One thing about Fink. It is very sensitive to changes in development tools. I upgraded Perl from 5.6 to 5.8 and have had no end of troubles ever since. I finally got Fink Commander working (after a few months) but last week I tried to run update-all and one package is screwed up because of confusion over Perl versions.
I halfway suspect that they are holding off on a lot of things until Panther is out, given how that will usher in a lot of changes/unifications with how general Unix stuff is installed. (I halfway wish they include xlc as an option as well -- it is for mathematical applications much faster)
Four wheel drive does do a lot for you. Don't assume that because many people don't know crap about their tool that the tool isn't useful. That's like saying that because a lot of newbies to computers leave their systems unsecured against worms that all computers are inherently unsafe.
The fact that many idiots don't learn the handling of their car shouldn't mean the car or other car drivers are reamed. In the same measure a lot of idiots have sports cars who have no idea how to drive them well. There are lots of dumbasses on bullet-bikes who are looking for an early grave. I could go on.
The one common fact about the world is that half of all people are of below average intelligence. Yet anyone who advocates a "lowest common denominator" to what people ought to be allowed to do is the greatest threat any society faces. (Not that you are doing that, but I've heard a lot of that kind of speech towards SUVs and pickups the past couple of years)
So a lot of idiots from the city buy vehicles that are more appropriate for rural regions. Probably they are buying them as a kind of transference for not having the time or energy to be able to do the fun things they want. But don't punish those who actually use SUVs and pickups just because of dumbasses from the city.
Frankly in the long run its cheaper and safer for EVERYONE to drive an economy car, and rent a larger vehicle when you NEED one.
Very few rental companies will allow you to take a rental car off paved roads. Which is the big use of an SUV or pickup. Likewise it is hard to go rent a truck when you wake up and there is a foot of snow on the ground and you need to be somewhere.
Perhaps your view holds in California, Florida or other places. But there are many places in the United States where the comments I'm hearing a pure stupidity.
Yeah people living in the densely populated east coast might not need an SUV. But that's a rather small portion of the US.
Someone ought to rate the parent up. I was about to say the same thing. The fact is that most SUV deaths don't occur in rollovers. People are hyping the rollover problems of SUVs because they don't like SUVs not because it is a big problem.
The real problem is akin to the problem of bike helmets. True story. When more people started wearing bike helmets injuries went up, not down. Why? Because they gave a false sense of invulnerability and safety. So people began driving more recklessly. It wasn't the bike helmets were inherently more dangerous. (Although recent studied have commented on neck twist injuries due to helmets) It was how people started driving their bikes.
Same with SUVs. The problem isn't the inherent safety of the SUV for those who drive halfway intelligently. It is the fact that people don't drive well. They think 4WD somehow makes them invulnerable in snow. Around here we have a lot of California students. First snow I like to sit at a particularly sharp turn and watch Californians in their SUVs go off the road because they are too dumb to drive slow on the icy snow.
The fact is that cars are a tool. They can be used well or poorly. I have a nice Pathfinder because I want to be able to drive to the places I enjoy hiking, biking and climbing. A lot of those you need 4WD to get to. I enjoy being able to go skiing and ice climbing without having to worry about the snow as much.
I complain about gas because I think a 20 cent increase in two weeks is freaking psycho. I'd probably complain the same if food or electricity went up that much. I can't afford two cars so my SUV is my primary vehicle. And while I want it for my weekend recreation I have to commute in it too. And that does add up.
Apple makes the best mice -- bar none -- save for one little problem. No damn second button or scroll wheel! I switched over to an Intellimouse Optical. Great mouse but the software only runs in user mode. (i.e. after you login) So the tracking at the login screen is way off.
Personally I think there were plenty of hints that Neo is himself a program (version 5) and that the machines are trying to learn to be human ala Dark City. The "excess" to humans (the residue) is what Neo has than the other machines didn't. But Neo is as much as machine as the Oracle is.
One should point out though that Longhorn will contain features that are not in 10.3. The much anticipated metadata savvy Finder and file system aren't part of Panther, for instance. (Despite expectations which only increased when the BeFS guy joined Apple)
OSX Hints has the following on how to install JBuilder.
BTW - where did you hear Borland dropped Mac support because of language adherence? I've never heard that. I heard more that people were simply picking Eclipse or Project Builder over JBuilder. I'm not sure why. What little I've played with it JBuilder seemed pretty nice, although my Java friends all seem to dislike its auto-code generation.
Admittedly Borland has been pushing their.NET plans a lot. I'm not sure if that will end up working for them though. As nice as their product is, it doesn't offer that much more compelling than Visual Studio other than their UML integration. (Which admittedly is pretty damn cool - but I wonder how many in practice use UML)
The big thing about the high capacity iPods is that people use them as external hard drives -- copying or backing up lots of files. Yeah few people need more than 15 GB for songs but many more could use a small portable hard drive.
As for what's next, I think many people would like to see a microphone on the iPod. I know several people who went with other solutions simply because of that lack. I personally hope they go back to the controller of the 2cd gen 10 GB iPod. I don't like the four buttons at the top. But that's me. I'd really like to see a true car stereo/iPod. But I doubt we will.
Re:Ian Fleming's Bond
on
Bay of Souls
·
· Score: 1
I've read the Ian Fleming books. They are not that well written. What is more interesting are discussions of the books. i.e. the latent homophobia since there is always some oversexed homosexual character. There is that strong mysoginist streak in Bond that makes you really wonder about the character. (Something that came through in the early Connery films) The whole "Illuminati" like secret conspiracy that is more dangerous than the Soviets. Very interesting. It's just the implementation that is lacking.
I always wished, after reading a few semiotic essays on Bond and his Foucalt's Pendulum, that Umberto Eco would write a book mimicking Bond. However given how poor his last two novels were, I'm not sure I'd want to now. (I couldn't even finish Baudolino)
The one benefit in Canada though is that the government is focused on getting broadband to small towns. It doesn't go all the way. For instance my cottage in Waterton is stuck with crappy dial up. (And they wish they could get 56K) However Cardston has pretty good broadband, all things considered.
Compare this to the US where if you live in a small town you are pretty screwed. Hell, even in a big town like I live in (Provo, UT) if it weren't for cable modems I'd be screwed. Lots of places have no other alternatives because they are in older parts of town and there is no incentive to put that last 3 miles of cable down. We tried various broadband wireless connections but they were highly unreliable.
A couple points both for the parent and a few comments to the parent.
Apple uses HyperTransport. It is in the custom chip they designed and IBM manufactures for them. It is only for the memory controller though. The FSB bus on the G5/970 is IBM's Elastic Bus. It is very similar to HyperTransport but not technically the same thing.
Cliff Bars are fantastic. They are mainly carbs though. And of course the ultimate carb bars are chocolat bars. I prefer the Hersey Crunch with Carmel myself.
For protein bars they are out there. I just bought a bunch that taste amazing. Your milage may vary. My wife doesn't think much of them.
Examples: global catastrophies of the Armageddon kind (be they population overload, total environmental disasters, plagues, asteroids, or nuclear wars); a secure and bug-free Windows; the end of Madonna's singing career (her 'acting' career was, I believe, still-born)
While there is something to be said for the above, one must also point out that some of those fears were justified.
While overpopulation of the world didn't happen, it didn't happen in part due to everyone controlling the number of children they had when they got rich. In places of poverty overpopulation was a reality. At it did have dire consequences. One might say that nature is compensating with various plagues (i.e. HIV) and starvation/war (i.e. Somalia/Ethiopia). But anyone with a portion of humanity would be horrified at that strong of a social Darwinist approach to human populations.
Nuclear war was a real threat and it really was a miracle it never happened -- although with terrorists and the nature of the technology of bio-weapons and nuclear weapons, it will remain a threat to humanity until we start having off-planet colonies.
A secure and bug free windows? Well there is OSX or Linux. They have Windows. (grin)
I think that global warming is still to be reckoned with. While I'm not convinced regarding the degree technology causes it the phenomena itself is real. Glaciers are rapidly melting and I think we're starting to see weather changes. If something happens with say the gulf current be prepared for major problems in the world.
Actually there was that trojan that was on some web pages. I seem to recall reading about that on the Battlefront over at ARS last week. Of course almost no one *got* it. I don't know if the vulnerability has been plugged by Apple or not. It was a problem in Safari 1.0. (And I don't believe there have been any updates to Safari outside of the Panther betas)
This doesn't quite sound right. While the Altivec unit is closer in nature to the old G4 rather than the G4e it also has the significant bandwidth benefits of the G5 that the G4s were massively limited by.
If you read Hannibal's appendium to his 970 articles he points out that the Altivec looks better than he initially thought. This isn't to say there isn't room for improvement. But to say that the G4 is the Altivec champ seems somewhat incorrect.
It is true that with G4 altivec code the G5 won't be as efficient as it could. Perhaps for some code the G4 might do better. But this is a simple matter to fix with a grep through your code. But initially altivec code won't show off the G5 until programmers do a simple recompile.
Unfortunately I only saw the Linux player there and source. I believe the OSX binary is still the July version. So there may be a delay before it is available.
The jobs get outsourced to Indian Consulants, but the end result in products or whatever is still sold here for the same amount,
I'm not sure the premise is right. Presumably the costs of upgrade features plus testing keeps going up. So yes the product presumably stays the same price. But the cost to keep that product up to date increases. So to cut costs on that you ship some jobs overseas. (I suspect that a lot of the design is still done here)
The assumption that software stays the same seems an odd one. Companies that don't upgrade their software quickly lose marketshare. That's why some companies try to deal with this by "bogus" upgrades. (i.e. minor upgrades but for the same price increase)
Still, look what happened to Quark Xpress or Framemaker. And that is in a rather conservative market. (i.e. doesn't like to change) Yes people still use those programs. But the marketshare is quite different. (Actually I've heard that Adobe is finally going to upgrade Framemaker - which is a good thing since it does a lot of things that other products don't.)
All the Indian programmers I've worked with have been excellent. As have the Russian ones and New Zealand ones. (Can't speak for other countries)
Adobe purchased a license to some of our code for Acrobat and we worked extensively with the development team in India. I was very impressed with them and their thoroughness. Indeed I'd have to say that compared with a lot of European and American programmers I've worked with the Indian company came up looking much better. Perhaps that just speaks to the quality of hiring Adobe did or perhaps the management of that particular group. But the generalizations I hear about Indian programmers doesn't seem that different from ripping on African-Americans in the sciences or computer industry. It is basically racism.
I'm sure there are poor quality Indian teams who do the least amount possible. I suspect they learned it from Americans. Heaven knows I've experienced that here! As to tech support - the quality of tech support has been going down hill for years. It isn't a problem of location. I suspect that it is due to cost cutting in terms of training, and then the complexity of machines increasing. (i.e. what is running on your machine that could be causing the problem)
The only place I'd agree with some comments is that I think anyone doing telephone support must be able to speak fairly accentless English well. But that applies just as much to American phone support as offshore phone support. I had an AT&T phone support woman who had a very thick southern inner city accent and I found it very difficult to understand. By the same token when I lived in the south for a few years my thick Nova Scotia accent (at the time) made it hard for them to understand.
Accent issues isn't racist. It is the skill needed for the job!
This is only bad if you simply want to be told what to do and want to remain the computer equivalent of a "manufacturing laborer."
If, instead, you see this as an opportunity to start your own company, become proactive, and actively be more creative, then this isn't a bad thing. It provides labor for small businesses that they could otherwise not afford. (We were able to hire excellent programmers for half the cost) Further, if you are an excellent programmer in a specialized field, then you aren't going to have much trouble anyway. People will seek you out. We do.
So contribute to Opensource software. Get your name out there.
But if you think that you can just "punch the card" then in my opinion you deserve what you get. And if you think you can stay in California, well, good luck unless you figure a way to build the better mousetrap that everyone wants.
And between the pain of emulating those in Linux, and the 1 game every year which gets ported to the Mac... well, you could say I'm a true fan of the Windows (and PS2 and Dreamcast and...) way of life.
I'll go out on a limb and guess that a lot more games came out for the Mac last month than came out for the Sega Dreamcast...
Someone mod the parent up. This is so true. There is no real public support for space. I personally think the trip to mars and the space station as proposed are dumb. But space is good. They just need to do some serious rethinking about how to do it.
At this point the X-Prize gives me more hope than NASA.
That is relative to the Absoft Fortran compiler. I've heard that the Absoft Fortran didn't produce that good of code. While that is relevant for the guys at NASA or other scientific programs, it isn't relevant to most programs. It's not as if Adobe is coding in Fortran...
The bigger question to me is how the C compiler compares to the Metrowerks C compiler. I think everyone knows that the gcc compiler sucks. Right now the MW compiler produces faster code for the G5 when compiled for the G4 that the current G5 optimized gcc. While Metrowerks has had their problems (and I'm not fond of their IDE) they have had pretty good compilers.
I'd like to see some common benchmarks compiled with all three compilers.
No, this is a valid concern. The Finder is the achilles heel of the Macintosh. I can only say that the Finder has been completely rewritten in Panther. Word on the street is that Panther may be out late in September or early in October. (Who knows if that is true. The word on the street for the past two months has been a new 15" Powerbook as well)
Anyways, back to your problem. If you copy with the shell or with any other file manager on the Mac it will be considerably faster.
As for Adobe Acrobat, I don't know what is wrong there. I installed it in just a few minutes without any problems.
However I must ask if you are for real. Sorry but just today have reports of dual G5's come out. That you "recently upgraded" sounds a bit doubtful. I don't know anyone with a dual G5. That you say your iPod stopped working and Safari isn't working during a copy makes me think either you have a flawed pre-release machine or are just blowing air. My apologies if you are legit. Just doesn't sound right.
In addition to the many other answers about why there is an xlc rather than an updated gcc, let me offer a few others. One is that xlc allows IBM to keep its technology internal. No viral open source license. Further even Apple's gcc isn't your mother's gcc. They have their own fork because some of their changes weren't accepted.
One must also point out the obvious that simply adding to someone else's code isn't always possible. You can't always just pick and choose like that. If you've never had to "fix" someone else's code you may not realize this. There are all sorts of different design decisions. That xlc basically is command line compatible with gcc is all I need.
Here's the real question. Will Apple move Project Builder away from gcc to xlc. I just downloaded it and haven't tried it, but I wonder if one could alias gcc to xlc.
BTW - to someone who knows. Is xlc compatible with gdb? I'd assume so, but wonder if anyone there knows for sure.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing about Fink. It is very sensitive to changes in development tools. I upgraded Perl from 5.6 to 5.8 and have had no end of troubles ever since. I finally got Fink Commander working (after a few months) but last week I tried to run update-all and one package is screwed up because of confusion over Perl versions. I halfway suspect that they are holding off on a lot of things until Panther is out, given how that will usher in a lot of changes/unifications with how general Unix stuff is installed. (I halfway wish they include xlc as an option as well -- it is for mathematical applications much faster)
The fact that many idiots don't learn the handling of their car shouldn't mean the car or other car drivers are reamed. In the same measure a lot of idiots have sports cars who have no idea how to drive them well. There are lots of dumbasses on bullet-bikes who are looking for an early grave. I could go on.
The one common fact about the world is that half of all people are of below average intelligence. Yet anyone who advocates a "lowest common denominator" to what people ought to be allowed to do is the greatest threat any society faces. (Not that you are doing that, but I've heard a lot of that kind of speech towards SUVs and pickups the past couple of years)
So a lot of idiots from the city buy vehicles that are more appropriate for rural regions. Probably they are buying them as a kind of transference for not having the time or energy to be able to do the fun things they want. But don't punish those who actually use SUVs and pickups just because of dumbasses from the city.
Very few rental companies will allow you to take a rental car off paved roads. Which is the big use of an SUV or pickup. Likewise it is hard to go rent a truck when you wake up and there is a foot of snow on the ground and you need to be somewhere.
Perhaps your view holds in California, Florida or other places. But there are many places in the United States where the comments I'm hearing a pure stupidity.
Yeah people living in the densely populated east coast might not need an SUV. But that's a rather small portion of the US.
The real problem is akin to the problem of bike helmets. True story. When more people started wearing bike helmets injuries went up, not down. Why? Because they gave a false sense of invulnerability and safety. So people began driving more recklessly. It wasn't the bike helmets were inherently more dangerous. (Although recent studied have commented on neck twist injuries due to helmets) It was how people started driving their bikes.
Same with SUVs. The problem isn't the inherent safety of the SUV for those who drive halfway intelligently. It is the fact that people don't drive well. They think 4WD somehow makes them invulnerable in snow. Around here we have a lot of California students. First snow I like to sit at a particularly sharp turn and watch Californians in their SUVs go off the road because they are too dumb to drive slow on the icy snow.
The fact is that cars are a tool. They can be used well or poorly. I have a nice Pathfinder because I want to be able to drive to the places I enjoy hiking, biking and climbing. A lot of those you need 4WD to get to. I enjoy being able to go skiing and ice climbing without having to worry about the snow as much.
I complain about gas because I think a 20 cent increase in two weeks is freaking psycho. I'd probably complain the same if food or electricity went up that much. I can't afford two cars so my SUV is my primary vehicle. And while I want it for my weekend recreation I have to commute in it too. And that does add up.
Apple makes the best mice -- bar none -- save for one little problem. No damn second button or scroll wheel! I switched over to an Intellimouse Optical. Great mouse but the software only runs in user mode. (i.e. after you login) So the tracking at the login screen is way off.
Personally I think there were plenty of hints that Neo is himself a program (version 5) and that the machines are trying to learn to be human ala Dark City. The "excess" to humans (the residue) is what Neo has than the other machines didn't. But Neo is as much as machine as the Oracle is.
One should point out though that Longhorn will contain features that are not in 10.3. The much anticipated metadata savvy Finder and file system aren't part of Panther, for instance. (Despite expectations which only increased when the BeFS guy joined Apple)
BTW - where did you hear Borland dropped Mac support because of language adherence? I've never heard that. I heard more that people were simply picking Eclipse or Project Builder over JBuilder. I'm not sure why. What little I've played with it JBuilder seemed pretty nice, although my Java friends all seem to dislike its auto-code generation.
Admittedly Borland has been pushing their .NET plans a lot. I'm not sure if that will end up working for them though. As nice as their product is, it doesn't offer that much more compelling than Visual Studio other than their UML integration. (Which admittedly is pretty damn cool - but I wonder how many in practice use UML)
As for what's next, I think many people would like to see a microphone on the iPod. I know several people who went with other solutions simply because of that lack. I personally hope they go back to the controller of the 2cd gen 10 GB iPod. I don't like the four buttons at the top. But that's me. I'd really like to see a true car stereo/iPod. But I doubt we will.
I always wished, after reading a few semiotic essays on Bond and his Foucalt's Pendulum, that Umberto Eco would write a book mimicking Bond. However given how poor his last two novels were, I'm not sure I'd want to now. (I couldn't even finish Baudolino)
Compare this to the US where if you live in a small town you are pretty screwed. Hell, even in a big town like I live in (Provo, UT) if it weren't for cable modems I'd be screwed. Lots of places have no other alternatives because they are in older parts of town and there is no incentive to put that last 3 miles of cable down. We tried various broadband wireless connections but they were highly unreliable.
Apple uses HyperTransport. It is in the custom chip they designed and IBM manufactures for them. It is only for the memory controller though. The FSB bus on the G5/970 is IBM's Elastic Bus. It is very similar to HyperTransport but not technically the same thing.
There's an excellent discussion at Ars on this.
For protein bars they are out there. I just bought a bunch that taste amazing. Your milage may vary. My wife doesn't think much of them.
While there is something to be said for the above, one must also point out that some of those fears were justified.
While overpopulation of the world didn't happen, it didn't happen in part due to everyone controlling the number of children they had when they got rich. In places of poverty overpopulation was a reality. At it did have dire consequences. One might say that nature is compensating with various plagues (i.e. HIV) and starvation/war (i.e. Somalia/Ethiopia). But anyone with a portion of humanity would be horrified at that strong of a social Darwinist approach to human populations.
Nuclear war was a real threat and it really was a miracle it never happened -- although with terrorists and the nature of the technology of bio-weapons and nuclear weapons, it will remain a threat to humanity until we start having off-planet colonies.
A secure and bug free windows? Well there is OSX or Linux. They have Windows. (grin)
I think that global warming is still to be reckoned with. While I'm not convinced regarding the degree technology causes it the phenomena itself is real. Glaciers are rapidly melting and I think we're starting to see weather changes. If something happens with say the gulf current be prepared for major problems in the world.
Actually there was that trojan that was on some web pages. I seem to recall reading about that on the Battlefront over at ARS last week. Of course almost no one *got* it. I don't know if the vulnerability has been plugged by Apple or not. It was a problem in Safari 1.0. (And I don't believe there have been any updates to Safari outside of the Panther betas)
If you read Hannibal's appendium to his 970 articles he points out that the Altivec looks better than he initially thought. This isn't to say there isn't room for improvement. But to say that the G4 is the Altivec champ seems somewhat incorrect.
Hannibal's Followup
It is true that with G4 altivec code the G5 won't be as efficient as it could. Perhaps for some code the G4 might do better. But this is a simple matter to fix with a grep through your code. But initially altivec code won't show off the G5 until programmers do a simple recompile.
Download MPlayer
Unfortunately I only saw the Linux player there and source. I believe the OSX binary is still the July version. So there may be a delay before it is available.
OSX MPlayer
I'm not sure the premise is right. Presumably the costs of upgrade features plus testing keeps going up. So yes the product presumably stays the same price. But the cost to keep that product up to date increases. So to cut costs on that you ship some jobs overseas. (I suspect that a lot of the design is still done here)
The assumption that software stays the same seems an odd one. Companies that don't upgrade their software quickly lose marketshare. That's why some companies try to deal with this by "bogus" upgrades. (i.e. minor upgrades but for the same price increase)
Still, look what happened to Quark Xpress or Framemaker. And that is in a rather conservative market. (i.e. doesn't like to change) Yes people still use those programs. But the marketshare is quite different. (Actually I've heard that Adobe is finally going to upgrade Framemaker - which is a good thing since it does a lot of things that other products don't.)
Adobe purchased a license to some of our code for Acrobat and we worked extensively with the development team in India. I was very impressed with them and their thoroughness. Indeed I'd have to say that compared with a lot of European and American programmers I've worked with the Indian company came up looking much better. Perhaps that just speaks to the quality of hiring Adobe did or perhaps the management of that particular group. But the generalizations I hear about Indian programmers doesn't seem that different from ripping on African-Americans in the sciences or computer industry. It is basically racism.
I'm sure there are poor quality Indian teams who do the least amount possible. I suspect they learned it from Americans. Heaven knows I've experienced that here! As to tech support - the quality of tech support has been going down hill for years. It isn't a problem of location. I suspect that it is due to cost cutting in terms of training, and then the complexity of machines increasing. (i.e. what is running on your machine that could be causing the problem)
The only place I'd agree with some comments is that I think anyone doing telephone support must be able to speak fairly accentless English well. But that applies just as much to American phone support as offshore phone support. I had an AT&T phone support woman who had a very thick southern inner city accent and I found it very difficult to understand. By the same token when I lived in the south for a few years my thick Nova Scotia accent (at the time) made it hard for them to understand.
Accent issues isn't racist. It is the skill needed for the job!
If, instead, you see this as an opportunity to start your own company, become proactive, and actively be more creative, then this isn't a bad thing. It provides labor for small businesses that they could otherwise not afford. (We were able to hire excellent programmers for half the cost) Further, if you are an excellent programmer in a specialized field, then you aren't going to have much trouble anyway. People will seek you out. We do.
So contribute to Opensource software. Get your name out there.
But if you think that you can just "punch the card" then in my opinion you deserve what you get. And if you think you can stay in California, well, good luck unless you figure a way to build the better mousetrap that everyone wants.
I'll go out on a limb and guess that a lot more games came out for the Mac last month than came out for the Sega Dreamcast...
At this point the X-Prize gives me more hope than NASA.
The bigger question to me is how the C compiler compares to the Metrowerks C compiler. I think everyone knows that the gcc compiler sucks. Right now the MW compiler produces faster code for the G5 when compiled for the G4 that the current G5 optimized gcc. While Metrowerks has had their problems (and I'm not fond of their IDE) they have had pretty good compilers.
I'd like to see some common benchmarks compiled with all three compilers.
Anyways, back to your problem. If you copy with the shell or with any other file manager on the Mac it will be considerably faster.
As for Adobe Acrobat, I don't know what is wrong there. I installed it in just a few minutes without any problems.
However I must ask if you are for real. Sorry but just today have reports of dual G5's come out. That you "recently upgraded" sounds a bit doubtful. I don't know anyone with a dual G5. That you say your iPod stopped working and Safari isn't working during a copy makes me think either you have a flawed pre-release machine or are just blowing air. My apologies if you are legit. Just doesn't sound right.
One must also point out the obvious that simply adding to someone else's code isn't always possible. You can't always just pick and choose like that. If you've never had to "fix" someone else's code you may not realize this. There are all sorts of different design decisions. That xlc basically is command line compatible with gcc is all I need.
Here's the real question. Will Apple move Project Builder away from gcc to xlc. I just downloaded it and haven't tried it, but I wonder if one could alias gcc to xlc.
BTW - to someone who knows. Is xlc compatible with gdb? I'd assume so, but wonder if anyone there knows for sure.