"It found that that the #1 complaint from employees was that there was not enough overtime work in slow periods. I guess that shouldn't exactly alleviate your suspicions."
Well, they clearly aren't there for their health - they're there to make money. And they probably want to make as much as possible as quickly as possible, in order to improve their lot in life - so they can afford a home or apartment. That means overtime.
Some people in the West seem to forget that even poor Chinese laborers can have ambitions and want more from life than leisure time and a subsistence wage.
"Snide remarks agains MS throughout the keynote? Why is that kind of stuff at a DEVELOPERS conference? You don't hear crap like that at MS dev conferences."
MS dev conferences consist largely of MS trying to mollify developers who are pissed that the new OS has slipped again, and/or mad that they wasted a lot of time preparing to use a technology which has been dropped from the OS.
Their audience probably isn't in the mood, and Microsoft wouldn't want to draw attention to a competitor which managed to ship OS'es.
"if this is VMWare's subtle riposte to Transgaming's 'Cider' engine [slashdot.org] for the world of Mac gaming? It's a bit of a stretch, I know, but the timing is a little too convenient."
A) VMWare doesn't care about Mac gamers, they mostly care about business and technical users.
B) They've been working on this for a while, and running job ads for Mac developers for a couple of months. If they were responding to the Cider announcement they would be just starting development, not announcing a public beta.
"Wasnt one Al's biggest supporters early on the Malthusian fool who wrote the big population growth scare book of the 80's.(we should be all dead by now).. His name escapes me."
The book you're thinking of was published in 1968.
"Actually if you look at his "profile" on Wikipedia you realize that his parents probably never let him go to Disneyland when he was a kid, so he's overcompensating."
Being Canadian, they probably went to Florida, but drove past Disneyland on the way to a Marxist summer camp, traumatizing the poor boy forever.
"As for his Novels.... Some funky ideas, I just wish he would stop being so utterly in love with everything Disney does, or at least let's it colour his view of the world."
Yeah, no kidding. Doctorow thinks the world owes him a lifetime of free entertainment, yet he's a slavish fanboy who goes nuts over every piece of tacky Disney merchandise he finds.
". I know that popularity doesn't equate to quality, but if an author can give away his books and still make money selling them, it should be obvious that he's doing something right."
How do you know he makes money selling them? Have you looked at his royalty statements?
For all anyone knows, he's a trust fund baby living on his grandparents' money (his parents were Trostkyist fools, so they clearly didn't make any money), or maybe he lives on revenue from the startup he was involved in which was acquired in the late 90s.
"As I was saying: NeXT complied with the letter of the GPL by dumping a hacked version of gcc on the world, but that wasn't useful for the gcc project, at least not for a long time."
I don't recall "utility to the gcc project" as being a requirement of the license. NeXT's needs were orthogonal to those of the typical gcc user. Big deal.
"C++, of course, is the spider-man standin, and Objective C is our metaphorical iron man. "
I think that's backwards. Objective-C is C that was injected with radioactive serum which effected a deep change in original language's existence and modus operandi.
C++, on the other hand, is like Iron Man (or even the bulkier Iron Man armor-based War Machine armor with attached gatling gun and rocket launchers), a highly complex, difficult to maintain technology that has many different versions, yet which essentially wraps around a still-flawed core with a bad heart and a booze problem. And a stack of C++ reference books is analogous to the briefcase Tony Stark had to carry around with him all the time to hold the armor.
Whereas Tony Stark is forever tinkering with his armor, charging it, improving it, tuning it, trying to fix bugs, and maintaining it, the radioactive spider venom "just works".
Well, yes, but not because of the presence of media, but because of the woefully limited interactivity which pretty much would require such a project to be stupid and childish.
I would recommend that they look at something like Inform 7 as an example of how to create interactive novels, and then contemplate how they could fully integrate multimedia with a sophisticated parser like that.
" For those of you like me who are out of the loop on this state of the art technology I offer you this 5 word summary: Zork with stills and sound."
Worse than that, it's like the primitive graphical adventure games that came out at about the same time as the Infocom games.
This has modern graphics, but it has a similarly rudimentary parser. Assuming it even parses anything. It may just be click-one-of-the-choice buttons, in which case HTML would work just as well.
"From a 15th century monk's perspective, today's curve is vertical."
The Dalai Lama is a pretty good analog to a 15th century monk dropped into a high-tech world (albeit in the 1960s), yet he seems to have kept up fairly well. While in Tibet, his exposure to technology was minimal. He learned how to fix watches, but the most advanced tech he was exposed to was an early 20th century automobile which had been brought to Lhasa in pieces. I'm not sure if it actually functioned.
Nowadays you see him giving talks wearing one of those high-tech Britney Spears-style wireless mics.
Remember, this is George W. Bush's thing. The man couldn't care less about space, the moon, Mars, or science as a whole. The man has the intellect and curiosity of a dairy cow.
This is about funneling billions to defense industry cronies while starving other projects of funding. Conveniently for Bush's cronies in industry, this includes cutting off funding for projects related to the global climate.
They even changed the NASA mission statement to remove reference to the study of Earth.
" That said, it is showing it's age, and could learn a few tricks from more recent Smalltalk derived languages like Ruby, but the last attempt to revise Obj-C syntax failed and I expect any new one would also."
That's not actually true.
The change you're talking about was the attempted shift to Java-like syntax, which thankfully died, being based on mid-90s Java hype and little else. But that was like 10 years ago.
More recently, there are some new features added to Objective-C such as Java-style try/catch/finally exception handing, and @synchronized blocks for threaded code.
There have been rumors that 10.5 might add support for garbage collection.
"If they really want broad-based industry and developer support, they will have to dump it eventually."
So you're saying they'd take broad-based industry and developer support by hamstringing themselves with inferior languages?
Doesn't sound like a very good deal to me.
C++ used to be the platform with "broad based industry and developer support", but that didn't stop everyone from fleeing to Java because C++ sucked so hard.
To me, newImage.blah looks like you're accessing part of a structure, mere data.
An object is something different, because it's active and knows how to do things. Therefore, it makes no sense to use the same syntax to pass a message to an object as you use to access part of a mere structure.
That's why I prefer the [newImage initWithContentsOfFile:fileName] syntax. It makes clear that you're dealing with an object, through a dynamic message call, rather than using some traditional C construct.
An IF game based on John Hersey's Hiroshima would probably be mighty disturbing.
I'm not sure a graphical game would be up to it. The player would probably become inured to the visuals pretty quickly, assuming the visuals didn't start out in uncanny valley and hokey hollow.
Slashdot Mirror
"On top of that, according to this bbc report, the audit was pretty lax - interviewing just 100 employees from more than 30,000."
Surveys claimed to represent the opinion of the entire United States regularly use only one or two thousand respondents.
By that standard, 100 out of a mere 30,000 ought to be enough to peg the situation correctly.
"It found that that the #1 complaint from employees was that there was not enough overtime work in slow periods. I guess that shouldn't exactly alleviate your suspicions."
Well, they clearly aren't there for their health - they're there to make money. And they probably want to make as much as possible as quickly as possible, in order to improve their lot in life - so they can afford a home or apartment. That means overtime.
Some people in the West seem to forget that even poor Chinese laborers can have ambitions and want more from life than leisure time and a subsistence wage.
"If they released binaries with no corresponding source, then yes, yes they would."
Er, no. "Open Source" doesn't include a SLA for a specific website.
If the current source is available, say from an independent mirror or torrent, that is sufficient.
"Snide remarks agains MS throughout the keynote? Why is that kind of stuff at a DEVELOPERS conference? You don't hear crap like that at MS dev conferences."
MS dev conferences consist largely of MS trying to mollify developers who are pissed that the new OS has slipped again, and/or mad that they wasted a lot of time preparing to use a technology which has been dropped from the OS.
Their audience probably isn't in the mood, and Microsoft wouldn't want to draw attention to a competitor which managed to ship OS'es.
"My protests were at Apple calling the OS X open source when it wasn't (coz you couldn't download the source)."
You silly tit, you could download 99% of it. "OMG! WTF! How DARE they! Hypocrisy! Clutch the pearls, I've got the vapors!"
"I want an oompa-loompa NOW, daddy!"
It's not hypocrisy if the source release for one small portion of their OS is temporarily delayed.
When you're at a restaurant, do you throw a crying tantrum if a pea gets into your mashed potatoes?
Time travel to the future is nothing special.
I do it every day.
"if this is VMWare's subtle riposte to Transgaming's 'Cider' engine [slashdot.org] for the world of Mac gaming? It's a bit of a stretch, I know, but the timing is a little too convenient."
A) VMWare doesn't care about Mac gamers, they mostly care about business and technical users.
B) They've been working on this for a while, and running job ads for Mac developers for a couple of months. If they were responding to the Cider announcement they would be just starting development, not announcing a public beta.
"Wasnt one Al's biggest supporters early on the Malthusian fool who wrote the big population growth scare book of the 80's.(we should be all dead by now).. His name escapes me."
The book you're thinking of was published in 1968.
You're a little off.
It's no fun watching the other leading brand. They never ship.
"Actually if you look at his "profile" on Wikipedia you realize that his parents probably never let him go to Disneyland when he was a kid, so he's overcompensating."
Being Canadian, they probably went to Florida, but drove past Disneyland on the way to a Marxist summer camp, traumatizing the poor boy forever.
"As for his Novels.... Some funky ideas, I just wish he would stop being so utterly in love with everything Disney does, or at least let's it colour his view of the world."
Yeah, no kidding. Doctorow thinks the world owes him a lifetime of free entertainment, yet he's a slavish fanboy who goes nuts over every piece of tacky Disney merchandise he finds.
It's very odd.
". I know that popularity doesn't equate to quality, but if an author can give away his books and still make money selling them, it should be obvious that he's doing something right."
How do you know he makes money selling them? Have you looked at his royalty statements?
For all anyone knows, he's a trust fund baby living on his grandparents' money (his parents were Trostkyist fools, so they clearly didn't make any money), or maybe he lives on revenue from the startup he was involved in which was acquired in the late 90s.
"As I was saying: NeXT complied with the letter of the GPL by dumping a hacked version of gcc on the world, but that wasn't useful for the gcc project, at least not for a long time."
I don't recall "utility to the gcc project" as being a requirement of the license. NeXT's needs were orthogonal to those of the typical gcc user. Big deal.
"C++, of course, is the spider-man standin, and Objective C is our metaphorical iron man. "
I think that's backwards. Objective-C is C that was injected with radioactive serum which effected a deep change in original language's existence and modus operandi.
C++, on the other hand, is like Iron Man (or even the bulkier Iron Man armor-based War Machine armor with attached gatling gun and rocket launchers), a highly complex, difficult to maintain technology that has many different versions, yet which essentially wraps around a still-flawed core with a bad heart and a booze problem. And a stack of C++ reference books is analogous to the briefcase Tony Stark had to carry around with him all the time to hold the armor.
Whereas Tony Stark is forever tinkering with his armor, charging it, improving it, tuning it, trying to fix bugs, and maintaining it, the radioactive spider venom "just works".
Could be worse.
In the early 90's there was a fat book about the NeXT computer, which was significantly padded by an appendix consisting of the output of "ls -lR
Well, yes, but not because of the presence of media, but because of the woefully limited interactivity which pretty much would require such a project to be stupid and childish.
I would recommend that they look at something like Inform 7 as an example of how to create interactive novels, and then contemplate how they could fully integrate multimedia with a sophisticated parser like that.
" For those of you like me who are out of the loop on this state of the art technology I offer you this 5 word summary: Zork with stills and sound."
Worse than that, it's like the primitive graphical adventure games that came out at about the same time as the Infocom games.
This has modern graphics, but it has a similarly rudimentary parser. Assuming it even parses anything. It may just be click-one-of-the-choice buttons, in which case HTML would work just as well.
I think you'll get a better return if you invest in bubble tea.
"From a 15th century monk's perspective, today's curve is vertical."
The Dalai Lama is a pretty good analog to a 15th century monk dropped into a high-tech world (albeit in the 1960s), yet he seems to have kept up fairly well. While in Tibet, his exposure to technology was minimal. He learned how to fix watches, but the most advanced tech he was exposed to was an early 20th century automobile which had been brought to Lhasa in pieces. I'm not sure if it actually functioned.
Nowadays you see him giving talks wearing one of those high-tech Britney Spears-style wireless mics.
Remember, this is George W. Bush's thing. The man couldn't care less about space, the moon, Mars, or science as a whole. The man has the intellect and curiosity of a dairy cow.
This is about funneling billions to defense industry cronies while starving other projects of funding. Conveniently for Bush's cronies in
industry, this includes cutting off funding for projects related to the global climate.
They even changed the NASA mission statement to remove reference to the study of Earth.
" That said, it is showing it's age, and could learn a few tricks from more recent Smalltalk derived languages like Ruby, but the last attempt to revise Obj-C syntax failed and I expect any new one would also."
That's not actually true.
The change you're talking about was the attempted shift to Java-like syntax, which thankfully died, being based on mid-90s Java hype and little else. But that was like 10 years ago.
More recently, there are some new features added to Objective-C such as Java-style try/catch/finally exception handing, and @synchronized blocks for threaded code.
There have been rumors that 10.5 might add support for garbage collection.
"If they really want broad-based industry and developer support, they will have to dump it eventually."
So you're saying they'd take broad-based industry and developer support by hamstringing themselves with inferior languages?
Doesn't sound like a very good deal to me.
C++ used to be the platform with "broad based industry and developer support", but that didn't stop everyone from fleeing to Java because C++ sucked so hard.
To me, newImage.blah looks like you're accessing part of a structure, mere data.
An object is something different, because it's active and knows how to do things. Therefore, it makes no sense to use
the same syntax to pass a message to an object as you use to access part of a mere structure.
That's why I prefer the [newImage initWithContentsOfFile:fileName] syntax. It makes clear that you're dealing with
an object, through a dynamic message call, rather than using some traditional C construct.
An IF game based on John Hersey's Hiroshima would probably be mighty disturbing.
I'm not sure a graphical game would be up to it. The player would probably become inured to the visuals pretty quickly, assuming the visuals
didn't start out in uncanny valley and hokey hollow.