Because it was never technically BSD. It's a Mach kernel with BSD-Userland.
Or, rather, a Mach+BSD+Apple stuff kernel with BSD+Apple stuff userland. That's why one subdirectory of the XNU source tree is called "bsd".... (There's no "Apple stuff" subdirectory; the changes and new stuff from Apple is scattered throughout the Mach ("osfmk") and BSD ("bsd") directory, as well as being in the "iokit" directory, etc..)
(Amusingly enough, Mountain Lion's autocorrect tries to replace "bsd" with "bad". Perhaps the Core OS group needs to pay a visit to the group that does autocorrect....:-))
So how is that different from stuff that runs on my a-bit-larger portable device (it's called a "Retina MacBook Pro") that I can walk away with?
Mine's available to me. All the time.
That's how your smartphone or tablet is different from your notebook. It is not how the software running on it is inherently different. It's not as if there's this magical new category of things called "apps" that are utterly massively different from the software that runs on desktop or notebook machines (especially given that, err, umm, Apple, for example, sells third party software for their desktop and notebook machines on something they call an, err, umm, "app store").
"App" is, sadly, a term being used for its connotation than its denotation; depending on how people want to spin things to make others believe what they're trying to get them to believe, it can, for example, mean "small application" (i.e., a program performing some small limited task) or "application that runs on a smartphone or tablet" (the fact that people talk about "apps" running on notebook and desktop computers notwithstanding). The two categories are far from equivalent - you can run some pretty large applications on smartphones and tablets, and there are plenty of small applications for desktops and notebooks.
Since I also have a macbook pro, I'm well aware of the inconvenience of dragging that thing around. As I'm also carrying a camera bag, it becomes a real logistical issue -- more than just "do I want to" but "is this really practical?" Seriously man, you just can't argue your way out of a phone or tablet being much more portable and convenient.
A smartphone is more portable than a tablet, which is more portable than a notebook, which is more portable than a desktop. Depending on, for example, how much screen space you need, a desktop can be more convenient for certain tasks than a notebook, and a notebook more convenient than a tablet, and a tablet more convenient than a smartphone. If various of the latter three categories can be plugged into larger monitors, then the convenience can be restored, at the expense of portability. Perhaps with future display technologies a large viewing area won't be a portability issue.
The point is that it's not as if there's some "mobile" market where there's no distinction between smartphones and tablets, or that there's some "desktop" market where there's no distinction between notebooks and desktops. You have at least four form factors, with a tradeoff between how easy the machine is to carry and how easy it is to do certain tasks on it.
OK, your pocket's pretty big or your tablet's a bit small if your tablet fits in it.
I always carry a bag. Camera's in it, as is some other tech. But even if I were not carrying a bag, an ipod or iphone fits fine in a pocket,
What sort of pocket? If you mean "pants pocket":
iPad: 7.31 inches by 9.50 inches.
iPad mini: 7.87 inches by 5.3 inches.
My pants pocket: about 8 inches by about 4 inches.
Neither of those tablets are going to fit. A quick look at the Galaxy Tabs doesn't show them as any more likely to fit in my pants pocket.
The iPad or iPad mini would, I think, fit in my shoulder bag; the question is whether, if I had an iPad, I'm going to want to stuff it there (as opposed to stuffing my iPhone into the shoulder bag assuming it's not already there) and carry an extra.68-pound/308g iPad mini or 1.44-pound/652g iPad rather than just a 3.95-ounce/112g iPhone 5.
and they are the same device for all intents and purposes.
Wrong. An iPhone fits easily in one hand, and weighs a little more than half of what an iPad mini weighs; neither an iPad nor an iPad mini would fit in one of my hands. Maybe you have big hands and big pants pockets.
In one very important way: It runs on my portable device and I can walk away with it.
So how is that different from stuff that runs on my a-bit-larger portable device (it's called a "Retina MacBook Pro") that I can walk away with?
That's all tablets and smartphones give anyone. But saying "that's all" understates the value by incredible amounts. I *love* having that kind of power in my pocket.
OK, your pocket's pretty big or your tablet's a bit small if your tablet fits in it. But I digress.... (The point being that lumping tablets and smartphones is a bit bogus, just as lumping desktops and notebooks is a bit bogus. I don't even think twice about carrying my smartphone with me; I suspect I'd think at least twice about carrying a tablet with me. I might or might not think more about carrying a notebook than a tablet; I wouldn't even think about carrying a desktop computer with me.)
In any case, this has nothing to do with "apps" vs. "computer software for desktops", it has to do with the size of the computer. How much of that software would be interesting only if running on a computer you can carry with you? How much of that software would be interesting only if running on a computer smaller than a notebook? And, as long as we're going down that path, how much of that software wouldn't be that interesting on a tablet, only on a smartphone?
And, once we're talking about software that's basically the same type of software as "computer software for desktops", except for the "the screen is limited in size, but you can touch it and activate the UI that way" part, why is there going to be a huge "app market" for it different from, say, the market for "computer software for desktops"? For example:
What's the length of an inverted vee resonant antenna for 3.800 MHz at 35 feet? At 60 feet?
...is the market for antenna-design software for sub-notebook machines going to be significantly larger than the market for antenna-design software for notebook-and-larger machines?
As people transition more and more of their time to Phones and Tablets, the market for iOS and Android apps will only grow.
Unless people figure out how to make their Web sites work well on smartphones and tablets without having to have a copy of "Cocoa Touch for Dummies" or "Dalvik for Dummies" on their desk. At that point, the market for apps will just be the market for apps that do something useful rather than just providing "an incomplete version of [their] website where you can't zoom".
You are a near-sighted idiot. Terminal is one program of many that are part of OS X. As the GP wrote, practically nothing.
And Konsole is one program of many that are part of KDE and gnome-terminal is one program of many that are part of GNOME. So how does any other flavor of "desktop Un*x" owe any more to Unix at the UI layer than does OS X?
Yes, that is quite true. But smartphones are useful in every day life.
A webpage itself is pretty generic most times, not to mention slow and limited because of years of W3C destruction. It is only just recovering with WHATWG spearheading development, everyone of any worth is ignoring W3C as an idea now, it is just broken and slow, not to mention monolithic, the opposite of what web tech can and needs to be.
When it is an app, it can be very specific, it can be fast and even fairly heavy in the media department too.
Please cite some examples of apps that are front ends to Web sites but that are significantly better by being "very specific" or "fast and even fairly heavy in the media department" (and not just "better" due to the Web site developer not bothering to offer a version of their Web site that works well on a small handheld screen).
No, it is relevant, because I was talking about apps. Not computer software for desktops, but apps.
To what extent are people going to be interested in "apps", in the sense of "a flood of.99{dollar,euro,etc.} programs a lot of which are small games or replacements for browser windows", on machines that can run software that can do more than those "apps" can? When the machines are powerful enough that a program whose main job is talking to a Web server and showing you the results of what it asked the server to say will work Just Fine when written as a bunch of Javascript sent to your browser and run inside that browser (and that the browser won't randomly start shooting windows down once you have 8 open and try to open another one), why would anybody bother to pay somebody to write an "app" to talk to that Web server rather than, at most, having a version of their Web site for machines with small touch screens and another version for machines with larger screens and a separate keyboard and pointing device?
If the "app" needs to do a significant amount of local processing or store a significant amount of local data, maybe there's a point to it being something other than a Web app, but, at that point, how is it different from "computer software for desktops" except that it uses a touchscreen and maybe a virtual rather than a real keyboard (assuming you don't just connect a real keyboard up to your smartphone or tablet) and a mouse?
The only thing limiting apps right now is small memory and slowish, low core-count processors.
As the pads and phones continue to power up, there will be a market for more and more serious software (and we'll begin to see a real desktop instead of this freakish abomination with 20 apps / drawer and no nested drawers and no app to app data sharing.)
Pads and phones are really in their infancy. I can think of a huge long list of additional capabilities that have yet to hit the market, and a whole bunch of potential apps that can't run there -- yet -- because the hardware is still too anemic.
When your pad or phone has 16 cores running at 3 ghz, a decent ultracap power supply, 64 gb of ram... you'll look at that "app bubble" statement the same way we look at what the head of the patent department in the early 1900's was saying when he declared something along the lines of "everything important has already been invented", or the famous "no one needs more than 64k (or was it 640? Can't be bothered, both are equally ridiculous.)
...and say "OK, smartphones and tablets are now complete replacements for desktops/notebooks, and the market for smartphone/tablet applications is like the market for desktop/notebook applications, so, instead of several million 0.99{dollar,euro,etc.} applications a lot of which are tiny games or replacements for browser windows, we have a much smaller number of applications that cost more and are actually worth that higher cost." That won't necessarily be a market in which everybody and their brother can go whip up an app and make money off of it....
Well, Linux is still tied to X11. Which means the window manager is separate from the graphics display interface, leading to a profusion of different user interfaces and fragmentation of developer effort.
That is not the only cause of the user interface fragmentation; the window manager is not the entire UI. The widget set is as big, or bigger, component, and X11 shipped with a framework for widgets (the Xt Intrinsics) and a very primitive widget set (the Athena widgets), and provided an interface that allowed tons of widget sets to be implemented atop it, so you had Motif with the Motif look and feel and API and XView and OLIT with the OPEN LOOK look and feel and two different APIs and so on and so forth.
And, in addition, the technical ability to have a variety of different UIs atop a core window system is not limited to X11. GTK+ runs on Windows atop the Windows graphics layer, and supports the same theme modules as it does atop X11, and the same mechanisms X11.app uses to draw windows without the standard system title bar, and widgets with the look and feel of whatever toolkit they're in, are available to programs using Quartz.
The difference here wasn't technical, it was organizational. The group developing X11 deliberately avoided policy decisions, probably because it included people from different companies who wanted their own toolkits and look-and-feel. Neither Microsoft nor Apple, however, wanted that sort of diversity, so they provided standard widget sets, and app developers didn't, by and large, want to roll their own widget sets and provide their own look and feel.
Now, I know perfectly well we could dicker about whether or not X11 is technically part of Unix,
We could, but anybody on the "yes, it's technically part of Unix" side would be wrong. Unix systems had window systems before X11 (SunWindows/SunView, for example), and at least two window systems contemporaneous with X11 (NeWS and NeXT's Display Postscript), and at least one window system after X11 (Quartz). In addition, X11 was also used as the window system for at least one non-Unix operating system (VMS).
and whether X11 has hobbled or helped the adoption of unix-based systems.
...or made no more than a minor difference in the adoption of Unix-based systems. Perhaps Unix didn't displace Windows because the superminicomputer-flavored Unixes were too much for PCs at the time (Microsoft's superminicomputer-flavored OS didn't become the mainstream consumer Windows until 2003 or so), or because DOS already had enough market share that Windows could pick up more easily than Unix, or because of the deals Microsoft offered to DOS OEMs, or....
Yes, the one Unix that did make significant inroads against Windows did have a non-X11-based Window system. However, it was the replacement for an existing OS that still had some desktop/notebook market share, and it made significant efforts to let applications for the existing OS run, and made significant efforts to make it easier to port applications from that existing OS (to the point of offering two OS X APIs for applications, rather than the one and only one - Cocoa - offered for Rhapsody, and making a version for OS 9 as well), so crediting its non-X11-based window system for those inroads (which still give it only a minority position) is a bit of a stretch.
But mainly I find it interesting how many have tried and failed to displace X11 on Linux.
The bulk of the competitors were small projects (Berlin, Y, etc.) that may not have had enough muscle behind them to make a difference. NeWS had Sun behind it, but that was both a bug and a feature; the companies on the other side of the Unix Wars(TM) didn't have much incentive to use it, and had some incentive to oppose it. Display Postscript was only a window system of its own on NeXTStEP, and NeXT, unlike Apple, didn't already have an i
> The app bubble if it existed popped a while back. Mobile development is where it is at.
I thought the apps under discussion were mobile apps? I don't think there's any desktop app bubble.
Why wasn't there one?
Either way, I don't believe it will 'pop.' The mobile space has been growing steadily and people don't seem eager to switch back to desktop/laptop net usage.
If they could switch to smartphone/tablet net usage, then, presumably, a desktop or notebook computer was overkill for what they needed, and they wouldn't have much incentive to switch back. However, how many apps do they really need for that? For a lot of that, do they need more than a few apps with names like {Safari,Browser,Chrome,Firefox,Internet Explorer,...} and Mail and $PICK_YOUR_MESSAGING_APPLICATION? How many incomplete versions of websites where you can't zoom do they need?
Perhaps the apps that are actually needed are the ones for more than just "net usage". That might not be the land of a zillion tiny apps, but instead the land of a smaller number of more capable apps; that's arguably not a bug but a feature.
Do they need one? If they find that they don't, will they bother continuing to spend money to keep their {Android, iOS, Windows Phone if it catches on} apps up to date and working.
and every webapp needs a native mobile counterpart to be taken seriously.
By whom? Users, or pundits? The only advantages, for me, that native apps for several sites have is that they don't consume one of the 8 windows that Safari allows on my iPhone, and thus reduce the risk of some Safari window I had open, with stuff I wanted to remember, getting randomly chosen to be closed when I open up something from Mail.
The native non-preinstalled apps I use or used, to a significant degree, on my iPhone are:
Remote - but that broke with a recent Apple TV update, and its UI was hideously un-responsive when it came to moving the movie forwards and backwards, and we don't search for movies/actors by title that much, so I'm just using the regular remote control;
RulerPlus and CarbFinder - and if my beta cells grew back and didn't just get destroyed again by my immune system, I wouldn't use them any more;
Wikipedia and IMDB - see previous comment about Safari windows.
SoundHound - they used to offer it for desktop/notebook machines with a Flash application on their website - would HTML5 blah blah blah be sufficient to let them do that for smaller machines?
I would be delighted to see the market for "here's an incomplete version of our website where you can't zoom" apps disappear completely. If that meant that the only "apps" that existed for sub-notebook-sized machines (I use my notebook-sized machine in places other than our home, and I don't know whether, if I had a tablet, I'd carry it everywhere, so I'm not convinced that "mobile" is a sensible term to apply to sub-notebook-sized computers) are those that require significant processing power or local storage, along the lines of what's done for notebook and desktop machines, with Web site access done through Web browsers, that's fine with me.
Not unlike the transition of Unix to the PC era, which never did work out. (OSX owes practically nothing to Unix at the UI level).
And the transition of MS-DOS to the PC era didn't work out either, I guess, as Windows doesn't seem to owe much to MS-DOS at the UI level.:-) More to the point, what does, for example, Linux+{GNOME,KDE,etc.} owe to Unix at the UI level?
The rejection states that "iPad" itself is also merely descriptive.
If that means the USPTO plan to withdraw the registration for iPad, then it's probably goodbye iPhone as well. The prospect of either of those happening would probably be sufficient to cause Apple Legal to spin up into fully-operational-battle-station mode; the prospect of both should bring galaxy-buster-scale weapons into play.
X on Quartz (OS X) actually works quite well. Copy/paste is not an issue.
The person to whom you're responding said a problem was "Copy/paste of more than text between X and non X" (emphasis mine). Can you, for example, copy an image from a Quartz app and paste it into an X11 app or vice versa?
So.. it only took 300 years, to prove all the alchemists right
Actually, the alchemists weren't the ones promoting the notion of the luminiferous aether.
So we now call "The Ether" the "Higgs-Boson"....
No, we call the quanta of the Higgs field "Higgs bosons", just as we call the quanta of the electromagnetic field "photons" and quanta of the weak field "W bosons" and "Z bosons" and call the quanta of the electron field "electrons" and.... The Higgs field is just another quantum field, along with all the others.
Ah, so logically God doesn't exist, but illogically he can...
More precisely, an "omnipotent" being, in the sense of "a being that can do anything you can describe", cannot logically exist, and, frankly, I doubt extremely strongly that such a being exists, for that reason alone. What happens if you ask that being "create a rock so heavy that you can't lift it, and then lift it"?
If you say "a being that can do anything you can describe without going "meta"" (in a bit more rigorous fashion than that), that might not have the logical paradox in question; that sort of "meta" stuff causes problems (such as Russell's paradox - can a supreme being tell us whether the set of all sets that don't include themselves is a member of itself?).
Nature: No story I could find specifically about the Higgs boson, just the "Seven days: 8–14 March 2013" column, which mentions it in an item ("The new particle discovered last year at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva continues to behave just like the Higgs boson predicted by the standard model of particle physics, according to results presented last week at a conference in La Thuile, Italy. The latest data indicate that the boson decays into leptons as predicted, and also dampen earlier hints that the boson decays into pairs of photons more often than the standard model allows. No evidence yet points to theories beyond the standard model, such as supersymmetry (see Nature 491, 505–506; 2012).")
So a list that does include Science, Nature, and some science outlets does have some articles and, not surprisingly, they largely don't have the "God particle" stuff in the headline.
Actually, the self-contradictory definitions do exist; there are probably plenty of people who believe in a God that can literally do anything, even though "anything" includes "making a rock so heavy that he can't lift it", to use the example cited by the noted Irish philosopher Georgius Carlinus.
Whether the entity described by that definition can exist is another matter - a matter that probably ends up involving a philosophical shell game played by people trying to get out from under the logical consequences of the notion of omnipotence. (Not all ideas that can be formulated actually make sense when you follow them to their logical conclusion; see, for example, Russell's paradox.)
Discovering that which the maths already shows exists is hardly a great discovery. Or perhaps some of you are dumb enough to think maths (in a fundamental sense) can be wrong.
Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that, if such and such a proposition is true of _anything_, then such and such another proposition is true of that thing. It is essential not to discuss whether the first proposition is really true, and not to mention what the anything is, of which it is supposed to be true. Both these points would belong to applied mathematics. We start, in pure mathematics, from certain rules of inference, by which we can infer that _if_ one proposition is true, then so is some other proposition. These rules of inference constitute the major part of the principles of formal logic. We then take any hypothesis that seems amusing, and deduce its consequences. _If_ our hypothesis is about _anything_, and not about some one or more particular things, then our deductions constitute mathematics. Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. People who have been puzzled by the beginnings of mathematics will, I hope, find comfort in this definition, and will probably agree that it is accurate.
Shorter Bertrand Russell: math is all about making some assumptions for the lulz and seeing what comes out the other end, not about Truth-with-a-capital-T.
(And Gödel's incompleteness theorem indicates that no set of assumptions is sufficient to let you prove or disprove every possibly "this is what comes out the other end" statement.)
Here's a fact. In the early days of nuclear science, the 'neutron' was considered a 'state secret' and its existence was missing from public science books of the time.
So presumably you're agreeing with the person to whom you're responding, and supplying another example of
None of these articles make any links to "God" other than a few -- mostly UK, not US -- sources referring to it as the so-called "God particle", but even those explain exactly what this particle is theorized to be, not anything supernatural, "proving God exists", or having anything whatever to do with God.
That was kind of my point. People said, "there's an omnipresent field that exists as much in a vacuum as at the centre of a sun, and it does all this crazy stuff".
It's now possible that there actually is a field with the above properties, but without the crazy stuff.
Well, I'm not sure what "present" means here, but, well, Maxwell's equations describe the behavior of, err, umm, an omnipresent field, in the sense of "at every point in space there are two 3-dimensional vector values, one for the electric field and one for the magnetic field". That long antedates the Higgs field. The "luminiferous aether" model just said those vector values "really" corresponded to the values of some property of an underlying medium, just as, for example, waves in water corresponded to the height of the water above some baseline value.
In current quantum field theories there are a bunch of fields of that sort; the Higgs field is only one of many, no more omnipresent than the Boring Old Electromagnetic Field.
I.e., when it comes to a luminiferous aether, "nothing new here, move along".
What I find interesting is that this Higgs particle suggests evidence of a Higgs field, which has characteristics not entirely unlike that of Luminiferous aether.
Not including, of course, the "carries the electromagnetic field" characteristic ascribed to the luminiferous aether but never ascribed to the Higgs field.
So what characteristics are ascribed to the Higgs field that are not entirely unlike those ascribed to the luminiferous aether?
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Because it was never technically BSD. It's a Mach kernel with BSD-Userland.
Or, rather, a Mach+BSD+Apple stuff kernel with BSD+Apple stuff userland. That's why one subdirectory of the XNU source tree is called "bsd".... (There's no "Apple stuff" subdirectory; the changes and new stuff from Apple is scattered throughout the Mach ("osfmk") and BSD ("bsd") directory, as well as being in the "iokit" directory, etc..)
(Amusingly enough, Mountain Lion's autocorrect tries to replace "bsd" with "bad". Perhaps the Core OS group needs to pay a visit to the group that does autocorrect.... :-))
Mine's available to me. All the time.
That's how your smartphone or tablet is different from your notebook. It is not how the software running on it is inherently different. It's not as if there's this magical new category of things called "apps" that are utterly massively different from the software that runs on desktop or notebook machines (especially given that, err, umm, Apple, for example, sells third party software for their desktop and notebook machines on something they call an, err, umm, "app store").
"App" is, sadly, a term being used for its connotation than its denotation; depending on how people want to spin things to make others believe what they're trying to get them to believe, it can, for example, mean "small application" (i.e., a program performing some small limited task) or "application that runs on a smartphone or tablet" (the fact that people talk about "apps" running on notebook and desktop computers notwithstanding). The two categories are far from equivalent - you can run some pretty large applications on smartphones and tablets, and there are plenty of small applications for desktops and notebooks.
Since I also have a macbook pro, I'm well aware of the inconvenience of dragging that thing around. As I'm also carrying a camera bag, it becomes a real logistical issue -- more than just "do I want to" but "is this really practical?" Seriously man, you just can't argue your way out of a phone or tablet being much more portable and convenient.
A smartphone is more portable than a tablet, which is more portable than a notebook, which is more portable than a desktop. Depending on, for example, how much screen space you need, a desktop can be more convenient for certain tasks than a notebook, and a notebook more convenient than a tablet, and a tablet more convenient than a smartphone. If various of the latter three categories can be plugged into larger monitors, then the convenience can be restored, at the expense of portability. Perhaps with future display technologies a large viewing area won't be a portability issue.
The point is that it's not as if there's some "mobile" market where there's no distinction between smartphones and tablets, or that there's some "desktop" market where there's no distinction between notebooks and desktops. You have at least four form factors, with a tradeoff between how easy the machine is to carry and how easy it is to do certain tasks on it.
OK, your pocket's pretty big or your tablet's a bit small if your tablet fits in it.
I always carry a bag. Camera's in it, as is some other tech. But even if I were not carrying a bag, an ipod or iphone fits fine in a pocket,
What sort of pocket? If you mean "pants pocket":
Neither of those tablets are going to fit. A quick look at the Galaxy Tabs doesn't show them as any more likely to fit in my pants pocket.
The iPad or iPad mini would, I think, fit in my shoulder bag; the question is whether, if I had an iPad, I'm going to want to stuff it there (as opposed to stuffing my iPhone into the shoulder bag assuming it's not already there) and carry an extra .68-pound/308g iPad mini or 1.44-pound/652g iPad rather than just a 3.95-ounce/112g iPhone 5.
and they are the same device for all intents and purposes.
Wrong. An iPhone fits easily in one hand, and weighs a little more than half of what an iPad mini weighs; neither an iPad nor an iPad mini would fit in one of my hands. Maybe you have big hands and big pants pockets.
In one very important way: It runs on my portable device and I can walk away with it.
So how is that different from stuff that runs on my a-bit-larger portable device (it's called a "Retina MacBook Pro") that I can walk away with?
That's all tablets and smartphones give anyone. But saying "that's all" understates the value by incredible amounts. I *love* having that kind of power in my pocket.
OK, your pocket's pretty big or your tablet's a bit small if your tablet fits in it. But I digress.... (The point being that lumping tablets and smartphones is a bit bogus, just as lumping desktops and notebooks is a bit bogus. I don't even think twice about carrying my smartphone with me; I suspect I'd think at least twice about carrying a tablet with me. I might or might not think more about carrying a notebook than a tablet; I wouldn't even think about carrying a desktop computer with me.)
In any case, this has nothing to do with "apps" vs. "computer software for desktops", it has to do with the size of the computer. How much of that software would be interesting only if running on a computer you can carry with you? How much of that software would be interesting only if running on a computer smaller than a notebook? And, as long as we're going down that path, how much of that software wouldn't be that interesting on a tablet, only on a smartphone?
And, once we're talking about software that's basically the same type of software as "computer software for desktops", except for the "the screen is limited in size, but you can touch it and activate the UI that way" part, why is there going to be a huge "app market" for it different from, say, the market for "computer software for desktops"? For example:
What's the length of an inverted vee resonant antenna for 3.800 MHz at 35 feet? At 60 feet?
...is the market for antenna-design software for sub-notebook machines going to be significantly larger than the market for antenna-design software for notebook-and-larger machines?
Hey, want to see my photo portfolio?
That's one of the minor apps and, if you're somewhere with sufficient connectivity, it might be sufficient for it to be a Web app. Same thing with the "When does Jupiter rise?" app.
As people transition more and more of their time to Phones and Tablets, the market for iOS and Android apps will only grow.
Unless people figure out how to make their Web sites work well on smartphones and tablets without having to have a copy of "Cocoa Touch for Dummies" or "Dalvik for Dummies" on their desk. At that point, the market for apps will just be the market for apps that do something useful rather than just providing "an incomplete version of [their] website where you can't zoom".
You are a near-sighted idiot. Terminal is one program of many that are part of OS X. As the GP wrote, practically nothing.
And Konsole is one program of many that are part of KDE and gnome-terminal is one program of many that are part of GNOME. So how does any other flavor of "desktop Un*x" owe any more to Unix at the UI layer than does OS X?
Yes, that is quite true. But smartphones are useful in every day life.
A webpage itself is pretty generic most times, not to mention slow and limited because of years of W3C destruction. It is only just recovering with WHATWG spearheading development, everyone of any worth is ignoring W3C as an idea now, it is just broken and slow, not to mention monolithic, the opposite of what web tech can and needs to be.
When it is an app, it can be very specific, it can be fast and even fairly heavy in the media department too.
Please cite some examples of apps that are front ends to Web sites but that are significantly better by being "very specific" or "fast and even fairly heavy in the media department" (and not just "better" due to the Web site developer not bothering to offer a version of their Web site that works well on a small handheld screen).
No, it is relevant, because I was talking about apps. Not computer software for desktops, but apps.
To what extent are people going to be interested in "apps", in the sense of "a flood of .99{dollar,euro,etc.} programs a lot of which are small games or replacements for browser windows", on machines that can run software that can do more than those "apps" can? When the machines are powerful enough that a program whose main job is talking to a Web server and showing you the results of what it asked the server to say will work Just Fine when written as a bunch of Javascript sent to your browser and run inside that browser (and that the browser won't randomly start shooting windows down once you have 8 open and try to open another one), why would anybody bother to pay somebody to write an "app" to talk to that Web server rather than, at most, having a version of their Web site for machines with small touch screens and another version for machines with larger screens and a separate keyboard and pointing device?
If the "app" needs to do a significant amount of local processing or store a significant amount of local data, maybe there's a point to it being something other than a Web app, but, at that point, how is it different from "computer software for desktops" except that it uses a touchscreen and maybe a virtual rather than a real keyboard (assuming you don't just connect a real keyboard up to your smartphone or tablet) and a mouse?
The only thing limiting apps right now is small memory and slowish, low core-count processors.
As the pads and phones continue to power up, there will be a market for more and more serious software (and we'll begin to see a real desktop instead of this freakish abomination with 20 apps / drawer and no nested drawers and no app to app data sharing.)
Pads and phones are really in their infancy. I can think of a huge long list of additional capabilities that have yet to hit the market, and a whole bunch of potential apps that can't run there -- yet -- because the hardware is still too anemic.
When your pad or phone has 16 cores running at 3 ghz, a decent ultracap power supply, 64 gb of ram... you'll look at that "app bubble" statement the same way we look at what the head of the patent department in the early 1900's was saying when he declared something along the lines of "everything important has already been invented", or the famous "no one needs more than 64k (or was it 640? Can't be bothered, both are equally ridiculous.)
...and say "OK, smartphones and tablets are now complete replacements for desktops/notebooks, and the market for smartphone/tablet applications is like the market for desktop/notebook applications, so, instead of several million 0.99{dollar,euro,etc.} applications a lot of which are tiny games or replacements for browser windows, we have a much smaller number of applications that cost more and are actually worth that higher cost." That won't necessarily be a market in which everybody and their brother can go whip up an app and make money off of it....
Well, Linux is still tied to X11. Which means the window manager is separate from the graphics display interface, leading to a profusion of different user interfaces and fragmentation of developer effort.
That is not the only cause of the user interface fragmentation; the window manager is not the entire UI. The widget set is as big, or bigger, component, and X11 shipped with a framework for widgets (the Xt Intrinsics) and a very primitive widget set (the Athena widgets), and provided an interface that allowed tons of widget sets to be implemented atop it, so you had Motif with the Motif look and feel and API and XView and OLIT with the OPEN LOOK look and feel and two different APIs and so on and so forth.
And, in addition, the technical ability to have a variety of different UIs atop a core window system is not limited to X11. GTK+ runs on Windows atop the Windows graphics layer, and supports the same theme modules as it does atop X11, and the same mechanisms X11.app uses to draw windows without the standard system title bar, and widgets with the look and feel of whatever toolkit they're in, are available to programs using Quartz.
The difference here wasn't technical, it was organizational. The group developing X11 deliberately avoided policy decisions, probably because it included people from different companies who wanted their own toolkits and look-and-feel. Neither Microsoft nor Apple, however, wanted that sort of diversity, so they provided standard widget sets, and app developers didn't, by and large, want to roll their own widget sets and provide their own look and feel.
Now, I know perfectly well we could dicker about whether or not X11 is technically part of Unix,
We could, but anybody on the "yes, it's technically part of Unix" side would be wrong. Unix systems had window systems before X11 (SunWindows/SunView, for example), and at least two window systems contemporaneous with X11 (NeWS and NeXT's Display Postscript), and at least one window system after X11 (Quartz). In addition, X11 was also used as the window system for at least one non-Unix operating system (VMS).
and whether X11 has hobbled or helped the adoption of unix-based systems.
...or made no more than a minor difference in the adoption of Unix-based systems. Perhaps Unix didn't displace Windows because the superminicomputer-flavored Unixes were too much for PCs at the time (Microsoft's superminicomputer-flavored OS didn't become the mainstream consumer Windows until 2003 or so), or because DOS already had enough market share that Windows could pick up more easily than Unix, or because of the deals Microsoft offered to DOS OEMs, or....
Yes, the one Unix that did make significant inroads against Windows did have a non-X11-based Window system. However, it was the replacement for an existing OS that still had some desktop/notebook market share, and it made significant efforts to let applications for the existing OS run, and made significant efforts to make it easier to port applications from that existing OS (to the point of offering two OS X APIs for applications, rather than the one and only one - Cocoa - offered for Rhapsody, and making a version for OS 9 as well), so crediting its non-X11-based window system for those inroads (which still give it only a minority position) is a bit of a stretch.
But mainly I find it interesting how many have tried and failed to displace X11 on Linux.
The bulk of the competitors were small projects (Berlin, Y, etc.) that may not have had enough muscle behind them to make a difference. NeWS had Sun behind it, but that was both a bug and a feature; the companies on the other side of the Unix Wars(TM) didn't have much incentive to use it, and had some incentive to oppose it. Display Postscript was only a window system of its own on NeXTStEP, and NeXT, unlike Apple, didn't already have an i
> The app bubble if it existed popped a while back. Mobile development is where it is at.
I thought the apps under discussion were mobile apps? I don't think there's any desktop app bubble.
Why wasn't there one?
Either way, I don't believe it will 'pop.' The mobile space has been growing steadily and people don't seem eager to switch back to desktop/laptop net usage.
If they could switch to smartphone/tablet net usage, then, presumably, a desktop or notebook computer was overkill for what they needed, and they wouldn't have much incentive to switch back. However, how many apps do they really need for that? For a lot of that, do they need more than a few apps with names like {Safari,Browser,Chrome,Firefox,Internet Explorer,...} and Mail and $PICK_YOUR_MESSAGING_APPLICATION? How many incomplete versions of websites where you can't zoom do they need?
Perhaps the apps that are actually needed are the ones for more than just "net usage". That might not be the land of a zillion tiny apps, but instead the land of a smaller number of more capable apps; that's arguably not a bug but a feature.
Every brand wants or has an app
Do they need one? If they find that they don't, will they bother continuing to spend money to keep their {Android, iOS, Windows Phone if it catches on} apps up to date and working.
and every webapp needs a native mobile counterpart to be taken seriously.
By whom? Users, or pundits? The only advantages, for me, that native apps for several sites have is that they don't consume one of the 8 windows that Safari allows on my iPhone, and thus reduce the risk of some Safari window I had open, with stuff I wanted to remember, getting randomly chosen to be closed when I open up something from Mail.
The native non-preinstalled apps I use or used, to a significant degree, on my iPhone are:
As for various other ones, e.g. Yelp, well, what Randall said.
I would be delighted to see the market for "here's an incomplete version of our website where you can't zoom" apps disappear completely. If that meant that the only "apps" that existed for sub-notebook-sized machines (I use my notebook-sized machine in places other than our home, and I don't know whether, if I had a tablet, I'd carry it everywhere, so I'm not convinced that "mobile" is a sensible term to apply to sub-notebook-sized computers) are those that require significant processing power or local storage, along the lines of what's done for notebook and desktop machines, with Web site access done through Web browsers, that's fine with me.
Not unlike the transition of Unix to the PC era, which never did work out. (OSX owes practically nothing to Unix at the UI level).
And the transition of MS-DOS to the PC era didn't work out either, I guess, as Windows doesn't seem to owe much to MS-DOS at the UI level. :-) More to the point, what does, for example, Linux+{GNOME,KDE,etc.} owe to Unix at the UI level?
The rejection states that "iPad" itself is also merely descriptive.
If that means the USPTO plan to withdraw the registration for iPad, then it's probably goodbye iPhone as well. The prospect of either of those happening would probably be sufficient to cause Apple Legal to spin up into fully-operational-battle-station mode; the prospect of both should bring galaxy-buster-scale weapons into play.
What's TFS? Another file system?
Yes.
And this "FFS", this is also a file system? ( :P )
Yes.
X on Quartz (OS X) actually works quite well. Copy/paste is not an issue.
The person to whom you're responding said a problem was "Copy/paste of more than text between X and non X" (emphasis mine). Can you, for example, copy an image from a Quartz app and paste it into an X11 app or vice versa?
So.. it only took 300 years, to prove all the alchemists right
Actually, the alchemists weren't the ones promoting the notion of the luminiferous aether.
So we now call "The Ether" the "Higgs-Boson" ....
No, we call the quanta of the Higgs field "Higgs bosons", just as we call the quanta of the electromagnetic field "photons" and quanta of the weak field "W bosons" and "Z bosons" and call the quanta of the electron field "electrons" and.... The Higgs field is just another quantum field, along with all the others.
Ah, so logically God doesn't exist, but illogically he can...
More precisely, an "omnipotent" being, in the sense of "a being that can do anything you can describe", cannot logically exist, and, frankly, I doubt extremely strongly that such a being exists, for that reason alone. What happens if you ask that being "create a rock so heavy that you can't lift it, and then lift it"?
If you say "a being that can do anything you can describe without going "meta"" (in a bit more rigorous fashion than that), that might not have the logical paradox in question; that sort of "meta" stuff causes problems (such as Russell's paradox - can a supreme being tell us whether the set of all sets that don't include themselves is a member of itself?).
Interesting, list doesn't include APR, Science, Nature, or any of the science outlets.
Just the MSM, which all get their news from 1-2 sources.
Let's take a look:
APR: what's "APR"? Applied Physics Reviews? Applied Physics Research? The former African Physics Review, now the African Review of Physics?
Science: Higgs Boson Positively Identified
Nature: No story I could find specifically about the Higgs boson, just the "Seven days: 8–14 March 2013" column, which mentions it in an item ("The new particle discovered last year at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva continues to behave just like the Higgs boson predicted by the standard model of particle physics, according to results presented last week at a conference in La Thuile, Italy. The latest data indicate that the boson decays into leptons as predicted, and also dampen earlier hints that the boson decays into pairs of photons more often than the standard model allows. No evidence yet points to theories beyond the standard model, such as supersymmetry (see Nature 491, 505–506; 2012).")
and various science outlets:
Science News: nothing at present
LiveScience: Confirmed! Newfound Particle Is a Higgs Boson
Phys.org: Now confident: CERN physicists say new particle is Higgs boson (Update 3)
and some random organization called "CERN" or something such as that: New results indicate that new particle is a Higgs boson
So a list that does include Science, Nature, and some science outlets does have some articles and, not surprisingly, they largely don't have the "God particle" stuff in the headline.
don't exist*
Freudian slip, of course. ;)
Actually, the self-contradictory definitions do exist; there are probably plenty of people who believe in a God that can literally do anything, even though "anything" includes "making a rock so heavy that he can't lift it", to use the example cited by the noted Irish philosopher Georgius Carlinus.
Whether the entity described by that definition can exist is another matter - a matter that probably ends up involving a philosophical shell game played by people trying to get out from under the logical consequences of the notion of omnipotence. (Not all ideas that can be formulated actually make sense when you follow them to their logical conclusion; see, for example, Russell's paradox.)
Discovering that which the maths already shows exists is hardly a great discovery. Or perhaps some of you are dumb enough to think maths (in a fundamental sense) can be wrong.
...or right. As Bertrand Russell said, Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.". The full paragraph in which that appears explains in more detail:
Shorter Bertrand Russell: math is all about making some assumptions for the lulz and seeing what comes out the other end, not about Truth-with-a-capital-T.
(And Gödel's incompleteness theorem indicates that no set of assumptions is sufficient to let you prove or disprove every possibly "this is what comes out the other end" statement.)
Here's a fact. In the early days of nuclear science, the 'neutron' was considered a 'state secret' and its existence was missing from public science books of the time.
I guess by 1932 the "early days of nuclear science" had passed.
If the Higgs particle and the God particle are the same thing, does that mean Higgs is God?
Nope, no long white beard.
On the msn.com home page: Physicists: 'God particle' is real
So presumably you're agreeing with the person to whom you're responding, and supplying another example of
to add to the list of headlines in their posting.
That was kind of my point. People said, "there's an omnipresent field that exists as much in a vacuum as at the centre of a sun, and it does all this crazy stuff".
It's now possible that there actually is a field with the above properties, but without the crazy stuff.
Well, I'm not sure what "present" means here, but, well, Maxwell's equations describe the behavior of, err, umm, an omnipresent field, in the sense of "at every point in space there are two 3-dimensional vector values, one for the electric field and one for the magnetic field". That long antedates the Higgs field. The "luminiferous aether" model just said those vector values "really" corresponded to the values of some property of an underlying medium, just as, for example, waves in water corresponded to the height of the water above some baseline value.
In current quantum field theories there are a bunch of fields of that sort; the Higgs field is only one of many, no more omnipresent than the Boring Old Electromagnetic Field.
I.e., when it comes to a luminiferous aether, "nothing new here, move along".
What I find interesting is that this Higgs particle suggests evidence of a Higgs field, which has characteristics not entirely unlike that of Luminiferous aether.
Not including, of course, the "carries the electromagnetic field" characteristic ascribed to the luminiferous aether but never ascribed to the Higgs field.
So what characteristics are ascribed to the Higgs field that are not entirely unlike those ascribed to the luminiferous aether?