"In the demo above, the phone displayed a partial boot screen before freezing."

"Google Demos Modular Phone That (Almost) Actually Works"

Maybe it's just me, but if a phone can't even get to the dialer to make a phone call, that's a little further from "actually working" than "almost."

I mean that seriously. My problem isn't with the phone itself. My problem is with the overly generous summary.

Call me a troll, but if any company other than Google unveiled this phone, and it didn't even boot during the demo, I don't think the reaction would be as positive.

Factually incorrect:
http://www.mondaq.com/unitedst...

And:
"The appeal stays the ruling. This leaves the enforceability of the commercial-drone ban -- at least for the moment -- up in the air."

Except trucks don't frequently crash as they're flying over my house, or power lines.

Sure, trucks do crash into houses sometimes, or do crash into power lines sometimes, but that's an entirely different situation than expecting them to fly over your hard.

The FAA could build up some form of regulated routes and co-ordination between drones, but they have not as of yet, and have not gotten any direction to do so. So until then, banning these uses of drones seems reasonable.

I know several people who this has happened to. Armed hold ups, people grabbing it and running, and people grabbing it when the owners back is turned.

So yes, in some cities this is a very real problem.

Peering isn't the same thing as enforcing QOS on the last mile of the connection. ISP's should be free to peer. They shouldn't be free to force QOS on end users. Having Netflix as a peer is entirely different than having my cable modem hard enforce download speeds of X everywhere, except Netflix which gets a download speed of Y. That's an artificial limitation.

And here I thought Google was making their money back on the advertising. That said, them owning the service still doesn't make it not evil. I remember a software company was brought up on antitrust charges for similar things back in the 90s. What were they named? Tinysoft? Macrosoft? Oh well.

They were.

They're also organizations that are probably donating to people like Representative Steve Stockman. Funny how that works.

Apparently Representative Steve Stockman has forgotten that the 1st Amendment only protects your rights to say something without prosecution by the government, and not your ability to not have to pay taxes.

It's both hilarious and sad that this man thinks having to pay normal taxes has anything to do with freedom of speech. Next Up: The government can't charge me taxes because it violates my religion. What religion is that you ask? None of your business, tax man.

"Best Rapid Development Language To Learn Today?"

Well sure, you could try using...

"Ideally, I'd like to learn a language that has web relevance, mobile relevance, GUI desktop applications relevance, and also that can be integrated into command-line workflows for data processing—a language that is interpreted rather than compiled, or at least that enables rapid, quick-and-dirty development"

Ah, um, hmmmm.

Look, I'm going to give you a protip about us "young folks": You seem to be under the assumption we are masochists. We are not.

If there was such a language, we'd all be using it daily for our development. The reason we use the tools we do are because they are the easiest tools for the job we do. Do you want to learn the most relevant tool for mobile development that is also the easiest? It's likely the one everyone else is using. If there was some hidden shortcut to do highly relevant development very quickly for every single platform, we'd all be using it. I don't like writing more code than I have to for the fun of it.

It sounds like you're trying to double dip here. You want a language that you can use for data modeling, but on the side you want it to be usable for about every single other arena for software development. Again, us young folks are already taking the easiest path. If you want to hit all those targets as well, learn the same languages that everyone else has already determined are the easiest paths, or keep focused on data modeling. The needs you're trying to specify for each language are totally different. Data modeling likes interpreted, but mobile strongly avoids the overhead of interpreted languages. All your requirements are exclusive, which is why there are a bunch of different languages and APIs to begin with.

Matlab is one tool I see frequently used by engineers who are mostly data modeling focused. For each of the other focus areas you've mentioned, I could probably list off several languages, usually with no overlap to the other platforms. Java possibly comes close, but you're not going to cover all your platforms, and it's not interpreted.

And to be honest, what you really haven't even scratched the surface of is that even if there was a language that covered all those platforms, you'd need to actually know all those platforms. Know the ins and outs of code signing on iOS or the Mac? Permissions on Android? 32 bit vs. 64 bit differences on Windows? The specifics of a bunch of different web browsers? If not, a language that covers all the platforms won't get you far anyway.

They did try and replace the file system around the time of the Intel switch. Got killed by licensing problems.
http://appleinsider.com/articl...

First, and impressive showing at WWDC, and now Google is nerfing their security model to be weaker than iOS's (iOS will notify when a new permission is required as part of an update when the application tries to make use of that permission.)

I think Windows Phone and iOS are both in a good position to start taking some market share from Google. If Google doesn't have a good Google/IO with Android, they may have officially dropped the ball on Android.

I have a 105mbps connection that frequently tests higher than that, so that doesn't sound right.

Yes? No? I think this is a misunderstanding of the motivations behind Apple's PowerPC switch. (Source: I wrote PowerPC Mac apps at the time and was in the room at WWDC when Apple announced the switch.)

The PowerPC market was a bit wider than that. Microsoft had Office on PowerPC, Adobe had their suite, and there was a smattering of other apps.

At the time, the future of PowerPC had looked pretty bright. Microsoft's Xbox, Sony's PS3, and Nintendo's Wii were all switching to PowerPC. Within a span of several months, the community was looking at a majority of gaming hardware being PowerPC based. PowerPC was going to be in very high demand, which would mean great things for the Mac PowerPC platform. Far from "the only company compiling for PowerPC was Adobe", Microsoft was buying Power Mac G5 boxes for their dev kits and they were porting Windows to the PowerPC for the Xbox. And in the end, Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo combined shipped several hundred million units based on the PowerPC (With Nintendo still shipping the Wii U with PowerPC today.)

So why did Apple leave the PowerPC?

At the time, laptop sales were on the rise, but Apple's laptop CPUs were not designed by IBM, they were designed by Motorola. IBM's PowerPC G5 was suitable for the Xbox 360 and desktop machines, but it ran far too hot to go into laptops. This left Motorola with their G4 CPU. And let me tell you, Motorola probably had very smart people working for them, but their execution was incompetent. The G4 had a 133 mhz system bus (which was slow even for the time), and ran very hot (but still cooler than the G5), and worst of all, was much slower than Intel's Pentium M.

Meanwhile the Pentium M was doing very well. It was faster than the G4, more power efficient than the G4, and it actually had a modern chipset and bus. Switching to the Pentium M was a no brainer.

There was speculation that Apple was trying to get IBM to make a mobile G5, but they were never able to get the power consumption down. When Microsoft and Sony entered onto the scene, IBM's interest shifted to getting the PowerPC into larger form factors, and Apple just didn't ship enough units in laptops to balance out the R&D demand that Microsoft and Sony created.

Motorola in the meantime with the G4 just kept sucking. There was a new architecture that was basically a modern architecture for the G4 that did eventually end up shipping, but by then Apple was just done with PowerPC.

Intel provided a stability the AIM (Apple, IBM, Motorola) alliance just didn't provide, with a quality chip. PowerPC did end up scaling, but there simply wasn't the same demand for PowerPC machines at the time to make it scale well enough.

So were people not actually writing code for PowerPC? No, lot's of people were. I'd actually guess that after Apple left PowerPC, the number of PowerPC developers continued to rise. And with the Xbox 360, Sony PS3, and the Nintendo Wii/Wii U continuing to get new games, there are still a lot of PowerPC developers out there.

To be honest, while this snippet is a few lines shorter, it's arguably more complicated than the corresponding Obj-C. It drops returning self in the init, and drops a few lines that would have had to go in to the class definition, but you gain a few unsightly keywords like "override", having to add the keyword "func" to every function, and you gain some more syntactical mess like "->".

It's not horrible, but I'm not sure this sample is more readable than Obj-C. As others have noted, Swift has the habit of taking the important parts of a function (like what it's named and what it returns, or what name a class is and what it subclasses) and shoving them off to entirely different sides of the function declaration.

From what I can tell (I just got out of WWDC and am reading through the docs) it can be bridged to, but not directly called. You can directly call Obj-C methods through the bridge, but not C methods. You'd have to bridge to the Obj-C methods which then call C methods.

I don't know what happens when that Obj-C method calls malloc and returns some memory for leak-tastic behavior. I still haven't read if or how Swift handles raw memory buffers.