I understand exactly what happened; I just don't care.
And in turn, I don't care that you don't care. I do care, however, that you made a post that indicates and propogates misunderstanding about the matter.
"Adobe is angry that Apple won't start supporting an app that it's never supported on its other portable platforms".
Perhaps you should stop posting on the topic until you can bring yourself to care enough to make statements that are accurate.
And I still stand by my assertion that buying a iPhone for the explicit purpose of running Flash apps is a fundamentally bad decision.
We're not talking about Flash apps. We're talking about iPhone apps.
Your friends are poor researchers because the iPhone and iPod Touch have never supported Flash. That's why the iPad flap was always so funny to me. It could be summarized as "Adobe is angry that Apple won't start supporting an app that it's never supported on its other portable platforms".
You don't understand what just happened between Adobe and Apple, then.
Apple's said plenty of times that it won't support Flash as an interpreter/runtime on the iPhone. I think everybody understood that.
What happened here is that Adobe took them at their word, and did something totally different: they wrote a compiler which takes content written using CS5 and targets *Apple's* runtime. FLA file in, iPhone Binary out. Not SWF, iPhone Binary. Doesn't need the Flash Player to run. Apple wouldn't have had to do a damn thing to "support" these applications.
So Apple changed their license terms and banned apps from the store that were created by another toolchain to target Apple's runtime.
And, for good measure, they also banned apps that are made by targeting Apple's tool chain from another language. So that way, Adobe knows they can't decide to build a version of Flash that takes a FLA file and emits an XCode project that's ready to build.
Of course, that means you can't do something like write in Scheme that compiles to C, either. Or for that matter, generate any code, really. If you're going to target the iPhone, you'll write all your C, C++, and Objective C code by hand like a real man, buster, and you'll like it.
I don't see why it's so hard to grasp the iPhone is not, and was never intended to be, a general-purpose computing device.
If it weren't enough that the hardware is more or less as capable of as the general-purpose hardware of 10 years ago, we could use the words of their own marketing campaign:
"there's an app for that."
It presents as a small, mobile computer with a touchscreen. The development environment lets you write apps the do general computer-y things. The app in the store do general computer-y things, except ones that Apple doesn't want to accept, and the phone will even do those if you jailbreak it.
It walks like a duck and quacks like a duck; I think it's likely that we're dealing with a member of the family anatidae.
That's actually not such a bad speculation. Apple HAS switched platforms before, and a key to that capability is having the apps written in XCode.
True. And it's worth noting that this isn't just about the compiler/toolchain, Cocoa has to be the king of cross-platform application frameworks in terms of target history. It's run on 68xxx, x86, SPARC, PPC, and ARM. Asking people to stick with the API makes sense. Asking people to stick with Apple's toolchain for building the binary even makes some sense.
But this doesn't explain the "original" language requirements. Someone using ANSCAMobile's Corona or doing what this guy did with scheme isn't going to be causing problems if/when it comes time for a processor architecture change... because though they violate the "original" language terms of 3.3.1, they build using XCode.
I really can't think of many useful things that part of 3.3.1 accomplishes, actually.
As if the Microsoft monopoly wasn't bad enough in the 90's, now we get a modern-day Apple one that makes Microsoft pale in comparison.... what Microsoft actually did.
Apple has some market power, and this license change is sucky and genuinely anti-competitive, but it doesn't even hold a candle to the crap that Microsoft pulled or even the position that Microsoft had in the market during their history, and if you really believe that statement above, the journey from where you are now to even a glimmer of dim understanding is going to be a long, hard, and possibly untenable one for you.
I've seen plenty of cross compiled code that looks like gibberish and which going through the same tools, ends up with vastly inferior results.
If Apple's become so selective they're worried about inefficient code emitted into their tools, then they probably ought to be screening out inferior human code-generators as well as programs that generate code. It's ultimately the same problem.
As for the rest of your post, I think you're inferring way too much and extending Apple's policy beyond sensible reason. It's fun to ridicule in that way
Ridicule is the primary purpose with the philosophy/cognitive argument -- because "original" programming language clause in the revised license is ridiculous and arbitrary. I'll admit I'm stretching things a bit, but the argument isn't entirely academic. From a pragmatic standpoint, am I allowed to psuedo-code my app before I write out something C-ish? Seems like a I should be. But what if my psuedo-code is essentially Ruby or Python (a lot of people have observed that the syntax of Ruby and Python matches a lot of psuedo-code conventions) does that violate the agreement? If not, when the time comes for me to translate it to Objective C... should I have to do it all by hand?
And what I wrote on Theodore Gray's The Elements app? No, I don't think I'm inferring too much, not if it's really true that most of the assets for the project and the build are run by Mathematica. That's a pretty clear violation of the language of the agreement, as well as a strong example why upstream techniques can be valuable in creating an impressive app.
Actually, I read about this the other day. Rumor has it, the language requirements actually do have a purpose, that is making sure the apps work with the new profiled multitasking setups. Supposedly cross compiled apps don't behave in the same way
That's plausible (a little tenuous, but plausible) if you're talking about restrictions against using another toolchain to build your binary.
But section 3.3.1 also bans upstream tools that generate code consumed by Apple's toolchain. You can't write code in another language to write C/C++/ObjC code for you. Which means you're telling developers that they can't write tools that make their lives easier. What's the justification for that?
A complete rendering pass for the e-book requires running eight parallel Mathematica processes for a couple of days on the fastest available 8-core Macintosh. But it is a completely automated process, turning a terabyte of image archives into a finished, fully operational 1.9 gigabyte iPad app. This complete automation meant that we were able to experiment with dozens of different layouts and styles, concentrating on creativity, not the grunt work of manual file processing, yet still be able to see the finished book in action after each tweak.
Apparently it runs afoul if 3.3.1.
Frankly, it's not clear to me that every iPhone app doesn't run afoul of 3.3.1. Unless you actually think in C/C++/Objective C, every program is arguably first a set of cognitive abstractions in a human brain. Or, as this article puts it, with this restriction, "Apple may thus be the first company to bet the farm on Cartesian dualism."
The *biggest* problem I see with this change is that is that it goes beyond forbidding tools that do their own compiling/linking at the final stage of a build. That's still pretty weird and annoying, but it's not the most onerous thing, and hey, anybody who's building their own tool targeting the iPhone would probably be well served to re-use as much of the open source tools that do the actual build process behind the scenes as possible.
No, the horrible thing here is... you apparently can't even target C, Objective C, or C++ code as an intermediary and then have *Apple's* tools produce your final output. That last part is indefensible even under the cloak of quality assurance -- the only worry with this kind of arrangement is about the quality of the code that goes into the XCode toolchain, and it's as big a worry if programmers write it by hand than if a programmer writes a program to generate it.
Apple is essentially telling developers it doesn't want them to use or build tools that make them more productive. Read this article by James Long:
"this is what programming is all about. We shouldn't be thinking within the bounds of our current tools; we should be wondering how we can use our tools to construct new tools that serve us better. Apple's recent changes forbid this kind of thinking."
This is also something new. This is potentially Apple's very first genuinely anticompetitive market-power abuse. People have made all kinds of noise about iTMS and DRM and the iPod but there's always been a pretty high degree of choice, there's always been an escape hatch to use what you've bought from Apple in some other way. This action may be their very first real sin on this front, and it's pretty troubling.
I'm not saying this as some anti-fanboi of the stripe who thinks the moronic observation "Apple is a fashion company" is deeply insightful comment. If you look at my comment history you'll find I've defended Apple in a lot of discussions. I still think a lot of their products have real merits. But the part of this license change that stipulates the "original" language code has to be written in is just indefensible.
I'm not saying this as some antifanboi. If you go through my comment history, you can find all kinds of comments where I defend Apple's product decisions and call out morons who somehow think that the statement "Apple is a fashion company" is insightful. I like a lot of their products. I even like XCode and Objective C.
I only care a bit about the walled garden -- it's annoying, but it's not hard to circumvent, and the territory inside the walled garden looks like it'll match my needs for this device well enough. Android's pretty cool, though, we'll see if any of the offerings coming down the pipe look good too. And hey, I'm still considering getting a Kindle and hacking that to do what I want.:)
Seriously, though, I've been looking at e-readers for a while. I've been thinking I'd like something like one (long battery life, similar form factor) that also had some general computing capabilities, a touchscreen, and the option to attach an external keyboard. Something that could both replace the stack of books that rotates through my laptop bag and serve as a sketchpad for code, music ideas, random text/writing, and as a general web surfing device, something with significantly longer battery life than my laptop. Some netbooks are close, but I don't think a fold-out device is right for what I have in mind. The iPad fits the requirements pretty well. If it were $300, I might already have one.
I've kindof been on the fence about the iPad (yeah, it's kindof pricey, it's missing some nice peripheral features, and the app-lock might be inconvenient someday, but on the other hand, the featureset makes it seem like it'd be a good spot between e-reader and netbook for me, plus there's a cool array of audio/instrument apps that have grown up around Cocoa Touch over the last two years).
But now that Rupert Murdoch has endorsed it, I'm more interested in checking out alternatives.
Kids are going to have sex. That's the long and short of it.
If the stats are true, not all of them are. Some of them because they're not prepared, some of them because they read Slashdot.:)
I agree with the rest of your statement: it's far more responsible to tell kids about how everything works, what risks exist, how to mitigate them, and for the parents, what their values are and why. You can't get someone to ignore sex by trying to lock down information. Biology won't work that way, and those that choose to be sexually active will be better served and protected by having the information.
But I also don't think it's right to promote the idea of inevitability. Not everybody is going to have sex by the time they're 18, nor should they.
I think the bigger problem is that the balance between providing the necessary nuts-and-bolts education and avoiding the promotion of a culture of promiscuity is too subtle for a lot of people. If I were writing the rules, public education would include the biology of sex and conception as well as hygiene, but with a light warning, something along the lines of "We've taught you the mechanics, health risks, how to manage that, but we can't teach you how to manage the emotional and psychological issues that some people find go along with sex. Some people believe there are spiritual issues as well. Rather than 'just do it,' we encourage you to take a reflective approach, talk to people you trust, who you *know* care about you, who can help you navigate the ethical, personal, and social issues that come along with all this."
Of course, some people would find this to be scaremongering or indoctrination, and some people would worry it's not enough.
Remember: These are the best legislators we could get. Just imagine the ones that didn't make the cut.
I can pretty easily imagine that some of those who didn't make the primary or general electoral cut might well have been better than most of those we get.
These are probably the best we can get... not because there aren't better ones out there, but because of the way we talk and think about "hiring."
Also, you're required to read each article thoroughly and comment on them here. Possibly by law.
At least, that's the best explanation I can think of for the number of comments from people who aren't interested in an iPad and are sick of people talking about it.
Is this sarcasm/satire or just a self-fulfilling opinion?
Satire.
However, either I was a little too subtle, or this is genuinely what your run-of-the-mill knee-jerk Apple Hater sounds like, because at least one moderator who marked me a "troll" couldn't tell the difference either.
Who, exactly, did that? Not the Obama administration with this policy, that's for sure.
To put it in monkey terms, since that seems to discourse trajectory here, our RedWhiteBlue monkey has a *lot* of SkullBashers, in a variety shapes, sizes, and degrees of devastationizingness. In particular, the MegaWhackBat is incredibly devastationizing. Now, noticing that the other monkeys -- even some of the smaller monkeys with smaller arsenals -- have been looking to get their own MegaWhackBat as a safeguard against bein' pushed around or even devastationized by RedWhiteBlue monkey, ol' RWB has done some serious game-theory like thinkin'. This does not involve flashing peace signs or giving up any weapon, including his MegaWhackBat. What he does is he screeches to the other crazy monkeys "Here's the deal; if you don't have a MegaWhackBat, and you agree not to get a MegaWhackBat, I MonkeyPromise I won't use my MegaWhackBat on you, even if we get into some serious SkullBashing (though I will totally use my BigStrongBats). If you have a MegaWhackBat, or look a lot like you're trying to build one, even if you say you aren't, no promises, you might get MegaWhacked."
Now, the truly crazy monkeys, the ones that don't care if they get MegaWhacked or not, this isn't going to affect. The ones that already have their own MegaWhackBats it isn't going to affect either. The ones it *is* going to affect are the ones who were worried that if they didn't have a MegaWhackBat that RWB would hold his over their head. Now they don't have to worry about that, unless they don't trust us, and seriously, who wouldn't?
See, actually, I do want a device and not yet another computer. Why?
It doesn't matter why you think you want what Apple's selling -- we know what the real reason is (fanboism/you're a sheeple/you like shiny things/Apple's marketing).
It's certainly not because you've done any kind of actual analysis of your wants/needs and how the iPad might actually meet them. I know, because I've done a careful detailed analysis based on my totally objective criteria for a tablet-like product, and the iPad comes up short every time. Just like all Apple products do if you're smart enough to see things like I do.
Sriously, what is the iPad, anyway? Sure, it might be a better e-reader than a laptop or a small mobile device, but it doesn't have e-Ink, so it can't be used as an e-reader. Sure, it might be able to watch video, but it doesn't have a fullsize screen and if your going to have a screen smaller than a laptop you might as well watch it on your open Android phone. Sure, it might have apps for working with documents, but it doesn't have a keyboard or you have to use a bluetooth keyboard or something so it looses to any netbook or laptop for cryin out loud. And of course your limited to just whatever you can find on the App store, and who knows what that is this week what with Apple changing what apps are allowed.
The only people this would appeal to are those who want something like an e-reader but don't care about e-ink and want it to do media and light computing stuff too. I don't know about you but I already have a laptop, a Nook, and a smartphone for that, I don't want to carry around another device that just does all of that.
The iPad is clearly for stupid people, and the only way we're going to save them from themselves, is if we stand up to the hordes of fanbois that threaten to drown out us clear-headed thinkers here on slashdot and speak the truth t o power clearly.
Speaking of Blatant Stupidity
on
iPad Review
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· Score: 1
Let's review:
* You can't play flash games. * It's awkward to type while holding it with one hand. * There's no video chat.
Therefore, what?
"there's no good use for iPad."
I can think of a number of productive and enjoyable uses for my laptop beyond video chat (rarely use) and flash games (rarely play), and I don't frequently type while holding it with one hand. If you're among the people who not only don't have any uses for a computer beyond that but can't actually think of any, the stupidity of other people shouldn't be your biggest concern in life.
So it's an expensive, half-assed replacement for cheaper devices that do a better job in their respective areas.
Another probably otherwise intelligent geek, hamstrung by a brain that insists on strong transitivity, unambiguous verdicts, and of naturally, completely objective standards.
It's not a better eReader than a Kindle -- so it's worse than a Kindle. It's not a better phone than the Nexus One -- so it's worse than the Nexus One. It's not better for typing on the go than a Dell Inspiron -- so it's worse than Dell Inspiron. It's not cheaper than the Asus EEE -- so it's worse than the Asus EEE.
Of course...
It's arguably better for typing than a Kindle or a Nexus One. It's cheaper than a Nexus One or a Dell Inspiron. It's a better eReader than, well, everything on the list above except the Kindle.
I don't want to carry yet another gadget
Exactly. You could carry a Kindle for reading, your creative zen for media listening, and a laptop or netbook for typing.
When serving the process becomes the objective, you're...... just following "Best Practices," right?
It's really not that some things that end up in the conceptual bin labeled "Best Practices" are bad ideas. But there are two classes of people who are following/implementing them: those who understand the principles that gave rise to the rules, and those who don't. Becoming part of the former group generally takes a significant up-front investment. Becoming part of the later group doesn't. Meanwhile, the benefits of wielding recommended practices and rules/regulations are more or less the same for both groups; the extra benefits of really understanding the principles are marginal (except for the occasional entrepreneurs who might be genuinely trying to compete with established players on efficiency). Particularly if your relationship with the company you work for falls between careerist and sociopathic, you have no real incentives to understand principles behind any distilled rule. Wrote recommendation and compliance is enough.
If you want regulation that works, rather than specifying some cargo-cult set of instructions for "compliance," you have to figure out what your real goal is, reward its genuine achievement, and make it really hurt (if at all possible) when there's a failure.
In addition to the other links you're getting about Kindle Hacking, which doesn't seem to be too hard and opens up a world of Linux possibilities, there's also an official Kindle Development Kit.
There might be a truly locked down device out there, and it's annoying that more manufacturer's don't make their devices more open platforms, but I don't know how much there is to complain about, really. The bottom line is that for most people who actually care about how open their devices are, there's usually a way to get what they want, even if it isn't what they want out of the box.
classes, inheritence, abstraction, encapsulation, polymorphism, and decoupling.
It's possible the parent was (correctly) trying to say that a lot of the ActionScript features the GP mentioned actually weren't necessary to make JavaScript an OO language -- all of these things were (and are) quite possible in JS before ActionScript introduced various keyword-based mechanisms.
Yes, but this compilation is JIT as you point out. JIT is not the same thing as a compiled language.
While that's certainly a distinction, I don't think it takes much away from the larger point is that JavaScript as a language is pretty much running "fast enough" for most of the things Flash does, and in some cases competitively w/regards to speed.
Anyone who has worked in a particularly large codebase (1000+kloc) would not agree.
Given the origin of that phrase and its usage to illustrate the complete unfamiliarity the French upper class had understanding the issues facing the poorer classes, it's hard to imagine why the current POTUS would use it.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand exactly what happened; I just don't care.
And in turn, I don't care that you don't care. I do care, however, that you made a post that indicates and propogates misunderstanding about the matter.
"Adobe is angry that Apple won't start supporting an app that it's never supported on its other portable platforms".
Perhaps you should stop posting on the topic until you can bring yourself to care enough to make statements that are accurate.
And I still stand by my assertion that buying a iPhone for the explicit purpose of running Flash apps is a fundamentally bad decision.
We're not talking about Flash apps. We're talking about iPhone apps.
Your friends are poor researchers because the iPhone and iPod Touch have never supported Flash. That's why the iPad flap was always so funny to me. It could be summarized as "Adobe is angry that Apple won't start supporting an app that it's never supported on its other portable platforms".
You don't understand what just happened between Adobe and Apple, then.
Apple's said plenty of times that it won't support Flash as an interpreter/runtime on the iPhone. I think everybody understood that.
What happened here is that Adobe took them at their word, and did something totally different: they wrote a compiler which takes content written using CS5 and targets *Apple's* runtime. FLA file in, iPhone Binary out. Not SWF, iPhone Binary. Doesn't need the Flash Player to run. Apple wouldn't have had to do a damn thing to "support" these applications.
So Apple changed their license terms and banned apps from the store that were created by another toolchain to target Apple's runtime.
And, for good measure, they also banned apps that are made by targeting Apple's tool chain from another language. So that way, Adobe knows they can't decide to build a version of Flash that takes a FLA file and emits an XCode project that's ready to build.
Of course, that means you can't do something like write in Scheme that compiles to C, either. Or for that matter, generate any code, really. If you're going to target the iPhone, you'll write all your C, C++, and Objective C code by hand like a real man, buster, and you'll like it.
I don't see why it's so hard to grasp the iPhone is not, and was never intended to be, a general-purpose computing device.
If it weren't enough that the hardware is more or less as capable of as the general-purpose hardware of 10 years ago, we could use the words of their own marketing campaign:
"there's an app for that."
It presents as a small, mobile computer with a touchscreen. The development environment lets you write apps the do general computer-y things. The app in the store do general computer-y things, except ones that Apple doesn't want to accept, and the phone will even do those if you jailbreak it.
It walks like a duck and quacks like a duck; I think it's likely that we're dealing with a member of the family anatidae.
That's actually not such a bad speculation. Apple HAS switched platforms before, and a key to that capability is having the apps written in XCode.
True. And it's worth noting that this isn't just about the compiler/toolchain, Cocoa has to be the king of cross-platform application frameworks in terms of target history. It's run on 68xxx, x86, SPARC, PPC, and ARM. Asking people to stick with the API makes sense. Asking people to stick with Apple's toolchain for building the binary even makes some sense.
But this doesn't explain the "original" language requirements. Someone using ANSCAMobile's Corona or doing what this guy did with scheme isn't going to be causing problems if/when it comes time for a processor architecture change... because though they violate the "original" language terms of 3.3.1, they build using XCode.
I really can't think of many useful things that part of 3.3.1 accomplishes, actually.
... and its at least soft real-time support, we actually got pretty close here.
As if the Microsoft monopoly wasn't bad enough in the 90's, now we get a modern-day Apple one that makes Microsoft pale in comparison. ... what Microsoft actually did.
Apple has some market power, and this license change is sucky and genuinely anti-competitive, but it doesn't even hold a candle to the crap that Microsoft pulled or even the position that Microsoft had in the market during their history, and if you really believe that statement above, the journey from where you are now to even a glimmer of dim understanding is going to be a long, hard, and possibly untenable one for you.
I've seen plenty of cross compiled code that looks like gibberish and which going through the same tools, ends up with vastly inferior results.
If Apple's become so selective they're worried about inefficient code emitted into their tools, then they probably ought to be screening out inferior human code-generators as well as programs that generate code. It's ultimately the same problem.
As for the rest of your post, I think you're inferring way too much and extending Apple's policy beyond sensible reason. It's fun to ridicule in that way
Ridicule is the primary purpose with the philosophy/cognitive argument -- because "original" programming language clause in the revised license is ridiculous and arbitrary. I'll admit I'm stretching things a bit, but the argument isn't entirely academic. From a pragmatic standpoint, am I allowed to psuedo-code my app before I write out something C-ish? Seems like a I should be. But what if my psuedo-code is essentially Ruby or Python (a lot of people have observed that the syntax of Ruby and Python matches a lot of psuedo-code conventions) does that violate the agreement? If not, when the time comes for me to translate it to Objective C... should I have to do it all by hand?
And what I wrote on Theodore Gray's The Elements app? No, I don't think I'm inferring too much, not if it's really true that most of the assets for the project and the build are run by Mathematica. That's a pretty clear violation of the language of the agreement, as well as a strong example why upstream techniques can be valuable in creating an impressive app.
Actually, I read about this the other day. Rumor has it, the language requirements actually do have a purpose, that is making sure the apps work with the new profiled multitasking setups. Supposedly cross compiled apps don't behave in the same way
That's plausible (a little tenuous, but plausible) if you're talking about restrictions against using another toolchain to build your binary.
But section 3.3.1 also bans upstream tools that generate code consumed by Apple's toolchain. You can't write code in another language to write C/C++/ObjC code for you. Which means you're telling developers that they can't write tools that make their lives easier. What's the justification for that?
Here's an already popular iPad app essentially written using Mathematica:
Apparently it runs afoul if 3.3.1.
Frankly, it's not clear to me that every iPhone app doesn't run afoul of 3.3.1. Unless you actually think in C/C++/Objective C, every program is arguably first a set of cognitive abstractions in a human brain. Or, as this article puts it, with this restriction, "Apple may thus be the first company to bet the farm on Cartesian dualism."
There are other problems with Apple's approach.
The *biggest* problem I see with this change is that is that it goes beyond forbidding tools that do their own compiling/linking at the final stage of a build. That's still pretty weird and annoying, but it's not the most onerous thing, and hey, anybody who's building their own tool targeting the iPhone would probably be well served to re-use as much of the open source tools that do the actual build process behind the scenes as possible.
No, the horrible thing here is... you apparently can't even target C, Objective C, or C++ code as an intermediary and then have *Apple's* tools produce your final output. That last part is indefensible even under the cloak of quality assurance -- the only worry with this kind of arrangement is about the quality of the code that goes into the XCode toolchain, and it's as big a worry if programmers write it by hand than if a programmer writes a program to generate it.
Apple is essentially telling developers it doesn't want them to use or build tools that make them more productive. Read this article by James Long:
http://jlongster.com/blog/2010/04/09/scheme-dead-iphone/
Particularly this quote:
This is also something new. This is potentially Apple's very first genuinely anticompetitive market-power abuse. People have made all kinds of noise about iTMS and DRM and the iPod but there's always been a pretty high degree of choice, there's always been an escape hatch to use what you've bought from Apple in some other way. This action may be their very first real sin on this front, and it's pretty troubling.
I'm not saying this as some anti-fanboi of the stripe who thinks the moronic observation "Apple is a fashion company" is deeply insightful comment. If you look at my comment history you'll find I've defended Apple in a lot of discussions. I still think a lot of their products have real merits. But the part of this license change that stipulates the "original" language code has to be written in is just indefensible.
I'm not saying this as some antifanboi. If you go through my comment history, you can find all kinds of comments where I defend Apple's product decisions and call out morons who somehow think that the statement "Apple is a fashion company" is insightful. I like a lot of their products. I even like XCode and Objective C.
"A giant hexagon encircling its north pole?"
Well, that sounds familiar:
"The team discovers a surface anomaly near the north pole of the planet, where a hexagonal hole appears for a brief interval every day. "
I for one welcome... er, wonder where our Markovian Overlords went.
Just sit tight.
Pretty much my strategy at the moment.
I only care a bit about the walled garden -- it's annoying, but it's not hard to circumvent, and the territory inside the walled garden looks like it'll match my needs for this device well enough. Android's pretty cool, though, we'll see if any of the offerings coming down the pipe look good too. And hey, I'm still considering getting a Kindle and hacking that to do what I want. :)
You don't know about 2nd breakfast? ;)
Seriously, though, I've been looking at e-readers for a while. I've been thinking I'd like something like one (long battery life, similar form factor) that also had some general computing capabilities, a touchscreen, and the option to attach an external keyboard. Something that could both replace the stack of books that rotates through my laptop bag and serve as a sketchpad for code, music ideas, random text/writing, and as a general web surfing device, something with significantly longer battery life than my laptop. Some netbooks are close, but I don't think a fold-out device is right for what I have in mind. The iPad fits the requirements pretty well. If it were $300, I might already have one.
I've kindof been on the fence about the iPad (yeah, it's kindof pricey, it's missing some nice peripheral features, and the app-lock might be inconvenient someday, but on the other hand, the featureset makes it seem like it'd be a good spot between e-reader and netbook for me, plus there's a cool array of audio/instrument apps that have grown up around Cocoa Touch over the last two years).
But now that Rupert Murdoch has endorsed it, I'm more interested in checking out alternatives.
Kids are going to have sex. That's the long and short of it.
If the stats are true, not all of them are. Some of them because they're not prepared, some of them because they read Slashdot. :)
I agree with the rest of your statement: it's far more responsible to tell kids about how everything works, what risks exist, how to mitigate them, and for the parents, what their values are and why. You can't get someone to ignore sex by trying to lock down information. Biology won't work that way, and those that choose to be sexually active will be better served and protected by having the information.
But I also don't think it's right to promote the idea of inevitability. Not everybody is going to have sex by the time they're 18, nor should they.
I think the bigger problem is that the balance between providing the necessary nuts-and-bolts education and avoiding the promotion of a culture of promiscuity is too subtle for a lot of people. If I were writing the rules, public education would include the biology of sex and conception as well as hygiene, but with a light warning, something along the lines of "We've taught you the mechanics, health risks, how to manage that, but we can't teach you how to manage the emotional and psychological issues that some people find go along with sex. Some people believe there are spiritual issues as well. Rather than 'just do it,' we encourage you to take a reflective approach, talk to people you trust, who you *know* care about you, who can help you navigate the ethical, personal, and social issues that come along with all this."
Of course, some people would find this to be scaremongering or indoctrination, and some people would worry it's not enough.
Remember: These are the best legislators we could get. Just imagine the ones that didn't make the cut.
I can pretty easily imagine that some of those who didn't make the primary or general electoral cut might well have been better than most of those we get.
These are probably the best we can get... not because there aren't better ones out there, but because of the way we talk and think about "hiring."
No.
Also, you're required to read each article thoroughly and comment on them here. Possibly by law.
At least, that's the best explanation I can think of for the number of comments from people who aren't interested in an iPad and are sick of people talking about it.
Is this sarcasm/satire or just a self-fulfilling opinion?
Satire.
However, either I was a little too subtle, or this is genuinely what your run-of-the-mill knee-jerk Apple Hater sounds like, because at least one moderator who marked me a "troll" couldn't tell the difference either.
A monkey who is throwing up a peace sign
Who, exactly, did that? Not the Obama administration with this policy, that's for sure.
To put it in monkey terms, since that seems to discourse trajectory here, our RedWhiteBlue monkey has a *lot* of SkullBashers, in a variety shapes, sizes, and degrees of devastationizingness. In particular, the MegaWhackBat is incredibly devastationizing. Now, noticing that the other monkeys -- even some of the smaller monkeys with smaller arsenals -- have been looking to get their own MegaWhackBat as a safeguard against bein' pushed around or even devastationized by RedWhiteBlue monkey, ol' RWB has done some serious game-theory like thinkin'. This does not involve flashing peace signs or giving up any weapon, including his MegaWhackBat. What he does is he screeches to the other crazy monkeys "Here's the deal; if you don't have a MegaWhackBat, and you agree not to get a MegaWhackBat, I MonkeyPromise I won't use my MegaWhackBat on you, even if we get into some serious SkullBashing (though I will totally use my BigStrongBats). If you have a MegaWhackBat, or look a lot like you're trying to build one, even if you say you aren't, no promises, you might get MegaWhacked."
Now, the truly crazy monkeys, the ones that don't care if they get MegaWhacked or not, this isn't going to affect. The ones that already have their own MegaWhackBats it isn't going to affect either. The ones it *is* going to affect are the ones who were worried that if they didn't have a MegaWhackBat that RWB would hold his over their head. Now they don't have to worry about that, unless they don't trust us, and seriously, who wouldn't?
See, actually, I do want a device and not yet another computer. Why?
It doesn't matter why you think you want what Apple's selling -- we know what the real reason is (fanboism/you're a sheeple/you like shiny things/Apple's marketing).
It's certainly not because you've done any kind of actual analysis of your wants/needs and how the iPad might actually meet them. I know, because I've done a careful detailed analysis based on my totally objective criteria for a tablet-like product, and the iPad comes up short every time. Just like all Apple products do if you're smart enough to see things like I do.
Sriously, what is the iPad, anyway? Sure, it might be a better e-reader than a laptop or a small mobile device, but it doesn't have e-Ink, so it can't be used as an e-reader. Sure, it might be able to watch video, but it doesn't have a fullsize screen and if your going to have a screen smaller than a laptop you might as well watch it on your open Android phone. Sure, it might have apps for working with documents, but it doesn't have a keyboard or you have to use a bluetooth keyboard or something so it looses to any netbook or laptop for cryin out loud. And of course your limited to just whatever you can find on the App store, and who knows what that is this week what with Apple changing what apps are allowed.
The only people this would appeal to are those who want something like an e-reader but don't care about e-ink and want it to do media and light computing stuff too. I don't know about you but I already have a laptop, a Nook, and a smartphone for that, I don't want to carry around another device that just does all of that.
The iPad is clearly for stupid people, and the only way we're going to save them from themselves, is if we stand up to the hordes of fanbois that threaten to drown out us clear-headed thinkers here on slashdot and speak the truth t o power clearly.
Let's review:
* You can't play flash games.
* It's awkward to type while holding it with one hand.
* There's no video chat.
Therefore, what?
"there's no good use for iPad."
I can think of a number of productive and enjoyable uses for my laptop beyond video chat (rarely use) and flash games (rarely play), and I don't frequently type while holding it with one hand. If you're among the people who not only don't have any uses for a computer beyond that but can't actually think of any, the stupidity of other people shouldn't be your biggest concern in life.
So it's an expensive, half-assed replacement for cheaper devices that do a better job in their respective areas.
Another probably otherwise intelligent geek, hamstrung by a brain that insists on strong transitivity, unambiguous verdicts, and of naturally, completely objective standards.
It's not a better eReader than a Kindle -- so it's worse than a Kindle.
It's not a better phone than the Nexus One -- so it's worse than the Nexus One.
It's not better for typing on the go than a Dell Inspiron -- so it's worse than Dell Inspiron.
It's not cheaper than the Asus EEE -- so it's worse than the Asus EEE.
Of course...
It's arguably better for typing than a Kindle or a Nexus One.
It's cheaper than a Nexus One or a Dell Inspiron.
It's a better eReader than, well, everything on the list above except the Kindle.
I don't want to carry yet another gadget
Exactly. You could carry a Kindle for reading, your creative zen for media listening, and a laptop or netbook for typing.
Or you could carry an iPad.
When serving the process becomes the objective, you're... ... just following "Best Practices," right?
It's really not that some things that end up in the conceptual bin labeled "Best Practices" are bad ideas. But there are two classes of people who are following/implementing them: those who understand the principles that gave rise to the rules, and those who don't. Becoming part of the former group generally takes a significant up-front investment. Becoming part of the later group doesn't. Meanwhile, the benefits of wielding recommended practices and rules/regulations are more or less the same for both groups; the extra benefits of really understanding the principles are marginal (except for the occasional entrepreneurs who might be genuinely trying to compete with established players on efficiency). Particularly if your relationship with the company you work for falls between careerist and sociopathic, you have no real incentives to understand principles behind any distilled rule. Wrote recommendation and compliance is enough.
If you want regulation that works, rather than specifying some cargo-cult set of instructions for "compliance," you have to figure out what your real goal is, reward its genuine achievement, and make it really hurt (if at all possible) when there's a failure.
In addition to the other links you're getting about Kindle Hacking, which doesn't seem to be too hard and opens up a world of Linux possibilities, there's also an official Kindle Development Kit.
There might be a truly locked down device out there, and it's annoying that more manufacturer's don't make their devices more open platforms, but I don't know how much there is to complain about, really. The bottom line is that for most people who actually care about how open their devices are, there's usually a way to get what they want, even if it isn't what they want out of the box.
classes, inheritence, abstraction, encapsulation, polymorphism, and decoupling.
It's possible the parent was (correctly) trying to say that a lot of the ActionScript features the GP mentioned actually weren't necessary to make JavaScript an OO language -- all of these things were (and are) quite possible in JS before ActionScript introduced various keyword-based mechanisms.
Yes, but this compilation is JIT as you point out. JIT is not the same thing as a compiled language.
While that's certainly a distinction, I don't think it takes much away from the larger point is that JavaScript as a language is pretty much running "fast enough" for most of the things Flash does, and in some cases competitively w/regards to speed.
Anyone who has worked in a particularly large codebase (1000+kloc) would not agree.
I am a counterexample. So is Steve Yegge, who seems about as familiar with large codebases and a certain popular statically typed language as anybody, and has made a great observation about how statically typed languages (particularly the common manifestly typed variety) might actually drive code size as much as help you work with it.
I heard was "Let them eat cake"
Given the origin of that phrase and its usage to illustrate the complete unfamiliarity the French upper class had understanding the issues facing the poorer classes, it's hard to imagine why the current POTUS would use it.