How are you going to write apps if you can't install anything that doesn't come from the App Store? It's a chicken-and-the-egg problem.
More importantly, the app store isn't going to be used for big, expensive, important software, like AutoCAD or Adobe Creative Suite or Microsoft Office. They aren't going to limit themselves to Apple's app DRM for licensing, and Apple isn't going to throw away Office and Photoshop.
Apple's stores use iPod touches (not sure which) in cases that incorporate a barcode scanner, for ringing up purchases, and a magnetic strip reader, for payments, and a rechargeable battery.
It is apparently something they designed themselves, a custom job, so it's not on the market.
A company writing an iPhone app in-house could probably license barcode reading code from a 3rd party, for use in their own apps.
I don't know if there's a market of enterprise app pieces being distributed as source code or libraries. Might be.
That's why text adventures can excel - the production values depend only on the author's writing ability. No need of teams of coders and artists and musicians.
One paragraph of text (and the reader's brain) can produce a scene that could take a large team weeks or months to produce a graphical depiction.
"Secondly, I doubt they chose a whole operating system because of the programming language used. It's a silly argument, for obvious reasons. They chose NeXT because it could support their requirements, at a good price"
They chose NeXT for the development environment's advantages. If they were selecting on price, they certainly wouldn't have chosen NeXT, given that in the early days you had to buy $4000 NeXT computers, and later the Intel version cost $795 for the OS and $4000 for the developer tools.
Just look at how NeXT's business evolved. They went from selling computers with an OS and dev tools, to selling an OS and dev tools, to selling the OpenStep development tools and a deployment environment on Windows, to selling the WebObjects environment for deployment on the web. They shed everything *but* the development environment, over time.
NSFormatters are usually attached to text fields or cells in a user interface, for things like formatting internationalized dates or numbers. With numbers it includes the sort of pretty-printing you see in spreadsheets (red for negative numbers, etc), maximum/minimum checking, etc. For dates I believe formatters will handle converting a string like "tomorrow" to the appropriate date.
If you just want to create a formatted string, you can use [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%d", anInt].
"You're not going to be able to simply copy over the code for a project."
You'd be able to copy over non-UI code.
Another benefit, though, is that iPhone code and GNUStep code will follow similar design patterns and idioms, use similar collection classes, similar ways of storing user defaults, a similar notification model, etc.
Porting a game from iOS to GNUStep will thus be similar to porting from iOS to Mac OS X (CocoaTouch to Cocoa).
"If reference counting were unrelated to the language's garbage collection, there would be no need to turn "retain" and "release" into no-ops, so clearly they are not unrelated. (The Wikipedia statement implies that they conflict with each other.)"
No. This is for when you take a pre-GC app and build it to use GC. You don't have to go through your old code and remove the retains and releases. They just become no-ops because they're irrelevant under GC. That's all the "backward compatibility" means.
True, but it shows that "real" apps can be developed using Objective-C and the NeXT-originated frameworks. Apps like trading systems at First National Bank of Chicago (now part of JP Morgan Chase), Bank of America, Swiss Bank Corp and UBS (now merged), Fannie Mae, etc.
" The world has moved on."
True, although I think many such customers in the mid-90s moved away from NeXT in order to reduce small-vendor risk (ie, not be caught out if NeXT went under). Especially when Java arrived. That was very seductive as an alternative, especially when per-seat deployment and development costs were considered.
What I don't know is how successful the projects were that ported NeXT-based systems to Java or C++ or otherwise, and how the development effort compared to the original NeXT projects. I suspect C++ would have been rather nastier in 1996 than it is now, assuming that template libraries, boost, etc have improved or come into existence.
Things might have turned out differently if NeXTSTEP were owned by a bigger, 'safer' company, and sold for less. If, say, Sun or IBM had owned the OS, and given away the OS and dev tools, making their profits on server hardware, it might have remained in use by corporations.
(As a point of reference, in my group at First Chicago/Bank One, in 2000 we had moved our trading app to OpenStep on NT, allowing it to run via Windows Terminal Server. That's about when I left, so I don't know where it went afterward. I think they may have tried moving it to WebObjects.)
There are lots of them available. The 2010 IF competition just finished, so there are a bunch of (free!) games of varying quality levels, genres, etc available.
" the organization being sued is a non-profit, Righthaven must show how their publishing of the article reduces Righthaven's ability to make money from the article."
Harvard, Yale, and the University of California system are all non-profits. Therefore, they can fill their libraries with bootleg copies of books and journals to their hearts' content.
Saying FIOS is available in various states is a bit of an exaggeration. It's available in some parts of some states. It's available in some parts of Massachusetts, but not where I live, in North Quincy, minutes from Boston.
"For example, if the use of the article is non-commercial and does not hurt the commercial value of the original, that's basically fair use."
No.
A full-length reproduction claim of fair use is justifiable when the original material is very short, so there's no portion that can act as a sensible stand-alone quote.
33 paragraphs is not short. The non-profit could have quoted meaningful passages from those 33 paragraphs.
Non-commercial use may be considered, but isn't enough. Harvard is non-commercial, but they have loads of staff, power, and money. Should they expect to be able to reproduce full news articles on their website or in their promotional materials, without compensating the source? (If they *ask* they may receive permission to use the material. But they shouldn't assume that, as a non-profit, they can have their way with anything published anywhere.)
I grew out of my building-PCs stage. If I'm not going to do that, i'm certainly not going to do the equivalent, PLUS crawling around on my knees bent under a dashboard, dealing with the joy of automotive proprietary wire harnesses and similar.
Throw an iPhone on the dashboard. No interest in an iPad. I don't watch TV, and barely watch movies. I'm not so media-addicted that i can't handle merely listening to audio in the car.
The IRS gave its consent in a secret pact known as an advanced pricing agreement. Google wouldn't discuss the price set under the arrangement, which licensed the rights to its search and advertising technology and other intangible property for Europe, the Middle East and Africa to a unit called Google Ireland Holdings, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Dublin Office
That licensee in turn owns Google Ireland Limited, which employs almost 2,000 people in a silvery glass office building in central Dublin, a block from the city's Grand Canal. The Dublin subsidiary sells advertising globally and was credited by Google with 88 percent of its $12.5 billion in non-U.S. sales in 2009.
Allocating the revenue to Ireland helps Google avoid income taxes in the U.S., where most of its technology was developed. The arrangement also reduces the company's liabilities in relatively high-tax European countries where many of its customers are located.
The profits don't stay with the Dublin subsidiary, which reported pretax income of less than 1 percent of sales in 2008, according to Irish records. That's largely because it paid $5.4 billion in royalties to Google Ireland Holdings, which has its "effective centre of management" in Bermuda, according to company filings.
Law Firm Directors
This Bermuda-managed entity is owned by a pair of Google subsidiaries that list as their directors two attorneys and a manager at Conyers Dill & Pearman, a Hamilton, Bermuda law firm.
Tax planners call such an arrangement a Double Irish because it relies on two Irish companies. One pays royalties to use intellectual property, generating expenses that reduce Irish taxable income. The second collects the royalties in a tax haven like Bermuda, avoiding Irish taxes.
To steer clear of an Irish withholding tax, payments from Google's Dublin unit don't go directly to Bermuda. A brief detour to the Netherlands avoids that liability, because Irish tax law exempts certain royalties to companies in other EU- member nations. The fees first go to a Dutch unit, Google Netherlands Holdings B.V., which pays out about 99.8 percent of what it collects to the Bermuda entity, company filings show. The Amsterdam-based subsidiary lists no employees.
Many companies use Irish tax rates through complicated legal arrangements that rarely involve actual business operations other than a post-office box.
Google uses an arrangement called the 'Double Irish' which involves a chain of an Irish-registered entity, to a Dutch-registered entity, and then to another entity which also comes under Irish law (hence double irish) which gives them something like a 2% corporate tax rate. They attribute their profits (I'm not sure if that's all profits, only non-US profits, or only European profits) to this entity, which is pretty much only something that exists on paper.
"I don't know how to describe it - I can give you a list of problems, like Ventillation, Heating, Vitamin D - which all have obvious solutions available,"
You mean cooling. In deep mines, it gets pretty hot. Temperature increases by 30-50 degrees Celsius for each kilometer of depth.
Back in the day, it was realized that Display Postscript could be exploited. This was demonstrated in an amusing way with encapsulated postscript files which, when NeXTSTEP's Mail program tried to render them in-line in a message, executed code that would cause your screen to "melt", or would grab all the windows on your screen and spin them around until you clicked the mouse.
Unfortunately, Postscript could also operate on files...
So NeXT added a default "secure DPS context" in which Postscript would execute with the problematic instructions disabled.
Slashdot Mirror
How are you going to write apps if you can't install anything that doesn't come from the App Store? It's a chicken-and-the-egg problem.
More importantly, the app store isn't going to be used for big, expensive, important software, like AutoCAD or Adobe Creative Suite or Microsoft Office. They aren't going to limit themselves to Apple's app DRM for licensing, and Apple isn't going to throw away Office and Photoshop.
Apple's stores use iPod touches (not sure which) in cases that incorporate a barcode scanner, for ringing up purchases, and a magnetic strip reader, for payments, and a rechargeable battery.
It is apparently something they designed themselves, a custom job, so it's not on the market.
A company writing an iPhone app in-house could probably license barcode reading code from a 3rd party, for use in their own apps.
I don't know if there's a market of enterprise app pieces being distributed as source code or libraries. Might be.
That's why text adventures can excel - the production values depend only on the author's writing ability. No need of teams of coders and artists and musicians.
One paragraph of text (and the reader's brain) can produce a scene that could take a large team weeks or months to produce a graphical depiction.
"Secondly, I doubt they chose a whole operating system because of the programming language used. It's a silly argument, for obvious reasons. They chose NeXT because it could support their requirements, at a good price"
They chose NeXT for the development environment's advantages. If they were selecting on price, they certainly wouldn't have chosen NeXT, given that in the early days you had to buy $4000 NeXT computers, and later the Intel version cost $795 for the OS and $4000 for the developer tools.
Just look at how NeXT's business evolved. They went from selling computers with an OS and dev tools, to selling an OS and dev tools, to selling the OpenStep development tools and a deployment environment on Windows, to selling the WebObjects environment for deployment on the web. They shed everything *but* the development environment, over time.
NSFormatters are usually attached to text fields or cells in a user interface, for things like formatting internationalized dates or numbers. With numbers it includes the sort of pretty-printing you see in spreadsheets (red for negative numbers, etc), maximum/minimum checking, etc. For dates I believe formatters will handle converting a string like "tomorrow" to the appropriate date.
If you just want to create a formatted string, you can use [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%d", anInt].
Or even printf.
"You're not going to be able to simply copy over the code for a project."
You'd be able to copy over non-UI code.
Another benefit, though, is that iPhone code and GNUStep code will follow similar design patterns and idioms, use similar collection classes, similar ways of storing user defaults, a similar notification model, etc.
Porting a game from iOS to GNUStep will thus be similar to porting from iOS to Mac OS X (CocoaTouch to Cocoa).
"using the 'static' keyword that was already in the language?"
Are you aware that classes in Objective-C are objects in their own right, and not just something munged onto file scope with a static keyword?
"I know they did that for compatibility with C, but that just makes it even more obvious that they should have made their stuff compatible with char*"
They just switched from char*'s everywhere to NSString when they went from NeXTSTEP to OpenStep.
If you want convenience methods for working with char *, write some freaking Categories.
"If reference counting were unrelated to the language's garbage collection, there would be no need to turn "retain" and "release" into no-ops, so clearly they are not unrelated. (The Wikipedia statement implies that they conflict with each other.)"
No. This is for when you take a pre-GC app and build it to use GC. You don't have to go through your old code and remove the retains and releases. They just become no-ops because they're irrelevant under GC. That's all the "backward compatibility" means.
"Yes, that was true, but quite a while back."
True, but it shows that "real" apps can be developed using Objective-C and the NeXT-originated frameworks. Apps like trading systems at First National Bank of Chicago (now part of JP Morgan Chase), Bank of America, Swiss Bank Corp and UBS (now merged), Fannie Mae, etc.
" The world has moved on."
True, although I think many such customers in the mid-90s moved away from NeXT in order to reduce small-vendor risk (ie, not be caught out if NeXT went under). Especially when Java arrived. That was very seductive as an alternative, especially when per-seat deployment and development costs were considered.
What I don't know is how successful the projects were that ported NeXT-based systems to Java or C++ or otherwise, and how the development effort compared to the original NeXT projects. I suspect C++ would have been rather nastier in 1996 than it is now, assuming that template libraries, boost, etc have improved or come into existence.
Things might have turned out differently if NeXTSTEP were owned by a bigger, 'safer' company, and sold for less. If, say, Sun or IBM had owned the OS, and given away the OS and dev tools, making their profits on server hardware, it might have remained in use by corporations.
(As a point of reference, in my group at First Chicago/Bank One, in 2000 we had moved our trading app to OpenStep on NT, allowing it to run via Windows Terminal Server. That's about when I left, so I don't know where it went afterward. I think they may have tried moving it to WebObjects.)
Most likely, they're patenting a particular, specific extension of what was done before.
I prefer coherent authorial voice, but thanks for the pointer.
There are lots of them available. The 2010 IF competition just finished, so there are a bunch of (free!) games of varying quality levels, genres, etc available.
" the organization being sued is a non-profit, Righthaven must show how their publishing of the article reduces Righthaven's ability to make money from the article."
Harvard, Yale, and the University of California system are all non-profits. Therefore, they can fill their libraries with bootleg copies of books and journals to their hearts' content.
I don't think it works that way.
Saying FIOS is available in various states is a bit of an exaggeration. It's available in some parts of some states. It's available in some parts of Massachusetts, but not where I live, in North Quincy, minutes from Boston.
"For example, if the use of the article is non-commercial and does not hurt the commercial value of the original, that's basically fair use."
No.
A full-length reproduction claim of fair use is justifiable when the original material is very short, so there's no portion that can act as a sensible stand-alone quote.
33 paragraphs is not short. The non-profit could have quoted meaningful passages from those 33 paragraphs.
Non-commercial use may be considered, but isn't enough. Harvard is non-commercial, but they have loads of staff, power, and money. Should they expect to be able to reproduce full news articles on their website or in their promotional materials, without compensating the source? (If they *ask* they may receive permission to use the material. But they shouldn't assume that, as a non-profit, they can have their way with anything published anywhere.)
I grew out of my building-PCs stage. If I'm not going to do that, i'm certainly not going to do the equivalent, PLUS crawling around on my knees bent under a dashboard, dealing with the joy of automotive proprietary wire harnesses and similar.
Throw an iPhone on the dashboard. No interest in an iPad. I don't watch TV, and barely watch movies. I'm not so media-addicted that i can't handle merely listening to audio in the car.
Here's a story at Bloomberg about Google's "Double Irish" arrangement:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21/google-2-4-rate-shows-how-60-billion-u-s-revenue-lost-to-tax-loopholes.html
What facilities? What jobs?
Many companies use Irish tax rates through complicated legal arrangements that rarely involve actual business operations other than a post-office box.
Google uses an arrangement called the 'Double Irish' which involves a chain of an Irish-registered entity, to a Dutch-registered entity, and then to another entity which also comes under Irish law (hence double irish) which gives them something like a 2% corporate tax rate. They attribute their profits (I'm not sure if that's all profits, only non-US profits, or only European profits) to this entity, which is pretty much only something that exists on paper.
Radiation could be an issue, depending on what's in the local rock.
I'd think storms would be a significant problem.
Central Greenland or the depths of the Gobi desert would be even easier, and there's plenty of room.
"I don't know how to describe it - I can give you a list of problems, like Ventillation, Heating, Vitamin D - which all have obvious solutions available,"
You mean cooling. In deep mines, it gets pretty hot. Temperature increases by 30-50 degrees Celsius for each kilometer of depth.
Back in the day, it was realized that Display Postscript could be exploited. This was demonstrated in an amusing way with encapsulated postscript files which, when NeXTSTEP's Mail program tried to render them in-line in a message, executed code that would cause your screen to "melt", or would grab all the windows on your screen and spin them around until you clicked the mouse.
Unfortunately, Postscript could also operate on files...
So NeXT added a default "secure DPS context" in which Postscript would execute with the problematic instructions disabled.