Niten

> [...] Receipts from his bag were photocopied and his laptop was inspected but it's not clear in what manner, the sources said. Officials from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Army then told him he was not under arrest but was being detained, the sources said. They asked questions about Wikileaks, asked for his opinions about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and asked where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is, but he declined to comment without a lawyer present, according to the sources. He was not permitted to make a phone call, they said.

What's more worrisome to me is that doublespeak like nonrandom "random searches" and "not arrested but detained" — not to mention state officials imprisoning citizens and holding them up to some political litmus test over their opinions of our foreign wars while searching through their documents and confiscating their equipment without a warrant — has apparently become such a norm in the USA that even more open-minded news sources like Wired don't bother to question it.

http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html

But I don't think that logic applies here. Sure, if you're a small operation going head to head with some huge corporation, that attitude toward patents makes perfect sense.

But that's not the order of things in scenario; Apple doesn't see small app developers as their competitors, rather they see Google's Android and possibly Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 (and the manufacturers who build the corresponding devices) as their competitors. So Apple's most likely use for these patents is to threaten developers building apps for Android and other non-iOS platforms. And that, in light of Apple's recent history of patent abuse, gives startups every reason to worry.

EDIT: In particular, I think macros and stm will be killer features with respect to other languages, once they're implemented in Rakudo.

And in all my programming adventures, AppleScript has to be the weirdest, most backward, hardest to figure out language I've ever had the misfortune of using. I think Gruber nails it here -- English and other natural languages are not nearly precise enough to express program text, and the problem is exacerbated when you try to support multiple natural languages simultaneously. Visual Basic may not be a terrific programming language, but at least it's internally consistent.

To quote Einstein, "Everything must be made as simple as possible, and not simpler." AppleScript's designers tried to simplify away the essence of programming, and wound up making scripting much, much harder than it should be.

To anyone out there who needs to script OS X, save yourself a great deal of pain and avoid the temptation of using AppleScript just because it's OS X's "native" scripting language (this is was my mistake). Access OSA through a sane language like Ruby or Python instead.

Look at it this way: pretty much any "Programming ______" book will at least touch on that language's regexp implementation. How many such books currently cover implementing basic parsers for non-regular grammars?

So yeah, if Perl 6 can bring parsers to the mainstream by providing easy, visible tools to implement them, and even simply by making parsers something you learn about in the course of learning Perl, that'll be a huge win for us all.

I'm more interested in using LLVM on FreeBSD or Linux than on OS X, but I'm happy to see Apple pushing its development.

Most customers don't know, much less care about, the exact version number of their phone's operating system. They care about what the operating system can do for them. But I suppose if Gruber were to compare the actual capabilities of currently available Android systems vs. iOS 4, he would have much less to be snarky about on Apple's behalf.

Like you said, typical users such as your parents have no idea what software their phone is running; they just want it to work. Android 2.1 works perfectly well, and the fact that 2.2 has been announced but is not yet commercially available is no hindrance to people who don't care for such matters.

The only people who really seem to be getting up in arms about Android 2.2 not being available right now are the Apple fanatics.

As for the Incredible's GPS performance, I couldn't be happier. It's accurate enough that when I go cycling and let My Tracks record my ride, I can zoom in and see where I headed out on one side of the road and came back on the other. The biggest downside is the elevation inaccuracy, but from what I can tell that's an issue with all devices that gather altitude data from GPS (rather than an internal barometer).

Besides, if they're going to announce a Verizon phone then they're effectively announcing a new model; the GSM iPhone 4 obviously isn't compatible with Verizon's network. In my opinion this is the kind of thing you'd do at the launch of a new iPhone generation, not just a few weeks afterward.

For instance, suppose I realize I'm out of milk. It'll come to mind that I should go to a grocery this afternoon to buy more milk, but this intention doesn't form as a complete sentence in my head. It may literally take a couple seconds for me to recall the vocabulary I'll need to express this thought in words, but I can continue thinking about my trip to the grocery -- which one I should go to, what else I need to pick up there, etc. -- before any words have even come to my mind. So ideas and their linguistic representations are very distinct to me, and sometimes I don't even bother with the latter at all, because (for whatever reason) forming the linguistic representation of a though imposes a significant overhead on my brain. (I'm also dyslexic, for what it's worth, and I often wonder of these issues are related.)

My hypothesis is that for people with better functioning language centers than mine, words may come to mind so easily that the delay between thought and linguistic representation is imperceptible to them, hence they "think in words". But for people like me those words might come late or not at all, but regardless, I do think all the same...

Now if Google could collect real-time data via automated parking ticket systems, or even by getting access to security camera feeds and doing some image processing, then they'd be in business. I don't know how these systems are typically run, but it might be a smart move for Google to pursue partnerships with popular big-city parking locations for exclusive access to this data, to the extent that it can be collected from current systems.

Lags behind in what sense?

Now as for whether they'd replace Objective-C with MacRuby, no, that wouldn't make sense. The two would live side by side. Apple can continue to implement Cocoa frameworks and core applications in Objective-C while also offering an excellent Ruby programming environment built on top of that.

It's sort of like C# vs. F# or IronPython in the .NET world -- Microsoft didn't have to replace the base .NET assembly implementation language (a.k.a. "assembly language for CLR") in order to provide more attractive dynamic or functional languages on top of the same infrastructure.

EDIT: In fact, the semantic mismatch between Objective-C and dynamic languages like Ruby is less than the mismatch between dynamic languages and the CLR, which mirrors the statically-typed semantics of C#. Is Apple's combination of the Objective-C type and dispatch systems and LLVM going to one-up .NET from a direction that we didn't see coming?

Given that MacRuby is not considered "stable" just yet, the time is not right for Apple to provide an exception to 3.3.1 for Ruby programming. If this does happen, then it will happen only after MacRuby is good and ready.

I emphasize that I do not support Apple's draconian policies toward iOS developers, but their behavior here is internally consistent with the possibility of an eventual allowance for MacRuby.

It works great on my HTC Incredible so far, including Whispersync with my Kindle 2. I wish it supported search and included a dictionary like my Kindle 2 does, but since even Kindle For PC doesn't have these features yet I suppose I'll have to wait.

My one big UI gripe so far is that the phone's back button isn't used for navigation like the back button on the Kindle hardware; instead it takes you straight to the welcome screen. The navigation feature analogous to the hardware Kindle's back button is bizarrely exposed as a separate choice through the application menu.

People flocked to iOS because it was unique and innovative when it was new, and because it runs on great hardware from Apple. People are flocking to Android because it's an open-source alternative that's in some ways superior to iOS, and because it runs on a skyrocketing number of devices from countless manufacturers and on countless carriers.

For MeeGo to win serious developer-share, it will have to either come on hardware more compelling than Apple's, or outdo Android on technical capability / developer experience or overall market penetration. To my naive eye, neither of these seem likely. So what's the deal here? Am I mistaken about MeeGo's prospects, or is this just a massive case of not-invented-here?

(Lest I be accused of ignoring the overriding issue of user response to the two operating systems, I'm working under the assumption that MeeGo doesn't currently have anything significant to add to the user experience provided by Android on smartphones. Am I wrong about that?)

I wonder if Apple could keep costs down here by shipping those rubber bumper cases to everyone. Unless this is some bizarre feedback issue that can be fixed in software, I don't see how Apple could recall the iPhone 4 and truly fix this short of a major redesign. And I'd hate to see that happen, if for no other reason than it would seem such a waste...