Or that unlike a lot of other languages Objective-C has a strong community which allows you to quickly and reliably find solutions to your specific problem without having to dig through books.
There is one popular computing platform that requires all programs to be written in Objective-C. There is another popular computing platform that requires all programs to be written in one of the many languages that compile to verifiably type-safe CLR bytecode, but Objective-C is not one of those languages. So if I want to develop an application for both of these platforms, in what language should I express the business logic of the application so that it can be automatically translated into Objective-C and into a CLR-friendly language?
C++ or any other C-compatible language. No, OS X does not require you to use Objective-C everywhere, they merely only make their GUI toolkit available through Objective-C bindings. If you can somehow make your program talk through a C API you can have an ObjC/Cocoa frontend talk to it. There's also Objective-C++ (so a C++ API might also work) but I haven't worked with that yet.
In case the CLR will absolutely refuse to talk to unmanaged libraries you might need to look into the possibility of C# offering data through C APIs, although that means you'll need to keep your business logic Mono-compatible.
You might also use languages with bindings to both environments like Python. Note, though, that the Python-ObjC bridge appears to have had no activity since november.
Why Free? Adobe can cash in on HTML5 by adding export functionality to the next version of their Flash authoring software. It's not that difficult; ActionScript is closely related to JavaScript and cross-compilation should be much easier than cross-compiling a different language to JavaScript.
If they're nimble (Adobe? Ha!) they can ensure that Flash stays ubiquitous as far as developers are concerned - just not client-side. After all, if the next version of Flash has HTML5 export they're much faster to market than any Free project can hope to be and they can just carry over the existing Flash developers.
They can even use HTML5 for a PR advantage: "You can help finally beat Flash... with Flash. The new Flash Professional CS6 with HTML5 export. Perfected IDE. Standards-compliant runtime." Really, this is so easy even I can come up with a sales pitch.
And where it runs it's "write once, run well in some places, less well in others". Example: Video. It works quite well on Windows but neither Flash/OS X nor Flash/Linux are known for consistently good video. I find that the easiest way to watch Flash video without constant stuttering is to circumvent the player, download the file to my hard drive and then watch it using VLC, thus completely breaking the whole streaming concept.
Flash is a decent WORM platform in theory. In practice a number of popular platforms don't have it and its video codecs are inexplicably slow on others. It's perfectly fine for vector content but for videos I'd just stick the raw file on the server and let the browser's media plugins handle it. At least until HTML5 video becomes feasible.
When I just checked iTuned first told me to go to the American App Store as the German one doesn't have it - and the American store then also told me it doesn't exist. Either this app is only available from inside the USA or it's gone.
You don't need the ISO? What country do you live in that doesn't follow any international standards at all?
What the GP meant with "ISO rigging" is that Microsoft successfully managed to bribe their way to an ISO standard, undermining faith in the ISO and international standards in the process. That's quite a bit of collateral damage they were willing to accept in order to protect their OOXML format (the standardized version of which, semi-amusingly, they still haven't managed to implement).
What if they note a certain behavior as problematic or conflicting with future firmware versions? The most obvious ways to counter it is to amend the rules, which will of course affect already-approved apps.
Yes, Apple shouldn't have approved apps that will later be found violating the rules but then again they only have limited knowledge of what they're going to do and see in the future.
Apple can choose between cutting off already-approved apps, applying their rules inconsistently based on seniority and never changing the App Store rules (and, by extension, never deprecating any API calls and behaviors). Neither option is perfect but the first one does make the most sense.
Careful, though. I haven't yet seen any moral choice system that worked, except for those where any putcome is presented free of judgement. For instance, the KOTOR games allow various choices which lead you to the light or dark side of the force. Either path is presented as appropriate, though. The system works.
And then you get stinkers like BioShock where you get to choose between being Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler. No, there is no in-between; you're either an inhumanly virtuous paragon of all that is good or you're evil incarnate. This is how moral systems are usually implemented: There's pure good and there's evil.
The closest we've come to a working judgemental system is Fallout where you gain notoriety if you do a lot of bad deeds. But again it's a perfectly valid path that makes the game only mildly more difficult and opens up new avenues.
Your second paragraph is a much better approach than "we hold the player's actions to an arbitrary set of rules and declare him evil if he doesn't follow them". It shows that you went into this thinking about how to turn a real-life problem into a compelling gameplay element instead of how to turn the problem into a game's focus.
You forgot concern number 4: The list would've been trivial to extend with non-child porn sites, turning it into a general censorship platform. In fact, even before the law was passed several politicians stated that they'd like to see a few other things put on there.
They couldn't have made it any more blatant without naming the law "law for raping of the constitution and censoring of the internet; oh, and also child porn".
Perhaps because the games in question have not yet been rated or the rating was rejected? Unrated games are treated like ones with an USK 18 rating - you may not sell them to minors. In addition, several companies like Microsoft completely refuse to bring any unrated game to market.
Note that the "no advertising" rule is related to the Index, onto which only unrated games can be put since 2003. Which, by the way, is one reason why companies won't release unrated games.
I think you need to find another word in English to express what you mean here. A "course" is a class, a series of lectures - i.e., what specific things you'll study in a semester. Are you saying that students at Bremen go through half of a semester without even committing to what they will be studying? How on earth can they actually learn anything if they've skipped half the semester?
You got me right there. We usually can't skip half the semester, though.
Our course structure (only for CS, by the way; it might be similar for other study courses but I don't have any data) is rather unusual: We have no written tests at all. Instead we have two kinds of courses: Regular courses and seminars.
In a regular course you get several exercise sheets over the course of the semester, which are usually designed to be solved by groups of students. These are the written part of your grade and can theoretically come as soon as the semester has started. You usually need to get X% of the total points and Y% of each sheet's points in order to be eligible for the final test, which is a fifteen-minute oral test where you prove that the other members of your group didn't just drag you along.
Alternatively you can skip exercise sheets altogether and do a harder thirty-minute oral test at the end. You usually won't have a reasonable chance of passing without having attended regularly and having done the exercise sheets helps to prepare. It's up to the lecturer to set a point at which you decide what you want to do; several let you decide at the very end of the semester so you can even switch plans halfway through if you missed a sheet or something.
Seminars are, well, seminars. Attendance is expected and you need to prepare and hold a talk as well as later write a paper on it. While theoretically no course can have mandatory attendance (yeah, great law they came up with recently) seminars usually get around this by requiring regular participation in the discussion segments.
The "no signup until halfway in" rule is mostly there to allow people to decide that certain courses aren't for them without having to have an aborted course on their record. The number of courses you do in a semester can shrink after the first few weeks but it rarely grows unless you want to do a long oral test and feel very confident about your ability to catch up.
As I just pointed out in another post it might be due to the amazingly vague way the questionnaire is written in. I doubt any emotionally stable person is going to score substantially higher than 50%.
Well, what is "often"? I'd assume that it means the majority of all cases. Whenever you hear about someone who is less fortunate for you, you feel bad. Not everyone but about 70% of all cases perhaps. Anough for you to notice it as the default reaction.
That's the problem with the questionnaire: It constantly uses words like "often", "sometimes" and liberally peppers the questions with "very much" or "a great deal". Let's look at question 4:
Other people's misfortunes do not usually disturb me a great deal.
I'd say that any sane person would answer with "Describes me very well". I read "disturb me a great deal" as the misfurtunes causing mental anguish almost to the point of trauma and "usually" as even stronger than "often" - perhaps 80 to 90%.
I'm sorry but while I feel bad for someone who broke his leg I'm not going to require counseling afterwards and I don't think any person without some kind of disorder would, especially not every single time they hear about someone having bad luck.
Given that questionnaire I'd come across as a lot more coldhearted than I am because the way I see it they're asking for an unrealistically high amount of caring - or because they're asking their questions in a convoluted and vague way. I think question five is the worst offender:
When I see someone being treated unfairly, I sometimes don't feel very much pity for them.
How much is "very much" pity? How often is "sometimes"? Do they really assume that seeing anyone get treated unfairly in any way will completely ruin the day of most people? Reliably so?
I think it's not a question of bias but rather a question of a badly-written questionnaire.
Studying used to be nearly free in Germany (well, usually about 200 EUR/semester in administrative fees). Recently - and to much furor - we introduced tuitions so the state could pay the universities less. Now you can expect to pay a couple hundred Euros per semester plus material expenses.
Well, unless you study in Bremen; the tuition law here was found unconstitutional and the senate never got around to making one that works so we're still at twohundredsomething EUR/semester, which of course includes free public tram and bus rides in the entire federal land (and half the neighboring one as well) and free train rides to certain other cities. After all, university students aren't made of money.
And in case you wonder: No, we don't pay for courses. In fact in Bremen you don't even sign up for them until halfway through the semester.
By which you mean "accelerate its demise". The sun runs on fusion, not fission. Heavy elements (like the stuff that makes up nuclear waste) lose energy in this scenario, not generate it.
Apart form the fact that all our nuclear waste combined ought to have an effect roughly comparable to a speck of dust ending up in a nuclear plant.
Actually, do this and expect the text to change. I've heard that if you regularly look at text and expect it to stay the same your brain will expect this in a dream and actually put in enough effort to give you immutable text (at least for as long as it takes you to "realize" it's not a dream). If you expect the text to change your brain will happily oblige, giving you your indicator.
Confusing and vapid. Eugh. The film does a good job of conveying the feeling of a dream but apart from a few scenes it would've been better without the dialogue.
Slashdot Mirror
Or that unlike a lot of other languages Objective-C has a strong community which allows you to quickly and reliably find solutions to your specific problem without having to dig through books.
Armchair science is fun!
There is one popular computing platform that requires all programs to be written in Objective-C. There is another popular computing platform that requires all programs to be written in one of the many languages that compile to verifiably type-safe CLR bytecode, but Objective-C is not one of those languages. So if I want to develop an application for both of these platforms, in what language should I express the business logic of the application so that it can be automatically translated into Objective-C and into a CLR-friendly language?
C++ or any other C-compatible language. No, OS X does not require you to use Objective-C everywhere, they merely only make their GUI toolkit available through Objective-C bindings. If you can somehow make your program talk through a C API you can have an ObjC/Cocoa frontend talk to it. There's also Objective-C++ (so a C++ API might also work) but I haven't worked with that yet.
In case the CLR will absolutely refuse to talk to unmanaged libraries you might need to look into the possibility of C# offering data through C APIs, although that means you'll need to keep your business logic Mono-compatible.
You might also use languages with bindings to both environments like Python. Note, though, that the Python-ObjC bridge appears to have had no activity since november.
Why Free? Adobe can cash in on HTML5 by adding export functionality to the next version of their Flash authoring software. It's not that difficult; ActionScript is closely related to JavaScript and cross-compilation should be much easier than cross-compiling a different language to JavaScript.
If they're nimble (Adobe? Ha!) they can ensure that Flash stays ubiquitous as far as developers are concerned - just not client-side. After all, if the next version of Flash has HTML5 export they're much faster to market than any Free project can hope to be and they can just carry over the existing Flash developers.
They can even use HTML5 for a PR advantage: "You can help finally beat Flash... with Flash. The new Flash Professional CS6 with HTML5 export. Perfected IDE. Standards-compliant runtime." Really, this is so easy even I can come up with a sales pitch.
And where it runs it's "write once, run well in some places, less well in others". Example: Video. It works quite well on Windows but neither Flash/OS X nor Flash/Linux are known for consistently good video. I find that the easiest way to watch Flash video without constant stuttering is to circumvent the player, download the file to my hard drive and then watch it using VLC, thus completely breaking the whole streaming concept.
Flash is a decent WORM platform in theory. In practice a number of popular platforms don't have it and its video codecs are inexplicably slow on others. It's perfectly fine for vector content but for videos I'd just stick the raw file on the server and let the browser's media plugins handle it. At least until HTML5 video becomes feasible.
But somehow I doubt Adobe will save everyone of us, even if they do manage to become kings of the impossible.
And then he bought Apple for minus 400 million Dollars.
When I just checked iTuned first told me to go to the American App Store as the German one doesn't have it - and the American store then also told me it doesn't exist. Either this app is only available from inside the USA or it's gone.
Great. Now I imagine him talking in a bad Austrian accent while everything explodes for no reason.
"Code vith me if you vant to live."
And of course: "GET TO DA COMPILA!"
No, sorry. Thanks to Randall Munroe I already won the game long ago. Best thing the man has ever done for me.
I wanted to point out that Enterprise was worse but you're right; that show never happened.
You're right. Road Trip With Captain Janeway And Her Wacky Crew is high art compared to The Petrelli Family Breaks The World.
You don't need the ISO? What country do you live in that doesn't follow any international standards at all?
What the GP meant with "ISO rigging" is that Microsoft successfully managed to bribe their way to an ISO standard, undermining faith in the ISO and international standards in the process. That's quite a bit of collateral damage they were willing to accept in order to protect their OOXML format (the standardized version of which, semi-amusingly, they still haven't managed to implement).
What if they note a certain behavior as problematic or conflicting with future firmware versions? The most obvious ways to counter it is to amend the rules, which will of course affect already-approved apps.
Yes, Apple shouldn't have approved apps that will later be found violating the rules but then again they only have limited knowledge of what they're going to do and see in the future.
Apple can choose between cutting off already-approved apps, applying their rules inconsistently based on seniority and never changing the App Store rules (and, by extension, never deprecating any API calls and behaviors). Neither option is perfect but the first one does make the most sense.
That's why he's bidding for one, of course.
moral choice systems
Careful, though. I haven't yet seen any moral choice system that worked, except for those where any putcome is presented free of judgement. For instance, the KOTOR games allow various choices which lead you to the light or dark side of the force. Either path is presented as appropriate, though. The system works.
And then you get stinkers like BioShock where you get to choose between being Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler. No, there is no in-between; you're either an inhumanly virtuous paragon of all that is good or you're evil incarnate. This is how moral systems are usually implemented: There's pure good and there's evil.
The closest we've come to a working judgemental system is Fallout where you gain notoriety if you do a lot of bad deeds. But again it's a perfectly valid path that makes the game only mildly more difficult and opens up new avenues.
Your second paragraph is a much better approach than "we hold the player's actions to an arbitrary set of rules and declare him evil if he doesn't follow them". It shows that you went into this thinking about how to turn a real-life problem into a compelling gameplay element instead of how to turn the problem into a game's focus.
You forgot concern number 4: The list would've been trivial to extend with non-child porn sites, turning it into a general censorship platform. In fact, even before the law was passed several politicians stated that they'd like to see a few other things put on there.
They couldn't have made it any more blatant without naming the law "law for raping of the constitution and censoring of the internet; oh, and also child porn".
Perhaps because the games in question have not yet been rated or the rating was rejected? Unrated games are treated like ones with an USK 18 rating - you may not sell them to minors. In addition, several companies like Microsoft completely refuse to bring any unrated game to market.
Note that the "no advertising" rule is related to the Index, onto which only unrated games can be put since 2003. Which, by the way, is one reason why companies won't release unrated games.
I think you need to find another word in English to express what you mean here. A "course" is a class, a series of lectures - i.e., what specific things you'll study in a semester. Are you saying that students at Bremen go through half of a semester without even committing to what they will be studying? How on earth can they actually learn anything if they've skipped half the semester?
You got me right there. We usually can't skip half the semester, though.
Our course structure (only for CS, by the way; it might be similar for other study courses but I don't have any data) is rather unusual: We have no written tests at all. Instead we have two kinds of courses: Regular courses and seminars.
In a regular course you get several exercise sheets over the course of the semester, which are usually designed to be solved by groups of students. These are the written part of your grade and can theoretically come as soon as the semester has started. You usually need to get X% of the total points and Y% of each sheet's points in order to be eligible for the final test, which is a fifteen-minute oral test where you prove that the other members of your group didn't just drag you along.
Alternatively you can skip exercise sheets altogether and do a harder thirty-minute oral test at the end. You usually won't have a reasonable chance of passing without having attended regularly and having done the exercise sheets helps to prepare. It's up to the lecturer to set a point at which you decide what you want to do; several let you decide at the very end of the semester so you can even switch plans halfway through if you missed a sheet or something.
Seminars are, well, seminars. Attendance is expected and you need to prepare and hold a talk as well as later write a paper on it. While theoretically no course can have mandatory attendance (yeah, great law they came up with recently) seminars usually get around this by requiring regular participation in the discussion segments.
The "no signup until halfway in" rule is mostly there to allow people to decide that certain courses aren't for them without having to have an aborted course on their record. The number of courses you do in a semester can shrink after the first few weeks but it rarely grows unless you want to do a long oral test and feel very confident about your ability to catch up.
As I just pointed out in another post it might be due to the amazingly vague way the questionnaire is written in. I doubt any emotionally stable person is going to score substantially higher than 50%.
That's the problem with the questionnaire: It constantly uses words like "often", "sometimes" and liberally peppers the questions with "very much" or "a great deal". Let's look at question 4:
I'd say that any sane person would answer with "Describes me very well". I read "disturb me a great deal" as the misfurtunes causing mental anguish almost to the point of trauma and "usually" as even stronger than "often" - perhaps 80 to 90%.
I'm sorry but while I feel bad for someone who broke his leg I'm not going to require counseling afterwards and I don't think any person without some kind of disorder would, especially not every single time they hear about someone having bad luck.
Given that questionnaire I'd come across as a lot more coldhearted than I am because the way I see it they're asking for an unrealistically high amount of caring - or because they're asking their questions in a convoluted and vague way. I think question five is the worst offender:
How much is "very much" pity? How often is "sometimes"? Do they really assume that seeing anyone get treated unfairly in any way will completely ruin the day of most people? Reliably so?
I think it's not a question of bias but rather a question of a badly-written questionnaire.
Well, you probably need a visa.
Studying used to be nearly free in Germany (well, usually about 200 EUR/semester in administrative fees). Recently - and to much furor - we introduced tuitions so the state could pay the universities less. Now you can expect to pay a couple hundred Euros per semester plus material expenses.
Well, unless you study in Bremen; the tuition law here was found unconstitutional and the senate never got around to making one that works so we're still at twohundredsomething EUR/semester, which of course includes free public tram and bus rides in the entire federal land (and half the neighboring one as well) and free train rides to certain other cities. After all, university students aren't made of money.
And in case you wonder: No, we don't pay for courses. In fact in Bremen you don't even sign up for them until halfway through the semester.
And that, children, is how summer came into existence.
By which you mean "accelerate its demise". The sun runs on fusion, not fission. Heavy elements (like the stuff that makes up nuclear waste) lose energy in this scenario, not generate it.
Apart form the fact that all our nuclear waste combined ought to have an effect roughly comparable to a speck of dust ending up in a nuclear plant.
Actually, do this and expect the text to change. I've heard that if you regularly look at text and expect it to stay the same your brain will expect this in a dream and actually put in enough effort to give you immutable text (at least for as long as it takes you to "realize" it's not a dream). If you expect the text to change your brain will happily oblige, giving you your indicator.
Confusing and vapid. Eugh. The film does a good job of conveying the feeling of a dream but apart from a few scenes it would've been better without the dialogue.