I'm not sure why you bothered to reply to this article; it's so utterly wrong in so many ways. First of all, Apple holds the copyright to Darwin and can use it however they want. Just because they license it to YOU under a license that requires YOU to share code you modify, Apple is not bound by that license. Secondly, it would be silly for Apple NOT to leverage some of the Mac OS, but it would be just as silly for them to port the entire desktop OS. I think of this as about the same as saying the XBox OS is Windows 2000. It shares many APIs, it's branched from the same codebase, but it's targeted and maintained for a completely different goal.
One correction: Apple bought from Xerox PARC many rights in exchange for Apple shares. It's one of the most directly profitable thing PARC ever did. So while the rest of your statement may be true to varying degrees, "Apple stole from Xerox PARC" is not.
Look, the companies providing the service have to make a buck somehow. If you don't like how Yahoo does it, there are competitors you can choose. Complaining that Yahoo is trying to enforce their stated business model seems really pointless to me. IMHO, Ad blockers are a way to ensure your favorite services disappear in the future. I know everyone (especially on Slashdot) wants everything for free, the world doesn't work like that. If you don't want ads, go pay for a service or switch to one that has some other business model.
I agree that the metric system is vastly superior for scientific purposes. Thermometers and road signs don't qualify, though. While NASA's recent move towards going all-metric is probably long overdue, I don't see why there's any great need for the rest of society to rapidly adopt metric. While metric was designed for science, imperial was designed for "normal" use. While metric designates zero degrees and 100 degrees the freezing and boiling points of water, imperial ties them to a reasonable estimate for the coldest and warmest days in a temperate climate zone. Having a basic unit of measurement between a cm and a m (ie a foot) seems nicely convenient for measuring things at the size of an average human work product, given the size of our hands, feet, etc.
It's possible that going to a more standard but less convenient measuring system will benefit the United States down the road, but right now it seems like a big cost with a very low ROI.
Sorry you feel that way. I did meet my wife at CMU here so I don't know about the singles scene, but I had the opposite experience for all your other points. While in California a $500K house has lower taxes, there are few houses as cheap as $500K where I was living (south bay) when I lived out there. And taxes would have to be awfully high to make up the 10x difference in purchase price over a reasonable time span.
Also, I wouldn't know about "tract homes". $150K will buy you a near mansion here with all the character of houses built in the earlier part of the century, when they used real building materials. In my house, every door (interior and exterior) is hardwood, the whole exterior is Italian stone, 2 car garage, half the basement is finished, etc., and the $125K price tag was a little high for the neighborhood. Compared to the paper mache, cookie-cutter houses in California that cost $750K, there's no contest.
And it sounds like you have different taste in food than the Pittsburgh norm, but that doesn't make your tastes better.
Maybe you just picked the wrong neighborhood to live and work. Pittsburgh is very, very different from neighborhood to neighborhood. I live in the east side and work on south side, and enjoy it here. If it was closer to my and my wife's family I'd probably settle here indefinitely. Or maybe this just isn't your town. You can't please everyone. But considering the huge tech industry here, especially per capita, it's no wonder it's on the list.
This is especially true considering the industry rags were comparing the Longhorn announced features with the then-released MacOS X 10.3 years ago, then again when 10.4 came out. Now that we're a few months from 10.5, you'd think they'd compare the 10.5 announced features against the now-released Vista, but no, the Mac doesn't get that advantage. Admittedly it's a little bit of Apple's fault with them being so secretive, but still... compare 2007 releases if you're going to compare.
This is exactly what I've been saying for a year now, but every time I suggest it on a Mac discussion forum I get called a troll. Objective-C is what people in the 1980's thought object orientation was going to be about. Let's get with the program, people! Apple could probably do more for C# adoption in the industry than Microsoft probably can (think USB) because of less momentum. It would behoove Microsoft to give Apple extremely good terms on any IP and even code and consulting to get them bootstrapped on C#.
I myself am actually an avid Java developer, but I think Java missed the boat on the desktop despite the gains in JDK 6. (If they'd gone all the way and revamped JNI and enabled heavyweight/lightweight mixing it might have been a different story, but with those not coming until JDK 7 a couple years from now they might as well give up.)
This seems to be the only tech town in the country where the geeks have made peace with the football players and everyone just goes out to have beer and pierogies.
(Actually, I suspect we made the list because of the "per capita" measurements. There's an awful lot of high tech-- from bio to hardware and software-- for a small city tucked in amongst a few rivers and woods.)
The real irony is that, for most of these other devices, the underlying architecture is invisible. Few know that Palm switched processors a few years back. Fewer still know what kind of cpu powers their cell phone.
And I think this will be increasingly true of the desktop. And since all the best desktop CPUs are x86, it'll probably stay x86.
From an engineering design point of view, it's possible some of these other architectures are cleaner or easier to design or code to, but from a desktop chip and compiler point of view, x86 is the best. It has the best codegen compilers, despite the fact that it may have taken more effort to get to that state, and the CPUs are damn fast at reasonable (although perhaps not optimal) power consumption levels. Talk of theoretical alternate options are academic. Unless one of those other options can produce a chip and compiler that's so much better than x86 that it would be worth moving to, emulation overhead during transition and all, it's not a practical discussion.
This reminds me of the old "Delta Clipper" DC-X design from McDonnell Douglas. Ironically, when looking Delta Clipper up at wikipedia to find a link for my previous sentence, it mentions the same thing.
The really nice thing about powered landings are that they can be done in an airless environment. You can use the same design to get to orbit, refuel, then go to the moon, mars, asteroids, etc. Just start cranking them off the manufacturing line and putting a fleet in LEO and you're halfway to everywhere.
That was my exact reaction, too. I thought Scientific American generally got input from experts in the field, and Bill Gates does not qualify as an expert in robotics. (I'd argue he doesn't qualify as an expert in Software Engineering, either.) Keep the Bill Gates articles in BusinessWeek and keep Scientific American as a forum for the experts to write layman-accessible articles. And if you want to discuss robotics, visit NREC at CMU, MIT, Honda, or one of the other myriad companies in the US, Japan, and around the world that actually know something on the topic.
There's also the question of whether you're obeying the law versus the spirit of the law. For example, speeding on a highway is against the law because, presumably, it's dangerous. However, at reasonable highway speeds the safest speed is the median speed of the cars around you (it minimizes relative speed and induced lane changes). Therefore, if everyone is going 5-10mph above the speed limit, the safest speed will usually be 5-10mph above the speed limit. So you have a choice to put yourselves and others at risk to obey a law just for obedience's sake, or to obey the spirit of the law and maximize safety at the same time.
There are all sorts of factors that lead to the ability to drive a disease to extinction. Smallpox had no non-human reservoir, while the flu-- sometimes even specific strains-- can infect many mammals and can often be fatal or harmful to several species. Even if every human on the planet was completely inoculated against flu, the flu wouldn't be eradicated. As soon as humans stopped vaccinating, it would be back.
The real point of heel-toe is not the possible loss of control, it's having the engine at the top of the power curve at all times. (Most gasoline engines have a fairly narrow range of RPMs where they produce the most horsepower and torque. Diesel doesn't really have this issue, which is one reason why some drivers hate them.) Anyway, since you're braking into a turn you're slowing down (and also giving the front tires more traction), so to keep the engine in the power band you have to downshift. Which means using all three pedals at once.
In most modern cars, at the speeds and conditions on most public roads, you could probably just downshift without matching RPMs and let the synchros pick up all the slack. But for real control at top performance through a turn in a car with a standard clutch and shifter, you need to toe-heel. (My old Alfa Romeo roadster basically had no synchros, and any time you downshifted you essentially had to match RPMs carefully, so it was a great car to practice on.)
Incidentally, most production cars' gearboxes are such that to do the first downshift, just press the clutch without lifting your foot from the gas... the resulting RPM jump should be just about right to go one gear lower.
A language and toolkit can't compensate for the people who build and maintain the software. Java is easily the best language out there for writing stable, maintainable systems if you use the right tools and know your domain..NET isn't bad, but IMHO its one big advantage over Java-- the ease with which one can integrate "native" code-- is also a big weakness in potential stability.
I think the open source community is doing a good enough job fragmenting itself around GPLv3, and doesn't need any help from Microsoft. You think this little hubbub at Novell is significant? It will be a drop in the ocean compared to the fragmentation that's on the horizon over GPLv3. I suspect many at Microsoft are cackling with glee over GPLv3 rather than caring much about Novell.
Performance is terrible, and moving an app from one VM to another often causes serious problems. Uh, what year did you last try Java? Java performance is pretty much on par with any other language these days. Sometimes it beats traditional languages, sometimes it's a little slower. The dynamic compilation causes minor slowdowns the first time something's run, but the fact that it can compile and optimize for the specifically available hardware makes up for it. There are very specific areas where it lags (large matrices and heavy numerics), but as a general-purpose programming language performance is no longer an issue.
And I don't know about moving from one VM to another, but on the Sun VM you can move across OSes without issue. In fact, with more recent Java releases any VM that meets their spec tends to be extremely good about running valid code. (There are certainly a few pitfalls that some programmers fall into, especially regarding threads, where their code makes assumptions about a particular VM's implementation that can lead to problems.)
I'm fairly sure you're wrong, as Sun doesn't have a compiler for Java bytecode to PowerPC, and large portions of the UI had been using Aqua. It's likely they borrowed extensively, but in the latest JDK 6 it pretty much *is* a recompile. They went back to using the Sun renderer as the primary renderer (merely having an Aqua theme for it), and can use the Sun x86 JIT compiler.
It's amazing what we're doing on behalf of mouse medicine these days. If scientists keep up at this pace, someday we'll have cured all mouse disease forever.
Don't forget directly violating the 14th Amendment of the Constitution: "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law [...] shall not be questioned."
Bush repeatedly referred to the US Treasury Bonds in which Social Security is invested as IOUs of questionable value back when he was trying to dismantle Social Security. One might argue that this section of the 14th Amendment, which largely deals with Civil War issues, is probably one that needs a little re-interpretation. But presumably Republicans would be against such "activist" meddling.
Re:Is it any faster for client-side apps?
on
Java SE 6 Released
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· Score: 4, Interesting
More information can be found at Chris Campbell's blog, but yes, graphics are much faster in JDK 6 especially with the OpenGL pipeline turned on, although they were hardly "slow" in JDK 5. Also, the JIT compiler has been largely reworked to improve codegen (especially with -server flag specified).
Another common complaint about Java UIs is that the dynamic loading/binding/compiling/optimizing makes things slow the first time anything is done, a little less slow the second time, then reasonably zippy from then on. So the longer you work in a Java app, the faster it gets. In any case, I code in Java IDEs all day long and they don't seem any slower than native apps.
Well, this should change dramatically very soon, at least on Intel Macs. With Java 6, Apple is mostly just recompiling the Sun JVM code directly on the Mac. It should run just as well on the Mac as it does on Windows.
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I'm not sure why you bothered to reply to this article; it's so utterly wrong in so many ways. First of all, Apple holds the copyright to Darwin and can use it however they want. Just because they license it to YOU under a license that requires YOU to share code you modify, Apple is not bound by that license. Secondly, it would be silly for Apple NOT to leverage some of the Mac OS, but it would be just as silly for them to port the entire desktop OS. I think of this as about the same as saying the XBox OS is Windows 2000. It shares many APIs, it's branched from the same codebase, but it's targeted and maintained for a completely different goal.
One correction: Apple bought from Xerox PARC many rights in exchange for Apple shares. It's one of the most directly profitable thing PARC ever did. So while the rest of your statement may be true to varying degrees, "Apple stole from Xerox PARC" is not.
Look, the companies providing the service have to make a buck somehow. If you don't like how Yahoo does it, there are competitors you can choose. Complaining that Yahoo is trying to enforce their stated business model seems really pointless to me. IMHO, Ad blockers are a way to ensure your favorite services disappear in the future. I know everyone (especially on Slashdot) wants everything for free, the world doesn't work like that. If you don't want ads, go pay for a service or switch to one that has some other business model.
I agree that the metric system is vastly superior for scientific purposes. Thermometers and road signs don't qualify, though. While NASA's recent move towards going all-metric is probably long overdue, I don't see why there's any great need for the rest of society to rapidly adopt metric. While metric was designed for science, imperial was designed for "normal" use. While metric designates zero degrees and 100 degrees the freezing and boiling points of water, imperial ties them to a reasonable estimate for the coldest and warmest days in a temperate climate zone. Having a basic unit of measurement between a cm and a m (ie a foot) seems nicely convenient for measuring things at the size of an average human work product, given the size of our hands, feet, etc.
It's possible that going to a more standard but less convenient measuring system will benefit the United States down the road, but right now it seems like a big cost with a very low ROI.
That most people won't spend over $400 on a phone because there aren't any phones worth spending that much on?
I think you've hit the nail on the head. I've never spent more than $100 on a phone, but I'm sure as heck going to own an Apple iPhone.
My guess is that not many people spent $300 on a portable music player before Apple entered that market, either.
Sorry you feel that way. I did meet my wife at CMU here so I don't know about the singles scene, but I had the opposite experience for all your other points. While in California a $500K house has lower taxes, there are few houses as cheap as $500K where I was living (south bay) when I lived out there. And taxes would have to be awfully high to make up the 10x difference in purchase price over a reasonable time span.
Also, I wouldn't know about "tract homes". $150K will buy you a near mansion here with all the character of houses built in the earlier part of the century, when they used real building materials. In my house, every door (interior and exterior) is hardwood, the whole exterior is Italian stone, 2 car garage, half the basement is finished, etc., and the $125K price tag was a little high for the neighborhood. Compared to the paper mache, cookie-cutter houses in California that cost $750K, there's no contest.
And it sounds like you have different taste in food than the Pittsburgh norm, but that doesn't make your tastes better.
Maybe you just picked the wrong neighborhood to live and work. Pittsburgh is very, very different from neighborhood to neighborhood. I live in the east side and work on south side, and enjoy it here. If it was closer to my and my wife's family I'd probably settle here indefinitely. Or maybe this just isn't your town. You can't please everyone. But considering the huge tech industry here, especially per capita, it's no wonder it's on the list.
This is especially true considering the industry rags were comparing the Longhorn announced features with the then-released MacOS X 10.3 years ago, then again when 10.4 came out. Now that we're a few months from 10.5, you'd think they'd compare the 10.5 announced features against the now-released Vista, but no, the Mac doesn't get that advantage. Admittedly it's a little bit of Apple's fault with them being so secretive, but still... compare 2007 releases if you're going to compare.
This is exactly what I've been saying for a year now, but every time I suggest it on a Mac discussion forum I get called a troll. Objective-C is what people in the 1980's thought object orientation was going to be about. Let's get with the program, people! Apple could probably do more for C# adoption in the industry than Microsoft probably can (think USB) because of less momentum. It would behoove Microsoft to give Apple extremely good terms on any IP and even code and consulting to get them bootstrapped on C#.
I myself am actually an avid Java developer, but I think Java missed the boat on the desktop despite the gains in JDK 6. (If they'd gone all the way and revamped JNI and enabled heavyweight/lightweight mixing it might have been a different story, but with those not coming until JDK 7 a couple years from now they might as well give up.)
Beer's probably why Pittsburgh made the list.
This seems to be the only tech town in the country where the geeks have made peace with the football players and everyone just goes out to have beer and pierogies.
(Actually, I suspect we made the list because of the "per capita" measurements. There's an awful lot of high tech-- from bio to hardware and software-- for a small city tucked in amongst a few rivers and woods.)
The real irony is that, for most of these other devices, the underlying architecture is invisible. Few know that Palm switched processors a few years back. Fewer still know what kind of cpu powers their cell phone.
And I think this will be increasingly true of the desktop. And since all the best desktop CPUs are x86, it'll probably stay x86.
From an engineering design point of view, it's possible some of these other architectures are cleaner or easier to design or code to, but from a desktop chip and compiler point of view, x86 is the best. It has the best codegen compilers, despite the fact that it may have taken more effort to get to that state, and the CPUs are damn fast at reasonable (although perhaps not optimal) power consumption levels. Talk of theoretical alternate options are academic. Unless one of those other options can produce a chip and compiler that's so much better than x86 that it would be worth moving to, emulation overhead during transition and all, it's not a practical discussion.
This reminds me of the old "Delta Clipper" DC-X design from McDonnell Douglas. Ironically, when looking Delta Clipper up at wikipedia to find a link for my previous sentence, it mentions the same thing.
The really nice thing about powered landings are that they can be done in an airless environment. You can use the same design to get to orbit, refuel, then go to the moon, mars, asteroids, etc. Just start cranking them off the manufacturing line and putting a fleet in LEO and you're halfway to everywhere.
That was my exact reaction, too. I thought Scientific American generally got input from experts in the field, and Bill Gates does not qualify as an expert in robotics. (I'd argue he doesn't qualify as an expert in Software Engineering, either.) Keep the Bill Gates articles in BusinessWeek and keep Scientific American as a forum for the experts to write layman-accessible articles. And if you want to discuss robotics, visit NREC at CMU, MIT, Honda, or one of the other myriad companies in the US, Japan, and around the world that actually know something on the topic.
There's also the question of whether you're obeying the law versus the spirit of the law. For example, speeding on a highway is against the law because, presumably, it's dangerous. However, at reasonable highway speeds the safest speed is the median speed of the cars around you (it minimizes relative speed and induced lane changes). Therefore, if everyone is going 5-10mph above the speed limit, the safest speed will usually be 5-10mph above the speed limit. So you have a choice to put yourselves and others at risk to obey a law just for obedience's sake, or to obey the spirit of the law and maximize safety at the same time.
It also resembles the cover of the book The Difference Engine
There are all sorts of factors that lead to the ability to drive a disease to extinction. Smallpox had no non-human reservoir, while the flu-- sometimes even specific strains-- can infect many mammals and can often be fatal or harmful to several species. Even if every human on the planet was completely inoculated against flu, the flu wouldn't be eradicated. As soon as humans stopped vaccinating, it would be back.
So... they both use UNIX?
The real point of heel-toe is not the possible loss of control, it's having the engine at the top of the power curve at all times. (Most gasoline engines have a fairly narrow range of RPMs where they produce the most horsepower and torque. Diesel doesn't really have this issue, which is one reason why some drivers hate them.) Anyway, since you're braking into a turn you're slowing down (and also giving the front tires more traction), so to keep the engine in the power band you have to downshift. Which means using all three pedals at once.
In most modern cars, at the speeds and conditions on most public roads, you could probably just downshift without matching RPMs and let the synchros pick up all the slack. But for real control at top performance through a turn in a car with a standard clutch and shifter, you need to toe-heel. (My old Alfa Romeo roadster basically had no synchros, and any time you downshifted you essentially had to match RPMs carefully, so it was a great car to practice on.)
Incidentally, most production cars' gearboxes are such that to do the first downshift, just press the clutch without lifting your foot from the gas... the resulting RPM jump should be just about right to go one gear lower.
A language and toolkit can't compensate for the people who build and maintain the software. Java is easily the best language out there for writing stable, maintainable systems if you use the right tools and know your domain. .NET isn't bad, but IMHO its one big advantage over Java-- the ease with which one can integrate "native" code-- is also a big weakness in potential stability.
I think the open source community is doing a good enough job fragmenting itself around GPLv3, and doesn't need any help from Microsoft. You think this little hubbub at Novell is significant? It will be a drop in the ocean compared to the fragmentation that's on the horizon over GPLv3. I suspect many at Microsoft are cackling with glee over GPLv3 rather than caring much about Novell.
And I don't know about moving from one VM to another, but on the Sun VM you can move across OSes without issue. In fact, with more recent Java releases any VM that meets their spec tends to be extremely good about running valid code. (There are certainly a few pitfalls that some programmers fall into, especially regarding threads, where their code makes assumptions about a particular VM's implementation that can lead to problems.)
I'm fairly sure you're wrong, as Sun doesn't have a compiler for Java bytecode to PowerPC, and large portions of the UI had been using Aqua. It's likely they borrowed extensively, but in the latest JDK 6 it pretty much *is* a recompile. They went back to using the Sun renderer as the primary renderer (merely having an Aqua theme for it), and can use the Sun x86 JIT compiler.
It's amazing what we're doing on behalf of mouse medicine these days. If scientists keep up at this pace, someday we'll have cured all mouse disease forever.
Don't forget directly violating the 14th Amendment of the Constitution:
"The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law [...] shall not be questioned."
Bush repeatedly referred to the US Treasury Bonds in which Social Security is invested as IOUs of questionable value back when he was trying to dismantle Social Security. One might argue that this section of the 14th Amendment, which largely deals with Civil War issues, is probably one that needs a little re-interpretation. But presumably Republicans would be against such "activist" meddling.
More information can be found at Chris Campbell's blog, but yes, graphics are much faster in JDK 6 especially with the OpenGL pipeline turned on, although they were hardly "slow" in JDK 5. Also, the JIT compiler has been largely reworked to improve codegen (especially with -server flag specified).
Another common complaint about Java UIs is that the dynamic loading/binding/compiling/optimizing makes things slow the first time anything is done, a little less slow the second time, then reasonably zippy from then on. So the longer you work in a Java app, the faster it gets. In any case, I code in Java IDEs all day long and they don't seem any slower than native apps.
Well, this should change dramatically very soon, at least on Intel Macs. With Java 6, Apple is mostly just recompiling the Sun JVM code directly on the Mac. It should run just as well on the Mac as it does on Windows.