No, GDC is purely a "C with block extensions" API. The blocks are essentially anonymous methods you can pass directly in to functions. It's integrated at a much lower level than Objective-C, which is only used for the higher-level application framework in MacOS.
Apple open-sourced the GDC API with this announcement, block extensions to C with LLVM implementation last week, and the OS support necessary as part of the xnu kernel Darwin release for 10.6.
pthreads and fork/exec are the equivalent of assembly language for parallelism compared to GCD. The API makes it easy to create anonymous methods that can be parallelized, have dependencies, be put in serial or parallel queues, etc. Then the OS implementation can prioritize at a finely-grained level based on dynamic resource availability, relative process priority, etc., on a system-wide basis. (The OS implementation of GCD was already open-sourced as part of 10.6's Darwin xnu kernel release last week.)
It's pretty nifty stuff. And it's good to see Apple continue MacOS X's tradition of openness and support of open source.
You'd have great points if everything you said wasn't completely wrong. Yes, some Apple hardware have had issues. But many surveys and independent entities (such as Consumer Reports) consistently rate Apple very high in quality. Apple doesn't "use sweatshops". They were accused of that and exonerated. Apple is ahead of everyone in the elimination of pollutants and the recyclability of their products.
So quit whining. Go back to calling Apple more expensive (than cheap knockoffs) and complaining that the App Store doesn't allow porn and stop making stuff up.
Not sure about FIFA, but Madden '10 is now for sale for the iPhone, so I suspect it will work just fine for that sort of game. Also available is Civilization Revolution, SimCity 3K, and other major titles. Assassin's Creed was demoed at today's event and the Command and Conquer franchise is coming over, as well as NBA Live. The myth that all the games for the iPhone are homebrew, low-budget Flash-like one-offs is long gone.
With over 50M devices sold to date that can play iPhone games (iPhone + iPod Touch), they've now got an installed base that's around 1/2 of the Nintendo DS+DSi+Lite. That's impossible for any game manufacturer to ignore.
It's true that the signal-to-noise (where noise is "something I don't want") is a problem. That's why they added recommendations for games based on past purchases today, and a new "top games by revenue" (rather than just pure #'s) to the store.
What are you honestly going to use the extra "power" for? Wouldn't you rather just have something that does its thing really well? And has a gazillion apps available? If you're going to go purely on features for the dollar instead of "brand", you're probably going to buy a SanDisk anyway. Microsoft is in the worst of both worlds here-- they can't compete with Apple in apps, games, usability, or utility, and they can't compete with the smaller Asian manufactures on pure feature checklist length. Unless you put a LOT of extra value in the "Microsoft" label why buy a Zune? (Which is probably why market share goes roughly 74% Apple, 18% "Other", 7% SanDisk, 1% Microsoft.)
The Congressional Research Service puts the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at $3 trillion. Obama has been in office for 6 months, and we now have a "projected" deficit of $9 trillion, last I heard.
Three times the debt, in 1/12 the time. There's some change you can believe in!
The deficit is the difference between revenue and expenditures each year. The debt is the total accumulated deficits over time.
The Congressional Budget Office projects that if nothing changes (ha!) over the next 10 years, in 10 years the DEBT will be almost $10T. That number includes the wars, tax cuts, prescription drug benefits, and the first bailout under Bush, as well as the second bank bailout under Obama and the stimulus. Which is big. But not catastrophic. It's more or less a return to Reagan-era budgets.
More relevant to the article at hand, trade deficits (exported goods vs imported goods) have shrunk dramatically this year as the dollar weakened and the cost of domestic labor shrank.
What matters is how many times you have to open your wallet to get *paid* releases
You have a strange definition of "have to". Don't upgrade if you don't think it's worth it! Just because Apple puts it up for sale it doesn't mean you have to buy it. Especially considering that Apple continues to offer security patches and support for the previous version of the OS, upgrading every other version seems pretty reasonable.
I suspect this is also why I've seen Macs disappear from Penn State's computer labs. You can still find some, but it used to be a 50-50 PC-to-Mac mix and now the Macs are rare.
I suspect it's due to an IT department with a platform bias. Most universities have seen a vast increase in Macintosh market share in the last 5 years. They're probably not even paying per-seat for the OS upgrades anyway.
Which is one reason the US Department of Defense bans all thumb drives from all DOD computers, and many large corporations these days have rules requiring the use of company-issued USB drives.
There is a difference between being able to repel a targeted attack against your particular machine and the vulnerabilities in an OS that would allow something to propagate in the wild. Macs often lose pwn2own which only tests for the first case-- often because of unpatched buffer overflows in open source utilities where Apple hasn't kept versions up to date with the latest. The Mac has many features that make it less vulnerable to the latter case, though, and in the rare cases where there has been malware it has required the user to explicitly download, run, and type their password in order to do anything.
Android is a platform that give much more, and more meaningful, freedoms to app developers.
Freedom? Yes. Friendliness? Not that I've seen, and you haven't cited a single piece of evidence towards "friendliness", just "freedom".
It's really, really easy to get started with iPhone development. You pay Apple a small fee and get access to piles and piles of sample code, great documentation, a mature API, and you even get 2 support incidents in which you get to interact with a real Apple developer for your money. And now there's an ecosystem of developer forums, third-party libraries, articles, server/ad services, marketing support... it's actually a pretty friendly experience. It's true that Apple gets veto power, but even then the rejection letter is friendly:)
I'm one of those crazy ones who always installs the.0 release. (I also back up, which is something most computer users don't do, either, so my risk profile is still probably better than average.) Most of the time for vast majority of people the upgrades go fine. There are always a few problems and the people experiencing those problems jump on the nearest message board and you hear a lot of noise about it. The millions who don't have problems don't, and you don't hear about them.
Would I install 10.6.0 on a mission-critical, high-uptime machine? No, definitely not-- there's no immediate business justification for it yet. (Wait until more 64-bit and massively parallel software takes advantage of the new APIs.) My home machine, though, is for my own learning and fun, and it's definitely worth it for me there. I can always restore if things go terribly awry.
You seem to have a significant mis-understanding of iPhone software. The iPhone is based on a C kernel with an Objective-C interface/library layer. Both of those languages are compiled languages. All third party "native" apps for the iPhone are compiled Objective-C apps. The compiler is gcc, and the target is either x86 for the emulator or ARM for the iPhone. And Objective-C on the iPhone allows the direct linking of C or C++ libraries.
It's true that Apple locks down their App Store, but that's a separate business decision, not a technological one.
Scenario #2 sounds more like Apple to me. Heck, if you want to recompile the MacOS X kernel and install your version on your laptop you are free to. Apple popularized USB for hardware interconnect. Apple publishes Windows drivers to make it easier to run that OS on its hardware, and linux is fully supported as well. And there is no application signing on the desktop (although personally, I think there should be. Not that it should have to be Apple or that you should be required to buy from a particular store, but just a signature that states "Here's who distributed this, here's the certificate authority that will vouch for my identity, and the bits you're getting are the bits I shipped.")
My camera has been able to do this for a few years. People's faces have white boxes around them that move with the scene.
Admittedly this brings it to a whole new level, being almost an augmented reality API. And that's where the power here lies... putting a general-purpose computing device capable of it into people's hands and an SDK that makes it easy into developers hands will make it take off. And hey, Apple is finally starting to open up the docking port (which has video-out) to software tie-in so maybe a HUD isn't far off either.
By the way, just how does it work out when someone supports Euthanasia and Abortion but is against the death penalty? "The unborn and the old are ok to kill but the killers and the rapists aren't."???
That's an easy one.
You are allowed to do with your own body as you see fit, but the Government is not allowed to do anything to your body.
the creed that only the strong survive and if you are too weak to survive we shouldn't help you do so
No!
The latter is the straw-man interpretation of fundamentalists, not something that Darwin ever asserted. In fact, recent studies have shown that being "fitter" often means being more socially adept than your genetic competitors (sorry, Slashdot). "Alms for the poor" and similar philosophies can easily fit within the definition of one genetic group being fitter to survive. And certainly being able to structure a fighting force is "fitter" than every man for themselves.
It was actually a debate between Darwin and his associates whether the phrase "survival of the fittest" should even be used because some people even then insisted on attacking it with the same straw-man argument.
Which of the claims in particular are you referring to? I assume you read them if you're going to claim this patent shouldn't have been granted.
As is normal in patent submissions of slashdot article, the summary has only a vague relationship to the actual claims, and its a patents claims (not its summary or description) that are what must be defended in court.
My reading of the claims seems to indicate a particular arrangement of tags with specific semantic meaning, not simply the encoding of any word processing into XML.
This is simply not true. Double-blind studies which can differentiate "placebo" effects have shown significant efficacy toward both depression and anxiety for many of the SSRIs. That's not to say the "placebo" effect isn't real or doesn't work. It is, in fact, used as part of the cognitive behavioral therapy (although not termed as such) and is also a part of any healthy person's normal mode of thought.
And you can even buy "cebocaps" at any pharmacy. They even have different colors in case one works better!:)
Crazy people are everywhere. Stop giving them attention.
This attitude is unhelpful.
The symptoms this man describes sound similar to anxiety disorder with agoraphobia. It's not uncommon, and is very treatable with cognitive behavioral therapy and an anti-anxiety medication such as an SSRI. Sufferers of this have physiological symptoms which are subjectively-- and sometimes objectively-- indistinguishable from anything from allergies to more serious medical conditions. The body creates a feedback loop in the endocrine system and the mind assigns causative correlations with anything that was happening at the time. It can result in anything from hot flashes to stuffy noses to a full-on asthma attack.
Calling such a condition "crazy" just exacerbates it, and attention to it is something that has to be managed carefully to try to break the feedback loops.
Disclaimer: I'm not a psychotherapist, just a patient.
Single-Stage To Orbit requires a mass-to-weight ratio in the range of 10-25. That is more than any current air or spacecraft, but recent advances in propellant storage and materials science has made it possible. Some existing rockets have been calculated to have a 10+ mass-to-weight first stage, but no one's ever tried to design the whole rocket around it. But there are certain economies of scale when you eliminate the staging as well... the rockets themselves are already heat-shielded and can lower the re-entry speeds as well. You only need 1 set of nozzles and no staging hardware. And the whole craft can be seamless and aerodynamic, allowing some steering and gliding ability without the weight of parachutes or wings.
The craft that inspired the recent SSTO designs is the DC-X, a sub-orbital prototype that was supposed to be followed by an orbital DC-Y before funding was cancelled (and the craft crashed and burned on its last flight).
IMHO, even if you put one of these things on top of an expendable booster to get it into orbit, having a partially fueled vertical lander in LEO suddenly opens up the solar system to some exciting possibilities.
Speaking as someone who was writing C++ for 4-5 years *before* ANSI came up with the original spec, that's not really the part I'm worried about. Judging by past experience, everyone except Microsoft will probably come up with a "good enough" compiler relatively quickly, and there will be a series of #defines that will allow one to simulate compliance on Microsoft compilers.
"White" LEDs today use phosphors just like this one does, but the phosphors are inefficient. That's why white LEDs aren't the 10x gain in efficiency over CFBs you'd expect from LEDs. The problem with non-phosphorescent white LED lights is that green LEDs are extremely hard to make, and without them you can't combine a red-green-blue triplet to get something approximating white light. Even then the energy bands would be very narrow and some colors may look very strange under it.
Anyway, this is basically a new manufacturing technique that has the potential for decreasing chemical use and increasing efficiency, not a new way of producing white light.
Particle interactions with more energy than LHC can produce happen in the Earth's atmosphere every day. But outside of a carefully controlled environment with extensive sensor equipment, they can't be studied. The LHC is not about creating energies never before seen on Earth-- it won't do that. It's about doing so in an extremely controlled manner than can be measured and investigated.
Can you actually cite some numbers here? How much money is being made in the FOSS world vs. in the MS Windows third-party software world? If my livelihood depended on it as an indie developer, I'd probably not pick either, but rather target the iPhone or some other niche where I could get better distribution and where advertising dollars might go further.
Slashdot Mirror
No, GDC is purely a "C with block extensions" API. The blocks are essentially anonymous methods you can pass directly in to functions. It's integrated at a much lower level than Objective-C, which is only used for the higher-level application framework in MacOS.
Apple open-sourced the GDC API with this announcement, block extensions to C with LLVM implementation last week, and the OS support necessary as part of the xnu kernel Darwin release for 10.6.
pthreads and fork/exec are the equivalent of assembly language for parallelism compared to GCD. The API makes it easy to create anonymous methods that can be parallelized, have dependencies, be put in serial or parallel queues, etc. Then the OS implementation can prioritize at a finely-grained level based on dynamic resource availability, relative process priority, etc., on a system-wide basis. (The OS implementation of GCD was already open-sourced as part of 10.6's Darwin xnu kernel release last week.)
It's pretty nifty stuff. And it's good to see Apple continue MacOS X's tradition of openness and support of open source.
You'd have great points if everything you said wasn't completely wrong. Yes, some Apple hardware have had issues. But many surveys and independent entities (such as Consumer Reports) consistently rate Apple very high in quality. Apple doesn't "use sweatshops". They were accused of that and exonerated. Apple is ahead of everyone in the elimination of pollutants and the recyclability of their products.
So quit whining. Go back to calling Apple more expensive (than cheap knockoffs) and complaining that the App Store doesn't allow porn and stop making stuff up.
Not sure about FIFA, but Madden '10 is now for sale for the iPhone, so I suspect it will work just fine for that sort of game. Also available is Civilization Revolution, SimCity 3K, and other major titles. Assassin's Creed was demoed at today's event and the Command and Conquer franchise is coming over, as well as NBA Live. The myth that all the games for the iPhone are homebrew, low-budget Flash-like one-offs is long gone.
With over 50M devices sold to date that can play iPhone games (iPhone + iPod Touch), they've now got an installed base that's around 1/2 of the Nintendo DS+DSi+Lite. That's impossible for any game manufacturer to ignore.
It's true that the signal-to-noise (where noise is "something I don't want") is a problem. That's why they added recommendations for games based on past purchases today, and a new "top games by revenue" (rather than just pure #'s) to the store.
What are you honestly going to use the extra "power" for? Wouldn't you rather just have something that does its thing really well? And has a gazillion apps available? If you're going to go purely on features for the dollar instead of "brand", you're probably going to buy a SanDisk anyway. Microsoft is in the worst of both worlds here-- they can't compete with Apple in apps, games, usability, or utility, and they can't compete with the smaller Asian manufactures on pure feature checklist length. Unless you put a LOT of extra value in the "Microsoft" label why buy a Zune? (Which is probably why market share goes roughly 74% Apple, 18% "Other", 7% SanDisk, 1% Microsoft.)
The deficit is the difference between revenue and expenditures each year. The debt is the total accumulated deficits over time.
The Congressional Budget Office projects that if nothing changes (ha!) over the next 10 years, in 10 years the DEBT will be almost $10T. That number includes the wars, tax cuts, prescription drug benefits, and the first bailout under Bush, as well as the second bank bailout under Obama and the stimulus. Which is big. But not catastrophic. It's more or less a return to Reagan-era budgets.
More relevant to the article at hand, trade deficits (exported goods vs imported goods) have shrunk dramatically this year as the dollar weakened and the cost of domestic labor shrank.
What matters is how many times you have to open your wallet to get *paid* releases
You have a strange definition of "have to". Don't upgrade if you don't think it's worth it! Just because Apple puts it up for sale it doesn't mean you have to buy it. Especially considering that Apple continues to offer security patches and support for the previous version of the OS, upgrading every other version seems pretty reasonable.
I suspect this is also why I've seen Macs disappear from Penn State's computer labs. You can still find some, but it used to be a 50-50 PC-to-Mac mix and now the Macs are rare.
I suspect it's due to an IT department with a platform bias. Most universities have seen a vast increase in Macintosh market share in the last 5 years. They're probably not even paying per-seat for the OS upgrades anyway.
It is.
I'm running Snow Leopard, and this is what I see:
Size: 4KB on disk (1,442 bytes)
The number in parens is the byte length of the file, the number "on disk" is the size considering disk blocks.
Don't believe everything you read on Slashdot.
Which is one reason the US Department of Defense bans all thumb drives from all DOD computers, and many large corporations these days have rules requiring the use of company-issued USB drives.
There is a difference between being able to repel a targeted attack against your particular machine and the vulnerabilities in an OS that would allow something to propagate in the wild. Macs often lose pwn2own which only tests for the first case-- often because of unpatched buffer overflows in open source utilities where Apple hasn't kept versions up to date with the latest. The Mac has many features that make it less vulnerable to the latter case, though, and in the rare cases where there has been malware it has required the user to explicitly download, run, and type their password in order to do anything.
Android is a platform that give much more, and more meaningful, freedoms to app developers.
Freedom? Yes. Friendliness? Not that I've seen, and you haven't cited a single piece of evidence towards "friendliness", just "freedom".
It's really, really easy to get started with iPhone development. You pay Apple a small fee and get access to piles and piles of sample code, great documentation, a mature API, and you even get 2 support incidents in which you get to interact with a real Apple developer for your money. And now there's an ecosystem of developer forums, third-party libraries, articles, server/ad services, marketing support... it's actually a pretty friendly experience. It's true that Apple gets veto power, but even then the rejection letter is friendly :)
I'm one of those crazy ones who always installs the .0 release. (I also back up, which is something most computer users don't do, either, so my risk profile is still probably better than average.) Most of the time for vast majority of people the upgrades go fine. There are always a few problems and the people experiencing those problems jump on the nearest message board and you hear a lot of noise about it. The millions who don't have problems don't, and you don't hear about them.
Would I install 10.6.0 on a mission-critical, high-uptime machine? No, definitely not-- there's no immediate business justification for it yet. (Wait until more 64-bit and massively parallel software takes advantage of the new APIs.) My home machine, though, is for my own learning and fun, and it's definitely worth it for me there. I can always restore if things go terribly awry.
You seem to have a significant mis-understanding of iPhone software. The iPhone is based on a C kernel with an Objective-C interface/library layer. Both of those languages are compiled languages. All third party "native" apps for the iPhone are compiled Objective-C apps. The compiler is gcc, and the target is either x86 for the emulator or ARM for the iPhone. And Objective-C on the iPhone allows the direct linking of C or C++ libraries.
It's true that Apple locks down their App Store, but that's a separate business decision, not a technological one.
Scenario #2 sounds more like Apple to me. Heck, if you want to recompile the MacOS X kernel and install your version on your laptop you are free to. Apple popularized USB for hardware interconnect. Apple publishes Windows drivers to make it easier to run that OS on its hardware, and linux is fully supported as well. And there is no application signing on the desktop (although personally, I think there should be. Not that it should have to be Apple or that you should be required to buy from a particular store, but just a signature that states "Here's who distributed this, here's the certificate authority that will vouch for my identity, and the bits you're getting are the bits I shipped.")
My camera has been able to do this for a few years. People's faces have white boxes around them that move with the scene.
Admittedly this brings it to a whole new level, being almost an augmented reality API. And that's where the power here lies... putting a general-purpose computing device capable of it into people's hands and an SDK that makes it easy into developers hands will make it take off. And hey, Apple is finally starting to open up the docking port (which has video-out) to software tie-in so maybe a HUD isn't far off either.
By the way, just how does it work out when someone supports Euthanasia and Abortion but is against the death penalty? "The unborn and the old are ok to kill but the killers and the rapists aren't."???
That's an easy one.
You are allowed to do with your own body as you see fit, but the Government is not allowed to do anything to your body.
Evolution is Survival of the Fittest
Yes...
the creed that only the strong survive and if you are too weak to survive we shouldn't help you do so
No!
The latter is the straw-man interpretation of fundamentalists, not something that Darwin ever asserted. In fact, recent studies have shown that being "fitter" often means being more socially adept than your genetic competitors (sorry, Slashdot). "Alms for the poor" and similar philosophies can easily fit within the definition of one genetic group being fitter to survive. And certainly being able to structure a fighting force is "fitter" than every man for themselves.
It was actually a debate between Darwin and his associates whether the phrase "survival of the fittest" should even be used because some people even then insisted on attacking it with the same straw-man argument.
Which of the claims in particular are you referring to? I assume you read them if you're going to claim this patent shouldn't have been granted.
As is normal in patent submissions of slashdot article, the summary has only a vague relationship to the actual claims, and its a patents claims (not its summary or description) that are what must be defended in court.
My reading of the claims seems to indicate a particular arrangement of tags with specific semantic meaning, not simply the encoding of any word processing into XML.
This is simply not true. Double-blind studies which can differentiate "placebo" effects have shown significant efficacy toward both depression and anxiety for many of the SSRIs. That's not to say the "placebo" effect isn't real or doesn't work. It is, in fact, used as part of the cognitive behavioral therapy (although not termed as such) and is also a part of any healthy person's normal mode of thought.
And you can even buy "cebocaps" at any pharmacy. They even have different colors in case one works better! :)
Crazy people are everywhere. Stop giving them attention.
This attitude is unhelpful.
The symptoms this man describes sound similar to anxiety disorder with agoraphobia. It's not uncommon, and is very treatable with cognitive behavioral therapy and an anti-anxiety medication such as an SSRI. Sufferers of this have physiological symptoms which are subjectively-- and sometimes objectively-- indistinguishable from anything from allergies to more serious medical conditions. The body creates a feedback loop in the endocrine system and the mind assigns causative correlations with anything that was happening at the time. It can result in anything from hot flashes to stuffy noses to a full-on asthma attack.
Calling such a condition "crazy" just exacerbates it, and attention to it is something that has to be managed carefully to try to break the feedback loops.
Disclaimer: I'm not a psychotherapist, just a patient.
Single-Stage To Orbit requires a mass-to-weight ratio in the range of 10-25. That is more than any current air or spacecraft, but recent advances in propellant storage and materials science has made it possible. Some existing rockets have been calculated to have a 10+ mass-to-weight first stage, but no one's ever tried to design the whole rocket around it. But there are certain economies of scale when you eliminate the staging as well... the rockets themselves are already heat-shielded and can lower the re-entry speeds as well. You only need 1 set of nozzles and no staging hardware. And the whole craft can be seamless and aerodynamic, allowing some steering and gliding ability without the weight of parachutes or wings.
The craft that inspired the recent SSTO designs is the DC-X, a sub-orbital prototype that was supposed to be followed by an orbital DC-Y before funding was cancelled (and the craft crashed and burned on its last flight).
IMHO, even if you put one of these things on top of an expendable booster to get it into orbit, having a partially fueled vertical lander in LEO suddenly opens up the solar system to some exciting possibilities.
Speaking as someone who was writing C++ for 4-5 years *before* ANSI came up with the original spec, that's not really the part I'm worried about. Judging by past experience, everyone except Microsoft will probably come up with a "good enough" compiler relatively quickly, and there will be a series of #defines that will allow one to simulate compliance on Microsoft compilers.
"White" LEDs today use phosphors just like this one does, but the phosphors are inefficient. That's why white LEDs aren't the 10x gain in efficiency over CFBs you'd expect from LEDs. The problem with non-phosphorescent white LED lights is that green LEDs are extremely hard to make, and without them you can't combine a red-green-blue triplet to get something approximating white light. Even then the energy bands would be very narrow and some colors may look very strange under it.
Anyway, this is basically a new manufacturing technique that has the potential for decreasing chemical use and increasing efficiency, not a new way of producing white light.
Particle interactions with more energy than LHC can produce happen in the Earth's atmosphere every day. But outside of a carefully controlled environment with extensive sensor equipment, they can't be studied. The LHC is not about creating energies never before seen on Earth-- it won't do that. It's about doing so in an extremely controlled manner than can be measured and investigated.
Can you actually cite some numbers here? How much money is being made in the FOSS world vs. in the MS Windows third-party software world? If my livelihood depended on it as an indie developer, I'd probably not pick either, but rather target the iPhone or some other niche where I could get better distribution and where advertising dollars might go further.