mhenr18

Sure, but the Windows APIs that I mentioned aren't historical. Those are all currently supported APIs. Carbon/Cocoa was the last time that OS X has had a dual-API situation but even then, Carbon was always referred to as the transitional library and Cocoa was always referred to as what you should use for new code.

While Apple floundered during the 90s with their OS strategy, their API strategy in OS X has been absolutely rock solid.

It's now 2016, Carbon has come and gone as it was intended to and Cocoa is still around and is still the API you use for working with the Mac. If you're trying to do something on the Mac, there's going to be a single officially supported way to do it and that's it (if it's supported at all).

Meanwhile, there are three totally different frameworks on Windows that you can use to do the same thing, all of which are officially supported and none of which are deprecated.

* You're right, but it took how long to get here?

* The APIs are there now, but the hardware isn't on many machines.

*

*

* Yes, I'm referring to graphics tablets. I've had to deal with the APIs for that stuff myself and what was about 10 lines of extra event handlers on OSX ended up being well over 200 lines on Windows.

* There's still driver issues that aren't present on OSX.

* You've got to realise that anywhere where you think "this really isn't that big a deal" it's actually a huge deal to the people who use OSX daily and want a better Mac Pro because Windows doesn't care about the small things.

* Cortana isn't better than Siri though, which is what it's actually meant to compete with.

* To be fair, the feature was so undiscoverable that it took someone on Hacker News telling me about it before I knew it existed.

A lot of my post was pointing out things that have been better on OSX for literally more than a decade before Windows finally caught up in a few areas.

HiDPI is probably the biggest thing that Windows just won't catch up to for a while. The API compatibility requires Windows to support APIs that will stop HiDPI from working well, because old Windows had the ability to set DPI that affected certain UI components but not everything.

A key difference with the Microsoft approach vs the Apple approach is that on Windows the API that exposes every single feature is such a beast that developers are expected to work at a level above that API.

Whether it's WPF, WinForms, WinRT, or whatever the new flavour of the day is, it's always a layer on top. And that layer is never perfect, because you still have to do the occasional [DllImport("Kernel32.dll")] interop reference.

Here are the currently supported ways to deal with windows on Windows:

* HWND

* System.Windows.Window

* Windows.UI.Xaml.Window

On OSX, you use Cocoa. When Apple introduced Swift, they didn't have to layer on top of the API accessed by ObjC. When you write Swift code, you call the exact same APIs as you would have done with your ObjC code.

Here are the currently supported ways to deal with windows on the Mac:

* NSWindow

You wouldn't be commenting on things working at high DPIs on Windows if you've been using a Mac for the past few years. It's really one of those things where a lot of Windows users think that it's fine, but once you see how well seamless and fully supported things are on OSX you realise just how much there is left to do.

Every single app integrates well and the scaling is flawless even for the few that don't support 2x mode. I have never dragged a window between screens on the Mac and seen it appear at the wrong scale.

I've done it about 50 times in the past week at my day job on my Windows machine. To be fair, that Windows machine drives a VR headset that you just can't use on OSX because no Macs have the compute power needed - there are definite wins to going with Windows.

It's just that the Windows mentality is to just get most things working and assume the rest is just something that most users won't care about, whereas the Mac mentality is to get it all to work together seamlessly.

And you don't notice any issues when you drag windows between the two monitors?

One of the developers at my work can't do fine tuning of our styles because his Windows multi-display setup won't re-render apps at 1x when he drags them to the lodpi monitor. Instead it renders the app at 2x and downscales it to 1x, blurring everything.

* Free OS updates.

* Better touchpad support throughout the entire OS.

* Vastly superior HiDPI support (especially if you're using a multi-screen, multi-DPI setup). I cannot stress how poorly Windows 10 performs in this regard. This has been a solved problem on the Mac for years.

* Better colour management through the whole UI stack.

* Better tablet support (OSX has had integrated support for tablet events since 10.4, on the Windows side there were still apps that broke when the Surface 3 launched almost a decade later due to using a third-party API for tablet events that needed custom drivers)

* Core Audio. OS X has had the same set of audio APIs since 10.3, and they've been well regarded for years and years. It wasn't until Windows 10 that you could argue Microsoft had finally caught up, and there's still people with ASIO driver compatibility issues. That's literally 12 years it took for Microsoft to catch up.

* OS X had scrolling of inactive windows for over a decade before Windows caught up. I actually think it's something that was there in 10.0 but I only started using Macs at 10.3 so I can't be sure.

* Spotlight. Spotlight is almost the perfect analogy of the difference between OS X and Windows, and I'm just going to look at one tiny feature of it. If you want to do some math on Windows at a single keypress, you need to turn on Cortana which only became availble in Windows 10. Cortana isn't even available in every country. Meanwhile OSX has had that built into Spotlight since 10.4 and it works on every Mac ever shipped since then, no matter what country you're in.

* File tagging. OSX has had this for over a decade, and you still can't do it in Windows.

* An integrated C/C++ runtime library, like every other Unix ever. It wasn't until Windows 10 that you could ship C/C++ code without worrying about whether your end user had the right msvcr/msvcp DLL installed on their machine.

I'll stop here, because there's so many things that OSX has had for a decade or more that Windows still hasn't caught up with that I wouldn't be surprised if Windows doesn't catch up after another decade.

I'm unsure about the US but I know that where I live a solid third or so of my power bills are a fixed rate that you pay to access the grid (so pretty much line rental). It doesn't feel to me like that's a particularly unique situation.

So it's worth keeping in mind that the actual power usage figure may be a fair amount lower, and that your SW calcs are a bit of a worst case estimate.

Bingo. Many of us here in Australia complain about the prices being exorbitant - the same Apple computer that's marketed as $1,799 USD sells for $2,699 AUD. Take off the GST and you get $2,453 AUD.

1 USD = 1.32 AUD, and 1.32 * $1,799 = $2,374.

So that's a $79 AUD markup on the product applied on Apple's part for buying it in Australia (with the rest being tax that's out of Apple's hands). Yes it's a non-zero markup but the AUD/USD isn't exactly a stable exchange rate so it makes sense that Apple won't align it to exactly the same amount.

Consider that at the start of this year the US pricing of the MBP would have been equivalent to $2,621 AUD, and that in May it would have only been $2,302 AUD. Also consider that this time 4 years ago, the same $1,799 USD would have been $1,741 AUD. If you're a company that doesn't want to change its prices daily, it's hard to set a perfect price in international markets.

I wasn't trying to claim that Australia is somehow equivalent to the US in terms of what's protected (because it isn't - the US is undoubtedly more protective of speech than Australia), but more making the point that in the porn case we don't make nanny-state laws saying that X breast size is too small. Rather, content classification is taken on a case-by-case basis using the "We'll know when we see it" threshold that allows for some flexibility and common sense without needing to make all kinds of meddling regulations.

If adopted right now with no other considerations, preferential voting offers one big win for the US over the current status quo, which is that you'd be able to quantify the true level of support that the minor parties have.

If given the option of voting third-party without running the risk of vote stealing, I'm certain that tons of Americans would take that option. Right now Alice might want to vote third party but won't do it because she knows that people like Bob won't, and Bob won't vote third party because he knows that Alice won't do it. Preferential voting breaks that cycle because it doesn't matter how other people vote and allows people to just care about their own vote.

Both the Australian and US Green parties were founded in the 1990s, and the Australian Greens have been able to take seats and hold the balance of power at times while the US Green party hasn't been able to take a single seat at the federal level or in most states. I fully attribute that to the ability of preferential voting to let minor parties grow over time without fear of vote stealing.

There are also a few other things that Australia does with voting that I think make a lot of sense, but many of these don't really need preferential voting to be of value to the US:

  - All elections (local, state, and federal) are held on Saturdays. 
    I don't really think I need to explain why this is a Good Thing.

  - Voting is compulsory. For free speech advocates this is sometimes a 
    tough pill to swallow. However, compulsory voting ensures that people 
    of all economic backgrounds and living situations still turn up and vote 
    - without making it mandatory and forcing everyone to do it many people 
    simply won't be able to find the time to vote. You are still allowed to 
    cast an informal (and thus uncounted) vote if you *really* don't want to 
    express your political views.

  - You do not have to vote at a designated polling place - you are free to
    vote at any polling place on the day of the election without any 
    justification whatsoever for being out of your electorate, and you are not
    required to register for an absentee vote ahead of time in this case. Again, 
    this is a way of ensuring that as many people vote as is humanly possible. It's 
    also somewhat required here due to it being really unfair to force people to
    vote but then potentially turn them away for being in the wrong place. 
    (Electoral rolls are of course checked during counting to ensure that people 
    haven't voted at multiple polling places)

  - Funding is allocated to the recipients of first preference votes (as long as 
    there's more than a certain threshold). House votes are worth $2.60, Senate 
    votes are worth twice as much and the value is indexed to inflation. This 
    allows smaller parties to slowly build up a base over time without actually 
    winning the election to begin with.

  - We do not use electronic voting. Our elections have comprehensive paper trails
    that can be audited to ensure accuracy.

As for things we do that don't make sense with our voting system, one downside of a diverse Senate is that we have a ton of candidates. This results in something of an excessively large ballot paper! http://resources3.news.com.au/images/2013/03/11/1226594/7771...

No, we don't have internet censorship in Australia. The idea was mooted and then shot down after backlash. That government was also voted out.

We also have no such regulation regarding the breast sizes of porn actresses. The refusal of classification is done on a "We'll know it when we see it" basis, much in the same way that many US laws are interpreted.

Your comments about religion are inaccurate in that we do not allow our faith to dictate our politics in the same way as the US. A 2011 Census question put Christianity at about 60%, while in the US it's at 70%. We do not have parts of the country that have a reputation for being deeply religious (unlike the American South) and we do not reference a deity of any kind in any official pledge whatsoever. We don't even have a pledge of allegiance that we force on our children in schools.

Our country has real problems (i.e humanitarian treatment of refugees and the environment) but we aren't the kind of place you're talking about.

Our High Court isn't a political game, our banks didn't fall apart during 07-08, and our worst terrorist attack in the past 10 years wasn't even bad enough to be considered a "mass murder" under the FBI's definitions.

One key difference between Australia and the US is that our Parliament can be dismissed if they are at a gridlock. This prevents the kind of gross obstructionism that has prevented the US government from functioning properly in recent years.

The other key difference is that we have compulsory voting.

Exactly. Limits only become reasonable when they're meant to stop you from uploading hundreds of megs worth of data and monopolising resources. A 1kb password or even a 1mb password supplied by a tiny fraction of a percent of users is not going to make an impact on you, but can provide that small group of users with a massively increased piece of mind.

Suppose you're of the view that a mass influx of people into your country that are willing to work for less than the locals are will do harm to the economy. If one country's economy is weaker than yours and is a source of immigration from people seeking greater opportunity (and who'll do anything to get it, including undercutting locals), is it racist to want to stop immigration from that country?

It's definitely protectionist and perhaps xenophobic but I don't think it's racist. (There is a clear distinction between xenophobia and racism - xenophobia is purely about an unjustified dislike for those from other countries while racism is an unjustified dislike for those who look different to you)

If I'm born in my Australia, and my parents were, and their parents were, and their parents were, I'm not Irish or Italian or German or whatever majority-white European country you want to pick that I have a vague connection to. I'm Australian.

The same applies to the Aboriginal people who have been here for thousands and thousands of years, before my ancestors invaded under a false pretense and treated them like garbage.

However, those were my ancestors. Each generation is progressively less racist than the one before, and we're just as Australian as each other.

The issue is not one of national identity but one of racial and cultural identity. Realistically, it's something that white people will have to put up with and understand as we're still in the long hangover of our more racist years. However, at some point our children (or our children's children) are going to ask why it's it's socially fine to embrace other races and cultures when it's shunned to embrace their own for reasons that are totally out of their control.

> A persons skin color is part of their identity

Unless they're white, at which point they get shunned if they even try to embrace that part of their identity.

If a black man says he's proud to be black, that's perfectly fine. If a white man says he's proud to be white, people think "what's wrong with being any other skin color?"

Two things:

1. You don't need closures at a language level to do event callbacks. Just the ability to refer to functions by reference and call those references. Closures certainly make it syntactically nicer, but you can work without them.

2. You don't need event callbacks in a webserver to make it performant. The memory/CPU overheads needed to make closures work are essentially identical to what's needed to make blocking threaded code work, as long as the threading is done in userspace and you have support for expanding stacks. Even if you don't have support for those niceties, modern kernels and hardware are perfectly capable of handling thousands of OS-level threads.

> Try managing the tax rules for 100 countries as a 1-2 person shop. Good luck.

The same justification could be made for accepting international credit card payments online, but companies like Stripe are happy to provide you with a service that takes away the hassle. If they can do that, then I'd say they would be perfectly willing to solve the local tax problem for you.

See, all of these "you won't have to carry a card ever" schemes that involve tapping a phone seem to not care that people have other cards to care about. Why bother with all of this effort to move payments onto my phone (which has a battery that dies), when I already have a wallet with my drivers license, public and private health insurance cards, my public transport payment card and my swipe card to get into the office?

The problem is not that a phone is fundamentally better for this stuff, the problem is that you're yet to be provided a card-based alternative that works well.

For transactions under $100, card payments in Australia don't require authorisation (I'm unsure if this is a legal requirement, or if it's just a de-facto standard that most of our banks have adopted). You just wave the card and you're good to go - the payment processes using the same mechanism as tapping a phone so it's just as fast.

It's actually more convenient in most cases as many places don't have their credit card terminals right in front of where you're served, so the cashier has to walk over to a terminal. With a card, I hand it to them and say "just tap" - they handle the rest while I wait and talk with whoever I'm with (or check my phone if I'm on my own). With a phone, I'd have to walk over to the terminal, wait for the cashier to key in the pricing and then hope that Touch ID won't stuff up while I hold it near the contactless reader. I also can't check my phone while I'm doing that, because I need to use it to make the payment.

Tapping cards works so well and is so widely supported that I was able to live just fine with a near-destroyed debit MasterCard (and zero cash) for nearly six months a few years ago. The plastic was coming off and prevented it from being inserted into a terminal, but by 2012/2013 our retail sector had such widespread support for contactless payments that it didn't matter. For the purchases over $100 I made, I tapped and then entered my PIN.

Despite Australia being the highest users of contactless payments in the world (per capita, of course), Apple Pay has had a very slow launch here. It only works for Amex (which no one uses as no one accepts it due to high fees), and MasterCard/VISA cards for one of our big four banks. The banks aren't interested in dealing with Apple due to extra fees that Apple wants to impose, and consumers aren't pressuring the banks or Apple to make a compromise because the current experience is already good enough.

Maybe there's something "magical" that I'm missing out on, but I really don't get why phone-based payments are being so widely hyped. It's already a solved problem.

Not OP, but I think I get what they're trying to say.

The GPL requires others to follow its terms, because that's the only license of the code that's available to them. There is no clause of the GPL or any software license that I'm aware of that prevents you from doing whatever you want with your own code under different terms.

Therefore, you can do something negative (sell software that uses changes to GPL'd code without providing those sources to others when they ask for it), while maintaining a positive image ("look, I license my code under the GPL because I care about software freedom").

You can see this happening in practice with software that has a "community" edition available under the GPL, but a paid version that's not GPL'd. The holder of the copyright gets to profit off of other people's well meaning contributions (which almost certainly will have had their copyright assigned to the original copyright holder), but the people who contributed don't get the benefit of the copyright holder's changes to that code that are only available to paid customers.

You can argue that those contributors made their contributions knowing that would happen, but the fact that it is possible somewhat undermines the entire point of the free software movement.

Doesn't that logic mean she should pull her music from all radio stations?

It's curious that the USA has effectively standardized on a 4 point GPA scale, yet Australia is still a complete catastrophe of marks. The universities in my city use a 7 point scale with 4 being a pass and 7 being 100%, meanwhile the one 100km south will use an American scale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_Australia

I actually don't know whether it would be more appropriate when conveying my marks to those in other countries to convert, or to just explain the scale.

I remember having a few Google engineers coming to my uni to do a talk - afterwards they mentioned that internally they've been doing a large amount of programming work using internal tools on Chromebooks.

Probably at the point of not voting in the people who make those laws in the first place.

I love Dash, have recommended it to everyone at uni. Using a machine where Alt+Space doesn't throw up documentation feels really weird.

This idea is cool, except for the gesture. There needs to be a way to summon a block with one finger so that one-handed use is still possible.

I'm assuming that the drive to stay as close to the current experience as possible influenced that - there's currently no "free" one-finger gesture/action on the home screen. I don't know how to pull it off, but needing to use two hands seems like it kills off the notion of doing things quickly.

edit: Although it's worth pointing out that while it's a cool party trick, it's not something I'd use day-to-day. Changing the Control Centre to let me keep applets open within it for things like 1Password or composing a message? That would get used every day.

I'm not usually one to initiate OSX/Windows comparisons, but it is rather surprising that menu searching isn't a thing on Windows.

While it's obvious that MS would have a reason, I have no clue what that could be. The only thing I can think of is that people seem to use Google rather than their app's help functionality even if the latter would do a better job.

No it's not.

Every day large chunks of the world's population are able to drive safely to their destinations. We have illustrated an ability to do this year after year and yet there's this idea that the best solution to stopping accidents is to ban humans from the equation.

I agree with your thoughts on properly training people on how to drive a car - Western countries that have better driving training and safer cars score far better in deaths per 100k motor vehicles than poorer countries and this is something that can still be improved on. That I was able to get a manual license (in Australia) without needing to demonstrate a hill start to my tester is a complete joke.

I'm not saying that self-driving cars are a bad thing - I would happily set my car to autopilot while I cruise down the highway and eat lunch or take a phone call. I'd love the additional safety of having a system that can brake perfectly for me if I'm about to crash. Being able to take a tight park because I can just get out and then watch my car go into the space? Awesome.

However, to completely ban humans is going too far. Sure, be much harsher on those at fault in accidents where they've disabled a safety feature that could have provably stopped the accident. But don't take the "a few people are bad so let's stop everyone" approach to something that we've already demonstrated a high level of competency at.

This isn't an objectively difficult one, but it's certainly one with a fun payoff.

I hacked together a system of file system listeners and named pipes so that I can inject code into a sandboxed app on OSX and have it communicate with the non-sandboxed process that put it there.

Well, that's entirely disheartening. As a CBA customer I'd expect an actual response, not just something that's effectively "It's all OK, stop asking" copied everywhere. A technology blog should be run by those who can actually give technical details on demand.

Changed my password anyway, like I did with every other service I use.

Man, the mood swing part rings true for me. In my case they're usually 1-2 weeks. There's some anxiety/depression on my mother's side of the family but I wouldn't say that I've got any issues with it.

Now I'm curious as to whether the mood swings are more common, or whether that's actually something I should look into. If there is an underlying issue I need to resolve then it might have been masked by my relatively good run of things.

Yep. Half of my news feed is bullshit stuff that my friends like because they haven't discovered true content aggregators. They use Facebook for the sort of stuff that I use Reddit for and it completely ruins my experience.

I'm there to see what's happening IRL with my friends, not to see pictures of stuff that I saw a few days ago while on the toilet.

For context, I'm a 19 year old student going into my third year at uni, so that puts me right in Facebook's original target demographic. It's disappointing that a service so useful for staying in touch with friends has degraded into little more than an IM service because the rest of it's been spammed to hell.