Yes Jeremy Hunt (the UK health secretary) seems to believe in homeopathy. It really shows the quality of your government when someone so unsuited to this job (or any position requiring the application of rational thought) is able to set health policy.
That just isn't true. I own a small share in a Cessna 152 (much like he plane in the story) and am currently building a two seat aerobatic kit plane. The Cessna share cost me ~$700 and I budget to fly it on average once every two weeks during the weekend. The total value of that little Cessna is about $20K and there are plenty around like it. I am nowhere near what you would classify as rich either.
More important than using your own code style is using the language code style if there is one. For example in C# you should code in the same style as the.NET, in Java like the Java SDK and in Objective-C (on OS X/iOS) like the Cocoa APIs. Don't invent your own style if there is already one existing.
C++ is an incredibly powerful language but ObjC is also extremely capable. Cocoa (Touch) is simply the most productive framework that I have ever used. Yes, it has a pretty steep learning curve but once you get used to the Cocoa way of doing things you can produce excellent and rich GUI applications in a fraction of the time it takes in many other development environments that I've used.
I work mostly in C# in my day job too...
I've been running the Snow Leopard GM for a week or so now and it is a very big improvement on 10.5 performance wise. Startup is faster; shutdown is faster; sleep and wake are faster; app launches are faster; menus popup faster; animations are smoother; Finder 10.6 is faster; Safari is much faster.
Basically Snow Leopard is a much faster more refined Leopard. Its well worth the upgrade just for the performance gains alone.
According to the BBC the UK price is amazingly £250 or about US$413. Which is a ripoff. At this price there is no way that I would consider buying one.
Except that it is OS X. It has the same kernel, frameworks, driver model, graphics subsystem and so on. The only thing really different is the UI layer because a desktop UI is highly unsuited for use on a mobile phone.
WinCE, on the other hand, shares little code in common with Windows XP/Vista/7 other than its APIs.
1) Requires iTunes.
True 2) Doesn't work with Linux.
Also true 3) Is laden with DRM.
Hardly laden with DRM. It plays MP3s, WAVs, AIFF and AAC all without requiring DRM. It just so happens that it ALSO plays DRMed AAC iTunes Store tracks. 4) Doesn't support popular codecs like OGG.
OGG is not a popular codec 5) ONLY supports iTunes Music Store and not other, cheaper services.
Rubbish! Amazon music store and anyone who supports MP3 works fine with it 6) Doesn't allow simple drag-and-drop access to copy music.
True, but then who actually cares? 7) Software is locked down on the device.
True for the moment. The SDK will be available this month. 8) Non-removable storage.
Yep also true but doesn't matter to most people. 9) Non-removable battery.
See my answer to 8 10) Costs $500, much more than cheaper, more open-devices do.
Actually the iPod touch starts at $300 which is $200 less than your fanatical comment
You can get a cheaper device that works just as well.
For example?
However, consider that the PE file format is also used by Microsoft's Common Language Runtime (CLR/.NET). Therefore, I think this is a preparatory move to start offering a native implementation of the.NET platform for OS X.
I was just about to post this myself... It makes a lot of sense for Apple to support.NET on Mac OS X. For a start C# is now the flagship language for Windows development and not supporting it may be the difference between getting hundreds of ported apps and not getting them at all. As a Mac user and.NET developer I think it would be a big mistake for Apple to ignore.NET.
I wonder if this is how the sandboxed iPhone SDK, which is to be available in February, will be implemented
Yes, if you have a laptop or PC with a proper keyboard in front of you, however SMS excels over e-mail at putting together and sending quickly small messages, which is what people want on their mobile phone. Email is simply too cumbersome for a phone and 99% of europeans realise this hence why they use SMS over e-mail.
Again: the iPhone does support SMS. I don't understand why you don't seem to believe this. I said that email was a better alternative to MMS, not SMS.
Just like just about every other mid to high range phone and every PDA that's been out in Europe for the last 5 years then? How innovative.
Specifically which phones and PDAs would these be? Also nobody is saying that having web access on a phone is innovative. Since you mention innovation, I suppose the approach to displaying and viewing the pages is fairly innovative though. Its certainly a big improvement on anything before it.
Just a shame there's no high quality camera to go with it, like say, the Nokia N95s with it's ability to film DVD quality video at 30fps. The iPhone's camera is equivalent to that of pre 2003 European mobile phone cameras.
The N95 most certainly cannot record DVD quality movies: it is limited to 640x480. It is obviously designed as a real camera replacement though which the iPhone clearly is not. The iPhone camera is admittedly nothing special, but there are far worse cameras sold in many current European phones.
Arguably not also, I suppose it comes down to whether you're a biased Apple fanboy or well, not.
I've yet to see a review claim that it doesn't have the best music player on a phone. However some people may prefer other players. It has nothing to do with being a fanboy or not. You didn't even give an example of what you think is better.
I'd rather be able to install applications without voiding my warranty thanks. Again, just like every mid to high range phone in Europe for the last 6 years has allowed.
I'm not sure that this does actually void the iPhone warranty.
Yes, because Nokia's UI's are so utterly hard to use, oh wait, no they're not. Seeing as just about everyone between the age of 4 and 90 in Europe/Asia owns a mobile phone and quite happily has done and has used it for the last 5 to 10 years the current UIs are clearly not that bad, nor a barrier to using the device. You're suggest a whole paradigm shift in mobile phone useage from the existing UI's is somehow going to not confuse people who are more than happy with their existing phone's UI? Fact is the iPhone's UI is gimmicky, it looks fancy and that's about it, when it comes to it's simply not anymore usable that much is certain.
Yes, Nokia UIs are truly awful! On my work Nokia phone I couldn't even figure out how to lock the keypad! I eventually had to google this and it turned out you have to press the stick down and press star. How is that obvious? I'd say it is the worst thought out device that I've ever used.
Interestingly many people in the higher age ranges do have trouble using things like text messaging. Most people with video phones do not even understand how to send a video message. So, yes, there is a serious problem with phone UIs today.
In what way is the iPhone UI gimmicky? It doesn't really look that fancy either. Its more functional like the old iPod interface. Also, every review that I've ever read says that the iPhone UI is a big improvement over what came before it.
As usual, Apple's products are 99% hype, 0.5% quality and 0.5% features.
Obviously you have a fair and balanced view! I don't think I've ever read a more biased post on this site, and this is slashdot!
hurray , i can now buy a phone that has less features (no SMS, no MMS, no video calls) than my old Nokia did in 2001
The iPhone does support SMS (and always has.) It also has real email (which is far more useful than MMS has ever been), a real web browser, a high-quality video player and arguably the best music player ever on a phone. It has also become very easy to install third party software on and has a rapidly growing community of developers. Someone has even managed to implement video chat!
The iPhone isn't about having a ton of features though. Its about having a phone with a UI that isn't really really shit and having the features that it does have work very well. These are the things that differentiates its from your Nokia.
Re:VB already gets the respect it deserves...
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
absolutely none. It's a horrible language
What is worse are the idiots who program in it. They will blindly defend it even though (in general) they have never used and have no knowledge of any other language.
I have met VB.NET developers who do not understand what an array is.
I have yet to meet a VB.NET developer who:
Understands what an interface is
Understands what a class method is
Understands inheritance
Really understands the difference between reference and value types
The problem with knowing a large number of programming languages is that the disadvantages of of each language become so much more clear. Recently, I was devising a class in C# and.NET 1.1 that would sort a large text file. My approach was standard enough; divide the file into chunks, sort each one in memory, and then progressively mergesort each file pair until only one output file remained. In C#, the class took well over 60 lines of code. In Haskell, it would have been barely over 6 (lazy evaluation is extremely useful for these sorts of problems).
The Haskell version may well be shorter but it generally takes a much longer time to write and then, when somebody comes along to maintain the code, it is very difficult to understand the deeply nested recursion. It probably also runs 50x slower! I actually did a fair amount of Haskell 98 programming a few years back and while functional languages are certainly interesting Haskell has very few real applications.
It sounds like you have had limited experience with various programming languages.
That may be true to some extent. Most of my expreience is in C like languages: C, Obj-C, Java, PHP and C#. Python I have tried but have never liked its syntax.
C# 2.0 is lightyears ahead of Java. But compared to other languages, Java shows signs of severe mental retardation, and C# 2.0 looks like a preschooler.
Unfortunately I have to develop software in the real world. This (for the most part anyway) completely rules out every language you suggested. It sounds like you lack experience programming in the real world.
Mac OS X and Windows Vista completely fail in this area, however. I cannot see the source code to the window systems of either, for instance. Nor can I inspect the kernel source code.
You are correct that you cannot view the OS X window system source but wrong about the kernel. The source to the Mac OS X kernel (XNU) is easily available from Apple. Apple also releases source to other major parts including things like launchd and bonjour as part of the Darwin core operating system.
In my opinion the only place where Windows is really far ahead of Mac OS X is.NET. Or more specifically: C# 2.0. C# is simply the nicest programming language and.NET the most consistent and easiest API that I've ever used. I went from a Java and Obj-C advocate to a C# maniac in about one month of using it. The biggest drawback with.NET is Visual BASIC which is horribly verbose and seems to attract idiot developers.
I think it would be great if Apple would adopt C# as the future of development on Mac OS X. I hate to say this but in comparison Objective-C 2.0 looks positively dated.
Other than.NET I think Mac OS X 10.4 and the up-comming 10.5 are still much better operating systems than Vista. Mac OS X is more consistent, nicer to use and is more stable than any version of Windows I've ever seen.
While not specifically for the uses stated in the article, we use MediaWiki for all our documentation nowadays. This has replaced the dreadful Lotus Notes as our documentation management system.
Actually Skype on the Mac is a Cocoa application. You can look inside the application package and view all the content.nib files very easily. I've yet to see a QT interface on the Mac looking native.
Maybe UMD would not have been such a massive failure if the movies were not so massively overpriced. There is no way people are going to pay more for a UMD movie than a DVD. The UMD version should be at most cost half the price of the DVD version.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes Jeremy Hunt (the UK health secretary) seems to believe in homeopathy. It really shows the quality of your government when someone so unsuited to this job (or any position requiring the application of rational thought) is able to set health policy.
That just isn't true. I own a small share in a Cessna 152 (much like he plane in the story) and am currently building a two seat aerobatic kit plane. The Cessna share cost me ~$700 and I budget to fly it on average once every two weeks during the weekend. The total value of that little Cessna is about $20K and there are plenty around like it. I am nowhere near what you would classify as rich either.
They will never block homeopathy due to our health secretary believing in homeopathy: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchiversscience/100179258/jeremy-hunt-health-secretary-thinks-homeopathy-works/. Yes the man put in charge of the National Health Service, once the greatest health care system in the world, believes in magical healing. Hunt isn't only a criminal (see his dealings with Rupert Murdoch) he is also a nut job.
More important than using your own code style is using the language code style if there is one. For example in C# you should code in the same style as the .NET, in Java like the Java SDK and in Objective-C (on OS X/iOS) like the Cocoa APIs. Don't invent your own style if there is already one existing.
C++ is an incredibly powerful language but ObjC is also extremely capable. Cocoa (Touch) is simply the most productive framework that I have ever used. Yes, it has a pretty steep learning curve but once you get used to the Cocoa way of doing things you can produce excellent and rich GUI applications in a fraction of the time it takes in many other development environments that I've used. I work mostly in C# in my day job too...
The last iPhone to have an ARM 11 was the 3G. They have been Cortex A8 based since the 3GS.
I've been running the Snow Leopard GM for a week or so now and it is a very big improvement on 10.5 performance wise. Startup is faster; shutdown is faster; sleep and wake are faster; app launches are faster; menus popup faster; animations are smoother; Finder 10.6 is faster; Safari is much faster.
Basically Snow Leopard is a much faster more refined Leopard. Its well worth the upgrade just for the performance gains alone.
According to the BBC the UK price is amazingly £250 or about US$413. Which is a ripoff. At this price there is no way that I would consider buying one.
No, Iphone OS is not OS X.
Except that it is OS X. It has the same kernel, frameworks, driver model, graphics subsystem and so on. The only thing really different is the UI layer because a desktop UI is highly unsuited for use on a mobile phone.
WinCE, on the other hand, shares little code in common with Windows XP/Vista/7 other than its APIs.
However they did port it to ARM for the iPhone and iPod touch.
Generally anything predicted by these so called analysts is almost certainly fantasy and is usually quite obviously so.
Some of the rumor sites (such as Apple Insider and MacRumors) have a better track record but even then are often wrong.
True
2) Doesn't work with Linux.
Also true
3) Is laden with DRM.
Hardly laden with DRM. It plays MP3s, WAVs, AIFF and AAC all without requiring DRM. It just so happens that it ALSO plays DRMed AAC iTunes Store tracks.
4) Doesn't support popular codecs like OGG.
OGG is not a popular codec
5) ONLY supports iTunes Music Store and not other, cheaper services.
Rubbish! Amazon music store and anyone who supports MP3 works fine with it
6) Doesn't allow simple drag-and-drop access to copy music.
True, but then who actually cares?
7) Software is locked down on the device.
True for the moment. The SDK will be available this month.
8) Non-removable storage.
Yep also true but doesn't matter to most people.
9) Non-removable battery.
See my answer to 8
10) Costs $500, much more than cheaper, more open-devices do.
Actually the iPod touch starts at $300 which is $200 less than your fanatical comment
You can get a cheaper device that works just as well.
For example?
However, consider that the PE file format is also used by Microsoft's Common Language Runtime (CLR/.NET). Therefore, I think this is a preparatory move to start offering a native implementation of the .NET platform for OS X.
I was just about to post this myself... It makes a lot of sense for Apple to support .NET on Mac OS X. For a start C# is now the flagship language for Windows development and not supporting it may be the difference between getting hundreds of ported apps and not getting them at all. As a Mac user and .NET developer I think it would be a big mistake for Apple to ignore .NET.
I wonder if this is how the sandboxed iPhone SDK, which is to be available in February, will be implemented
If that were true then surely they'd make a statement about it?
Again: the iPhone does support SMS. I don't understand why you don't seem to believe this. I said that email was a better alternative to MMS, not SMS.
Just like just about every other mid to high range phone and every PDA that's been out in Europe for the last 5 years then? How innovative.
Specifically which phones and PDAs would these be? Also nobody is saying that having web access on a phone is innovative. Since you mention innovation, I suppose the approach to displaying and viewing the pages is fairly innovative though. Its certainly a big improvement on anything before it.
Just a shame there's no high quality camera to go with it, like say, the Nokia N95s with it's ability to film DVD quality video at 30fps. The iPhone's camera is equivalent to that of pre 2003 European mobile phone cameras.
The N95 most certainly cannot record DVD quality movies: it is limited to 640x480. It is obviously designed as a real camera replacement though which the iPhone clearly is not. The iPhone camera is admittedly nothing special, but there are far worse cameras sold in many current European phones.
Arguably not also, I suppose it comes down to whether you're a biased Apple fanboy or well, not.
I've yet to see a review claim that it doesn't have the best music player on a phone. However some people may prefer other players. It has nothing to do with being a fanboy or not. You didn't even give an example of what you think is better.
I'd rather be able to install applications without voiding my warranty thanks. Again, just like every mid to high range phone in Europe for the last 6 years has allowed.
I'm not sure that this does actually void the iPhone warranty.
Yes, because Nokia's UI's are so utterly hard to use, oh wait, no they're not. Seeing as just about everyone between the age of 4 and 90 in Europe/Asia owns a mobile phone and quite happily has done and has used it for the last 5 to 10 years the current UIs are clearly not that bad, nor a barrier to using the device. You're suggest a whole paradigm shift in mobile phone useage from the existing UI's is somehow going to not confuse people who are more than happy with their existing phone's UI? Fact is the iPhone's UI is gimmicky, it looks fancy and that's about it, when it comes to it's simply not anymore usable that much is certain.
Yes, Nokia UIs are truly awful! On my work Nokia phone I couldn't even figure out how to lock the keypad! I eventually had to google this and it turned out you have to press the stick down and press star. How is that obvious? I'd say it is the worst thought out device that I've ever used.
Interestingly many people in the higher age ranges do have trouble using things like text messaging. Most people with video phones do not even understand how to send a video message. So, yes, there is a serious problem with phone UIs today.
In what way is the iPhone UI gimmicky? It doesn't really look that fancy either. Its more functional like the old iPod interface. Also, every review that I've ever read says that the iPhone UI is a big improvement over what came before it.
As usual, Apple's products are 99% hype, 0.5% quality and 0.5% features.
Obviously you have a fair and balanced view! I don't think I've ever read a more biased post on this site, and this is slashdot!
hurray , i can now buy a phone that has less features (no SMS, no MMS, no video calls) than my old Nokia did in 2001
The iPhone does support SMS (and always has.) It also has real email (which is far more useful than MMS has ever been), a real web browser, a high-quality video player and arguably the best music player ever on a phone. It has also become very easy to install third party software on and has a rapidly growing community of developers. Someone has even managed to implement video chat!
The iPhone isn't about having a ton of features though. Its about having a phone with a UI that isn't really really shit and having the features that it does have work very well. These are the things that differentiates its from your Nokia.
absolutely none. It's a horrible language
What is worse are the idiots who program in it. They will blindly defend it even though (in general) they have never used and have no knowledge of any other language.
I have met VB.NET developers who do not understand what an array is. I have yet to meet a VB.NET developer who:The problem with knowing a large number of programming languages is that the disadvantages of of each language become so much more clear. Recently, I was devising a class in C# and .NET 1.1 that would sort a large text file. My approach was standard enough; divide the file into chunks, sort each one in memory, and then progressively mergesort each file pair until only one output file remained. In C#, the class took well over 60 lines of code. In Haskell, it would have been barely over 6 (lazy evaluation is extremely useful for these sorts of problems).
The Haskell version may well be shorter but it generally takes a much longer time to write and then, when somebody comes along to maintain the code, it is very difficult to understand the deeply nested recursion. It probably also runs 50x slower! I actually did a fair amount of Haskell 98 programming a few years back and while functional languages are certainly interesting Haskell has very few real applications.
It sounds like you have had limited experience with various programming languages.
That may be true to some extent. Most of my expreience is in C like languages: C, Obj-C, Java, PHP and C#. Python I have tried but have never liked its syntax.
C# 2.0 is lightyears ahead of Java. But compared to other languages, Java shows signs of severe mental retardation, and C# 2.0 looks like a preschooler.
Unfortunately I have to develop software in the real world. This (for the most part anyway) completely rules out every language you suggested. It sounds like you lack experience programming in the real world.
Mac OS X and Windows Vista completely fail in this area, however. I cannot see the source code to the window systems of either, for instance. Nor can I inspect the kernel source code.
You are correct that you cannot view the OS X window system source but wrong about the kernel. The source to the Mac OS X kernel (XNU) is easily available from Apple. Apple also releases source to other major parts including things like launchd and bonjour as part of the Darwin core operating system.
In my opinion the only place where Windows is really far ahead of Mac OS X is .NET. Or more specifically: C# 2.0. C# is simply the nicest programming language and .NET the most consistent and easiest API that I've ever used. I went from a Java and Obj-C advocate to a C# maniac in about one month of using it. The biggest drawback with .NET is Visual BASIC which is horribly verbose and seems to attract idiot developers.
.NET I think Mac OS X 10.4 and the up-comming 10.5 are still much better operating systems than Vista. Mac OS X is more consistent, nicer to use and is more stable than any version of Windows I've ever seen.
I think it would be great if Apple would adopt C# as the future of development on Mac OS X. I hate to say this but in comparison Objective-C 2.0 looks positively dated.
Other than
While not specifically for the uses stated in the article, we use MediaWiki for all our documentation nowadays. This has replaced the dreadful Lotus Notes as our documentation management system.
Actually Skype on the Mac is a Cocoa application. You can look inside the application package and view all the content .nib files very easily. I've yet to see a QT interface on the Mac looking native.
Maybe UMD would not have been such a massive failure if the movies were not so massively overpriced. There is no way people are going to pay more for a UMD movie than a DVD. The UMD version should be at most cost half the price of the DVD version.
"A study by South Korean physicists confirms that people can in fact make money out of stating what is blatantly obvious to everyone"