since, unlike other proposals use of biometrics (ID cards, credit card authorisation, building access, etc), the biometric is present and presented at the point of use only. Biometric data need never leave the device, or even be present (it could be used as a key for disk contents, for example). It's not necessary that the device be proof against determined attack.
Yes, the robber won't know that you have a new, fingerprint-protected ipod, but like vaccination, once enough of them are in circulation theft should drop.
The second risk protected against is loss of data, again in the case of a trivial attack. That is, my phone has various phone numbers (e.g. home numbers of business colleagues) that I don't really want floating around. My home phone number is likewise floating around in others' phones, and I would bet that almost none of them are password-protected. This would make me feel better if the phone were stolen or just lost.
So where's the problem? It won't pose an onerous burden, doesn't screw the user (there's no data centralisation), helps for two common risks. What's not to like?
(yeah, I know it would need a few fixes for shared ipods etc. Not a big deal).
Too late. It's already being used indispensibly as an ID, so it wouldn't function just as well without that information.
I don't know what's so indispensable about it. I don't carry one. Over the past year I have not found a lack of "official photo ID" to have prevented me from doing anything except obtain cell phone service or fly internationally. Domestically I can travel as long as I submit to the upper-colonic treatment...which used to happen to me anyway (why?) so hardly makes my life more difficult. Admittedly I haven't tried renting a car, but otherwise I live your usual busy life.
People often ask, but when I politely[*] indicate I don't have any they seem to find a way to do business with me anyway.
I do have a DL but it's buried in my car someplace. If I were stopped I could probably find it. And if the car were stolen and stripped, well, then someone would find it too. Big deal.
Why dodge the question of whether a national identification card is a good idea or not, when that is the central issue?
Because the essential point that driving is unconnected with identity might be seen as partisanly driven. But in fact, that common confusion is an ontological confusion which screws up rational debate by short-circuiting it.
This was allegedly an issue with the German carbines on the Russian Front in the 1940s too....plenty of time to learn that lesson, but who learns from history?
Why should driving licenses function as "ID?" All the police should need to know is that you have proven you know how to drive and have paid your driving tax. Driving licenses would function just as well if they merely had your photo on them -- no name, no numbers, nothing.
Oops, you lost your driving license? Pay the fee and get another (if you pass the driving test).
Don't mix the driving and "REAL ID" issues.
This posting should not be taken as advocating for or against this legislation -- merely pointing out that the position in that posting is unsupported.
For those people that dont care about CCTV and Orwellian ideas that they have in Britain because they dont think of themselvs as a criminal, Think Again....[list of example laws]
How would you even know, if the law you were violating were a secret law?
Flash screws up the browsing experience (e.g. "back" doesn't work, you can't bookmark stuff so you often have to run through a bunch of irrelevant navigation to get to what you might want, etc). I have never liked it.
Well it's useless for browsing, but could be handy for looking for things like opening hours, schedules, and the like that you might quickly want to find rather than, say, reading slashdot.
Unfortunately I say "could be" and not "is" because every time I try to do that with my phone I end up at some pathetic lavascript-using, flash-belarded, "best when viewed in" site rather than something designed for, say, the web!
If you're super-lucky you could infer the navigation required, but usually it's just easier, as you say, to bother a friend.
(not a joke): Yeah, in English, cats have nine lives, but in German (for example) they have only seven. I wonder how many they have in Coptic / ancient Egyptian, or other languages for that matter.
For this reason in our house we use English while speaking with the cats, completely weirding out some visitors.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know Apple's motivation, but you know, there are compilers that can generate better X86 code than GCC.
GCC is quite portable and generates very good code on many architectures, especially X86, but often chip vendors ship highly optimised compilers for their own processors, even when they fund GCC as well.
Also, Microsoft has some special internal compilers that they don't ship (sometimes they take a very long time to compile, but generate very tight code. I don't know if they use any of them for shipping products but I wouldn't be surprised. These wouldn't really be productisable, but are appropriate for this sort of in-house use.
I only use GCC myself, because it's really good, but I don't kid myself that it's the best in every situation.
Once NeXT realised they couldn't keep the objc runtime proprietary they did work with us to help us port it over, and made changes so that it would fit into the ain line. They realised they benefited from being in the main line as well. It's not like they were jerks about it.
I also hope (for my own sake, as a Mac user) that 10.5 stresses robustness and solid under-the-hood foundations. I don't need for Apple to spend much energy at all on showy stuff -- I want the results, showy or not, in the apps I use. [...]Copland failed because it was much too ambitious. They wanted 100% backward compatibility + protected memory and other modern OS goodies.[...]
[...]Apple is changing the [mobile phone] game here. It is putting emphasis on the end user experience -- something that's apparently new to the industry -- and I think they will be successful because of it. To be fair, Nokia in particular tried to do that too, so it's not new to the industry. The problem is that the carriers have had too much control, even in Europe.
What's different is two things, I think:
In the case of the phone, I suspect that the OS on it is not really that OS X-like -- likely less like OS X than Windows Mobile 3 is like Vista. Perhaps they will gradually move more functionality into it, as they do with OS X releases, as the platform matures. But again, they appear unafraid to tell developers "hey, you get limited extension capability" which for any other company would be risky. I don't know how they manage to get away with that but somehow they do.
I don't carry a drivers license but did have my passport; Cingular wouldn't sell me service unless I had a valid united states driver's license! Oh yeah, and like you I was happy to pay for two years of service plus their stupid deposit right up front.
BTW you can call yourself to verify these stupid policies. The person in the shop have me this number to call; it's not on their web site: Cingular's compliance office 800 635 6840). I was unable to find out how, if at all, they protect the personal info they collect.
I used to buy phones at the grocery store in Europe (procedure: pay for your service, open box, discard packaging responsibly, switch on phone, call your friend). Is this still possible anywhere?
What potentially saves the iPhone is that there's a tough trade-off between features and usability, which Apple does work hard to get right and which few others do (in particular Nokia, who used to be OK at it but somehow lost the thread). This is a big reason why iPods sell well and more featureful MP3 players, frankly, suck. Apple might get it right with their phone, and maybe it will be rev 3 that finally is of value to people in more developed (phone-wise) countries.
Two disclaimers
Back around 1990 we got an ad in the mail for a product (presumably a VMS database book) called "RMS Expert"!
Even funnier -- our marketing director got the joke!
(ob explanation to avoid whooshing sounds: in the "ol days" RMS was a kind of VMS structured file, Stallman was not an international celebrity and people thought we were loons for trying to make a business around software we gave away).
...unless I'm mistaken, a Church is private propertyMore likely this lawsuit is an attempt to exploit the Streisand Effect since the CoE has become so uninteresting to most people that people are starting to forget it's even around.
And of course all of this this is apart from the technical, statistical, and ethical issues.
Fortunately none of this worries me in the slightest. If certain groups or societies use this technology on themselves, in the long run they'll just build a vulnerable monoculture and wipe themselves out. The process may be nasty for bystanders, but on a global scale it's no big deal.
And if you think these monocultural societies aren fun, consider re-reading Brave New World.
of steve balmer lurking, hunched over, and furtively whispering, "developers.....developers....developers...develop ers..."
/., where so many of us are programmers. I hope he's ticked off about canceling the PDC, whatever the reason. And maybe I go to heck for making that joke).
(OK, joking aside, though I rather dislike Ballmer, that was a really great video of a truly great attitude for him to have had and it's really unfair that gets slagged for it. It's especially unfair that he gets slagged for it on
Carl Fenman's dad won the nobel prize while Carl was still a little boy. He told me once that when he was little, when his friends said that their father's had "gone to work" he thought they meant their fathers did what his dad would do: make a cup of tea, sit down in the kitchen, and think.
On the other hand, in some ways you have it easy: I have tried to explain to my kid that his dad is a Geschaeftsfuehrer...he cannot understand. Finally I gave up and told him I dig up the road and he seemed to find that more satisfying.
No, it's not just you; blinking lights were always cool at MIT and it had become a bit of a shame that the machines of the day (e.g. DEC-20s, Vaxes, various workstations and PCs) had lost their lights. A lot of the early AI work was done on PDP-6s and PDP-10s (KAs and KLs). The PDP-6s and KA-10s had (incandescent!) lights to show the register state.
The CM-1 was even cooler in this regard: it was constructed as a 2x2x2 cube each cube of course containing a mass of 1-bit CPUs (arguably just ALUs). So for each of them an LED could show the processor state.
Unfortunately I can't find a photo but (I believe it was Steve Strassman) wrote a program to map the connection-machine status array into workstation video RAM. So as you moved the mouse across your screen you'd see it move hugely magnified across the room on the computer!
The reason I chose your message is that it clearly illustrates two "obvious" lines of argument supporting national ID which, in fact, aren't obvious, or even relevant. They are disjoint, which is good (as opposed to many messages which just cite example after similar example supporting the poster's position).
The first is how a mythical magic ID would help people in extremis:Actually, if you walk into an emergency room you need assistance regardless of who you are. If the health care system is truly universal, what matters it who you are (except perhaps in cases in which you want to tie to other care records and can't refer to them yourself, for instance because you're incapacitated). Oddly enough this is a case where the biometric would be valuable but your identity irrelevant: how about a system that says "the person with this fingerprint is allergic to penicillin" but doesn't say who you are? How about "person with this fingerprint though unconscious, needs XXX or they'll have a seizure." Do you want that info tied to your name (perhaps it already is in your state)?
Your identity is not related to provision of care if coverage is universal. In fact your identity is irrelevant for all sorts of things where identity is leaked today (ability to drive, proof of age, etc). Just think of all the ways that people ask for ID today and consider "but what if I didn't have ID to go with this?"
Here's an important issue relating to privacy itself:First of all, such systems already exist for various police and tax databases and have been frequently shown to fail. More importantly, this site is "news for nerds" and I think it should be clear to denizens of this board that the kinds of controls you describe only work in Hollywood.
More broadly: technology isn't a fix for a policy problem. Setting up a big fat target raises the value of attack out of proportion to the value of the defense.
It prevents the obvious, trivial risk (petty theft). It's the perfect biometric app since, unlike other proposals use of biometrics (ID cards, credit card authorisation, building access, etc), the biometric is present and presented at the point of use only. Biometric data need never leave the device, or even be present (it could be used as a key for disk contents, for example). It's not necessary that the device be proof against determined attack.
Yes, the robber won't know that you have a new, fingerprint-protected ipod, but like vaccination, once enough of them are in circulation theft should drop.
The second risk protected against is loss of data, again in the case of a trivial attack. That is, my phone has various phone numbers (e.g. home numbers of business colleagues) that I don't really want floating around. My home phone number is likewise floating around in others' phones, and I would bet that almost none of them are password-protected. This would make me feel better if the phone were stolen or just lost.
So where's the problem? It won't pose an onerous burden, doesn't screw the user (there's no data centralisation), helps for two common risks. What's not to like?
(yeah, I know it would need a few fixes for shared ipods etc. Not a big deal).
I don't know about getting iHamburgers, but I have been lead to understand that Second Life is full of tasty hot grits!
People often ask, but when I politely[*] indicate I don't have any they seem to find a way to do business with me anyway.
I do have a DL but it's buried in my car someplace. If I were stopped I could probably find it. And if the car were stolen and stripped, well, then someone would find it too. Big deal.
Because the essential point that driving is unconnected with identity might be seen as partisanly driven. But in fact, that common confusion is an ontological confusion which screws up rational debate by short-circuiting it.
This was allegedly an issue with the German carbines on the Russian Front in the 1940s too....plenty of time to learn that lesson, but who learns from history?
Why should driving licenses function as "ID?" All the police should need to know is that you have proven you know how to drive and have paid your driving tax. Driving licenses would function just as well if they merely had your photo on them -- no name, no numbers, nothing.
Oops, you lost your driving license? Pay the fee and get another (if you pass the driving test).
Don't mix the driving and "REAL ID" issues.
This posting should not be taken as advocating for or against this legislation -- merely pointing out that the position in that posting is unsupported.
Flash screws up the browsing experience (e.g. "back" doesn't work, you can't bookmark stuff so you often have to run through a bunch of irrelevant navigation to get to what you might want, etc). I have never liked it.
Well it's useless for browsing, but could be handy for looking for things like opening hours, schedules, and the like that you might quickly want to find rather than, say, reading slashdot.
Unfortunately I say "could be" and not "is" because every time I try to do that with my phone I end up at some pathetic lavascript-using, flash-belarded, "best when viewed in" site rather than something designed for, say, the web!
If you're super-lucky you could infer the navigation required, but usually it's just easier, as you say, to bother a friend.
Err, so "meaning-based media" means it maintains "ACID semantics..."?
(not a joke): Yeah, in English, cats have nine lives, but in German (for example) they have only seven. I wonder how many they have in Coptic / ancient Egyptian, or other languages for that matter.
For this reason in our house we use English while speaking with the cats, completely weirding out some visitors.