It has been quite some time since this NDA has been lifted, which is why there are plenty of books and tutorials readily available for anyone to buy/read (this wasn't the case when the SDK was first released). These publications generally contain a healthy dose of source code, so obviously it's fine to share. The only significant NDA that still exists regarding the iPhone SDK only covers beta releases of the SDK, which are only available to people who have signed up for the paid developer program.

Not quite accurate. Apple does not allow duplicating the functionality of Apple's apps. They don't care if you're the 1000th person to create a twitter client or a "flashlight". They still may reject an app for a million other reasons, but they only care about people impinging on their own territory.

Logistically, solar and wind are perfect for an application like an electric car since the energy can be stored in the car's batteries. The biggest drawback to solar and wind is that they're not "always on", but the car can be charged during times where solar and wind are at peak output and hold that energy for later use. I'm not ragging on nuclear (I think it's great and we should be trading coal for nuclear, in the very short term), but I think you're being a little naive by thinking that wind and solar can't generate electricity at utility scale. They're already doing it in many places. You don't want to be the guy who says something will "never" happen, only to be proved wrong.

Similarly, you can do integer division or multiplication by 2 as a bit shift, since a bit shift is a far less costly operation:

SHR EAX,1
instead of
DIV EAX,2

I don't agree with this perspective about PCs. Both consoles and PCs are effectively of the same overarching design: a general purpose CPU, a GPU, some general purpose memory, and some graphics memory. In fact, consoles are generally less capable machines than PCs because they do lots of things to reduce the component costs like stripping out branch prediction from the CPU cores, sharing memory between systems all over the place, etc. The reason that console games appear to be "optimized" is because they're uniform. A developer knows exactly what hardware specs he/she will be writing code for and can therefore maximize a game's performance to that spec. For example, if you know you have exactly 16 MB of texture memory, you can make your textures fit exactly in that foot print and not have to worry about managing it by moving it between other types of memory. PC developers have to do a great deal of work to make a game scale to the wide range of hardware that's out there. Unfortunately, this idealized steps on the scale are never perfect because systems are so dissimilar. While most modern PC games try to auto-detect your specs and use that info to scale the game detail to a certain level, it's never quite perfect and the discerning end user will spend some time tweaking settings until he/she is satisfied. The developers aren't relying on a PC's "brute force", as you describe it. Instead, they're trying their best to accommodate its versatility.

I'd say that it's most likely the fact that AT&T is trying to find a new and unusual way to gouge people by altering their MMS price plants. They're probably just taking some extra time to optimize their rape-to-profit ratio.

I suppose that's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is that there's only one assembly line, and some PCBs come off it with a second flash chip soldered on, while others come off with bare contacts and it costs next to nothing to do one over the other beyond the cost of the chip.

It wasn't really that they were "generous" about the 3G. It was more that the original iPhone wasn't subsidized at all. Basically, they were giving a subsidy to people who had never really received one previously. Either way, this complaint is stupid. Every other US carrier and phone manufacturer has these exact same terms. Can someone explain to me why it is that when it's Apple + AT&T, it becomes an unbearable outrage?

Ion is an nVidia product, not an Intel product. The terms "Intel graphics" and "gaming PC" should never be used together.

Most of the common human/computer interfaces require significant behavioral modification, so I'm not sure why you seem to highlight this particular one negatively. Typing on any keyboard is an unnatural process and requires some type of formal training to become effective at it. My high school required a semester course in typing, and by the end of that, the top few people in the class could touch type about 45 wpm, which would be considered quite crappy by anyone who uses a computer every day for his/her job. Even if the training is just a copy of Mario Teaches Typing, it still requires a great deal of effort for most people to become proficient at it. Formal training is, by definition, behavior modification. While there are increasingly more natural interfaces becoming available (speech recognition, mind melding, whatever), typing is still the gold standard and has been for the last 100 years. The fact that every cell phone manufacturer's goal these days is to build a good QWERTY keyboard into their device should be a strong indicator that typing is still going to be the gold standard for decades. Believe me, I would love to get away from having to tap away on a curiously-arranged array of buttons as much as the next guy, but if there is some technique that will make it less annoying, I'll go for it even if it requires a little bit of "behavior modification".

Except we know he's not programming for something other than a "big-old desktop PC" because the title of the post is "Lightweight C++ Library for SVG On Windows?" Even for the crappiest/oldest Windows systems still in use, 2 MB is comically small. I I actually thought that spec was some sort of typo, but I guess not!

I think the point the parent was trying to make is that it's a huge pain in the ass to write a large app using a simple text editor vs. a full-blown IDE, not that there are hard limits on how many lines of code they can handle (which I would imagine that ANY type of coding environment should be more than capable of handling far more lines of code than anyone would ever sanely have open at a given time. It's just text, folks! Imagine what a couple gigs of text looks like and that's roughly how long it'll take until you start "swapping"). There are plenty of things that Emacs and Vi[m] can do that true IDEs do like syntax highlighting, bracket matching, etc. In fact, my roommate wrote his own .vimrc that's like 300 lines long and has all sorts of ridiculous stuff in it that I didn't even know was possible. However, what they don't do is integrate with the compiler and the debugger well. Sure, you can run gcc or make or whatever from inside Vi by using the ! command, but once you've attempted to compile and eventually muck something up, it's then up to you to read the compiler output and navigate manually to the problem area. This may be fine if you have one problem, but if you have several, this process becomes burdensome. What it amounts to is a lot of extra typing, and no clear advantage over a full IDE. The classic terminal editors definitely have their uses, though. If you're on any sort of *nix system that you haven't had the pleasure of configuring yourself, Vi is almost certainly on there and ready to go. If you want, you can easily just pop in your own .vimrc and it'll work just as you'd like it. Also, if you're stuck doing work remotely over SSH (which I've done my fair share of) having a full-featured text editor at your disposal is quite refreshing.

I'd have to agree that both Eclipse and NetBeans have sort of a "heavy" feel to them, and it's probably at least in part due to the fact that they're written in Java (and by this, I mean the actual IDE is a Java app, not that it's an IDE for writing in Java). Despite this, I've started to appreciate a lot of the features NetBeans has for Java development. I'm not sure if they all carry over to other languages through plug-ins and whatnot, but for Java, it really goes the extra mile. Good code completion, in-line lookup of Javadocs, safely renaming all instances of an object in a given scope, and a highly useful and simple-to-use GUI toolkit prompted me to make the switch. I was previously using JCreator, which is another free Java IDE that's much more lightweight and I still use it sometimes if I'm dealing with a single-file project so that I don't have to deal with throwing stuff into my workspace, creating a new project, etc. in NetBeans. I still haven't gotten around to giving Eclipse a try, but I hear it's comparable in quality.

I agree that they had major name recognition, but that recognition equated to them being labeled "the guys who are pissing off Apple by making clones" and not "the guys who are making awesome, cheap Mac clones that I want to buy". The members of the /. community that enjoy Macs do so because of the technical merits (UNIX underpinnings, efficient GUI, etc. [don't flame me]). The rest of the world likes Macs because they're "cool" and they don't necessarily define that "coolness" explicitly. So, if a /.er wants the technical advantages of having a Mac without the price, they go for a hackintosh. The problem there is that a /.er is probably just going to build that hackintosh him/herself rather than pay Psystar for one. Not only is it cheaper, but you get to learn something in the process. The rest of the world would see a Mac clone and say "that's not a Mac! It's not cool!" and move along.

When I hear "normal" people complain about Macs, what I hear consistently is "I wish Apple would make a cheaper Mac", not "I wish some other company would step in and compete with Apple to drive down the price." What I'm trying to say is that the market for pre-built hackintoshes is tiny. Of all the people I know, both technical and nontechnical, I can't imagine any of them buying one.

In my book, gaining 20 pounds results in a 50 DKP MINUS!