What does that have to do with Apple?
178 karma · joined November 6, 2010
They needed each other, that's why they split the company 50/50.
Sandboxing brings with it XPC, which is an IPC framework for doing very fast and awesome message passing.
It's got some great features for separation of privileges. For instance, you might have an XPC sandboxed process for, say, rendering a H.264 video to a buffer. That process never gets access to the filesystem, the graphics card, or anything apart from the strip of memory that contains the file, and the buffer it has to write its pixels to.
Then you can use this to render a H.264 video in your application, and if a buffer overflow is found that could lead to a video containing shellcode to be executed, you have no fear that bad things can happen to the filesystem or users' stuff.
If I'm not mistaken, I'm pretty sure XPC is how they implemented the crazy feature where you open a QuickLook window on an image or something in the Finder, and if you it the Open with Preview(.app) button, the Finder's QuickLook window turns into a Preview window.
There's a box where you can paste in your own EULA during the upload process.
I disagree.
If the CEO is not a part of the equation, then either the engineers and designers at Apple just somehow randomly turned out to be just better than everyone else, or he IS part of the equation.
Nobody in the media is arguing that Steve Jobs drew up the iPod design on some graph paper and told people to build it. Everyone is praising him on his ability to work with engineers and designers to improve products and prepare them for consumers. That, and the ability to say no to stupid features tacked on by the builders. He is praised for knowing what customers wanted, before they knew they wanted it.
I can't imagine Steve designing the original iMac from scratch, but I can imagine him getting his team together and saying: "Consumers need a beautiful machine that they can take out of the box and turn on with no headaches or setup and connect to the internet. Let's make it happen.". THAT is how Steve thought differently.
I don't know how this article made it to the front page. It's uneducated flame-bait.
As was as I was aware, you can only have a pointer to an actual object.
As much as I would love to believe this conspiracy, and would suddenly make my pub meetings with his research group way more interesting, I don't think it's him. But I will keep this article in mind so I can bring it up at every opportunity.
:/
I'm reminded by the interviews with the original Xbox team at MS, who were apparently shouted at by a red faced Ballmer for weeks after they said that it wouldn't run Windows. Imagine how the Xbox's usability and popularity would have been reduced if they tried to run the Windows desktop on it.
It seems to me that there is a huge push at the upper levels in Microsoft to put Windows on everything.
Meanwhile, Apple realized the sad but true fact that most computer users are completely incapable of understanding concepts like the filesystem. They made a tablet that your granny can use without having to be taught. They made a system as foolproof as possible, while the power users who scream "walled garden" and "i needs my zsh shell on it!" can still use it as a casual device and jailbreak it if they want to get the features they require.
Many in the tech media lambasted the iPad as a useless oversized iPod touch, but look at it today. They shipped a "crippled" device that ended up being more usable to more people than the PC has been. They also successfully convinced users who want to be able to do things like spreadsheets and presentations to try things like Numbers and Keynote, which were completely redesigned for touch and work great on the device.
Microsoft hasn't realized this strategy, and I think many users will be worried by the initial lack of apps for Metro and try to use Word and Excel on a 10 inch touch device, and get angry with it when the UI is just too cumbersome.
I played around with a Windows 7 tablet at PC World recently. An anti-virus warning from McAfee or something like that was popping up and becoming modal every time I tried to open the Start menu, then when I eventually managed to kill it, the items in the Start menu were way too small to accurately touch. Text input worked like crap, and IE was barely usable. Anyone buying that device was doomed to constant frustration. (At the same time, a friend of mine, who is a hardcore Arch Linux user and a sysadmin, went in with the intention of getting an Eee Pad Transformer or other android tablet, and was so disheartened by the user experience of those that he left with an iPad 2).
Really, I don't want Microsoft to fail. Many people have hated them for many years, but these days it seems to be more pity than hate. If they released an excellent update to Windows for the desktop, still focusing on the mouse and keyboard, then pushed for developers to make awesome apps for Metro and had that only on tablets, I think they would be much more likely to gain some marketshare, especially if they pushed some cloud syncing features and integration with other products. Of course Windows 8 will gain marketshare anyway, I think mostly through OEM sales, but I don't think the tablet market will pick it up like it might if they focused on a solid tablet-only OS but played the vertical integration game with services.
Just my opinion.
They are too often attacked and exploited, that anyone who attempts to run them really needs to know what they are doing, and at least have basic knowledge about infosec and Linux.
It's cruel to give those people the tools to (in 90 seconds) lead them down a path to getting owned.
Their software patents too are always very specialized, with no real vague areas that can be used for patent trolling. Not that they need to make a habit of patent trolling when they can print money with their sales anyway.
Even a tiny startup company full of web 2.0 rockstars who hate software patents will be advised to patent as much as they can, because if they don't, some other count will come along and patent their stuff from under them and force THEM to pay.
Pretty much nobody likes the software patent system except for software patent trolls, and as such we have to deal with it. Software patents won't go away until bad people go away.
>>> ''.join([chr(ord(c) - len(k) - 1) for c in k])
'SCALA-DEV@GUSHQ.COM'
Can I get a job as a translator?
I wouldn't be too worried about this.
This way I can be sure I'm typing `halt` into the right box, because it's easier to spot the wrong color than the wrong hostname in 10pt text.
While it's a nice toolkit for doing very basic visualizations of data, it's a pain in the hole to do anything more advanced than that.
They made us use it to develop a GUI application with text input, buttons, tables, and graphs, in order to visualize some IMDB-style movie ratings data.
Unfortunately it's absolute crap for doing things like that. I basically ended up implementing GTK in it, with widgets rendering to buffers and having a hand-rolled DOM-style event system. I implemented scroll views on my own, and used them to create text input boxes and scrollbars. While I'm personally proud of making it actually work, it was a horrifying experience to do using the really basic tools provided.
The IDE that's included with Processing is also really awful. It can't do indentation correctly, doesn't work at all in tiling window managers, and seems to make people write horrible code. Walking around the labs trying to help people, I found that the vast majority of people's bugs were missing curly braces and things indented wrong simply because of the awfulness of the text editor.
If you want to do anything useful in it, you need to import core.jar into Eclipse (or do it on the command line) and do it in Java. It seems that the processing compiler is really just a small preprocessor over Java that wraps the whole thing in 'public class Main implements PApplet {' and '}' and replaces #FFFFFF with 0xFFFFFF.
I also used processing to make a tetris game (https://github.com/sipefree/setris), which was much easier than doing a GUI application, but I really didn't get any decent drawing performance on non state-of-the-art hardware.
TL;DR it's nice but a pain in the hole.
We're a long way off from web ads being as animation intensive as the latest 3D games. Browser rendering technology can reach the point where the animations that we're used to seeing these days can be optimized quite well, especially if the graphics card is involved. Real strides in the power of HTML5 animation has only reached an awesome level in the past year or so. Next year things will be even better, and it will take advertisers a lot longer to move on from Flash.
As for ad blockers, they have been blocking non-flash content for years now. Google ads are HTML and javascript based, and they are blocked just fine. Same with popups: all javascript. Most advertisers are not going to spend a hell of a lot of time trying to get around ad blockers, since they work with mass distribution and an awful lot of punters don't care about downloading and using an ad blocker. The only sites that try really hard to make you see or click on an ad are usually scams anyway.
Later, of course, things like Compiz came along, but they've always seemed like weak hacks compared to things like Quartz. Hopefully wayland will change everything.