Maybe Steve is looking to sell his PC division, too!
I was about to start laughing really, really, hard, but hey, he sold off the hardware division at NeXT, so he's sold off PC hardware divisions before!
Of course, NeXT's hardware division wasn't making money. Apple's is. It's just not going to happen.
But as long as you're cooking up insane scenarios, you could get really wacky with this and spin a scenario where IBM buys Apple's PowerPC desktop-production ( thus giving themselves an entire line of PowerPC-based hardware ), and Apple sells OS X ( for Intel and PowerPC ) and iPods and other 'digital lifestyle' software and hardware products... although IBM shouldn't need to come to Apple to buy that stuff...
har har it just gets more crazy... I wouldn't bet on any of this stuff, let's put it that way.
I have to agree, it's a pretty silly idea. I expect more, possibly closer IBM/Apple partnerships, but don't really see the business case for a merger.
Still, I think IBM could pull it off ( IFF Steve Jobs wanted them to ), technically. IBM's market cap is something like 6 times Apple's. What such a move would do to IBM's stock price is an interesting question.
Still, until Steve Jobs starts knocking on doors looking to sell Apple, it's just silly to talk about stuff like this- it's just not going to happen unless it's Steve's idea... rrright. That's what he's been building the company up for, a sale! Ha!
Ok, now that I think about it like that, this is the dumbest story slashdot has covered since, uh, the last really dumb story... which would probably that one about the big "young people use the internet" news...
I can't imagine support staff being cut at all actually.
I can imagine it, but it's either terrifying or funny, depending on how sadistic you are. Somewhere, someone has a PHB who decided his employees didn't need a someone staffing an IT help desk...
Yes. I'm aware the iRiver costs more. That's why I mentioned the price difference.
Oh! Well, that really is interesting. It would have been nice if you had mentioned that in your original post. I ( and clearly at least a few others ) just assumed you were gunning for the iPod...
And yea, what's up with the iRiver costing more? I guess they don't think folks looking at non-iPod hard drive based players are looking based on price ? That's probably a fair assumption, actually, but that does make it seem like they've given up competing against the iPod.
the best thing one gets from going to a top-notch school is the connections and networking opportunities.
agreed. My experience has shown that to be true. On the other hand, my current gig is from a networking opportunity presented by my wife's volunteer work, not my university connections. Then again, my university-connection gigs paid better...
Unless you want to go for an ivy league type of degree (MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, etc.), as long as the college offers a strong program, where you go to school has ZERO effect on your life after your first job
....
I am sure to be flamed by people who went to well known schools and swear by it, but none of the people I work with who have BS desgrees went anywhere recognizable. It is all about how you perform.
I went to one of those schools you mention, and I'm definitely not going to flame you for that. If the guy wanted to be something other than a programmer, I'd tell him he's nuts, but as it is... well, he should get into a better school if he can, but not neccessarily a well-known one.
On the other hand, you might want to avoid schools known as the best party school... Chico State was infamous about 13 years ago...
People who have a CS degree from a well known school will say "most definitely!" so they can justify their own.
I most certainly would not say "most definitely!". I got my degree 10 years ago, from a well-known school. With an emphasis on C and it's object-oriented supersets, C++ and Objective-C. The only things we didn't have 10 years ago are Java, C#, and a crappy job market.
And yea, guys like you with no degree in positions of hiring authority do piss off guys like me. You suck. Still, I'll come work for you if you double my current salary.;-)
... but I'm not in a great position to say, since my degree is from a fairly prestigious university. I suspect the name recognition of my school helped a bit early in my career, but I don't think it's been a terribly large boost to my job prospects since those first 3 years, and really, it's impossible to know if it was ever a factor.
I've worked with a lot of programmers in a fair number of companies, and it's not always the case that the leads come from big-name schools. I've found that employers are far more hung up on results and winning personalities ( really! ) than diplomas... and as far as getting a job, your connections are likely to matter more than your degree. Which, honestly, might be where a big-name school might give you the biggest advantage.
Learning how to run an interview and having good references are really key to a successful job search as well. Experience counts probably more than anything.
Still, I suppose your dad does have a point. If you can 'trade up' to a better school ( even if not more well known ), why would you not ??
Re:What would sit well next to an iPod?
on
Three Books On The iPod
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The receipt and the price difference for an iRiver
I know you're a troll... because the price difference you allege doesn't exist.
I'm happy to check out a link that shows otherwise, and bad-mouth the moderators for calling you a troll as a result, but... until you do, everyone has the link above, showing clearly that, if anything, the 40GB iPod can be had cheaper than the 40GB iRiver.
There are some other 40GB players that are actually a bit cheaper than the iPod, if you weren't just a troll you might have mentioned one of them, or provided a link to back up your troll. Sadly, you're just a troll...
Just to be clear, I don't own an iPod and could care less which 40GB MP3 player is cheaper ( I'm not buying one, sorry ), I just like to bug people who don't back up their baseless claims with at least links to other baseless claims...
An alternative is to offer a tooltip with an explanation. How hard is that?
For any reasonably complex bit of software, it's really, really hard. How many different reasons for the disabled menu could there be? Many. In some cases, very many. Once there are two reasons, that's too many for a tooltip.
Software isn't written like that because it takes enough time and effort to write software as it is. It could be written like that. Someone probably has written such a piece of software. But it you never saw it, because it probably never made it to market.
If I delete the only copy outside of keychain, is it unreasonable to expect me to be able to export it?
No, it's not unreasonable, until you realize that Keychain Access is the crappiest app Apple has seen fit to include in OS X...
The inability to export has been fixed in Tiger, HOWEVER it still will not let you export your own private keys. Quite annoying.
And it continues to be the ugly stepchild of OS X. What gives? I'm tempted to chalk it up to "security is hard" and "they're leaving out features to keep it secure", but I doubt it. There's probably just one coder assigned to Keychain Access, and they have other, more important responsibilities, so it's left to 'later'...
A good example of this is the "export" function in OS X's KeyChain Access tool. It is ALWAYS (as in 100% of the time) greyed out.
That just happens to be my all-time least-favorite OS X application. Sounds like a bug in the Keychain to me. Not terribly shocking. KeyChain Access is definitely something Apple has yet to get right. If a dialog was to be shown to describe why "Export" is disabled, it'd probably say "This feature is not yet implemented".
Not that I'm really clear on what you'd export to... the cert had to exist outside the keychain to begin with, so you shouldn't need to export those... 'keys' don't really make sense outside of another Keychain, which is an "add" or admin function. Did I mention I dislike Keychain Access? It's like Apple forgot about it or something...
It looks like you have little experience with applications other than very simple ones, where the conditions causing a menu item to be grayed are clear.
I've seen lots of applications graying out menu items for _very_ obscure reasons.
First, dude, get an account, nobody reads AC posts anymore. Second, no, I work with extremely complicated UIs all of the time. Even the UI I use most often - XCode - has a pretty complex set of menu items, though it's no MS Word or Adobe Photoshop. ( or Illustrator, etc ). Still, I don't readily know what needs to be done to access some of those less-frequently-used menu items, but usually I can figure it out pretty quickly, and if I can't, I'll look at the documentation; as a user of complex software, I expect to do that from time to time.
Third, the fact that some menu items disable for very obscure reasons actually helps my argument that a dialog describing that obscure reason won't solve the 'problem' here - it'll probably be wrong more often than right, and will likely confuse the user even when it's right. The more obscure and difficult to describe the reason for the disabled menu, the more difficult that description becomes to put in a dialog box. Again, what you really need to do is understand what that menu item does.
That does leave a documentation and training problem, though, and raises the important question of why the design is so complex. What a menu item or button does ( and what is needed to enable it's action ) should be obvious from the context of the UI. If it's not, there is maybe a better UI design which could make the needed context clear.
My favorite: the mysteriously dimmed menu options. Why are those darned things grey anyway?
Uh, they're grey because they're disabled ?
I'm sorry, I don't understand how this is a design flaw. You'd rather the menu in question _always_ do something? What do you want copied when nothing is selected? Would you rather the menu was enabled always, but just beeped or did something else ( i.e. not the desired action ) when clicked ?
The menu is grey to let you know it can't do anything until some other action is taken. It doesn't just disappear because location/muscle memory is how we remember where that menu is. What would be the better design? How is a disabled menu a flaw, again? You'd rather get a dialog box telling you that you need to do something before clicking here... how could you have known ? Why is clicking "copy" bringing up a dialog box ?
TSFA says: The software "knows" why it has dimmed the item. Some decision or decisions led to the flag being set. At the same time as the flag is set, the reason why should be made available. If the user clicks on a grayed-out option, the reason or reasons should be made known. And none of those, "Gosh, Oh, Gee, it could be any one of these 14 reasons or maybe something else" messages. The message needs to be intelligent, responsive, and accurate. This one is important. This one needs to be done right.
Ok, so the issue is that you want to know why the menu is disabled. So, which of 20 different on-screen objects do you want a message to indicate could be selected to enable "copy" ? Even if you manage to get the message "right", how useful is the message "You must select something to copy." going to be after the second time you see it? At that point the greyed menu tells me everything I needed to know.
Gee, I wonder why that one hasn't been fixed. Yea, that's a real design bug, right there. Just like the dock, which even my mother-in-law can use, with it's 9 bugs and all...
Now, ASCII sort and reasonably flexible data entry ( aka Bug Name: Let's you save me some work ) now, those are real design bugs. Design bugs which are usually there ( as the article notes ) doe to lazyness of the software designers/creators.
A few of these design problems I can agree with, but IMHO, if you're troubled by a disabled menu, that's a clear sign you don't understand the function of that menu, and you might want to try a menu item that isn't greyed out, like that one labeled "Help".
Spend some time in comp.sys.mac.advocacy some time. Those people are nuts.
I'm not sure it's wise to base your impression of a group of people on such a biased sampling. By the same method, I could come up with the notion that there are a LOT of wacky Linux/Windows/Republican/whatever folks out there. Not that there aren't some wacked-out fanatics in any group, but... c'mon, you have to see the problem with thinking folks who flock to comp.sys.mac.advocacy are representative.
the poll isn't about how many people already use the Mac. It's not enough that they already use a Mac, they want a perception that people are actively switching from the PC to the Mac.
What's really wacky is that you think a lot of Mac users were somehow included in this survey of what, 200 people? Statistically, there should be what, four of your "lying Mac users" in that sample? And how would they know what the poll is about? Wouldn't one of the lead-in questions be "what kind of computer do you use"?
Sorry. Nobody lied and said they were Windows users when they weren't. That idea is what is nuts.
So, what's your bias? Why are you so convinced that people saying they're considering switching must be lying, nutty Macintosh fanatics? What's your operating system of choice, Mr. Reality Master 101? Are you sure you might not be biased, just a teeny bit ?
Some number of those people are Apple users already, and I don't think they're above lying to pollsters in order to artificially inflate Mac popularity.
What a weird thing to think. Why would they not just say "oh, I already use a Macintosh"; wouldn't that show their support for the platform more than saying they're thinking about switching?
I think you're not being exactly rational in your bias against OS X users.
Browsers aren't responsible for sandboxing plugins--in fact, they couldn't do it if they wanted to. Sandboxing is exclusively a function of the language and its runtime, in this case Java. If Sun's Java plugin allows the execution of dangerous code by untrusted code, it is Sun's fault.
Which explains why the problem doesn't affect Opera or um, anything on OS X ?
You're sure it's not the plugin implementation more than Java itself?
Your point that in this case it's Sun's implementation that's buggy is well taken... but the problem is not so much Java as it is the plugin, or it'd be a problem on all browser platforms.
You're the post I was looking for that got this right. If you do a Google search on "Perfect 10" and "lawsuit", you get quite an eyeful... from a quick glance, it looks like they've sued some "age verification" services like AdultCheck, among others... the list seems to go on and on.
Oddly enough, I haven't found an article where they win, so you have to wonder... maybe they're funded well enough by settlements that they figure they can just go on suing...
Your knowledge of Fortran is based on the outdated Fortran 77 standard. Since then, there have been three standards, Fortran 90, 95, and recently 2003. Please consult a Fortran tutorial at http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Language s/Fortran/Tutorials/Fortran_90_and_95/ before spreading misinformation in the future. About ten Fortran 95 compilers exist -- see http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Language s/Fortran/Compilers/
It's definitely true the most of the Fortran I've had to work with has been Fortran77 code- that's just the era when it was written. Fortran 90 I do know a bit about and it is fundamentally improved.
Ok, so to bring this back to the ( now very old ) actual topic... uh, I don't suppose there is a Fortran 95-compliant compiler for OS X? Huh, I don't see one. Are there any that are freely available for development use on *any* platform? I only found one that was even free for personal evaluation in that list... Not to take away from your point, but looking at the list in the link you provided, I'm guessing that even today, _most_ Fortran is likely to be to be of the Fortran77 variety.
Nice example of FortranI/O.
But, um, how do you read a vector of integers when you don't know the length of the vector, for example?
Anyway, I'm *really* not here to bag on Fortran, if it's your thing, great. It's not my thing, I'd much rather write Objective-C code, or C for that matter. If you want to do future generations of programmers a favor, you'll write your new code in C- the younger guys don't know from Fortran. Just my humble opinion.
I don't know why I even bother, but it beats working...
Objective-C is slow, it eats memory, and its syntax is very verbose. Most languages don't have 120-some character method names. And for all that, it's still unsafe, and has very little in the way of static type-checking, and no garbage collector (a refcounter where you have to twiddle references a lot doesn't count). I would not call it "the most developer-friendly language every created." I'd much rather code in Python or O'Caml.
You want fast and a garbage collector?? Objective-C is slow? Um... not terribly. Large memory footprint? Not unless you're forgetting to deallocate objects, or just have a bad design. 120-some-character method names? Not typically, and verbose method names are actually good, if occasionally overdone. Yea, it's unsafe, it's a superset of C, of course it's unsafe. You really think Objective-C is less memory-hungry than Python or O'Caml? Interesting... I'd like to see your benchmarks there. It's clear we have different ideas of what makes a language developer-friendly. Access to C routines makes Objective-C developer-friendly in my book.
C is not a good choice for anything but the core of most games, as it is too developer-unfriendly and lacks in features (like OO, anonymous functions, garbage collection...). While excellent for low-level code, it's not really in the running for high-level.
C is great for the core of most calculation routines of any type. Which is how it is often used in the context of an Objective-C program. You don't always need high-level.
C++ is a good language for games, but many people would rather have something higher-level. It's unsafe, but many people will overlook.
Now you're making me wonder how many Python or O'Caml games there are out there. I guess there must be a few... any commercial ones? C++ when written correctly is awfully high-level, no? I can't belive you'd complain about Objective-C syntax and not C++ syntax...
Java is slow and verbose, and therefore painful for game development.
First, slow compared to what? Link me up with that Java/Python benchmark comparison. No, really. Something tells me you might just be making this stuff up, repeating something you read somewhere or something. Java used to be slow. Starting up a JVM can be slow. Some Swing drawing routines on some platforms can be slow. I'm also wondering, huh, do you think of programming in terms of anything besides games? Again, verbose in a programming language == readable == very good.
Maybe they want to code in Python?
Power to you. XCode documentation even has pointers as to how to set up a project for Python. Is Python sytax really less verbose than Objective-C? Is it really faster? Does it really have better, more complete libraries? Is there really a reason other than "I want to", which- don't get me wrong - I think is great reason... just maybe not one you can sell to the other folks working on your project, if you get my drift. Really, yea, Python is cool, but... why not Objective-C, again?
Slashdot Mirror
I was about to start laughing really, really, hard, but hey, he sold off the hardware division at NeXT, so he's sold off PC hardware divisions before!
Of course, NeXT's hardware division wasn't making money. Apple's is. It's just not going to happen.
But as long as you're cooking up insane scenarios, you could get really wacky with this and spin a scenario where IBM buys Apple's PowerPC desktop-production ( thus giving themselves an entire line of PowerPC-based hardware ), and Apple sells OS X ( for Intel and PowerPC ) and iPods and other 'digital lifestyle' software and hardware products... although IBM shouldn't need to come to Apple to buy that stuff...
har har it just gets more crazy... I wouldn't bet on any of this stuff, let's put it that way.
Still, I think IBM could pull it off ( IFF Steve Jobs wanted them to ), technically. IBM's market cap is something like 6 times Apple's. What such a move would do to IBM's stock price is an interesting question.
Still, until Steve Jobs starts knocking on doors looking to sell Apple, it's just silly to talk about stuff like this- it's just not going to happen unless it's Steve's idea... rrright. That's what he's been building the company up for, a sale! Ha!
Ok, now that I think about it like that, this is the dumbest story slashdot has covered since, uh, the last really dumb story... which would probably that one about the big "young people use the internet" news...
The U.S. has no hope of ever being as cool as Japan, no matter how much they love to copy aspects of our, um, pop 'culture'...
Insert I-unit joke here...
Well, it will take care of the second most annoying part of any IT-related job...
Of course, we'll have lots of fun with systems constantly rebooting in attempts to 'fix' themselves... that'll be fun.
Nothing is less fun than a literalist.
So now we just have to figure out a way to steal the internet from the natives?
The internet must really piss off "governance and control" guys like Tenet. It's awfully hard to control something you can't own...
Dual-tuner TiVo. Of course, the only one I can actually think of is the DirecTV TiVo... which I have.
The advantage of a dual-tuner Tivo can not be understated.
This problem is huge, though, and it sucks. There's nothing worse than missing the last couple of minutes of a show.
To the networks: fine, start your shows not on the hour. But tell us you're doing it in your schedule!
I can imagine it, but it's either terrifying or funny, depending on how sadistic you are. Somewhere, someone has a PHB who decided his employees didn't need a someone staffing an IT help desk...
Oh!
Well, that really is interesting. It would have been nice if you had mentioned that in your original post. I ( and clearly at least a few others ) just assumed you were gunning for the iPod...
And yea, what's up with the iRiver costing more? I guess they don't think folks looking at non-iPod hard drive based players are looking based on price ? That's probably a fair assumption, actually, but that does make it seem like they've given up competing against the iPod.
agreed. My experience has shown that to be true. On the other hand, my current gig is from a networking opportunity presented by my wife's volunteer work, not my university connections. Then again, my university-connection gigs paid better...
....
I am sure to be flamed by people who went to well known schools and swear by it, but none of the people I work with who have BS desgrees went anywhere recognizable. It is all about how you perform.
I went to one of those schools you mention, and I'm definitely not going to flame you for that. If the guy wanted to be something other than a programmer, I'd tell him he's nuts, but as it is... well, he should get into a better school if he can, but not neccessarily a well-known one.
On the other hand, you might want to avoid schools known as the best party school... Chico State was infamous about 13 years ago...
I most certainly would not say "most definitely!". I got my degree 10 years ago, from a well-known school. With an emphasis on C and it's object-oriented supersets, C++ and Objective-C. The only things we didn't have 10 years ago are Java, C#, and a crappy job market.
And yea, guys like you with no degree in positions of hiring authority do piss off guys like me. You suck. Still, I'll come work for you if you double my current salary. ;-)
I've worked with a lot of programmers in a fair number of companies, and it's not always the case that the leads come from big-name schools. I've found that employers are far more hung up on results and winning personalities ( really! ) than diplomas... and as far as getting a job, your connections are likely to matter more than your degree. Which, honestly, might be where a big-name school might give you the biggest advantage.
Learning how to run an interview and having good references are really key to a successful job search as well. Experience counts probably more than anything.
Still, I suppose your dad does have a point. If you can 'trade up' to a better school ( even if not more well known ), why would you not ??
I know you're a troll... because the price difference you allege doesn't exist.
I'm happy to check out a link that shows otherwise, and bad-mouth the moderators for calling you a troll as a result, but... until you do, everyone has the link above, showing clearly that, if anything, the 40GB iPod can be had cheaper than the 40GB iRiver.
There are some other 40GB players that are actually a bit cheaper than the iPod, if you weren't just a troll you might have mentioned one of them, or provided a link to back up your troll. Sadly, you're just a troll...
Just to be clear, I don't own an iPod and could care less which 40GB MP3 player is cheaper ( I'm not buying one, sorry ), I just like to bug people who don't back up their baseless claims with at least links to other baseless claims...
For any reasonably complex bit of software, it's really, really hard. How many different reasons for the disabled menu could there be? Many. In some cases, very many. Once there are two reasons, that's too many for a tooltip.
Software isn't written like that because it takes enough time and effort to write software as it is. It could be written like that. Someone probably has written such a piece of software. But it you never saw it, because it probably never made it to market.
No, it's not unreasonable, until you realize that Keychain Access is the crappiest app Apple has seen fit to include in OS X...
The inability to export has been fixed in Tiger, HOWEVER it still will not let you export your own private keys. Quite annoying.
And it continues to be the ugly stepchild of OS X. What gives? I'm tempted to chalk it up to "security is hard" and "they're leaving out features to keep it secure", but I doubt it. There's probably just one coder assigned to Keychain Access, and they have other, more important responsibilities, so it's left to 'later'...
That just happens to be my all-time least-favorite OS X application. Sounds like a bug in the Keychain to me. Not terribly shocking. KeyChain Access is definitely something Apple has yet to get right. If a dialog was to be shown to describe why "Export" is disabled, it'd probably say "This feature is not yet implemented".
Not that I'm really clear on what you'd export to... the cert had to exist outside the keychain to begin with, so you shouldn't need to export those... 'keys' don't really make sense outside of another Keychain, which is an "add" or admin function. Did I mention I dislike Keychain Access? It's like Apple forgot about it or something...
I've seen lots of applications graying out menu items for _very_ obscure reasons.
First, dude, get an account, nobody reads AC posts anymore. Second, no, I work with extremely complicated UIs all of the time. Even the UI I use most often - XCode - has a pretty complex set of menu items, though it's no MS Word or Adobe Photoshop. ( or Illustrator, etc ). Still, I don't readily know what needs to be done to access some of those less-frequently-used menu items, but usually I can figure it out pretty quickly, and if I can't, I'll look at the documentation; as a user of complex software, I expect to do that from time to time.
Third, the fact that some menu items disable for very obscure reasons actually helps my argument that a dialog describing that obscure reason won't solve the 'problem' here - it'll probably be wrong more often than right, and will likely confuse the user even when it's right. The more obscure and difficult to describe the reason for the disabled menu, the more difficult that description becomes to put in a dialog box. Again, what you really need to do is understand what that menu item does.
That does leave a documentation and training problem, though, and raises the important question of why the design is so complex. What a menu item or button does ( and what is needed to enable it's action ) should be obvious from the context of the UI. If it's not, there is maybe a better UI design which could make the needed context clear.
Uh, they're grey because they're disabled ?
I'm sorry, I don't understand how this is a design flaw. You'd rather the menu in question _always_ do something? What do you want copied when nothing is selected? Would you rather the menu was enabled always, but just beeped or did something else ( i.e. not the desired action ) when clicked ?
The menu is grey to let you know it can't do anything until some other action is taken. It doesn't just disappear because location/muscle memory is how we remember where that menu is. What would be the better design? How is a disabled menu a flaw, again? You'd rather get a dialog box telling you that you need to do something before clicking here... how could you have known ? Why is clicking "copy" bringing up a dialog box ?
TSFA says :
The software "knows" why it has dimmed the item. Some decision or decisions led to the flag being set. At the same time as the flag is set, the reason why should be made available. If the user clicks on a grayed-out option, the reason or reasons should be made known. And none of those, "Gosh, Oh, Gee, it could be any one of these 14 reasons or maybe something else" messages. The message needs to be intelligent, responsive, and accurate. This one is important. This one needs to be done right.
Ok, so the issue is that you want to know why the menu is disabled. So, which of 20 different on-screen objects do you want a message to indicate could be selected to enable "copy" ? Even if you manage to get the message "right", how useful is the message "You must select something to copy." going to be after the second time you see it? At that point the greyed menu tells me everything I needed to know.
Gee, I wonder why that one hasn't been fixed. Yea, that's a real design bug, right there. Just like the dock, which even my mother-in-law can use, with it's 9 bugs and all...
Now, ASCII sort and reasonably flexible data entry ( aka Bug Name: Let's you save me some work ) now, those are real design bugs. Design bugs which are usually there ( as the article notes ) doe to lazyness of the software designers/creators.
A few of these design problems I can agree with, but IMHO, if you're troubled by a disabled menu, that's a clear sign you don't understand the function of that menu, and you might want to try a menu item that isn't greyed out, like that one labeled "Help".
I'm not sure it's wise to base your impression of a group of people on such a biased sampling. By the same method, I could come up with the notion that there are a LOT of wacky Linux/Windows/Republican/whatever folks out there. Not that there aren't some wacked-out fanatics in any group, but... c'mon, you have to see the problem with thinking folks who flock to comp.sys.mac.advocacy are representative.
the poll isn't about how many people already use the Mac. It's not enough that they already use a Mac, they want a perception that people are actively switching from the PC to the Mac.
What's really wacky is that you think a lot of Mac users were somehow included in this survey of what, 200 people? Statistically, there should be what, four of your "lying Mac users" in that sample? And how would they know what the poll is about? Wouldn't one of the lead-in questions be "what kind of computer do you use"?
Sorry. Nobody lied and said they were Windows users when they weren't. That idea is what is nuts.
So, what's your bias? Why are you so convinced that people saying they're considering switching must be lying, nutty Macintosh fanatics? What's your operating system of choice, Mr. Reality Master 101? Are you sure you might not be biased, just a teeny bit ?
What a weird thing to think. Why would they not just say "oh, I already use a Macintosh"; wouldn't that show their support for the platform more than saying they're thinking about switching?
I think you're not being exactly rational in your bias against OS X users.
Which explains why the problem doesn't affect Opera or um, anything on OS X ?
You're sure it's not the plugin implementation more than Java itself?
Your point that in this case it's Sun's implementation that's buggy is well taken... but the problem is not so much Java as it is the plugin, or it'd be a problem on all browser platforms.
Oddly enough, I haven't found an article where they win, so you have to wonder... maybe they're funded well enough by settlements that they figure they can just go on suing...
It's definitely true the most of the Fortran I've had to work with has been Fortran77 code- that's just the era when it was written. Fortran 90 I do know a bit about and it is fundamentally improved.
Ok, so to bring this back to the ( now very old ) actual topic... uh, I don't suppose there is a Fortran 95-compliant compiler for OS X? Huh, I don't see one. Are there any that are freely available for development use on *any* platform? I only found one that was even free for personal evaluation in that list... Not to take away from your point, but looking at the list in the link you provided, I'm guessing that even today, _most_ Fortran is likely to be to be of the Fortran77 variety.
read (*,*) ivec(1:4),xvec(1:10)
write (*,"(4i6,10f10.4)") ivec(1:4),xvec(1:10)
Nice example of FortranI/O.
But, um, how do you read a vector of integers when you don't know the length of the vector, for example?
Anyway, I'm *really* not here to bag on Fortran, if it's your thing, great. It's not my thing, I'd much rather write Objective-C code, or C for that matter. If you want to do future generations of programmers a favor, you'll write your new code in C- the younger guys don't know from Fortran. Just my humble opinion.
Objective-C is slow, it eats memory, and its syntax is very verbose. Most languages don't have 120-some character method names. And for all that, it's still unsafe, and has very little in the way of static type-checking, and no garbage collector (a refcounter where you have to twiddle references a lot doesn't count). I would not call it "the most developer-friendly language every created." I'd much rather code in Python or O'Caml.
You want fast and a garbage collector?? Objective-C is slow? Um... not terribly. Large memory footprint? Not unless you're forgetting to deallocate objects, or just have a bad design. 120-some-character method names? Not typically, and verbose method names are actually good, if occasionally overdone. Yea, it's unsafe, it's a superset of C, of course it's unsafe. You really think Objective-C is less memory-hungry than Python or O'Caml? Interesting... I'd like to see your benchmarks there. It's clear we have different ideas of what makes a language developer-friendly. Access to C routines makes Objective-C developer-friendly in my book.
C is not a good choice for anything but the core of most games, as it is too developer-unfriendly and lacks in features (like OO, anonymous functions, garbage collection...). While excellent for low-level code, it's not really in the running for high-level.
C is great for the core of most calculation routines of any type. Which is how it is often used in the context of an Objective-C program. You don't always need high-level.
C++ is a good language for games, but many people would rather have something higher-level. It's unsafe, but many people will overlook.
Now you're making me wonder how many Python or O'Caml games there are out there. I guess there must be a few... any commercial ones? C++ when written correctly is awfully high-level, no? I can't belive you'd complain about Objective-C syntax and not C++ syntax...
Java is slow and verbose, and therefore painful for game development.
First, slow compared to what? Link me up with that Java/Python benchmark comparison. No, really. Something tells me you might just be making this stuff up, repeating something you read somewhere or something. Java used to be slow. Starting up a JVM can be slow. Some Swing drawing routines on some platforms can be slow. I'm also wondering, huh, do you think of programming in terms of anything besides games? Again, verbose in a programming language == readable == very good.
Maybe they want to code in Python?
Power to you. XCode documentation even has pointers as to how to set up a project for Python. Is Python sytax really less verbose than Objective-C? Is it really faster? Does it really have better, more complete libraries? Is there really a reason other than "I want to", which- don't get me wrong - I think is great reason... just maybe not one you can sell to the other folks working on your project, if you get my drift. Really, yea, Python is cool, but... why not Objective-C, again?