This is all a ploy by Apple to stop Europeans flying to the USA to buy iPads, after the worldwide launch was delayed!
Its not clear whether Jobs has actually placed iNukes in the Icelandic volcano to cause the eruption or if Apple have teamed up with the CIA, SPECTRE, THRUSH, SkyNet and the Milk Marketing Board to hack computers and exaggerate the threats!! Maybe that's not ash on the computer projections - its the famous Reality Distortion Field!!!
Expect the ban to persist until the end of May!!!!
Now I expect all the Apple fanbois will crawl out of the woodwork and start trying to deny the obvious truth, and I'll be modded down faster than an Airbus with both engines on fire. If Microsoft had done this everybody would be up in arms!!!!!
Probably won't work - I'm sure that the Kin will detect those yellow dots they put on banknotes and refuse to take the picture. I expect even Vietnam have adopted them by now.
(Disclaimer: this is a joke based on the fact that us westerners think the name of the Vietnamese currency is funny. If you find yellow spots on the other sort of dong, please seek medical advice).
Which gives me a brilliant idea! Soccer moms of the world!! Get your sprogs' privates tattooed with yellow dots and no nasty pervert will ever be able to take photos or print pictures of them!!!
Hate to be a 'kin grammar Nazi but there's a 'kin apostrophe missing there (to indicate missing letters - actually there should be one after as well, but that looks silly and the "g" is usually silent anyway).
As in: "'kin hell, some 'kin perv has sent me a 'kin picture of his 'kin moob! Ugh, its 'kin mingin'!"
They've failed to 'kin notice that, but they're worried about 'kin man tits?
(Plus, Kin Sexting sounds a bit incestuous...)
(To appease Pratchett fans, perhaps the next Android phone will be the "-ing"...)
The ash cloud hit my city a few hours ago (Sweden). Other than the airports closed (and I don't understand why), nothing out of ordinary is going on.
Here in England you wouldn't know anything was happening. The dust is passing over at high altitude, so its only the planes that are affected. I'm sure we'd have had a very nice sunset if it hadn't been cloudy...
Space travel is hard and takes a LONG time. Galaxy spanning empires are unlikely to exist without unknown physics being used.
...and also, if you have the technology to do long-haul space travel in generation ships (the only kind that we know is remotely feasible) you also have the technology to fill your solar system with space habitats (easier because you have solar energy and raw materials floating around) which is going to take the edge off your need for colonization. If your worry about the health of your sun exceeds your love of solar energy, just park out in the Oort cloud. Probes and exploratory missions won't produce the exponential colonization that the Fermi paradox assumes.
I think it was Greg Egan who wrote that "going exponential" Fermi-style "is what bacteria with spaceships would do" (his post-humans tended to upload themselves to computers and explore their own virtual universes or try to prove Goedel's theorum by exhaustion).
The problem with the Fermi paradox is that its extrapolating from one point: us (if someone jumped up tomorrow and said "Good News Everyone - I've invented FTL travel).
Plus, every good nerd knows that if you've just colonized a new world, the first thing that happens is that your society collapses back to the stone age because someone forgot to pack the machine that makes the machine that makes the machine that makes the chips that run your high-tech hydroponics modules. That's assuming that, during the voyage, you didn't murder the officers and start worshipping the ship's engine.
And when Apple holds functions and features back for ransom
Or, to spin it the other way, when Apple is actively (and with some success) encouraging sites to support emerging web standards using HTML5 and ECMAScript in place of proprietary (and poorly implemented on non-Windows platforms) Flash...
We'd got into a stupid situation where the best way to embed video on a web page was to use a cumbersome system in which the video player was embedded in an applet running in a third-party VM.
Of course, Flash was also good for RIAs, animations, applets and casual games. I've done quite a lot of work in Flash - but I was getting totally browned off by Adobe's habit of introducing a totally new, non-backwards-compatible API/App framework with every release (plus a different API for Flex) instead of (e.g.) properly documenting and debugging the previous one. Switching to a different system sounds like an opportunity...
Of course, there's still the h.264 rights problem, but that's a fail for Flash (which was also migrating to h.264) too.
Well, at least that's three more tricks than the usual Hollywood blockbuster paint-by-numbers script.
...and he tends to cast actors he knows already: is there any member of the female cast from Buffy/Angel/Firefly/Dollhouse that you don't want to see involved in some implied lesbianism?
Actually, I think Joss would have been an ideal candidate for remaking the UK Avengers. Summer Glau for the female sidekick? (More of a Purdy than a Mrs Peel, I think, but she can do a good bad English accent and beat people up, so what's not to like).
Could have been more fun than more fricking Marvel superheroes. Ho hum, I wonder if they'll deconstruct the superhero mythos (again).
I'm beginning to suspect that laptop-format DVD-RWs are just shite.
I've had the DVD-RW drives on a Mac, a Sony Vaio and my homebrew small-form-factor MythTV box morph into DVD-ROM drives (two of the three were Matsushita slot-loaders - the other was a typical laptop tray loader, Sony I presume).
Do you understand the concept of N-tier applications development?
Yes. Do you understand the concept of any other model of applications development?
Basically, there are two reasons for wanting an App Store App rather than a web-hosted app:
You want an iPhone-like interface to your web service. You don't mind it requiring constant internet access. In that case, your argument makes perfect sense and writing your front end in Objective C is a no brainer. Yes, a lot of apps fall into this category.
You want a largely self-contained application that users can run offline even without a WiFi or cellular signal. In that case, all the "business logic" has to run on the phone, and your model falls to pieces. E.g. TomTom/Copilot, and most games.
Its the latter category that will be hit by this simplistic rule - you seem to be thinking entirely in terms of the first category. Quite frankly, if you are doing a client/server app the "best tool for the job" looks increasingly like Javascript/HTML for the frontend which can target any platform with a decent browser and doesn't have to be approved by the App Store.
Presuming the VP8 implementation they release is able to play older VP6 encoded files, which seems reasonably likely
Remember, VP6 is a codec, not a file format. Legacy flash videos may use VP6 compression but the container file format used for VP6 in Flash is.FLV and proprietary (ISTR Flash has moved to an iso-specified container for H.264). Whether browsers support.FLV in a HTML5 video tag will likely be down to the broswer, not the codec. Meanwhile, websites that use Flash video work by embedding a Flash applet (often custom-written) which fetches and plays the clip, and provides control - so adding.FLV support to your browser still won't let it work with sites using Flash video.
I suspect the only practical upshot is, for webmasters, that transcoding a VP6 file from.FLV to another container is potentially much faster than re-compressing using a different codec.
Also, Google have left it a bit late, as H.264 is already gaining momentum for both Flash and HTML5 (especially with the Apple-led move to encourage support for HTML5/H.264).
Think about it: Google releases a software framework and works with TI to release a cheap ASIC that plays VP6-8 video.
Interesting question - if a patent-encumbered video codec is implemented in hardware, and the hardware manufacturer has paid their 30 pieces of silver to the patent holder, does that leave software writers free to use the chip without worrying about the patent? And how does that sit with the GPL3?
If my company were to create an application for the iPhone, we would use Objective-C for the app and probably C# for the web services it would consume.
Sure, if you're developing exclusively for the iPhone that's a no-brainer.
...but if you wanted to produce substantially the same application for iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile, would you maintain 3 complete, separate code bases in (respectively) Objective C, Java and C#? Me, I'd look for ways of putting as much of the code as possible in a common language.
So, looks like there's a market for an Objective C to Java/C# translator:-)
If you were targeting several platforms from the beginning, your core code should be C/C++
Why? True, C/C++ isn't a bad choice for a cross-platform app, but cross-compilers or virtual machine based languages are perfectly valid approaches. With the main competitor, Android, using Java as its preferred language then using a Java-to-C or Java-to-javascript cross compiler, or some custom language which can cross-compile to either might make sense.
For instance, the TeX typesetting software was written in Knuth's own Pascal subset called "WEB" and has been ported to most platforms by cross-compiling to C. That would apparently be disallowed by the Apple clause.
Or, there is the Google Web Toolkit, which cross-compiles Java to Javascript - again, that seems to fall foul of the rule that "Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript" - although you could still eschew the App Store and serve the application over the web with a manifest file to give it a more App-like appearance.
I normally try and defend Apple, but this one has me feeling like... well, any true nerd will get the Blackadder reference in the title.
I kinda understand the "innocent explanation" for this - the Mac platform has had its share of half-assed "ports" that don't really follow Mac UI standards as well as development tools to produce such ports - but generally users and developers have eventually voted with their feet (anybody remember when Microsoft produced a Visual C++/MFC cross-compiler for Mac?) - something Adobe are risking with their current Mac offerings.
However, this could be achieved by setting UI and performance standards for apps, not the blunt instrument of dictating which programming language could be used and making it very difficult for developers to target multi-platform.
Of course - this is all Job's risk: even in the phone/tablet market, Apple only "dominates" certain narrowly defined sectors and doesn't enjoy the sort of near-total monopoly that MS enjoyed in its prime. If he decimates the iProduct developer community then its still possible for the market to show him the error of his ways.
Meanwhile, I'll repeat what I've said before: the future in mobile "Apps" might just be browser-based apps hosted by the "cloud" or on your home server which completely bypass the App store and these rules - so although the end result has to be in Javascript, you are free to use cross-compilers like this or this.
Right now, mobile internet is barely up to snuff for this, but once that improves it makes so much more sense in a world where you may have multiple mobile gadgets.
What would be the backlash if after the next OS X/Safari update, Adobe announced no more Mac support for PDF, Flash, Photoshop, CS, etc...
Well, that would mostly hit Apple's "graphics professional" customers, since most of Adobe's products are too expensive for anyone else.
Now, 10-15 years ago, that would have been curtains for Apple, since that was their market niche. Today, I suspect that Apple is more interested in the home/school/soho market, although Final Cut and Aperture are partial competitors/replacements for Adobe CS.
However, while pro users are often locked into Adobe (and, as you say, GIMP ain't Photoshop, however much it wants to be) there are viable alternatives to Adobe's "personal" products: iPhoto pretty much removes most of the need for Photoshop Elements (I've also been meaning to give Pixelmator a try) and Adobe has already dropped all but the expensive "pro" version of Acrobat from the Mac because OSX already does most of what Acrobat Standard offers in terms of creation, annotation and simple editing of PDFs.
As for Flash: dropping the Flash player from Mac might hurt Mac users. However, given that zillions of iPhone users seem to manage without Flash, and Jobs has persuaded several high-profile sites to support HTML5, so this could backfire.
Meanwhile, Adobe has been doing a pretty good job of annoying its own users cross-platform, with sky-high upgrade prices, bugs, feeping creaturism and other annoyances (such as completely changing the API for Flash Pro with every release). If I couldn't get CS at education prices I'd have been priced out ages ago.
(...and the less said about Illustrator the better - does anybody find it remotely usable? I just fire up Windows in a VM and run Xara instead - its a crying shame that the Mac port of that fizzled).
Mac OS 9 and earlier only had "co operative" multitasking and Mac zealots of the day used to proclaim it was better than "true" multitasking and came up with all sorts of rationales for it
Like... it actually fulfilled the main need Mac users had for multitasking: i.e. having multiple apps running and being able to switch between them, without imposing the extra overhead of proper preemptive multitasking? Or that the main competition, Windows 95, only had half-baked multitasking anyway?
Anyway, only the most rabid Mac zealots would deny that, by the end of the 90s, Mac OS 9 had passed its sell-by date.
Uncomfortable truth: if you're running interactive applications, you don't need full multitasking. If you've got a system with limited CPU/RAM you don't want full multitasking.
Multitasking on Windows Mobile: epic fail. Multitasking on Android: sorry folks, I actually use an Android phone and it grinds to a halt unless you use a third-party task killer app. Me, I don't want to miss phone calls because I've forgot to kill my GPS app (and it doesn't matter that the radio is independent - the phone UI still needs the main CPU).
Does apple even care about personal computers any more?
Yes - its just that the flavour of the month is the iPad. The rumour sites are saying that they'll be updating their PC range Real Soon Now.
The last noteworthy computer they announced was the Air (which in retrospect seems like a super-advanced iPad that was largely ignored).
Nope - The Air was pretty obviously designed to compete with premium-priced ultraportables such as the Sony Vaios. Apple just had bad luck that the netbook phenomenon happened around the time the Air was ready for launch - so instead of reviews of the Air vs. a $2000 Vaio, we saw reviews of the Air vs. a $200 EEE.
The unibody MacBooks were pretty noteworthy in terms of design, if not tech (apart from the Coca Cola years, design has always been an important factor for Apple). Its also noteworthy how many laptop makers have copied Apple's "scrabble tile" keyboards (which, surprisingly, are actually rather nice to use).
Bear in mind that the Commons chamber is just a bit of theatre, really, and for most bills the debate and vote is just a formality, since the ruling party usually has an absolute majority and that party's MPs are effectively obliged to vote for the party line. If the ministers want a bill passed, it will pass.
So, if necessary, the ruling party just pages all its MPs and they can push through anything. There is horse trading and gentlemen's agreements to ensure that MPs don't have to turn up to vote on a done deal.
Where there is sufficient dissent within the ruling party's back benches for significant numbers of their MPs to vote against the party line, raising the possibility of the government being defeated, then you'll see the chamber packed to the rafters and MPs being pushed in on wheelchairs...
If your MP is a good representitive, he'll bend the ear of the ministers writing the bill or the comittees refining the details. Althouigh, quite honestly, in recent years our unelected Lords have been doing a better job of looking out for the rights of Joe Public than the MPs.
There was an old Fourth Doctor story (The Destiny of the Daleks), in which while the Doctor is trapped and awaiting Romana to return with help, he bides his time by reading (and criticizing) an Oolan Calluphid book.
And Doc #10 name-checked Arthur Dent in "The Christmas Invasion"...
The Jeddoon (sp? The rather thick space rhinos) seem to owe something* to the Vogons, too, except they're cops rather than civil servants.
HINT: He's done this before, Mac OS has switched architectures twice.
Three times, if you count the move from OS 9 to NextStep..., er, sorry OS X as an architecture change.
However, in all three cases, they went to great lengths (the 68k-on-PPC emulator, Rosetta, Classic mode in OS X) to ensure that legacy software would run on the new system. Plus, OS X represented a massive opening up of the system and the bundling of development tools and a bevvy of programming languages - all on Jobs' watch. See, we can all cherry pick the elements of Apple's past behavior which support our case.
as all the non technical and most of the technical Mac users I know (and/. reflects this) use Mac's because its not MS.
Really? That may be a factor, but I use Mac because it runs Unix, has a better GUI than Linux, runs most of the open source software that I would prefer to use yet can still run industry-standard applications from MS and Adobe when I'm obliged to use them for work. Prior to OS X, I preferred Windows to Mac. I suspect that many mac-using slashdotters feel the same.
1. OS X needs it. Wrong. Intel chips are vastly overpowered for OS X on the desktop.
For the people using their Macs to check email and surf the web, yes. For the people using Macs for serious graphics, sound and video work (do you think Adobe maintain Creative Suite, and Apple develop Final Cut and Aperture for a hobby?) not so much.
Except this was never the case. All apple fanboys argued that PPC was far superior to Intel back before the Switch.
The PPC architecture probably is better than Intel - on paper. The problem was, in practice, Freescale and IBM were making low-power PPCs for the embedded market and server/workstation class Power chips but nobody was making fast, cool PPC chips for high-performance desktops and high-end laptops. Intel was ploughing zillions into just that market - and although their architecture was fugly, the chips got the job done.
ARM-based systems-on-a-chip that can be assembled pick'n'mix are great for appliances like the iPad, but nothing is going to keep up with the PC-fueled development of Intel chips.
IBM who told Apple to sod off, IBM had secured contracts to build the CPU's for the Nintendo Wii,
Underpowered
Xbox 360 and
Famous for overheating and/or requiring noisy fan.
Sony Playstation 3.
Cell processor - may include a PPC core, but gives mediocre performance unless code is rewritten to make use of the multiple SPEs. As much work as switching to Intel.
IBM didn't need Apple and their constant interference into Power PC development was costing IBM.
Translation: IBM weren't interested in making PPC processors optimised for desktops and high-end laptops because Apple were their only customer for such chips, whereas they had huge mass-market customers for Cell and the space-heater PPC for the Xbox. Intel-based machines were starting to kick sand in Macs' faces.
Apple would be in the same position with a desktop-strength ARM - they'd be the only market for such a chip and couldn't compete with the brute-force investment and economy of scale going into Intel.
Essentially it felt as if Douglas Adams had written it, which is never a bad thing.
Of course, Adams used to work as a writer and script editor on Doctor Who, and several of his books (particularly "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" and "Life, the Universe and Eveything") contain material originally intended for Doctor Who.
Stephen Moffat certainly returned the favour with "The Girl in the Fireplace" which I felt was particularly Adams-esque (and possibly lifted a couple of ideas from Adams - the amnesiac spaceship computer from "Mostly Harmless" and the incongruous horse from "Dirk Gently"). You should check out that episode if you like Adams.
(In fact, the new episode featured something almost, but not quite entirely the same as a Somebody Else's Problem field).
You know, that's an interesting question re: audience, which I hadn't honestly considered.
Its promoted as a "family" show in the UK, airing around 6pm on Saturdays (and for the last several years, its been one of the big attractions on Xmas day and Easter).
Plus, because it ran for so long (and before multi-channel TV - when it started there were only two channels), most of the adults watching it grew up on Doctor Who, so we're now seeing second and third generation Who fans:-)
Its also one of the biggest TV shows in the UK - usually snapping at the heels of the major soaps and talent shows in the ratings.
I see in the US it airs at 9pm, and I guess BBC So yes, the UK audience is probably different to the US.
Slashdot Mirror
This is all a ploy by Apple to stop Europeans flying to the USA to buy iPads, after the worldwide launch was delayed!
Its not clear whether Jobs has actually placed iNukes in the Icelandic volcano to cause the eruption or if Apple have teamed up with the CIA, SPECTRE, THRUSH, SkyNet and the Milk Marketing Board to hack computers and exaggerate the threats!! Maybe that's not ash on the computer projections - its the famous Reality Distortion Field!!!
Expect the ban to persist until the end of May!!!!
Now I expect all the Apple fanbois will crawl out of the woodwork and start trying to deny the obvious truth, and I'll be modded down faster than an Airbus with both engines on fire. If Microsoft had done this everybody would be up in arms!!!!!
Send pictures of your dong to Microsoft now!
Probably won't work - I'm sure that the Kin will detect those yellow dots they put on banknotes and refuse to take the picture. I expect even Vietnam have adopted them by now.
(Disclaimer: this is a joke based on the fact that us westerners think the name of the Vietnamese currency is funny. If you find yellow spots on the other sort of dong, please seek medical advice).
Which gives me a brilliant idea! Soccer moms of the world!! Get your sprogs' privates tattooed with yellow dots and no nasty pervert will ever be able to take photos or print pictures of them!!!
Hang on - I need to call the patent office...
Microsoft's Kin mobile phone project
Hate to be a 'kin grammar Nazi but there's a 'kin apostrophe missing there (to indicate missing letters - actually there should be one after as well, but that looks silly and the "g" is usually silent anyway).
As in: "'kin hell, some 'kin perv has sent me a 'kin picture of his 'kin moob! Ugh, its 'kin mingin'!"
They've failed to 'kin notice that, but they're worried about 'kin man tits?
(Plus, Kin Sexting sounds a bit incestuous...)
(To appease Pratchett fans, perhaps the next Android phone will be the "-ing"...)
"Red sky at night... volcanic ash in the atmosphere."
Rhyming fail. The correct adage is:
Red sky at night - Iceland alight!
The ash cloud hit my city a few hours ago (Sweden). Other than the airports closed (and I don't understand why), nothing out of ordinary is going on.
Here in England you wouldn't know anything was happening. The dust is passing over at high altitude, so its only the planes that are affected. I'm sure we'd have had a very nice sunset if it hadn't been cloudy...
Space travel is hard and takes a LONG time. Galaxy spanning empires are unlikely to exist without unknown physics being used.
...and also, if you have the technology to do long-haul space travel in generation ships (the only kind that we know is remotely feasible) you also have the technology to fill your solar system with space habitats (easier because you have solar energy and raw materials floating around) which is going to take the edge off your need for colonization. If your worry about the health of your sun exceeds your love of solar energy, just park out in the Oort cloud. Probes and exploratory missions won't produce the exponential colonization that the Fermi paradox assumes.
I think it was Greg Egan who wrote that "going exponential" Fermi-style "is what bacteria with spaceships would do" (his post-humans tended to upload themselves to computers and explore their own virtual universes or try to prove Goedel's theorum by exhaustion).
The problem with the Fermi paradox is that its extrapolating from one point: us (if someone jumped up tomorrow and said "Good News Everyone - I've invented FTL travel).
Plus, every good nerd knows that if you've just colonized a new world, the first thing that happens is that your society collapses back to the stone age because someone forgot to pack the machine that makes the machine that makes the machine that makes the chips that run your high-tech hydroponics modules. That's assuming that, during the voyage, you didn't murder the officers and start worshipping the ship's engine.
And when Apple holds functions and features back for ransom
Or, to spin it the other way, when Apple is actively (and with some success) encouraging sites to support emerging web standards using HTML5 and ECMAScript in place of proprietary (and poorly implemented on non-Windows platforms) Flash...
We'd got into a stupid situation where the best way to embed video on a web page was to use a cumbersome system in which the video player was embedded in an applet running in a third-party VM.
Of course, Flash was also good for RIAs, animations, applets and casual games. I've done quite a lot of work in Flash - but I was getting totally browned off by Adobe's habit of introducing a totally new, non-backwards-compatible API/App framework with every release (plus a different API for Flex) instead of (e.g.) properly documenting and debugging the previous one. Switching to a different system sounds like an opportunity...
Of course, there's still the h.264 rights problem, but that's a fail for Flash (which was also migrating to h.264) too.
Well, at least that's three more tricks than the usual Hollywood blockbuster paint-by-numbers script.
...and he tends to cast actors he knows already: is there any member of the female cast from Buffy/Angel/Firefly/Dollhouse that you don't want to see involved in some implied lesbianism?
Never mind. Joss, you're pardoned.
Actually, I think Joss would have been an ideal candidate for remaking the UK Avengers. Summer Glau for the female sidekick? (More of a Purdy than a Mrs Peel, I think, but she can do a good bad English accent and beat people up, so what's not to like).
Could have been more fun than more fricking Marvel superheroes. Ho hum, I wonder if they'll deconstruct the superhero mythos (again).
and my DVD drive no longer burns DVD's
I'm beginning to suspect that laptop-format DVD-RWs are just shite.
I've had the DVD-RW drives on a Mac, a Sony Vaio and my homebrew small-form-factor MythTV box morph into DVD-ROM drives (two of the three were Matsushita slot-loaders - the other was a typical laptop tray loader, Sony I presume).
Do you understand the concept of N-tier applications development?
Yes. Do you understand the concept of any other model of applications development?
Basically, there are two reasons for wanting an App Store App rather than a web-hosted app:
Its the latter category that will be hit by this simplistic rule - you seem to be thinking entirely in terms of the first category. Quite frankly, if you are doing a client/server app the "best tool for the job" looks increasingly like Javascript/HTML for the frontend which can target any platform with a decent browser and doesn't have to be approved by the App Store.
Presuming the VP8 implementation they release is able to play older VP6 encoded files, which seems reasonably likely
Remember, VP6 is a codec, not a file format. Legacy flash videos may use VP6 compression but the container file format used for VP6 in Flash is .FLV and proprietary (ISTR Flash has moved to an iso-specified container for H.264). Whether browsers support .FLV in a HTML5 video tag will likely be down to the broswer, not the codec. Meanwhile, websites that use Flash video work by embedding a Flash applet (often custom-written) which fetches and plays the clip, and provides control - so adding .FLV support to your browser still won't let it work with sites using Flash video.
I suspect the only practical upshot is, for webmasters, that transcoding a VP6 file from .FLV to another container is potentially much faster than re-compressing using a different codec.
Also, Google have left it a bit late, as H.264 is already gaining momentum for both Flash and HTML5 (especially with the Apple-led move to encourage support for HTML5/H.264).
Think about it: Google releases a software framework and works with TI to release a cheap ASIC that plays VP6-8 video.
Interesting question - if a patent-encumbered video codec is implemented in hardware, and the hardware manufacturer has paid their 30 pieces of silver to the patent holder, does that leave software writers free to use the chip without worrying about the patent? And how does that sit with the GPL3?
If my company were to create an application for the iPhone, we would use Objective-C for the app and probably C# for the web services it would consume.
Sure, if you're developing exclusively for the iPhone that's a no-brainer.
...but if you wanted to produce substantially the same application for iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile, would you maintain 3 complete, separate code bases in (respectively) Objective C, Java and C#? Me, I'd look for ways of putting as much of the code as possible in a common language.
So, looks like there's a market for an Objective C to Java/C# translator :-)
I could make my own Ethernet cable (with a screwdriver as the only tool no less) when i was 12.
...but to make up for that, your parents could sleep comfortably in the knowledge that you were unlikely to become a teenage parent :-)
If you were targeting several platforms from the beginning, your core code should be C/C++
Why? True, C/C++ isn't a bad choice for a cross-platform app, but cross-compilers or virtual machine based languages are perfectly valid approaches. With the main competitor, Android, using Java as its preferred language then using a Java-to-C or Java-to-javascript cross compiler, or some custom language which can cross-compile to either might make sense.
For instance, the TeX typesetting software was written in Knuth's own Pascal subset called "WEB" and has been ported to most platforms by cross-compiling to C. That would apparently be disallowed by the Apple clause.
Or, there is the Google Web Toolkit, which cross-compiles Java to Javascript - again, that seems to fall foul of the rule that "Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript" - although you could still eschew the App Store and serve the application over the web with a manifest file to give it a more App-like appearance.
I normally try and defend Apple, but this one has me feeling like... well, any true nerd will get the Blackadder reference in the title.
I kinda understand the "innocent explanation" for this - the Mac platform has had its share of half-assed "ports" that don't really follow Mac UI standards as well as development tools to produce such ports - but generally users and developers have eventually voted with their feet (anybody remember when Microsoft produced a Visual C++/MFC cross-compiler for Mac?) - something Adobe are risking with their current Mac offerings.
However, this could be achieved by setting UI and performance standards for apps, not the blunt instrument of dictating which programming language could be used and making it very difficult for developers to target multi-platform.
Of course - this is all Job's risk: even in the phone/tablet market, Apple only "dominates" certain narrowly defined sectors and doesn't enjoy the sort of near-total monopoly that MS enjoyed in its prime. If he decimates the iProduct developer community then its still possible for the market to show him the error of his ways.
Meanwhile, I'll repeat what I've said before: the future in mobile "Apps" might just be browser-based apps hosted by the "cloud" or on your home server which completely bypass the App store and these rules - so although the end result has to be in Javascript, you are free to use cross-compilers like this or this.
Right now, mobile internet is barely up to snuff for this, but once that improves it makes so much more sense in a world where you may have multiple mobile gadgets.
Sorry to promote MS here, but I happen to like method names like OnInit and OnLoad.
What, no PrestoChangoSelector? :-)
What would be the backlash if after the next OS X/Safari update, Adobe announced no more Mac support for PDF, Flash, Photoshop, CS, etc...
Well, that would mostly hit Apple's "graphics professional" customers, since most of Adobe's products are too expensive for anyone else.
Now, 10-15 years ago, that would have been curtains for Apple, since that was their market niche. Today, I suspect that Apple is more interested in the home/school/soho market, although Final Cut and Aperture are partial competitors/replacements for Adobe CS.
However, while pro users are often locked into Adobe (and, as you say, GIMP ain't Photoshop, however much it wants to be) there are viable alternatives to Adobe's "personal" products: iPhoto pretty much removes most of the need for Photoshop Elements (I've also been meaning to give Pixelmator a try) and Adobe has already dropped all but the expensive "pro" version of Acrobat from the Mac because OSX already does most of what Acrobat Standard offers in terms of creation, annotation and simple editing of PDFs.
As for Flash: dropping the Flash player from Mac might hurt Mac users. However, given that zillions of iPhone users seem to manage without Flash, and Jobs has persuaded several high-profile sites to support HTML5, so this could backfire.
Meanwhile, Adobe has been doing a pretty good job of annoying its own users cross-platform, with sky-high upgrade prices, bugs, feeping creaturism and other annoyances (such as completely changing the API for Flash Pro with every release). If I couldn't get CS at education prices I'd have been priced out ages ago.
(...and the less said about Illustrator the better - does anybody find it remotely usable? I just fire up Windows in a VM and run Xara instead - its a crying shame that the Mac port of that fizzled).
Mac OS 9 and earlier only had "co operative" multitasking and Mac zealots of the day used to proclaim it was better than "true" multitasking and came up with all sorts of rationales for it
Like... it actually fulfilled the main need Mac users had for multitasking: i.e. having multiple apps running and being able to switch between them, without imposing the extra overhead of proper preemptive multitasking? Or that the main competition, Windows 95, only had half-baked multitasking anyway?
Anyway, only the most rabid Mac zealots would deny that, by the end of the 90s, Mac OS 9 had passed its sell-by date.
Uncomfortable truth: if you're running interactive applications, you don't need full multitasking. If you've got a system with limited CPU/RAM you don't want full multitasking.
Multitasking on Windows Mobile: epic fail. Multitasking on Android: sorry folks, I actually use an Android phone and it grinds to a halt unless you use a third-party task killer app. Me, I don't want to miss phone calls because I've forgot to kill my GPS app (and it doesn't matter that the radio is independent - the phone UI still needs the main CPU).
Does apple even care about personal computers any more?
Yes - its just that the flavour of the month is the iPad. The rumour sites are saying that they'll be updating their PC range Real Soon Now.
The last noteworthy computer they announced was the Air (which in retrospect seems like a super-advanced iPad that was largely ignored).
Nope - The Air was pretty obviously designed to compete with premium-priced ultraportables such as the Sony Vaios. Apple just had bad luck that the netbook phenomenon happened around the time the Air was ready for launch - so instead of reviews of the Air vs. a $2000 Vaio, we saw reviews of the Air vs. a $200 EEE.
The unibody MacBooks were pretty noteworthy in terms of design, if not tech (apart from the Coca Cola years, design has always been an important factor for Apple). Its also noteworthy how many laptop makers have copied Apple's "scrabble tile" keyboards (which, surprisingly, are actually rather nice to use).
Bear in mind that the Commons chamber is just a bit of theatre, really, and for most bills the debate and vote is just a formality, since the ruling party usually has an absolute majority and that party's MPs are effectively obliged to vote for the party line. If the ministers want a bill passed, it will pass.
So, if necessary, the ruling party just pages all its MPs and they can push through anything. There is horse trading and gentlemen's agreements to ensure that MPs don't have to turn up to vote on a done deal.
Where there is sufficient dissent within the ruling party's back benches for significant numbers of their MPs to vote against the party line, raising the possibility of the government being defeated, then you'll see the chamber packed to the rafters and MPs being pushed in on wheelchairs...
If your MP is a good representitive, he'll bend the ear of the ministers writing the bill or the comittees refining the details. Althouigh, quite honestly, in recent years our unelected Lords have been doing a better job of looking out for the rights of Joe Public than the MPs.
There was an old Fourth Doctor story (The Destiny of the Daleks), in which while the Doctor is trapped and awaiting Romana to return with help, he bides his time by reading (and criticizing) an Oolan Calluphid book.
And Doc #10 name-checked Arthur Dent in "The Christmas Invasion"...
The Jeddoon (sp? The rather thick space rhinos) seem to owe something* to the Vogons, too, except they're cops rather than civil servants.
(* Probably a counter-signed Form 3791/11B(iv))
HINT: He's done this before, Mac OS has switched architectures twice.
Three times, if you count the move from OS 9 to NextStep..., er, sorry OS X as an architecture change.
However, in all three cases, they went to great lengths (the 68k-on-PPC emulator, Rosetta, Classic mode in OS X) to ensure that legacy software would run on the new system. Plus, OS X represented a massive opening up of the system and the bundling of development tools and a bevvy of programming languages - all on Jobs' watch. See, we can all cherry pick the elements of Apple's past behavior which support our case.
as all the non technical and most of the technical Mac users I know (and /. reflects this) use Mac's because its not MS.
Really? That may be a factor, but I use Mac because it runs Unix, has a better GUI than Linux, runs most of the open source software that I would prefer to use yet can still run industry-standard applications from MS and Adobe when I'm obliged to use them for work. Prior to OS X, I preferred Windows to Mac. I suspect that many mac-using slashdotters feel the same.
1. OS X needs it. Wrong. Intel chips are vastly overpowered for OS X on the desktop.
For the people using their Macs to check email and surf the web, yes. For the people using Macs for serious graphics, sound and video work (do you think Adobe maintain Creative Suite, and Apple develop Final Cut and Aperture for a hobby?) not so much.
Except this was never the case. All apple fanboys argued that PPC was far superior to Intel back before the Switch.
The PPC architecture probably is better than Intel - on paper. The problem was, in practice, Freescale and IBM were making low-power PPCs for the embedded market and server/workstation class Power chips but nobody was making fast, cool PPC chips for high-performance desktops and high-end laptops. Intel was ploughing zillions into just that market - and although their architecture was fugly, the chips got the job done.
ARM-based systems-on-a-chip that can be assembled pick'n'mix are great for appliances like the iPad, but nothing is going to keep up with the PC-fueled development of Intel chips.
IBM who told Apple to sod off, IBM had secured contracts to build the CPU's for the Nintendo Wii,
Underpowered
Xbox 360 and
Famous for overheating and/or requiring noisy fan.
Sony Playstation 3.
Cell processor - may include a PPC core, but gives mediocre performance unless code is rewritten to make use of the multiple SPEs. As much work as switching to Intel.
IBM didn't need Apple and their constant interference into Power PC development was costing IBM.
Translation: IBM weren't interested in making PPC processors optimised for desktops and high-end laptops because Apple were their only customer for such chips, whereas they had huge mass-market customers for Cell and the space-heater PPC for the Xbox. Intel-based machines were starting to kick sand in Macs' faces.
Apple would be in the same position with a desktop-strength ARM - they'd be the only market for such a chip and couldn't compete with the brute-force investment and economy of scale going into Intel.
Essentially it felt as if Douglas Adams had written it, which is never a bad thing.
Of course, Adams used to work as a writer and script editor on Doctor Who, and several of his books (particularly "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" and "Life, the Universe and Eveything") contain material originally intended for Doctor Who.
Stephen Moffat certainly returned the favour with "The Girl in the Fireplace" which I felt was particularly Adams-esque (and possibly lifted a couple of ideas from Adams - the amnesiac spaceship computer from "Mostly Harmless" and the incongruous horse from "Dirk Gently"). You should check out that episode if you like Adams.
(In fact, the new episode featured something almost, but not quite entirely the same as a Somebody Else's Problem field).
You know, that's an interesting question re: audience, which I hadn't honestly considered.
Its promoted as a "family" show in the UK, airing around 6pm on Saturdays (and for the last several years, its been one of the big attractions on Xmas day and Easter).
Plus, because it ran for so long (and before multi-channel TV - when it started there were only two channels), most of the adults watching it grew up on Doctor Who, so we're now seeing second and third generation Who fans :-)
Its also one of the biggest TV shows in the UK - usually snapping at the heels of the major soaps and talent shows in the ratings.
I see in the US it airs at 9pm, and I guess BBC So yes, the UK audience is probably different to the US.
So, basically, its Marmite!