Especially since it appears that the $550 gets you the motherboard, without any radio modules. The $550 will get you something that you need to spend more money on until it is functional. I think this is just a case of the journalist not really digging into it more than superficially, but the guy the reporter was talking to should have also pointed out how much a minimally configured system would cost.
At a minimum you will need the motherboard, a radio module, some cable (which isn't cheap, especially for doing higher frequency work), and a useful antenna (those tiny ones they advertise on the website will be fine for higher frequencies, but if you want to do anything else, you are looking at an external antenna and more cable).
However, this is a very cool project. A lot of good will come from this work. But $550 is not the starting price. The starting price is higher.
I was not even worried about the relative sizes of the development community, since the original question was about dev tools for OSX. It may have been the main point of your post, but I chose to address the part of your post that was most relavant to the discussion at hand.
The real point -- which splitting hairs about the age of development toolkits that I didn't even mention completely evades
Thinking of Cocoa as the "development toolkit" is disingenuous at best. While the names of the pieces tend to include the term "Kit", thinking of them as a development toolkit makes as much sense as thinking of Win32 as a development toolkit. It's a fun rhetorical device (akin to comparing the sizes of the dev communities when the topic at hand is dev tools for OSX), but diverts attention from the larger role that it plays.
It is interesting that you try to classify the runtime part of Cocoa as "part of the Unix foundation." It's not. Cocoa is the application support library that rest on a Unix foundation. It doesn't necessarily NEED Unix either -- OPENSTEP shipped for Win32 at one point in it's lifetime. While the packaged product called "OSX" is certainly young, and I would never dispute that, the vast majority of the base (including the support library structure, the object hierarchy, and a good proportion of the development tools) were in place before Apple got hold of it.
Consider the points of view of the two camps and their actions make perfect sense.
I would never debate that, because I don't think it's in question. In fact, I don't think much of what your trying to debate me about is in question, I would agree with you on everything but the relative age and maturity of the platforms. If I wanted to talk about products, I would have been talking about NT/XP vs OSX.
>On OSX, the platform -- not counting the Unix foundation -- is young
Are you kidding? Cocoa is based on NeXTStep, which has been actively refined since the late 80's. Win32 dates from the early 90's, and.NET is even younger still.
Interface Builder, the primary Cocoa/NeXTStep GUI tool, was the first of it's kind. I saw it for the first time in 1989.
The class library that makes up Cocoa is one of the most mature frameworks out there.
He does a good job of telling you what really matters. If he has a bias, it's towards Nikon. BUt that's beside the point. His focus is photography, digital or film.
And I'm pretty sure that if you asked him, he'd point you towards the Nikon D70.
Of course, the hackability of the Canon 300 is pretty tempting, but it's not really the point. You can take fantastic pictures with an SLR or a point and shoot. Those extra features aren't going to make your pictures better. Shooting a lot of pictures and honestly evaluating them is what makes your pictures better.
In the article, they don't talk about using GPS to find the target, they talk about the target using a GPS BEACON. This means the target was transmitting. Doesn't matter what it's transmitting. You just need to home in on the signal. Don't even need to decode it.
This is the same way that HARM missles work, so it's not like it's really cutting edge technology.
This isn't flaming, but it's obvious that you've never had to track down any non-trivial bugs involving memory allocation or error codes that were never checked.
When your paycheck depends on shipping code that works on a machine other than your own, you'll appreciate the garbage collection and exception handling.
No, Java and Python don't solve all of the problems, and there are many things that C++ does really nicely. But I've had to pull less overtime tracking down other peoples bugs since I left C++ behind.
"Billy Joel," when used to describe the author or the performance of music, is a trademark. It's so that someone else cannot package up some random music and then print "Billy Joel" on it to sell it. The argument is that there are specific associations with "Billy Joel" and music, and so Mr. Joel has acted to prevent "dilution of brand."
And of course, he admits that it IS about profit, as well as musical integrity.
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Especially since it appears that the $550 gets you the motherboard, without any radio modules. The $550 will get you something that you need to spend more money on until it is functional. I think this is just a case of the journalist not really digging into it more than superficially, but the guy the reporter was talking to should have also pointed out how much a minimally configured system would cost.
At a minimum you will need the motherboard, a radio module, some cable (which isn't cheap, especially for doing higher frequency work), and a useful antenna (those tiny ones they advertise on the website will be fine for higher frequencies, but if you want to do anything else, you are looking at an external antenna and more cable).
However, this is a very cool project. A lot of good will come from this work. But $550 is not the starting price. The starting price is higher.
I was not even worried about the relative sizes of the development community, since the original question was about dev tools for OSX. It may have been the main point of your post, but I chose to address the part of your post that was most relavant to the discussion at hand.
The real point -- which splitting hairs about the age of development toolkits that I didn't even mention completely evades
Thinking of Cocoa as the "development toolkit" is disingenuous at best. While the names of the pieces tend to include the term "Kit", thinking of them as a development toolkit makes as much sense as thinking of Win32 as a development toolkit. It's a fun rhetorical device (akin to comparing the sizes of the dev communities when the topic at hand is dev tools for OSX), but diverts attention from the larger role that it plays.
It is interesting that you try to classify the runtime part of Cocoa as "part of the Unix foundation." It's not. Cocoa is the application support library that rest on a Unix foundation. It doesn't necessarily NEED Unix either -- OPENSTEP shipped for Win32 at one point in it's lifetime. While the packaged product called "OSX" is certainly young, and I would never dispute that, the vast majority of the base (including the support library structure, the object hierarchy, and a good proportion of the development tools) were in place before Apple got hold of it.
Consider the points of view of the two camps and their actions make perfect sense.
I would never debate that, because I don't think it's in question. In fact, I don't think much of what your trying to debate me about is in question, I would agree with you on everything but the relative age and maturity of the platforms. If I wanted to talk about products, I would have been talking about NT/XP vs OSX.
>On OSX, the platform -- not counting the Unix foundation -- is young
.NET is even younger still.
Are you kidding? Cocoa is based on NeXTStep, which has been actively refined since the late 80's. Win32 dates from the early 90's, and
Interface Builder, the primary Cocoa/NeXTStep GUI tool, was the first of it's kind. I saw it for the first time in 1989.
The class library that makes up Cocoa is one of the most mature frameworks out there.
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech.htm
He does a good job of telling you what really matters. If he has a bias, it's towards Nikon. BUt that's beside the point. His focus is photography, digital or film.
And I'm pretty sure that if you asked him, he'd point you towards the Nikon D70.
Of course, the hackability of the Canon 300 is pretty tempting, but it's not really the point. You can take fantastic pictures with an SLR or a point and shoot. Those extra features aren't going to make your pictures better. Shooting a lot of pictures and honestly evaluating them is what makes your pictures better.
In the article, they don't talk about using GPS to find the target, they talk about the target using a GPS BEACON. This means the target was transmitting. Doesn't matter what it's transmitting. You just need to home in on the signal. Don't even need to decode it.
This is the same way that HARM missles work, so it's not like it's really cutting edge technology.
They cheated.
Care to guess how many lines of code have been written in COBOL? Various machine languages?
When your paycheck depends on shipping code that works on a machine other than your own, you'll appreciate the garbage collection and exception handling.
No, Java and Python don't solve all of the problems, and there are many things that C++ does really nicely. But I've had to pull less overtime tracking down other peoples bugs since I left C++ behind.
And of course, he admits that it IS about profit, as well as musical integrity.
Because we can't find one. The ONLY known effect of an "overdose" of THC is extended sleepiness.
Don't forget: "First Post!"
Actually, they DO mention this. At the very beginning, in bold type even, they call this a "Microsoft Commisioned Study".
Bastards. All the talk made me buy one on the way home. Why is it that I'm addicted to gadgets?