Slashdot has some manner of JavaScript that's meant to make the site work better on mobile devices, but it's totally borked on mi ios4.3.5 iPhone 4 and 3.2.2 iPad.
I typed out a post, previewed it, attempted to check a link but was taken to slashdot's homepage instead. After that I found that my post had disappeared into the ether.
It won't take long to reenter it from my MacBook pro after I superglue the shattered remnants of my iPhone back together.
In any case, the people who see me working on my iOS app, or those who I show it to, do think I'm pretty cool. "want to see my iPhone app?" is a great way to strike up conversations with complete strangers. Whenever I see someone with an iOS device I ask them to beta test it. Even if they're not up for that they are interested to discuss it.
I imagine lots of these people think I'm wealthy because I code for iPhones but in reality I'm totally busted because I go without paying work as much as I possibly can so I can focus on my own product.
From time to time I would post a link to the Beta Testing announcment for my iOS App. After a while Facebook would not allow me to post the link anymore, claiming that it was abusive.
A friend of mine who uses Facebook quite a lot had to sign up for a second account because her first account kept getting censored. She was not doing anything the least bit abusive, just using Facebook a lot to keep in touch with her friends.
Graduate school at UC Santa Cruz didn't work out as a result of my mental illness, but the people at the Physics department there made it clear they wanted me back after I recovered from getting profoundly paranoid over the fact that North Korea was caught building a nuclear reactor during my second quarter of my first year. A-Bombs aren't really that hard to build; while it takes a lot of cash and a big industrial plant, some US Government committee, in its infinite wisdom, declassified most of the Manhattan Project secrets in 1965. The only still-classified secret is the Plutonium Implosion Bomb's initiator. Spending too much time thinking about World War III and trying to warn the world about it put me in the Dominican Mental Health Unit twice that Spring.
While I never made a career of it, I have some papers in the Astrophysical Journal and Physics Review Letters B. I wrote my UCSC undergraduate thesis on a US Energy Department grant at the Spin Muon Collaboration's facility on the French side of CERN during the Summer of '93. Most UCSC students have to stay on campus to research their thesis, but my advisor Clem Heusch said I had unusual potential.
Clem was looking for Non-Conservation of Lepton Number by using the SMC's Muon beam and highly magnetized Liquid Helium target to look for a Muon going in, scattering off a nucleon (or, more precisely, one of the quarks that make up a neutron or proton), then leaving the interaction having been changed into an Electron or Positron. This would be a violation of one of the most fundamental Laws of Physics, but for reasons I was never really able to grasp, it is speculated that just this might occur naturally in the Universe. If so, it could contribute to the explanation of Dark Matter and other unexplainable phenomena.
The observation of neutrinos traveling faster than light is exciting and unexpected, but not THAT unexpected. Clem's Muon-to-Neutrino search was part of the whole Physics community's effort to revise the Standard Model. The Standard Model is all of the Laws of Physics put together, with the exception of General Relativity - Einstein's gravitational theory. We don't include Gravity because gravity is such a weak force that we cannot collect enough experimental data for the theorists to produce a Quantum Theory of Gravity.
It has been widely agreed for decades that the Standard Model is quite wrong, but only recently are we beginning to identify just how it is wrong. The observation of Neutrino oscillations at CERN a few years ago by blasting an intense beam of them through a bunch of heavily shielded photographic film, then right down the main street of neighboring St. Genis, France was the first experimental proof that the Standard Model really is incorrect. Collecting more measurements of more oscillations will give the theorists some of the experimental data they need to revise the Model.
Neutrinos were originally thought not to oscillate, but some theorist predicted that if they had non-zero mass, they would oscillate as well. What is really exciing about this latest find is not just that C isn't quite the Speed Limit of the Whole Universe, but that massive objects are exceeding lightspeed!
As to why I posted this comment in reply to the above limerick...
Young Lady Bright's Relativistic Limerick has been my very favorite of all limericks ever since I found it in Clifton Fadiman's The Mathematical Magpie at the Moscow, Idaho public library when I was in sixth grade. The fact that I spent so much time reading that book had a lot to do with my physics degee and my career as a software engineer. It was published in the 1950s, but it was still in print last time I checked several years ago. One of my proudest possessions is my own hardback copy that I found in a used bookstore. There was a card inserted in it that indicated it was meant for a book reviewer, so my partic
I am intimately familiar with the interaction of light with matter as a result of having been an avid Amateur Telescope Maker and Amateur Astronomer since the tender age of twelve.
This led to my acceptance to study Astronomy at Caltech in the Fall of 1982, where I was privileged to attend a non-credit class called "Physics X" that was taught by The Immortal Richard Feynman. You could ask him any question you wanted - it didn't have to be about Physics even - but the ensuing discussion had to be purely conceptual. Questions that would require Feynmen to work out equations on the chalkboard were not permitted.
One afternoon I pointed out to him that the phenomenon that light slows down as it passes through a medium just had to be wrong. When one examines any medium at a subatomic scale, it is mostly empty vacuum with some rare particles that have all been either proven or are suspected to be geometric points. (While Protons and Neutrons have a non-zero diameter, they are each composed of three quarks, which themselves are thought to be point particles.)
"Surely," I pointed out to Feynman, "When light passes through all this vacuous space inside a piece of glass, it always travels at precisely C! How could Snell's Law" - which yields the angle of refraction when light passes through the surface of a medium - "possibly be correct!"
I knew damn well that Snell's Law was correct, as Snell himself experimentally demonstrated the law hundreds of years ago. While he did not measure what the Speed of Light had to do with refraction, we have been able to measure light's speed for over a century.
Feynman replied that when light passes through matter, the charged particles in that matter oscillate in sympathy with the oscillations of the light's electomagnetic field. But because they are all in a bound state, and because accellerating charged particles causes them to emit light of their own, thereby carrying away energy and so dampening their sympathetic oscillation, the movements of the charged particles in matter is not quite in phase with the waves in the light passing through the medium.
Feynman concluded, "The light emitted by the charge particles in matter interferes with the light passing through the medium" - that is, wave peaks add to wave peaks, and so with troughs, while peaks and troughs together cancel each other - "so that the resulting combination of light waves only appears to move slower than C."
Thus the Photons are always moving at a constant velocity of C, but all the Photons in the medium interact so that passing a Photon through the medium will result in the exit Photon being delayed from the timing you would expect from when the entrance Photon entered the front surface. They key to understanding all this is that the entrance and exit Photons are NOT THE SAME PHOTON!
Feynman discusses this in a really lucid way, with rigorous mathematics, in Volume II of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Volume II covers Electricity and Magnetism, Volume I covers Classical Mechanics - Newton's Laws of Motion and such - while the third volume does Quantum Mechanics. The set of three is expensive but are easy to read, even if you don't know much Calculus, and would be a good investment for any Slashdotter.
I was mortally embarrased to realize years later that I had asked Feynman a really basic, purely conceptual question whose completely rigorous answer led to him sharing the 1965 Nobel Prize with Tomanaga of Japan! Their Quantum Electrodynamics describes the interaction of light with electric charge with complete precision.
Feynman's formulation uses a conceptual drawing called a Feynman Diagram as a calculational and explanatory device. I don't know how Tomanaga formulated his Quantum Electrodynamics, but my understanding as that at first no one could understand why the two theories seemed quite different but always yielded the same numerical results. Some time later Freeman Dyson - Esth
Pentium Processor Optimization Tools by Michael L. Schmit comes with a floppy that contains an "Optimizing Assembler". It doesn't actually optimize your code, but produces a formatted listing that gives the timing of each instruction, as well as pipeline stalls and the like. One can then use the listing to refactor the assembly source to be more efficient.
The book is long out of print but can easily be had used. It's also a good book for learning x86 assembly in general.
Quantitative Investment Software coding is just about the highest paying work a software engineer can get. The jobs typically start at $150,000 per year, and can pay as much as a million if you're really good. It's all written in C++, with Linux being the operating system in recent years.
But you have to work in New York City. I don't want to live there, I think I'd go nuts. I've been looking for West Coast quant work, but none is available. You'd think there would be, as all the investment houses have offices in the West, but I guess they don't do their development there.
I don't feel quite comfortable about it, as there is really no way to determine whether a faxed signature is a forgery. Sometimes these contracts are for tens of thousands of dollars, but the client is in a hurry and wants a fax rather than waiting for a "wet signature" to arrive in the mail.
Get This:
Now and then my clients will request what they call a "digital signature". They're not asking for public key cryptography. What they want to do is email me a Word document. I am then expected to "digitally sign" the document by signing a blank piece of paper, scanning my signature, cropping it into a small graphic file, then inserting my signature graphic at the bottom of the contract. Yeah, Right. I've never done that. Instead I've printed the document out, signed it, then faxed it.
I wouldn't want a clipped-out graphic of my signature floating around The Series of Tubes, after all.
Most faxes are I think Group 3 faxes. Group 3 was described to me once as "a big mass of protocol". It's not layered like the Internet protocols are, so there is no way you can alter any part of it to improve the protocol.
There have been some attempts to improve on Group 3. Group 4 fax is a layered protocol just like the Internet is. I once interviewed at a company that made Group 4 faxes. This was back in the late 80s; they used laser printers, and high-res scanners, so that the document one received via Group 4 looked just like a laser print.
But they were very expensive, and for them to work, one needed Group 4 devices on both ends. Other than during this interview, I've never seen Group 4 devices in actual use.
I still own an ancient Apple LaserWriter model that includes Postscript Fax. But again for it to work, both ends need to be Postscript Fax. At the time you could only get a Postscript RIP from Adobe. No one wanted to adopt a single company's proprietary protocol.
What was really screwy is that my printer doesn't include a scanner. The way it's meant to work is that one can choose to fax documents from the Mac OS so that they print remotely via fax. One can't use it to fax signed contracts back and forth like you can with a fax that has a scanner. I thought the Postscript Fax feature sounded like a great idea when I bought the printer, but I never once actually used it.
I think it's wonderful that WikiLeaks lampoons people of wealth and power, but most intelligence sources are likely poor fuckers like you and me who are just trying to rid their countries of tyranny or terrorists. Posting their real names on the web subjects them and their loved ones to gruesomely violent reprisals.
There are more Android devices sold than iOs devices. I don't see how it is to my advantage to stay with a platform that is losing market share. Maybe there is no Android answer to the iPod Touch, but I don't expect things will stay that way.
The iOS has hardware memory management and mush the same kernel as Mac os x does. It should not be possible for a sandboxes userspace app to panic the kernel.
The iOS was clearly rushed to market with inadequate design and testing. That's unlike my experience of Apple on the desktop.
Look man, if you are a truck driver and the steering fails on your truck and kills someone, how would you feel if someone were to say the same to you if you complained that your truck was mechanically defective? That's just asinine.
I even had my iPhone kernel panic right at the start of a demo of my app during a job interview. I had to forcibly reboot my phone while the clients waited impatiently. They cut the interview short and would not let me complete my demo, no doubt thinking that the kernel panic was a bug in my userspace app.
I am not at all impressed by the quality of the apps that I've downloaded from the App Store, not even the ones I've paid money for. Even if you don't have an iOS device, go have a look at the star ratings and user reviews by browsing the app store's website. They are overwhelmingly negative. It is uncommon for apps to be positively rated or to have positive user comments.
Apple makes the claim that they require inspection of your app before it goes on sale so that they can keep the quality up, and maintain a really great user experience. I don't buy that. Apple requires that inspection because there are certain kinds of apps that they don't want in the app store.
For example the app store approval guidelines specifically say that any mention of competing mobile platforms in your app is grounds for rejection. While my app can advertise my services as an iOS developer, it cannot also advertise my Android services. How does that restriction maintain the quality of iOS Apps, or improve the user experience? It does not in any way. It just enhances Apple's profits while diminishing my opportunities for promoting my company from within my apps.
Yeah, some do, and for vertical markets the apps are of critical importance. But I don't think that most people really care that much about which or how many apps are available for their device.
Instead they buy devices that their friends and family also have, or that are readily available in the area where they live. It is only after making a purchase that they start to care about apps.
I used to live in Silicon Valley. Everybody had iPhones there. I live in Washington state now. Everyone here has Android phones; it is very rare that I see iPhones.
I once lived in Canada. In Atlantic Canada, everyone uses Windows. Mac OS X are practically unheard of. To the best of my knowledge there is not one single Apple authorized dealer in the entire province of Newfoundland. The only Apple dealer in Truro, Nova Scotia works out of his home, with his inventory stacked all over his living room. This because he doesn't do enough business to pay for a storefront. But in Vancouver BC, Macs are everywhere. Such regional differences cannot possibly be explained by the availability of apps for the various platforms.
I've been working on an iOS app for a while. While Objective-C and Cocoa Touch are pretty nice to work with, I am sick to death of Apple's corporate control freak mentality. The fact that I cannot run code I wrote myself on an iOS device I bought with my own cash is, frankly, offensive.
Now I can pay $99 to be an iOS developer, which gives me a digital certificate that allows me to load my own binaries on my devices. I can also get certificates that allow for Ad Hoc distribution on other devices for beta testing. But both of these certificates have expiration dates. What that means is that I cannot give a binary directly to an end-user and have it continue working forever on their device. The only way to achieve that is for my users to get my app from Apple's App Store.
From now on, I'll develop for iOS if a client pays me to do it, but for all of my own titles, I'm going to focus on Android. Apple knows very well that so many of its developers are sick of being treated like this, and so like me are moving to Android. Rather than playing nicely with others by easing its restrictions on who can install what on iOS devices, or where end-users can obtain apps from, they are trying to prevent the loss of iOS developers by putting an end to Android entirely.
Trademarks are special in that you lose them if you don't enforce them. That's not the case with copyrights, patents or trade secrets. If you don't defend your trademark, then the law holds that your mark becomes part of the language, so that you don't own it anymore.
I learned of this when Saks 41st Avenue sent a C&D letter to a small clothing store called Sacks 41st Avenue in Capitola, California. It made the front page of the local paper. Saks' attorney told the reporter who asked about it that they had to defend their trademark or they would lose it.
The problem though is that whoever administers the domain name dispute resolution policy may not apply the trademark law. It is possible that Atari could take the domain because they registered their trademark before the website registered their domain. Because their trademark is no longer enforceable, they have no rights to the domain, but ICANN may not heed that fact and so force the register to hand the domain over to Atari.
Another poster lamented C++ as being a terribly, messy language, and said it was nothing better than C with Classes.
If all you write is C with Classes, you'll get a leaky mess full of crash bugs that you'll never be able to do away with.
But if you write C++ the way C++ wants to be written, it's actually a very easy language to write leak-free, bug free code with. Memory management in particular is very easy with RAII - Resource Allocation Is Initialization. Smart Pointers are RAII applied to heap blocks, but it should be applied to every allocated resource, such as database locks or file handles.
The reason bacteria was once fatal, and even common bacteria will sicken you is that bacteria have a totally different chemistry from humans.
Antibiotics are what fungus uses to kill bacteria. Fatal to bacteria, safe for humans.
The problem is that anything that will kill a fungus will kill a human. Bees too, presumably, as being animals I would expect their chemistry to be roughly similar to humans.
(Evolution took hold with the discovery of antibiotics: with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the bacteria are changing their chemistry and learning to fight back.)
There are more Android devices sold these days than iOS devices. Apple has a higher individual market share, but lots of companies are making Android devices.
Both Java and Objective-C are easy to learn and work with.
I've been searching for a mobile app programming job for a while. No one even wants to interview you unless you can provide the name of at least one App that is already in the App store.
It's going to Alpha in a few days as it is stable and nearly feature-complete. I'll finish writing the manual during Alpha and Beta test, then as soon as I submit to the App Store, I'll write the whole thing over again in Java for Android.
Both systems have limited resources and tiny screens. You often have to solve the same UI problems for both systems, but there are some differences that mean your UI solutions will be different between the two platforms.
Android App Development is to be distinguished from Android Platform Development.
Android Apps are written in Java, are directly visible to the user and are user-installable.
The Android Platform includes the Linux kernel, the Dalvik Java VM and the various userspace middleware libraries. The kernel is written in C and assembly code. The middleware is written in C and C++. The Android API includes libraries written in Java.
If you're going to develop for Android, you should learn both App and Platform development. Which one you do in the long run depends on your personal abilities and preferences, but even if you only develop Apps, it's useful and helpful to understand the Platform.
As for documentation... Apple has always had the best developer doc. They also have very good developer mailing lists with active participation by Apple engineers. Thus if you have never done any mobile development at all, I'd start with the iPhone.
However, iPhone development requires an Intel Mac. Android can be done on Mac or Linux. If you don't have a lot of money and don't own a Mac, start with Android while you save up the money for an Intel Mac.
A Mac Mini works just fine for iPhone Development, but to sell yourself as a developer, especially if you want to do independent consulting, you'll need a MacBook Pro laptop. Those are way expensive.
Syria has ballistic missiles that can reach anywhere in Israel, that are armed with VX nerve gas. While the Syrians don't have nuclear bombs. a mist of VX at a moderate altitude over an Israeli city might as well be.
I never, ever read about this in the press, nor do I hear anyone talk about it. But it's not any kind of secret - I found it on some US government disarmament website. My guess is that no one talks about it for fear of making things worse.
While they (mostly) don't admit it, the Israelis are known to have a few hundred nuclear weapons. No doubt they have hydrogen bombs. While they don't openly test, there was what was thought to be a nuclear test in the ocean off of South Africa a while back. Even if they don't test, Israel has no shortage of smart people, or computers capable of accurate numerical modeling.
Do you know the song Ninety Nine Red Balloons? The original German was Neun und Neunzig Luft Balon (SP?). I understand it was inspired by a wayward bundle of helium balloons that was mistaken by the Soviets as a missile launch.
Some people say I'm paranoid. Such people just aren't paying attention.
If you're not too specific about the target, say you just want to hit somewhere in the middle of a large city, it's not too hard to deliver a thousand pounds of high explosives a distance of a few hundred miles.
It was done with 1940s technology: the V-1 Buzz Bomb.
Do you know how the V-1 knew it was time to dive down at its target? It had a small propeller at the front, that would spin from the onrushing air. After a certain number of rotations, the engine would be cut off, and it would plummet to the ground to explode.
This poster was displayed here and there around Apple back when I worked there in the mid-90s: "Many of our competitors dine in the same fine restaurants we do."
This to advise one not to discuss trade secrets over lunch.
If it's already cross-platform, why the grief?
on
Cross With the Platform
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think JWZ's crucial mistake was in expecting the Mac OS X source to just work out of the box on the iPhone. Apple never made that claim. It's the wrong approach to take.
While there are many conceptual similarities between the two operating systems, they are different enough that they really should have been considered separate platforms from the very start.
I've been doing cross-platform development for twenty years. Don't Even Get Me Started.
He's been developing ZooLib for twenty years, but it has only been Open Source for ten.
Andy is a consultant; whenever he gets a new contract, if ZooLib doesn't already provide some functionality he needs for his gig, he adds it into ZooLib.
As for the website not listing many apps - I'm the webmaster, but not a very diligent one. Most of ZooLib's apps are sold by the various clients that Andy and I have had over the years.
Slashdot Mirror
If they really do have a million dollar idea and you can get by without pay, getting paid in equity is the best way to get rich.
But if their idea is so valuable, why do they need to find business partners on craigslist?
Slashdot has some manner of JavaScript that's meant to make the site work better on mobile devices, but it's totally borked on mi ios4.3.5 iPhone 4 and 3.2.2 iPad.
I typed out a post, previewed it, attempted to check a link but was taken to slashdot's homepage instead. After that I found that my post had disappeared into the ether.
It won't take long to reenter it from my MacBook pro after I superglue the shattered remnants of my iPhone back together.
In any case, the people who see me working on my iOS app, or those who I show it to, do think I'm pretty cool. "want to see my iPhone app?" is a great way to strike up conversations with complete strangers. Whenever I see someone with an iOS device I ask them to beta test it. Even if they're not up for that they are interested to discuss it.
I imagine lots of these people think I'm wealthy because I code for iPhones but in reality I'm totally busted because I go without paying work as much as I possibly can so I can focus on my own product.
From time to time I would post a link to the Beta Testing announcment for my iOS App. After a while Facebook would not allow me to post the link anymore, claiming that it was abusive.
A friend of mine who uses Facebook quite a lot had to sign up for a second account because her first account kept getting censored. She was not doing anything the least bit abusive, just using Facebook a lot to keep in touch with her friends.
I don't just play one on the Internet.
Graduate school at UC Santa Cruz didn't work out as a result of my mental illness, but the people at the Physics department there made it clear they wanted me back after I recovered from getting profoundly paranoid over the fact that North Korea was caught building a nuclear reactor during my second quarter of my first year. A-Bombs aren't really that hard to build; while it takes a lot of cash and a big industrial plant, some US Government committee, in its infinite wisdom, declassified most of the Manhattan Project secrets in 1965. The only still-classified secret is the Plutonium Implosion Bomb's initiator. Spending too much time thinking about World War III and trying to warn the world about it put me in the Dominican Mental Health Unit twice that Spring.
While I never made a career of it, I have some papers in the Astrophysical Journal and Physics Review Letters B. I wrote my UCSC undergraduate thesis on a US Energy Department grant at the Spin Muon Collaboration's facility on the French side of CERN during the Summer of '93. Most UCSC students have to stay on campus to research their thesis, but my advisor Clem Heusch said I had unusual potential.
Clem was looking for Non-Conservation of Lepton Number by using the SMC's Muon beam and highly magnetized Liquid Helium target to look for a Muon going in, scattering off a nucleon (or, more precisely, one of the quarks that make up a neutron or proton), then leaving the interaction having been changed into an Electron or Positron. This would be a violation of one of the most fundamental Laws of Physics, but for reasons I was never really able to grasp, it is speculated that just this might occur naturally in the Universe. If so, it could contribute to the explanation of Dark Matter and other unexplainable phenomena.
The observation of neutrinos traveling faster than light is exciting and unexpected, but not THAT unexpected. Clem's Muon-to-Neutrino search was part of the whole Physics community's effort to revise the Standard Model. The Standard Model is all of the Laws of Physics put together, with the exception of General Relativity - Einstein's gravitational theory. We don't include Gravity because gravity is such a weak force that we cannot collect enough experimental data for the theorists to produce a Quantum Theory of Gravity.
It has been widely agreed for decades that the Standard Model is quite wrong, but only recently are we beginning to identify just how it is wrong. The observation of Neutrino oscillations at CERN a few years ago by blasting an intense beam of them through a bunch of heavily shielded photographic film, then right down the main street of neighboring St. Genis, France was the first experimental proof that the Standard Model really is incorrect. Collecting more measurements of more oscillations will give the theorists some of the experimental data they need to revise the Model.
Neutrinos were originally thought not to oscillate, but some theorist predicted that if they had non-zero mass, they would oscillate as well. What is really exciing about this latest find is not just that C isn't quite the Speed Limit of the Whole Universe, but that massive objects are exceeding lightspeed!
As to why I posted this comment in reply to the above limerick...
Young Lady Bright's Relativistic Limerick has been my very favorite of all limericks ever since I found it in Clifton Fadiman's The Mathematical Magpie at the Moscow, Idaho public library when I was in sixth grade. The fact that I spent so much time reading that book had a lot to do with my physics degee and my career as a software engineer. It was published in the 1950s, but it was still in print last time I checked several years ago. One of my proudest possessions is my own hardback copy that I found in a used bookstore. There was a card inserted in it that indicated it was meant for a book reviewer, so my partic
I am intimately familiar with the interaction of light with matter as a result of having been an avid Amateur Telescope Maker and Amateur Astronomer since the tender age of twelve.
This led to my acceptance to study Astronomy at Caltech in the Fall of 1982, where I was privileged to attend a non-credit class called "Physics X" that was taught by The Immortal Richard Feynman. You could ask him any question you wanted - it didn't have to be about Physics even - but the ensuing discussion had to be purely conceptual. Questions that would require Feynmen to work out equations on the chalkboard were not permitted.
One afternoon I pointed out to him that the phenomenon that light slows down as it passes through a medium just had to be wrong. When one examines any medium at a subatomic scale, it is mostly empty vacuum with some rare particles that have all been either proven or are suspected to be geometric points. (While Protons and Neutrons have a non-zero diameter, they are each composed of three quarks, which themselves are thought to be point particles.)
"Surely," I pointed out to Feynman, "When light passes through all this vacuous space inside a piece of glass, it always travels at precisely C! How could Snell's Law" - which yields the angle of refraction when light passes through the surface of a medium - "possibly be correct!"
I knew damn well that Snell's Law was correct, as Snell himself experimentally demonstrated the law hundreds of years ago. While he did not measure what the Speed of Light had to do with refraction, we have been able to measure light's speed for over a century.
Feynman replied that when light passes through matter, the charged particles in that matter oscillate in sympathy with the oscillations of the light's electomagnetic field. But because they are all in a bound state, and because accellerating charged particles causes them to emit light of their own, thereby carrying away energy and so dampening their sympathetic oscillation, the movements of the charged particles in matter is not quite in phase with the waves in the light passing through the medium.
Feynman concluded, "The light emitted by the charge particles in matter interferes with the light passing through the medium" - that is, wave peaks add to wave peaks, and so with troughs, while peaks and troughs together cancel each other - "so that the resulting combination of light waves only appears to move slower than C."
Thus the Photons are always moving at a constant velocity of C, but all the Photons in the medium interact so that passing a Photon through the medium will result in the exit Photon being delayed from the timing you would expect from when the entrance Photon entered the front surface. They key to understanding all this is that the entrance and exit Photons are NOT THE SAME PHOTON!
Feynman discusses this in a really lucid way, with rigorous mathematics, in Volume II of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Volume II covers Electricity and Magnetism, Volume I covers Classical Mechanics - Newton's Laws of Motion and such - while the third volume does Quantum Mechanics. The set of three is expensive but are easy to read, even if you don't know much Calculus, and would be a good investment for any Slashdotter.
I was mortally embarrased to realize years later that I had asked Feynman a really basic, purely conceptual question whose completely rigorous answer led to him sharing the 1965 Nobel Prize with Tomanaga of Japan! Their Quantum Electrodynamics describes the interaction of light with electric charge with complete precision.
Feynman's formulation uses a conceptual drawing called a Feynman Diagram as a calculational and explanatory device. I don't know how Tomanaga formulated his Quantum Electrodynamics, but my understanding as that at first no one could understand why the two theories seemed quite different but always yielded the same numerical results. Some time later Freeman Dyson - Esth
Pentium Processor Optimization Tools by Michael L. Schmit comes with a floppy that contains an "Optimizing Assembler". It doesn't actually optimize your code, but produces a formatted listing that gives the timing of each instruction, as well as pipeline stalls and the like. One can then use the listing to refactor the assembly source to be more efficient.
The book is long out of print but can easily be had used. It's also a good book for learning x86 assembly in general.
Quantitative Investment Software coding is just about the highest paying work a software engineer can get. The jobs typically start at $150,000 per year, and can pay as much as a million if you're really good. It's all written in C++, with Linux being the operating system in recent years.
But you have to work in New York City. I don't want to live there, I think I'd go nuts. I've been looking for West Coast quant work, but none is available. You'd think there would be, as all the investment houses have offices in the West, but I guess they don't do their development there.
I don't feel quite comfortable about it, as there is really no way to determine whether a faxed signature is a forgery. Sometimes these contracts are for tens of thousands of dollars, but the client is in a hurry and wants a fax rather than waiting for a "wet signature" to arrive in the mail.
Get This:
Now and then my clients will request what they call a "digital signature". They're not asking for public key cryptography. What they want to do is email me a Word document. I am then expected to "digitally sign" the document by signing a blank piece of paper, scanning my signature, cropping it into a small graphic file, then inserting my signature graphic at the bottom of the contract. Yeah, Right. I've never done that. Instead I've printed the document out, signed it, then faxed it.
I wouldn't want a clipped-out graphic of my signature floating around The Series of Tubes, after all.
Most faxes are I think Group 3 faxes. Group 3 was described to me once as "a big mass of protocol". It's not layered like the Internet protocols are, so there is no way you can alter any part of it to improve the protocol.
There have been some attempts to improve on Group 3. Group 4 fax is a layered protocol just like the Internet is. I once interviewed at a company that made Group 4 faxes. This was back in the late 80s; they used laser printers, and high-res scanners, so that the document one received via Group 4 looked just like a laser print.
But they were very expensive, and for them to work, one needed Group 4 devices on both ends. Other than during this interview, I've never seen Group 4 devices in actual use.
I still own an ancient Apple LaserWriter model that includes Postscript Fax. But again for it to work, both ends need to be Postscript Fax. At the time you could only get a Postscript RIP from Adobe. No one wanted to adopt a single company's proprietary protocol.
What was really screwy is that my printer doesn't include a scanner. The way it's meant to work is that one can choose to fax documents from the Mac OS so that they print remotely via fax. One can't use it to fax signed contracts back and forth like you can with a fax that has a scanner. I thought the Postscript Fax feature sounded like a great idea when I bought the printer, but I never once actually used it.
I think it's wonderful that WikiLeaks lampoons people of wealth and power, but most intelligence sources are likely poor fuckers like you and me who are just trying to rid their countries of tyranny or terrorists. Posting their real names on the web subjects them and their loved ones to gruesomely violent reprisals.
That's Not Right.
There are more Android devices sold than iOs devices. I don't see how it is to my advantage to stay with a platform that is losing market share. Maybe there is no Android answer to the iPod Touch, but I don't expect things will stay that way.
The iOS has hardware memory management and mush the same kernel as Mac os x does. It should not be possible for a sandboxes userspace app to panic the kernel.
The iOS was clearly rushed to market with inadequate design and testing. That's unlike my experience of Apple on the desktop.
Look man, if you are a truck driver and the steering fails on your truck and kills someone, how would you feel if someone were to say the same to you if you complained that your truck was mechanically defective? That's
just asinine.
I've reported lots of iOS bugs to Apple.
I even had my iPhone kernel panic right at the start of a demo of my app during a job interview. I had to forcibly reboot my phone while the clients waited impatiently. They cut the interview short and would not let me complete my demo, no doubt thinking that the kernel panic was a bug in my userspace app.
I am not at all impressed by the quality of the apps that I've downloaded from the App Store, not even the ones I've paid money for. Even if you don't have an iOS device, go have a look at the star ratings and user reviews by browsing the app store's website. They are overwhelmingly negative. It is uncommon for apps to be positively rated or to have positive user comments.
Apple makes the claim that they require inspection of your app before it goes on sale so that they can keep the quality up, and maintain a really great user experience. I don't buy that. Apple requires that inspection because there are certain kinds of apps that they don't want in the app store.
For example the app store approval guidelines specifically say that any mention of competing mobile platforms in your app is grounds for rejection. While my app can advertise my services as an iOS developer, it cannot also advertise my Android services. How does that restriction maintain the quality of iOS Apps, or improve the user experience? It does not in any way. It just enhances Apple's profits while diminishing my opportunities for promoting my company from within my apps.
Yeah, some do, and for vertical markets the apps are of critical importance. But I don't think that most people really care that much about which or how many apps are available for their device.
Instead they buy devices that their friends and family also have, or that are readily available in the area where they live. It is only after making a purchase that they start to care about apps.
I used to live in Silicon Valley. Everybody had iPhones there. I live in Washington state now. Everyone here has Android phones; it is very rare that I see iPhones.
I once lived in Canada. In Atlantic Canada, everyone uses Windows. Mac OS X are practically unheard of. To the best of my knowledge there is not one single Apple authorized dealer in the entire province of Newfoundland. The only Apple dealer in Truro, Nova Scotia works out of his home, with his inventory stacked all over his living room. This because he doesn't do enough business to pay for a storefront. But in Vancouver BC, Macs are everywhere. Such regional differences cannot possibly be explained by the availability of apps for the various platforms.
-m.
I've been working on an iOS app for a while. While Objective-C and Cocoa Touch are pretty nice to work with, I am sick to death of Apple's corporate control freak mentality. The fact that I cannot run code I wrote myself on an iOS device I bought with my own cash is, frankly, offensive.
Now I can pay $99 to be an iOS developer, which gives me a digital certificate that allows me to load my own binaries on my devices. I can also get certificates that allow for Ad Hoc distribution on other devices for beta testing. But both of these certificates have expiration dates. What that means is that I cannot give a binary directly to an end-user and have it continue working forever on their device. The only way to achieve that is for my users to get my app from Apple's App Store.
From now on, I'll develop for iOS if a client pays me to do it, but for all of my own titles, I'm going to focus on Android. Apple knows very well that so many of its developers are sick of being treated like this, and so like me are moving to Android. Rather than playing nicely with others by easing its restrictions on who can install what on iOS devices, or where end-users can obtain apps from, they are trying to prevent the loss of iOS developers by putting an end to Android entirely.
That's Just Wrong.
Trademarks are special in that you lose them if you don't enforce them. That's not the case with copyrights, patents or trade secrets. If you don't defend your trademark, then the law holds that your mark becomes part of the language, so that you don't own it anymore.
I learned of this when Saks 41st Avenue sent a C&D letter to a small clothing store called Sacks 41st Avenue in Capitola, California. It made the front page of the local paper. Saks' attorney told the reporter who asked about it that they had to defend their trademark or they would lose it.
The problem though is that whoever administers the domain name dispute resolution policy may not apply the trademark law. It is possible that Atari could take the domain because they registered their trademark before the website registered their domain. Because their trademark is no longer enforceable, they have no rights to the domain, but ICANN may not heed that fact and so force the register to hand the domain over to Atari.
If all you write is C with Classes, you'll get a leaky mess full of crash bugs that you'll never be able to do away with.
But if you write C++ the way C++ wants to be written, it's actually a very easy language to write leak-free, bug free code with. Memory management in particular is very easy with RAII - Resource Allocation Is Initialization. Smart Pointers are RAII applied to heap blocks, but it should be applied to every allocated resource, such as database locks or file handles.
A while back I wrote a style guide that summarizes much of what I know about C++: Pointers, References and Values.
Antibiotics are what fungus uses to kill bacteria. Fatal to bacteria, safe for humans.
The problem is that anything that will kill a fungus will kill a human. Bees too, presumably, as being animals I would expect their chemistry to be roughly similar to humans.
(Evolution took hold with the discovery of antibiotics: with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the bacteria are changing their chemistry and learning to fight back.)
It would be easier to build a telescope that could resolve the surface of the planet, than it would be to travel there.
Both Java and Objective-C are easy to learn and work with.
I've been searching for a mobile app programming job for a while. No one even wants to interview you unless you can provide the name of at least one App that is already in the App store.
I'm working on an implementation of Conway's Game of Life for the iPhone. Here is the manual. Here is my call for beta testers.
It's going to Alpha in a few days as it is stable and nearly feature-complete. I'll finish writing the manual during Alpha and Beta test, then as soon as I submit to the App Store, I'll write the whole thing over again in Java for Android.
Both systems have limited resources and tiny screens. You often have to solve the same UI problems for both systems, but there are some differences that mean your UI solutions will be different between the two platforms.
Android App Development is to be distinguished from Android Platform Development.
Android Apps are written in Java, are directly visible to the user and are user-installable.
The Android Platform includes the Linux kernel, the Dalvik Java VM and the various userspace middleware libraries. The kernel is written in C and assembly code. The middleware is written in C and C++. The Android API includes libraries written in Java.
If you're going to develop for Android, you should learn both App and Platform development. Which one you do in the long run depends on your personal abilities and preferences, but even if you only develop Apps, it's useful and helpful to understand the Platform.
As for documentation... Apple has always had the best developer doc. They also have very good developer mailing lists with active participation by Apple engineers. Thus if you have never done any mobile development at all, I'd start with the iPhone.
However, iPhone development requires an Intel Mac. Android can be done on Mac or Linux. If you don't have a lot of money and don't own a Mac, start with Android while you save up the money for an Intel Mac.
A Mac Mini works just fine for iPhone Development, but to sell yourself as a developer, especially if you want to do independent consulting, you'll need a MacBook Pro laptop. Those are way expensive.
It's in the US Constitution and everything: the US Congress has the authority to order civilian merchant ships to do battle.
I never, ever read about this in the press, nor do I hear anyone talk about it. But it's not any kind of secret - I found it on some US government disarmament website. My guess is that no one talks about it for fear of making things worse.
While they (mostly) don't admit it, the Israelis are known to have a few hundred nuclear weapons. No doubt they have hydrogen bombs. While they don't openly test, there was what was thought to be a nuclear test in the ocean off of South Africa a while back. Even if they don't test, Israel has no shortage of smart people, or computers capable of accurate numerical modeling.
Do you know the song Ninety Nine Red Balloons? The original German was Neun und Neunzig Luft Balon (SP?). I understand it was inspired by a wayward bundle of helium balloons that was mistaken by the Soviets as a missile launch.
Some people say I'm paranoid. Such people just aren't paying attention.
It was done with 1940s technology: the V-1 Buzz Bomb.
Do you know how the V-1 knew it was time to dive down at its target? It had a small propeller at the front, that would spin from the onrushing air. After a certain number of rotations, the engine would be cut off, and it would plummet to the ground to explode.
This to advise one not to discuss trade secrets over lunch.
While there are many conceptual similarities between the two operating systems, they are different enough that they really should have been considered separate platforms from the very start.
I've been doing cross-platform development for twenty years. Don't Even Get Me Started.
He's been developing ZooLib for twenty years, but it has only been Open Source for ten.
Andy is a consultant; whenever he gets a new contract, if ZooLib doesn't already provide some functionality he needs for his gig, he adds it into ZooLib.
As for the website not listing many apps - I'm the webmaster, but not a very diligent one. Most of ZooLib's apps are sold by the various clients that Andy and I have had over the years.