BigZaphod

I think the deal is that it's returning an IP from the lookup based on the IP of the DNS server that's making the request. This is so it returns a server that's closer to your network. If your DNS request is going through Google, it's going to return a server that's close to Google's DNS server and not your own ISP's DNS server (which would of course be much closer to you networkingly-speaking).

Telling everyone to just sit back and be amazed at their luck for living at this time and place in history is, IMO, sad. We can do better and we will do better. Progress is our purpose.

I've always understood it to be that prototypes are a superset of classes.

Just to play devil's advocate: Isn't the end result basically the same, though? The commercial entities in the US ultimately took the content down. They may or may not have had to, technically/legally, but the fact remains that they did.

That companies obeyed this "request" from the government only empowers the government further - and as soon as someone eventually pushes back against this kind of thing, a law or technicality will be found making such push-back illegal because, hey, they used to get away with these requests all the time and it totally must have been making the country safer! We wouldn't want to give that important national security power up! Let's make it official! And then boom - we're just like China.

I code like this. It wasn't always the case, but at some point I had the realization that everything I do can be undone, reset, restarted, or otherwise restored and no longer have any fear about digging in and utterly gutting a piece of code if I can imagine a way to make it better.

This philosophy now has a name - and I like it.

When the first 32-bit troubles occurred, they should have just switched to a string-based ID, IMO.

I believe the reason this has got so confused is that the earlier betas had a driver/OSX thingy you could install which enabled your printers to show up in AirPrint. However they decided (with no explanation that I know of) to pull this feature for release. What happens, though, is that people who installed that beta driver on OSX still have it and if they are attempting to review 4.2-release on the same machines, they might mistakenly be thinking it has that support with it because the old beta stuff is still installed on their system and so their iPad will happily see their printers and use them.

I'm quite sure that Apple has stated that officially the only printers supported by AirPlay (now) are those few HP models listed in the press release. I've seen a few statements supposedly made by Apple people that always include the words "for now." I suspect what happened is the beta test either revealed that the setup process was "too weird" or they ran into a number of nasty bugs and decided to hold off until they could nail it all down. Whatever the real reason is, though, Apple doesn't seem to be talking about it.

While running the betas, I had that experience as well. Oddly, I got used to the new method after awhile and don't really think about it anymore. But I suppose that's not going to be true for everyone and I may not have used the switch as often as others do, anyway. :)

I've been running the betas on my iPad for awhile now and it is really pretty great having the multitasking support. Like the iPhone, it's mostly not "real" multitasking, so when it comes to interruptions and the like you shouldn't have to worry about that. The iPad also has considerably more RAM than the iPhone 3G had, so it can keep a lot of apps in memory at once and the switching becomes reasonably seamless and quick. During the betas, 4.2 was often very slow, but as soon as it went GM performance jumped significantly. As far as I can tell, it's just as fast as 3.2 was - only with all the added benefits of the new features.

Unfortunately no, there's no other way at the moment. Apple is aware of the issues this causes a lot of people, but so far I've not heard of any upcoming solutions to this the situation. (Filing more radars complaining about this can't hurt, though, as bug reports act as votes.)

It's not exactly banned, but just removed from their curriculum. It will still be found in the school's library.

This is easy: Most people don't and will never directly feel the consequences of that stuff. Millions of people fly every day and directly experience the TSA nonsense.

This might be the best thing they could have done to further the cause of their own demise.

I'm biased as I'm the creator of Whirl, but one my favorite 99-bottles implementations might just be this one: http://bigzaphod.org/whirl/kang-99.html And of course, there's the one I did for another of my silly languages, Taxi: http://bigzaphod.org/taxi/99.txt :) [edit: To clarify, I didn't write the one done in Whirl, that was sent to me by Kang Seonghoon.)

I think that eventually some programming tasks will become highly specialized, yes, and use custom and very specific languages depending on the field and the problem at hand and may end up with their own degree programs, etc. There's already hints of this sort of thing right now. It's very hard to transplant a programmer from (for example) web development to 3D game engine development - it has nothing to do with language, though. There's just a huge set of knowledge required for each that has very little overlap - even if the languages used happened to currently be the same in some cases.

It doesn't make sense to forever expend the effort required to force every problem into just a handful of languages' structures - even if it is theoretically possible to do so.

I think that things like OMeta (http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/) are an important piece and the other work being done by Viewpoints Research (http://www.viewpointsresearch.org) could help.

I agree. I don't mind actual public recognition. In fact, I sorta desire it sometimes - but only when it's actually earned and the people being told of the achievement recognize why it was an achievement in the first place. There has to be real meaning behind this stuff, IMO. Things like "employee of the month" just feels like cheap pandering and no one really cares.

Fear of change.

Dot syntax isn't so evil. Even the example of setting a property on a view's frame seems slightly contrived in that the compiler will give an error. It doesn't silently fail or do undefined things. The primary confusion there is, when you're new, wondering what in the world the strange error message means - but that's something you eventually get over as you learn more about the language and how it works.

Also, dot syntax is how you reference properties when you're doing KVC and KVO, so it wasn't without precedent.

In theory, they could. I suspect that, practically, that's not going to be possible. I don't know all the details, but I imagine it'd mean going to every contributor and getting some kind of statement that they are allowing their code to be relicensed under a new license. That'd be pretty nasty. I believe Squeak Smalltalk went through something like this and it took years.

Apple does not agree to abide by your terms. Instead, by clicking "I Agree" when you submit a new app, you (app submitter) is agreeing to abide by Apple's terms. That's an important distinction in this case. It's irrelevant if you'd like Apple to change their polices. (Though they may some day - they've changed and relaxed many things over the years.) The point is that someone told Apple they had all legal permissions required to allow Apple to distribute it the way they do, and since there was an actual legal contract involved, Apple trusted that person. That person was apparently mistaken. It is that person whom the FSF and/or the VLC dev should be angry about - not Apple. (At least in this case.)

Yes, Apple's policies are calculated. That doesn't make them evil nor does it make them necessarily wrong. It sounds to me like you want your (GPL, etc) rules to trump Apple's rules. What gives you that right? The App Store is huge, popular, and everyone wants a piece of it. Apple created that success for themselves. You (or anyone else) has no basis to rush in and claim they deserve their own little slice of it just because. You play by Apple's rules until Apple changes their rules or don't play at all. Don't like it? Go somewhere else - that's your right which is given in exchange for Apple having the right to make their own rules.

I know it's not the same individual that submitted as is making the current complaint.

Whomever agreed to Apple's terms told Apple, by way of agreeing to the contract, that they had full rights and authority to grant Apple the right to distribute the app with all the associated restrictions, etc. outlined in the contract. It would seem that when you consider the terms of the GPL, that person did not have the authority to claim such a thing. That person lied or, at best, was simply mistaken. This isn't Apple's fault. That's all I'm saying. Perhaps ultimately we agree on that point.

So who lied, then, when they agreed to Apple's explicitly stated terms and gave Apple permission to distribute VLC in this form in the App Store? If VLC gets removed, it's because this developer is essentially demanding that Apple remove it.

It's ironic to me that "openness" is cited as a reason to prevent certain software from being used and enjoyed on a specific platform.

This isn't much of a stand, IMO. Apple will just pull it unceremoniously.

Those who loved having it on their devices lose. VLC loses "customers." The GPL loses by looking worse than Apple's own rules. Apple loses by looking as if their approval process failed to catch yet another edge case.

Everyone loses.

I've always imagined myself quite good at this sort of thing but this is the first time I've ever tested it. I got 18/20 and the 2 I missed were 1st and 3rd, so it was before I really got into it, I think. By the 4th or 5th one my brain had remember what to look for and the rest were pretty easy.

I think the MacBook Air line will drop the "Air" name in the near future (maybe in a year or so) and become just the regular MacBook line. It seems more like it was meant to be a test/bridge machine in Apple's quest to eliminate legacy ports, optical storage, and magnetic media. I'd bet that the market will make this choice easy for them as Airs begin to outsell standard MacBooks in the coming year. (Pure speculation, but from what I've seen of the reviews and general attitude toward the air from people I've talked to, it's now a serious machine that many are considering - some even considering switching to it from a MacBook Pro as the Air can do everything they need on a day-to-day basis. Time will tell...)

I just tried typing "Rear light" on my iPad with one finger of my right hand while holding the pad itself with my left hand. It took about 2 seconds. On my iPhone, with only my left hand holding it and using my left thumb to type leaving my right hand doing nothing, I can bang that phrase out in about... 2 seconds. In the promo video, it took the guy just about 5 seconds with the pen.

Not that this matters a whole lot - just adding my own data points to the discussion. :)

It's just so weird! It's like they are advertising to an alternate universe where the iPad, iPhone, iPod touch don't exist. I can't believe how slow and laggy it looks in their own video. How can they not see this?

Here's one of their promo videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xX-B2wG1e4&feature=playe...

I guess I was focusing on the bit-level answers since that's what the article and most of the comments seem to value the highest.

You're right, though, the original question itself is not so much of a problem, I suppose. What bothered me is the subtext that, unless you get down to the bit level with the minimum possible number of CPU instructions in the result and do the compiler's job yourself, you're not a "real programmer" or something.