Objective-C is a comfortably simple, straightforward language; it's a superset of C, and that superset is fairly thin, so if you already know C you're almost there now.
What you will spend all of your time learning are the Cocoa (and Cocoa Touch) frameworks. While there are multiple language bindings for the Cocoa framework, all reference materials and sample code assume that you're using Objective-C. A lazy weekend's investment in learning Obj C will pay for itself many times over, when you can simply read (as opposed to "read and mentally translate") all tutorials, reference docs, and sample code.
"Eventually, the iPad will have equivalents for [Photoshop, Apache, PHP, a compiler]..."
Wow, I sure hope not. Thumbs up to to anyone who wants to undertake esoteric engineering challenges just for the joy of it, but there's no VALUE to using an iPad as a development server or a graphics workstation.
The iPad is a consumer appliance. It's optimized for consuming information, rather than creating it. I would no more want to run a compiler or web server on my iPad than I would want to use my bicycle to help three other people get to work in the morning. Need to take others with you to the office? Use a car. Want a casual afternoon out in the sun with the wind in your hair? Ride your bike. Trying to make your bike behave like a car gives you a rickshaw. You get the worst of both worlds, not the best.
It doesn't bother me that an iPad can't do everything that a netbook can because what the iPad does, it does very well. I don't feel any need to run productivity apps or server software on the thing, because I have desktops and servers for that. I'd hate for the iPad to become less friendly, less nimble, less comfortable in an attempt to be all things to all users. Like you said, use the right tool for the right job.
"will this one be worse than the original, or have less of an impact?"
Before we can answer that question, you need to provide some specifics: The original dotbomb was bad because A, B, and C. This round will be worse because...
I worked for a (once large) web design firm during the first bust. I saw an ocean of twenty-somethings react in horror as a smug, arrogant sense of entitlement was stripped away from them. They'd grown up during a continuous economic boom, they'd learned a skill that you could teach your grandmother, and they thought they deserved huge salaries and touchy-feely perks.
During the last boom I not only kept my job, but I got to watch people I seriously disliked lose theirs, so for me the last bust was just fine.
Now if I were to get laid off this time around, this bust would be MUCH worse - for me.
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
A good friend of mine asked me to think about a country where the citizens were well armed, had formed militias, and were taking responsibility for the defense of their communities.
Iraq in 2007 fails only the "well regulated" part of the above definition.
Some other player (who apparently didn't notice, in his first twenty levels, that once you have "focus" on a monster, other people attacking that monster merely saves you some time, and costs you neither experience nor gold) took umbrage with my attempted altruism and spent the next ten minutes preemptively attacking every monster in which I displayed any interest.
This episode reminded me of what I hate most about gaming: gamers. I thought to myself, "I'm paying money for the privilege of being annoyed by some under-socialized puke with a chip on his shoulder."
From the article: "especially now that Web-based applications are written in operating system-agnostic languages such as Java and.Net."
I just went to Microsoft's page for the.net framework, and it sure looked 100% windows to me. Perhaps the author is considering "multiple flavors of windows" to be "multiple platforms." My bias leads me to a different conclusion.
It's already been mentioned in these comments but it's worth repeating - Zimbra ( http://www.zimbra.com/ ) is an excellent alternative to Exchange for companies that aren't mandated to use an all-Windows infrastructure stack. The company I work for is small and flexible enough that I have the luxury of considering many options. Of those that I reviewed for calendaring, Zimbra was the clear winner.
Zimbra-the-application is a mail/calendar/docs sharing server with an excellent web interface and native client support for all the protocols you mentioned. Zimbra-the-software is the integration code that turns a collection of important-but-separate technologies (postfix + mysql + openldap + about a dozen other open source technologies) into a well designed, manageable, drop-in "solution" a la Exchange.
I'm not an employee, and I'm not even a customer yet because the "open source edition" meets our pilot project's needs. If your user population doesn't demand to use MS Outlook as their mail/calendaring client, then the open source version is all you need. The commercial version is basically the open source version plus a half-dozen proprietary connectors for cranky client applications, such as MS Outlook. I suspect that we will need to buy those connectors in order to get the CEO and the Director of Professional Services onboard; if it turns out that we need to buy some licenses, I'll be happy to give these people my money. They've earned it.
You wrote, "First of all, I find it interesting that FreeBSD never seems to get these complaints and hate about having to recompile packages with portupgrade all the time, and being able to tweak the flags, etc. In this respect, it's just like gentoo!!!."
As was pointed out in an earlier post, gentoo is a meta-distribution, whereas FreeBSD is complete operating system. Overall, the "FreeBSD experience" is significantly different from the "Gentoo experience." FreeBSD feels much more polished, and is therefore less likely to produce frustrated blog entries.
I administer Gentoo, FreeBSD, and RHEL boxes, and have several years of Solaris experience. There is a lot to like about gentoo but the final point that you acknowledge, "Gentoo takes more time to keep running," is extremely important, and worth elaborating on in a whole paragraph of its own.
It does require more time and effort to build a gentoo box in the first place; it take more time/effort to provide a secure environment (glsa-check is still in beta, for good reasons); it requires more time/effort to ensure that your dev, staging, and production environments are all in sync. Yes, it can be done, and quite elegantly, but it costs more (time == money) to do that on gentoo than using other solutions.
That is the core frustration of every negative gentoo review that I've read. The most common counter-argument to those complaints boils down to, "You just haven't spent enough time to appreciate the elegant beauty that is gentoo." Allow me to offer a counter-counter-argument.
Once upon a time, I took the time to fully appreciate the beauty that is emacs. I accepted the truism that emacs doesn't meet you halfway, that you have to go to emacs; I read books on the subject; I made it my default editor; I created a highly customized.emacs file; I got tired of pushing my customzied.emacs file, and all associated libraries, onto every new machine; my pinkies started to hurt all the time; and I noticed that when I was REALLY in a hurry I used vi. Eventually I just stopped using emacs.
I think of gentoo as the "emacs" of operating systems - really cool, but with a high pain threshold before the cool starts paying for itself.
"Frankly I could care less what Apple does, because I don't use it."
"I'm sure that if I were to use Linix or Apple... I would encounter just as many problems as Windows."
How can you be sure of something that you're not familiar with? While it's possible that your average annoyance count with OS X or Linux might be the same as your annoyance count for Windows, you don't actually know. By stating conjecture as fact in one area, you make all of your other assertions vulnerable to attack.
I already know that I'm not going to buy anything based on an online ad banner. I'm not even going to click through the ad banner. So an online ad is nothing more than an animated distraction. The flashing primary colors annoy me while I'm trying to read an article, so I almost reflexively adblock the server that the provided the ad.
Take any web site and remove all the ads - that web site just became a more pleasant experience to read. Remove the blinking crap, and you'll see the site the the designer created, not what Marketing agreed to.
Well, I'll have my cake and eat it too, thank you very much. I'll get the best of the design without the ads whenever possible
And no, I don't feel at all bad about my near-total ad blocking. I work for an online marketing firm that produces (some of) the ad banners that clutter up your browser. We're bad people. I hope we go out of business.
And yes, I do subscribe to several online sites, including (but not limited to) Salon, Nerve, and the Irish Times. I have no reservations about paying money for quality content. I don't require the entire web to be free. I do require the parts the I frequent to NOT annoy me.
If you want to avoid a holy war, then persuade me that your egregiously slow network speeds aren't the result of a duplex mistmatch. If your home computer on a different network could consume a similarily sized file in about two minutes, but the TiVo at work is taking ten times that, then I'd bet my lunch money that the problem is not with the supplier (server) or the consumer (TiVo) but with the network connection.
Calendaring is the biggest organizational problem that I have to deal with at work.
Calendaring is also the feature that time-crunched execs with multiple assistants cannot live without, and about which they will not compromise. They aren't welded to Outlook as an email client. Email is a highly standardized medium. They're equally comfortable using Yahoo! mail as Outlook for their mail.
But the calendaring server landscape is populated by standards-oblivious applications that don't talk to each other. Some times the same vendor's own servers and clients don't get along well. MS Entourage is the equivalent of "POP calendaring," whereas Outlook is "IMAP calendaring." Entourage works fine if you always, only do your calendaring from one machine. Doesn't work AT ALL as soon as you walk to another machine. God help you if your laptop crashes, or is stolen, and you didn't have a recent back up of your monolithic, 2GB binary database that Entourage uses to store your mail.
At my company more than one exec is sick and tired of the daily regimen necessary to protect their Windows machines against viruses, worms, and security vulnerabilities. Calendaring via Outlook+Exchange is the single largest obstacle to those execs abandoning Windows entirely.
I switched to postfix from sendmail for my company's MX servers, and have been extremely happy.
A couple of severe Sendmail message-born vulnerabilities came out in rapid succession, around the time that I was trying to make sendmail more efficient at stopping spam.
Postfix's UCE rules are straightforward, logical, and easy to configure. I don't see postfix vulnerability alerts with the same frequency that I do for sendmail. The first time one of my coworkers looked at my postfix main.cf file, he understood immediately what I was trying to do.
I don't have any mail-related needs that sendmail does but postfix doesn't, and I find postfix to be MUCH more maintainable. For me, postfix does the same amount of work while demanding less of my time.
Excellent news. I've been using zope and plone for a few months now for intranet projects at my employer, and I am very, very impressed with that software stack. The plone 2.0 betas illustrate the the Plone team has some extremely talented UI people. I look forward to reading more about these technologies.
As a Linux geek who has moved to OS X, I would be perfectly happy if Apple's market share stayed the same and Linux's increased.
I don't think that Linux will cannibalize Mac OS X sales. The two platforms have different strengths.
I do expect Linux to start making inroads in vertical industries which really just need a dumb terminal which can surf the web. Linux is extremely well situated to acquire a lot of that business, and in fact has already begun to do so.
I don't see Linux establishing a significant desktop presence in industries where Macs are predominant, at least not until people like Quark or Adobe begin making Linux native versions of their software. I don't see that happening any time soon.
A merger is most beneficial between companies whose products have synergy. To merge with a company whose products compete with yours is to essentially buy their customer base.
Because IBM and Sun compete more than they cooperate, a merger between the two would be effectively IBM buying Sun to acquire its Java unit, and end-of-life its hardware and OS.
I've been using PHP consistenly for the past four years or so (and Perl for about six years). I'll certainly look at PHP5 once its out of beta, but I must admit that even though the majority of my work over the past three years has been in PHP, all my recent work has been in Python.
A while ago I did a lot of PHP intranet development using custom classes which talked to LDAP data sources, and I came away from my efforts with the feeling that PHP is architecturally inconsistent. Those inconsistencies left a bad taste in my mouth.
I doubt I'll ever stop using Perl, but with only a little direct experience I can already see the day when I will have stopped using PHP in favor of Python.
You are correct about the audible.com encrypted downloads.
I created an audible.com account, supplying a username and password. Then I bought the three volumes of "Learn Japanese in Your Car," (I guess "Learn Japanese on the Plane" just doesn't sound as catchy...) downloading the @47MB files in MP3 format, which were actually stored locally as "x_mp332.aa" files, where "x" was the selection name.
From within iTunes, I selected "File->Import..." and selected the.aa file. A dialogue popped up, I provided my audible.com username and password, and the files were decrypted and available to iTunes.
Next, I activated the Software Base Station option on my tower, brought my TiBook laptop within range, did "arp -a" to find the IP address of the Tower, and scp'd over a.tar file of the.aa files.
Later, with the Software Base Station disabled, I untarred the.aa files and imported them into the iTunes on my laptop. Same dialog, same username and password. No network connection.
The only complaint that I have about the audible.com content is that it doesn't fit nicely into the "artist/album" views for sorting data. I found it useful to make a new playlist for the audible content, so that I could find it again without too much searching.
Slashdot Mirror
Am I just getting old and crotchety, or is this a new trend?
Speaking as someone old and crotchety myself, I respectfully suggest that it's not an either/or question.
Objective-C is a comfortably simple, straightforward language; it's a superset of C, and that superset is fairly thin, so if you already know C you're almost there now.
What you will spend all of your time learning are the Cocoa (and Cocoa Touch) frameworks. While there are multiple language bindings for the Cocoa framework, all reference materials and sample code assume that you're using Objective-C. A lazy weekend's investment in learning Obj C will pay for itself many times over, when you can simply read (as opposed to "read and mentally translate") all tutorials, reference docs, and sample code.
Here is the link to Apple's Objective-C primer.
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#referencelibrary/GettingStarted/Learning_Objective-C_A_Primer/index.html%23//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40007594
just think how muscular those pinkies would be if you were writing your Obj-C using Emacs!
"Eventually, the iPad will have equivalents for [Photoshop, Apache, PHP, a compiler]..."
Wow, I sure hope not. Thumbs up to to anyone who wants to undertake esoteric engineering challenges just for the joy of it, but there's no VALUE to using an iPad as a development server or a graphics workstation.
The iPad is a consumer appliance. It's optimized for consuming information, rather than creating it. I would no more want to run a compiler or web server on my iPad than I would want to use my bicycle to help three other people get to work in the morning. Need to take others with you to the office? Use a car. Want a casual afternoon out in the sun with the wind in your hair? Ride your bike. Trying to make your bike behave like a car gives you a rickshaw. You get the worst of both worlds, not the best.
It doesn't bother me that an iPad can't do everything that a netbook can because what the iPad does, it does very well. I don't feel any need to run productivity apps or server software on the thing, because I have desktops and servers for that. I'd hate for the iPad to become less friendly, less nimble, less comfortable in an attempt to be all things to all users. Like you said, use the right tool for the right job.
I look forward to the follow-up post that you write on your laptop while sitting outside during the next downpour.
"will this one be worse than the original, or have less of an impact?"
Before we can answer that question, you need to provide some specifics: The original dotbomb was bad because A, B, and C. This round will be worse because...
I worked for a (once large) web design firm during the first bust. I saw an ocean of twenty-somethings react in horror as a smug, arrogant sense of entitlement was stripped away from them. They'd grown up during a continuous economic boom, they'd learned a skill that you could teach your grandmother, and they thought they deserved huge salaries and touchy-feely perks.
During the last boom I not only kept my job, but I got to watch people I seriously disliked lose theirs, so for me the last bust was just fine.
Now if I were to get laid off this time around, this bust would be MUCH worse - for me.
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
A good friend of mine asked me to think about a country where the citizens were well armed, had formed militias, and were taking responsibility for the defense of their communities.
Iraq in 2007 fails only the "well regulated" part of the above definition.
Some other player (who apparently didn't notice, in his first twenty levels, that once you have "focus" on a monster, other people attacking that monster merely saves you some time, and costs you neither experience nor gold) took umbrage with my attempted altruism and spent the next ten minutes preemptively attacking every monster in which I displayed any interest.
This episode reminded me of what I hate most about gaming: gamers. I thought to myself, "I'm paying money for the privilege of being annoyed by some under-socialized puke with a chip on his shoulder."
So tell me... why did YOU quit?
From the article: "especially now that Web-based applications are written in operating system-agnostic languages such as Java and .Net."
.net framework, and it sure looked 100% windows to me. Perhaps the author is considering "multiple flavors of windows" to be "multiple platforms." My bias leads me to a different conclusion.
I just went to Microsoft's page for the
It's already been mentioned in these comments but it's worth repeating - Zimbra ( http://www.zimbra.com/ ) is an excellent alternative to Exchange for companies that aren't mandated to use an all-Windows infrastructure stack. The company I work for is small and flexible enough that I have the luxury of considering many options. Of those that I reviewed for calendaring, Zimbra was the clear winner.
Zimbra-the-application is a mail/calendar/docs sharing server with an excellent web interface and native client support for all the protocols you mentioned. Zimbra-the-software is the integration code that turns a collection of important-but-separate technologies (postfix + mysql + openldap + about a dozen other open source technologies) into a well designed, manageable, drop-in "solution" a la Exchange.
I'm not an employee, and I'm not even a customer yet because the "open source edition" meets our pilot project's needs. If your user population doesn't demand to use MS Outlook as their mail/calendaring client, then the open source version is all you need. The commercial version is basically the open source version plus a half-dozen proprietary connectors for cranky client applications, such as MS Outlook. I suspect that we will need to buy those connectors in order to get the CEO and the Director of Professional Services onboard; if it turns out that we need to buy some licenses, I'll be happy to give these people my money. They've earned it.
You wrote, "First of all, I find it interesting that FreeBSD never seems to get these complaints and hate about having to recompile packages with portupgrade all the time, and being able to tweak the flags, etc. In this respect, it's just like gentoo!!!."
.emacs file; I got tired of pushing my customzied .emacs file, and all associated libraries, onto every new machine; my pinkies started to hurt all the time; and I noticed that when I was REALLY in a hurry I used vi. Eventually I just stopped using emacs.
As was pointed out in an earlier post, gentoo is a meta-distribution, whereas FreeBSD is complete operating system. Overall, the "FreeBSD experience" is significantly different from the "Gentoo experience." FreeBSD feels much more polished, and is therefore less likely to produce frustrated blog entries.
I administer Gentoo, FreeBSD, and RHEL boxes, and have several years of Solaris experience. There is a lot to like about gentoo but the final point that you acknowledge, "Gentoo takes more time to keep running," is extremely important, and worth elaborating on in a whole paragraph of its own.
It does require more time and effort to build a gentoo box in the first place; it take more time/effort to provide a secure environment (glsa-check is still in beta, for good reasons); it requires more time/effort to ensure that your dev, staging, and production environments are all in sync. Yes, it can be done, and quite elegantly, but it costs more (time == money) to do that on gentoo than using other solutions.
That is the core frustration of every negative gentoo review that I've read. The most common counter-argument to those complaints boils down to, "You just haven't spent enough time to appreciate the elegant beauty that is gentoo." Allow me to offer a counter-counter-argument.
Once upon a time, I took the time to fully appreciate the beauty that is emacs. I accepted the truism that emacs doesn't meet you halfway, that you have to go to emacs; I read books on the subject; I made it my default editor; I created a highly customized
I think of gentoo as the "emacs" of operating systems - really cool, but with a high pain threshold before the cool starts paying for itself.
"Frankly I could care less what Apple does, because I don't use it."
... I would encounter just as many problems as Windows."
"I'm sure that if I were to use Linix or Apple
How can you be sure of something that you're not familiar with? While it's possible that your average annoyance count with OS X or Linux might be the same as your annoyance count for Windows, you don't actually know. By stating conjecture as fact in one area, you make all of your other assertions vulnerable to attack.
Kudos to you! To turn the shit who's stealing your food into an incontinent shit is excellent behavior modification.
I already know that I'm not going to buy anything based on an online ad banner. I'm not even going to click through the ad banner. So an online ad is nothing more than an animated distraction. The flashing primary colors annoy me while I'm trying to read an article, so I almost reflexively adblock the server that the provided the ad.
Take any web site and remove all the ads - that web site just became a more pleasant experience to read. Remove the blinking crap, and you'll see the site the the designer created, not what Marketing agreed to.
Well, I'll have my cake and eat it too, thank you very much. I'll get the best of the design without the ads whenever possible
And no, I don't feel at all bad about my near-total ad blocking. I work for an online marketing firm that produces (some of) the ad banners that clutter up your browser. We're bad people. I hope we go out of business.
And yes, I do subscribe to several online sites, including (but not limited to) Salon, Nerve, and the Irish Times. I have no reservations about paying money for quality content. I don't require the entire web to be free. I do require the parts the I frequent to NOT annoy me.
I agree completely! Using "MAC" to refer to Macintosh computers is a pet peeve of mine, too.
MAC = Media Access Control, i.e., ethernet.
If you want to avoid a holy war, then persuade me that your egregiously slow network speeds aren't the result of a duplex mistmatch. If your home computer on a different network could consume a similarily sized file in about two minutes, but the TiVo at work is taking ten times that, then I'd bet my lunch money that the problem is not with the supplier (server) or the consumer (TiVo) but with the network connection.
Calendaring is the biggest organizational problem that I have to deal with at work.
Calendaring is also the feature that time-crunched execs with multiple assistants cannot live without, and about which they will not compromise. They aren't welded to Outlook as an email client. Email is a highly standardized medium. They're equally comfortable using Yahoo! mail as Outlook for their mail.
But the calendaring server landscape is populated by standards-oblivious applications that don't talk to each other. Some times the same vendor's own servers and clients don't get along well. MS Entourage is the equivalent of "POP calendaring," whereas Outlook is "IMAP calendaring." Entourage works fine if you always, only do your calendaring from one machine. Doesn't work AT ALL as soon as you walk to another machine. God help you if your laptop crashes, or is stolen, and you didn't have a recent back up of your monolithic, 2GB binary database that Entourage uses to store your mail.
At my company more than one exec is sick and tired of the daily regimen necessary to protect their Windows machines against viruses, worms, and security vulnerabilities. Calendaring via Outlook+Exchange is the single largest obstacle to those execs abandoning Windows entirely.
I switched to postfix from sendmail for my company's MX servers, and have been extremely happy.
A couple of severe Sendmail message-born vulnerabilities came out in rapid succession, around the time that I was trying to make sendmail more efficient at stopping spam.
Postfix's UCE rules are straightforward, logical, and easy to configure. I don't see postfix vulnerability alerts with the same frequency that I do for sendmail. The first time one of my coworkers looked at my postfix main.cf file, he understood immediately what I was trying to do.
I don't have any mail-related needs that sendmail does but postfix doesn't, and I find postfix to be MUCH more maintainable. For me, postfix does the same amount of work while demanding less of my time.
Excellent news. I've been using zope and plone for a few months now for intranet projects at my employer, and I am very, very impressed with that software stack. The plone 2.0 betas illustrate the the Plone team has some extremely talented UI people. I look forward to reading more about these technologies.
As a Linux geek who has moved to OS X, I would be perfectly happy if Apple's market share stayed the same and Linux's increased.
I don't think that Linux will cannibalize Mac OS X sales. The two platforms have different strengths.
I do expect Linux to start making inroads in vertical industries which really just need a dumb terminal which can surf the web. Linux is extremely well situated to acquire a lot of that business, and in fact has already begun to do so.
I don't see Linux establishing a significant desktop presence in industries where Macs are predominant, at least not until people like Quark or Adobe begin making Linux native versions of their software. I don't see that happening any time soon.
My two cents,
MCM
A merger is most beneficial between companies whose products have synergy. To merge with a company whose products compete with yours is to essentially buy their customer base.
Because IBM and Sun compete more than they cooperate, a merger between the two would be effectively IBM buying Sun to acquire its Java unit, and end-of-life its hardware and OS.
I've been using PHP consistenly for the past four years or so (and Perl for about six years). I'll certainly look at PHP5 once its out of beta, but I must admit that even though the majority of my work over the past three years has been in PHP, all my recent work has been in Python.
A while ago I did a lot of PHP intranet development using custom classes which talked to LDAP data sources, and I came away from my efforts with the feeling that PHP is architecturally inconsistent. Those inconsistencies left a bad taste in my mouth.
I doubt I'll ever stop using Perl, but with only a little direct experience I can already see the day when I will have stopped using PHP in favor of Python.
Only two changes are needed to "Enterprise" to make it first rate science fiction.
1) Rename it "Firefly"
2) replace Berman and Cast with Whedon and cast.
You are correct about the audible.com encrypted downloads.
.aa file. A dialogue popped up, I provided my audible.com username and password, and the files were decrypted and available to iTunes.
.tar file of the .aa files.
.aa files and imported them into the iTunes on my laptop. Same dialog, same username and password. No network connection.
I created an audible.com account, supplying a username and password. Then I bought the three volumes of "Learn Japanese in Your Car," (I guess "Learn Japanese on the Plane" just doesn't sound as catchy...) downloading the @47MB files in MP3 format, which were actually stored locally as "x_mp332.aa" files, where "x" was the selection name.
From within iTunes, I selected "File->Import..." and selected the
Next, I activated the Software Base Station option on my tower, brought my TiBook laptop within range, did "arp -a" to find the IP address of the Tower, and scp'd over a
Later, with the Software Base Station disabled, I untarred the
The only complaint that I have about the audible.com content is that it doesn't fit nicely into the "artist/album" views for sorting data. I found it useful to make a new playlist for the audible content, so that I could find it again without too much searching.