Point of view perhaps, but personally I see it as an XP premium.
I can get this great machine that I think I can do everything I want, and it doesn't have all those nasty viruses in the wild. And if I can't get it to work, I can pay that XP premium and turn it into an upgraded version of my old machine.
From what I commonly hear, people start off thinking they'll "try" the mac (probably by being told to try-it-and-see by the Apple staff), but they have the security that it works with XP if they don't like MacOS. It's a security-blanket.
The common experience seems to be that people like what they get without having to buy XP though, so they don't. Sometimes I've heard people say they bought XP "but haven't booted into it for ages".
It could just be the people I know, but it's seeming like a strong trend to me...
I was actually going to rebut every one of your comments, but I see it's already been done.
I'll mention the virus thing though: Apache is by far the dominant webserver on the planet, and yet year on year it has far fewer bugs/vulnerabilities than (to pluck one from the air) IIS. Numbers are not anywhere near as relevant to security as you seem to think - the Mac has a far better innate security system than Windows does. Yes it's possible to fool a mac user to do something stupid, but the "social engineering" attacks are the only currently-known vectors of attack against OSX. The reason for that is more based in computer science than social science.
When a mac app is ever-so-slightly needlessly-different in its user-interface, the Mac community gets up in arms. The fact that you have Gnome *and* KDE in that sentence is indicative of competing (and hence different) styles.
The mac has a long and established history of well-behaved apps, inter-operating via the OS. Nothing else comes close to the level of standardisation for all the commonplace things (cut/paste, print, preferences, user-customisable toolbars, menu layout, window management, etc. etc. etc.) It's a far more stable (as in: unvarying) environment for apps to co-exist.
Hell, you can run the whole thing with a mouse with only one button.. Twice as easy as anything else [grin]
I think though, it comes down to the well-behaved nature of the apps/developers, and the level of thought that has gone into how to make apps useful - have you seen the *size* of the Apple human-interface guidelines book ?
Take the menubar being always at the top of the screen - not everyone likes that (personally it bugs me to have to traverse two wide-screen displays to get to the File menu), but it means it's "infinitely deep". You can slam the mouse as fast as you like to the top of the screen and it'll still hit the menubar on a mac. Now I've seen people do the same thing on a PC (video-editing app), but they made it 1-pixel-in (presumably the border for a full-screen window took 1 pixel or something). Now it's nowhere near as easy to use... There are a myriad of little things like that, where it's been thought about on the Mac, and the lesson doesn't seem to have been transferred to any of the competitors.
"Actually, they'll be a bit harder to use, eh, and who needs a complicated, expensive heat pump when it heats your house just as well (as far as you know) as the last model. Get the cheap one and forget about it again until it breaks"
Aren't you mixing your statements there ?
The mac will be (slightly) more expensive, a *lot* easier to use, and it'll work a lot better without all those nasty viruses, spyware, trojans, you-name-it.
The pc will be (slightly) cheaper, just as hard to use as the previous one, and just as vulnerable (Vista notwithstanding)
A lot of people are going to go for the "upgrade" to the Mac, I think.
Whether it's a real (I think it is, actually) or a perceived upgrade doesn't make much difference at this point - perception is all. It's interesting that most people "get by" with their PC, but "love" their Macs though - that tells me they're getting more from their Mac than they were getting from their PC. Certainly my non-scientific non-representative anecdote (My mother, sister, and brother:-) tells me they all much prefer their Macs. Three from three, and I no longer have a trans-atlantic support line. Their macs just work.
And since it appears that the main difference is the loser pays rule, and that British society is probably no better or worse than American society, that implies that a lot of fair, perfectly meritorious cases are going untried because of the dangers of the loser pays rule. That's why I don't like it; it's unfair.
There's an in-built assumption that going to court is "a good thing" in the above statement, and a representation of the alternative system as "more dangerous", an emotive term. I would suggest that it simply encourages more people to come to an agreement outside of a court-room in the UK; that when no agreement is forthcoming a court-case is a perfectly acceptable solution, but that other routes ought to be pursued first.
I guess what you see as "unfair", I see as more pragmatic, and more efficient. Perhaps it's just a difference of style - going to court in the UK is usually a last-resort (unless it's a criminal case, of course) even if you're completely confident of winning.
From what you write above, it seems that the equivalent of legal-aid is not as common as in the UK, either. I've had two members of my family claim (and get) legal aid in civil cases. It wasn't particularly (pun intended:-) trying. Perhaps (*because* it's a last-resort) there is more money (relatively speaking) to support those who *need* to go to court to resolve something...
Because it's not fair. And those countries don't have as much entirely justifiable litigation either. Since litigation is simply dispute resolution, this means that they have a lot of unresolved disputes. That's not desirable
I'm not so sure about "not fair". In the UK it's generally "loser pays", but there is such a thing as legal-aid (http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1988/Ukpga_198800 34_en_1.htm). If you can't convince the legal-aid lawyers that you have a fighting chance, there are also several lawyer firms who operate on a no-win,no-fee basis that isn't *too* disproportionate.
And there *are* a lot less lawsuits. There is also binding arbitration, and the small-claims court (for any claim against anyone/any company under £1000) which keeps the courts free of frivolous stuff - I don't know if the same happens in the US. The small-claims court is *really* useful if a company screws you - the company *very* rarely turn up, so the judge usually just finds in your favour, and the company loses.
For me, the best 8-bit computer ever was the BBC micro - I doubt it ever gained any traction over here in the US, but *man* was that a well-designed and elegant machine.
The OS was fully vectored and modular, the BASIC language had procedures and functions, as well as a built-in assembler that could access BASIC variables, but the hardware design was what made it stand out. It had every i/o port under the sun - serial, parallel, "user i/o", other dedicated ones for a network (Econet), to support floppy disks and hard disks, and even plug in a second co-processor (there were 8086, Z80 and 32000 variants I think). You could get Pascal and C for it, and it supported 80-column text on a monitor.
And to bring it slightly back on-topic, the documentation was simply excellent - the "Advanced user guide" told you just about everything you needed to know about the machine, from the event i/o to interrupt-programming, documenting the OSxxx calls, and all the port i/o etc.
Nothing since has come close to the flexibility of that machine given the design limitations at the time, and it's a tribute to the designers.
Most of what you say above is actually what I think too - it's just that I didn't take the time and space to expound on it - eg: when I said ObjC was slower than C++, I meant that because of the dynamic despatch, it was slower... I still think it's worth it. And there's always IMP's and raw C to help you along...
The only thing I'd disagree with is the class-library comment. ObjC has been my language-of-choice for ~18 months now, and I find myself forgetting some of the subtleties of C++ that I used to know by heart. I think memory management in ObjC is pretty easy though - easier than in C++ I think. Most of my problems in "the old days" were (ie: before smart pointers came along) were of memory-management issues. I don't have that in ObjC. Plus it looks as though Leopard might have GC anyway.
Two comments about language choices. (1) I wonder if ObjC would have been chosen at all if had been more-similar to Smalltalk / Oberon (I don't know Dylan). For all their flexibility, they are a lot slower than ObjC. It's possible the reason we have ObjC is precisely the compromises that were made. (2) I think the class-library is an intrinsic part of the language - it's hard to tell where ObjC leaves off and NSObject starts... certainly ObjC never really got anywhere on non-Mac platforms until Openstep started to make some headway, and it's still got a tiny tiny presence even now.
My own thought is that ObjC is compiled Java with dynamic despatch (at least it will be if we *do* get garbage collection:-) The similarities (OO, single-inheritance, interfaces, introspection, exceptions, threads, abstracted IO,...) between the language (syntax aside) are quite remarkable, and both depend on an intrinsic class-library to make them useful.
Um, from your own url: "A dongle is a small hardware device that connects to a computer to authenticate some piece of software". The OP is referring to his G5 as a 'dongle', and I'm disagreeing. What part was it that I misunderstood about dongles ?
The argument that the machine is a "dongle" only works if it were true. It's not. I can purchase a copy of OSX Tiger and give it to any number of other Mac users to install on their machine, and Apple lose money. Sure, you *have* already bought a computer from them, and I'm sure Apple are happy about that, but to claim that it somehow restricts you from piracy is just wrong.
Back when I were a young lad, I had an Atari XL (the first computer I ever had that came with a disk drive:-), there was a bloke ("Rob C", a postman actually, who my brother actually ended up working with for a while) who spent a lot of time cracking games and putting N of them on a disk with his name on the menu. Lots of disks made their way around the pirate scene. Did the XL somehow become a dongle, just because it wasn't a PC ?
People operate within their communities, if there is the potential for theft within that community there will be some people who will take that opportunity. For the mac, the community is mac-owners, and the potential for piracy is just as valid within that community as for PC owners within theirs. The Mac community is smaller, true, but that doesn't matter when you're (ahem) "swapping" software.
I just don't believe that spending $$$ on a computer entitles you to stop spending $ on software from the same company (can you tell I'm a reformed character:-). I must have spent ~$1200 on a mac, and ~$300 on OS so far. 25% is a significant chunk of cash just to assume the user will be "a good guy/gal", but that's what they do, and I (for one) appreciate it.
Just as a note, and in no way trying to contradict your point (which I agree with), the objective-C method to do something similar (the class name method is built into the NSObject class, so it's a nop:-) would be:
In general, you don't use char* pointers in objective C though, it would be an NSString class that was generated/returned.
I've been coding for over 25 years, have used a wide variety of languages, including C,C++, Java as well as several more-obscure ones. My language of choice is now Objective C - it has all the flexibility of C (it groks pure C perfectly), and introduces less than a dozen language constructs to make it a *very* flexible object-orientated language.
My own feeling is that it's a lot simpler than C++ and I've not found any situation where it restricted what I can do. It's not as fast, but nearly so. It doesn't have templates, but the dynamic method despatch can pretty much replace that. It doesn't have multiple inheritance, but it does have formal (and informal) protocols - formal protocols are pretty much the same as Java interfaces. It has categories as well - I can define a category on a class which adds methods to the class, even without the source code to that class. It doesn't have garbage collection (yet - there are rumours of Leopard adding this, and there's already a checkbox in Xcode to set it 'on'), but it does intrinsically support reference counting.
The bottom line is that I think it makes me a lot more productive than the more powerful (but more complex) C++. I don't feel as though I'm fighting the language so often when I'm pushing it to do things out-of-the-ordinary. The class-library really helps here, of course. The NS (NextStep) hierarchy is a really easy-to-use class hierarchy, with lots of the time-saving features built-in that in C++ you have to find a library for, or code yourself.
And all that for a slightly-odd syntax (unless you used smalltalk or lisp:-) that soon becomes second-nature. Named parameters rock! Especially with code-completion:-)
Sophistry. The set of people who can receive email are the identical set to those who are "on the internet". Saying the one is the same as saying the other, and you can't read any more information into saying either.
Consider a fatal disease running amok on an island in the middle of the ocean, after running its course it had killed 1000 of the original 2000 islanders. There had been no arrivals (word of the disease spread) and no departures (the island was in quarantine). Would you say that it had a fatality-rate of 50% ? Or would you put it close to 0% by including the population of the rest of the world ?
If it is fundamentally impossible for you to receive an email, I don't see the point of including you in the statistics. Both figures are valid (thus proving that you can prove anything with statistics by varying the problem domain), but one makes a lot more sense than the other...
Yo, genius, brother-mine. I *did* read the article, and it didn't say how someone without access to a computer could receive an email. It does talk about emails "received" after all...
32 The average number of e-mail messages received per person per day. This is rising by 84 per cent each year
.. Just sayin' that bein' a genius an' all, even *I* can't figure that one out...
This is the speed at which the Cell can read RSX's local memory. Memory bandwidth for the Cell itself is ~25 GB/sec. If the Cell ever wants to access the private RAM of the RSX (why ?) it *is* possible, but it's a lot more efficient to use the normal pathway through main memory...
I think he means the EU as a potential market is higher than the US. The combined economies of the EU outweigh the US (the last figure I saw had the EU ~10% larger, but that was before we had more countries join the EU). It's probably on the order of 50% larger now.
As far as MS revenue goes, the EU accounts for ~20% according to a business-week article I read a few weeks ago.
Yeah, but not much... At least, I think Europe can survive without MS. I don't think the reverse applies.
It's not as though all the existing XP/NT installations suddenly stop working, it just means there's a huge new market (for local-to-Europe companies) to migrate people away from MS technology. Linux wins bigtime, or perhaps Apple.
But it would never come to that anyway - at the moment, the EU is playing nicey-nicey... a fine is all that's been suggested. If the EU start to play hard-ball, MS will very quickly sit-up-and-beg. The shock to their business of losing 25% of their market could in fact be fatal, and they wouldn't risk that.
Oh, so now we *are* talking about 3rd-party add-ons ?
You can't have it both ways - compare like to like. Either look at the 3rd-party tools on both platforms, or the OS-provided tools on both platforms. It's not as though Spotlight was the only thing that was improved in OSX 10.4...
Well, you could argue that Apple's below-par interface was better than Microsoft's non-existant one. In a shipping OS, of course...
I think the point is that it's always easier to copy - it's much harder to get it right the first time, and in this context, "getting it right" includes actually getting it to customers..
Simon
Re:HFS++ looking pretty sharp now eh?
on
WinFS Gets the Axe
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· Score: 3, Informative
Actually, spotlight doesn't have anything to do with HFS+ metadata. It builds a separate index of the data into two files stored in the root-dir of each filesystem. It uses mdimporter plugins to allow different file-formats to be parsed, so any arbitrary file can have metadata extracted and inserted into Spotlight's index.
Any filesystem could do this - you could do it using the DOS FAT filesystem. I think Spotlight is cool (though slow), but it's definitely add-on technology.
I wrote a full-text search index for Incisive Media which currently has over a million pages indexed - maybe a few hundred million word instances in total. Searching for phrases of words takes on the order of a tenth of a second. It takes a measurably long time to index and re-index, but it's blindingly-fast at search. Since you search a lot more than you index, it works for them. I think Spotlight got the balance wrong, or used the wrong technological solution.
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree over this one.
You see, I *did* know all the facts you put forward, and I *still* think the case is ridiculous. I dunno - maybe it's just me. I *expect* my coffee to be boiling hot (it's almost certainly ~100 degrees when I make it myself). Don't get me wrong about not having sympathy for the woman's injuries - anyone with any compassion would feel for her regarding the burns, but I have no sympathy for her subsequent actions. None.
The case you put for the driver of the car doesn't really fit, in that case the driver of a car has a duty of care to other road users, especially pedestrian ones. Coffee vendors should have the right to expect that customers purchasing a hot drink understand the concept of 'hot'. I doubt she'd try to swallow it in a single gulp (because it'd burn her throat), why then would she expect to be able to pour it over other areas of her body ? After all, if the vendor is at fault, it must be that she should *expect* to be able to do that without injury...
But hell, the courts sided with your position, as did most of the press as far as I could tell. I'm just a lone voice, crying in the wilderness:-)
Would you fashion a noose of razor-wire, and place it around your neck while you were driving ? No ? Then why place a cup of boiling water between your thighs ?
A quick search on the web reveals that coffee is supposed to be that hot (or at least within the range that MacDonalds were serving it). I still have no sympathy for stupidity, and even less so for a legal system that propogates it.
The correct response to "the coffee between my thighs has just scalded me" is "I shouldn't have put the coffee there", not "they shouldn't be serving a hot drink hot enough to scald me if I do something stupid with it". But the collective denial of responsibility endemic within (particularly) US society doesn't allow for self-blame - it's always someone else's fault...
Slashdot Mirror
Point of view perhaps, but personally I see it as an XP premium.
I can get this great machine that I think I can do everything I want, and it doesn't have all those nasty viruses in the wild. And if I can't get it to work, I can pay that XP premium and turn it into an upgraded version of my old machine.
From what I commonly hear, people start off thinking they'll "try" the mac (probably by being told to try-it-and-see by the Apple staff), but they have the security that it works with XP if they don't like MacOS. It's a security-blanket.
The common experience seems to be that people like what they get without having to buy XP though, so they don't. Sometimes I've heard people say they bought XP "but haven't booted into it for ages".
It could just be the people I know, but it's seeming like a strong trend to me...
Simon
I was actually going to rebut every one of your comments, but I see it's already been done.
I'll mention the virus thing though: Apache is by far the dominant webserver on the planet, and yet year on year it has far fewer bugs/vulnerabilities than (to pluck one from the air) IIS. Numbers are not anywhere near as relevant to security as you seem to think - the Mac has a far better innate security system than Windows does. Yes it's possible to fool a mac user to do something stupid, but the "social engineering" attacks are the only currently-known vectors of attack against OSX. The reason for that is more based in computer science than social science.
Simon.
When a mac app is ever-so-slightly needlessly-different in its user-interface, the Mac community gets up in arms. The fact that you have Gnome *and* KDE in that sentence is indicative of competing (and hence different) styles.
The mac has a long and established history of well-behaved apps, inter-operating via the OS. Nothing else comes close to the level of standardisation for all the commonplace things (cut/paste, print, preferences, user-customisable toolbars, menu layout, window management, etc. etc. etc.) It's a far more stable (as in: unvarying) environment for apps to co-exist.
Hell, you can run the whole thing with a mouse with only one button.. Twice as easy as anything else [grin]
I think though, it comes down to the well-behaved nature of the apps/developers, and the level of thought that has gone into how to make apps useful - have you seen the *size* of the Apple human-interface guidelines book ?
Take the menubar being always at the top of the screen - not everyone likes that (personally it bugs me to have to traverse two wide-screen displays to get to the File menu), but it means it's "infinitely deep". You can slam the mouse as fast as you like to the top of the screen and it'll still hit the menubar on a mac. Now I've seen people do the same thing on a PC (video-editing app), but they made it 1-pixel-in (presumably the border for a full-screen window took 1 pixel or something). Now it's nowhere near as easy to use... There are a myriad of little things like that, where it's been thought about on the Mac, and the lesson doesn't seem to have been transferred to any of the competitors.
Or hell, I could be wrong.
Simon
Aren't you mixing your statements there ?
The mac will be (slightly) more expensive, a *lot* easier to use, and it'll work a lot better without all those nasty viruses, spyware, trojans, you-name-it.
The pc will be (slightly) cheaper, just as hard to use as the previous one, and just as vulnerable (Vista notwithstanding)
A lot of people are going to go for the "upgrade" to the Mac, I think.
Whether it's a real (I think it is, actually) or a perceived upgrade doesn't make much difference at this point - perception is all. It's interesting that most people "get by" with their PC, but "love" their Macs though - that tells me they're getting more from their Mac than they were getting from their PC. Certainly my non-scientific non-representative anecdote (My mother, sister, and brother
Simon.
I have two. One whines; one doesn't. Soon, neither will.
Simon, he of few words.
And since it appears that the main difference is the loser pays rule, and that British society is probably no better or worse than American society, that implies that a lot of fair, perfectly meritorious cases are going untried because of the dangers of the loser pays rule. That's why I don't like it; it's unfair.
:-) trying. Perhaps (*because* it's a last-resort) there is more money (relatively speaking) to support those who *need* to go to court to resolve something...
There's an in-built assumption that going to court is "a good thing" in the above statement, and a representation of the alternative system as "more dangerous", an emotive term. I would suggest that it simply encourages more people to come to an agreement outside of a court-room in the UK; that when no agreement is forthcoming a court-case is a perfectly acceptable solution, but that other routes ought to be pursued first.
I guess what you see as "unfair", I see as more pragmatic, and more efficient. Perhaps it's just a difference of style - going to court in the UK is usually a last-resort (unless it's a criminal case, of course) even if you're completely confident of winning.
From what you write above, it seems that the equivalent of legal-aid is not as common as in the UK, either. I've had two members of my family claim (and get) legal aid in civil cases. It wasn't particularly (pun intended
Simon.
Because it's not fair. And those countries don't have as much entirely justifiable litigation either. Since litigation is simply dispute resolution, this means that they have a lot of unresolved disputes. That's not desirable
0 34_en_1.htm). If you can't convince the legal-aid lawyers that you have a fighting chance, there are also several lawyer firms who operate on a no-win,no-fee basis that isn't *too* disproportionate.
I'm not so sure about "not fair". In the UK it's generally "loser pays", but there is such a thing as legal-aid (http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1988/Ukpga_19880
And there *are* a lot less lawsuits. There is also binding arbitration, and the small-claims court (for any claim against anyone/any company under £1000) which keeps the courts free of frivolous stuff - I don't know if the same happens in the US. The small-claims court is *really* useful if a company screws you - the company *very* rarely turn up, so the judge usually just finds in your favour, and the company loses.
Simon.
For me, the best 8-bit computer ever was the BBC micro - I doubt it ever gained any traction over here in the US, but *man* was that a well-designed and elegant machine.
...
The OS was fully vectored and modular, the BASIC language had procedures and functions, as well as a built-in assembler that could access BASIC variables, but the hardware design was what made it stand out. It had every i/o port under the sun - serial, parallel, "user i/o", other dedicated ones for a network (Econet), to support floppy disks and hard disks, and even plug in a second co-processor (there were 8086, Z80 and 32000 variants I think). You could get Pascal and C for it, and it supported 80-column text on a monitor.
And to bring it slightly back on-topic, the documentation was simply excellent - the "Advanced user guide" told you just about everything you needed to know about the machine, from the event i/o to interrupt-programming, documenting the OSxxx calls, and all the port i/o etc.
Nothing since has come close to the flexibility of that machine given the design limitations at the time, and it's a tribute to the designers.
Of course, such largesse can be abused [grin] See My first and only virus-writing incident
Simon
Most of what you say above is actually what I think too - it's just that I didn't take the time and space to expound on it - eg: when I said ObjC was slower than C++, I meant that because of the dynamic despatch, it was slower ... I still think it's worth it. And there's always IMP's and raw C to help you along...
... certainly ObjC never really got anywhere on non-Mac platforms until Openstep started to make some headway, and it's still got a tiny tiny presence even now.
:-) The similarities (OO, single-inheritance, interfaces, introspection, exceptions, threads, abstracted IO, ...) between the language (syntax aside) are quite remarkable, and both depend on an intrinsic class-library to make them useful.
The only thing I'd disagree with is the class-library comment. ObjC has been my language-of-choice for ~18 months now, and I find myself forgetting some of the subtleties of C++ that I used to know by heart. I think memory management in ObjC is pretty easy though - easier than in C++ I think. Most of my problems in "the old days" were (ie: before smart pointers came along) were of memory-management issues. I don't have that in ObjC. Plus it looks as though Leopard might have GC anyway.
Two comments about language choices. (1) I wonder if ObjC would have been chosen at all if had been more-similar to Smalltalk / Oberon (I don't know Dylan). For all their flexibility, they are a lot slower than ObjC. It's possible the reason we have ObjC is precisely the compromises that were made. (2) I think the class-library is an intrinsic part of the language - it's hard to tell where ObjC leaves off and NSObject starts
My own thought is that ObjC is compiled Java with dynamic despatch (at least it will be if we *do* get garbage collection
Simon
Um, from your own url: "A dongle is a small hardware device that connects to a computer to authenticate some piece of software". The OP is referring to his G5 as a 'dongle', and I'm disagreeing. What part was it that I misunderstood about dongles ?
Simon
... and I still don't buy it.
:-), there was a bloke ("Rob C", a postman actually, who my brother actually ended up working with for a while) who spent a lot of time cracking games and putting N of them on a disk with his name on the menu. Lots of disks made their way around the pirate scene. Did the XL somehow become a dongle, just because it wasn't a PC ?
:-). I must have spent ~$1200 on a mac, and ~$300 on OS so far. 25% is a significant chunk of cash just to assume the user will be "a good guy/gal", but that's what they do, and I (for one) appreciate it.
The argument that the machine is a "dongle" only works if it were true. It's not. I can purchase a copy of OSX Tiger and give it to any number of other Mac users to install on their machine, and Apple lose money. Sure, you *have* already bought a computer from them, and I'm sure Apple are happy about that, but to claim that it somehow restricts you from piracy is just wrong.
Back when I were a young lad, I had an Atari XL (the first computer I ever had that came with a disk drive
People operate within their communities, if there is the potential for theft within that community there will be some people who will take that opportunity. For the mac, the community is mac-owners, and the potential for piracy is just as valid within that community as for PC owners within theirs. The Mac community is smaller, true, but that doesn't matter when you're (ahem) "swapping" software.
I just don't believe that spending $$$ on a computer entitles you to stop spending $ on software from the same company (can you tell I'm a reformed character
Simon.
Just as a note, and in no way trying to contradict your point (which I agree with), the objective-C method to do something similar (the class name method is built into the NSObject class, so it's a nop :-) would be:
:-) that soon becomes second-nature. Named parameters rock! Especially with code-completion :-)
@implementation Silly
+ (const char *) firstDayOfWeek
{ return "Sunday"; }
@end
printf("%s\n", [Silly firstDayOfWeek]);
In general, you don't use char* pointers in objective C though, it would be an NSString class that was generated/returned.
I've been coding for over 25 years, have used a wide variety of languages, including C,C++, Java as well as several more-obscure ones. My language of choice is now Objective C - it has all the flexibility of C (it groks pure C perfectly), and introduces less than a dozen language constructs to make it a *very* flexible object-orientated language.
My own feeling is that it's a lot simpler than C++ and I've not found any situation where it restricted what I can do. It's not as fast, but nearly so. It doesn't have templates, but the dynamic method despatch can pretty much replace that. It doesn't have multiple inheritance, but it does have formal (and informal) protocols - formal protocols are pretty much the same as Java interfaces. It has categories as well - I can define a category on a class which adds methods to the class, even without the source code to that class. It doesn't have garbage collection (yet - there are rumours of Leopard adding this, and there's already a checkbox in Xcode to set it 'on'), but it does intrinsically support reference counting.
The bottom line is that I think it makes me a lot more productive than the more powerful (but more complex) C++. I don't feel as though I'm fighting the language so often when I'm pushing it to do things out-of-the-ordinary. The class-library really helps here, of course. The NS (NextStep) hierarchy is a really easy-to-use class hierarchy, with lots of the time-saving features built-in that in C++ you have to find a library for, or code yourself.
And all that for a slightly-odd syntax (unless you used smalltalk or lisp
Simon
Sophistry. The set of people who can receive email are the identical set to those who are "on the internet". Saying the one is the same as saying the other, and you can't read any more information into saying either.
Simon.
Consider a fatal disease running amok on an island in the middle of the ocean, after running its course it had killed 1000 of the original 2000 islanders. There had been no arrivals (word of the disease spread) and no departures (the island was in quarantine). Would you say that it had a fatality-rate of 50% ? Or would you put it close to 0% by including the population of the rest of the world ?
If it is fundamentally impossible for you to receive an email, I don't see the point of including you in the statistics. Both figures are valid (thus proving that you can prove anything with statistics by varying the problem domain), but one makes a lot more sense than the other...
Simon
Simon
Hey genius, not every human has a computer to receive emails on ...
Simon.
You are misinformed.
This is the speed at which the Cell can read RSX's local memory. Memory bandwidth for the Cell itself is ~25 GB/sec. If the Cell ever wants to access the private RAM of the RSX (why ?) it *is* possible, but it's a lot more efficient to use the normal pathway through main memory...
Simon.
I'd point out the benefits of tying a piece of rope to the outside of the airlock, and tying the other end around the astronaut's waist.
It's an old, outdated solution, but I'd definitely go for it if the alternative was a slow death by radiation or oxygen starvation - that's just me...
Simon
I think he means the EU as a potential market is higher than the US. The combined economies of the EU outweigh the US (the last figure I saw had the EU ~10% larger, but that was before we had more countries join the EU). It's probably on the order of 50% larger now.
As far as MS revenue goes, the EU accounts for ~20% according to a business-week article I read a few weeks ago.
Simon
So would Europe
Yeah, but not much... At least, I think Europe can survive without MS. I don't think the reverse applies.
It's not as though all the existing XP/NT installations suddenly stop working, it just means there's a huge new market (for local-to-Europe companies) to migrate people away from MS technology. Linux wins bigtime, or perhaps Apple.
But it would never come to that anyway - at the moment, the EU is playing nicey-nicey... a fine is all that's been suggested. If the EU start to play hard-ball, MS will very quickly sit-up-and-beg. The shock to their business of losing 25% of their market could in fact be fatal, and they wouldn't risk that.
Simon
Oh, so now we *are* talking about 3rd-party add-ons ?
You can't have it both ways - compare like to like. Either look at the 3rd-party tools on both platforms, or the OS-provided tools on both platforms. It's not as though Spotlight was the only thing that was improved in OSX 10.4...
Simon
Well, you could argue that Apple's below-par interface was better than Microsoft's non-existant one. In a shipping OS, of course...
I think the point is that it's always easier to copy - it's much harder to get it right the first time, and in this context, "getting it right" includes actually getting it to customers..
Simon
Actually, spotlight doesn't have anything to do with HFS+ metadata. It builds a separate index of the data into two files stored in the root-dir of each filesystem. It uses mdimporter plugins to allow different file-formats to be parsed, so any arbitrary file can have metadata extracted and inserted into Spotlight's index.
Any filesystem could do this - you could do it using the DOS FAT filesystem. I think Spotlight is cool (though slow), but it's definitely add-on technology.
I wrote a full-text search index for Incisive Media which currently has over a million pages indexed - maybe a few hundred million word instances in total. Searching for phrases of words takes on the order of a tenth of a second. It takes a measurably long time to index and re-index, but it's blindingly-fast at search. Since you search a lot more than you index, it works for them. I think Spotlight got the balance wrong, or used the wrong technological solution.
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree over this one.
:-)
You see, I *did* know all the facts you put forward, and I *still* think the case is ridiculous. I dunno - maybe it's just me. I *expect* my coffee to be boiling hot (it's almost certainly ~100 degrees when I make it myself). Don't get me wrong about not having sympathy for the woman's injuries - anyone with any compassion would feel for her regarding the burns, but I have no sympathy for her subsequent actions. None.
The case you put for the driver of the car doesn't really fit, in that case the driver of a car has a duty of care to other road users, especially pedestrian ones. Coffee vendors should have the right to expect that customers purchasing a hot drink understand the concept of 'hot'. I doubt she'd try to swallow it in a single gulp (because it'd burn her throat), why then would she expect to be able to pour it over other areas of her body ? After all, if the vendor is at fault, it must be that she should *expect* to be able to do that without injury...
But hell, the courts sided with your position, as did most of the press as far as I could tell. I'm just a lone voice, crying in the wilderness
Simon
I think you're missing my point.
Would you fashion a noose of razor-wire, and place it around your neck while you were driving ? No ? Then why place a cup of boiling water between your thighs ?
A quick search on the web reveals that coffee is supposed to be that hot (or at least within the range that MacDonalds were serving it). I still have no sympathy for stupidity, and even less so for a legal system that propogates it.
The correct response to "the coffee between my thighs has just scalded me" is "I shouldn't have put the coffee there", not "they shouldn't be serving a hot drink hot enough to scald me if I do something stupid with it". But the collective denial of responsibility endemic within (particularly) US society doesn't allow for self-blame - it's always someone else's fault...
Simon