How many times has the President (any President) done exactly this? Since Jackson famously told the Supremes "now go and enforce it" the Executive has been able to give the Judicial the finger. How many times in recent memory has the Executive waived, changed, or broken existing laws regarding the new Health Care act?
The problem is that this isn't a federally enforced law, it's a state enforced law. Obama can tell federal agents to no longer enforce any of these laws, but that won't change anything in since the feds aren't the ones supporting these laws to begin with.
Basically you'd be down to what the government had to do to force racial integration: Send in the army to keep Tesla dealerships open and protect the Tesla dealerships against state law enforcement. While I'd like to see you, you can understand why that might cause problems in this political climate. There is also a decent argument that Obama might not have this authority because their is no Federal counter law to the state law. Any way you look at this, Congress needs to pass a law for Obama to do anything. The example you're giving is the reverse: a President ignoring existing federal law. Here, it's the opposite: Obama would have to make up new a new federal law to override state law that does not exist. Not really the same thing.
could just as easily mean, 'we havent worked WITH govt agencies.. but when they told us to step aside and let their devs in to commandeer a subroutine, we turned a blind/black-box eye'
Pretty sure giving them any access to any box or building would legally meet the definition of "working with."
You have to give credit to Apple for making these statements, because if it comes out that they did help the government, these open letters could be used as ammo against them in a class action lawsuit. So either Apple is stupid for making these claims when a no comment would be a better option legally, or they're not actually working with the government.
From everything I hear, it's the second option. Everyone I know at Apple is obsessed with security and privacy, to the point where I don't see Apple willingly giving anyone access. I know that's just my opinion, but even before this NSA thing happened, they were crazy about that.
I think part of that is a lot of their employees have very... strong feelings... about the way Google does business. Apple doesn't even want the information available for them to data mine themselves. They're basically denying themselves the opportunity to inspect data so no one will ever sell user information and run ads. It seems like most these policy decisions were made before the NSA spying case, which makes me believe they were legitimate convictions. Either that, or the government was already bugging Apple, so Apple made these changes.
China is going to shortly release a state sponsored phone running their own OS and hardware that is totally "secure."
It's understandable that a nation like China would want to get in on the cell phone industry more deeply. Being able to insure a monopoly in China by scaring everyone away from the competition would create a huge, profitable industry internally. I just have a hard time taking what they're saying at face value.
And yes, before someone mentions it, I know the US does similar things for their own ends.
The "Apple ships and underpowered processed" gets an ehhh from me.
It's clocked low, but it's a 64 but processor with many branching features from desktops.
It may be slower clocked but it punches well above it's weight class. Which is usually missed because most PC kiddies only look at clock instead of benchmarks, and think 64 bit is only something that let's you use a lot of RAM, and don't really understand things like processor features.
"Watts Up With That? has a more skeptical take on the calculations."
And if you look at the site it's pretty much a site full of straw men and attacks on climate change friendly politicians and scientists, with little actual scientific facts (besides the grandiose endorsement of it's own content.)
Why is this link even here? Did someone just randomly Google it and stick it on there because, hey, it's on the internet? Or did someone want the site to get more page views?
C'mon editors. This is news for nerds. Not news my uncle sent me in his email about how Obama is part of the illuminati.
They'll all fail because there simply is no mass need to drive sales.
I wear a Nike Fuelband. It's not really a "smart watch", but it's a nice reminder I need to get up and walk. I can hit a button and get a semi accurate reminder of how active I've been for the day. It pings my phone when it needs my attention, and in since it's not my phone I can wear it to the gym and let it's accelerometers rate my activity. I know, I could ask myself if I've exercised enough for the day, but when I'm deep in a programming puzzle, I need the nudge.
Why do I bring up the Fuelband?
It would be great to have a Fuelband that can do calendar reminders, and maybe some sort of digital wallet thing. Maaaaybe read only interface to my text messages. My needs aren't extreme. I think that's why most wearables have fallen flat. A lot of the Android wear smart watches have features like cameras, microphones, voice control, blah blah blah... So much crap I don't need, that I'm paying for, and that will run the battery down. I want an accessory for my phone. Not a watch computer onto itself. I don't need a duplicate of every feature I have on my phone. Just tell me what room my next meeting is in so I don't have to take my phone out of my pocket.
Wearables are in an unnecessary arms race right now. What wearables need is a simple set of features done well, and done in a compelling way. That has Apple written all over it, but we'll see what Microsoft brings to the table as well.
"In the demo above, the phone displayed a partial boot screen before freezing."
"Google Demos Modular Phone That (Almost) Actually Works"
Maybe it's just me, but if a phone can't even get to the dialer to make a phone call, that's a little further from "actually working" than "almost."
I mean that seriously. My problem isn't with the phone itself. My problem is with the overly generous summary.
Call me a troll, but if any company other than Google unveiled this phone, and it didn't even boot during the demo, I don't think the reaction would be as positive.
Considering these are basically miniature electric helicopters, I'm not sure a crash is really that big a deal; certainly no more so than a truck crashing in the street while delivering the same package through the FAA-approved route. Plus, whoever it crashed on would get free stuff as compensation.
Except trucks don't frequently crash as they're flying over my house, or power lines.
Sure, trucks do crash into houses sometimes, or do crash into power lines sometimes, but that's an entirely different situation than expecting them to fly over your hard.
The FAA could build up some form of regulated routes and co-ordination between drones, but they have not as of yet, and have not gotten any direction to do so. So until then, banning these uses of drones seems reasonable.
I predicted this would happen. As soon as lawmakers figured out there was this thing called peering they'd freak out and try to control it. The discussion went from treating each packet the same to controlling peering. How long will it take for lawmakers to completely screw up the Internet? Much of what I see about net neutrality is like reading people's thoughts on organic food. Small bits of truth, but mostly junk. Now turn that ignorance over to the power of the Federal government. No good can come of this.
So basically between 1 in 4 to 1 in 2 packets going over the ISP's transit link will be Netflix data. Why would an ISP do that if they have the option to peer directly with Netflix? It makes absolutely no sense. Any spike in Netflix data will cause everyone's connection to be crap. Not just Netflix users, everyone. This is not helping the potential competitor to Netflix, it is hurting them! Peering is a good thing! Please stop trying to regulate it.
Peering isn't the same thing as enforcing QOS on the last mile of the connection. ISP's should be free to peer. They shouldn't be free to force QOS on end users. Having Netflix as a peer is entirely different than having my cable modem hard enforce download speeds of X everywhere, except Netflix which gets a download speed of Y. That's an artificial limitation.
First, as pointed out, it is removed from YouTube, not google search results. This is annoying to the artists, but Youtube belongs to google. They set the terms for you hosting videos there at no cost to you.
And here I thought Google was making their money back on the advertising. That said, them owning the service still doesn't make it not evil. I remember a software company was brought up on antitrust charges for similar things back in the 90s. What were they named? Tinysoft? Macrosoft? Oh well.
I was under the impression that one of the requirements for being a non-profit was the agreement that you wouldn't be an actionable organization. Seems to me that most of the organizations, both conservative and liberal, were rightly under the microscope.
They were.
They're also organizations that are probably donating to people like Representative Steve Stockman. Funny how that works.
Bullshit. These people are just trying to avoid paying taxes. Kill this 501(c) bullshit now. Or are you going to try to tell me that would violates everybody's "rights"?
Apparently Representative Steve Stockman has forgotten that the 1st Amendment only protects your rights to say something without prosecution by the government, and not your ability to not have to pay taxes.
It's both hilarious and sad that this man thinks having to pay normal taxes has anything to do with freedom of speech. Next Up: The government can't charge me taxes because it violates my religion. What religion is that you ask? None of your business, tax man.
"Ideally, I'd like to learn a language that has web relevance, mobile relevance, GUI desktop applications relevance, and also that can be integrated into command-line workflows for data processing—a language that is interpreted rather than compiled, or at least that enables rapid, quick-and-dirty development"
Ah, um, hmmmm.
Look, I'm going to give you a protip about us "young folks": You seem to be under the assumption we are masochists. We are not.
If there was such a language, we'd all be using it daily for our development. The reason we use the tools we do are because they are the easiest tools for the job we do. Do you want to learn the most relevant tool for mobile development that is also the easiest? It's likely the one everyone else is using. If there was some hidden shortcut to do highly relevant development very quickly for every single platform, we'd all be using it. I don't like writing more code than I have to for the fun of it.
It sounds like you're trying to double dip here. You want a language that you can use for data modeling, but on the side you want it to be usable for about every single other arena for software development. Again, us young folks are already taking the easiest path. If you want to hit all those targets as well, learn the same languages that everyone else has already determined are the easiest paths, or keep focused on data modeling. The needs you're trying to specify for each language are totally different. Data modeling likes interpreted, but mobile strongly avoids the overhead of interpreted languages. All your requirements are exclusive, which is why there are a bunch of different languages and APIs to begin with.
Matlab is one tool I see frequently used by engineers who are mostly data modeling focused. For each of the other focus areas you've mentioned, I could probably list off several languages, usually with no overlap to the other platforms. Java possibly comes close, but you're not going to cover all your platforms, and it's not interpreted.
And to be honest, what you really haven't even scratched the surface of is that even if there was a language that covered all those platforms, you'd need to actually know all those platforms. Know the ins and outs of code signing on iOS or the Mac? Permissions on Android? 32 bit vs. 64 bit differences on Windows? The specifics of a bunch of different web browsers? If not, a language that covers all the platforms won't get you far anyway.
First, and impressive showing at WWDC, and now Google is nerfing their security model to be weaker than iOS's (iOS will notify when a new permission is required as part of an update when the application tries to make use of that permission.)
I think Windows Phone and iOS are both in a good position to start taking some market share from Google. If Google doesn't have a good Google/IO with Android, they may have officially dropped the ball on Android.
x86 is hardly any less proprietary than PowerPC or SPARC. You've got Intel and AMD at the helm. VIA walked the plank ages ago. Apple ditched PowerPC because Apple's market share was so fucking low that the only company compiling for PowerPC was Adobe. The decision to drop PowerPC had to do with market share and cost, not the architecture itself.
Yes? No? I think this is a misunderstanding of the motivations behind Apple's PowerPC switch. (Source: I wrote PowerPC Mac apps at the time and was in the room at WWDC when Apple announced the switch.)
The PowerPC market was a bit wider than that. Microsoft had Office on PowerPC, Adobe had their suite, and there was a smattering of other apps.
At the time, the future of PowerPC had looked pretty bright. Microsoft's Xbox, Sony's PS3, and Nintendo's Wii were all switching to PowerPC. Within a span of several months, the community was looking at a majority of gaming hardware being PowerPC based. PowerPC was going to be in very high demand, which would mean great things for the Mac PowerPC platform. Far from "the only company compiling for PowerPC was Adobe", Microsoft was buying Power Mac G5 boxes for their dev kits and they were porting Windows to the PowerPC for the Xbox. And in the end, Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo combined shipped several hundred million units based on the PowerPC (With Nintendo still shipping the Wii U with PowerPC today.)
So why did Apple leave the PowerPC?
At the time, laptop sales were on the rise, but Apple's laptop CPUs were not designed by IBM, they were designed by Motorola. IBM's PowerPC G5 was suitable for the Xbox 360 and desktop machines, but it ran far too hot to go into laptops. This left Motorola with their G4 CPU. And let me tell you, Motorola probably had very smart people working for them, but their execution was incompetent. The G4 had a 133 mhz system bus (which was slow even for the time), and ran very hot (but still cooler than the G5), and worst of all, was much slower than Intel's Pentium M.
Meanwhile the Pentium M was doing very well. It was faster than the G4, more power efficient than the G4, and it actually had a modern chipset and bus. Switching to the Pentium M was a no brainer.
There was speculation that Apple was trying to get IBM to make a mobile G5, but they were never able to get the power consumption down. When Microsoft and Sony entered onto the scene, IBM's interest shifted to getting the PowerPC into larger form factors, and Apple just didn't ship enough units in laptops to balance out the R&D demand that Microsoft and Sony created.
Motorola in the meantime with the G4 just kept sucking. There was a new architecture that was basically a modern architecture for the G4 that did eventually end up shipping, but by then Apple was just done with PowerPC.
Intel provided a stability the AIM (Apple, IBM, Motorola) alliance just didn't provide, with a quality chip. PowerPC did end up scaling, but there simply wasn't the same demand for PowerPC machines at the time to make it scale well enough.
So were people not actually writing code for PowerPC? No, lot's of people were. I'd actually guess that after Apple left PowerPC, the number of PowerPC developers continued to rise. And with the Xbox 360, Sony PS3, and the Nintendo Wii/Wii U continuing to get new games, there are still a lot of PowerPC developers out there.
Ok, you guys are too slow, I RTFA and downloaded the iBook. So far, I am very much liking the SYNTAX, especially OBJECTS and FUNCTIONS, they even brought the LET keyword in from BASIC. SWIFT will make programming Apple products much easier for the C loving syntax crowd, from what I can see. Ahhh... what a breath of fresh air. Code snippet below of creating an object and exercising it. I feel bad for those that suffered through Objective-C.
To be honest, while this snippet is a few lines shorter, it's arguably more complicated than the corresponding Obj-C. It drops returning self in the init, and drops a few lines that would have had to go in to the class definition, but you gain a few unsightly keywords like "override", having to add the keyword "func" to every function, and you gain some more syntactical mess like "->".
It's not horrible, but I'm not sure this sample is more readable than Obj-C. As others have noted, Swift has the habit of taking the important parts of a function (like what it's named and what it returns, or what name a class is and what it subclasses) and shoving them off to entirely different sides of the function declaration.
From what I can tell (I just got out of WWDC and am reading through the docs) it can be bridged to, but not directly called. You can directly call Obj-C methods through the bridge, but not C methods. You'd have to bridge to the Obj-C methods which then call C methods.
I don't know what happens when that Obj-C method calls malloc and returns some memory for leak-tastic behavior. I still haven't read if or how Swift handles raw memory buffers.
Slashdot Mirror
How many times has the President (any President) done exactly this? Since Jackson famously told the Supremes "now go and enforce it" the Executive has been able to give the Judicial the finger. How many times in recent memory has the Executive waived, changed, or broken existing laws regarding the new Health Care act?
The problem is that this isn't a federally enforced law, it's a state enforced law. Obama can tell federal agents to no longer enforce any of these laws, but that won't change anything in since the feds aren't the ones supporting these laws to begin with.
Basically you'd be down to what the government had to do to force racial integration: Send in the army to keep Tesla dealerships open and protect the Tesla dealerships against state law enforcement. While I'd like to see you, you can understand why that might cause problems in this political climate. There is also a decent argument that Obama might not have this authority because their is no Federal counter law to the state law. Any way you look at this, Congress needs to pass a law for Obama to do anything. The example you're giving is the reverse: a President ignoring existing federal law. Here, it's the opposite: Obama would have to make up new a new federal law to override state law that does not exist. Not really the same thing.
could just as easily mean, 'we havent worked WITH govt agencies.. but when they told us to step aside and let their devs in to commandeer a subroutine, we turned a blind/black-box eye'
Pretty sure giving them any access to any box or building would legally meet the definition of "working with."
You have to give credit to Apple for making these statements, because if it comes out that they did help the government, these open letters could be used as ammo against them in a class action lawsuit. So either Apple is stupid for making these claims when a no comment would be a better option legally, or they're not actually working with the government.
From everything I hear, it's the second option. Everyone I know at Apple is obsessed with security and privacy, to the point where I don't see Apple willingly giving anyone access. I know that's just my opinion, but even before this NSA thing happened, they were crazy about that.
I think part of that is a lot of their employees have very... strong feelings... about the way Google does business. Apple doesn't even want the information available for them to data mine themselves. They're basically denying themselves the opportunity to inspect data so no one will ever sell user information and run ads. It seems like most these policy decisions were made before the NSA spying case, which makes me believe they were legitimate convictions. Either that, or the government was already bugging Apple, so Apple made these changes.
China is going to shortly release a state sponsored phone running their own OS and hardware that is totally "secure."
It's understandable that a nation like China would want to get in on the cell phone industry more deeply. Being able to insure a monopoly in China by scaring everyone away from the competition would create a huge, profitable industry internally. I just have a hard time taking what they're saying at face value.
And yes, before someone mentions it, I know the US does similar things for their own ends.
"is unstable, creates wars, has weapons to wipe out the world twice over, and makes computer viruses."
And machines couldn't do the same things?
I guarantee you once we have machines that can write code, we'll put them to work on how to break other people's machines. The NSA will see to that.
I think this lawsuit is more about the Kindle Fire, which is sold as a kid acceptable tablet, not the Fire Phone, which has barely even launched.
The "Apple ships and underpowered processed" gets an ehhh from me.
It's clocked low, but it's a 64 but processor with many branching features from desktops.
It may be slower clocked but it punches well above it's weight class. Which is usually missed because most PC kiddies only look at clock instead of benchmarks, and think 64 bit is only something that let's you use a lot of RAM, and don't really understand things like processor features.
"Watts Up With That? has a more skeptical take on the calculations."
And if you look at the site it's pretty much a site full of straw men and attacks on climate change friendly politicians and scientists, with little actual scientific facts (besides the grandiose endorsement of it's own content.)
Why is this link even here? Did someone just randomly Google it and stick it on there because, hey, it's on the internet? Or did someone want the site to get more page views?
C'mon editors. This is news for nerds. Not news my uncle sent me in his email about how Obama is part of the illuminati.
They'll all fail because there simply is no mass need to drive sales.
I wear a Nike Fuelband. It's not really a "smart watch", but it's a nice reminder I need to get up and walk. I can hit a button and get a semi accurate reminder of how active I've been for the day. It pings my phone when it needs my attention, and in since it's not my phone I can wear it to the gym and let it's accelerometers rate my activity. I know, I could ask myself if I've exercised enough for the day, but when I'm deep in a programming puzzle, I need the nudge.
Why do I bring up the Fuelband?
It would be great to have a Fuelband that can do calendar reminders, and maybe some sort of digital wallet thing. Maaaaybe read only interface to my text messages. My needs aren't extreme. I think that's why most wearables have fallen flat. A lot of the Android wear smart watches have features like cameras, microphones, voice control, blah blah blah... So much crap I don't need, that I'm paying for, and that will run the battery down. I want an accessory for my phone. Not a watch computer onto itself. I don't need a duplicate of every feature I have on my phone. Just tell me what room my next meeting is in so I don't have to take my phone out of my pocket.
Wearables are in an unnecessary arms race right now. What wearables need is a simple set of features done well, and done in a compelling way. That has Apple written all over it, but we'll see what Microsoft brings to the table as well.
"In the demo above, the phone displayed a partial boot screen before freezing."
"Google Demos Modular Phone That (Almost) Actually Works"
Maybe it's just me, but if a phone can't even get to the dialer to make a phone call, that's a little further from "actually working" than "almost."
I mean that seriously. My problem isn't with the phone itself. My problem is with the overly generous summary.
Call me a troll, but if any company other than Google unveiled this phone, and it didn't even boot during the demo, I don't think the reaction would be as positive.
The FAA elected NOT to appeal this.
Factually incorrect:
http://www.mondaq.com/unitedst...
And:
"The appeal stays the ruling. This leaves the enforceability of the commercial-drone ban -- at least for the moment -- up in the air."
Considering these are basically miniature electric helicopters, I'm not sure a crash is really that big a deal; certainly no more so than a truck crashing in the street while delivering the same package through the FAA-approved route. Plus, whoever it crashed on would get free stuff as compensation.
Except trucks don't frequently crash as they're flying over my house, or power lines.
Sure, trucks do crash into houses sometimes, or do crash into power lines sometimes, but that's an entirely different situation than expecting them to fly over your hard.
The FAA could build up some form of regulated routes and co-ordination between drones, but they have not as of yet, and have not gotten any direction to do so. So until then, banning these uses of drones seems reasonable.
I know several people who this has happened to. Armed hold ups, people grabbing it and running, and people grabbing it when the owners back is turned.
So yes, in some cities this is a very real problem.
I predicted this would happen. As soon as lawmakers figured out there was this thing called peering they'd freak out and try to control it. The discussion went from treating each packet the same to controlling peering. How long will it take for lawmakers to completely screw up the Internet? Much of what I see about net neutrality is like reading people's thoughts on organic food. Small bits of truth, but mostly junk. Now turn that ignorance over to the power of the Federal government. No good can come of this.
So basically between 1 in 4 to 1 in 2 packets going over the ISP's transit link will be Netflix data. Why would an ISP do that if they have the option to peer directly with Netflix? It makes absolutely no sense. Any spike in Netflix data will cause everyone's connection to be crap. Not just Netflix users, everyone. This is not helping the potential competitor to Netflix, it is hurting them! Peering is a good thing! Please stop trying to regulate it.
Peering isn't the same thing as enforcing QOS on the last mile of the connection. ISP's should be free to peer. They shouldn't be free to force QOS on end users. Having Netflix as a peer is entirely different than having my cable modem hard enforce download speeds of X everywhere, except Netflix which gets a download speed of Y. That's an artificial limitation.
First, as pointed out, it is removed from YouTube, not google search results. This is annoying to the artists, but Youtube belongs to google. They set the terms for you hosting videos there at no cost to you.
And here I thought Google was making their money back on the advertising. That said, them owning the service still doesn't make it not evil. I remember a software company was brought up on antitrust charges for similar things back in the 90s. What were they named? Tinysoft? Macrosoft? Oh well.
I was under the impression that one of the requirements for being a non-profit was the agreement that you wouldn't be an actionable organization. Seems to me that most of the organizations, both conservative and liberal, were rightly under the microscope.
They were.
They're also organizations that are probably donating to people like Representative Steve Stockman. Funny how that works.
Bullshit. These people are just trying to avoid paying taxes. Kill this 501(c) bullshit now. Or are you going to try to tell me that would violates everybody's "rights"?
Apparently Representative Steve Stockman has forgotten that the 1st Amendment only protects your rights to say something without prosecution by the government, and not your ability to not have to pay taxes.
It's both hilarious and sad that this man thinks having to pay normal taxes has anything to do with freedom of speech. Next Up: The government can't charge me taxes because it violates my religion. What religion is that you ask? None of your business, tax man.
"Best Rapid Development Language To Learn Today?"
Well sure, you could try using...
"Ideally, I'd like to learn a language that has web relevance, mobile relevance, GUI desktop applications relevance, and also that can be integrated into command-line workflows for data processing—a language that is interpreted rather than compiled, or at least that enables rapid, quick-and-dirty development"
Ah, um, hmmmm.
Look, I'm going to give you a protip about us "young folks": You seem to be under the assumption we are masochists. We are not.
If there was such a language, we'd all be using it daily for our development. The reason we use the tools we do are because they are the easiest tools for the job we do. Do you want to learn the most relevant tool for mobile development that is also the easiest? It's likely the one everyone else is using. If there was some hidden shortcut to do highly relevant development very quickly for every single platform, we'd all be using it. I don't like writing more code than I have to for the fun of it.
It sounds like you're trying to double dip here. You want a language that you can use for data modeling, but on the side you want it to be usable for about every single other arena for software development. Again, us young folks are already taking the easiest path. If you want to hit all those targets as well, learn the same languages that everyone else has already determined are the easiest paths, or keep focused on data modeling. The needs you're trying to specify for each language are totally different. Data modeling likes interpreted, but mobile strongly avoids the overhead of interpreted languages. All your requirements are exclusive, which is why there are a bunch of different languages and APIs to begin with.
Matlab is one tool I see frequently used by engineers who are mostly data modeling focused. For each of the other focus areas you've mentioned, I could probably list off several languages, usually with no overlap to the other platforms. Java possibly comes close, but you're not going to cover all your platforms, and it's not interpreted.
And to be honest, what you really haven't even scratched the surface of is that even if there was a language that covered all those platforms, you'd need to actually know all those platforms. Know the ins and outs of code signing on iOS or the Mac? Permissions on Android? 32 bit vs. 64 bit differences on Windows? The specifics of a bunch of different web browsers? If not, a language that covers all the platforms won't get you far anyway.
They did try and replace the file system around the time of the Intel switch. Got killed by licensing problems.
http://appleinsider.com/articl...
First, and impressive showing at WWDC, and now Google is nerfing their security model to be weaker than iOS's (iOS will notify when a new permission is required as part of an update when the application tries to make use of that permission.)
I think Windows Phone and iOS are both in a good position to start taking some market share from Google. If Google doesn't have a good Google/IO with Android, they may have officially dropped the ball on Android.
I have a 105mbps connection that frequently tests higher than that, so that doesn't sound right.
x86 is hardly any less proprietary than PowerPC or SPARC. You've got Intel and AMD at the helm. VIA walked the plank ages ago.
Apple ditched PowerPC because Apple's market share was so fucking low that the only company compiling for PowerPC was Adobe. The decision to drop PowerPC had to do with market share and cost, not the architecture itself.
Yes? No? I think this is a misunderstanding of the motivations behind Apple's PowerPC switch. (Source: I wrote PowerPC Mac apps at the time and was in the room at WWDC when Apple announced the switch.)
The PowerPC market was a bit wider than that. Microsoft had Office on PowerPC, Adobe had their suite, and there was a smattering of other apps.
At the time, the future of PowerPC had looked pretty bright. Microsoft's Xbox, Sony's PS3, and Nintendo's Wii were all switching to PowerPC. Within a span of several months, the community was looking at a majority of gaming hardware being PowerPC based. PowerPC was going to be in very high demand, which would mean great things for the Mac PowerPC platform. Far from "the only company compiling for PowerPC was Adobe", Microsoft was buying Power Mac G5 boxes for their dev kits and they were porting Windows to the PowerPC for the Xbox. And in the end, Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo combined shipped several hundred million units based on the PowerPC (With Nintendo still shipping the Wii U with PowerPC today.)
So why did Apple leave the PowerPC?
At the time, laptop sales were on the rise, but Apple's laptop CPUs were not designed by IBM, they were designed by Motorola. IBM's PowerPC G5 was suitable for the Xbox 360 and desktop machines, but it ran far too hot to go into laptops. This left Motorola with their G4 CPU. And let me tell you, Motorola probably had very smart people working for them, but their execution was incompetent. The G4 had a 133 mhz system bus (which was slow even for the time), and ran very hot (but still cooler than the G5), and worst of all, was much slower than Intel's Pentium M.
Meanwhile the Pentium M was doing very well. It was faster than the G4, more power efficient than the G4, and it actually had a modern chipset and bus. Switching to the Pentium M was a no brainer.
There was speculation that Apple was trying to get IBM to make a mobile G5, but they were never able to get the power consumption down. When Microsoft and Sony entered onto the scene, IBM's interest shifted to getting the PowerPC into larger form factors, and Apple just didn't ship enough units in laptops to balance out the R&D demand that Microsoft and Sony created.
Motorola in the meantime with the G4 just kept sucking. There was a new architecture that was basically a modern architecture for the G4 that did eventually end up shipping, but by then Apple was just done with PowerPC.
Intel provided a stability the AIM (Apple, IBM, Motorola) alliance just didn't provide, with a quality chip. PowerPC did end up scaling, but there simply wasn't the same demand for PowerPC machines at the time to make it scale well enough.
So were people not actually writing code for PowerPC? No, lot's of people were. I'd actually guess that after Apple left PowerPC, the number of PowerPC developers continued to rise. And with the Xbox 360, Sony PS3, and the Nintendo Wii/Wii U continuing to get new games, there are still a lot of PowerPC developers out there.
Ok, you guys are too slow, I RTFA and downloaded the iBook. So far, I am very much liking the SYNTAX, especially OBJECTS and FUNCTIONS, they even brought the LET keyword in from BASIC. SWIFT will make programming Apple products much easier for the C loving syntax crowd, from what I can see. Ahhh... what a breath of fresh air. Code snippet below of creating an object and exercising it. I feel bad for those that suffered through Objective-C.
To be honest, while this snippet is a few lines shorter, it's arguably more complicated than the corresponding Obj-C. It drops returning self in the init, and drops a few lines that would have had to go in to the class definition, but you gain a few unsightly keywords like "override", having to add the keyword "func" to every function, and you gain some more syntactical mess like "->".
It's not horrible, but I'm not sure this sample is more readable than Obj-C. As others have noted, Swift has the habit of taking the important parts of a function (like what it's named and what it returns, or what name a class is and what it subclasses) and shoving them off to entirely different sides of the function declaration.
From what I can tell (I just got out of WWDC and am reading through the docs) it can be bridged to, but not directly called. You can directly call Obj-C methods through the bridge, but not C methods. You'd have to bridge to the Obj-C methods which then call C methods.
I don't know what happens when that Obj-C method calls malloc and returns some memory for leak-tastic behavior. I still haven't read if or how Swift handles raw memory buffers.
I think HP killed it because HP.
First thing I'd do is disable networking on these devices.
Something like Google's Nest becomes mostly useless without networking.
At that point, why even buy the Google product?