Taking advatange of Cocoa makes your code non-portable.
Wrong. Objective C is supported anywhere gcc runs, and there are multiple free implementations of Foundation (the non-GUI portion of Cocoa). The UI portion of Cocoa is not portable (although GNUstep is getting closer), but then neither is Carbon.
When Alias|wavefront ported Maya to Mac OS X, they had no need for a 9 version, they had no existing Mac code base to salvage, they were starting from scratch. Yet they ended up using Carbon
Possibly because when they began their port, Cocoa projects couldn't have ObjC and C++ source code in the same file. They can now, so there's no reason you can't have a Cocoa front end to your C++ back end (see Chimera for an example).
It's great for little one-shot tools and utilities, but the big boys use Carbon.
Most of the big boys may use Carbon currently, but Cocoa lets the little guys create apps that rival them. See OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, TIFFany, Stone Design, ViaVoice, and many others. Perhaps what you're seeing is that companies writing Carbon apps need many more developers than those writing Cocoa apps.
Primarily, a dynamic runtime. Want to know if an object implements a method? Ask it with -respondsToSelector:. Want to get a class object given its name? NSClassFromString(). Want to set a property of an object, when both the property name and value are determined at runtime? Use -takeValue:forKey:. C++ has none of these capabilities (at least last time I checked), and they are very useful in a variety of areas.
Almost all Software Engineers agree that most of the software development process can/should be automated.
Which is another argument for Objective-C, since programs using it tend to be much shorter than C++ programs. The line you don't have to write doesn't have a bug.
C++ is going to allow engineers to develop software that doesn't depend on run time conditions, but more on compile time conditions.
And you can write static code in ObjC if you want to. But in C++ as soon as you want dynamic behavior, you end up writing tons of code (and therefore bugs) to reproduce the features that more dynamic languages give you for free.
why isn;t there a 3rd slayer now?, buffy did die last season, right?
The death-trigger only works once. Buffy has already died at the end of the 1st season (thereby summoning Kendra), so nothing happened when she died again.
It's like how a Java object gets garbage collected; you can resurrect it in its finalize() method, but when it's garbage collected again later finalize() won't be called a second time.
QuickTime on Windows is basically very much the same as Carbon. Porting the old ToolBox (Classic part of OS X) to x86 would be fruitless and probably impossible. Porting Carbon to x86 has largely been done in QuickTime as it is. Carbon is just an API - one greatly cleaned up.
Moderate this up, it's exactly correct. The eWeek article is likely wrong on this point; there's no reason why Carbon couldn't be fully ported to other platforms, and I expect it has been.
The only thing that's gutting the economy is the Bush administration's tax cuts for the wealthy.
Good lord, can you type this with a straight face? Aside from the ludicrous implication that tax cuts hurt the economy, there are just a few other factors that might possibly have something to do with it. First, we had some jackasses kill a few thousand people, scare the crap out of everyone, and inflict huge damage to the airline industry. There's also the dot-com crash as people realized that it's nice for companies to have actual income. Then there's the scumbags who looted large corporations thereby screwing the employees and shareholders out of billions. You'll note that the last two occurred before the Prince of Darkness took office, although I have no doubt you have a bit of tortured illogic to blame them on him as well.
Global warming is accepted by the majority of mainstream scientists as being scientific fact.
Pretending this is true for a moment, that still doesn't mean that Kyoto is a good idea. To do that you need to show that the benefits outweigh the costs. Environmentalists have not done this; instead they've resorted to the "we're all gonna die!" fear-mongering that they've been using for decades.
Would you rather reduce pollution and learn that it was unnecessary or keep polluting and then realize that global warming has spiralled out of control and will devastate the planet in the coming decades?
Yes, thanks for the example. This is just the environmentalist version of Pascal's Wager, and it's equally fallacious.
A survey asking people if they would hypothetically buy an electric car is worthless. Giving the politically correct answer to a survey question is a far cry from actually doing something. It's exactly what happens with sex and violence in movies and TV; every poll says people think there's too much of it, but the ratings say otherwise.
No, all PowerPCs that have shipped in Macs have 32 bit integer registers. They have wider floating point and (sometimes) vector registers, but so do x86 processors.
It is true that PowerPCs are faster per-cycle than x86 chips, partially due to having *more* registers.
Precisely. Microsoft has the threat of terminating Mac Office; this is Apple's counterthreat. Things will get very interesting if either of them pulls the trigger.
this is just saying that you can't alter a movie without someone's permission.
Except that's not true. Copyright is the exclusive right to copy and redistribute a work, it was not intended to grant absolute control over how it it is used by customers. It is perfectly legal for me to alter a videotape I bought by splicing out portions I don't want to see. Why should it be illegal to pay a third party to do this for me?
Re:Americans throw away freedom for capitalism
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 2
You are confusing capitalism with corporate welfare. The US is increasingly moving away from the former and toward the latter; overbroad intellectual property laws which are used not to prevent piracy but to stifle competition and remove users' rights are just one example of this.
I was going to post something similar, but you said it better. I would only add that applets were DOA on the web because Sun insisted that each browser have its own VM rather than shipping their own standard plugin, thereby guaranteeing a horde of incompatibilities between different browsers and platforms. (Yes, they finally released a Java browser plugin, years too late).
When you break anything in the EULA you cease to have a licensed copy of the software and have, therefore, a pirate copy (if you keep using it).
Which would be relevant if you needed a license to run a piece of software that you acquired legally, but you don't.
I generally support Apple, but I'm very disappointed in their actions here. In the past they've been very good about supporting the rights of users, and I hope they realize that invoking the DMCA for their own purposes plays right into the hands of the **AAs who would love to shut down their entire digital hub strategy (or render it unusable by inserting DRM everywhere).
Patch the code that reads the key off the CD to instead return a known valid key. As long as the user controls what software runs on his computer, any scheme like this is doomed. This control is of course what Palladium and the CBDTPA seek to eliminate.
have a look at my MacOSXQuestions [markcrocker.com] page and tell me that I'm all wrong and that there are simple solutions to my Mac OS X problems... please.
What the heck, I'm waiting on a big compile.
start up a second copy of an already running application, but as root?
sudo/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit . The key is to directly launch the executable rather than using open.
add to the effective host table?
man niload
# set the monitor power/sleep button to put just the display to sleep and not my machine?
I'm pretty sure my G4 at home has an option for that in the Displays preferences pane. It has an Apple 15" LCD, maybe it only shows up for certain monitors.
add root to the login window?
You mean as a choice from the list of users? Showing that list is horrible from a security perspective, just have it display username and password fields.
set an image's icon to a thumbnail of the image?
Open image, copy contents, bring up "Get Info" window in the Finder, select icon, paste. Just did this in Jaguar, it may not work in 10.1.
CON: casual viewing becomes much more hastle, you may miss stuff you didn't know you would like.
To solve this, TV producers just need to learn from drug dealers and make the first hit free.
I'd rather see Buffy slamming back a Coke (tm) for a few seconds as opposed to a 30 second spot for Coke. I realize that in real like people use brand-name products.
Good example, Apple uses product placements in Buffy and it is unobtrusive. It fits in very well too; of course Willow's going to use an iBook instead of some boring Wintel machine. This also has the advantage that even if the shows get pirated, the advertising remains.
Personally, I would like to see 2 and 4 in combination.
Also, the dock is a blatant replacement for the Taskbar.
Actually, it's a blatant replacement for the dock from NeXT. I wish they had taken more from NeXT than they did. For example, scrollbars should be on the left side, and the Finder needs a shelf (which allows moving files around far more elegantly than the copy-paste kludge, which they *did* take from Windows).
In short, reinventing the wheel each time is pointless.
And I'm not suggesting that you should. Go ahead and use your reusable frameworks, and copy them into the application wrapper for distribution.
Don't start saying things like "hard disk space is cheap", because I have a lot of things to spend my money on and not much money to spend, so forking over because programmers were lazy pisses me off.
Sorry, but $1/gig is cheap, and TANSTAAFL. If a programmer has to spend time reducing the size of an application by a couple of megs, who's going to pay for the cost of that extra development? Personally, I'd rather have the programmer fixing bugs or improving performance rather than saving every possible byte of drive space.
Ever used apt-get?
Yes, it's very nice. Would you recommend your mother use it?
Look at Windows, often Office/Internet Explorer upgrade the OS as well.
Those are still MS upgrades, and Office and IE are practically part of the OS anyway. Likewise, Apple has released updates for things like iTunes that update system frameworks as well.
Not everyone wants to have a huge disk they don't really need, because their apps all install a truckload of stuff they'll never use.
I would be quite surprised if the increased size required by app wrappers on a typical system were more than a few hundred megs. You're getting bent out of shape over an effective cost of less than a dollar.
if you don't like restrictive contracts, why are you using a Mac?
I don't recall signing any contract when I bought my Macs. Regardless, your statements about being unable to present EULAs or validate serial numbers using app wrappers are entirely incorrect.
With appfolders you throw away virtually ALL flexibility for a slight increase in usability.
I consider it both flexibile and usable when I can copy nearly any app from one Mac to another by dragging a single file, and have it just work on the destination system without having to worry about dependencies.
And here's an experiment I just tried. I have OmniWeb installed on my system. If I look inside the OmniWeb.app wrapper in Contents/Frameworks I see reusable frameworks such as OmniFoundation, OmniHTML, etc. If I move OmniFoundation.framework to/tmp, obviously OmniWeb fails to launch. But if I then move OmniFoundation.framework to/Library/Frameworks, OmniWeb launches and runs just fine. Conclusion: you sacrifice nothing with app wrappers. If you are so upset by the duplication of frameworks, you could move the common frameworks to a system-wide frameworks directory and delete them from the individual apps. Flexibility again.
Appfolders don't meet many developers requirements.
This is simply not true. The large majority of applications I've installed on Mac OS X use single application files. Of the ones that use installers, most don't need to.
Contrary to seemingly popular opinion, sharing code is a good thing, and should be encouraged.
In theory you're right, in practice you're wrong. Application bundles completely eliminate DLL hell, which is well worth the small price of possibly using a few more megs of your 40 gig drive.
It also means that only Apple can really ship updates to the OS
I don't understand what you mean here. Who other than Apple should be shipping updates to Apple's OS?
No install time customisation.
See above, hard drive space is incredibly cheap. The main reason I'd do a selective install is to avoid unnecessary crap strewn about my hard drive, which never occurs with app wrappers.
How do you present EULAs?
Aside from the utter stupidity of the concept of EULAs, you can create disk images that display dialogs before they are mounted. Or you can have the app present a dialog when it is run for the first time.
How do you check serial codes?
As above, do the check the first time you launch the program.
In short, appfolders seem like a good idea, but actually aren't.
because until Jaguar's astounding requirement (which probably has something to do with the astronomical VRAM needs of Jaguar -- what other window manager needs 32 megs of VRAM)
That is a gross misrepresentation. Jaguar does not need 32 megs of VRAM and an AGP 2x card. If you have such a card, Quartz Extreme will take advantage of it, but it is by no means a requirement. *Every* Mac running OS X will see UI performance improvements under Jaguar, Macs which can use Quartz Extreme will see larger improvements.
Complaining about this is as silly as being upset when software is optimized for the G4 or P4, even though it continues to run just as well on older hardware.
Typical of the Mac community. Suggestions for improvements are received with hostility.
And your attitude couldn't possibly have anything to do with it. Hint: saying "it would be nice if I could turn some of the Aqua effects off to reduce CPU usage" makes you appear reasonable. Proclaiming that Aqua is useless and calling people who disagree with you idiots makes you appear to be a jerk.
Why is O'reilly doing this? Has Billy Deep-Pockets gotten to him? Or is he worried that laws like this will make it difficult for him to make a profit int he future?
Or could it possibly be that he has an honest viewpoint that happens to be different from yours? I agree with him, and I certainly haven't received any payoffs from Bill.
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Wrong. Objective C is supported anywhere gcc runs, and there are multiple free implementations of Foundation (the non-GUI portion of Cocoa). The UI portion of Cocoa is not portable (although GNUstep is getting closer), but then neither is Carbon.
When Alias|wavefront ported Maya to Mac OS X, they had no need for a 9 version, they had no existing Mac code base to salvage, they were starting from scratch. Yet they ended up using Carbon
Possibly because when they began their port, Cocoa projects couldn't have ObjC and C++ source code in the same file. They can now, so there's no reason you can't have a Cocoa front end to your C++ back end (see Chimera for an example).
It's great for little one-shot tools and utilities, but the big boys use Carbon.
Most of the big boys may use Carbon currently, but Cocoa lets the little guys create apps that rival them. See OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, TIFFany, Stone Design, ViaVoice, and many others. Perhaps what you're seeing is that companies writing Carbon apps need many more developers than those writing Cocoa apps.
Primarily, a dynamic runtime. Want to know if an object implements a method? Ask it with -respondsToSelector:. Want to get a class object given its name? NSClassFromString(). Want to set a property of an object, when both the property name and value are determined at runtime? Use -takeValue:forKey:. C++ has none of these capabilities (at least last time I checked), and they are very useful in a variety of areas.
Almost all Software Engineers agree that most of the software development process can/should be automated.
Which is another argument for Objective-C, since programs using it tend to be much shorter than C++ programs. The line you don't have to write doesn't have a bug.
C++ is going to allow engineers to develop software that doesn't depend on run time conditions, but more on compile time conditions.
And you can write static code in ObjC if you want to. But in C++ as soon as you want dynamic behavior, you end up writing tons of code (and therefore bugs) to reproduce the features that more dynamic languages give you for free.
The death-trigger only works once. Buffy has already died at the end of the 1st season (thereby summoning Kendra), so nothing happened when she died again.
It's like how a Java object gets garbage collected; you can resurrect it in its finalize() method, but when it's garbage collected again later finalize() won't be called a second time.
Moderate this up, it's exactly correct. The eWeek article is likely wrong on this point; there's no reason why Carbon couldn't be fully ported to other platforms, and I expect it has been.
Good lord, can you type this with a straight face? Aside from the ludicrous implication that tax cuts hurt the economy, there are just a few other factors that might possibly have something to do with it. First, we had some jackasses kill a few thousand people, scare the crap out of everyone, and inflict huge damage to the airline industry. There's also the dot-com crash as people realized that it's nice for companies to have actual income. Then there's the scumbags who looted large corporations thereby screwing the employees and shareholders out of billions. You'll note that the last two occurred before the Prince of Darkness took office, although I have no doubt you have a bit of tortured illogic to blame them on him as well.
Global warming is accepted by the majority of mainstream scientists as being scientific fact.
Pretending this is true for a moment, that still doesn't mean that Kyoto is a good idea. To do that you need to show that the benefits outweigh the costs. Environmentalists have not done this; instead they've resorted to the "we're all gonna die!" fear-mongering that they've been using for decades.
Would you rather reduce pollution and learn that it was unnecessary or keep polluting and then realize that global warming has spiralled out of control and will devastate the planet in the coming decades?
Yes, thanks for the example. This is just the environmentalist version of Pascal's Wager, and it's equally fallacious.
A survey asking people if they would hypothetically buy an electric car is worthless. Giving the politically correct answer to a survey question is a far cry from actually doing something. It's exactly what happens with sex and violence in movies and TV; every poll says people think there's too much of it, but the ratings say otherwise.
It is true that PowerPCs are faster per-cycle than x86 chips, partially due to having *more* registers.
Precisely. Microsoft has the threat of terminating Mac Office; this is Apple's counterthreat. Things will get very interesting if either of them pulls the trigger.
Macs boot via Open Firmware, which is neither evil nor proprietary.
Except that's not true. Copyright is the exclusive right to copy and redistribute a work, it was not intended to grant absolute control over how it it is used by customers. It is perfectly legal for me to alter a videotape I bought by splicing out portions I don't want to see. Why should it be illegal to pay a third party to do this for me?
You are confusing capitalism with corporate welfare. The US is increasingly moving away from the former and toward the latter; overbroad intellectual property laws which are used not to prevent piracy but to stifle competition and remove users' rights are just one example of this.
I was going to post something similar, but you said it better. I would only add that applets were DOA on the web because Sun insisted that each browser have its own VM rather than shipping their own standard plugin, thereby guaranteeing a horde of incompatibilities between different browsers and platforms. (Yes, they finally released a Java browser plugin, years too late).
Which would be relevant if you needed a license to run a piece of software that you acquired legally, but you don't.
I generally support Apple, but I'm very disappointed in their actions here. In the past they've been very good about supporting the rights of users, and I hope they realize that invoking the DMCA for their own purposes plays right into the hands of the **AAs who would love to shut down their entire digital hub strategy (or render it unusable by inserting DRM everywhere).
Patch the code that reads the key off the CD to instead return a known valid key. As long as the user controls what software runs on his computer, any scheme like this is doomed. This control is of course what Palladium and the CBDTPA seek to eliminate.
If you want a nice UI to control this, grab Fackbore Effects, which also lets you run multiple screen savers simultaneously.
Libertarians often agree with the ACLU. Even the NRA often does; for example all three groups oppose campaign finance "reform" on free speech grounds.
What the heck, I'm waiting on a big compile.
start up a second copy of an already running application, but as root?
sudo
add to the effective host table?
man niload
# set the monitor power/sleep button to put just the display to sleep and not my machine?
I'm pretty sure my G4 at home has an option for that in the Displays preferences pane. It has an Apple 15" LCD, maybe it only shows up for certain monitors.
add root to the login window?
You mean as a choice from the list of users? Showing that list is horrible from a security perspective, just have it display username and password fields.
set an image's icon to a thumbnail of the image?
Open image, copy contents, bring up "Get Info" window in the Finder, select icon, paste. Just did this in Jaguar, it may not work in 10.1.
Hope this helps...
The new version of NeXTStep seems to be doing pretty well...
To solve this, TV producers just need to learn from drug dealers and make the first hit free.
I'd rather see Buffy slamming back a Coke (tm) for a few seconds as opposed to a 30 second spot for Coke. I realize that in real like people use brand-name products.
Good example, Apple uses product placements in Buffy and it is unobtrusive. It fits in very well too; of course Willow's going to use an iBook instead of some boring Wintel machine. This also has the advantage that even if the shows get pirated, the advertising remains.
Personally, I would like to see 2 and 4 in combination.
I agree completely.
Actually, it's a blatant replacement for the dock from NeXT. I wish they had taken more from NeXT than they did. For example, scrollbars should be on the left side, and the Finder needs a shelf (which allows moving files around far more elegantly than the copy-paste kludge, which they *did* take from Windows).
And I'm not suggesting that you should. Go ahead and use your reusable frameworks, and copy them into the application wrapper for distribution.
Don't start saying things like "hard disk space is cheap", because I have a lot of things to spend my money on and not much money to spend, so forking over because programmers were lazy pisses me off.
Sorry, but $1/gig is cheap, and TANSTAAFL. If a programmer has to spend time reducing the size of an application by a couple of megs, who's going to pay for the cost of that extra development? Personally, I'd rather have the programmer fixing bugs or improving performance rather than saving every possible byte of drive space.
Ever used apt-get?
Yes, it's very nice. Would you recommend your mother use it?
Look at Windows, often Office/Internet Explorer upgrade the OS as well.
Those are still MS upgrades, and Office and IE are practically part of the OS anyway. Likewise, Apple has released updates for things like iTunes that update system frameworks as well.
Not everyone wants to have a huge disk they don't really need, because their apps all install a truckload of stuff they'll never use.
I would be quite surprised if the increased size required by app wrappers on a typical system were more than a few hundred megs. You're getting bent out of shape over an effective cost of less than a dollar.
if you don't like restrictive contracts, why are you using a Mac?
I don't recall signing any contract when I bought my Macs. Regardless, your statements about being unable to present EULAs or validate serial numbers using app wrappers are entirely incorrect.
With appfolders you throw away virtually ALL flexibility for a slight increase in usability.
I consider it both flexibile and usable when I can copy nearly any app from one Mac to another by dragging a single file, and have it just work on the destination system without having to worry about dependencies.
And here's an experiment I just tried. I have OmniWeb installed on my system. If I look inside the OmniWeb.app wrapper in Contents/Frameworks I see reusable frameworks such as OmniFoundation, OmniHTML, etc. If I move OmniFoundation.framework to
This is simply not true. The large majority of applications I've installed on Mac OS X use single application files. Of the ones that use installers, most don't need to.
Contrary to seemingly popular opinion, sharing code is a good thing, and should be encouraged.
In theory you're right, in practice you're wrong. Application bundles completely eliminate DLL hell, which is well worth the small price of possibly using a few more megs of your 40 gig drive.
It also means that only Apple can really ship updates to the OS
I don't understand what you mean here. Who other than Apple should be shipping updates to Apple's OS?
No install time customisation.
See above, hard drive space is incredibly cheap. The main reason I'd do a selective install is to avoid unnecessary crap strewn about my hard drive, which never occurs with app wrappers.
How do you present EULAs?
Aside from the utter stupidity of the concept of EULAs, you can create disk images that display dialogs before they are mounted. Or you can have the app present a dialog when it is run for the first time.
How do you check serial codes?
As above, do the check the first time you launch the program.
In short, appfolders seem like a good idea, but actually aren't.
Yes, they are.
That is a gross misrepresentation. Jaguar does not need 32 megs of VRAM and an AGP 2x card. If you have such a card, Quartz Extreme will take advantage of it, but it is by no means a requirement. *Every* Mac running OS X will see UI performance improvements under Jaguar, Macs which can use Quartz Extreme will see larger improvements.
Complaining about this is as silly as being upset when software is optimized for the G4 or P4, even though it continues to run just as well on older hardware.
And your attitude couldn't possibly have anything to do with it. Hint: saying "it would be nice if I could turn some of the Aqua effects off to reduce CPU usage" makes you appear reasonable. Proclaiming that Aqua is useless and calling people who disagree with you idiots makes you appear to be a jerk.
Or could it possibly be that he has an honest viewpoint that happens to be different from yours? I agree with him, and I certainly haven't received any payoffs from Bill.