Since you don't actually deal with property lists as XML, ease-of-use is kind of beside the point. You can just use the APIs, or the commandline tools.
But there is a big difference between your two examples.
The second is an array. The first is explicitly a dictionary, of key/value pairs.
NSArrays can hold objects of multiple types. So the second example, just putting a key, then a value, then a key, then a value, is ambiguous. Is it an NSArray which happens to contain a number, then a string? or is it an NSDictionary containing a single key/value pair?
Or is it neither? Just two values archived in sequence. (Technically identical to an array's contents, but much different when you're archiving the data of an object which as an NSString instance variable, an NSNumber instance variable, and an NSArray instance variable.)
Apps that Apple says need fullscreen can, yes. But what about apps that I say need it?
Er, no. Apps that the developer says need fullscreen can do it. It's not reserved to Apple. If you want a third-party app to do fullscreen, ask the developer to do so.
Ask someone to develop a WebKit-based Safari clone that does fullscreen. Ask Omni to implement it.
which isn't surprising considering that the necessary call(s) are part of the QuickTime API.
No, the calls are part of CoreGraphics. You may have been using old, pre-OS/X references. Perhaps that explains the events as well, if you were expecting the old Carbon events model.
I believe you need to use CGDisplayCapture() and related functions.
Could be firewire to an expansion box which would sit on top of the mini.
The expansion box could hold additional hard drive storage, along with video and audio hardware and connectors appropriate for a media box. The hard drive could be bigger and faster, because it would be in a separate box from the CPU.
The expansion box would match the Mini's size and shape, except with a UI on the front for controlling things, and maybe a remote control sensor.
Stacked, the two would still be only about 5" high.
I suppose these guys wasted too much time playing video games, so they came up with this at the last minute before deadline.
RFID is a dumb way of sending the information, anyway, because so little data is carried.
Better to slap a USB key drive on an arrow. Or maybe just a rolled up piece of paper with a URL scrawled on it.
But, nooo. RFID is "hot", so they mentioned it instead.
Perhaps I'm wrong, though, and this is just a pathetic attempt at getting government or industry funding for 'research', which will probably consist of much time using the aforementioned videogames, and lots of British Columbia weed.
Real books are much more useful under the circumstances. Sending electronics, PDAs, printers - that makes no sense. Even a PDA is a bad idea - batteries are probably expensive as hell, especially good ones.
Gutenberg is overkill. Most of the texts in there are unlikely to be of interest.
Bound paper editions of Gutenberg's top 50, or 100, or 200 would be far better. Many would be available, cheap, at used book stores, or as discount reprinted classics at Barnes & Noble.
Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has never split its stock, which is all you need to know about stock splits, AFAIC
True, but the price of Berkshire Hathaway stock is currently $91,000 per share.
While nice for the stockholders, I'd expect that to limit liquidity somewhat, because there just aren't as many people with funds to buy stock at $91,000/share. Today only 290 shares traded. 3 month average volume is 393 shares. (It'd probably be harder to make an option-based incentive program work with so few shares outstanding. And you can pretty much forget about non-executive employees having stock in the company.)
Like it or not, many (probably most) investors are not perfectly rational creatures. They'll buy a stock, after a split, because the share price drops into a range that they find attractive or accessible.
If someone would like to invest in Apple right now, they might not have $8,000 available to buy 100 shares. On February 28, they'll be able to buy 100 shares for $4000 or so, which perhaps they can afford.
Now, if you're Homo Economicus ( a runtlike feral creature recently discovered in fossils on an island in Southeast Asia) you understand that halving the price doesn't necessarily make Apple any better of a buy. It's not like a half-price sale.
But most people aren't that rational. They invest like it is a half-price sale. Never mind that you're getting half as much of Apple when you buy a share.
Splitting a stock helps companies take advantage of this kind of behavior. At a given price, there will be people who want to buy, but can't. Halve the price with a split, and those people will buy, unless the fundamentals are atrocious. If the company was good enough to buy, pre-split, but cost too much, they'll buy post-split, which helps drive the price up again.
There's a big psychological factor. It's also part of why companies occasionally do a reverse split, to raise the price of their stock. If a stock is down around $5 or less, like Sun's, it just looks like a loser, fading into inconsequence.
I hate that. There's no way of knowing when that article was written. At best you can say it's after 1998, when Malone's book on Apple came out. The copyright at the bottom of the page says "2000-2004", which doesn't exactly narrow it down.
When he wrote that would be useful in evaluating his foresight. If it was written in 1998, then he gets some slack, because Apple was in really bad shape at the time, and Jobs' turnaround of Apple was definitely against the odds. If it was written in, say, 2004, then he has the foresight of a mole.
PEOPLE! Please! Put persistent dates on your articles when you post them!
(Note, this is not directed at the parent comment's author. I'm talking to the vague mass of people on the intarwebnets who have editorial control of websites. You know who you are.)
Buffett's company Berkshire Hathaway owns GEICO, which uses the gecko as its most recognizable corporate symbol.
I'd think customers would want professionals dealing with their auto insurance claims, yet GEICO (and Buffett) think a little gecko is just dandy.
Actually, we all know the accepted way to advertise to IT professionals is to either use gratuitous T&A, or else use one of those omnipresent stock-photo guys: the Asian guy with the spiky hair and the dark glasses, or the ultra-nerd guy who shows up in IT job ad sections, as if we like being insulted with a stereotype.
Underwood's devil trademark dates from 1870, and is the oldest US food trademark still in use.
"The original red devil was a real he-goat, half man, half goat, with horns, pronged spear and a tail. He was a leering demonic Lucifer, frequently portrayed in early ads dipping a whole ham into a boiling caldron as flames roar in the background and Satan's sons dance with glee. The current red devil has been stripped of evil. He is a happy Satan, smiling, carrying his spear, and apparently waving at the potential customer. His footwear appears to be elves slippers. The logo appears prominently on Underwood's entire line of meat spreads, chunk meats and sardines.
Advertising showing the little red devil began to appear nationally as early as 1895. It has become and icon of American culture. "
Keep the demon, but - if someone's got his panties in a bunch - make it a grown-up one, not a cute one like George Lucas would insert into his movies.
Or maybe the BSD logo could incorporate a cute chunk meat.
Now that she's gorged herself on the spirit of thousands, no doubt she'll float down to another company via her golden parachute and repeat the process there.
I find it incredible that Apple could have a patent on generating code from a user drawing a line between two mapped interfaces - doesn't Visio (among many other flowcharters) do it like that?
It wouldn't be a patent on just drawing a line.
It'd be a patent on drawing a line to establish a functional communications channel between two object instances.
Or something like that.
Because that's what IB does. It establishes the connection between a UI object, its target, and the Objective-C message sent to the target. These live objects are then freeze-dried, or put into suspended animation, with this information intact. Source code isn't generated.
It's not just "drawing a line".
Another possible aspect of the patent would be the way they implement the line. The line may connect objects in different windows, so can't just be drawn in a window like in Visio. If I'm not mistaken, the line is implemented with very thin windows.
I think the difference is that Naked Came The Stranger was an effort to write a well-crafted, but extremely low-brow and tawdry, novel, and see if they could sell it to a publisher. The awful part was the *story*, not the writing itself.
The "Travis Tea" effort, on the other hand, was a deliberate effort to craft horrible prose AND a horrible story, which no reputable publisher would ever publish.
The point is that a reputable publisher makes its money by *selling* the book to readers. They can do this if they buy a well-written but horribly tawdry book. There's a big market for tawdry, and "Naked Came The Stranger" was plumbing the depths to see just how tawdry it could be.
The stung publisher, PublishAmerica, does not make its money by selling books to readers. They get their money from authors, by persuading the author to pay for publication. So PublishAmerica need not concern itself with the quality of the writing or the story. They would probably be happy to publish a book consisting only of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". They'd be happy to publish that book even if it had been disemvowelled. As long as they get the money from the author, PublishAmerica doesn't care if the printed books languish in the author's basement.
Yet they present themselves as a legit publisher, concerned with quality. Thus, the sting.
The cardinal rule for authors to remember, when dealing with publishers, is that money flows toward the author. (I believe that's known as Yog's Law.) Authors do not pay up front for publishing, editing, proofreading, agenting, etc.
Nevertheless, the possibilities are endless what could happen when you locked a bunch of roombas, some cardea segway-style bots, some aibos and and some humanoid robots in your house.
And then put in a deaf/blind person! What larfs!
More seriously, the "emergent behavior" of such a menagerie would be about as interesting as a tableful of yapping battery-powered mechanical puppies that use 1980's tech and lack any AI or sensors.
Trust. And several well functioning sales channels.
I suspect that Apple would not benefit from those things, should they acquire Sun. Sun customers would probably start researching non-Sun alternatives, rather than buy from Apple.
After all, if Apple bought Sun, Sun's customers would be looking at unavoidable drastic change in the near future. (The product lines would be simplified, probably meaning an end to Solaris, and probably also much of the Sun hardware.) Customers might as well take their fate in their own hands and decide the changes themselves.
(It'd be kind of like IBM's PC customers, currently investigating alternatives due to the Lenovo deal and the resulting uncertainty about the future of the products.)
If Apple wants to do enterprise sales, they'd be better off just hiring people who can do it well, and building an organization from scratch, rather than buying a whole company most of which they don't want or need.
A good place to start might be the Peoplesoft employees who've been laid off by Oracle. And maybe some IBM staff who don't relish working for Lenovo.
Well, in my case, I don't eat Dunkin Donuts because I worked there as a teen. I don't have any particular dislike for the company, and I liked my manager.
Slashdot Mirror
Since you don't actually deal with property lists as XML, ease-of-use is kind of beside the point. You can just use the APIs, or the commandline tools.
But there is a big difference between your two examples.
The second is an array. The first is explicitly a dictionary, of key/value pairs.
NSArrays can hold objects of multiple types. So the second example, just putting a key, then a value, then a key, then a value, is ambiguous. Is it an NSArray which happens to contain a number, then a string? or is it an NSDictionary containing a single key/value pair?
Or is it neither? Just two values archived in sequence. (Technically identical to an array's contents, but much different when you're archiving the data of an object which as an NSString instance variable, an NSNumber instance variable, and an NSArray instance variable.)
The frog twitching went way back, to Galvani, I believe, and inspired Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Edison went all the way up to electrocuting horses
He also did an elephant.
Apps that Apple says need fullscreen can, yes. But what about apps that I say need it?
Er, no. Apps that the developer says need fullscreen can do it. It's not reserved to Apple. If you want a third-party app to do fullscreen, ask the developer to do so.
Ask someone to develop a WebKit-based Safari clone that does fullscreen. Ask Omni to implement it.
which isn't surprising considering that the necessary call(s) are part of the QuickTime API.
No, the calls are part of CoreGraphics. You may have been using old, pre-OS/X references. Perhaps that explains the events as well, if you were expecting the old Carbon events model.
I believe you need to use CGDisplayCapture() and related functions.
Could be firewire to an expansion box which would sit on top of the mini.
The expansion box could hold additional hard drive storage, along with video and audio hardware and connectors appropriate for a media box. The hard drive could be bigger and faster, because it would be in a separate box from the CPU.
The expansion box would match the Mini's size and shape, except with a UI on the front for controlling things, and maybe a remote control sensor.
Stacked, the two would still be only about 5" high.
I suppose these guys wasted too much time playing video games, so they came up with this at the last minute before deadline.
RFID is a dumb way of sending the information, anyway, because so little data is carried.
Better to slap a USB key drive on an arrow. Or maybe just a rolled up piece of paper with a URL scrawled on it.
But, nooo. RFID is "hot", so they mentioned it instead.
Perhaps I'm wrong, though, and this is just a pathetic attempt at getting government or industry funding for 'research', which will probably consist of much time using the aforementioned videogames, and lots of British Columbia weed.
Sheesh.
Real books are much more useful under the circumstances. Sending electronics, PDAs, printers - that makes no sense. Even a PDA is a bad idea - batteries are probably expensive as hell, especially good ones.
Gutenberg is overkill. Most of the texts in there are unlikely to be of interest.
Bound paper editions of Gutenberg's top 50, or 100, or 200 would be far better. Many would be available, cheap, at used book stores, or as discount reprinted classics at Barnes & Noble.
"Unless you're using something like newsprint, they don't make acidic paper anymore"
Cheap paperbacks are, most likely, still acidic. Budget "classics" like are sold at Barnes & Noble are probably also printed on cheap paper.
Nobody wants their game state written all over their body.
(Well, some hardcore gamers might actually get off on that.)
That's why they issue Series B [yahoo.com] shares, which have considerable volume.
Considerable, compared to the other Hathaway stock, but still only 19,000 shares or so. That's orders of magnitude smaller than most stocks.
Also, at over $3,000 per share, it's still too pricey for most investors, who'd rather not risk so much of their money on a single stock.
Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has never split its stock, which is all you need to know about stock splits, AFAIC
True, but the price of Berkshire Hathaway stock is currently $91,000 per share.
While nice for the stockholders, I'd expect that to limit liquidity somewhat, because there just aren't as many people with funds to buy stock at $91,000/share. Today only 290 shares traded. 3 month average volume is 393 shares. (It'd probably be harder to make an option-based incentive program work with so few shares outstanding. And you can pretty much forget about non-executive employees having stock in the company.)
Like it or not, many (probably most) investors are not perfectly rational creatures. They'll buy a stock, after a split, because the share price drops into a range that they find attractive or accessible.
If someone would like to invest in Apple right now, they might not have $8,000 available to buy 100 shares. On February 28, they'll be able to buy 100 shares for $4000 or so, which perhaps they can afford.
Now, if you're Homo Economicus ( a runtlike feral creature recently discovered in fossils on an island in Southeast Asia) you understand that halving the price doesn't necessarily make Apple any better of a buy. It's not like a half-price sale.
But most people aren't that rational. They invest like it is a half-price sale. Never mind that you're getting half as much of Apple when you buy a share.
Splitting a stock helps companies take advantage of this kind of behavior. At a given price, there will be people who want to buy, but can't. Halve the price with a split, and those people will buy, unless the fundamentals are atrocious. If the company was good enough to buy, pre-split, but cost too much, they'll buy post-split, which helps drive the price up again.
There's a big psychological factor. It's also part of why companies occasionally do a reverse split, to raise the price of their stock. If a stock is down around $5 or less, like Sun's, it just looks like a loser, fading into inconsequence.
I hate that. There's no way of knowing when that article was written. At best you can say it's after 1998, when Malone's book on Apple came out. The copyright at the bottom of the page says "2000-2004", which doesn't exactly narrow it down.
When he wrote that would be useful in evaluating his foresight. If it was written in 1998, then he gets some slack, because Apple was in really bad shape at the time, and Jobs' turnaround of Apple was definitely against the odds. If it was written in, say, 2004, then he has the foresight of a mole.
PEOPLE! Please! Put persistent dates on your articles when you post them!
(Note, this is not directed at the parent comment's author. I'm talking to the vague mass of people on the intarwebnets who have editorial control of websites. You know who you are.)
I think the name of the genre was "nudie cutie".
Not quite soft porn.
And then there's their FUD about the sexual proclivities of Tinky Winky and Spongebob Squarepants.
Hey, I have an idea. Let's play to the fundies.
Make the new BSD mascot be a cutesy "head of John the Baptist on a silver platter".
Heck, the fundies think Proctor & Gamble's logo is satanic.
There's no reasoning with them.
Buffett's company Berkshire Hathaway owns GEICO, which uses the gecko as its most recognizable corporate symbol.
I'd think customers would want professionals dealing with their auto insurance claims, yet GEICO (and Buffett) think a little gecko is just dandy.
Actually, we all know the accepted way to advertise to IT professionals is to either use gratuitous T&A, or else use one of those omnipresent stock-photo guys: the Asian guy with the spiky hair and the dark glasses, or the ultra-nerd guy who shows up in IT job ad sections, as if we like being insulted with a stereotype.
Not necessarily a Shoggoth, but demons and devils are not unheard-of in corporate identities.
Underwood's devil trademark dates from 1870, and is the oldest US food trademark still in use.
"The original red devil was a real he-goat, half man, half goat, with horns, pronged spear and a tail. He was a leering demonic Lucifer, frequently portrayed in early ads dipping a whole ham into a boiling caldron as flames roar in the background and Satan's sons dance with glee. The current red devil has been stripped of evil. He is a happy Satan, smiling, carrying his spear, and apparently waving at the potential customer. His footwear appears to be elves slippers. The logo appears prominently on Underwood's entire line of meat spreads, chunk meats and sardines.
Advertising showing the little red devil began to appear nationally as early as 1895. It has become and icon of American culture. "
Keep the demon, but - if someone's got his panties in a bunch - make it a grown-up one, not a cute one like George Lucas would insert into his movies.
Or maybe the BSD logo could incorporate a cute chunk meat.
Now that she's gorged herself on the spirit of thousands, no doubt she'll float down to another company via her golden parachute and repeat the process there.
Carly Fiorina is a slake-moth?
It's about money.
The budget Bush just submitted cuts the Hubble.
I find it incredible that Apple could have a patent on generating code from a user drawing a line between two mapped interfaces - doesn't Visio (among many other flowcharters) do it like that?
It wouldn't be a patent on just drawing a line.
It'd be a patent on drawing a line to establish a functional communications channel between two object instances.
Or something like that.
Because that's what IB does. It establishes the connection between a UI object, its target, and the Objective-C message sent to the target. These live objects are then freeze-dried, or put into suspended animation, with this information intact. Source code isn't generated.
It's not just "drawing a line".
Another possible aspect of the patent would be the way they implement the line. The line may connect objects in different windows, so can't just be drawn in a window like in Visio. If I'm not mistaken, the line is implemented with very thin windows.
I think the difference is that Naked Came The Stranger was an effort to write a well-crafted, but extremely low-brow and tawdry, novel, and see if they could sell it to a publisher. The awful part was the *story*, not the writing itself.
The "Travis Tea" effort, on the other hand, was a deliberate effort to craft horrible prose AND a horrible story, which no reputable publisher would ever publish.
The point is that a reputable publisher makes its money by *selling* the book to readers. They can do this if they buy a well-written but horribly tawdry book. There's a big market for tawdry, and "Naked Came The Stranger" was plumbing the depths to see just how tawdry it could be.
The stung publisher, PublishAmerica, does not make its money by selling books to readers. They get their money from authors, by persuading the author to pay for publication. So PublishAmerica need not concern itself with the quality of the writing or the story. They would probably be happy to publish a book consisting only of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". They'd be happy to publish that book even if it had been disemvowelled. As long as they get the money from the author, PublishAmerica doesn't care if the printed books languish in the author's basement.
Yet they present themselves as a legit publisher, concerned with quality. Thus, the sting.
The cardinal rule for authors to remember, when dealing with publishers, is that money flows toward the author. (I believe that's known as Yog's Law.) Authors do not pay up front for publishing, editing, proofreading, agenting, etc.
Single Flabby Female?
Not something Shuttle probably wants their name to invoke...
Nevertheless, the possibilities are endless what could happen when you locked a bunch of roombas, some cardea segway-style bots, some aibos and and some humanoid robots in your house.
And then put in a deaf/blind person! What larfs!
More seriously, the "emergent behavior" of such a menagerie would be about as interesting as a tableful of yapping battery-powered mechanical puppies that use 1980's tech and lack any AI or sensors.
Trust. And several well functioning sales channels.
I suspect that Apple would not benefit from those things, should they acquire Sun. Sun customers would probably start researching non-Sun alternatives, rather than buy from Apple.
After all, if Apple bought Sun, Sun's customers would be looking at unavoidable drastic change in the near future. (The product lines would be simplified, probably meaning an end to Solaris, and probably also much of the Sun hardware.) Customers might as well take their fate in their own hands and decide the changes themselves.
(It'd be kind of like IBM's PC customers, currently investigating alternatives due to the Lenovo deal and the resulting uncertainty about the future of the products.)
If Apple wants to do enterprise sales, they'd be better off just hiring people who can do it well, and building an organization from scratch, rather than buying a whole company most of which they don't want or need.
A good place to start might be the Peoplesoft employees who've been laid off by Oracle. And maybe some IBM staff who don't relish working for Lenovo.
Well, in my case, I don't eat Dunkin Donuts because I worked there as a teen. I don't have any particular dislike for the company, and I liked my manager.
But I've seen the glaze vat.
Yeah... those prices are really in the ballpark
In the ballpark of machine prices from 1992, Einstein.
The price of a Mac Mini in 1992 would really have been prohibitive, seeing as how it would have required a freaking time machine.
I'm talking 1992 Macs, 1992 Sun boxes, 1992 PCs.