orib

Because Windows PCs are well known to be friendly to developers, with a lovely, powerful Win32 API that's a joy to use, has no horrible warts and... oh. wait.

Thanks to an accident of history (NeXT) combined with Apple killing backwards compatibility with OS9 down, they have a really developer-friendly API compared to Windows. On a purely technical level, Apple is far more developer-friendly than Windows.

They are doing their very best to shit that all away though, when it comes to the legal and backwards-compatibility side of things. That's one reason I doubt I'll ever spend my money on Apple.

As I said, I have no clue on how Redhat's paid support compares to Sun's, although I know they hire lots of developers working on things throughout the entire stack, so I'm assuming that if you paid enough they'd set one of their developers on your problem. I'm not qualified to judge how helpful they are though.

Interestingly, I seem to have the entire opposite experience with unpaid support. If I asked nicely, I quickly got help about where to dig into the software and what to look for when fixing stuff. The programmers on the projects were quick to respond with requests for more information and suggested fixes, and often the problem was solved within a day or so. All I did was poke them on IRC.

No support contracts at all.

Wow, I never expected to see a parody of the Sunscreen Marketing Board sketch. And it's all good advice, no less.

If you pay for support, you get support. I doubt that there would have been much difference in your experience if you were paying for a support contract with one of the larger Linux distributors, like Redhat or Novell. Linux doesn't mean you're stuck without vendor support, although that's a common misconception.

I don't know how Sun's support compares to the various commercial distros, but comparing an unsupported Linux install to a supported Solaris install isn't an apples-to-apples comparison.

Induction isn't the core of it. The idea is that you try to find counterexamples in science, and you don't have proofs in the general sense. Ever. The best you can say is that "If I guessed right, then I have math that worked out." Nothing more. Mathematics allows a definite "This is a solution that exists to this problem.". In Science, you can say that a solution exists to a problem, but that's not the tricky part -- the tricky part is figuring out the right problem to solve.

Science is effectively an attempt to reverse engineer the universe. Imagine that you were given a clock by a client. A very ornate clock that he doesn't want you to take apart. Then he tells you he wants you to make schematics for the clock so precise he could put together a precise functional duplicate. But you're not allowed to take it apart.

I would say that does not that count as mathematics, although mathematics would certainly have a use as a tool to prove that the behavior is correct in all observed respects. But you could probably find a new minute difference in the way the hand moves, and that would blast all your carefully crafted mathematics to bits.

I'm not slagging on mathematics, and I'm not trying to glorify science and say that one is a more powerful superset of the other.

They're both very useful and very tightly intertwined disciplines, but they're also very different. In a way, you could say that math is the study of solving problems, and science is the study of finding physically meaningful problems.

Computer science is not a science. It is a math.

Science is the attempt to find counterexamples to disprove your ideas on how a given system behaves. It involves conducting experiments to give input data for constructing a model, and then trying to find corner cases that break the model and allow you to refine or otherwise rework your model until it accounts for all your data.

Computer science has none of this. Computer science is the art of coming up with definitions that are of use to solving certain classes of problems, with formalisms to back them up. That is math.

Which, when you look at it, is just another name for "undefined". It didn't solve anything, and seemed to me like a bad troll on the mathematical community.

Doesn't matter. Any distro that's worth using is just fine as a server. Just use whatever you use on a desktop to minimize niggly almost-the-same-but-not-quite annoyances between them, and you'll be happy.

Personally, I like Debian Testing on my servers -- it's reasonably recent (as opposed to Debian Stable, which gets hopelessly outdated quickly), has no releases (instead it just stays up to date as you update stuff) and is rock solid for me, but it's more a matter of taste than anything else.

Besides, I like Debian's attempts to mostly stick with Free software in their base distro. While I'm not a fanatic, I like knowing that what I use is open source, and that I can fix it and debug by hacking it up (and occasionally have) if it breaks on me.

Oh god no. Let MDI die like it needs to, please!

Interesting. Got any links about the approach you're taking to decide what would be optimal? It seems like that would be a very difficult problem.

Interesting. I suppose it depends on what you're doing, but I typically see the speed taken getting cut to half vs -O and -O2 in C/GCC, so things will typically run at 50% the speed. Flipping around between -O, -O2, and -O3 don't make much difference though. The big thing to note is that once you start enabling some major optimizations (doing good register allocation, strength reduction, loop-invariant hoisting, and tail-call elimination) you've already got 95% of the optimization you're going to get. The rest is far less important.

This, of course, won't matter if you spend most of your time in I/O or libraries.

I think you missed the sarcasm.

Since when did the cloud mean non-relational data stores? For that matter, since when did the cloud mean anything concrete * ? I've heard cloud computing describe more ideas (all of them ancient) than almost any other term in computing. Yes, the cloud is yet another instance of "What's old is new again."

* other than "it's running on someone else's machine"

What if the iPhone was like a product, and we subjected it to the same standards as any other product out on the market?

Just a thought, you know.

You're always in a box, but it's not necessarily a cubic box, and it usually has more odd nooks and crannies than you'd expect. Most people restrict themselves to a certain well-explored subset of your problem space. The trick is to explore the rest of it.

And this analogy is overextended and cliché. Let's move on and find better analogies.

This sort of thing wouldn't be competing with Linux. It would be far closer to competing with Nessus (the Blackberry OS) or FIRST Robotic's PIC "OS" or some other small embedded systems, instead of being a destktop OS.

to horribly abuse Feynman's phrase -- There's plenty of room at the bottom. The embedded market is huge. There's also a whole lot less need to stick with legacy systems; things are throw-away and you don't need to transfer apps between them as much. If you want to create a totally new system, start in embedded.

The point is that it's supposed to be a Squeak VM running directly on hardware. (So converting the VM to a CM -- Concrete Machine; yes, I did just coin that term). Running C code would mostly defeat the purpose.

Also, in a way it is an OS, but it's an OS that does nothing more than run what used to be a single userspace VM, so.. unless a VM is a userspace OS, it feels kind of funny to say that this is an OS...

Essentially, this is an OS-free VM, or a single VM OS. Both are correct.

I disagree. Doctor Who would definitely have used a machine that you've probably never seen before. Something quirky that you'd never know how to use if you had never seen it without training. Perhaps an SGI O2 running a customized Slackware... with a WM that he wrote himself by hacking Compiz and WMII together.

Oh, and the rest of the article? Amusing but content-free.

Women who go into computing do it because they think that it will benefit them them more than the generalizations about women will annoy them.

Science is also not the unqualified saying loudly "LALALA I CANT HEAR YOU". In many cases he's simply dead wrong, but people listen because what he says is more pleasant than the truth.

We're running out of resources (not just oil. Copper, platinum, I belive... indium? are all going to be in short supply in a short few hundred years). The climate is changing. We don't care if it's man made or not, it's harming our living conditions. We're still polluting our lakes -- the great lakes have large segments of horribly toxic sediment, for example. (although cleanup is going well, and costing only a few billion dollars.)

And yes, I am a physics student taking some extra classes on analyzing human damage to the environment, and a number of my professors are researching or otherwise involved with this stuff, from attempting to create efficient solar cells to cleaning up the great lakes. I'm not an expert on our environmental challenges, but I think I have a somewhat better-than-average grasp of the situation.

A suggestion and a possible monetization idea - don't sell to students. Make schools your target. They buy a copy of your app and put it on their servers. Make it possible for teachers to push out assignments to it.

It also makes the thing actually useful for me -- I don't want to have to remember to add the assignments to it myself. I already know what my assignments are and I don't have time to type them into yet another place.

You can be happy without being "normal". Normalcy is overrated. Balance, on the other hand, isn't. Go out and start meeting people. A good place to start is some sort of relatively geeky but non-computer oriented event. SCA, perhaps? Pick something on the internet, find a local group, and join.

Really, the thing is to frequently ask yourself "Is what I'm doing making me happy now? If not, is it somehow helping me be happier in the long term? If not, why the f--k am I doing it?"

Uh, What? Mainstream hardware support from OSX?

Not only does it have poor support for common hardware, it has artificially restricted support. What it does support, it supports reasonably well, but that hardly qualifies OSX as a system that supports mainstream hardware.

It also makes it impossible to DRM non-Apple provided files on Apple devices.

As much as I'd like to see DRM go away, if it has to exist, there had better be one spec that lets me buy from any store to play on any device.

For some reason that typo gave me a rather amusing mental image of the neighbor's kid trying to eat your lawn ("shove it in his maw"). Yeah. Stupid brain making connections where they don't exist.

They haven't been very easy to defend for about 4 or so years now. I've been saying that although Apple's products are technically nicer than Microsoft's at the moment, I'd rather see MS in a position of dominance than Apple, just based on the way that the companies have been behaving in relatively recent history.

The problem is that plain language is full of loopholes and double meanings. Legalese is hard to understand, but it tries to be precise and loophole-free.

And a whole lot of "wait, what tree does this code map to again?"

With lisp, there's no difficulty mapping:

   int main(int x) {foo()}

to

  Method m = new Method(return:=new Type(int),
                        args  := new ArgList(
                                  new Arg(new Type(int),
                                          new Name("x"))),
                        body  := new Block(

.... I'm sure you get the point....

The syntax tree is apparent from the syntax.

  (+ 1 2 (* 3 4))

Maps to:

  '(+ 1 2 (* 3 4))

I don't see why this got downmodded. XKCD and Dilbert are awesome, but everyone already knows about them. I went there with hopes of seeing some new stuff (and I did, but not as much as I wanted to see)

I think we're in agreement on that, and you just repeated my point =)