You may not write a lot of C functions in your code, but you'd using plenty of functions (and function like macros), which are part of Apple's frameworks. So you'll have to understand C functions if you write Objective-C code.
Re:Tablet... Is Not An Ebook Reader...
on
The eBook Backlash
·
· Score: 1
Not to mention that it often takes (me) more than one reading in order to retain the information in said book.
Well, to be fair, Apple's packaging has been covering all those points since the original iPod. And back then that kind of attention to packaging was fairly innovative for a consumer electronics product — as demonstrated by that infamous Microsoft internal training video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k
There seems to be ongoing confusion between innovation and invention.
What you describe as Apple's innovation is what innovation is in general -- you start with an existing thing and improve it some way.
Coming up with something completely new is invention and I don't think either Apple or Google do a lot of that.
Yeah, yeah DarkDust means the Location Services database "-gate", which you are right is not even remotely similar. In fact the two issues are as dissimilar as they can be. And here lies the most depressing thing — this will garner very little attention, especially outside of geek circles. I'd be surprised if this revelation, as egregious violation of privacy as it describes, will cause mainstream media excitement and force a congressional hearing and grilling like the Location Services thing did.
Sure they can do that, but will it really matter? By then they'll have lost a lot of money, a lot of market share, a lot of mind share and brand value. And switching to Android will not prevent the rest of the Android OEMs from gutting them. In fact it probably will be a much more brutal gutting, because while with WinPho7 Nokia are at least getting in the game early on in the life of the platform with Android they will be 5-ish years behind most of their competitors.
This has been the case throughout the whole of the last ten years and we've been eagerly awaiting said pioneer for at least 4-5 of them. Still nothing. I'm starting to suspect that there is actually no gold and that the only ones who haven't figured it out yet are some of the folks on Slashdot.
In what way GNUstep + GCC (+ presumably Linux) facilitate "systems [lock]down and... prevent after-market modifications" more than "Android-esque / Java"?
Some of the biggest NeXT clients were precisely from the military, intelligence, banking, financial services and science communities. And they chose NeXT precisely because of Objective-C and NeXTStep.
Apple don't have to do squat to prevent iPad apps form being "recycled" on a Sony gadget - there are more than enough differences that cannot easily be compensated between this Sony platform and iOS for this to even be a possibility. For example Sony will be using Cairo instead of Apple's Quartz, so any drawing code in an app will have to be rewritten. Also GNUstep does not implement UIKit at all. It doesn't even mimic AppKit all that well. And reverse engineering and achieving parity with either framework is a gargantuan task. So any UI code in an app will also need to be rewritten, or at least significantly modified, at which point you might as well rewrite the whole application in an entirely different language/framework.
Each share of Apple stock is worth one N-th (where N is the total number of shares, which for Apple is about 900 million) of the company's book value. If Apple were to shut down tomorrow you'll get some sum of money without having to pass your shares to anybody.
Contrary to the obviously less than clued in article says, it's all Linux, be it Android, Chrome or WebOS.
But is it? When you have three completely distinct ways of writing applications, would you still count them as one OS simply because they have the same kernel? Would you be running a glorified browser, like ChromeOS, on a SuperDome Supercomputer?
If the PR team is planning to "manage the rumors", I'm hesitant to believe that the rumor is accurate. After all, if HP was really killing the Slate, why wouldn't they want word out as soon as possible, or why would they care about managing what's said?
Actually, I'm reading this exactly the opposite way - if HP were not killing the Slate a simple response would be sufficient, something like - "Of course no. That rumor is ludicrous. We are still shipping the Slate in the already announced timeframe."
On the other hand, if they are "killing" the Slate and, say, replacing it with the same hardware but running WebOS, they probably need time to assess how much time will that take, or whatever, so they can come out and say - "We are killing the current Slate device if favor of releasing so-and-so in six months."
I may, too, be reading it wrongly, though. Probably it's best if we don't assume either way until HP comment on the matter or release the device.
*takes a deep breath*
FOR THE UMPTEENTH TIME, NOBODY IS ARGUING APPLE DIDN'T KNOW HIS IDENTITY!
*and exhale*
The point Doches is making, and completely agree with, is that we should not splatter his name and face all over teh intertubes and laugh at his expense. The guy has it quite hard as is and he can do without out visceral gloating.
You need to only ask yourself whether you trust Opera Software ASA.
Or any individual one of their employees, who have access to said servers. And when it comes to financial information, my position is no on both counts. I sure hope most people share my position.
Screwing with adults and their privacy is one thing, photographing naked children is some next level shit to put it bluntly.
Yeah, some guy in Australia, I believe, got sentenced to jail for pedophilia because he had pornographic pictures of cartoon characters, but it's OK for government employed perverts to be ogling our kids in the name of "safety". Top grade job UK government, fucking A+.
OK, let me break down fuzzyfuzzyfungus' argument into simple sentences for you, because you seem unable to wrap your mind around it.
-- Government chooses a proprietary format
-- Everybody who is part of "the market" inevitably has to interact with the government and their documentation.
-- The software of the company owning said format, regardless of its merits, is the only one that can be used to comunicate with the government.
-- "The market" can go fuck itself selecting the best product.
-- Government chooses an open, unencumbered with patents format
-- Everybody who is part of "the market" inevitably has to interact with the government and their documentation.
-- Anyone can write software that can be used to comunicate with the government.
-- "The market" can freely choose whichever products they fancy.
And you seem to be absolutely right, only evil socialist governments and the pinko commies who've elected them seem to understand these two simple concepts. Hoorah for libertarianism.
At the very least Apple, and I'd presume Microsoft too, although I don't really know (or care), does not require bank or tax information if you don't plan on selling your app. The developer account registration does not ask you for that information and once you've got your developer credentials, you already have an active contract with the iTunes App store for worldwide distribution of free apps.
The developer in TFA claims that Palm asked him to provide PayPal seller credentials (or whatever you call them), even though his only two apps are free.
On the other hand, you have to consider the fact that the weapons that have been used in the past in place of this "sound cannon" for crowd control - rubber bullets and wooden batons, for example - are significantly more likely to cause bodily harm, including permanent damage and "fatal aneurisms". And they are significantly harder to escape.
Why parallel programming has to be tied to a kernel change and to a language spec change, when a good library (OpenMP, anyone?, but I'm sure there are others) will suffice...
GCD is not tied to the kernel and a parallel programing library (like OpenMP) won't suffice, because none of the ones that I've seen so far is as easy to use as GCD backed blocks.
Good support for OpenMP or any of the existing shared memory parallel programming libraries would have been much cleaner and portable.
GCD is pretty clean and, since both libdispatch and llvm are open source (and under BSD-like licenses), it and the code written against it are infinitely portable.
Does Linux need selector uniquing if it doesn't use Objective-C?
No it doesn't. Since the average executable on linux is static code linked to dynamic libraries made up of static code, you get your "selector uniquing" at compile time - you don't get a method selector description, instead you get a pre-calculated and already unique address of the method or function.
To me this sounds like an inefficiency in Objective-C that made it less efficient than C++ (the other OO flavour of C) has been improved somewhat.
It is a tradeoff. You get to worry about the performance of shared library selector uniquing, but you get all the benefits of dynamic language and runtime. In practice such inefficiencies matter most in cases where you are very constrained for resources - e.g. on a phone, as hinted in TFA. I doubt in the context of the rest of the performance and efficiency improvements in Snow Leopard and on a reasonably modern computer, the 1/10 of a second or the few megabytes of memory saved matter all that much.
Apple may be plenty arrogant, but it still is not an apt analogy. In order to be, it has to be analogous in the first place. Whatever you may think of Apple, their behavior in the recent past has demonstrated that they are not the kind of company that would rest on their laurels. In fact some still quote the fact that Apple killed the iPod mini at the peak of its popularity to replace it with the nano, something that very few other companies would do - most would milk the mini for all its worth before moving on. So yeah, the grandparent is completely right to say - "Apple don't seem to be taking any naps anytime soon."
iTunes app *reviews* are not a bug reporting system. Make it abundantly clear to your customers, probably best in the description blurb on the apps' page on the store, where they can express their griefs - support page, support email, bugtracker, etc., and equally clear that nothing that doesn't go through that channel will be considered or responded to. Problem solved.
As for the ratings thing - are you absolutely sure that the rating actually impacts your app enough to justify your getting so wound up about it? Because for many apps the target audience is not under 17 in the first place - and not because of objectionable content but simply because teens by and large don't care about body fat calculators or cookbook apps. And more importantly, the only way Apple enforces these ratings is through the parental controls settings in iTunes and on the device. I'd wager that nearly all of your customers will not have parental controls turned on at all.
Otherwise I do agree with you - there is plenty to be improved with the App store and iTunes connect. But it's not going to happen faster because people are ranting on teh intertubes.
Your comment is a mix of bullshit and speculation.
First, it is not marketshare that creates a monopoly, it's leverage. And Apple has hardly any leverage over the mobile phone, or smartphone, or even portable music player markets. Hell, they don't even have leverage over the online music distribution market - their competitors got to sell DRM-free higher bitrate music for almost a year before all music labels agreed to let Apple do it, and only after Apple conceded flat pricing. So, yeah I'd love to see how would regulators argue that Apple constitutes a monopoly.
As for the latter part of your comment, I've already demonstrated that, not only is your claim that content owners may not allow or hinder competitors to iTunes a completely baseless speculation, but in reality the situation is probably exactly the opposite - music labels are scared shitless by iTunes' huge popularity and are willing to give its competitors much more leeway in an attempt to get marketshare back from Apple.
At the end of it all, Apple are in no way preventing anyone form creating an alternative to their iTMS/iTunes/iPod/iPhone package - either by creating their own music distribution service and their own jukebox/library software, OR by partnering with companies that have ALREADY created such services and software.
Yeah, there is no quick, easy and free way for Palm to create the same great user experience as Apple, but Apple didn't get either to where they are quickly, easily or for free.
Slashdot Mirror
You may not write a lot of C functions in your code, but you'd using plenty of functions (and function like macros), which are part of Apple's frameworks. So you'll have to understand C functions if you write Objective-C code.
Not to mention that it often takes (me) more than one reading in order to retain the information in said book.
Well, to be fair, Apple's packaging has been covering all those points since the original iPod. And back then that kind of attention to packaging was fairly innovative for a consumer electronics product — as demonstrated by that infamous Microsoft internal training video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k
There seems to be ongoing confusion between innovation and invention. What you describe as Apple's innovation is what innovation is in general -- you start with an existing thing and improve it some way. Coming up with something completely new is invention and I don't think either Apple or Google do a lot of that.
Yeah, yeah DarkDust means the Location Services database "-gate", which you are right is not even remotely similar. In fact the two issues are as dissimilar as they can be. And here lies the most depressing thing — this will garner very little attention, especially outside of geek circles. I'd be surprised if this revelation, as egregious violation of privacy as it describes, will cause mainstream media excitement and force a congressional hearing and grilling like the Location Services thing did.
Sure they can do that, but will it really matter? By then they'll have lost a lot of money, a lot of market share, a lot of mind share and brand value. And switching to Android will not prevent the rest of the Android OEMs from gutting them. In fact it probably will be a much more brutal gutting, because while with WinPho7 Nokia are at least getting in the game early on in the life of the platform with Android they will be 5-ish years behind most of their competitors.
This has been the case throughout the whole of the last ten years and we've been eagerly awaiting said pioneer for at least 4-5 of them. Still nothing. I'm starting to suspect that there is actually no gold and that the only ones who haven't figured it out yet are some of the folks on Slashdot.
In what way GNUstep + GCC (+ presumably Linux) facilitate "systems [lock]down and ... prevent after-market modifications" more than "Android-esque / Java"?
Some of the biggest NeXT clients were precisely from the military, intelligence, banking, financial services and science communities. And they chose NeXT precisely because of Objective-C and NeXTStep.
Apple don't have to do squat to prevent iPad apps form being "recycled" on a Sony gadget - there are more than enough differences that cannot easily be compensated between this Sony platform and iOS for this to even be a possibility. For example Sony will be using Cairo instead of Apple's Quartz, so any drawing code in an app will have to be rewritten. Also GNUstep does not implement UIKit at all. It doesn't even mimic AppKit all that well. And reverse engineering and achieving parity with either framework is a gargantuan task. So any UI code in an app will also need to be rewritten, or at least significantly modified, at which point you might as well rewrite the whole application in an entirely different language/framework.
Each share of Apple stock is worth one N-th (where N is the total number of shares, which for Apple is about 900 million) of the company's book value. If Apple were to shut down tomorrow you'll get some sum of money without having to pass your shares to anybody.
But is it? When you have three completely distinct ways of writing applications, would you still count them as one OS simply because they have the same kernel? Would you be running a glorified browser, like ChromeOS, on a SuperDome Supercomputer?
Actually, I'm reading this exactly the opposite way - if HP were not killing the Slate a simple response would be sufficient, something like - "Of course no. That rumor is ludicrous. We are still shipping the Slate in the already announced timeframe."
On the other hand, if they are "killing" the Slate and, say, replacing it with the same hardware but running WebOS, they probably need time to assess how much time will that take, or whatever, so they can come out and say - "We are killing the current Slate device if favor of releasing so-and-so in six months."
I may, too, be reading it wrongly, though. Probably it's best if we don't assume either way until HP comment on the matter or release the device.
*takes a deep breath* FOR THE UMPTEENTH TIME, NOBODY IS ARGUING APPLE DIDN'T KNOW HIS IDENTITY! *and exhale* The point Doches is making, and completely agree with, is that we should not splatter his name and face all over teh intertubes and laugh at his expense. The guy has it quite hard as is and he can do without out visceral gloating.
You need to only ask yourself whether you trust Opera Software ASA.
Or any individual one of their employees, who have access to said servers. And when it comes to financial information, my position is no on both counts. I sure hope most people share my position.
Screwing with adults and their privacy is one thing, photographing naked children is some next level shit to put it bluntly.
Yeah, some guy in Australia, I believe, got sentenced to jail for pedophilia because he had pornographic pictures of cartoon characters, but it's OK for government employed perverts to be ogling our kids in the name of "safety". Top grade job UK government, fucking A+.
OK, let me break down fuzzyfuzzyfungus' argument into simple sentences for you, because you seem unable to wrap your mind around it.
-- Government chooses a proprietary format
-- Everybody who is part of "the market" inevitably has to interact with the government and their documentation.
-- The software of the company owning said format, regardless of its merits, is the only one that can be used to comunicate with the government.
-- "The market" can go fuck itself selecting the best product.
-- Government chooses an open, unencumbered with patents format
-- Everybody who is part of "the market" inevitably has to interact with the government and their documentation.
-- Anyone can write software that can be used to comunicate with the government.
-- "The market" can freely choose whichever products they fancy.
And you seem to be absolutely right, only evil socialist governments and the pinko commies who've elected them seem to understand these two simple concepts. Hoorah for libertarianism.
At the very least Apple, and I'd presume Microsoft too, although I don't really know (or care), does not require bank or tax information if you don't plan on selling your app. The developer account registration does not ask you for that information and once you've got your developer credentials, you already have an active contract with the iTunes App store for worldwide distribution of free apps. The developer in TFA claims that Palm asked him to provide PayPal seller credentials (or whatever you call them), even though his only two apps are free.
On the other hand, you have to consider the fact that the weapons that have been used in the past in place of this "sound cannon" for crowd control - rubber bullets and wooden batons, for example - are significantly more likely to cause bodily harm, including permanent damage and "fatal aneurisms". And they are significantly harder to escape.
I'd say crippled is too strong of a word here. Form the libdispatch project main page, linked in the blurb above:
While kernel support provides many performance optimizations on Mac OS X, it is not strictly required for portability to other platforms.
Why parallel programming has to be tied to a kernel change and to a language spec change, when a good library (OpenMP, anyone?, but I'm sure there are others) will suffice...
GCD is not tied to the kernel and a parallel programing library (like OpenMP) won't suffice, because none of the ones that I've seen so far is as easy to use as GCD backed blocks.
Good support for OpenMP or any of the existing shared memory parallel programming libraries would have been much cleaner and portable.
GCD is pretty clean and, since both libdispatch and llvm are open source (and under BSD-like licenses), it and the code written against it are infinitely portable.
Does Linux need selector uniquing if it doesn't use Objective-C?
No it doesn't. Since the average executable on linux is static code linked to dynamic libraries made up of static code, you get your "selector uniquing" at compile time - you don't get a method selector description, instead you get a pre-calculated and already unique address of the method or function.
To me this sounds like an inefficiency in Objective-C that made it less efficient than C++ (the other OO flavour of C) has been improved somewhat.
It is a tradeoff. You get to worry about the performance of shared library selector uniquing, but you get all the benefits of dynamic language and runtime. In practice such inefficiencies matter most in cases where you are very constrained for resources - e.g. on a phone, as hinted in TFA. I doubt in the context of the rest of the performance and efficiency improvements in Snow Leopard and on a reasonably modern computer, the 1/10 of a second or the few megabytes of memory saved matter all that much.
Apple may be plenty arrogant, but it still is not an apt analogy. In order to be, it has to be analogous in the first place. Whatever you may think of Apple, their behavior in the recent past has demonstrated that they are not the kind of company that would rest on their laurels. In fact some still quote the fact that Apple killed the iPod mini at the peak of its popularity to replace it with the nano, something that very few other companies would do - most would milk the mini for all its worth before moving on. So yeah, the grandparent is completely right to say - "Apple don't seem to be taking any naps anytime soon."
iTunes app *reviews* are not a bug reporting system. Make it abundantly clear to your customers, probably best in the description blurb on the apps' page on the store, where they can express their griefs - support page, support email, bugtracker, etc., and equally clear that nothing that doesn't go through that channel will be considered or responded to. Problem solved.
As for the ratings thing - are you absolutely sure that the rating actually impacts your app enough to justify your getting so wound up about it? Because for many apps the target audience is not under 17 in the first place - and not because of objectionable content but simply because teens by and large don't care about body fat calculators or cookbook apps. And more importantly, the only way Apple enforces these ratings is through the parental controls settings in iTunes and on the device. I'd wager that nearly all of your customers will not have parental controls turned on at all.
Otherwise I do agree with you - there is plenty to be improved with the App store and iTunes connect. But it's not going to happen faster because people are ranting on teh intertubes.
Your comment is a mix of bullshit and speculation.
First, it is not marketshare that creates a monopoly, it's leverage. And Apple has hardly any leverage over the mobile phone, or smartphone, or even portable music player markets. Hell, they don't even have leverage over the online music distribution market - their competitors got to sell DRM-free higher bitrate music for almost a year before all music labels agreed to let Apple do it, and only after Apple conceded flat pricing. So, yeah I'd love to see how would regulators argue that Apple constitutes a monopoly.
As for the latter part of your comment, I've already demonstrated that, not only is your claim that content owners may not allow or hinder competitors to iTunes a completely baseless speculation, but in reality the situation is probably exactly the opposite - music labels are scared shitless by iTunes' huge popularity and are willing to give its competitors much more leeway in an attempt to get marketshare back from Apple.
At the end of it all, Apple are in no way preventing anyone form creating an alternative to their iTMS/iTunes/iPod/iPhone package - either by creating their own music distribution service and their own jukebox/library software, OR by partnering with companies that have ALREADY created such services and software.
Yeah, there is no quick, easy and free way for Palm to create the same great user experience as Apple, but Apple didn't get either to where they are quickly, easily or for free.