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List of Leopard-only apps is growing
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Cocoa Blogs has linked a blog post from Gus Mueller, developer of such apps as VoodooPad, that an upcoming FlySketch 2.0 update will be Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard-only. This adds to a growing list of upcoming app releases such as TextMate 2 and Delicious Library 2 which will only play with Apple’s next big cat.
So what does this tell us about 10.5 and its impact on the Mac, both for developers and users? Sounds to me like there are some pretty ground-breaking changes in Leopard since, from what I understand, developers typically try to keep theirs doors as open as possible by maintaining backwards compatibility with at least one previous version of the Mac OS. Of course, this can vary depending on how difficult it is to keep these doors open, as well as whether the developer works out of an office or a living room.
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I’m sure some users are wondering why developers are doing this, and some developers are wondering if they should do the same.
Many early adopter end-users are planning to upgrade to Leopard regardless, but some might want to wait for various reasons. From the casual observer’s perspective, the obvious thing to do is support older versions of Mac OS X in order to have access to a larger market. In a sense, that’s true. But there’s more to the story.
The best analogy I can think of right now is a concert. Picture yourself going to see Flying Meat or Delicious Monster perform live (weird how those actually work as band names). They choose a venue that’s a bit father away and costs a bit more to get into, but once you’re there, you see it was worth it to provide a better experience. It’s not that they don’t care, it’s that they want FlyGesture and Library to be the best they can possibly be, even if it means narrowing the scope a bit. That’s the Mac software ethic in a nutshell.
What Leopard Offers to Developers
By using Leopard APIs and language improvements, not only can an app be faster and more stable, but it can actually do things that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Part of this is because the newer APIs offer new capabilities, but some of it is the fact that the energy saved on implementing the basics can be re-channeled into other areas. Here are two specific examples:
Language Improvements: Using properties, Objective-C 2.0 can substantially reduce the amount of code a developer needs to write, and can essentially eliminate the most time-consuming and frustrating task of programming: memory management. It’s not just frustrating for the developer to think about, but it’s frustrating for users because bugs in memory management cause crashes. Garbage collection will, at least, minimize the amount of memory-related code that has to be written and later fixed.
Garbage collection should also make writing threaded apps easier, since you don’t have to worry about whether the object you’re passing to another thread will stay around long enough for the receiver to use it. Tracking down over-released objects in multiple threads is one of the most difficult things imaginable because it’s inconsistent. It may only crash 45% of the time.
Simplified Drawing Code: Core Animation is not just for fancy 3D effects. It’s just as useful for 2D drawing. It simplifies drawing code (some cases, drastically simplifies it), and can provide huge performance benefits. If nothing else, Core Animation rendering runs in its own thread, so the UI can stay responsive while the main thread is churning away on something else.
And that’s just the stuff we’re allowed to talk about.
And it’s most likely the stuff they’re not allowed to talk about that is really exiting. Perhaps next week we know more, after the two hour (double the normal time!) keynote by Steve…
Silent Star Wars
Dems to the Net: Go to hell
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As everyone knows, one issue critical to those who are making the Net interesting (for politics at least) is IP reform. Not “reform? in the sense of the last decade (e.g., Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, DMCA, NET Act, etc.), but real reform designed to make IP laws work sensibly in the digital age. Real reform — not the piddly full-employment-act-for-lawyers reform proposed by the Copyright Office for “orphan works,? or the puny reform suggested for digital libraries. Instead, reform that tries to fit the legitimate objectives of copyright — to assure that artists have the incentives they need to create great new work — into the contours of digital technology.
To craft that reform would require real work. I don’t think anyone has a clear picture of what would be best yet. But what is clear is that the war on technology of the last decade must come to an end. And the efforts by content holders to leverage their power over rights they can’t even prove they own (see, e.g., the Google Book Search battle) into control over the architecture of the net must be stopped. No one should defend “piracy.? But no one should believe that the way the law currently defines “piracy? makes any sense at all.
So is there any hope for such reform from the Democrats? Word from Washington so far: Fat chance. As reported in the LA Times two weeks ago (registration required but hey, it’s LA), the crucial House IP subcommittee will be chaired by Hollywood Howard (Berman) — among the most extreme of the IP warriors. It is this committee that largely determines what reform Congress considers. It is the Chairman who picks what voices get heard. And while Berman is a brilliant man — whose brilliance could really have been used in the problems facing the mid-east — his brilliance has not yet been directed towards working out the problems of IP and the Net with any view beyond the narrowest of special interests.
This is like making a congressman from Detroit head of a Automobile Safety sub-committee, or a senator from Texas head of a Global Warming sub-committee. Are you kidding, Dems? The choice signals clearly the party’s view about the issues, and its view of the “solution?: more of the same. This war — no more successful than President Bush’s war — will continue.
No doubt, there are Net issues beyond copyright — surveillance, net neutrality, etc. But I suggest this choice is an important signal about this party (and I’m afraid, any party). I once asked a senior staffer of a brilliant Senator why the Senator didn’t take a stronger position in favor of Net Neutrality. “No Senator remains a Senator opposing an industry with that much money? was his answer.
And so too here. The Dems have looked at the potential “return? from the activists on the Net. They’ve considered the kids being sued by the industry (including the kids running MySpace, and maybe soon, YouTube), and the kids creating amazing new (but presumptively illegal) mashups and remixes, and they have compared that value to the party with the value promised by Hollywood. Result: the 20th Century continues to rule.
Dems to the Net: “Thanks for the blogs. And please continue to get outraged by MoveOn messages. But don’t think for a second we’re interested in hearing anything beyond the charming wisdom of Jack Valenti. We appreciate your support. We appreciate your money. But come on — you’re all criminals. Don’t expect your criminal ways to be taken seriously by an institution as respected as the US Congress.?
The Showa Retro Heisei Pop Analog Wrist Watch
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The creators at Maywa Electronics call it the Showa retro, Heisei pop analog* style. Back in the day of the rotary dial phone, there was a number people frequently dial to get the precise-to-the-millisecond time–117. There’s a robot lady who says, continuously: “The time is now 8:34 and 15 seconds…peep peep peep.” So this watch emulates that by requiring users to “dial” 117 on the rotary dial to get a robotic woman’s voice to tell you the time. Plus, you gotta be a diligent dialer–if you fuck up, you’ll get a “This longer is not in service” message. It can annoy the hell out of you or make you smile with nostalgia.
Olbermann: Special comment about ‘sacrifice’
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If in your presence an individual tried to sacrifice an American serviceman or woman, would you intervene?
Would you at least protest?
What if he had already sacrificed 3,003 of them?
What if he had already sacrificed 3,003 of them — and was then to announce his intention to sacrifice hundreds, maybe thousands, more?
This is where we stand tonight with the BBC report of President Bush’s “new Iraq strategy,? and his impending speech to the nation, which, according to a quoted senior American official, will be about troop increases and “sacrifice.?
The president has delayed, dawdled and deferred for the month since the release of the Iraq Study Group.
He has seemingly heard out everybody, and listened to none of them.
If the BBC is right — and we can only pray it is not — he has settled on the only solution all the true experts agree cannot possibly work: more American personnel in Iraq, not as trainers for Iraqi troops, but as part of some flabby plan for “sacrifice.?
Sacrifice!
More American servicemen and women will have their lives risked.
More American servicemen and women will have their lives ended.
More American families will have to bear the unbearable and rationalize the unforgivable —“sacrifice? — sacrifice now, sacrifice tomorrow, sacrifice forever.
And more Americans — more even than the two-thirds who already believe we need fewer troops in Iraq, not more — will have to conclude the president does not have any idea what he’s doing — and that other Americans will have to die for that reason.
Is Bush a psychopath? Take the test.
Fill out the linked form based on what you know about the US President. Then click the “Preview evaluation” to find out if Bush is a psychopath. Link
Gas-price conspiracy? You bet!
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Say you’re an oil executive and you want to keep the Republicans in control of Congress. What can you do prior to an election?
Well, you can keep your refineries running at full speed, flood the market with extra fuel, and take less per gallon in profit than usual.
And guess what: Department of Energy data suggest that’s exactly what the oil companies did this fall.
By the second week in October, gasoline prices fell 70 cents from summer’s record highs. Refineries were running full throttle and America’s gasoline inventories were up nearly 7 percent from the three previous Octobers.
The rise in supply came despite BP’s major pipeline disruption in Alaska. Ordinarily, that’s an industry excuse to shrink supplies and raise prices.
Now, the oil industry claimed pump prices fell because crude oil prices dropped.
But gas prices dropped far more steeply than crude oil. Crude oil comes in barrels. There are 42 gallons in a barrel and the price of each gallon was down 10 cents this October over last. But gas prices fell 61 cents a gallon over the same time last year.
In other words, in the run-up to the election, oil companies cut gasoline prices 500 percent more than their raw material cost fell. And it wasn’t because refining and distribution costs rose. They’re relatively stable.
Oil companies simply took less profit from their refineries for a short period of time. Could it have been to influence a political outcome?
Well, right after election day, the price of gas suddenly rose after two months of sharp decline. Post-election, refineries have slowed down, inventories are shrinking, and gas prices are climbing.
It’s back to business as usual, unless the new Congress starts to do business differently.
Simple enough for a child to understand.
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Ross McGinnis was 19 years old when he died. Nineteen years old. I’ve got ties that are older than that. They are well made, but nothing outstanding. That’s the difference between Ross McGinnis and my ties. He was outstanding.
The kid was one in a million. Actually, more like one in two million. You’ll see where that number came from in a moment, but first I want you to really appreciate just how special he was. If you meet seventy new people every day for the next 100 years, you would be lucky if you met one like Ross McGinnis. Think about that the next time you get on a bus, or a train, or a plane. Every day. For a 100 years. Here’s why…
A few weeks ago, young Mr. McGinnis was riding in the back of a Humvee on patrol in Iraq when someone tossed a grenade in the back. He didn’t have enough time to snatch the grenade and throw it out. He did have enough time to jump out and save himself. Instead, he chose to jump on the grenade and saved the lives of everyone around him. At nineteen years old, he was the youngest guy in the patrol. But when the moment came, he had the maturity and courage to think about someone beside himself. That’s character.
His father’s heartbreaking letter written December 23rd and published in yesterday’s Washington Post explains the decision in terms even a child can understand. ”It was just a matter of simple kindergarten arithmetic. Four means more than one,” he wrote. As a result of this extraordinary act of bravery above and beyond the call of duty, Ross McGinnis has been recommended for the Congressional Medal of Honor. It is a rare honor. A mere 125 Medal of Honor recipients currently walk among 300 million Americans. That’s where the 1 in 2 million number comes from.
Who needs a story when a picture is all you need?
Overweight woman stuck in South African cave
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An overweight woman got stuck in a well-known South African cave for nearly twelve hours on New Year’s Day, trapping 23 others in the process.
The woman was stuck inside the “Tunnel of Love” shortly after noon and was freed with the help of liquid paraffin and a pulley around 11:30 pm, said Hein Gerstner, manager of the Cango Caves in the Western Cape.
“She was really quite a large woman,” he told AFP Tuesday. “She was forewarned at the ticket office and by the guide that she might have difficulty on the tour, but she insisted on going along.”
Rescuers from two nearby towns and a private ambulance service were called in to help.
“We used liquid paraffin to grease the surface area and used a pulley to lift her,” said Gerstner. “She was eventually carried out on a stretcher.”
Twenty-three other people trapped in another tunnel behind the woman were given blankets, water, chocolate bars and ablution buckets during the rescue effort.
Woman fined for feeding birds
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A New York woman said she received a ticket with a hefty fine from two police officers who confronted her while she fed birds.
Yvette Bavier, a 60-year-old special-education administrator, said the female officers ticketed her for littering when they caught her sprinkling birdseed on the ground during her lunch break, the New York Post reported Tuesday. Bavier said it took the police several minutes to find a suitable offense to write on her ticket.
CEOs have already made a mint this year
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The new year is only two days old, but that’s all the time it took for the country’s highest-paid CEOs to earn the annual salary of the average Canadian.
Minimum-wage workers would have barely rolled out of bed on New Year’s Day by the time the country’s top earners pocketed $15,931 — an amount that will likely take low-paid workers all of 2007 to make.
A study released Tuesday by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives finds the 100 highest-paid private-sector executives will have earned an average Canadian’s salary of $38,010 by 9:46 a.m. Tuesday. By the time Canadians flicked on the 6 p.m. news Tuesday, the average CEO will have pocketed a staggering $70,000.
Just like NASCAR
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And Fallujah’s just like Daytona.
Blackwater attempts to cover up Christmas eve murder
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“On [Christmas] eve (2006) here in the Green Zone a Blackwater employee got into a scuffle with an Iraqi personal guard that was guarding a judge and shot him ten times and killed him. The Blackwater employee was drunk. Why did he have his weapon on him? He has been whisked out of Iraq as fast as possible so the local authorities could not get a hold of him.
Blackwater is trying to keep it all hush-hush so the media doesn’t find out about it and dirty their already dirty reputation. Now all the Blackwater employees are pissed off cause they have installed a no alcohol ban on all Blackwater employees.
Open Secrets
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The national-security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large.
The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much. The C.I.A. had a position on what a post-invasion Iraq would look like, and so did the Pentagon and the State Department and Colin Powell and Dick Cheney and any number of political scientists and journalists and think-tank fellows. For that matter, so did every cabdriver in Baghdad.
The distinction is not trivial. If you consider the motivation and methods behind the attacks of September 11th to be mainly a puzzle, for instance, then the logical response is to increase the collection of intelligence, recruit more spies, add to the volume of information we have about Al Qaeda. If you consider September 11th a mystery, though, you’d have to wonder whether adding to the volume of information will only make things worse. You’d want to improve the analysis within the intelligence community; you’d want more thoughtful and skeptical people with the skills to look more closely at what we already know about Al Qaeda. You’d want to send the counterterrorism team from the C.I.A. on a golfing trip twice a month with the counterterrorism teams from the F.B.I. and the N.S.A. and the Defense Department, so they could get to know one another and compare notes.
If things go wrong with a puzzle, identifying the culprit is easy: it’s the person who withheld information. Mysteries, though, are a lot murkier: sometimes the information we’ve been given is inadequate, and sometimes we aren’t very smart about making sense of what we’ve been given, and sometimes the question itself cannot be answered. Puzzles come to satisfying conclusions. Mysteries often don’t.
If you sat through the trial of Jeffrey Skilling, you’d think that the Enron scandal was a puzzle. The company, the prosecution said, conducted shady side deals that no one quite understood. Senior executives withheld critical information from investors. Skilling, the architect of the firm’s strategy, was a liar, a thief, and a drunk. We were not told enough—the classic puzzle premise—was the central assumption of the Enron prosecution.
“This is a simple case, ladies and gentlemen,? the lead prosecutor for the Department of Justice said in his closing arguments to the jury:
Because it’s so simple, I’m probably going to end before my allotted time. It’s black-and-white. Truth and lies. The shareholders, ladies and gentlemen, . . . buy a share of stock, and for that they’re not entitled to much but they’re entitled to the truth. They’re entitled for the officers and employees of the company to put their interests ahead of their own. They’re entitled to be told what the financial condition of the company is.
They are entitled to honesty, ladies and gentlemen.But the prosecutor was wrong. Enron wasn’t really a puzzle. It was a mystery.
(read the whole thing!)
Cartoons
Undark and the Radium Girls
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In 1922, a bank teller named Grace Fryer became concerned when her teeth began to loosen and fall out for no discernible reason. Her troubles were compounded when her jaw became swollen and inflamed, so she sought the assistance of a doctor in diagnosing the inexplicable symptoms. Using a primitive X-ray machine, the physician discovered serious bone decay, the likes of which he had never seen. Her jawbone was honeycombed with small holes, in a random pattern reminiscent of moth-eaten fabric.
As a series of doctors attempted to solve Grace’s mysterious ailment, similar cases began to appear throughout her hometown of New Jersey. One dentist in particular took notice of the unusually high number of deteriorated jawbones among local women, and it took very little investigation to discover a common thread; all of the women had been employed by the same watch-painting factory at one time or another.
In 1902, twenty years prior to Grace’s mysterious ailment, inventor William J. Hammer left Paris with a curious souvenir. The famous scientists Pierre and Marie Curie had provided him with some samples of their radium salt crystals. Radioactivity was somewhat new to science, so its properties and dangers were not well understood; but the radium’s slight blue-green glow and natural warmth indicated that it was clearly a fascinating material. Hammer went on to combine his radium salt with glue and a compound called zinc sulfide which glowed in the presence of radiation. The result was glow-in-the-dark paint.
Hammer’s recipe was used by the US Radium Corporation during the First World War to produce Undark, a high-tech paint which allowed America’s infantrymen to read their wristwatches and instrument panels at night. They also marketed the pigment for non-military products such as house numbers, pistol sights, light switch plates, and glowing eyes for toy dolls. By this time the dangers of radium were better understood, but US Radium assured the public that their paint used the radioactive element in “such minute quantities that it is absolutely harmless.” While this was true of the products themselves, the amount of radium present in the dial-painting factory was much more dangerous, unbeknownst to the workers there.
US Radium employed hundreds of women at their factory in Orange, New Jersey, including Grace Fryer. Few companies at that time were willing to employ women, and the pay was much higher than most alternatives, so the company had little trouble finding employees to occupy the rows and rows of desks. They were required to paint delicate lines with fine-tipped brushes, applying the Undark to the tiny numbers and indicator hands of wristwatches. After a few strokes a brush tended to lose its shape, so the women’s managers encouraged them to use their lips and tongues to keep the tips of the camel hair brushes sharp and clean. The glowing paint was completely flavorless, and the supervisors assured them that rosy cheeks would be the only physical side effect to swallowing the radium-laced pigment. Cause for concern was further reduced by the fact that radium was being marketed as a medical elixir for treating all manner of ailments.
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In 1925, three years after Grace’s health problems began, a doctor suggested that her jaw problems may have had something to do with her former job at US Radium. As she began to explore the possibility, a specialist from Columbia University named Frederick Flynn asked to examine her. Flynn declared her to be in fine health. It would be some time before anyone discovered that Flynn was not a doctor, nor was he licensed to practice medicine, rather he was a toxicologist on the US Radium payroll. A “colleague” who had been present during the examination– and who had confirmed the healthy diagnosis– turned out to be one of the vice-presidents of US Radium.
I wonder what things we’re doing today that will seem outlandishly foolish to our grandchildren? Genetically Modified foods, maybe?
Stad weer veiliger, zegt politie
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Voor het zevende achtereenvolgende jaar is Amsterdam volgens de politie veiliger geworden.
De bereidheid van Amsterdammers aangifte te doen van een misdrijf steeg met elf procent, maar het aantal aangiften is ongeveer gelijk gebleven, 97.000.
Het aantal arrestanten bedroeg opnieuw ongeveer veertigduizend.
Dat heeft hoofdcommissaris Bernard Welten van de Amsterdamse politie vanmorgen gezegd. Het aantal overvallen is sterk gedaald, net als het aantal diefstallen van auto’s en fietsen, het aantal winkeldiefstallen en zakkenrollerij.
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De hoofdcommissaris herhaalde zijn kritiek op automobilisten die waardevolle spullen in hun auto achterlaten. ”Het gaat bijna altijd om auto’s waar een laptop, tas of losse routeplanner voor iedereen zichtbaar op de stoel ligt. Vorig jaar hebben we zelfs een arts op het bureau gehad van wie een tas vol medicijnen uit de auto was gestolen, en een filmploeg die zijn volledige uitrusting kwijt was. Ze hadden hun auto met hun spullen even achtergelaten. Ik vind dat dat niet langer kan.”
Als jij nou al die draaideurcrimi’s gewoon ’s achter slot en grendel zet, kunnen wij onze tomtoms en autoradio’s gewoon weer daar laten waar ze het handigste zijn: in de auto.
And You Thought Snow Globes Were Harmless Decorations
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To paraphrase a classic line from Lily Tomlin, I worry that the person who thought up the rules for carrying liquids and gels on airplanes last year is busy thinking up something new this year.
The thought arises partly because of a scene just after Christmas at an airport security checkpoint, where a half-dozen festive snow globes — like the ones with Frosty the Snowman in a liquid-filled glass globe that simulates snowfall when you shake it — were lined up on a counter.
Wasn’t that nice! The Transportation Security Administration had decorated the checkpoint! But as it turned out, Frosty and his co-conspirators had actually been busted — confiscated from passengers’ carry-on bags pursuant to the following notification by the security administration:
“Snow globes, regardless of size of amount of liquid inside, even with documentation, are prohibited in your carry-on.?
Now, I am not sure what exactly constitutes a documented snow globe. But I do know that the snow globe rule has intensified ridicule of airport security, and that cannot be a good thing.
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(Documentation on these things would be proof of purchase, etc. I can imagine they don’t allow these things even if you just bought it, because you need only a few minutes to change the liquid.)
I am so looking forward to next Monday. I’ll be at home, I’ll be able to listen to the keynote without having to worry about working. My last keynote was back in August and I bought a Mac Pro because of it. I wonder what I will be buying this time…
I really wish this show would see the announcement of Leopard being released. I know it’s supposed to be much later, but still. I would love to see Apple one-up Microsoft and beat Vista out to consumers.
I’m also hoping that we will see more info on iTV and Leopard.
I wonder what I will be buying this time…
If the rumours are correct, iTV will ship end of January or early Feb. That might be my next Apple product…
Yeah, that is high on my list right now too. I just hooked up my MacBook to my HDTV with an DVI-HDMI cable and optical audio cable. It’s pretty amazing seeing my MacBook running 1920×1024 on a 42″ HD LCD TV.
I know the iTV isn’t a full computer, but it’s all I really want from my MacBook hooked up that way. Music, movies, pictures all from my Mac Pro downstairs.