TFA writer was referring to the difference of a shared-ride Uber Pool (where the other passenger was supposed to be dropped off first) as opposed to a private UberX.
Do you live in a major metro area? In New York City, where I live, black cars picking up and dropping off are frequently causing congestion in the cross-streets of central manhattan. Often, the cross streets have only one driving lane (parking is generally allowed on either curb) so a black car stopping to unload passengers blocks traffic. This is especially true with ride hail apps over traditional cabs, as the app driver will stop somewhere and wait for their passengers to emerge from whatever restaurant, bar or office.
The macOS package manager Homebrew (http://brew.sh) has some flaws but one of my favorite features is that it operates entirely within its own tree at/usr/local/Homebrew. Installing the package manager in the first place requires root to gain permission to write in/usr/local but after that, all operations are done at user permission levels.
For what it’s worth, Apple has had a policy where any developer has access to nearly all of the source code for their non-secret projects. I don’t know if that is true to this day, but it was definitely true as of a couple years ago.
Amusingly enough, Git already provides the solution to this problem cryptographically. Git revisions have a SHA1 hash. I just looked it up and the built-in Go package manager (invoked as `go get`) does not have any way to specify a revision hash or any other head marker of a Git repo. About a year ago, the language itself added some type of support for specific revisions (some dependency management they called "vendoring") but unless a specific hash is required for every dependency, you've still got the vulnerability.
As an engineering team leader, it completely baffles me that you could rely on a dependency management system that doesn't care about the version of the module its fetching. Obviously it's entirely possible (and for some projects, could be likely) that the HEAD of the Git repo is unstable, if not completely broken at any given time.
Personally, I’ve figured that Facebook wasn’t engaging for me for the same reason that I can’t sit and watch reality TV. Everything is out of context and hyped.
I got one free when I bought a Nest E thermostat last week. Two podcasts I listen to have advertisements for products that also would be incentivized with a free Google Home. I suspect tons of these "sold" numbers are free promotional bundles.
I'm right there with you, my friend. A good number of my friends are expats that have struggled against the American legal immigration system. A couple have even given up and tried to start over in other countries because of how onerous and stressful it is to try to become a permanent resident and then citizen here. One of my closest friends fled Iran and managed to get asylum here because she's a gay woman and was living under threat of imprisonment or forced gender reassignment in her country of birth. She has been working for years to make it possible for her parents to come live with her in the US, but the hostility that our current government is displaying to Iranian-born individuals makes it almost totally impossible now. Her parents were recently denied a tourist visa to visit their daughter as they had done in years past, with the US State Department interviewer immediately reject their application and referring to their daughter with homophobic slurs.
A lot of smart people unfortunately have very very wrong, closed-minded ideas about multiculturalism and humanism. We're seeing so much ugliness come out of the woodwork now that these sorts of xenophobic ideas are being embraced by the public face of our government.
Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight polling organization definitely didn't say trump had ZERO chance of winning. Looks like the lowest forecast point they had for Trump was around 10% at Aug 14, 2016. If memory serves, that was right after the Access Hollywood recording of Trump talking in misogynistic terms was published. That was the point when the leaders of the Republican party were distancing themselves from the candidate and Reince Preibus reportedly asked Trump to drop out of the race.
A huge reason for Colombia having experienced such huge problems with narcotics traffic is an aborted coup attempt a few generations ago. The aftermath saw the rise of a rebel group (FARC) that has persisted for more than 50 years. This guerrilla military group, living in the jungles, began using drug production and trafficking to fund themselves in the 80s and its been a problem ever since. Within the last several months there has been completely unprecedented progress in the demilitarization and breakup of the FARC rebel group. At this point, the drug trade can be effectively curtailed and will eventually dwindle.
Also, for what it's worth, the major cities of Colombia haven't been seriously affected by dangers of narcotics trade for a while now. By around 10 years ago, the major cartels had all been disbanded or seriously crippled. In more recent years I believe Colombia lost the top spot on the list of countries producing cocaine. Actually, I recently heard that the drug production spiked in the last year or two ahead of an anticipated peace agreement with the FARC rebels. This was because the FARC leadership wanted to go into negotiations with a stronger bargaining position and believed they could extort some concessions from the government in exchange for turning over huge quantities of narcotics to be destroyed.
California is not mired in debt. They've had a budget surplus for the last few years and it looks like the budget might dip back below the break even point. And this is not because of exorbitant public good spending costs, but rather declining tax receipts.
I also reject your assertion that regions of the state or country being multilingual is some sort of problem or a sign of decline. Most Spanish-speaking people in the country also speak English either as a primary or secondary language. Even recent immigrants that only speak Spanish will have children, and those children will grow up to be bilingual as they learn English is school. It's evident if you hang out in the historically Puerto-Rican or Dominican neighborhoods in my hometown of Brooklyn, NYC.
You're just flat-out wrong in characterizing any part of California, Arizona or the country at all becoming "like Mexico". You're looking at pockets of people originally from various countries across Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. These are people living in the United States. Living the life of someone in the United States. Interacting with the various strong cultures of the United States. Having children that are even more immersed in the popular cultures of the United States. My fiancé is originally from Colombia. We often eat arepas for breakfast and I like to listen to salsa in the car. Is our apartment a Colombian narco den? Hell no. She and I watch The West Wing, drink wine from Italy and go to jazz clubs in the west village. I've learned some interesting things about Colombian life and culture from her. Yet every day is a new lesson on American culture and values for her. She's still learning tons of new English words despite taking university english classes every day for the past two years.
My fiancé got a degree in journalism and had a job in a prominent newspaper in Colombia. For personal reasons she left Colombia and lived in a couple different countries before arriving in New York more than two years ago. She and I met completely by chance within a month of her arrival. She didn't speak any English (and my Spanish was pretty bad). She spent the last two years paying a grand a month for English language university courses while working below minimum wage in restaurants or coffee shops. All because she's not legally allowed to support herself with a real job.
Now my fiancé can speak English very well, but it's doubtful she could get a journalism job anytime soon despite writing being her passion. She's had to deal with a lot of hard luck and done a lot of hard work. This woman is liekly the smartest person I know, and she works harder and with fewer complaints than any of my American-born friends.
It takes a lot of guts and a lot of determination to grow up in a different culture uproot yourself and try to start a life in a place where you have no friends and can't speak the language. Doubly so when you are fighting against absurd legal restrictions that are designed to make your life more onerous. I came from a poor family and I've had some rough years. Sometimes due to my own mistakes and sometimes due to life just kicking me in the groin. But I know that I can never dismiss her or someone like her as being a mooch or a undeserving burden. There's nothing that makes me more worthy of a person to have success or wealth. It truly saddens me when I hear people speak in such a way that it's obvious they don't acknowledge how lucky they are. That their position in life has a lot more to do with a roll of the dice as far as where they were born than any strength of character they perceive in themselves.
Thanks for sharing your story. I'm inclined to believe that what people refer to as the American Dream should really be re-characterized as a shared human dream.
On my Mac, Xcode 8.3 is currently using 600MB of memory. That's with our main workspace loaded, with has a hierarchy of 13 separate Xcode projects providing a total of 150 targets (approx). Most of the code is C++, including several modules from boost in the workspace which makes the code intelligence plugins go nuts. Slack is currently using 1.5GB of memory, while I'm connected to 3 different teams. For some reason, that's across 5 helpers plus the main app. That's insane.
A couple months ago, the Slack team released an update with significantly curbed memory usage on macOS, perhaps other platforms. Evidently there were some nasty bugs in their code that would result in gigabytes of leaked or wasted memory after a few days of use. TFA was almost certainly written after this memory usage reduction patch, and of course the performance characteristics are still absolutely terrible.
This whole issue is amusing to me because with the past couple days there was another Slashdot headline, an attack piece bashing Apple for not adopting "Progressive Web Apps." The Slack app's awful performance is an example of why this desktop web app concept is evil.
In my day job, I'm the CTO at a small business that develops cross-platform desktop apps for configuring and hardening mobile devices. Aside from the necessity to use a USB driver to communicate with these devices, in the course of normal usage our application has to open 3 or 4 TCP connections simultaneously to different API services on the devices. We write very tight code because any overhead is multiplied when our users connect 20 or even 50 devices for simultaneous configuration. At full tilt, our applications will probably be running more threads than the Apache install serving you this site:P
I can't imagine how much we'd FUBAR the system if my team had started in Node.JS + Electron or whatever the hip web app framework is. We do the bulk of our interactive UI in a web view to make the cross-platform support easier and so a less expensive team can handle the UI. Experienced C++ engineers have their cost, but they're worth it when you need really great-performing software. As it is, will still use nowhere near as much memory or CPU time at idle as Slack. At load, our CPU usage can get crazy but our memory usage will almost never break 200MB. (I just double-checked. Idle, our desktop app alone uses 20MB and with the web view loaded it goes up to 70MB. Slack, with it's 5 little helpers is currently using 1.5GB on my Mac.) On top of that, our app is 30MB on disk and that includes shipping dependencies like OpenSSL, boost, and sqlite. Slack is more than 5 times that size, with the bulk of it being the Electron Helper Framework. Nice...
You undoubtedly were bitten by the ages old Windows 7 bug/feature where Windows Update has to reindex some idiotic database with dependency graphs for every update. It's one of the reasons why if you make a new install of Windows 7, it'll take something approaching 24 hours to download the update to windows update, the next update to windows update, the update to the reindexer, reindex, then then 500+ updates after SP1, etc...
Precisely why some states (such as my home New York) require mandatory bi-yearly emissions testing to stay on the road. We also have a mandatory tailpipe emissions test for heavy-duty road vehicles such as trucks. I've known people who have had to either sink serious money into their car or junk it and buy a slightly younger car because of problems with emissions control equipment. Sure it sucks when you personally get hit in the wallet because of it but it helps ensure that the worst-polluting vehicles stay off the road. So much so that a friend of mine with a 60s-era vehicle had to go get it registered as a "classic car" in Connecticut because there was no feasible way to register it in New York.
macOS has changed a great deal since Snow Leopard. UI-wise, Finder now supports tabbed windows, there's a whole new system-wide notification system (accessible through the hamburger at the top right of the menubar) and Spotlight search has been redesigned to make it easier to find things besides files.
Under the hood, the system now has a ton of new security features enforced by the kernel such as application sandboxes, protection of system files (SIP aka rootless) and signed binaries. The ApplicationKit programming framework that basically all Mac apps use for window and document management has been overhauled to be easier to use and enforce safer development practices. Objective-C has been supplanted by Swift for a great deal of app development and most new built-in applications are being written in it.
Apple has even started down the path of replacing their venerable (extremely old) filesystem HFS+ with a new modern filesystem called APFS. All iOS devices running iOS 10.3 are using APFS because the update migrated the existing data. By the end of the year, it's expected that all Macs will have the option to migrate to the new filesystem.
Evidently, Apple has realized they made a pretty big mistake with the trashcan Mac Pro design and they're going back to a modular, upgradable form factor.
All bets are off if it's not on the App Store anymore. I've seen getifaddrs() return data structures with blanked out MAC addresses on iOS devices. The sandbox enforced at the kernel level probably hooks the system calls that are being used for any network interface data. Way easier than making patches for each type of network stack API in iOS.
The "basic UNIX API" in iOS returns 00:00:00:00:00:00 for non-system apps. iOS has a kernel-level sandbox that lets them do cool things like prevent lowly app developers from circumventing user data protection policies.
Some posts really make me wish Slashdot had a "-1 factually incorrect" moderation. As a professional developer in iOS I can tell you that Uber's app is most definitely not saving the device UDID. For years, app developers were using the system-provided Unique Device Identifier (UDID) to track individual users, even though the identifier is really supposed to permanently relate to the device and isn't a good way to track a user who may sell or give away that device. Since iOS 6, Apple starting removing any software access to unique hardware identifiers such as UDID and MAC address by apps published on the App Store. Higher level APIs that would return said identifiers either provide randomized data that is specific to each app sandbox or are explicitly forbidden from use. Lower level APIs, such as network driver stuff will return 00:00:00:00:00:00 for MAC address and the like.
Occasionally, an app developer has found a new way to identify specific hardware models and Apple patches it. While Uber may have figured out another identifier or pattern of identifiers that happens to remain unique to a piece of hardware over its lifetime, I promise you they are not simply "saving device UDID."
Those lines you mention in terms of denying housing are legally defined, fortunately. Being black or gay is legally defined as being a member of a protected class. The logic is of course that you don't get to choose whether you are black or gay (or several other things) so therefore you should not be penalized and people should not be allowed to make judgements about you based on those qualities. Klansmen are not a protected class because you're completely able to choose whether or not you want to be a member of the Klu Klux Klan. On the other hand, if a business was refusing service to white people on the basis of their race then the same equal protection bits of the law can be brought into play.
He's just talking about WWDC. And it's a given that Apple will general focus on software over hardware at WWDC. The new Mac Pro preview a couple years ago was a fluke. Apple tries not to make this event a media frenzy over new products because they want it to be for the developers.
Slashdot Mirror
TFA writer was referring to the difference of a shared-ride Uber Pool (where the other passenger was supposed to be dropped off first) as opposed to a private UberX.
Do you live in a major metro area? In New York City, where I live, black cars picking up and dropping off are frequently causing congestion in the cross-streets of central manhattan. Often, the cross streets have only one driving lane (parking is generally allowed on either curb) so a black car stopping to unload passengers blocks traffic. This is especially true with ride hail apps over traditional cabs, as the app driver will stop somewhere and wait for their passengers to emerge from whatever restaurant, bar or office.
The macOS package manager Homebrew (http://brew.sh) has some flaws but one of my favorite features is that it operates entirely within its own tree at /usr/local/Homebrew. Installing the package manager in the first place requires root to gain permission to write in /usr/local but after that, all operations are done at user permission levels.
For what it’s worth, Apple has had a policy where any developer has access to nearly all of the source code for their non-secret projects. I don’t know if that is true to this day, but it was definitely true as of a couple years ago.
Amusingly enough, Git already provides the solution to this problem cryptographically. Git revisions have a SHA1 hash. I just looked it up and the built-in Go package manager (invoked as `go get`) does not have any way to specify a revision hash or any other head marker of a Git repo. About a year ago, the language itself added some type of support for specific revisions (some dependency management they called "vendoring") but unless a specific hash is required for every dependency, you've still got the vulnerability.
As an engineering team leader, it completely baffles me that you could rely on a dependency management system that doesn't care about the version of the module its fetching. Obviously it's entirely possible (and for some projects, could be likely) that the HEAD of the Git repo is unstable, if not completely broken at any given time.
Personally, I’ve figured that Facebook wasn’t engaging for me for the same reason that I can’t sit and watch reality TV. Everything is out of context and hyped.
I got one free when I bought a Nest E thermostat last week. Two podcasts I listen to have advertisements for products that also would be incentivized with a free Google Home. I suspect tons of these "sold" numbers are free promotional bundles.
I shop on Amazon and I was interested in the eclipse. I sure as hell didn't hear about a recall notice.
I'm right there with you, my friend. A good number of my friends are expats that have struggled against the American legal immigration system. A couple have even given up and tried to start over in other countries because of how onerous and stressful it is to try to become a permanent resident and then citizen here. One of my closest friends fled Iran and managed to get asylum here because she's a gay woman and was living under threat of imprisonment or forced gender reassignment in her country of birth. She has been working for years to make it possible for her parents to come live with her in the US, but the hostility that our current government is displaying to Iranian-born individuals makes it almost totally impossible now. Her parents were recently denied a tourist visa to visit their daughter as they had done in years past, with the US State Department interviewer immediately reject their application and referring to their daughter with homophobic slurs.
A lot of smart people unfortunately have very very wrong, closed-minded ideas about multiculturalism and humanism. We're seeing so much ugliness come out of the woodwork now that these sorts of xenophobic ideas are being embraced by the public face of our government.
Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight polling organization definitely didn't say trump had ZERO chance of winning . Looks like the lowest forecast point they had for Trump was around 10% at Aug 14, 2016. If memory serves, that was right after the Access Hollywood recording of Trump talking in misogynistic terms was published. That was the point when the leaders of the Republican party were distancing themselves from the candidate and Reince Preibus reportedly asked Trump to drop out of the race.
A huge reason for Colombia having experienced such huge problems with narcotics traffic is an aborted coup attempt a few generations ago. The aftermath saw the rise of a rebel group (FARC) that has persisted for more than 50 years. This guerrilla military group, living in the jungles, began using drug production and trafficking to fund themselves in the 80s and its been a problem ever since. Within the last several months there has been completely unprecedented progress in the demilitarization and breakup of the FARC rebel group. At this point, the drug trade can be effectively curtailed and will eventually dwindle.
Also, for what it's worth, the major cities of Colombia haven't been seriously affected by dangers of narcotics trade for a while now. By around 10 years ago, the major cartels had all been disbanded or seriously crippled. In more recent years I believe Colombia lost the top spot on the list of countries producing cocaine. Actually, I recently heard that the drug production spiked in the last year or two ahead of an anticipated peace agreement with the FARC rebels. This was because the FARC leadership wanted to go into negotiations with a stronger bargaining position and believed they could extort some concessions from the government in exchange for turning over huge quantities of narcotics to be destroyed.
California is not mired in debt. They've had a budget surplus for the last few years and it looks like the budget might dip back below the break even point. And this is not because of exorbitant public good spending costs, but rather declining tax receipts.
I also reject your assertion that regions of the state or country being multilingual is some sort of problem or a sign of decline. Most Spanish-speaking people in the country also speak English either as a primary or secondary language. Even recent immigrants that only speak Spanish will have children, and those children will grow up to be bilingual as they learn English is school. It's evident if you hang out in the historically Puerto-Rican or Dominican neighborhoods in my hometown of Brooklyn, NYC.
You're just flat-out wrong in characterizing any part of California, Arizona or the country at all becoming "like Mexico". You're looking at pockets of people originally from various countries across Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. These are people living in the United States. Living the life of someone in the United States. Interacting with the various strong cultures of the United States. Having children that are even more immersed in the popular cultures of the United States. My fiancé is originally from Colombia. We often eat arepas for breakfast and I like to listen to salsa in the car. Is our apartment a Colombian narco den? Hell no. She and I watch The West Wing, drink wine from Italy and go to jazz clubs in the west village. I've learned some interesting things about Colombian life and culture from her. Yet every day is a new lesson on American culture and values for her. She's still learning tons of new English words despite taking university english classes every day for the past two years.
My fiancé got a degree in journalism and had a job in a prominent newspaper in Colombia. For personal reasons she left Colombia and lived in a couple different countries before arriving in New York more than two years ago. She and I met completely by chance within a month of her arrival. She didn't speak any English (and my Spanish was pretty bad). She spent the last two years paying a grand a month for English language university courses while working below minimum wage in restaurants or coffee shops. All because she's not legally allowed to support herself with a real job.
Now my fiancé can speak English very well, but it's doubtful she could get a journalism job anytime soon despite writing being her passion. She's had to deal with a lot of hard luck and done a lot of hard work. This woman is liekly the smartest person I know, and she works harder and with fewer complaints than any of my American-born friends.
It takes a lot of guts and a lot of determination to grow up in a different culture uproot yourself and try to start a life in a place where you have no friends and can't speak the language. Doubly so when you are fighting against absurd legal restrictions that are designed to make your life more onerous. I came from a poor family and I've had some rough years. Sometimes due to my own mistakes and sometimes due to life just kicking me in the groin. But I know that I can never dismiss her or someone like her as being a mooch or a undeserving burden. There's nothing that makes me more worthy of a person to have success or wealth. It truly saddens me when I hear people speak in such a way that it's obvious they don't acknowledge how lucky they are. That their position in life has a lot more to do with a roll of the dice as far as where they were born than any strength of character they perceive in themselves.
Thanks for sharing your story. I'm inclined to believe that what people refer to as the American Dream should really be re-characterized as a shared human dream.
On my Mac, Xcode 8.3 is currently using 600MB of memory. That's with our main workspace loaded, with has a hierarchy of 13 separate Xcode projects providing a total of 150 targets (approx). Most of the code is C++, including several modules from boost in the workspace which makes the code intelligence plugins go nuts. Slack is currently using 1.5GB of memory, while I'm connected to 3 different teams. For some reason, that's across 5 helpers plus the main app. That's insane.
A couple months ago, the Slack team released an update with significantly curbed memory usage on macOS, perhaps other platforms. Evidently there were some nasty bugs in their code that would result in gigabytes of leaked or wasted memory after a few days of use. TFA was almost certainly written after this memory usage reduction patch, and of course the performance characteristics are still absolutely terrible.
:P
This whole issue is amusing to me because with the past couple days there was another Slashdot headline, an attack piece bashing Apple for not adopting "Progressive Web Apps." The Slack app's awful performance is an example of why this desktop web app concept is evil.
In my day job, I'm the CTO at a small business that develops cross-platform desktop apps for configuring and hardening mobile devices. Aside from the necessity to use a USB driver to communicate with these devices, in the course of normal usage our application has to open 3 or 4 TCP connections simultaneously to different API services on the devices. We write very tight code because any overhead is multiplied when our users connect 20 or even 50 devices for simultaneous configuration. At full tilt, our applications will probably be running more threads than the Apache install serving you this site
I can't imagine how much we'd FUBAR the system if my team had started in Node.JS + Electron or whatever the hip web app framework is. We do the bulk of our interactive UI in a web view to make the cross-platform support easier and so a less expensive team can handle the UI. Experienced C++ engineers have their cost, but they're worth it when you need really great-performing software. As it is, will still use nowhere near as much memory or CPU time at idle as Slack. At load, our CPU usage can get crazy but our memory usage will almost never break 200MB. (I just double-checked. Idle, our desktop app alone uses 20MB and with the web view loaded it goes up to 70MB. Slack, with it's 5 little helpers is currently using 1.5GB on my Mac.) On top of that, our app is 30MB on disk and that includes shipping dependencies like OpenSSL, boost, and sqlite. Slack is more than 5 times that size, with the bulk of it being the Electron Helper Framework. Nice...
You undoubtedly were bitten by the ages old Windows 7 bug/feature where Windows Update has to reindex some idiotic database with dependency graphs for every update. It's one of the reasons why if you make a new install of Windows 7, it'll take something approaching 24 hours to download the update to windows update, the next update to windows update, the update to the reindexer, reindex, then then 500+ updates after SP1, etc...
Precisely why some states (such as my home New York) require mandatory bi-yearly emissions testing to stay on the road. We also have a mandatory tailpipe emissions test for heavy-duty road vehicles such as trucks. I've known people who have had to either sink serious money into their car or junk it and buy a slightly younger car because of problems with emissions control equipment. Sure it sucks when you personally get hit in the wallet because of it but it helps ensure that the worst-polluting vehicles stay off the road. So much so that a friend of mine with a 60s-era vehicle had to go get it registered as a "classic car" in Connecticut because there was no feasible way to register it in New York.
macOS has changed a great deal since Snow Leopard. UI-wise, Finder now supports tabbed windows, there's a whole new system-wide notification system (accessible through the hamburger at the top right of the menubar) and Spotlight search has been redesigned to make it easier to find things besides files.
Under the hood, the system now has a ton of new security features enforced by the kernel such as application sandboxes, protection of system files (SIP aka rootless) and signed binaries. The ApplicationKit programming framework that basically all Mac apps use for window and document management has been overhauled to be easier to use and enforce safer development practices. Objective-C has been supplanted by Swift for a great deal of app development and most new built-in applications are being written in it.
Apple has even started down the path of replacing their venerable (extremely old) filesystem HFS+ with a new modern filesystem called APFS. All iOS devices running iOS 10.3 are using APFS because the update migrated the existing data. By the end of the year, it's expected that all Macs will have the option to migrate to the new filesystem.
I've got good news for you :) The Mac Pro Lives
Evidently, Apple has realized they made a pretty big mistake with the trashcan Mac Pro design and they're going back to a modular, upgradable form factor.
I suspect you don't mean 2005. The first iPhone was released in 2007.
All bets are off if it's not on the App Store anymore. I've seen getifaddrs() return data structures with blanked out MAC addresses on iOS devices. The sandbox enforced at the kernel level probably hooks the system calls that are being used for any network interface data. Way easier than making patches for each type of network stack API in iOS.
The "basic UNIX API" in iOS returns 00:00:00:00:00:00 for non-system apps. iOS has a kernel-level sandbox that lets them do cool things like prevent lowly app developers from circumventing user data protection policies.
Some posts really make me wish Slashdot had a "-1 factually incorrect" moderation. As a professional developer in iOS I can tell you that Uber's app is most definitely not saving the device UDID. For years, app developers were using the system-provided Unique Device Identifier (UDID) to track individual users, even though the identifier is really supposed to permanently relate to the device and isn't a good way to track a user who may sell or give away that device. Since iOS 6, Apple starting removing any software access to unique hardware identifiers such as UDID and MAC address by apps published on the App Store. Higher level APIs that would return said identifiers either provide randomized data that is specific to each app sandbox or are explicitly forbidden from use. Lower level APIs, such as network driver stuff will return 00:00:00:00:00:00 for MAC address and the like.
Occasionally, an app developer has found a new way to identify specific hardware models and Apple patches it. While Uber may have figured out another identifier or pattern of identifiers that happens to remain unique to a piece of hardware over its lifetime, I promise you they are not simply "saving device UDID."
Those lines you mention in terms of denying housing are legally defined, fortunately. Being black or gay is legally defined as being a member of a protected class. The logic is of course that you don't get to choose whether you are black or gay (or several other things) so therefore you should not be penalized and people should not be allowed to make judgements about you based on those qualities. Klansmen are not a protected class because you're completely able to choose whether or not you want to be a member of the Klu Klux Klan. On the other hand, if a business was refusing service to white people on the basis of their race then the same equal protection bits of the law can be brought into play.
He's just talking about WWDC. And it's a given that Apple will general focus on software over hardware at WWDC. The new Mac Pro preview a couple years ago was a fluke. Apple tries not to make this event a media frenzy over new products because they want it to be for the developers.