No product aimed at the zillion Linux weenies is ever going to be commercially successful. The reason is that there aren't a zillion Linux weenies. There probably aren't even 100,000 Linux weenies that would buy an MP3 player just so they could reflash it.
What could possibly be a better use of a engineer's efforts than:
* Going out and buying an overpriced Mac that is useless for anything other than running the Apple devtools
Actually, you can do all sorts of things with a Mac - it's a general purpose computer.
* Wasting time learning Objective C that no other company uses except Apple
It's not a waste of time if you can make some money out of the apps you write with it.
* Having your application be at the total whim of Apple who could at any moment or for any reason decide to reject your app or pull your app from the Apple store
According to Apple there are 15,000 apps in the Appstore at the moment. So it's obviously not that hard to get your application accepted, particularly when you look at the quality of some of them.
The bottom line for a developer thinking about investing in the tools necessary to do iPhone development is whether they can make money out of it. From that perspective, as long as the iPhone (and iPod Touch) have significant market share, there will be people willing to put the investment in to develop apps for them. I don't see that market share disappearing any time soon. Out there in the real world people like shiny devices, they don't care about the technical merits of the underlying operating system. They don't care about the restrictions the Apple Appstore places on developers, they just download hundreds of apps because it is so easy to do.
I hated Z80 assembler. I found the 6502 instruction set much cleaner and more logical. Because of the optimisation for zero page addressing, you effectively had a 128 identical 16 bit address registers and three special purpose registers.
The Z80 had lots of registers, but they all did a mish mash of different things. I found I spent a lot of time and energy just finding the optimal way to move the data around to get it into the correct register. And more seriously, the op code mnemonics were not the same length making assembly listings much less aesthetically pleasing. That's probably why The Terminator used 6502 - it's more photogenic.
JeremyP's first law of assembly programming is that any CPU where the registers have names is hard to program, but any CPU where the registers are numbered is easy to program.
The grand parent post contained just such an example. If I keep my kernel up to date, it's possible my nVidia drivers to stop working after a while because Linus refuses to stabilise the kernel driver API. This makes it harder to use hardware for which only proprietary drivers are available. That's restricting my freedom.
Of course, even proprietary operating systems don't remain compatible for ever, but in general, point releases don't screw things up.
They don't distribute non-BBC originated material via iPlayer;
They do actually. Many of the BBC's programmes are really made by independent companies under contract to the BBC. They even distribute some blatantly non BBC programmes via iPlayer (currently you can view an episode of Heroes on it, for example).
Seriously, although OS X is based on Mach, it is a traditional monolithic kernel. There's still only kernel space and user space. There's no magic "Mach space" that has all the advantages of a user space daemon (can't panic the OS) and none of the disadvantages (slower than a kernel space driver).
Even for a user space file system, there has to be a small in kernel space portion that plugs into the VFS. Using Mach ports to communicate between the user space and kernel space is not a magic bullet. You still have to get your data across the barrier between the two and that's what is slow. On the other hand, if you put everything in kernel space, Mach ports are an unnecessary overhead. You can just make normal function calls which are much faster.
Also bear in mind that the OS X virtual file system implementation is a direct descendant of the one in FreeBSD. Look at the VFS code and you won't see a hint of Mach ports anywhere. It's designed for the BSD world.
So in your CS course, your students are going to spend a whole year not understanding what you are talking about. Have you any idea how soul destroying it is attending a course which you don't understand?
Perhaps you hadn't noticed, but most people want their software to be distributed as binaries.
People do not want to build their software from source with all the dependency hell that it entails. They want to put the CD in the drive and either copy the files across or have an installer do it for them and let that be it.
The fact that something is the product of your effort doesn't grant you sovereignty over that thing's use.
No, but it does grant you sovereignty over the redistribution of copies of the product provided it falls under copyright law. The Gnu Public Licence would be unenforceable if it didn't.
I don't agree with your assessment of where the crime was committed. In this case it was clearly committed in country B where the servers are even though the accused never physically left country A.
Let's try a different example. Let country A = Afghanistan and country B = the United States of America. Osama Bin Laden, located in country A, was guilty of conspiracy to commit murder in country B. Osama Bin Laden himself never set foot in country B so, by your argument, his crime took place in Afghanistan and he should therefore be tried for it in Afghanistan.
Do you think that any American would accept your argument in that instance?
You can't compare a research paper and an HP lexicon. The whole ethos of research papers is to allow people to reuse the research in themand thus properly attributed quotes are considered a good thing and contribute to the writers' reputation. In fact, in the UK, the number of citations your research gets is used as a quantitative measure of its value and may affect your future fuding. Scientists probably look forward to seeing lots of lovely long quotes from their papers - as long at it's not plagiarised.
Why is it you think you need access to your computer? Surely there are ways to record your results without recourse to a computer in a sterile environment. I mean seriously what is wrong with a notepad and a pencil? In the days of Newton, Galileo, Einstein, Lavoisier, Lord Kelvin, Darwin, Planck, Curie etc that was the best technology available and yet, amazingly, they were still capable of good science
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No product aimed at the zillion Linux weenies is ever going to be commercially successful. The reason is that there aren't a zillion Linux weenies. There probably aren't even 100,000 Linux weenies that would buy an MP3 player just so they could reflash it.
I disagree, it doesn't not unsurprise me.
Actually, you can do all sorts of things with a Mac - it's a general purpose computer.
It's not a waste of time if you can make some money out of the apps you write with it.
According to Apple there are 15,000 apps in the Appstore at the moment. So it's obviously not that hard to get your application accepted, particularly when you look at the quality of some of them.
The bottom line for a developer thinking about investing in the tools necessary to do iPhone development is whether they can make money out of it. From that perspective, as long as the iPhone (and iPod Touch) have significant market share, there will be people willing to put the investment in to develop apps for them. I don't see that market share disappearing any time soon. Out there in the real world people like shiny devices, they don't care about the technical merits of the underlying operating system. They don't care about the restrictions the Apple Appstore places on developers, they just download hundreds of apps because it is so easy to do.
I hated Z80 assembler. I found the 6502 instruction set much cleaner and more logical. Because of the optimisation for zero page addressing, you effectively had a 128 identical 16 bit address registers and three special purpose registers.
The Z80 had lots of registers, but they all did a mish mash of different things. I found I spent a lot of time and energy just finding the optimal way to move the data around to get it into the correct register. And more seriously, the op code mnemonics were not the same length making assembly listings much less aesthetically pleasing. That's probably why The Terminator used 6502 - it's more photogenic.
JeremyP's first law of assembly programming is that any CPU where the registers have names is hard to program, but any CPU where the registers are numbered is easy to program.
You'd have better luck porting the Linux version. The Mac OS X user interface API is very different from anything that runs on BSD.
The grand parent post contained just such an example. If I keep my kernel up to date, it's possible my nVidia drivers to stop working after a while because Linus refuses to stabilise the kernel driver API. This makes it harder to use hardware for which only proprietary drivers are available. That's restricting my freedom.
Of course, even proprietary operating systems don't remain compatible for ever, but in general, point releases don't screw things up.
Leela: Depth at 45 hundred feet, 48 hundred, 50 hundred! 5000 feet!
Farnsworth: Dear Lord, that's over 150 atmospheres of pressure.
Fry: How many atmospheres can this ship withstand?
Farnsworth: Well it's a spaceship, so I'd say anywhere between zero and one.
Yes. We wouldn't want a high signal to noise ratio on Slashdot.
I think the point was that Apple failed to flag a required firmware update. I may be wrong, I haven't read the article yet.
I haven't. My brother hasn't. All my friends haven't. Everybody in the office where I work hasn't. My Parents haven't.
They do actually. Many of the BBC's programmes are really made by independent companies under contract to the BBC. They even distribute some blatantly non BBC programmes via iPlayer (currently you can view an episode of Heroes on it, for example).
What is this Mach layer of which you speak?
Seriously, although OS X is based on Mach, it is a traditional monolithic kernel. There's still only kernel space and user space. There's no magic "Mach space" that has all the advantages of a user space daemon (can't panic the OS) and none of the disadvantages (slower than a kernel space driver).
Even for a user space file system, there has to be a small in kernel space portion that plugs into the VFS. Using Mach ports to communicate between the user space and kernel space is not a magic bullet. You still have to get your data across the barrier between the two and that's what is slow. On the other hand, if you put everything in kernel space, Mach ports are an unnecessary overhead. You can just make normal function calls which are much faster.
Also bear in mind that the OS X virtual file system implementation is a direct descendant of the one in FreeBSD. Look at the VFS code and you won't see a hint of Mach ports anywhere. It's designed for the BSD world.
So in your CS course, your students are going to spend a whole year not understanding what you are talking about. Have you any idea how soul destroying it is attending a course which you don't understand?
If you live in a society where it is too dangerous for smaller weaker people to walk down the street, you need to emigrate.
Perhaps you hadn't noticed, but most people want their software to be distributed as binaries.
People do not want to build their software from source with all the dependency hell that it entails. They want to put the CD in the drive and either copy the files across or have an installer do it for them and let that be it.
If by "sixth generation iPod" you mean iPod Touch, then yes. The iPod Touch is the same as an iPhone but without the phone hardware or GPS.
Who owns the IP rights to the design of your grass skirt?
It is the UK advert that has been banned.
That would be a fantastic idea wouldn't it.
That must be why my sat nav has had such a database of speed cameras in it for the last two years.
From TFA
"[Alchemy] performance can be considerably faster than ActionScript 3.0 and anywhere from 2-10x slower than native C/C++"
No, but it does grant you sovereignty over the redistribution of copies of the product provided it falls under copyright law. The Gnu Public Licence would be unenforceable if it didn't.
I don't agree with your assessment of where the crime was committed. In this case it was clearly committed in country B where the servers are even though the accused never physically left country A.
Let's try a different example. Let country A = Afghanistan and country B = the United States of America. Osama Bin Laden, located in country A, was guilty of conspiracy to commit murder in country B. Osama Bin Laden himself never set foot in country B so, by your argument, his crime took place in Afghanistan and he should therefore be tried for it in Afghanistan.
Do you think that any American would accept your argument in that instance?
You can't compare a research paper and an HP lexicon. The whole ethos of research papers is to allow people to reuse the research in themand thus properly attributed quotes are considered a good thing and contribute to the writers' reputation. In fact, in the UK, the number of citations your research gets is used as a quantitative measure of its value and may affect your future fuding. Scientists probably look forward to seeing lots of lovely long quotes from their papers - as long at it's not plagiarised.
Your regex doesn't allow + signs in the name part.
Nor, I would suspect would it handle quoted strings e.g. "Jeremy P"@example.com is technically a valid RFC 822 address.
And having just looked up the RFC 5322 spec which you quote, I see there are more cases you fail to take acount of e.g.
Jeremy P <jeremyp@example.com>
Also, what makes you think upper case in domain names is invalid? jeremyp@example.COM fails validation.
What is the real problem you are trying to solve?
Why is it you think you need access to your computer? Surely there are ways to record your results without recourse to a computer in a sterile environment. I mean seriously what is wrong with a notepad and a pencil? In the days of Newton, Galileo, Einstein, Lavoisier, Lord Kelvin, Darwin, Planck, Curie etc that was the best technology available and yet, amazingly, they were still capable of good science