"Hey stop working on the internal combustion engine! We've got to come up with stronger horseshoes!"
Unfortunately one gets the impression that Microsoft Research is mostly working on perfecting the Elephantoplasty operation, and things like that, rather than anything so practical as the internal combustion engine.
I think Motorola effectively killed Code Warrior. In any case, their interests were no longer in sync. Motorola wanted a development environment for embedded work. It made sense for Apple to go with their mature GCC-based toolchain, rather than rely on a third party.
And of course if Apple had killed their use of gcc and stuck with Code Warrior, they wouldn't have invested so much in clang/llvm/lldb
"Flame away, those who are so inclined, but I have never heard anyone say they would prefer to program in Objective-C over Java, C++, Python, or the.Net languages."
I'm one who prefers Objective-C to Java, C++, Python, or.Net languages.
Good lord, learning Objective-C is easy. Learning any language is easy. It's the frameworks and libraries and idioms that are the hard part. A programmer who resists learning a language as easy as Objective-C is like a child who refuses to try any food other than their staple chicken nuggets and spaghettios.
"However, the way you get music on is a royal PITA. I mean, seriously, you have a closed, proprietary system, with strangely named files/folders."
Oh come on. They seem perfectly intelligible to me. I have no trouble navigating the filesystem to find a track, should that be necessary.
You'd have a point if iTunes arranged your files into a hierarchy of UUID-named items like you see in the Windows Registry, or something along those lines, rather than artist name, album name, etc.
"all the tools you need for professional work, comes on the OS installation disk with every Mac."
Or via download with a free developer account, if you get your hands on a second-hand Mac with an OS on the hard disk but no install DVD.
Plus, the free tools include things like Shark. As far as I can tell, there's nothing as good for Windows, and the only tools that approach it are quite expensive.
(And you get to use dtrace, and Instruments, etc).
" But then it turned into marketing for all their other products and the surface area of the whole.net thing grew out of control. "
Right. When I read this about Google's Vic Gundotra's years at Microsoft: "In 1991, Vic Gundotra, a 21-year-old programmer at Microsoft's Washington, DC, office, showed some of his demos to Steve Ballmer, then Microsoft's head of sales (and now CEO). Soon after, Gundotra was moved to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, WA. There, Gundotra and colleagues ran the skunk works project that resulted in a new architecture for supporting company software applications across many kinds of computers; now knows as.Net, it won out over several established projects. "
The brand.Net covers so much ground that I'm at a loss to guess which fetal portion he might have been working on in 1991.
"The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right."
"the most important thing in a debugger really is how well you can inspect, analyze, and debug code with it."
I'd expect that since the llvm project is already working on richer intermediate representations of code, and more informative compiler error messages, that lldb will likewise be able to provide more and better information about a program than gdb can, at least when working with executables built using clang/llvm.
Xcode offers the alternatives of GCC 4.2, GCC front end with an LLVM back end, or Clang/LLVM.
Since Clang's C++ support is still under development, it's understandable that they don't default to the clang front end.
I would be surprised if they aren't defaulting to clang/llvm by this time next year.
They're shifting gradually, but they're definitely shifting. It's my understanding that a number of the apps in Snow Leopard were built using clang/llvm.
"It's just as open as Mac darwin, on the very page you link to it lists the iPhoneOS downloads."
You clearly didn't look at the pages, did you? The iPhoneOS page has only six links for download. WebCore, JavaScriptCore, and things from the compiler toolchain, some of which they are required to post, like gcc and gdb. But there's no kernel.
The list of downloads under MacOS is far longer. In addition to the GPL, BSD, APACHE, and other licensed packages, there are a lot of downloads listed that are APSL-licensed, which are Apple code.
" or is it coming from large numbers of sales of small ticket items (itunes music store and app store). You have a point if the former, but if it's the latter (which I suspect), not so much."
The music store is break-even, or slightly profitable. The app store is probably similar, given the number of free apps.
The profits come from the iPhone, iPod, iPad, and computers. Apple makes more profit from iPhone sales than Nokia makes, even though Nokia sells many, many more phones.
"If you ask: "hey, can I get online access to BIA or SWIFT messages" they will come with very expensive solutions."
Which is, among other things, a way of making sure that you really NEED BIA or SWIFT access, and are serious enough to invest in a decent implentation, and you're not a fly-by-night dilletante or scammer.
While it probably also covers the back-end labor cost of supporting a new client, I suspect it is the equivalent of the 'earnest money' put down with an offer to buy, say, a house.
"On the iPod they had no competition when selling content"
Ever heard of a compact disc? You can rip them to mp3, put them in iTunes, and load them on your iPod.
" so they sold inferior content for higher prices then their competitors (who sold 192Kbps for $0.79, but never got far cause they couldn't license Apple's DRM"
No, they had their own DRM. If they didn't have DRM, then they could be loaded on an iPod.
You don't know what the hell you're talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hey stop working on the internal combustion engine! We've got to come up with stronger horseshoes!"
Unfortunately one gets the impression that Microsoft Research is mostly working on perfecting the Elephantoplasty operation, and things like that, rather than anything so practical as the internal combustion engine.
"Now here's the irony, Microsoft Research is supercool."
You know what's really supercool?
Shipping stuff that people can use.
"It killed Code Warrior"
I think Motorola effectively killed Code Warrior. In any case, their interests were no longer in sync. Motorola wanted a development environment for embedded work. It made sense for Apple to go with their mature GCC-based toolchain, rather than rely on a third party.
And of course if Apple had killed their use of gcc and stuck with Code Warrior, they wouldn't have invested so much in clang/llvm/lldb
"`deleteLater()` only fires when the event loop finishes:"
Like Objective-C's - autorelease; method.
"And how exactly do you backup your music easily"
Um, RAID? It's your ~/Music folder. You copy it. The only difficulty is the size.
(Yes, it's a bit annoying that Movies go in ~/Music/... rather than your ~/Movies directory. )
"Flame away, those who are so inclined, but I have never heard anyone say they would prefer to program in Objective-C over Java, C++, Python, or the .Net languages."
I'm one who prefers Objective-C to Java, C++, Python, or .Net languages.
Good lord, learning Objective-C is easy. Learning any language is easy. It's the frameworks and libraries and idioms that are the hard part. A programmer who resists learning a language as easy as Objective-C is like a child who refuses to try any food other than their staple chicken nuggets and spaghettios.
"However, the way you get music on is a royal PITA. I mean, seriously, you have a closed, proprietary system, with strangely named files/folders."
Oh come on. They seem perfectly intelligible to me. I have no trouble navigating the filesystem to find a track, should that be necessary.
You'd have a point if iTunes arranged your files into a hierarchy of UUID-named items like you see in the Windows Registry, or something along those lines, rather than artist name, album name, etc.
"all the tools you need for professional work, comes on the OS installation disk with every Mac."
Or via download with a free developer account, if you get your hands on a second-hand Mac with an OS on the hard disk but no install DVD.
Plus, the free tools include things like Shark. As far as I can tell, there's nothing as good for Windows, and the only tools that approach it are quite expensive.
(And you get to use dtrace, and Instruments, etc).
" But then it turned into marketing for all their other products and the surface area of the whole .net thing grew out of control. "
Right. When I read this about Google's Vic Gundotra's years at Microsoft: .Net, it won out over several established projects. "
"In 1991, Vic Gundotra, a 21-year-old programmer at Microsoft's Washington, DC, office, showed some of his demos to Steve Ballmer, then Microsoft's head of sales (and now CEO). Soon after, Gundotra was moved to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, WA. There, Gundotra and colleagues ran the skunk works project that resulted in a new architecture for supporting company software applications across many kinds of computers; now knows as
The brand .Net covers so much ground that I'm at a loss to guess which fetal portion he might have been working on in 1991.
"This comes up on every Slashdot article even vaguely related to Microsoft, Express Editions [microsoft.com] are free, dumbass."
And crippled?
Digital watches.
The report is from the MIT Energy Initiative, which counts among its members: BP Technology Ventures, Saudi Aramco, Chevron, Total, Hess.
The Board of Advisors includes: "Tony Hayward Group Chief Executive, BP p.l.c."
"The war was about states' rights, and against crushing economic pressure brought by northern industrialists."
Bullshit. The slave states were just fine with violating "states' rights" with the Fugitive Slave Act.
It was about slavery. The confederate vice president said so in his "cornerstone" speech in 1861.
"The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right."
"the most important thing in a debugger really is how well you can inspect, analyze, and debug code with it."
I'd expect that since the llvm project is already working on richer intermediate representations of code, and more informative compiler error messages, that lldb will likewise be able to provide more and better information about a program than gdb can, at least when working with executables built using clang/llvm.
Xcode offers the alternatives of GCC 4.2, GCC front end with an LLVM back end, or Clang/LLVM.
Since Clang's C++ support is still under development, it's understandable that they don't default to the clang front end.
I would be surprised if they aren't defaulting to clang/llvm by this time next year.
They're shifting gradually, but they're definitely shifting. It's my understanding that a number of the apps in Snow Leopard were built using clang/llvm.
"It's just as open as Mac darwin, on the very page you link to it lists the iPhoneOS downloads."
You clearly didn't look at the pages, did you? The iPhoneOS page has only six links for download. WebCore, JavaScriptCore, and things from the compiler toolchain, some of which they are required to post, like gcc and gdb. But there's no kernel.
The list of downloads under MacOS is far longer. In addition to the GPL, BSD, APACHE, and other licensed packages, there are a lot of downloads listed that are APSL-licensed, which are Apple code.
" or is it coming from large numbers of sales of small ticket items (itunes music store and app store). You have a point if the former, but if it's the latter (which I suspect), not so much."
The music store is break-even, or slightly profitable. The app store is probably similar, given the number of free apps.
The profits come from the iPhone, iPod, iPad, and computers. Apple makes more profit from iPhone sales than Nokia makes, even though Nokia sells many, many more phones.
"If you ask: "hey, can I get online access to BIA or SWIFT messages" they will come with very expensive solutions."
Which is, among other things, a way of making sure that you really NEED BIA or SWIFT access, and are serious enough to invest in a decent implentation, and you're not a fly-by-night dilletante or scammer.
While it probably also covers the back-end labor cost of supporting a new client, I suspect it is the equivalent of the 'earnest money' put down with an offer to buy, say, a house.
"That thing with the little LCD display in the lid of a laptop, pretty sure that was MSR"
Um... that's kind of underwhelming. Not the kind of thing that rises to the level of requiring MSR brains, I don't think.
Ever consider that it might not be price that's limiting your sales?
"On the iPod they had no competition when selling content"
Ever heard of a compact disc? You can rip them to mp3, put them in iTunes, and load them on your iPod.
" so they sold inferior content for higher prices then their competitors (who sold 192Kbps for $0.79, but never got far cause they couldn't license Apple's DRM"
No, they had their own DRM. If they didn't have DRM, then they could be loaded on an iPod.
You don't know what the hell you're talking about.
" A $99 iPad would be a true game-changer, and I think something along those lines is the next step. "
Ah yes, the iPad shuffle. No screen.
I'd like Apple to ship an ARM-based, iPhone OS-based Apple TV with app store support.
People who work with non-visible IR or UV lasers can use special tools that fluoresce visibly when contacted by a laser of the appropriate wavelength.
There are specially coated cardboard cards, as well as small disks that can be placed in lens holders on an optical breadboard.
http://thorlabs.com/NewGroupPage9.cfm?ObjectGroup_ID=296
Hm. Amazon.co.jp is still selling Apple products online.
Clearly, there is no "ban on online sales". Slashdot really shouldn't post stories based on Google translation.
Whatever is going on is more nuanced than the submitted story has been able to grasp.
It might be about online shops selling for below MSRP, but I can't see any reason why street retail shops couldn't do the same.