I can hardly wait for the match to start (the first game is this Saturday). I will be getting up at 4:30AM EST for the duration of the match, to watch the games live on the web. Although I play nowadays only against computers, I used to play for college team (at Brown) and had reached an expert rating (2100 USCF rating), before quitting human play. As a kid back in the old country (ex-Yugoslavia), my brother and I who shared one bedroom, after the lights out would play blindfolded chess games in the dark, each with the chessboard in his mind eye. He never stopped active competition and became a chess master eventually (that's one rank above me). Once you are bitten by the chess bug, it stays with you for life.
Physics is not immune to parasitic and mercenary research phenomena either, especially in more exotic areas with great funding potential, such as quantum computing & crypto where exaggerations and self-puffery are common. One might say the whole field is of that kind, since their whole theorizing (which is all they got) rests on the speculative aspects of quantum measurement theory, the foundations of which are still awaiting unambiguous experimental demonstration (such as the "loophoole free" violations of Bell inequalities), for over half century already. Should the experimental failure to confirm the fundamental conjectures persist, the whole field will be recognized as fancily relabeled analog computing (such as D-Wave system).
Yes, I have seen that. The wave aspects of QM are not mysterious since some fluids can satisfy similar differential equations (there was a fluid dynamics formulation of QM in 1920s, Madelung's QM).
The strange predictions of non-local behaviors arise only from the QM Measurement Theory (QM-MT; it dates to 1920s Dirac, Heisenberg, von Neumann) which includes postulate about non-local state collapse of composite system.
The Quantum Electrodynamics has its own, newer and rigorously derived measurement theory (QED-MT) developed by Glauber in 1965 which doesn't postulate such remote field collapse, but only non-controversial local collapse, while deriving from QED dynamical equations the behavior of the composite system measurement. That theory doesn't predict non-local behaviors since all dynamics is described via local differential equations, which in Heisenberg picture look just like Maxwell equations, except that operators (matrices) not scalars are field variables. The Quantum Optics is based on QED-MT since it agrees better with what they observe. See this post and discussion explaining the difference between the QM-MT and QED-MT.
This is not the non-local collapse which some QM physicists (mystical school of thought) believe in. Everything in this experiment is local, the two superposed wave components which collapse into one are fully overlapped. Hence it is no more mysterious than your radio antenna collapsing superposed waves of thousands of radio stations striking it, into one component, that of a station you tuned in.
The real controversy is about existence of non-local collapse i.e. when two components and detectors are "far apart" (at space like distance), so that detection by detector D1 (supposedly) instantly collapses the remote field component causing the remote detector D2 to fail to detect it. Most recent experiment claiming to demonstrate such phenomenon with photon on a beam splitter actually cheated (see discussion here). In that claim they basically tweaked the timings on two coincidence circuits well out of manufacturer's specs so that they could never trigger D1 and D2 simultaneously.
Non-local collapse, which was never demonstrated empirically, does not follow from the Quantum Field Theory (discussion here) but is merely a hypothesis in the QM "measurement theory", which is the speculative, soft and fuzzy, part of the theory that has been debated among physicists, philosophers and mystics for nearly a century without getting anywhere so far.
It appears that ideology and political correctness have taken over the debate, here and elsewhere. This should be a matter of research not emotions. For example it is known that women in heavily male dominated professions, such as math, physics, engineering, programming, hacking,... have more problems conceiving and have more miscarriages. This is due to their hormonal balance which is shifted toward male side. Generally, women who have problems with miscarriages are advised during pregnancy to take it easy, avoid stress (physical and psychological) and in severe cases they can get a medical leave from work for much of the pregnancy. Of course, driving in rush hour can be quite stressful. Most prescription medications have warnings advising against use by pregnant women and infants or children. Similarly pregnant women or those trying to conceive are advised to stop smoking since tobacco smoke upregulates corticosteroids (including stress hormones) and testosterone which suppresses estrogen release. In earlier times they would also be advised to stop riding horses. Even today, pregnant women are instinctively helped by passers by in the street with carrying heavier objects, doing something hazardous or requiring physical exertions.
Hence, the gist of the cleric's comment may not be all that far fetched. In any case emotional attacks are certainly not a productive technique for resolving scientific questions and providing the best scientific advice for the women seeking to conceive and carry the pregnancy through with the lowest risks to themselves and their infants.
Each generation is brainwashed into a different Matrix. 'Founding Fathers' and other great men until 1960s would by today's brainwashing be denounced as racist, sexist homophobes. Kids of tomorrow may denounce you as a hateful old polygamophobe, pedophilophobe, zoophilophobe, necrophilophobe, fetishphobe, toesuckingphobe, kleptophobe.... And then you too will wonder, what the heck is wrong with these kids, while they will insist that you vet your public speaking with younger, more enlightened folks before making a fool out of yourself. Having lived in a communist country as it flipped into its exact opposite, then not long after that it flipped back, you wouldn't believe how quickly and how thoroughly the tune in schools and media changes the dominant mythology to its complete opposite. Once you experience it, you can't take any of them very seriously.
Of course, not all Matrices are created equal. Since each Matrix is a computational process, working out yet another provisional solution to the social harmonization puzzle, you can't know which is a good and which a poor solution until some time time has passed and the latest experimental solution had a chance to get tested under variety of conditions. As the old book taught, you will know them by their fruits.
It may also be that people who take good care of their teeth, which includes regular dental checkups end up with more x-rays and more exposure to variety of viruses or bacteria which may be carcinogenic (such as HPV, cold sores). Another potential factor is carcinogenicity of the tooth care products, such as toothpastes and mouthwashes. These are couple possibilities that one wouldn't expect research by 'cavity industry' to consider.
When went on vacations for 3 weeks to the 'old country' and came back, everything looked huge and spread out here, roads, buildings, cars, houses, yards, people... It was surreal the first couple hours after the return.
Did wild fish, wolves, foxes, lions... i.e. animals not relying on human-made food get obese? I didn't see any of those mentioned in the article. It seems the common thread is that obesity increased in the organisms eating food manufactured by humans and that food did change significantly over the last several decades.
The need to boost yield (weight gain) of food sources must have had a downstream biochemical side-effect of boosting the yields (weight gains) of anyone consuming such foods. For example growth hormones and antibiotics will cause weight gain in farm animals and in those eating them. That may be true for other types of food (non-animal) and other mechanisms, whether they were deliberately introduced to boost the production efficiency or merely empirically absorbed into the production practices (whatever works).
There is still a factual element missing from any such description in terms present natural science e.g. what is it like to see redness, the qualia of red (which is distinct from describing which neuron does what). There is nothing even in the most detailed description of neural function that indicates how such network experiences redness (what is it like to be in that state), or that there is anything like experience of redness. The present science cannot even define what it is to be studied here, yet it is the only phenomenon one can truly be certain about at all (e.g. if you're solipsist in which case everything else is merely a labeling convention to you help you organize elements of your own direct experience which the only thing that exists). Additional postulates and formalism are needed to formulate and answer such questions. The present natural science is simply incomplete in this domain (as it always was, is and will remain in many other ways).
Nothing in natural science can predict that such and such configuration of atoms and fields has a consciousness attribute. There isn't even such an attribute to be characterized in present natural science, let alone predicted or falsified.
You are welcome to point to a theory and peer reviewed papers that predict (not a synonym for handwaving 'complex', 'emergent',....) which configurations of matter-energy have 'consciousness' attribute, along with experiments that that measures this 'consciousness' attribute. Is the 'consciousness' attribute a Boolean value, integer, floating point, complex number, quaternion,... and what range does it have? What is the equation that allows you to compute it?
You are simply offering one among conceivable conjectures consistent with observations, the matter-mind stuff identity hypothesis. The 'brain as a receiver' (of the mind stuff) conjecture is one among alternatives. Another one is to view the physical universe as a simulation, with matter and its laws being analogous to patterns in the Conway game of Life and the mind stuff belonging to the "chief programmer of the universe" (Schrodinger and Planck, among others, favored this kind of 'single mind' hypothesis).
The point of the "hard problem of consciousness" (which, from your "summary", you seem to thoroughly misunderstand) is that present natural science lacks any way to empirically distinguish between them i.e. currently they are merely unfalsifiable speculations.
The natural science lacks explanation for consciousness (hard problem of consciousness). Nothing in the laws of natural science as presently known indicates what is it like to be such and such arrangement of elementary particles and fields. The mere correlation between reports or introspection of conscious states and electro-chemical activity of the brain does not imply that conscious state is produced or maintained by the this electro-chemical activity. After all, there are no little people dancing and singing inside TV even though their activity is strongly correlated with electrical activity in the TV and can be interfered with by cutting off the electric power to the TV.
As the authors explain "Testing these predictions quantitatively using 3-D climate models should be a fruitful topic for future research." i.e. they need to keep paying mortgages, car loans,... next few years. The model is so embarrassingly inadequate, that considering how much room for fudging one has with toy models, they still barely managed to get Earth to come inside the "habitable zone."
I also wonder how will politicians translate this 1-D toy model into a story in which we are somehow responsible for the Earth's distance from Sun and need to pay them for it.
The bad parenting is result of some brain difference too. And that difference is passed on genetically. Hence, on what basis do they attribute the difference to the neglect rather than to genetic causes?
Native apps (including those running UIWebView) already use native ARM machine instructions as they wish (you can set compiler to to compile into pure native ARM instructions or write ARM assembly code if you want; Apple only controls which system APIs developers can access, which they can do from JS->machine compiled code equally well). So that "explanation" doesn't make much sense. It is more likely that they merely rushed the iOS upgrade out before their programmers had finished the porting to UIWebView.
It's trivial to block this -- just add a batch file nofb.bat that replaces your host file with the one that has facebook redirected to 127.0.0.1. If you use fb and wish to actually go there, you can have another bat file, gofb.bat which changes host file back to the one with facebook entry commented out (the bat file may call a little executable that flushes local DNS cache on your machine by resolving the affected domain name). In general case, if you wish to do this selectively for n tracking sites, with n>1, you will need one bat file that blocks all of them and one for each site that has just one site site unblocked, hence you need n+1 bat files. Also, going to any of the tracking sites to use their services will also cost you an extra click for in and out.
Note that google, digg and many others are doing the same kind of tracking, whether you subscribe to their site or not. You get ID on their servers attached to your cookies, tracking your visits anywhere where their bug is placed. That way they can sell to some site A which you are visiting now the fact that you have also visited sites B, C, D,... earlier (when and how many times each, what kind of content you used there, etc). Of course, if the tracking servers know who you are, they can also sell that info to sites A, B, C..., at a higher price.
Dr. Brad Cox -- and he had one main goal in mind: Be a strict superset of C
That's as worthy a goal as inventing car that is strict superset of the horse carriage or a plane which is strict superset of a hot air baloon. Strict C is not suitable for OOP due to lack of overloading and creation/management of name spaces.
This is by design. It allows dynamic messaging. You can even, for example, send a message to nil and everything is fine.
You should't have to execute hundreds of CPU instructions to make a function call that checks for the whether function pointer (or its parent ptr) is null. Three CPU instructions can easily handle it (e.g. OR EAX,EAX; JZ skip; CALL EAX). In fact this dubious "feature" has probably cost me more debugging time than any other "feature" -- an uninitialized/released object quietly returns 0, that breaks something else many steps later, which needs then to be backtracked to the source problem. I would rather the code crashed right there at call, so I can find it on the first crash, rather then reconstructing it from some subtle malfunction much later on.
Again, only something you need in a statically linked object-inheritance style language like C++.
There is absolutely no gain (other than saving efforts of the compiler writer at the expense of programmers & end users CPU/battery) in hashing method names and searching them in a hash table for each invocation of class method/property access compared to storing the target function address into an array of pointers (which can be fixed-up/reloacted if needed by loader) and calling them via function pointers retrieved in a single instruction via compiler generated index. The array of pointers, with an extern/export allowing access to it to the app, has full dynamical felxibility equal to anything provided by hashed method names, while using hundreds times fewer runtime CPU instructions (with more complex compiler code instead). Single step once through assembly code of a method call or property access, and recall that all it is doing is one or two instruction worth of actual task.
Again, by design. Named arguments makes Objective-C one of the best languages for code readability. You don't have to wonder what the arguments are!
I don't find [obj string:string count:count] any more readable than obj->string(count) or *obj(string,count). It's needless clutter that saved the compiler writer trouble of implementing name mangling & overloading by shoving that part of compiler job to the brains of future programmers. Compiler designer saved himself few weeks at the expense of few hundred million weeks of work for programmers. Great deal.
I agree that the Cocoa library objects / methods are verbose, but this is a GOOD thing.
It's a good thing if you are manager who hasn't programmed since college and wish to peek at what some code is doing, without learning the language. Cocoa names are like having manual for the class rewritten over and over in each statement.
But if you are trying to follow the pattern specific to the task of your code, the vast volume of the Cocoa names smothers it, making even the most trivial algorithm look like rocket science. Dragging with each name its whole ancestry is exactly opposite from the objective of abstraction, which is the key tool in conquering the complexities of programming. All aspects that are not strictly specific to narrow task that some function/method is doing, should be out of sight, just like the one of most valuable abstraction tools in computer languages, functions, hide all the variation of the caller's context and purposes from the implementation of the function. The function knows only the aspect of the world defined by its parameters & return values and need not worry about whether, say rectangle it is operating on is screen rectangle or room floor...
With its lack of overloading, named args, poor name space partitioning,... the Obj-C is completely contrary to the objectives of abstra
You clearly don't know what you are talking about, which is probably why you were shut down on the Apple forum.
I wasn't shut down on the forum. Just one thread was frozen by some big honcho after they couldn't defend Obj-C in a fair debate.
Using things like KVO/Bindings and distributed objects REQUIRES that the functions be addressed by name, not by address.
On iPhone/iPad there are no distributed objects or execution. Even with distributed execution systems why would one use malloc-ed ascii string objects for simple scalar parameters (like integers, small enums, even single bits) to a service. I have written quite a bit of networking code (mostly in CFNetwork & BSD sockets whenever possible), with complex distributed state machines and execution, and all protocols and state machines are pure binary, without needless back and forth conversions to/from ascii, let alone malloc-ing memory block for an ascii string to pass a true/false parameter to a service. If something needs to be distribute the processing, any de/serializing should be wrapped and hidden from the API user. The ascii string objects/name-value dictionaries obsession for simple scalar values is pervasive in Cocoa APIs, almost like some religious rite. Unless that's all you grew up with and don't know any better, it is extremely annoying since it is completely needless.
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly, the ancient medicinal plant, tobacco, is also caspase inhibitor, just like the promising drug VX-765 (aka "belnacasan") in that article.
I can hardly wait for the match to start (the first game is this Saturday). I will be getting up at 4:30AM EST for the duration of the match, to watch the games live on the web. Although I play nowadays only against computers, I used to play for college team (at Brown) and had reached an expert rating (2100 USCF rating), before quitting human play. As a kid back in the old country (ex-Yugoslavia), my brother and I who shared one bedroom, after the lights out would play blindfolded chess games in the dark, each with the chessboard in his mind eye. He never stopped active competition and became a chess master eventually (that's one rank above me). Once you are bitten by the chess bug, it stays with you for life.
I thin this one is more pertinent for the Salon article.
Physics is not immune to parasitic and mercenary research phenomena either, especially in more exotic areas with great funding potential, such as quantum computing & crypto where exaggerations and self-puffery are common. One might say the whole field is of that kind, since their whole theorizing (which is all they got) rests on the speculative aspects of quantum measurement theory, the foundations of which are still awaiting unambiguous experimental demonstration (such as the "loophoole free" violations of Bell inequalities), for over half century already. Should the experimental failure to confirm the fundamental conjectures persist, the whole field will be recognized as fancily relabeled analog computing (such as D-Wave system).
Yes, I have seen that. The wave aspects of QM are not mysterious since some fluids can satisfy similar differential equations (there was a fluid dynamics formulation of QM in 1920s, Madelung's QM).
The strange predictions of non-local behaviors arise only from the QM Measurement Theory (QM-MT; it dates to 1920s Dirac, Heisenberg, von Neumann) which includes postulate about non-local state collapse of composite system.
The Quantum Electrodynamics has its own, newer and rigorously derived measurement theory (QED-MT) developed by Glauber in 1965 which doesn't postulate such remote field collapse, but only non-controversial local collapse, while deriving from QED dynamical equations the behavior of the composite system measurement. That theory doesn't predict non-local behaviors since all dynamics is described via local differential equations, which in Heisenberg picture look just like Maxwell equations, except that operators (matrices) not scalars are field variables. The Quantum Optics is based on QED-MT since it agrees better with what they observe. See this post and discussion explaining the difference between the QM-MT and QED-MT.
This is not the non-local collapse which some QM physicists (mystical school of thought) believe in. Everything in this experiment is local, the two superposed wave components which collapse into one are fully overlapped. Hence it is no more mysterious than your radio antenna collapsing superposed waves of thousands of radio stations striking it, into one component, that of a station you tuned in.
The real controversy is about existence of non-local collapse i.e. when two components and detectors are "far apart" (at space like distance), so that detection by detector D1 (supposedly) instantly collapses the remote field component causing the remote detector D2 to fail to detect it. Most recent experiment claiming to demonstrate such phenomenon with photon on a beam splitter actually cheated (see discussion here). In that claim they basically tweaked the timings on two coincidence circuits well out of manufacturer's specs so that they could never trigger D1 and D2 simultaneously.
Non-local collapse, which was never demonstrated empirically, does not follow from the Quantum Field Theory (discussion here) but is merely a hypothesis in the QM "measurement theory", which is the speculative, soft and fuzzy, part of the theory that has been debated among physicists, philosophers and mystics for nearly a century without getting anywhere so far.
It appears that ideology and political correctness have taken over the debate, here and elsewhere. This should be a matter of research not emotions. For example it is known that women in heavily male dominated professions, such as math, physics, engineering, programming, hacking,... have more problems conceiving and have more miscarriages. This is due to their hormonal balance which is shifted toward male side. Generally, women who have problems with miscarriages are advised during pregnancy to take it easy, avoid stress (physical and psychological) and in severe cases they can get a medical leave from work for much of the pregnancy. Of course, driving in rush hour can be quite stressful. Most prescription medications have warnings advising against use by pregnant women and infants or children. Similarly pregnant women or those trying to conceive are advised to stop smoking since tobacco smoke upregulates corticosteroids (including stress hormones) and testosterone which suppresses estrogen release. In earlier times they would also be advised to stop riding horses. Even today, pregnant women are instinctively helped by passers by in the street with carrying heavier objects, doing something hazardous or requiring physical exertions.
Hence, the gist of the cleric's comment may not be all that far fetched. In any case emotional attacks are certainly not a productive technique for resolving scientific questions and providing the best scientific advice for the women seeking to conceive and carry the pregnancy through with the lowest risks to themselves and their infants.
Each generation is brainwashed into a different Matrix. 'Founding Fathers' and other great men until 1960s would by today's brainwashing be denounced as racist, sexist homophobes. Kids of tomorrow may denounce you as a hateful old polygamophobe, pedophilophobe, zoophilophobe, necrophilophobe, fetishphobe, toesuckingphobe, kleptophobe.... And then you too will wonder, what the heck is wrong with these kids, while they will insist that you vet your public speaking with younger, more enlightened folks before making a fool out of yourself. Having lived in a communist country as it flipped into its exact opposite, then not long after that it flipped back, you wouldn't believe how quickly and how thoroughly the tune in schools and media changes the dominant mythology to its complete opposite. Once you experience it, you can't take any of them very seriously.
Of course, not all Matrices are created equal. Since each Matrix is a computational process, working out yet another provisional solution to the social harmonization puzzle, you can't know which is a good and which a poor solution until some time time has passed and the latest experimental solution had a chance to get tested under variety of conditions. As the old book taught, you will know them by their fruits.
It may also be that people who take good care of their teeth, which includes regular dental checkups end up with more x-rays and more exposure to variety of viruses or bacteria which may be carcinogenic (such as HPV, cold sores). Another potential factor is carcinogenicity of the tooth care products, such as toothpastes and mouthwashes. These are couple possibilities that one wouldn't expect research by 'cavity industry' to consider.
They are still down. Now Slashdot will get sued and audited by IRS for crashing government's infrastructure.
(Don't blame me, I voted for Ron Paul.)
When went on vacations for 3 weeks to the 'old country' and came back, everything looked huge and spread out here, roads, buildings, cars, houses, yards, people... It was surreal the first couple hours after the return.
Did wild fish, wolves, foxes, lions... i.e. animals not relying on human-made food get obese? I didn't see any of those mentioned in the article. It seems the common thread is that obesity increased in the organisms eating food manufactured by humans and that food did change significantly over the last several decades.
The need to boost yield (weight gain) of food sources must have had a downstream biochemical side-effect of boosting the yields (weight gains) of anyone consuming such foods. For example growth hormones and antibiotics will cause weight gain in farm animals and in those eating them. That may be true for other types of food (non-animal) and other mechanisms, whether they were deliberately introduced to boost the production efficiency or merely empirically absorbed into the production practices (whatever works).
There is still a factual element missing from any such description in terms present natural science e.g. what is it like to see redness, the qualia of red (which is distinct from describing which neuron does what). There is nothing even in the most detailed description of neural function that indicates how such network experiences redness (what is it like to be in that state), or that there is anything like experience of redness. The present science cannot even define what it is to be studied here, yet it is the only phenomenon one can truly be certain about at all (e.g. if you're solipsist in which case everything else is merely a labeling convention to you help you organize elements of your own direct experience which the only thing that exists). Additional postulates and formalism are needed to formulate and answer such questions. The present natural science is simply incomplete in this domain (as it always was, is and will remain in many other ways).
Nothing in natural science can predict that such and such configuration of atoms and fields has a consciousness attribute. There isn't even such an attribute to be characterized in present natural science, let alone predicted or falsified.
You are welcome to point to a theory and peer reviewed papers that predict (not a synonym for handwaving 'complex', 'emergent',....) which configurations of matter-energy have 'consciousness' attribute, along with experiments that that measures this 'consciousness' attribute. Is the 'consciousness' attribute a Boolean value, integer, floating point, complex number, quaternion,... and what range does it have? What is the equation that allows you to compute it?
You are simply offering one among conceivable conjectures consistent with observations, the matter-mind stuff identity hypothesis. The 'brain as a receiver' (of the mind stuff) conjecture is one among alternatives. Another one is to view the physical universe as a simulation, with matter and its laws being analogous to patterns in the Conway game of Life and the mind stuff belonging to the "chief programmer of the universe" (Schrodinger and Planck, among others, favored this kind of 'single mind' hypothesis).
The point of the "hard problem of consciousness" (which, from your "summary", you seem to thoroughly misunderstand) is that present natural science lacks any way to empirically distinguish between them i.e. currently they are merely unfalsifiable speculations.
The natural science lacks explanation for consciousness (hard problem of consciousness). Nothing in the laws of natural science as presently known indicates what is it like to be such and such arrangement of elementary particles and fields. The mere correlation between reports or introspection of conscious states and electro-chemical activity of the brain does not imply that conscious state is produced or maintained by the this electro-chemical activity. After all, there are no little people dancing and singing inside TV even though their activity is strongly correlated with electrical activity in the TV and can be interfered with by cutting off the electric power to the TV.
As the authors explain "Testing these predictions quantitatively using 3-D climate models should be a fruitful topic for future research." i.e. they need to keep paying mortgages, car loans,... next few years. The model is so embarrassingly inadequate, that considering how much room for fudging one has with toy models, they still barely managed to get Earth to come inside the "habitable zone."
I also wonder how will politicians translate this 1-D toy model into a story in which we are somehow responsible for the Earth's distance from Sun and need to pay them for it.
The bad parenting is result of some brain difference too. And that difference is passed on genetically. Hence, on what basis do they attribute the difference to the neglect rather than to genetic causes?
Recent outages of AWS and other providers demonstrate that weather does affect the "Cloud" platforms.
Native apps (including those running UIWebView) already use native ARM machine instructions as they wish (you can set compiler to to compile into pure native ARM instructions or write ARM assembly code if you want; Apple only controls which system APIs developers can access, which they can do from JS->machine compiled code equally well). So that "explanation" doesn't make much sense. It is more likely that they merely rushed the iOS upgrade out before their programmers had finished the porting to UIWebView.
It's trivial to block this -- just add a batch file nofb.bat that replaces your host file with the one that has facebook redirected to 127.0.0.1. If you use fb and wish to actually go there, you can have another bat file, gofb.bat which changes host file back to the one with facebook entry commented out (the bat file may call a little executable that flushes local DNS cache on your machine by resolving the affected domain name). In general case, if you wish to do this selectively for n tracking sites, with n>1, you will need one bat file that blocks all of them and one for each site that has just one site site unblocked, hence you need n+1 bat files. Also, going to any of the tracking sites to use their services will also cost you an extra click for in and out.
Note that google, digg and many others are doing the same kind of tracking, whether you subscribe to their site or not. You get ID on their servers attached to your cookies, tracking your visits anywhere where their bug is placed. That way they can sell to some site A which you are visiting now the fact that you have also visited sites B, C, D, ... earlier (when and how many times each, what kind of content you used there, etc). Of course, if the tracking servers know who you are, they can also sell that info to sites A, B, C..., at a higher price.
why didn't you use objective c++?
I did try it on one of the apps, but found the mixing of the two quite different OOP schemes even more discordant.
By the way, if I remember correctly nothing stops you from declaring methods that can be called as e.g. "[foo bar :1 :2 :3]" if you want.
That's what I do. Unfortunately, Xcode disables syntax coloring if you don't name the method parameters.
Dr. Brad Cox -- and he had one main goal in mind: Be a strict superset of C
That's as worthy a goal as inventing car that is strict superset of the horse carriage or a plane which is strict superset of a hot air baloon. Strict C is not suitable for OOP due to lack of overloading and creation/management of name spaces.
This is by design. It allows dynamic messaging. You can even, for example, send a message to nil and everything is fine.
You should't have to execute hundreds of CPU instructions to make a function call that checks for the whether function pointer (or its parent ptr) is null. Three CPU instructions can easily handle it (e.g. OR EAX,EAX; JZ skip; CALL EAX). In fact this dubious "feature" has probably cost me more debugging time than any other "feature" -- an uninitialized/released object quietly returns 0, that breaks something else many steps later, which needs then to be backtracked to the source problem. I would rather the code crashed right there at call, so I can find it on the first crash, rather then reconstructing it from some subtle malfunction much later on.
Again, only something you need in a statically linked object-inheritance style language like C++.
There is absolutely no gain (other than saving efforts of the compiler writer at the expense of programmers & end users CPU/battery) in hashing method names and searching them in a hash table for each invocation of class method/property access compared to storing the target function address into an array of pointers (which can be fixed-up/reloacted if needed by loader) and calling them via function pointers retrieved in a single instruction via compiler generated index. The array of pointers, with an extern/export allowing access to it to the app, has full dynamical felxibility equal to anything provided by hashed method names, while using hundreds times fewer runtime CPU instructions (with more complex compiler code instead). Single step once through assembly code of a method call or property access, and recall that all it is doing is one or two instruction worth of actual task.
Again, by design. Named arguments makes Objective-C one of the best languages for code readability. You don't have to wonder what the arguments are!
I don't find [obj string:string count:count] any more readable than obj->string(count) or *obj(string,count). It's needless clutter that saved the compiler writer trouble of implementing name mangling & overloading by shoving that part of compiler job to the brains of future programmers. Compiler designer saved himself few weeks at the expense of few hundred million weeks of work for programmers. Great deal.
I agree that the Cocoa library objects / methods are verbose, but this is a GOOD thing.
It's a good thing if you are manager who hasn't programmed since college and wish to peek at what some code is doing, without learning the language. Cocoa names are like having manual for the class rewritten over and over in each statement.
But if you are trying to follow the pattern specific to the task of your code, the vast volume of the Cocoa names smothers it, making even the most trivial algorithm look like rocket science. Dragging with each name its whole ancestry is exactly opposite from the objective of abstraction, which is the key tool in conquering the complexities of programming. All aspects that are not strictly specific to narrow task that some function/method is doing, should be out of sight, just like the one of most valuable abstraction tools in computer languages, functions, hide all the variation of the caller's context and purposes from the implementation of the function. The function knows only the aspect of the world defined by its parameters & return values and need not worry about whether, say rectangle it is operating on is screen rectangle or room floor...
With its lack of overloading, named args, poor name space partitioning,... the Obj-C is completely contrary to the objectives of abstra
You clearly don't know what you are talking about, which is probably why you were shut down on the Apple forum.
I wasn't shut down on the forum. Just one thread was frozen by some big honcho after they couldn't defend Obj-C in a fair debate.
Using things like KVO/Bindings and distributed objects REQUIRES that the functions be addressed by name, not by address.
On iPhone/iPad there are no distributed objects or execution. Even with distributed execution systems why would one use malloc-ed ascii string objects for simple scalar parameters (like integers, small enums, even single bits) to a service. I have written quite a bit of networking code (mostly in CFNetwork & BSD sockets whenever possible), with complex distributed state machines and execution, and all protocols and state machines are pure binary, without needless back and forth conversions to/from ascii, let alone malloc-ing memory block for an ascii string to pass a true/false parameter to a service. If something needs to be distribute the processing, any de/serializing should be wrapped and hidden from the API user. The ascii string objects/name-value dictionaries obsession for simple scalar values is pervasive in Cocoa APIs, almost like some religious rite. Unless that's all you grew up with and don't know any better, it is extremely annoying since it is completely needless.