The only thing worth figuring out now is which tablet player has the right strategy: Apple with their seperate-from-a-laptop-and-purposefully-limited-to-make-it-easier device or Microsoft with their no-compromises-it's-a-tablet-and-a-laptop-in-one device.
With Windows 8 for x86 and Windows RT for ARM, is Microsoft trying both strategies?
A computer is just a computer. It doesnt become a apple pc or a windows pc until you load the operating system on it. You can load OS or windows 7 on the exact same pc.
You can load OS X on the PC in question if either either 1) the PC is sold by Apple Inc. ("PC" here meaning just "personal computer", so, in that sense, Apple sells them) or 2) you've made a Hackintosh out of it.
I.e., to use OS X you must by an Apple machine or do some hacks.
the machine used to fight the browser and a mail program and an office suite and... for resources on the machine, and he can and does move his browsing and mail and MS Office stuff and... to the Mac, so that the software no longer has to compete with those other apps for resources.
For one thing, wouldn't someone switching to a Mac as his primary computer need to re-buy Microsoft Office?
Yes - under the not-unreasonable assumption that if it's going to be their primary computer, it's going to be the one on which they run Office.
For another, if "his browsing and mail and MS Office stuff and..." are moved to the Mac, and is used solely to run Visual Studio, what method do you recommend to copy from a Mac and paste to a PC running Windows or vice versa?
If it's just stuff from browsing, perhaps the answer is "run a browser on the Windows box but don't do any more than you have to in it, and hope that keeps its memory requirements down". If it's more than that, yeah, maybe you'd be better off buying an additional copy of Windows and sending the old machine off to somebody else.
However, I wasn't solely considering the case of somebody who was doing Windows development here; for people who don't need to run Visual Studio, but only need to run some specialized Windows-only app, leaving the old machine around for that purpose and doing everything else on the Mac might work.
All other things being equal, I'd recommend [buying a copy of retail Windows to run on a Mac]
I agree with you, especially if the Mac one ends up buying is a MacBook and not a Mac mini. Still, Apple could have made the "I'm a Mac and a PC" use case sonewhat cheaper by becoming a Windows OEM and offering a Boot Camp customization option.
...or by becoming a Windows OEM and offering a {VMware Fusion, Parallels Workstation}-with-Windows-preinstalled bundle as an option; that does better at the "cut and paste between Windows and OS X" stuff.
Who says he's talking about "coding on the iPad" in the sense that the editor and toolchain is running on the iPad?
Sorry, but I cannot buy any other explanation because of the context - this story was about coding for the iPad, on the iPad. That is the hot topic at hand across multiple threads. Yet you claim some guy is coming in to tell us how he can run an SSH terminal on the iPad? It makes no sense to me, again in the whole context of what is being talked about.
Other people have also talked, in responses to this article, about using the iPad as a terminal, so it is not inconceivable to me that he was referring to that; that comes across to me as less strange than explicitly mentioning ssh in the context of developing for the iPad on the iPad. Given how little detail he gave, I'm not going to treat any argument as to what he meant (including my own) as definitive; I'll wait until he explains what he meant before concluding that.
The SSH app is not necessary for doing development for an iPad on an iPad, given the existence of mobileterminal.
True but he may either not know about mobile terminal, or prefer using a good SSH client to go back into the iPad.
As I noted in the message to which you were responding (see the "The only reasons I could see for sshing into the iPad from the iPad would be" list).
Or he may be just mislabeling MobileTerminal an an ssh app...
OK, at this point, I won't rule that one out, just as I won't rule out "he's sshing in from his iPad to his iPad" or "he's not talking about doing the development on the iPad itself" or even "he's talking about sshing into the iPad from another machine with a keyboard", as I've seen both me and other people get in trouble making too many assumptions and assuming conclusions drawn from those assumptions are unassailable....
People love to predict the death of $X all the time. In the case of technology they are very often wrong.
Yup. Betteridge's Law of Headlines, as often cited in comments on this article, applies to the headlines "Will XXX kill YYY?" and the variant "Is XXX a YYY-killer?", unless "kill" is redefined to mean "grow to the point of being much more significant than", in which case the answer changes to "maybe".:-)
I use a bluetooth keyboard with my iPad, I'm not really seeing the usability issue?
Perhaps dell623's usability issues (plural) include the screen size:
This is the age of stupid hybrid OS like Windows 8 coupled to a hybrid device that has a much smaller screen than a standard laptop in a ridiculous 16:9 ratio at a much higher price than a comparably specced laptop just so you can use it as a tablet? Who in their sane mind would want to code on a tablet, I sit here on a 1080p 15.6 screen thinking I really need to pick up a 24"/27" as soon as possible to do real work.
and that plus the one-window-at-a-time UI that at least in part may stem from the screen size:
Writing and editing books and articles, manuscripts spanning hundreds of pages with a long list of references to be checked, all written on an iPad, because who the hell needs multiple windows open and visible at the same time on the screen
in addition to the keyboard? Perhaps the smaller screen works for you, but I'm finding the 15" screen of my new machine annoying at times as I can't have as much stuff visible as on my old 17"; a 10" screen such as the one on the iPad would drive me nuts.
They will have to scavenge for porn in some way, as it's customary with repair guys. iPads have internal disks of some form too,
They have non-volatile storage that's used for the file system (yes, it has a UN*X file system - multiple partitions, running, I think, case-sensitive HFSX - even if it's not made visible to the end user of a non-jailbroken box), but it's flash memory soldered to the motherboard, so accessing it if you can't turn the iPad on would be a bit more work.
If you don't need to run any Windows software on your primary machine (either because you don't need to run it at all or because you can run it on some other machine)
If someone is making the Mac his primary machine at the end of an ordinary four-year PC upgrade cycle, then he probably has Windows software that he still needs to run,
That depends on whether the software he was using on Windows has OS X equivalents that he'd consider adequate replacements.
and the old computer isn't powerful enough to run the software he needs anymore.
Depends on the software. If the machine was powerful enough to run it when he bought it, and he isn't doing bigger tasks with it, and hasn't had to upgrade it to newer versions that require more power, perhaps not - especially if, for example, the machine used to fight the browser and a mail program and an office suite and... for resources on the machine, and he can and does move his browsing and mail and MS Office stuff and... to the Mac, so that the software no longer has to compete with those other apps for resources.
Consider the case of someone who develops software for both Windows and Mac OS X, or both Windows Phone and iPhone, or both Surface and iPad.
...which some users do and some don't.
Would you recommend that he buy two computers and keep both up to date, or that he buy a Mac and retail Windows?
All other things being equal, I'd recommend the latter (that's how I do occasional non-OS X development work - the software on which I do development work is mostly cross-platform, and a lot of the work I can do on OS X and it Just Works on the other platforms). I don't use Boot Camp, though, I use VMware Fusion, so it cost me a little bit more.
so I suspect he was not sshing back into his own machine, but instead into another machine.
Again, if he's talking about ssh from a real computer, why would he specify a keyboard?
Who says he's talking about "coding on the iPad" in the sense that the editor and toolchain is running on the iPad? He could have meant "I use the iPad as a terminal for doing development on another machine, by sshing into the other machine, and typing on my Bluetooth keyboard". The original quote was just "You can still have iPad, keyboard and a SSH app.", which doesn't give enough detail to figure out whether that's he meant or not (and the posting to which he was responded was, in its entirely, a title of "Seriously?" and a body of "No.", which certainly doesn't supply any more context).
The only reasons I could see for sshing into the iPad from the iPad would be
you can't get a terminal app for iOS with as good a UI as an SSH client;
you aren't aware of the existence of mobileterminal and the like, and therefore think you need an ssh client to get a terminal UI.
The SSH app is not necessary for doing development for an iPad on an iPad, given the existence of mobileterminal.
Pretty sure he was talking about using an iPad SSH client *on* the iPad, to open a terminal on the same iPad where you would use vim to code.
And the advantage of that over just using mobileterminal is? Either of those scenarios requires jailbreaking, so it's not as if using ssh magically removes that restriction, so I suspect he was not sshing back into his own machine, but instead into another machine.
That doesn't mean otherapps that might be considered politically controversial aren't banned from the App Store, but they clearly are allowing the political cartoon app in question, along with other political cartoon apps, such as the msnbc.com Conservative Cartoons and msnbc.com Liberal Cartoons apps.
and that developers are at Apple's mercy).
Yes, if you're developing for iOS, you either have to have Apple find your app acceptable according to their standards or limit yourself to jailbroken machines.
$200 for the operating system? You're off by an order of magnitude. The latest version of OS X is only $19.99, and Xcode is free.
The claim to which you're responding is
or the purchase of a $200 second operating system to run in Boot Camp if you instead decide to make the Mac your primary machine
which sounds as if the "second operating system" isn't going to be OS X (as per "if you instead decide to make the Mac your primary machine) - and I suspect he was referring, in particular, to Windows, which does cost about $200.
If you don't need to run any Windows software on your primary machine (either because you don't need to run it at all or because you can run it on some other machine), you don't need to pay $200 for Windows if you're switching to using a Mac as your primary machine.
If you don't have a real keyboard you don't have a real development tool
So get a Bluetooth keyboard.
That doesn't give you a bigger screen, or the ability to have multiple windows open on said bigger screen (maybe you can quickly slide between displays and work around the inability to look at two things at the same time), however, so it still might not be what a lot of developers would want.
The conclusion I have come to though is that most of my development time does not happen while being "mobile" - I'm at a desk somewhere.
If "mobile" refers to "using something while on the move and not seated", yes, that's the case for me; I'm unlikely to start coding while walking down the street. Then again, if I had a tablet I probably wouldn't start doing much of anything with it while walking down the street - I'd probably be using a smartphone for the stuff I'd be doing under those circumstances. I haven't yet figured out what I'd use a tablet for, which is probably why I don't own one....
I might do development while not at a desk at home, but that's a different matter, and a laptop is sufficiently "mobile" for those purposes for me.
OS X targets the retarded appliance user that an actual computing environment is a waste to give to. One can easily argue, that it transforms a computer into something that isn't a computer anymore, but a information and entertainment appliance.
Linux targets people who actually use their computer as a *computer*. People who automate their work away, by writing shell scripts, and calling them from udev, cron and keyboary shortcuts, etc. People who adapt the system to their needs, and gain the vast amount of power resulting from really using a universal programmable computing machine. The greatest machine ever invented. The holy grail of information processing.
Nobody of the latter group could even use the former system, since it would be completely crippling and basically useless.
Gee, I use the former system and I'm a member of the latter group. The devices on my "desktop" (really laptop) machine don't change often enough that the absence of something as general as udev doesn't matter, and there aren't that many tasks that need to be done periodically for me to bother firing up crontab, and the other shell-script stuff I just do directly from a terminal window rather than binding it to keyboard shortcuts in the GUI (I assume those are the "keyboard shortcuts" to which you're referring). Then again, a lot of the scripts I whip up on the spot to perform a task that I'm unlikely ever to need again, so I just stuff it in/tmp and run it from there, e.g. in a find... -exec command.
but does the binary have to run or just work if you configure; make; make install again? right the OSS world assumes that software can be recompiled, and most only needs that. Sometimes it needs a simple patch, but yes breaking ABI isn't really an issue. Breaking an API is much more of one.
How many of the ABI breakages about which people compile are the result of API breakage, and how many are the result of changing the sizes or layout of data types in ways that don't break the API?
Both of those types are incapable of making decisions.
Had they given a shit about it in the first place they would not be iPhone users.
OK, so "can't" in "no you can't" meant "you are incapable of making decisions", not "the choice to no longer buy Apple phones is not available to you for some external reason". If so, then note that "made a decision that they later regretted" is different from "is inherently incapable of making good decisions now or in the future".
Of course there are people who choose not to be iPhone users. I did not include them because I stated that there are 2 types of iPhone users.
In the post to which you originally replied, the person said "We can decide where to spend our money based on how Apple treats us in meeting our demands." It seems pretty obvious that one of the "decisions", if not the decision, to which that refers is the decision to spend your money with Samsung or HTC or Motorola or $PICK_YOUR_ANDROID_VENDOR rather than with Apple. (You could also go with $PICK_YOUR_WINDOWS_MOBILE_VENDOR if Microsoft's app store policies bother you less than Apple's app store policies.)
So "we" in "we can decide where to spend our money" includes people who were iPhone users but have decided not to be iPhone users in the future. Yeah, they can't go back and un-spend the money that they spent on the iPhone (modulo getting some of it back by selling the iPhone), but they can refuse to spend any future money with Apple.
In your first post, you said only "No you can't.:)" in response to that. If the "you" in that statement is the same as the "we" in the statement to which you're referring, then the statement is false, as, while they can't un-spend the money they already sent, they can, as indicated, choose not to spend more money with Apple in the future. I.e., "pointing out that there are 2 types of iPhone users", as a response to the original poster, completely misses the point of what the original poster was saying, and so it would be completely silly to read "No you can't." as "pointing out that there are 2 types of iPhone users".
I thought that I was pointing out that there are 2 types of iPhone users.
Those too stupid to know that they have no choice and those that made the choice to not have one.
("One" in "have one" presumably referring to "the choice as to which apps you want to have, including apps not approved by Apple". There is, however, a third type of iPhone users, namely those who made the choice to jailbreak their phones and run non-App Store apps on them.)
Yes, but there are also people who have made the choice not to be iPhone users, which is the choice to which the AC to whom you replied was presumably referring.
If you're referring to "We can decide where to spend our money based on how Apple treats us in meeting our demands.", are you claiming that smartphone users are forced to purchase iPhones?
IMHO, Apple would have scored a lot of points by making Rosetta open-source.
If by "would have scored a lot of points" you mean "would have gotten a visit from the lawyers from the new owners of Transitive Corporation", Transitive Corporation being the suppliers of the binary-to-binary translation code in Rosetta, yes, they would have.
I.e., it wasn't entirely theirs to open-source. Maybe IBM could've been convinced to open-source it, but I'm not sure how interested IBM would be in something that translates code from one of their instruction-set architectures to x86, as opposed to going the other way (which is why they were interested in Transitive).
There exists a philosophical computing spectrum with stable, vendor-controlled, locked down, less customizable, less flexible, more compatible user-experience on one extreme end. On the other extreme end, you have nearly infinite flexibility and user-control at the expense of stability, compatibility and vendor-support. Apple is on one extreme, Desktop Linux is on the other, and MS Windows sits somewhere in the middle.
Saying that Apple can steal Linux users is like claiming that the Republican party (for lack of an example of an extreme-right party) can steal voters from the communist party. Absurd.
And there exists another axis with "certified UNIXes" on one end and MS Windows at the other. To a large degree, on that axis you have OS X and Linux and... on or near one end (Leopard, Snow Leopard, and Mountain Lion being certified, and Linux not being certified but being extremely "Unix-like") and MS Windows at the other and, as the author claims in TFA, "The need to develop native applications was diminishing and at the same time OS X provided a good enough Unix-like environment that programmers could develop on a Mac and then deploy to a Linux server."
They said "Linux desktop", not "desktops built atop UN*X". Presumably the argument being made is that one desktop built atop UN*X reduced the demand for others; in TFA the author says "The need to develop native applications was diminishing and at the same time OS X provided a good enough Unix-like environment that programmers could develop on a Mac and then deploy to a Linux server."
Or, to put it another way, the argument is that one reason why it killed the Linux desktop is that it's, err, umm, built on top of Unix.
So there's POSIX, most of the command line user environment, etc.
Actually, much of "the command line user environment" is part of present-day POSIX, i.e. the Single UNIX Specification, and 1003.2 dates back to 1992, so it's been a part of POSIX for about 20 years now.
In any case, what Xenious may have meant by "you had all the functionality of the Linux OS" is "you had an OS that was another member of the UN*X family".
Great! But don't forget that you cannot distribute the output of X-Code without adhering to the license; for example, any Quicktime functionality you develop is permitted to run "only on supported Mac OS X and/or Windows platforms with QuickTime installed".
Any other examples, in the Xcode license, of redistribution restrictions of that sort? The only other such stuff I see on the version of the Xcode license on Scribd is "if you redistribute the Javascript "Apple Classes" from Dashcode, follow the license", "don't use the "System Provided Images" in ways Apple doesn't approve of" ("images" here meaning "pictures", so some of that is probably trademark protection), "don't use Location Services without asking the user's permission" (personally, I rather like that restriction), and "maybe we'll add some other things in the future that have additional licensing terms". The rest is largely restrictions on modifying/redistributing/etc. the "Developer Software" itself.
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The only thing worth figuring out now is which tablet player has the right strategy: Apple with their seperate-from-a-laptop-and-purposefully-limited-to-make-it-easier device or Microsoft with their no-compromises-it's-a-tablet-and-a-laptop-in-one device.
With Windows 8 for x86 and Windows RT for ARM, is Microsoft trying both strategies?
A computer is just a computer. It doesnt become a apple pc or a windows pc until you load the operating system on it. You can load OS or windows 7 on the exact same pc.
You can load OS X on the PC in question if either either 1) the PC is sold by Apple Inc. ("PC" here meaning just "personal computer", so, in that sense, Apple sells them) or 2) you've made a Hackintosh out of it.
I.e., to use OS X you must by an Apple machine or do some hacks.
the machine used to fight the browser and a mail program and an office suite and... for resources on the machine, and he can and does move his browsing and mail and MS Office stuff and... to the Mac, so that the software no longer has to compete with those other apps for resources.
For one thing, wouldn't someone switching to a Mac as his primary computer need to re-buy Microsoft Office?
Yes - under the not-unreasonable assumption that if it's going to be their primary computer, it's going to be the one on which they run Office.
For another, if "his browsing and mail and MS Office stuff and..." are moved to the Mac, and is used solely to run Visual Studio, what method do you recommend to copy from a Mac and paste to a PC running Windows or vice versa?
If it's just stuff from browsing, perhaps the answer is "run a browser on the Windows box but don't do any more than you have to in it, and hope that keeps its memory requirements down". If it's more than that, yeah, maybe you'd be better off buying an additional copy of Windows and sending the old machine off to somebody else.
However, I wasn't solely considering the case of somebody who was doing Windows development here; for people who don't need to run Visual Studio, but only need to run some specialized Windows-only app, leaving the old machine around for that purpose and doing everything else on the Mac might work.
All other things being equal, I'd recommend [buying a copy of retail Windows to run on a Mac]
I agree with you, especially if the Mac one ends up buying is a MacBook and not a Mac mini. Still, Apple could have made the "I'm a Mac and a PC" use case sonewhat cheaper by becoming a Windows OEM and offering a Boot Camp customization option.
...or by becoming a Windows OEM and offering a {VMware Fusion, Parallels Workstation}-with-Windows-preinstalled bundle as an option; that does better at the "cut and paste between Windows and OS X" stuff.
Who says he's talking about "coding on the iPad" in the sense that the editor and toolchain is running on the iPad?
Sorry, but I cannot buy any other explanation because of the context - this story was about coding for the iPad, on the iPad. That is the hot topic at hand across multiple threads. Yet you claim some guy is coming in to tell us how he can run an SSH terminal on the iPad? It makes no sense to me, again in the whole context of what is being talked about.
Other people have also talked, in responses to this article, about using the iPad as a terminal, so it is not inconceivable to me that he was referring to that; that comes across to me as less strange than explicitly mentioning ssh in the context of developing for the iPad on the iPad. Given how little detail he gave, I'm not going to treat any argument as to what he meant (including my own) as definitive; I'll wait until he explains what he meant before concluding that.
The SSH app is not necessary for doing development for an iPad on an iPad, given the existence of mobileterminal.
True but he may either not know about mobile terminal, or prefer using a good SSH client to go back into the iPad.
As I noted in the message to which you were responding (see the "The only reasons I could see for sshing into the iPad from the iPad would be" list).
Or he may be just mislabeling MobileTerminal an an ssh app...
OK, at this point, I won't rule that one out, just as I won't rule out "he's sshing in from his iPad to his iPad" or "he's not talking about doing the development on the iPad itself" or even "he's talking about sshing into the iPad from another machine with a keyboard", as I've seen both me and other people get in trouble making too many assumptions and assuming conclusions drawn from those assumptions are unassailable....
People love to predict the death of $X all the time. In the case of technology they are very often wrong.
Yup. Betteridge's Law of Headlines, as often cited in comments on this article, applies to the headlines "Will XXX kill YYY?" and the variant "Is XXX a YYY-killer?", unless "kill" is redefined to mean "grow to the point of being much more significant than", in which case the answer changes to "maybe". :-)
I use a bluetooth keyboard with my iPad, I'm not really seeing the usability issue?
Perhaps dell623's usability issues (plural) include the screen size:
and that plus the one-window-at-a-time UI that at least in part may stem from the screen size:
in addition to the keyboard? Perhaps the smaller screen works for you, but I'm finding the 15" screen of my new machine annoying at times as I can't have as much stuff visible as on my old 17"; a 10" screen such as the one on the iPad would drive me nuts.
They will have to scavenge for porn in some way, as it's customary with repair guys. iPads have internal disks of some form too,
They have non-volatile storage that's used for the file system (yes, it has a UN*X file system - multiple partitions, running, I think, case-sensitive HFSX - even if it's not made visible to the end user of a non-jailbroken box), but it's flash memory soldered to the motherboard, so accessing it if you can't turn the iPad on would be a bit more work.
If you don't need to run any Windows software on your primary machine (either because you don't need to run it at all or because you can run it on some other machine)
If someone is making the Mac his primary machine at the end of an ordinary four-year PC upgrade cycle, then he probably has Windows software that he still needs to run,
That depends on whether the software he was using on Windows has OS X equivalents that he'd consider adequate replacements.
and the old computer isn't powerful enough to run the software he needs anymore.
Depends on the software. If the machine was powerful enough to run it when he bought it, and he isn't doing bigger tasks with it, and hasn't had to upgrade it to newer versions that require more power, perhaps not - especially if, for example, the machine used to fight the browser and a mail program and an office suite and... for resources on the machine, and he can and does move his browsing and mail and MS Office stuff and... to the Mac, so that the software no longer has to compete with those other apps for resources.
Consider the case of someone who develops software for both Windows and Mac OS X, or both Windows Phone and iPhone, or both Surface and iPad.
...which some users do and some don't.
Would you recommend that he buy two computers and keep both up to date, or that he buy a Mac and retail Windows?
All other things being equal, I'd recommend the latter (that's how I do occasional non-OS X development work - the software on which I do development work is mostly cross-platform, and a lot of the work I can do on OS X and it Just Works on the other platforms). I don't use Boot Camp, though, I use VMware Fusion, so it cost me a little bit more.
so I suspect he was not sshing back into his own machine, but instead into another machine.
Again, if he's talking about ssh from a real computer, why would he specify a keyboard?
Who says he's talking about "coding on the iPad" in the sense that the editor and toolchain is running on the iPad? He could have meant "I use the iPad as a terminal for doing development on another machine, by sshing into the other machine, and typing on my Bluetooth keyboard". The original quote was just "You can still have iPad, keyboard and a SSH app.", which doesn't give enough detail to figure out whether that's he meant or not (and the posting to which he was responded was, in its entirely, a title of "Seriously?" and a body of "No.", which certainly doesn't supply any more context).
The only reasons I could see for sshing into the iPad from the iPad would be
The SSH app is not necessary for doing development for an iPad on an iPad, given the existence of mobileterminal.
Pretty sure he was talking about using an iPad SSH client *on* the iPad, to open a terminal on the same iPad where you would use vim to code.
And the advantage of that over just using mobileterminal is? Either of those scenarios requires jailbreaking, so it's not as if using ssh magically removes that restriction, so I suspect he was not sshing back into his own machine, but instead into another machine.
I do develop hobby software projects when mobile, like, at hotels, visiting a friend, sitting in a random a lobby. But on a bus? What.
If he has a long bus commute, why not?
(and nevermind that they are not just refusing to allow malware, but also any political cartoons,
Presumably you mean "have refused in the past to allow political cartoons" (the app in question was the one the controversy about political cartoon apps was about).
That doesn't mean other apps that might be considered politically controversial aren't banned from the App Store, but they clearly are allowing the political cartoon app in question, along with other political cartoon apps, such as the msnbc.com Conservative Cartoons and msnbc.com Liberal Cartoons apps.
and that developers are at Apple's mercy).
Yes, if you're developing for iOS, you either have to have Apple find your app acceptable according to their standards or limit yourself to jailbroken machines.
$200 for the operating system? You're off by an order of magnitude. The latest version of OS X is only $19.99, and Xcode is free.
The claim to which you're responding is
which sounds as if the "second operating system" isn't going to be OS X (as per "if you instead decide to make the Mac your primary machine) - and I suspect he was referring, in particular, to Windows, which does cost about $200.
If you don't need to run any Windows software on your primary machine (either because you don't need to run it at all or because you can run it on some other machine), you don't need to pay $200 for Windows if you're switching to using a Mac as your primary machine.
If you don't have a real keyboard you don't have a real development tool
So get a Bluetooth keyboard.
That doesn't give you a bigger screen, or the ability to have multiple windows open on said bigger screen (maybe you can quickly slide between displays and work around the inability to look at two things at the same time), however, so it still might not be what a lot of developers would want.
The conclusion I have come to though is that most of my development time does not happen while being "mobile" - I'm at a desk somewhere.
If "mobile" refers to "using something while on the move and not seated", yes, that's the case for me; I'm unlikely to start coding while walking down the street. Then again, if I had a tablet I probably wouldn't start doing much of anything with it while walking down the street - I'd probably be using a smartphone for the stuff I'd be doing under those circumstances. I haven't yet figured out what I'd use a tablet for, which is probably why I don't own one....
I might do development while not at a desk at home, but that's a different matter, and a laptop is sufficiently "mobile" for those purposes for me.
OS X targets the retarded appliance user that an actual computing environment is a waste to give to. One can easily argue, that it transforms a computer into something that isn't a computer anymore, but a information and entertainment appliance.
Linux targets people who actually use their computer as a *computer*. People who automate their work away, by writing shell scripts, and calling them from udev, cron and keyboary shortcuts, etc. People who adapt the system to their needs, and gain the vast amount of power resulting from really using a universal programmable computing machine. The greatest machine ever invented. The holy grail of information processing.
Nobody of the latter group could even use the former system, since it would be completely crippling and basically useless.
Gee, I use the former system and I'm a member of the latter group. The devices on my "desktop" (really laptop) machine don't change often enough that the absence of something as general as udev doesn't matter, and there aren't that many tasks that need to be done periodically for me to bother firing up crontab, and the other shell-script stuff I just do directly from a terminal window rather than binding it to keyboard shortcuts in the GUI (I assume those are the "keyboard shortcuts" to which you're referring). Then again, a lot of the scripts I whip up on the spot to perform a task that I'm unlikely ever to need again, so I just stuff it in /tmp and run it from there, e.g. in a find ... -exec command.
So stop that nonsensical propaganda!
Yes, please do.
but does the binary have to run or just work if you configure; make; make install again? right the OSS world assumes that software can be recompiled, and most only needs that. Sometimes it needs a simple patch, but yes breaking ABI isn't really an issue. Breaking an API is much more of one.
How many of the ABI breakages about which people compile are the result of API breakage, and how many are the result of changing the sizes or layout of data types in ways that don't break the API?
Both of those types are incapable of making decisions. Had they given a shit about it in the first place they would not be iPhone users.
OK, so "can't" in "no you can't" meant "you are incapable of making decisions", not "the choice to no longer buy Apple phones is not available to you for some external reason". If so, then note that "made a decision that they later regretted" is different from "is inherently incapable of making good decisions now or in the future".
Of course there are people who choose not to be iPhone users. I did not include them because I stated that there are 2 types of iPhone users.
In the post to which you originally replied, the person said "We can decide where to spend our money based on how Apple treats us in meeting our demands." It seems pretty obvious that one of the "decisions", if not the decision, to which that refers is the decision to spend your money with Samsung or HTC or Motorola or $PICK_YOUR_ANDROID_VENDOR rather than with Apple. (You could also go with $PICK_YOUR_WINDOWS_MOBILE_VENDOR if Microsoft's app store policies bother you less than Apple's app store policies.)
So "we" in "we can decide where to spend our money" includes people who were iPhone users but have decided not to be iPhone users in the future. Yeah, they can't go back and un-spend the money that they spent on the iPhone (modulo getting some of it back by selling the iPhone), but they can refuse to spend any future money with Apple.
In your first post, you said only "No you can't. :)" in response to that. If the "you" in that statement is the same as the "we" in the statement to which you're referring, then the statement is false, as, while they can't un-spend the money they already sent, they can, as indicated, choose not to spend more money with Apple in the future. I.e., "pointing out that there are 2 types of iPhone users", as a response to the original poster, completely misses the point of what the original poster was saying, and so it would be completely silly to read "No you can't." as "pointing out that there are 2 types of iPhone users".
I thought that I was pointing out that there are 2 types of iPhone users. Those too stupid to know that they have no choice and those that made the choice to not have one.
("One" in "have one" presumably referring to "the choice as to which apps you want to have, including apps not approved by Apple". There is, however, a third type of iPhone users, namely those who made the choice to jailbreak their phones and run non-App Store apps on them.)
Yes, but there are also people who have made the choice not to be iPhone users, which is the choice to which the AC to whom you replied was presumably referring.
No you can't. :)
If you're referring to "We can decide where to spend our money based on how Apple treats us in meeting our demands.", are you claiming that smartphone users are forced to purchase iPhones?
IMHO, Apple would have scored a lot of points by making Rosetta open-source.
If by "would have scored a lot of points" you mean "would have gotten a visit from the lawyers from the new owners of Transitive Corporation", Transitive Corporation being the suppliers of the binary-to-binary translation code in Rosetta, yes, they would have.
I.e., it wasn't entirely theirs to open-source. Maybe IBM could've been convinced to open-source it, but I'm not sure how interested IBM would be in something that translates code from one of their instruction-set architectures to x86, as opposed to going the other way (which is why they were interested in Transitive).
There exists a philosophical computing spectrum with stable, vendor-controlled, locked down, less customizable, less flexible, more compatible user-experience on one extreme end. On the other extreme end, you have nearly infinite flexibility and user-control at the expense of stability, compatibility and vendor-support. Apple is on one extreme, Desktop Linux is on the other, and MS Windows sits somewhere in the middle.
Saying that Apple can steal Linux users is like claiming that the Republican party (for lack of an example of an extreme-right party) can steal voters from the communist party. Absurd.
And there exists another axis with "certified UNIXes" on one end and MS Windows at the other. To a large degree, on that axis you have OS X and Linux and... on or near one end (Leopard, Snow Leopard, and Mountain Lion being certified, and Linux not being certified but being extremely "Unix-like") and MS Windows at the other and, as the author claims in TFA, "The need to develop native applications was diminishing and at the same time OS X provided a good enough Unix-like environment that programmers could develop on a Mac and then deploy to a Linux server."
...when OS X is built on top of Unix?
They said "Linux desktop", not "desktops built atop UN*X". Presumably the argument being made is that one desktop built atop UN*X reduced the demand for others; in TFA the author says "The need to develop native applications was diminishing and at the same time OS X provided a good enough Unix-like environment that programmers could develop on a Mac and then deploy to a Linux server."
Or, to put it another way, the argument is that one reason why it killed the Linux desktop is that it's, err, umm, built on top of Unix.
Linux is a unix workalike. OS X IS UNIX (to head off the nitpickers, the latest versions aren't certified).
Actually, the latest version is certified; Lion wasn't, but Snow Leopard was (and Leopard was, but maybe the certifications time out and disappear from unix.org after a while).
So there's POSIX, most of the command line user environment, etc.
Actually, much of "the command line user environment" is part of present-day POSIX, i.e. the Single UNIX Specification, and 1003.2 dates back to 1992, so it's been a part of POSIX for about 20 years now.
In any case, what Xenious may have meant by "you had all the functionality of the Linux OS" is "you had an OS that was another member of the UN*X family".
Great! But don't forget that you cannot distribute the output of X-Code without adhering to the license; for example, any Quicktime functionality you develop is permitted to run "only on supported Mac OS X and/or Windows platforms with QuickTime installed".
Any other examples, in the Xcode license, of redistribution restrictions of that sort? The only other such stuff I see on the version of the Xcode license on Scribd is "if you redistribute the Javascript "Apple Classes" from Dashcode, follow the license", "don't use the "System Provided Images" in ways Apple doesn't approve of" ("images" here meaning "pictures", so some of that is probably trademark protection), "don't use Location Services without asking the user's permission" (personally, I rather like that restriction), and "maybe we'll add some other things in the future that have additional licensing terms". The rest is largely restrictions on modifying/redistributing/etc. the "Developer Software" itself.