Yes, regardless of processor. The press release says it weighs 390 grams, which is 0.86 pounds.
Go to your local sporting good store and get a 1-pound ankle weight. Try wearing in on your wrist all of the time. (Even let.14 grams of the sand out if you like).
You'll find out it's a lot heavier than you thought, especially for vaporware.
while staying within the bounds (albeit loosely) of "possible" scientific reality.
Yes, Heinlein really cared about his science... and particularly his engineering and orbital mechanics. He actually did the orbital mechanics calculations whenever he mentioned specific figures in a story. (I.E. if he said "We burned at 1.3G for 5 seconds to insert into a station-keeping orbit" it generally meant he had actually done that math.)
However, nearly all of his stories depend on "torchships": ships with nuclear drive engines that have a combination of high thrust and high specific impulse that is extremely unlikely in the real world. The closest thing that has been proposed is Zubrin's Nuclear Salt-water Rocket which uses an aqueous solution of plutonium or uranium salt as both fuel and reaction mass, expelling this radioactive mixture out the back -- and a lot of physicists aren't even sure the NSWR could really work. It does have the charming feature of completely ruining the landscape underneath the launch site, which matches Heinlein's torchships pretty well.
There's a fantastic discussion of all this at a website called The Atomic Rocket, which collects in one place all the useful scientific information about space travel and ship design for anyone who is writing fiction or designing games.
For my money, it's the best damn geek site in the history of the web by a clear margin. (Though you have to be an old-school geek who thinks space is even cooler than computers.) Every few months I get sucked in and read the whole thing over again (and it's huge).
There's a particular anti-hypertension drug (nifedipine.php) that suppresses fertility in men; enough that it could conceivably be used as a contraceptive pill. This has been known for fourteen years, but the drug manufacturer has been suppressing the info and lobbying against research of nifedipine as a contraceptive, afraid that it will hurt sales of the drug as an antihypertensive.
This kind of baffles me. It's a short-term effect, and do most people really want to have a pregnancy most of the time. I would think that even for married couples the preferred state would be to not have a baby until you make a positive decision that it's time. Then you switch to a different hypertensive for a couple months until you conceive, then switch back. I really would imagine that this is a feature not a bug.
But everyone seem convinced that men want to have babies all the time, and therefore would feel that anything that temporarily reduces fertility is a bad thing.
I don't know any guys who feel that way, do you? In my experience, most people are worried about accidental pregnancy a fair amount of the time.
Acceleration will return with remarkable speed the day China lands dudes on the moon.
Because nothing kicks a country in the ass like a perceived enemy they want to outdo. CF. the "Space Race", which only happened because of a gargantuan pissing contest between two big countries.
Which by the way, is a fantastic thing, despite a negative name like "pissing contest". When it comes down to it, a technological show-off pissing contest is a lot better thing than a war. Think how many lives would have been spared if the Allies had had a space race vs. Germany instead of WWII.
I'm really hoping the US can have a space race vs. China instead of WWIII!
Because China is going to pass the US economy sooner than most people realize, and technologically not long behind that. Usually when one nation surpasses the dominant country it means war. Maybe this time it will mean dudes on Mars instead.
I live in Altadena (a suburb of Los Angeles), and I can walk to the Angeles National Forest from my house in about ten minutes. (Or a one-minute drive). From there, I can easily hike 500 miles of trails without repeating a step.
Moreover, as others have pointed out, Griffith Park is the second largest urban park in the the country at 4210 acres. It is definitely large enough to get lost in, especially in the dark if you don't know the trails.
I just get a little annoyed when people continually badmouth my town. East coasters tend to think LA is just like New York except with snotty movie stars. It's not - West-Coast big cities are very different from East Coast ones in that they are much more spread out instead of vertical and are usually completely surrounded by hundreds of miles of wilderness. Drive 90 minutes in any direction from LA and you are pretty much in the middle of nowhere.
It's one of the few cities anywhere where you can wake up on an April morning and decide that day if you're going to spend the day surfing/sunbathing at the beach... or snowboarding, since both are within easy driving distance. I live in LA in part because I like both the opportunities of a big city with major scientific research institutions (Caltech, UCLA, USC) and business opportunity plus plenty of outdoor activities all in one place.
. I don't know what Larry Ellison is doing these days, but in the past, his main "philanthropic" ambition was to donate to an anti-aging research foundation.
I don't have a problem with that. Aging kills more people than anything else.
The problem is not gold farmers or eBay. The problem is the dumb design of the game's economy.
Continually generating new random monsters carrying gold is the direct equivalent of continually printing new money, period. Even if there were no farmers, regular players would be killing those monsters and reaping the gold, and the money supply would continually increase. Farmers just speed up the process.
It's a basic part of the game's underlying structure. Banning players for taking advantage of it will just lead to an arms race where folks develop farming tools with increasingly human apparent behavior, making them harder and harder to detect.
If there's something you don't want players to do, then design the game such that there is no advantage for them to do it. The first lesson of economics is that people will do whatever they have incentive to do. This particular game design/rules interaction is like putting a government-sponsored free ice cream cart on every street corner while making it illegal to eat ice cream and periodically shooting all the ice-cream eaters.
The right solution is to design the game with a smart and balanced economy from the get-go.
I agree with the parent that it doesn't matter at all whether the climate change is human-caused or not. We will suffer the consequences either way, so in any case we should be working on it.
But I disagree that cooling would be worse than warming. We can bundle up and move crops south if we have to. But between 1/6 and 1/5 of the earth's population (estimates vary) live within three meters of sea level. And if the Ross Ice Shelf broke off Antartica, sea levels could rise five meters in a very short period of time. (weeks to a few years depending on exactly how it broke).
A new ice age would kill a lot of people, yes. But it would develop gradually, giving us time to plan and react. It would be nothing compared to a rapidly-developing refugee crisis of over a billion people all at once as the ocean swallowed every seaside city on the planet.
The video describes (incredibly vaguely) some "silent killer" that they imply is an escaped mutant or something from a proteomics lab. It has some dude in a white jacket and then proceeds to show you a series of random microscope images of objects that don't even look vaguely related to each other, with cheap pan and scan effects and the occasional depth of focus change.
There's no soundtrack, and it doesn't look like the labcoat guy is saying the same thing as the caption text. They may have grabbed some footage of a lab tech leading a a tour of a lab and slapped it together in iMovie with some microscope images.
The best thing: the video and the website "crossinglines.net" don't actually name this deadly disease they are documenting. That means that multiple different hoaxes like "Morgellons" can link to the same video, all using it as "proof" of this horrible disease they're using to sell snake oil.
Have you seen the Site for Taurox?. Aside from looking nothing like a pharmaceutical company or even a homeopathist, it has fascinating text like this:
CureImmune develops and distributes products containing TauroxTM, which is believed to be the most potent therapy available for any indication. It naturally modulates or balances the immune system to function optimally.
Yes, it says their product is the most potent therapy for any indication: i.e. a cure-all. aka "snake oil". If you search around, you'll see in some places it's marketed as a homeopathic medicine at high dilution factors (homeopathic 6X = 10E-6 dilution factor, IIRC), and in other places as a conventional medication or nutritional supplement at high concentration. Yes folks, this wonderful medicine, taken in any form and any concentration, is the most effective treatment available... no matter what disease you have!
It wouldn't surprise me if many of these sufferers did indeed have a neurological disorder, or a psychiatric disorder, or even as others have suggested, some underlying condition like Lyme or a skin parasite compounded with psychological difficulties. I'm sure it varies from patient to patient. But this company "CureImmune" is taking all these poor fuckers to the cleaners by setting up websites with scary micrographs of lint and stories about fibers growing out of your skin - all to cash in on a scare and people's implicit drive to mistrust the medical establishment.
Of course! Good Lord, man, no one I know has any problem with going after terrorists.
In the sense that the federal government means, I oppose going after terrorists. There, I've said it.
Terrorists are inconsequential. 2001 was the worst of any year in history: terrorists killed nearly 4000 people across the globe. In every other year beforehand, terrorists had killed < 800, and in years since, < 1200 people annually. By comparison, automobile accidents kill tens of thousands, heart disease and cancer each kill over half a million.
Meanwhile, what terrorists *want* is for us to come after them. Their goal is to disrupt life through fear. They want to shake things up. They want us to start wars. They want us to change our laws, wiretap our own people, whatever... because this brings attention to their cause.
Terrorism is an activity that thrives only off of attention and reaction, which we've given them in abundance the last few years. Frankly, the best thing we could have done is to just ignore them.
Now, I don't mind "going after them" with law-enforcement techniques as we would any other serious criminal - that's an appropriate response that would have been the best thing we could have do. Much worse to give them more response than they deserve. Incredibly stupid to start a war and wiretap all of our own citizens - the terrorists couldn't have hoped for more.
I am amazed by how much fuzz anything related to sexuality is generating.
Why? It's the current razor edge of our world's social development. There is always a subject of social controversy about which society is divided. Social topics near that line are highly controversial and create a lot of noise. Subjects far to either side do not generate so much hot air. The effect is polarizing: conservatives will call the new issue "the end of society" and liberals will call it "justice". I tend to agree with the latter in most cases myself, but in any event in 25 years the topic will usually be pretty well accepted and society will move on to a new battle.
Right now, the razor edge is centered (mostly) on issues of sexuality: orientation, stem cells, emergency birth control, abortion.
A generation ago, the controversial edge was on the length of your hair, the substances you imbibed, and premarital sex. Homosexuality was only beginning to show on the radar but racist law was already waning.
Two generations ago, it was skin color and equal rights for racial minorities. Very few people talked about homosexuality at the time, but today equal rights for blacks isn't a very controversial principle. (Which is not to say it has been entirely achieved, but few people openly oppose it anymore). At the time, it was obvious to everyone, even the liberals, that homosexuality and premarital sex weren't okay.
So don't be surprised in WoW or anyplace else. Most of our social debates will be about sex, sex, sex all the time for the next few years until we get it out of our system and move on to the next subject.
What's up next? Hard to say, impossible to predict. Maybe religious tolerance and principles of secular government need to go through the wringer again. Maybe polyamory is up for its' turn (that would feed into the obsession with sex, anyway). Maybe another round over psychoactive substances is due, though I'd guess that's further off in the US at least.
Who knows. Either way, in 25 years people won't talk much about homosexuality at all and one of those other issues will be the source of all the noise. Even in online games.
For now, odds are you'll just end up with birth defects and adult acne.
I'll be 32 years old in two weeks. Now admittedly IANAB (...Biochemist), but I don't think any amount of Omega-III Fatty Acids can give me birth defects at this point.
You're describing an OS that hasn't been sold in 4-5 years, will not run on any currently-produced hardware, and because it is closed-source and nonstandard, cannot be easily used with the vast majority of modern server applications, languages, and tools being used these days.
I have faithfully used the mac for 15 years and I agree there were some strong security benefits to the classic OS. At the same time, when I am working as an admin and/or developer these days I want recent versions of MySQL and PHP, and I want to be able to shell into my server remotely to be able to administrate it.
If I just happened to have an ultra-security-required web application that didn't need much throughput or capability I might run it on OS 9 on an old G3. But that's definitely a tiny niche. Everything else I'll do with a modern mix of OS X and LAMP, thank you very much.
If you think my characterization of your statement as "bold" was unfair, that's fine.
Either way, I'm merely asking you to back up a statement of fact with a reference. It's not something I have ever heard anywhere else. Which does not mean it does not exist, it might mean I have simply never before encountered the relevant literature.
In which case, if it is a fact, you would be doing me a favor by pointing me towards a documented source so that I may learn of it.
Re:Application Programming
on
Beyond Java
·
· Score: 1
My dayjob is custom LAMP stuff; I love PHP. But in the evenings I've been working on a standalone app, and it seems odd to me too that nobody ever talks about standalone apps anymore. I mean hell - 95% of the crap installed on any computer is standalone so somebody is programming it. Is it all just winders c++ coders that don't read slashdot?
Anyway, the criteria for my app: (1) friendly GUI for non-geek end users. (2) Real-time signal analysis of live audio streams, so it must crunch huge quantities of numbers quickly. (3) Minimal effort to deliver both Win and Mac compatibility, since our customer base is a mix of artistic and educational types. (4) Code and any porting done by a two-person team working a couple nights per week in their spare time -- we both have day jobs.
Given the criteria, there really was no other choice than Java. Our app live-processes data from a microphone input. And there is not one byte of code difference between the shipping versions of the windows and mac versions. Hardware interface, gui, everything. A few mac customizations are handled by command line arguments, but we only have one code tree for two platforms - even though we're doing hardware audio I/O. Can Ruby do that?
The right tool for the right job. My options for this project were Java and C++... and the latter would have been a mother to port, using different GUI and Audio APIs on two platforms; the only part I could have saved was the signal processing code. Call it 180% as much effort.
Slashdot Mirror
... gets replaced by the "Flaming red scream of death".
do you need a StrongARM to be able to use it?
.14 grams of the sand out if you like).
Yes, regardless of processor. The press release says it weighs 390 grams, which is 0.86 pounds.
Go to your local sporting good store and get a 1-pound ankle weight. Try wearing in on your wrist all of the time. (Even let
You'll find out it's a lot heavier than you thought, especially for vaporware.
while staying within the bounds (albeit loosely) of "possible" scientific reality.
... and particularly his engineering and orbital mechanics. He actually did the orbital mechanics calculations whenever he mentioned specific figures in a story. (I.E. if he said "We burned at 1.3G for 5 seconds to insert into a station-keeping orbit" it generally meant he had actually done that math.)
Yes, Heinlein really cared about his science
However, nearly all of his stories depend on "torchships": ships with nuclear drive engines that have a combination of high thrust and high specific impulse that is extremely unlikely in the real world. The closest thing that has been proposed is Zubrin's Nuclear Salt-water Rocket which uses an aqueous solution of plutonium or uranium salt as both fuel and reaction mass, expelling this radioactive mixture out the back -- and a lot of physicists aren't even sure the NSWR could really work. It does have the charming feature of completely ruining the landscape underneath the launch site, which matches Heinlein's torchships pretty well.
There's a fantastic discussion of all this at a website called The Atomic Rocket, which collects in one place all the useful scientific information about space travel and ship design for anyone who is writing fiction or designing games.
For my money, it's the best damn geek site in the history of the web by a clear margin. (Though you have to be an old-school geek who thinks space is even cooler than computers.) Every few months I get sucked in and read the whole thing over again (and it's huge).
What's next? The seats?
Yeah, maybe.
There's a lot of truth to that joke.
There's a particular anti-hypertension drug (nifedipine.php) that suppresses fertility in men; enough that it could conceivably be used as a contraceptive pill. This has been known for fourteen years, but the drug manufacturer has been suppressing the info and lobbying against research of nifedipine as a contraceptive, afraid that it will hurt sales of the drug as an antihypertensive.
This kind of baffles me. It's a short-term effect, and do most people really want to have a pregnancy most of the time. I would think that even for married couples the preferred state would be to not have a baby until you make a positive decision that it's time. Then you switch to a different hypertensive for a couple months until you conceive, then switch back. I really would imagine that this is a feature not a bug.
But everyone seem convinced that men want to have babies all the time, and therefore would feel that anything that temporarily reduces fertility is a bad thing.
I don't know any guys who feel that way, do you? In my experience, most people are worried about accidental pregnancy a fair amount of the time.
By the time that happens, the entire map will be different.
Acceleration will return with remarkable speed the day China lands dudes on the moon.
Because nothing kicks a country in the ass like a perceived enemy they want to outdo. CF. the "Space Race", which only happened because of a gargantuan pissing contest between two big countries.
Which by the way, is a fantastic thing, despite a negative name like "pissing contest". When it comes down to it, a technological show-off pissing contest is a lot better thing than a war. Think how many lives would have been spared if the Allies had had a space race vs. Germany instead of WWII.
I'm really hoping the US can have a space race vs. China instead of WWIII!
Because China is going to pass the US economy sooner than most people realize, and technologically not long behind that. Usually when one nation surpasses the dominant country it means war. Maybe this time it will mean dudes on Mars instead.
I live in Altadena (a suburb of Los Angeles), and I can walk to the Angeles National Forest from my house in about ten minutes. (Or a one-minute drive). From there, I can easily hike 500 miles of trails without repeating a step.
... or snowboarding, since both are within easy driving distance. I live in LA in part because I like both the opportunities of a big city with major scientific research institutions (Caltech, UCLA, USC) and business opportunity plus plenty of outdoor activities all in one place.
Moreover, as others have pointed out, Griffith Park is the second largest urban park in the the country at 4210 acres. It is definitely large enough to get lost in, especially in the dark if you don't know the trails.
I just get a little annoyed when people continually badmouth my town. East coasters tend to think LA is just like New York except with snotty movie stars. It's not - West-Coast big cities are very different from East Coast ones in that they are much more spread out instead of vertical and are usually completely surrounded by hundreds of miles of wilderness. Drive 90 minutes in any direction from LA and you are pretty much in the middle of nowhere.
It's one of the few cities anywhere where you can wake up on an April morning and decide that day if you're going to spend the day surfing/sunbathing at the beach
What the msPod will look like:a lbum=4&pos=139
= microsoft%20iPod
http://gallery.ilounge.com/ipod/displayimage.php?
A video has also been showing the box design:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeXAcwriid0&search
. I don't know what Larry Ellison is doing these days, but in the past, his main "philanthropic" ambition was to donate to an anti-aging research foundation.
I don't have a problem with that. Aging kills more people than anything else.
The problem is not gold farmers or eBay. The problem is the dumb design of the game's economy.
Continually generating new random monsters carrying gold is the direct equivalent of continually printing new money, period. Even if there were no farmers, regular players would be killing those monsters and reaping the gold, and the money supply would continually increase. Farmers just speed up the process.
It's a basic part of the game's underlying structure. Banning players for taking advantage of it will just lead to an arms race where folks develop farming tools with increasingly human apparent behavior, making them harder and harder to detect.
If there's something you don't want players to do, then design the game such that there is no advantage for them to do it. The first lesson of economics is that people will do whatever they have incentive to do. This particular game design/rules interaction is like putting a government-sponsored free ice cream cart on every street corner while making it illegal to eat ice cream and periodically shooting all the ice-cream eaters.
The right solution is to design the game with a smart and balanced economy from the get-go.
I agree with the parent that it doesn't matter at all whether the climate change is human-caused or not. We will suffer the consequences either way, so in any case we should be working on it.
But I disagree that cooling would be worse than warming. We can bundle up and move crops south if we have to. But between 1/6 and 1/5 of the earth's population (estimates vary) live within three meters of sea level. And if the Ross Ice Shelf broke off Antartica, sea levels could rise five meters in a very short period of time. (weeks to a few years depending on exactly how it broke).
A new ice age would kill a lot of people, yes. But it would develop gradually, giving us time to plan and react. It would be nothing compared to a rapidly-developing refugee crisis of over a billion people all at once as the ocean swallowed every seaside city on the planet.
The Morgellon's website links to this video:
E pidemic_wmv.htm
http://www.crossinglines.net/2006%20A%20Silent%20
The video describes (incredibly vaguely) some "silent killer" that they imply is an escaped mutant or something from a proteomics lab. It has some dude in a white jacket and then proceeds to show you a series of random microscope images of objects that don't even look vaguely related to each other, with cheap pan and scan effects and the occasional depth of focus change.
There's no soundtrack, and it doesn't look like the labcoat guy is saying the same thing as the caption text. They may have grabbed some footage of a lab tech leading a a tour of a lab and slapped it together in iMovie with some microscope images.
The best thing: the video and the website "crossinglines.net" don't actually name this deadly disease they are documenting. That means that multiple different hoaxes like "Morgellons" can link to the same video, all using it as "proof" of this horrible disease they're using to sell snake oil.
Hang on to your cash around these people, mmmkay?
Have you seen the Site for Taurox?. Aside from looking nothing like a pharmaceutical company or even a homeopathist, it has fascinating text like this:
... no matter what disease you have!
CureImmune develops and distributes products containing TauroxTM, which is believed to be the most potent therapy available for any indication. It naturally modulates or balances the immune system to function optimally.
Yes, it says their product is the most potent therapy for any indication: i.e. a cure-all. aka "snake oil". If you search around, you'll see in some places it's marketed as a homeopathic medicine at high dilution factors (homeopathic 6X = 10E-6 dilution factor, IIRC), and in other places as a conventional medication or nutritional supplement at high concentration. Yes folks, this wonderful medicine, taken in any form and any concentration, is the most effective treatment available
It wouldn't surprise me if many of these sufferers did indeed have a neurological disorder, or a psychiatric disorder, or even as others have suggested, some underlying condition like Lyme or a skin parasite compounded with psychological difficulties. I'm sure it varies from patient to patient. But this company "CureImmune" is taking all these poor fuckers to the cleaners by setting up websites with scary micrographs of lint and stories about fibers growing out of your skin - all to cash in on a scare and people's implicit drive to mistrust the medical establishment.
You're making quite a flap about it, for sure.
Of course! Good Lord, man, no one I know has any problem with going after terrorists.
... because this brings attention to their cause.
In the sense that the federal government means, I oppose going after terrorists. There, I've said it.
Terrorists are inconsequential. 2001 was the worst of any year in history: terrorists killed nearly 4000 people across the globe. In every other year beforehand, terrorists had killed < 800, and in years since, < 1200 people annually. By comparison, automobile accidents kill tens of thousands, heart disease and cancer each kill over half a million.
Meanwhile, what terrorists *want* is for us to come after them. Their goal is to disrupt life through fear. They want to shake things up. They want us to start wars. They want us to change our laws, wiretap our own people, whatever
Terrorism is an activity that thrives only off of attention and reaction, which we've given them in abundance the last few years. Frankly, the best thing we could have done is to just ignore them.
Now, I don't mind "going after them" with law-enforcement techniques as we would any other serious criminal - that's an appropriate response that would have been the best thing we could have do. Much worse to give them more response than they deserve. Incredibly stupid to start a war and wiretap all of our own citizens - the terrorists couldn't have hoped for more.
I'd have to agree with Doc Brown if i'm in a mood for coolness.
But if I'm in a human heterosexual male mood (typical), I may have to go with that blonde hotness scientist from Deep Blue Sea.
Don't know the character or actor's name since I only saw 15 minutes of the movie while in a waiting room lobby, but, damn.
I swear I read that at "Airplane was a remake of Zero Wing" and was waiting for the "Somebody set up us the bomb" joke.
you can make them flash purple and blue and outline them with a dotted cyan line if you want to.
Wow, how did you know how I format my links?
I am amazed by how much fuzz anything related to sexuality is generating.
Why? It's the current razor edge of our world's social development. There is always a subject of social controversy about which society is divided. Social topics near that line are highly controversial and create a lot of noise. Subjects far to either side do not generate so much hot air. The effect is polarizing: conservatives will call the new issue "the end of society" and liberals will call it "justice". I tend to agree with the latter in most cases myself, but in any event in 25 years the topic will usually be pretty well accepted and society will move on to a new battle.
Right now, the razor edge is centered (mostly) on issues of sexuality: orientation, stem cells, emergency birth control, abortion.
A generation ago, the controversial edge was on the length of your hair, the substances you imbibed, and premarital sex. Homosexuality was only beginning to show on the radar but racist law was already waning.
Two generations ago, it was skin color and equal rights for racial minorities. Very few people talked about homosexuality at the time, but today equal rights for blacks isn't a very controversial principle. (Which is not to say it has been entirely achieved, but few people openly oppose it anymore). At the time, it was obvious to everyone, even the liberals, that homosexuality and premarital sex weren't okay.
So don't be surprised in WoW or anyplace else. Most of our social debates will be about sex, sex, sex all the time for the next few years until we get it out of our system and move on to the next subject.
What's up next? Hard to say, impossible to predict. Maybe religious tolerance and principles of secular government need to go through the wringer again. Maybe polyamory is up for its' turn (that would feed into the obsession with sex, anyway). Maybe another round over psychoactive substances is due, though I'd guess that's further off in the US at least.
Who knows. Either way, in 25 years people won't talk much about homosexuality at all and one of those other issues will be the source of all the noise. Even in online games.
Due to Congressional budget cuts, they had to settle for Freakin' Sea Bass with bad dispositions.
For now, odds are you'll just end up with birth defects and adult acne.
I'll be 32 years old in two weeks. Now admittedly IANAB (...Biochemist), but I don't think any amount of Omega-III Fatty Acids can give me birth defects at this point.
So?
You're describing an OS that hasn't been sold in 4-5 years, will not run on any currently-produced hardware, and because it is closed-source and nonstandard, cannot be easily used with the vast majority of modern server applications, languages, and tools being used these days.
I have faithfully used the mac for 15 years and I agree there were some strong security benefits to the classic OS. At the same time, when I am working as an admin and/or developer these days I want recent versions of MySQL and PHP, and I want to be able to shell into my server remotely to be able to administrate it.
If I just happened to have an ultra-security-required web application that didn't need much throughput or capability I might run it on OS 9 on an old G3. But that's definitely a tiny niche. Everything else I'll do with a modern mix of OS X and LAMP, thank you very much.
If you think my characterization of your statement as "bold" was unfair, that's fine.
Either way, I'm merely asking you to back up a statement of fact with a reference. It's not something I have ever heard anywhere else. Which does not mean it does not exist, it might mean I have simply never before encountered the relevant literature.
In which case, if it is a fact, you would be doing me a favor by pointing me towards a documented source so that I may learn of it.
My dayjob is custom LAMP stuff; I love PHP. But in the evenings I've been working on a standalone app, and it seems odd to me too that nobody ever talks about standalone apps anymore. I mean hell - 95% of the crap installed on any computer is standalone so somebody is programming it. Is it all just winders c++ coders that don't read slashdot?
... and the latter would have been a mother to port, using different GUI and Audio APIs on two platforms; the only part I could have saved was the signal processing code. Call it 180% as much effort.
Anyway, the criteria for my app: (1) friendly GUI for non-geek end users. (2) Real-time signal analysis of live audio streams, so it must crunch huge quantities of numbers quickly. (3) Minimal effort to deliver both Win and Mac compatibility, since our customer base is a mix of artistic and educational types. (4) Code and any porting done by a two-person team working a couple nights per week in their spare time -- we both have day jobs.
Given the criteria, there really was no other choice than Java. Our app live-processes data from a microphone input. And there is not one byte of code difference between the shipping versions of the windows and mac versions. Hardware interface, gui, everything. A few mac customizations are handled by command line arguments, but we only have one code tree for two platforms - even though we're doing hardware audio I/O. Can Ruby do that?
The right tool for the right job. My options for this project were Java and C++