GarageBand for iPad is pretty sweet and I use it to make music, not all of which sucks. Pages is pretty decent for putting together a letter or flyer, it's not as nice as Pages for Mac but you really could layout just about anything in it. I can't vouch for Keynote or Numbers because I haven't bought them for iPad but they're probably at least as nice as their Mac counterparts. MS Office app knock-offs abound, so many I haven't even bought one. For non-Apple apps you have Freeform which I like better than Inkscape for creating application icons (even if it doesn't support SVG.) I've written a few hundred lines of code/html using Textastic, it would be great if they polish it up a bit more. A few other production apps on my iPad are Sketchpad, Elance, oDesk, Photoshop Express, iOctocat and Remoter VNC.
I spend more time with my iPad playing World of Goo or watching Netflix than using any of these. But I don't think that will always be the case, I think the apps will just get better and better and will eventually be easier to use than the Desktop apps.
I think what's dying is the worker/employer dichotomy. We're moving away from big corporations with thousands of cradle-to-grave employees, and moving to a situation where the workers own the means of production within a semi-free market economy. An example of this is the thousands of independent contractors who work for themselves. As a work-at-home web developer, I'm in this class of people. I taught myself all the open source tools using free documentation. Now I own my own business and am able to pay for me and my wife's health insurance, life insurance, renters insurance, food, lodging and retirement savings all using open source tools and free information. Most of my friends who are building construction contractors, electricians and auto-mechanics are moving to the same model too, btw. They own their own tools and teach themselves, in return they make more money and can set their own schedules. Everyone who works this way is a lot happier too. I know I am, I take Monday's off every week to focus on volunteer projects. In fact, it's not far away from true communism when the workers own the means of production. Even if they own it individually, instead of "collectively".
When people say communism though they usually mean a super-powerful state with an small oligarchy that decides wealth distribution. Somehow this is argued as being better, when the proposal to fix crony-capitalism is crony-communism. Every "communist" country in the world today has a terrible wealth distribution. Kim Jong-Il was the number one world buyer of Hennessey Cognac, meanwhile his people are starving. Communist party members have always enjoyed massively better lives in every single country communism has been tried in. Just look at the standard of living of the average "worker" in any of these "workers paradises" around the world. You're right that the rich are selfish dicks, but a free society allows anyone to become rich. It just takes time and hard work.
was really geeky. I wrote a Greasemonkey script that replaced the definition on the top 20 dictionary results on Google for a specific word. Then I sent my wife (girlfriend at the time) a letter telling her poetically just how great she was. I used all kind of flowery language and some obscure words. Anyway, I put the trigger word as the last one.
She looked it up on Google, then the content on the dictionary site was replaced by a photograph of me holding her engagement ring. The definition of the word was "Will you marry me?". I was nearby with the real ring and an explanation. It was pretty cool. She always has me install the greasemonkey script every time she switches computers so she can go look up the word when she gets lonely.
I support Eclipse dropping Ruby. It's a waste of time for them to support my favorite language. Eclipse is the peak of the Java wave. Nay, it is the very pinnacle of Gosling's genius. Anyone who looks at the incredible elegance of the system will quickly realize how unsuited it is to Ruby development. Ruby is just not ready for the brilliance of the Eclipse Development System. It was too shoddy, too tainted with the foul fumes of scripting languages. Practically reeks of Perl.
Until Ruby is worthy we'll just have to settle for Textmate and Vim.
I was always partial to Scorched Tanks. Granted, it was a rip-off. But the graphics were better. I almost killed my brother a couple of times during multi-player.
I can agree, we all need to pay for the roads, police and military. I believe that patronizing the arts and sciences with government money is also a great benefit for society. However, the amount of tax versus the total money earned has been going up over the last century. Particularly for the lower income bracket. For example, the lowest income bracket pays 10% today, this was 1% for much of our history.
Much of this money does not go to benefit mankind or to benefit anyone really. It pays for unjust wars of "freedom". It pays for a military industrial complex which is vastly larger than it needs to be in a time of world peace. It pays for a broken education system which is among the worst in the world - yet costs more per-pupil than any other (except Lichtenstein.) All of which has become impossible to fix due to entrenched political forces.
So I don't blame anyone who evades taxes. Good for them. (I don't do it, btw. I just morally support anyone who makes that difficult decision.) Taxes should not be mandatory anyway. You want a driver's license? Show an "infrastructure tax payer" receipt. You want a cop to show up for an emergency? You better do the same. People WOULD pay for it. Just look at how many people pay for all kinds of insurance. Military costs would be paid through import duties and sales taxes.
Or the other option is to allow a line-item income tax. Where a taxpayer could pick and choose what programs they want to fund. I would support that. What we have now is nothing more than an oligarchy shaking down their subjects. The battle is always between them, what part of the meat they'll get. It never occurs to them that killing the animal was wrong. The average taxpayer has no voice in the media and no choice at the poll. Both parties don't dare to challenge the status-quo. In fact, they fight brutally for the system.
I'm one of your fans on here. Here's why I don't like H.264, for starters I run Linux on a few of my systems and there's no Quicktime available on it. On my Windows systems I don't install Quicktime because it's bloated. It tries to run ALL the time by default, seriously what a ridiculous thing for a media player. Not to mention that it installs a bunch of unrelated junk - like Bonjour.
I've used H.264 for quite a while. I was thrilled when it became available as a streaming format under Flash.The superiority of H.264 is debatable however, just like the debate between Ogg/Vorbis and MP3. End users can't tell the difference anyway. Google has a huge monetary cost associated with using an inefficient codec - YouTube. That cost would dwarf licensing costs by a long shot.
I think we're literally seeing intelligent people at Google advocating a technological change which ultimately is in the public interest. You can't support open source software while proprietary systems like H.264 are in use. It creates an artificial barrier into entry in the market to free software by causing unwitting users to entrust their personal information to a format they must pay to use. There's no positive for ordinary people with H.264, none. Google has just gained a lot of points in my book.
I remove it from my linux boxes as well. I realized one day that there was no software that I use that was written in Java. Not a single thing. Problem solved.
Ha, I had a Java free 2010 because Java is irrelevant, starting on a Java free 2011 because it's a security concern.
I think you're confusing education and intelligence. It is the informed opinion of a large segment of the population that joining the military is a stupid thing to do. Not simply uninformed, we're talking about room temperature intelligence quotient. Therefore you would expect a great deal of stupid people in the military. The fact that these stupid people get free college is irrelevant.
Although I want to say that I don't necessarily believe everyone in the military is stupid. On the contrary, it seems like they start out stupid and leave being some of the best human beings I've ever met.
If you're one of those Second Amendment nuts, you really need to read your history book on why it was passed. Here's a hint: Contrary to popular Second Amendment nut mantra, it was to defend the United States against outsiders, not to attack the United States and its institutions yourself. Duh.
Not a second amendment nut here, just a history buff. Unfortunately you're wrong, several of the founding father's (including Thomas Jefferson) espoused gun ownership for the exact reason he mentions - to keep the government honest. It was their opinion that governments oppress people and when in the course of human events it becomes necessary to sever (by force) the ties that bind the people to them... well it should be done. All of the founders took up guns and shot and killed the current people in power in their government - even when they were vastly outnumbered and unpopular. Only 30% of the people at the time were in favor of the revolution. To the perspective of most people in the world at the time the American revolution was completely insane and destined for failure.
yeah, I'm not sure what Vista you're using but it's not the same as mine. Vista was a miserable pile of crap, particularly on a memory starved system - which every system that I used that ran Vista always was. It was slow, always swapping and.... cludgey. My laptop doubled in speed when I installed Windows 7, even on a fresh install it was miserable under Vista. Now I've moved everything over to Ubuntu and it's even better.
Yeah, this got me really appreciating Bitcoin. I think if we all start doing business withe people using BitCoins then it'll really fix the whole problem.
Yeah, I think P did stand for Perl. Believe me, I was once a huge Perl fan. I went into PHP because the market went that way, not because I liked it. All the big commercial frameworks I've written were written for mod_perl, not PHP. It's just, as nasty and unreadable and... horrible as PHP code is, it's faster to develop than mod_perl. In my opinion. Rails is the first system I've used that does not lead to nasty, unreadable spaghetti code. Everything about it encourages separation of logic and code in a way that benefits the programmer, instead of hinders. I think that Prudence is another great framework. There's plenty of others out there. But at the moment Rails seems to have the most momentum.
Rails is dead? Ruby is "just perl with less powerful syntax"? I think we have someone here who has never learned Rails (or any other new language or framework, for that matter.) The thing Rails did was brought together MVC, ORM and "meta-programming" into a well integrated framework. I've written or been on teams writing several commercial frameworks. I've used nearly all of the open source frameworks and CMS products in my development career. Including the Rails rip-offs like CakePHP. Nothing is as good as Rails. There's a reason why Rails drives people into Ruby development, it's wonderfully elegant, effective and allows for flexibility and nearly instant development. Normally you can have one or the other.
I know it's a pain to keep up with the constantly moving world of web development. However, it is necessary. I started with Perl CGI (in 1998), then moved to PHP and LAMP and now I've moved to Ruby. The improvement is really just as big as the move from Perl/CGI.pm to PHP. This video demonstrates the improvement I'm talking about, he doesn't pick Rails as his choice. I disagree with him of course. But it does show just how big the imporvement is.
Apple has made software compatibility ideological. Anyone who unlocks their iPhone is now a political dissident. Anyone who leaves Apple and jumps ship is now a defector. Remember, they're censoring A MAGAZINE because of the content! Can you imagine Microsoft preventing Word and Publisher from writing articles that criticize Microsoft? Or hooking the printer driver from preventing them from being printed? This is where this is going, don't think Apple wouldn't do it if it could.
As a refugee from the Amiga, I remember Microsoft in the 90s. Never forgot or forgave them for their behavior either. And yes, Microsoft has put the screws to any PC manufacturer who dared sell PCs without Windows pre-installed. I.e. the Microsoft tax. This was nowhere near as menacing or anti-competitive as Apple has become.
I think you're overplaying Apple's coolness. The bloom has faded on the rose. I have more hipster friends with Android devices than with iPhones now. iPhones are soooooo 2006. Now it's the me-too followers who buy iPhones.
It would be more like designing Chevy vehicles to drive only on roads that Chevy approves of. Then banning all roads that go near Ford dealerships.
What Apple is doing is unconscionable. I have always been anti-Microsoft, in this regard I was always pulling for Apple. But it's important to realize WHY I was anti-Microsoft. Namely because of their anti-competitive and asshole behavior. A set of behavior that Apple has perfected and made even more grotesquely anti-consumer, anti-choice and ultimately insulting to all intelligent customers of their products. At least Microsoft had enough respect for you to give you a choice. Now you have nanny-Apple deciding what you can and cannot install on the device you purchased and now legally own.
This level of anti-competitive and just... asshole behavior has probably never been seen before, not even with Microsoft. How can Apple ever hope to become a serious part of community infrastructure when they display this level of disrespect for their customers? Is the fear that some bumbling iPhone user might accidentally install the Android magazine app and have a sudden flash of inspiration that iPhone is inferior? Why do we, as customers, take this? Not even Microsoft had the greedy foolishness to prohibit its competitor's software from running on their platform. Why don't we demand control of the devices that we have purchased? Lets hope that MeeGo can deliver a genuinely open phone experience. Ubuntu and Linux Mint both show how an app store could be done.
My post was tongue-in-cheek, and it was coming from a Java programmer (me) of several years.
You're right, C++ sucks for enterprise application programming. Which is why it shouldn't ever be used for it. And for the same reasons that Java should never be used for it. Java and C++ suck at user interfaces. A person can only know this if they've both used Java and other more modern tools to create enterprise applications. See the link in my previous post for more details. It is the opposite of fast turn-around and rapid development. There are better, faster and less headache inducing ways now. Just look at how much Java IDEs suck at this, despite thousands of man-hours and great talent developing them. This is not the fault of the developers, this is the fault of the language. And it's time people begin progressing away from Java, in the same way we should avoid writing things in COBOL or APL.
The reaction to my post is kind of why I made it in the first place. Why be so upset when somebody criticizes your language? It seems to me to be a kind of fundamentalism. And the more crappy the religion the more angry and vicious are its fundamentalists.
Here we observe the later stage of the life cycle of the ancient javan fanboicus extremis. Scientists believe that the first of the species was born in the Sun Microsystems booth at a Comdex convention in the mid 1990s (reportedly from a fling between Grace Murray Hopper and James Gosling.) From there the species propagated by its strange inter-species relationship with management. Similar to the tape worm reproductive cycle (Taenia solium), the javan first infects the management of the organization by later stage infected programmers (salesmen) who have been infected coming in contact with management of the organization. Usually promises are made and buzzwords (the mating call of management) are dropped. Similar once again to the tapeworm life cycle the infection of a new host is caused by cysts being eaten. However, in this case those in the management cycle force feed the cysts to the programmer cycle. At first the new programmer recoils in disgust at the Javan experience. This is followed by the first sign of infection; browsing infective books and as the disease progresses - buying them. As the infection commences the programmer is told to like the experience, overriding any natural senses and instinct. In the second stage the programmer still has a mild distaste and at some basic level realizes they shouldn't be having the feelings they're feeling. In final stage infection the programmer can be seen tossing and turning in bed saying "pure java..... it.... must... be in.... pure java..." and things like that. During this stage it is common for programmers to begin writing everything in Java. Shortly afterward they begin reproducing by attempting to create other Java programmers. Although their chances of actual sexual reproduction go down significantly after infection.
It's easy to be immunized against javan infection, but no instant cure is now known. And immunize those you know and love. It's important to remember that ultimately this is a parasitic infection. Java causes many reams of code to be written in Java that should never be. It adds a minimum of 30% to development time. And contrary to typical management mating calls, because of the thousands more lines of code Java takes to express ideas, it costs many times more for long term support. Like COBOL before it, it rarely dies until the host dies. So the infection can only be prevented, not cured. Keep safe, and always use a prophylaxis.
I kind of like Javascript, I have written and maintained HUGE applications in many languages. To be honest, the worst was Java, not Javascript. Javascript is light, easy to understand, highly extensible (see JQuery or mootools) and once something is written to the standards it usually runs EVERYWHERE there is a reasonably modern web browser. Something which is not true of Flash or Java. Just look at how many people use it and write in it! Talk about a successful language!
I'm fluent in Ruby, Python, Perl, Java and UNIX/Linux standard C. I've used C++, C#, AS3 and even Scheme on various professional jobs before. And I think I like Ruby best, but not by much. Javascript has a certain simple elegance that even Ruby doesn't have. It's what Java could have been. If Gosling hadn't been so strict type happy.
Slashdot Mirror
GarageBand for iPad is pretty sweet and I use it to make music, not all of which sucks. Pages is pretty decent for putting together a letter or flyer, it's not as nice as Pages for Mac but you really could layout just about anything in it. I can't vouch for Keynote or Numbers because I haven't bought them for iPad but they're probably at least as nice as their Mac counterparts. MS Office app knock-offs abound, so many I haven't even bought one. For non-Apple apps you have Freeform which I like better than Inkscape for creating application icons (even if it doesn't support SVG.) I've written a few hundred lines of code/html using Textastic, it would be great if they polish it up a bit more. A few other production apps on my iPad are Sketchpad, Elance, oDesk, Photoshop Express, iOctocat and Remoter VNC.
I spend more time with my iPad playing World of Goo or watching Netflix than using any of these. But I don't think that will always be the case, I think the apps will just get better and better and will eventually be easier to use than the Desktop apps.
I think what's dying is the worker/employer dichotomy. We're moving away from big corporations with thousands of cradle-to-grave employees, and moving to a situation where the workers own the means of production within a semi-free market economy. An example of this is the thousands of independent contractors who work for themselves. As a work-at-home web developer, I'm in this class of people. I taught myself all the open source tools using free documentation. Now I own my own business and am able to pay for me and my wife's health insurance, life insurance, renters insurance, food, lodging and retirement savings all using open source tools and free information. Most of my friends who are building construction contractors, electricians and auto-mechanics are moving to the same model too, btw. They own their own tools and teach themselves, in return they make more money and can set their own schedules. Everyone who works this way is a lot happier too. I know I am, I take Monday's off every week to focus on volunteer projects. In fact, it's not far away from true communism when the workers own the means of production. Even if they own it individually, instead of "collectively".
When people say communism though they usually mean a super-powerful state with an small oligarchy that decides wealth distribution. Somehow this is argued as being better, when the proposal to fix crony-capitalism is crony-communism. Every "communist" country in the world today has a terrible wealth distribution. Kim Jong-Il was the number one world buyer of Hennessey Cognac, meanwhile his people are starving. Communist party members have always enjoyed massively better lives in every single country communism has been tried in. Just look at the standard of living of the average "worker" in any of these "workers paradises" around the world. You're right that the rich are selfish dicks, but a free society allows anyone to become rich. It just takes time and hard work.
was really geeky. I wrote a Greasemonkey script that replaced the definition on the top 20 dictionary results on Google for a specific word. Then I sent my wife (girlfriend at the time) a letter telling her poetically just how great she was. I used all kind of flowery language and some obscure words. Anyway, I put the trigger word as the last one.
She looked it up on Google, then the content on the dictionary site was replaced by a photograph of me holding her engagement ring. The definition of the word was "Will you marry me?". I was nearby with the real ring and an explanation. It was pretty cool. She always has me install the greasemonkey script every time she switches computers so she can go look up the word when she gets lonely.
I support Eclipse dropping Ruby. It's a waste of time for them to support my favorite language. Eclipse is the peak of the Java wave. Nay, it is the very pinnacle of Gosling's genius. Anyone who looks at the incredible elegance of the system will quickly realize how unsuited it is to Ruby development. Ruby is just not ready for the brilliance of the Eclipse Development System. It was too shoddy, too tainted with the foul fumes of scripting languages. Practically reeks of Perl.
Until Ruby is worthy we'll just have to settle for Textmate and Vim.
Don't forget Bitcoin, it allows for anonymous untraceable donations which cannot be "frozen" under governmental pressure.
I was always partial to Scorched Tanks. Granted, it was a rip-off. But the graphics were better. I almost killed my brother a couple of times during multi-player.
I can agree, we all need to pay for the roads, police and military. I believe that patronizing the arts and sciences with government money is also a great benefit for society. However, the amount of tax versus the total money earned has been going up over the last century. Particularly for the lower income bracket. For example, the lowest income bracket pays 10% today, this was 1% for much of our history.
Much of this money does not go to benefit mankind or to benefit anyone really. It pays for unjust wars of "freedom". It pays for a military industrial complex which is vastly larger than it needs to be in a time of world peace. It pays for a broken education system which is among the worst in the world - yet costs more per-pupil than any other (except Lichtenstein.) All of which has become impossible to fix due to entrenched political forces.
So I don't blame anyone who evades taxes. Good for them. (I don't do it, btw. I just morally support anyone who makes that difficult decision.) Taxes should not be mandatory anyway. You want a driver's license? Show an "infrastructure tax payer" receipt. You want a cop to show up for an emergency? You better do the same. People WOULD pay for it. Just look at how many people pay for all kinds of insurance. Military costs would be paid through import duties and sales taxes.
Or the other option is to allow a line-item income tax. Where a taxpayer could pick and choose what programs they want to fund. I would support that. What we have now is nothing more than an oligarchy shaking down their subjects. The battle is always between them, what part of the meat they'll get. It never occurs to them that killing the animal was wrong. The average taxpayer has no voice in the media and no choice at the poll. Both parties don't dare to challenge the status-quo. In fact, they fight brutally for the system.
Whew, good thing we're not a democracy.
I'm one of your fans on here. Here's why I don't like H.264, for starters I run Linux on a few of my systems and there's no Quicktime available on it. On my Windows systems I don't install Quicktime because it's bloated. It tries to run ALL the time by default, seriously what a ridiculous thing for a media player. Not to mention that it installs a bunch of unrelated junk - like Bonjour.
I've used H.264 for quite a while. I was thrilled when it became available as a streaming format under Flash.The superiority of H.264 is debatable however, just like the debate between Ogg/Vorbis and MP3. End users can't tell the difference anyway. Google has a huge monetary cost associated with using an inefficient codec - YouTube. That cost would dwarf licensing costs by a long shot.
I think we're literally seeing intelligent people at Google advocating a technological change which ultimately is in the public interest. You can't support open source software while proprietary systems like H.264 are in use. It creates an artificial barrier into entry in the market to free software by causing unwitting users to entrust their personal information to a format they must pay to use. There's no positive for ordinary people with H.264, none. Google has just gained a lot of points in my book.
I remove it from my linux boxes as well. I realized one day that there was no software that I use that was written in Java. Not a single thing. Problem solved.
Ha, I had a Java free 2010 because Java is irrelevant, starting on a Java free 2011 because it's a security concern.
I think you're confusing education and intelligence. It is the informed opinion of a large segment of the population that joining the military is a stupid thing to do. Not simply uninformed, we're talking about room temperature intelligence quotient. Therefore you would expect a great deal of stupid people in the military. The fact that these stupid people get free college is irrelevant.
Although I want to say that I don't necessarily believe everyone in the military is stupid. On the contrary, it seems like they start out stupid and leave being some of the best human beings I've ever met.
If you're one of those Second Amendment nuts, you really need to read your history book on why it was passed. Here's a hint: Contrary to popular Second Amendment nut mantra, it was to defend the United States against outsiders, not to attack the United States and its institutions yourself. Duh.
Not a second amendment nut here, just a history buff. Unfortunately you're wrong, several of the founding father's (including Thomas Jefferson) espoused gun ownership for the exact reason he mentions - to keep the government honest. It was their opinion that governments oppress people and when in the course of human events it becomes necessary to sever (by force) the ties that bind the people to them... well it should be done. All of the founders took up guns and shot and killed the current people in power in their government - even when they were vastly outnumbered and unpopular. Only 30% of the people at the time were in favor of the revolution. To the perspective of most people in the world at the time the American revolution was completely insane and destined for failure.
yeah, I'm not sure what Vista you're using but it's not the same as mine. Vista was a miserable pile of crap, particularly on a memory starved system - which every system that I used that ran Vista always was. It was slow, always swapping and .... cludgey. My laptop doubled in speed when I installed Windows 7, even on a fresh install it was miserable under Vista. Now I've moved everything over to Ubuntu and it's even better.
Yeah, this got me really appreciating Bitcoin. I think if we all start doing business withe people using BitCoins then it'll really fix the whole problem.
One of the reasons I moved from Perl to Ruby was Bundler and Capistrano. These really fix the problem of instant multi-server deployment AND upgrades. It's a beautiful thing! http://gembundler.com/ https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano
I once got in trouble with my boss for going to a porn site: Freashmeat.net
Yeah, I think P did stand for Perl. Believe me, I was once a huge Perl fan. I went into PHP because the market went that way, not because I liked it. All the big commercial frameworks I've written were written for mod_perl, not PHP. It's just, as nasty and unreadable and ... horrible as PHP code is, it's faster to develop than mod_perl. In my opinion. Rails is the first system I've used that does not lead to nasty, unreadable spaghetti code. Everything about it encourages separation of logic and code in a way that benefits the programmer, instead of hinders. I think that Prudence is another great framework. There's plenty of others out there. But at the moment Rails seems to have the most momentum.
-1 Troll
Rails is dead? Ruby is "just perl with less powerful syntax"? I think we have someone here who has never learned Rails (or any other new language or framework, for that matter.) The thing Rails did was brought together MVC, ORM and "meta-programming" into a well integrated framework. I've written or been on teams writing several commercial frameworks. I've used nearly all of the open source frameworks and CMS products in my development career. Including the Rails rip-offs like CakePHP. Nothing is as good as Rails. There's a reason why Rails drives people into Ruby development, it's wonderfully elegant, effective and allows for flexibility and nearly instant development. Normally you can have one or the other.
I know it's a pain to keep up with the constantly moving world of web development. However, it is necessary. I started with Perl CGI (in 1998), then moved to PHP and LAMP and now I've moved to Ruby. The improvement is really just as big as the move from Perl/CGI.pm to PHP. This video demonstrates the improvement I'm talking about, he doesn't pick Rails as his choice. I disagree with him of course. But it does show just how big the imporvement is.
Apple has made software compatibility ideological. Anyone who unlocks their iPhone is now a political dissident. Anyone who leaves Apple and jumps ship is now a defector. Remember, they're censoring A MAGAZINE because of the content! Can you imagine Microsoft preventing Word and Publisher from writing articles that criticize Microsoft? Or hooking the printer driver from preventing them from being printed? This is where this is going, don't think Apple wouldn't do it if it could.
As a refugee from the Amiga, I remember Microsoft in the 90s. Never forgot or forgave them for their behavior either. And yes, Microsoft has put the screws to any PC manufacturer who dared sell PCs without Windows pre-installed. I.e. the Microsoft tax. This was nowhere near as menacing or anti-competitive as Apple has become.
I think you're overplaying Apple's coolness. The bloom has faded on the rose. I have more hipster friends with Android devices than with iPhones now. iPhones are soooooo 2006. Now it's the me-too followers who buy iPhones.
It would be more like designing Chevy vehicles to drive only on roads that Chevy approves of. Then banning all roads that go near Ford dealerships.
What Apple is doing is unconscionable. I have always been anti-Microsoft, in this regard I was always pulling for Apple. But it's important to realize WHY I was anti-Microsoft. Namely because of their anti-competitive and asshole behavior. A set of behavior that Apple has perfected and made even more grotesquely anti-consumer, anti-choice and ultimately insulting to all intelligent customers of their products. At least Microsoft had enough respect for you to give you a choice. Now you have nanny-Apple deciding what you can and cannot install on the device you purchased and now legally own.
This level of anti-competitive and just... asshole behavior has probably never been seen before, not even with Microsoft. How can Apple ever hope to become a serious part of community infrastructure when they display this level of disrespect for their customers? Is the fear that some bumbling iPhone user might accidentally install the Android magazine app and have a sudden flash of inspiration that iPhone is inferior? Why do we, as customers, take this? Not even Microsoft had the greedy foolishness to prohibit its competitor's software from running on their platform. Why don't we demand control of the devices that we have purchased? Lets hope that MeeGo can deliver a genuinely open phone experience. Ubuntu and Linux Mint both show how an app store could be done.
*whoosh*
My post was tongue-in-cheek, and it was coming from a Java programmer (me) of several years.
You're right, C++ sucks for enterprise application programming. Which is why it shouldn't ever be used for it. And for the same reasons that Java should never be used for it. Java and C++ suck at user interfaces. A person can only know this if they've both used Java and other more modern tools to create enterprise applications. See the link in my previous post for more details. It is the opposite of fast turn-around and rapid development. There are better, faster and less headache inducing ways now. Just look at how much Java IDEs suck at this, despite thousands of man-hours and great talent developing them. This is not the fault of the developers, this is the fault of the language. And it's time people begin progressing away from Java, in the same way we should avoid writing things in COBOL or APL.
The reaction to my post is kind of why I made it in the first place. Why be so upset when somebody criticizes your language? It seems to me to be a kind of fundamentalism. And the more crappy the religion the more angry and vicious are its fundamentalists.
Here we observe the later stage of the life cycle of the ancient javan fanboicus extremis. Scientists believe that the first of the species was born in the Sun Microsystems booth at a Comdex convention in the mid 1990s (reportedly from a fling between Grace Murray Hopper and James Gosling.) From there the species propagated by its strange inter-species relationship with management. Similar to the tape worm reproductive cycle (Taenia solium), the javan first infects the management of the organization by later stage infected programmers (salesmen) who have been infected coming in contact with management of the organization. Usually promises are made and buzzwords (the mating call of management) are dropped. Similar once again to the tapeworm life cycle the infection of a new host is caused by cysts being eaten. However, in this case those in the management cycle force feed the cysts to the programmer cycle. At first the new programmer recoils in disgust at the Javan experience. This is followed by the first sign of infection; browsing infective books and as the disease progresses - buying them. As the infection commences the programmer is told to like the experience, overriding any natural senses and instinct. In the second stage the programmer still has a mild distaste and at some basic level realizes they shouldn't be having the feelings they're feeling. In final stage infection the programmer can be seen tossing and turning in bed saying "pure java..... it .... must... be in .... pure java..." and things like that. During this stage it is common for programmers to begin writing everything in Java. Shortly afterward they begin reproducing by attempting to create other Java programmers. Although their chances of actual sexual reproduction go down significantly after infection.
It's easy to be immunized against javan infection, but no instant cure is now known. And immunize those you know and love. It's important to remember that ultimately this is a parasitic infection. Java causes many reams of code to be written in Java that should never be. It adds a minimum of 30% to development time. And contrary to typical management mating calls, because of the thousands more lines of code Java takes to express ideas, it costs many times more for long term support. Like COBOL before it, it rarely dies until the host dies. So the infection can only be prevented, not cured. Keep safe, and always use a prophylaxis.
I kind of like Javascript, I have written and maintained HUGE applications in many languages. To be honest, the worst was Java, not Javascript. Javascript is light, easy to understand, highly extensible (see JQuery or mootools) and once something is written to the standards it usually runs EVERYWHERE there is a reasonably modern web browser. Something which is not true of Flash or Java. Just look at how many people use it and write in it! Talk about a successful language! I'm fluent in Ruby, Python, Perl, Java and UNIX/Linux standard C. I've used C++, C#, AS3 and even Scheme on various professional jobs before. And I think I like Ruby best, but not by much. Javascript has a certain simple elegance that even Ruby doesn't have. It's what Java could have been. If Gosling hadn't been so strict type happy.