Slow multi-threading? Assuming this Wikipedia article is correct (the reference currently points to a dead document on Apple's site) queuing up a task for thread-dispatch takes only 15 instructions which seems a lot faster than spawning a new thread. In the end, though, it's still just threads, just a convenient way for developers to take advantage of them. If not with threads, how would you expect Photoshop to take advantage of multiple cores? And how do you think it creates these threads? By using one of several "big, general OS libraries" that exposes the API, such as Core Foundation (MacOSX), pthreads or Win32 each of which will just end up using an underlying kernel system call.
As I see it, these are the advantages
A global thread-pool, meaning applications don't need to maintain their own, and the kernel can manage the size of it according to system resources
New language constructs that will encourage developers to use threads in more places, since it is now utterly painless to make a block of code execute in its own thread
(On OSX, at least) Kernel level acceleration for queuing up tasks
I can think of absolutely no reason why developers writing new OSX software (OS backward compatibility aside) would not take advantage of this.
Wish I had mod points. I think this comment pretty much sums up what I think is the heart of this matter. Obviously nothing can ever be done that will make up for what was done to Alan Turing, since he is dead. While it might seem that the government could have done more than merely apologize, I think it would have been a hollow gesture, since Turing has already been profoundly honored over the years by countless individuals and organizations. I believe that the government did the one thing that ONLY the government could do in his instance: issue a formal apology for actions that were taken by the government. I only wish that Brown could have at least attempted to demonstrate some humility when he gave the statement. "I am pleased to have the chance"? Somehow I think he could have found a better way to phrase that.
Honestly, I don't think that calling a tooth an organ is very much of a stretch. Teeth have their own blood vessels and nerves, and consist of a large proportion of living tissue. This little blurb provides what I think is a convincing, if hardly exhaustive, argument that teeth are organs.
The difference is that Java -will- close() the resource -if- the object does get finalized and GCed. At least for FileInputStreams and Sockets (I think).
There is no (non-deprecated) way of guaranteeing that a finalizer will ever actually be run, though. Generally speaking, finalizers should only be used as a backup 'safety-net' when an object holds resources that should be cleaned up. When it does, it should log a warning if it finds its resource not already cleaned up. Finalizers are not destructors, and woe be to any developer that uses them as such. C# also has a 'with' keyword, in conjunction with, I believe, the ICloseable interface. I find it to be a handy piece of syntactic sugar and do wish that Java would offer it. Oh well.
Direction of travel is called Bearing. A plain GPS device can give you bearing, but not heading. Many handheld GPS devices include a solid-state magnetic compass, though.
I disagree entirely. Just try playing Metroid Prime 3, for example. It's a first person shooter and has fantastic controls, particularly if you compare it the Gamecube Metroid games. As good as a mouse & keyboard? That -might- be arguable. But certainly in the same class.
Sorry, but you're absolutely wrong about the OSX kernel somehow being 'locked down'. Anybody can make kernel extensions for the OS and they do not require any sort of signing to install or use. The vast majority of the kernel is even open source. On the other hand, I've tried MacDrive on XP to read my MacFS (HFS+) drives and ended up with a severely damaged filesystem when there was a power failure. So, well... I suppose your mileage my vary with any option...
How does corn used for animal feed NOT count as being part of the 'human food stream', except perhaps that which is fed to pets or worker animals? This means meat becomes more expensive as well, unless a less expensive animal feed can be found. I absolutely agree that corn is a problematic animal feed to begin with. For example, almost all dried corn contains varying amount of a fungus that contains carcinogenic toxins, Aflatoxin and Fumonisin.
Sadly, HFCS is almost just as common in Canada as it is in the US. Coke in Canada, for example, is made from HFCS. The reason you may not have realized this by reading ingredients is that HFCS doesn't need to be labeled as such in Canada! Up here, we simple list it as "Glucose-Fructose" or "Glucose/Fructose". Good luck if you have a corn allergy...
Blackberry booting is 'instant'? Hardly. Waking from sleep is instant. Actually rebooting the damned thing? I've waited 4-7 minutes before on some devices. (Blackberry developer)
No it's not, at least not to the average Joe. Consumer DVD media and/or hardware does not support writing to a special portion of the DVD that's reserved for some portion of the CSS copy protection. I suppose in theory you could rip the image unencrypted to your hard drive, but I'm not really sure you could do anything with it after that.
This list of rights owners DOES NOT include all rights owners that report through the VeRO Program. These are the rights owners that have chosen to post About Me pages. Many other rights owners have chosen not to maintain an About Me page.
I love the can of cooking spray that I have that says that it's "fat free" when the nutritional information quite clearly shows that it's nearly 100% fat by weight.
I'm betting that the 1 year warranty at Best Buy means that you can return it to Best Buy for a year. As far as I know, most mainstream drive manufacturers offer at least 3 year warranties will all their drives. The drive you buy from Best Buy with 'only' a 1 year warranty on it actually still has a manufacturer's warranty on it, for 3 to 5 years. In order to make use of it, though, you'd need to swap the drive with the manufacturer itself.
This isn't all that big of a deal, considering that some version or another of Stuffit Expander has been included, standard, in every install of MacOS for at least the last 10 years.
There actually is a Standard SQL server-side, procedural language. It's called PSM (Persistant Stored Modules). It looks fairly similar to Oracle's PL/SQL, but seems to be more deliberately designed. It's an addendum to SQL-92 and standard in SLQ-3. Some information here. Unfortunately, the only database I've personally used that implements it is Frontbase. Frontbase is an interesting creature, since it offers no syntax or language manual itself. According to them, the appropriate manual is simply the "Guide to SQL Standard, 4th edition", available here, for example. They document a few differences between the standard and their database on their web site, and anything else that doesn't match is considered a bug. I find something very appealing about that design philosophy.
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By the way, very shortly, Adobe will be releasing a Flash tool that lets you turn a flash applet into an iPhone application.
The vender's (Apple's) compiler? You realize that you're talking about gcc, right?
As I see it, these are the advantages
I can think of absolutely no reason why developers writing new OSX software (OS backward compatibility aside) would not take advantage of this.
Wish I had mod points. I think this comment pretty much sums up what I think is the heart of this matter. Obviously nothing can ever be done that will make up for what was done to Alan Turing, since he is dead. While it might seem that the government could have done more than merely apologize, I think it would have been a hollow gesture, since Turing has already been profoundly honored over the years by countless individuals and organizations. I believe that the government did the one thing that ONLY the government could do in his instance: issue a formal apology for actions that were taken by the government. I only wish that Brown could have at least attempted to demonstrate some humility when he gave the statement. "I am pleased to have the chance"? Somehow I think he could have found a better way to phrase that.
Honestly, I don't think that calling a tooth an organ is very much of a stretch. Teeth have their own blood vessels and nerves, and consist of a large proportion of living tissue. This little blurb provides what I think is a convincing, if hardly exhaustive, argument that teeth are organs.
Rogers/Fido in Canada, surprisingly, will allow tethering.
Did you read the article? Did you look at what #1 was? I encourage you to look again.
The difference is that Java -will- close() the resource -if- the object does get finalized and GCed. At least for FileInputStreams and Sockets (I think).
There is no (non-deprecated) way of guaranteeing that a finalizer will ever actually be run, though. Generally speaking, finalizers should only be used as a backup 'safety-net' when an object holds resources that should be cleaned up. When it does, it should log a warning if it finds its resource not already cleaned up. Finalizers are not destructors, and woe be to any developer that uses them as such.
C# also has a 'with' keyword, in conjunction with, I believe, the ICloseable interface. I find it to be a handy piece of syntactic sugar and do wish that Java would offer it. Oh well.
Direction of travel is called Bearing. A plain GPS device can give you bearing, but not heading. Many handheld GPS devices include a solid-state magnetic compass, though.
It would mean no Windows. ARM is not an x86 architecture.
Actually, this is very common among bankers and accountants. I believe that most spreadsheets do this as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rounding#Round-to-even_method
It's not exactly 'random' but the system is designed to average out the errors.
HFSPlus (MacOS Extended) is only optionally journaled. The option just happens to be the default.
I disagree entirely. Just try playing Metroid Prime 3, for example. It's a first person shooter and has fantastic controls, particularly if you compare it the Gamecube Metroid games. As good as a mouse & keyboard? That -might- be arguable. But certainly in the same class.
Sorry, but you're absolutely wrong about the OSX kernel somehow being 'locked down'. Anybody can make kernel extensions for the OS and they do not require any sort of signing to install or use. The vast majority of the kernel is even open source.
On the other hand, I've tried MacDrive on XP to read my MacFS (HFS+) drives and ended up with a severely damaged filesystem when there was a power failure. So, well... I suppose your mileage my vary with any option...
How does corn used for animal feed NOT count as being part of the 'human food stream', except perhaps that which is fed to pets or worker animals? This means meat becomes more expensive as well, unless a less expensive animal feed can be found. I absolutely agree that corn is a problematic animal feed to begin with. For example, almost all dried corn contains varying amount of a fungus that contains carcinogenic toxins, Aflatoxin and Fumonisin.
Sadly, HFCS is almost just as common in Canada as it is in the US. Coke in Canada, for example, is made from HFCS. The reason you may not have realized this by reading ingredients is that HFCS doesn't need to be labeled as such in Canada! Up here, we simple list it as "Glucose-Fructose" or "Glucose/Fructose". Good luck if you have a corn allergy...
Blackberry booting is 'instant'? Hardly. Waking from sleep is instant. Actually rebooting the damned thing? I've waited 4-7 minutes before on some devices. (Blackberry developer)
No it's not, at least not to the average Joe. Consumer DVD media and/or hardware does not support writing to a special portion of the DVD that's reserved for some portion of the CSS copy protection. I suppose in theory you could rip the image unencrypted to your hard drive, but I'm not really sure you could do anything with it after that.
It was an old SNL skit.
I love the can of cooking spray that I have that says that it's "fat free" when the nutritional information quite clearly shows that it's nearly 100% fat by weight.
I'm betting that the 1 year warranty at Best Buy means that you can return it to Best Buy for a year. As far as I know, most mainstream drive manufacturers offer at least 3 year warranties will all their drives. The drive you buy from Best Buy with 'only' a 1 year warranty on it actually still has a manufacturer's warranty on it, for 3 to 5 years. In order to make use of it, though, you'd need to swap the drive with the manufacturer itself.
This isn't all that big of a deal, considering that some version or another of Stuffit Expander has been included, standard, in every install of MacOS for at least the last 10 years.
There actually is a Standard SQL server-side, procedural language. It's called PSM (Persistant Stored Modules). It looks fairly similar to Oracle's PL/SQL, but seems to be more deliberately designed. It's an addendum to SQL-92 and standard in SLQ-3. Some information here. Unfortunately, the only database I've personally used that implements it is Frontbase. Frontbase is an interesting creature, since it offers no syntax or language manual itself. According to them, the appropriate manual is simply the "Guide to SQL Standard, 4th edition", available here, for example. They document a few differences between the standard and their database on their web site, and anything else that doesn't match is considered a bug. I find something very appealing about that design philosophy.
Smell Trademark I remember reading about this a year or two ago.