Yeah, that shit is why Origin will only be running on my machine while I'm playing Battlefield 3. I hate exclusivity with a passion, but my desire to play BF3 outweighs my issues with EA and Origin.

The interface resembles the Logs/Statistics view in the Airport Admin Utility. The capture and debug logs features are new though. Good find, just the other day I was trying to figure out which of the couple public networks available was giving me better throughput.

As an experienced Obj-C programmer, I grappled with some of your complaints a long time ago. It's not the job of the language to protect you from careless mistakes. Moreover, Obj-C and Java have two very different philosophies and goals. Complaining about getting a run-time error when you've effectively mangled a function pointer is meaningless when comparing the language with Java, which has nothing even resembling performSelector or function pointers. The main difference between those two languages is not the usefulness of the stack trace (or more likely exception report with Java - practically everything throws exceptions) but that one is being interpreted and the other is more or less native.

I've always found it so amusing that Java IDEs have refactoring functions designed for spawning getters/setters and the like. I like objective-c's solution: getters/setters are required, but type a pair of lines and the compiler generates them for you. The way it's actually invoked also makes an object's public interface a little easier to grasp.

FWIW I've heard from friends inside Apple that a real SDK was intended all along, but the logistics took a while to settle on. Also, I've been told that as a product concept, the "iPad" effectively existed way before the iPhone. As early as 2001 Apple was toying with the concept of a highly portable computing device geared toward media consumption and communication, as opposed to just about every PDA or tablet-like device that had existed up to that point. It was decided that the technologies and consumer interest didn't exist to make such a device viable yet. Eventually, the concept was mutated into the development of the iPhone.

This is why I love developing in Objective-C (for iOS and OS X). The application I just finished writing is effectively a USB HID interface written in C (using the CoreFoundation framework) with a simple window-based GUI that I whipped up in Objective-C (Foundation framework). The Apple Objective-C model is designed so that the CoreFoundation (pure C) types and API calls are almost entirely compatible with the Foundation (Objective-C) stuff. This makes it incredibly easy to merge C underpinnings with Cocoa/UIKit and the other Mac OS X/iOS-specific Objective-C user interface libraries.

Normally I don't create new parent posts when there's already a lot of response, but I feel like just about everyone else who has posted has missed the mark. I'm a pretty hard-core Mac user. I'm certainly not an Apple fanboi - I'm quite unhappy with their new direction and I don't own an iPhone :P. Still, it has been pretty clear for at least a little while that iOS "computers" are Apple's goal. If you read the stories from the original Macintosh development team (check out some here), it's pretty clear that this is what Steve Jobs has wanted forever. His original dream of the Mac was an appliance, everyone having identical models that suit their needs in a generalized, mass produced way. Home computers running something resembling iOS are pretty damn close to that. And to be honest, as much as the prosumer in me screams in rage at it, it makes sense.

Just about everyone I know that went off to a state school after high school either already had or bought an Apple laptop. I know a ton of people that got MacBook Pros, for no reason other than they're middle class and have money. Most of them won't use the resources of that computer for anything even resembling its capabilities. For a large majority of the computer-using populace, an iOS-like operating system is much better suited to their use cases than any of the typical desktop OSes. I know the slashdot crowd hates to accept this, but the average consumer-level computer user clicks the same three or four shortcuts every day: web browser, music player, email client/instant messenger, and piracy software. Bringing a tablet or smartphone-style OS to their home computer is less of a reduction in as opposed to a better targeting of capabilities. The walled garden model provides a huge boost to security (I know people will cry bullshit about that but face it, less attack vectors means less attacks) and makes things drastically easier to use. I hear a lot more about people's grandmothers figuring out how to use iPads than how to use computers.

People in this thread have been talking about a reduce in hardware capability. Personally I wouldn't see that as a given. As hardware has evolved, so has software. Modern OSes and runtimes quite obviously have drastically higher overhead than of years ago. Again, personally I feel that in terms of efficiency operating systems have taken many steps backward. Regardless, MacBook Airs aren't by any definition low-end hardware, and the iPad 2 (and presumably iPhone 5) has an incredibly powerful processor for a handheld device.

I defined myself earlier as a "prosumer." I base that definition off the fact that I make heavy use of the Mac OS X and iOS development tools, in addition to Logic and Adobe software in freelance and hobbyist work. It troubles me greatly that very likely, the consumer Mac OS will soon lack the capabilities that I have always loved it for. My personal theory is that there will be a paid "Pro" upgrade to the next version of Mac OS X, ala editions of Windows. Hell, it'll probably be available on the Mac App Store like the Mac OS X Server upgrade is now. Although I certainly don't like where Apple (and personal computing as a whole) is heading, it really makes a lot more sense.

Isn't the current problem that the government doesn't control the money supply? As I recall the private banking sector (i.e. Federal Reserve) has been manipulating the value of US currency for almost 100 years.

I've seen that video. From what I've read from other sources it seems pretty poignant on some points but gets lost in the dramatic on others. Personally what I see as an issue with the economic ideologies that are thrown around presently is that every group thinks that their plan will be 100% effective. A completely free market has issues, a completely controlled economy and total communism has issues. It has always been my belief that there needs to be a balance. Eliminating greed would help too...

I'd have a long response but I'm not very awake at the moment/p.

From my understanding, stronger regulation of the financial sector essentially has the same effect of having a gold-backed currency, with the advantage that there is actually a degree of control over the market fluctuations. Again, this is only my understanding, but the concept of money "disappearing" is essentially someone thinks they have money but they actually don't. That's a gross oversimplification but I think it's an apt way of describing what essentially is a broker thinking his plan for gains has executed properly when he was in reality outpaced (outsmarted) by other "forces" in the market.

The phrase "unwinding of the 1930s laws" reminds me of a clip from Capitalism: A Love Story in which Michael Moore talks about a photograph showing treasury dept. members that were formerly involved with Lehman (I think?) cutting away the red tape of financial regulation. Wall Street is a casino, with gambling fanatics running around with no net gain. But the casino owners, the few who have put themselves in a position to run the game, are coming out farther ahead than can be imagined. There most certainly are people who are fully aware of where this has been heading since the beginning.

The G5s have had some capacitor plague issues that originated from a bunch of manufacturers turning out huge numbers of bad caps. The first gen and ALS iMac G5s had huge extended service plans for bad caps on the mainboard, though I've heard many PowerMac G5s suffered the same problem with PSU caps.

FWIW my girlfriend plays Fallout, Portal, all sorts of single player games on my Steam account while I'm playing TF2 or something else on my own computer. She just keeps the Steam client on her computer logged into my account in offline mode and there are no issues. If Steam is set to offline it doesn't even bother checking if the account is logged in elsewhere. Every once and a while she goes online to check for updates but then she can go offline again. It would be cool if Steam had options more friendly to the "family account" concept, but I bet those will come eventually. When Steam was introduced, it wasn't targeted at the family market.

The BSD components of those OSes are. That's the benefit of BSD, the license.

That would be Beware of the Snow Leopard

There comes a point at which you have to draw a line. Personally, my ideal world would be one in which no one had any desire for chemical stimulus. Alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, everything has health risks. In regards to my own body I think those risks are too high. The fact that people who don't agree with me have the potential to injure or kill others certainly makes it attractive to say that all drugs should be banned. There are many people who can drink responsibly, but there are many more who kill people in drunk driving accidents every year. The cold fact of ANY mind-altering substance is just that, it's a mind-altering substance. An altered state of mind could be extremely dangerous in certain situations - driving, caring for children, even using a stove. Back in my college dorm a few guys almost burned down the building because they were high. When the pizza they ordered arrived they threw it in the oven, box and all. I'm all for personal freedoms, but when people with chemically impaired judgement start a fire and I have to stand out in the snow in my robe at 3 AM for 45 minutes then having those guys punished sounds pretty good to me.

You might call it wallowing in ignorance, but some people are a danger to others. That's just a fact of life. We as a society generally accept the concept of putting a psychopathic killer in a mental institution or even just denying a driver's license to someone who has physically impaired perception or reflexes. There is a class of people with which there is a significant degree of probability that they will chemically impair themselves and then do things which they do not possess the threshold of attention to do safely. Since it's obviously unacceptable to prevent people who drink from owning cars or somesuch, there has to be a determination made in regard to balancing public safety and freedom. It's just like any responsibility of the state, to protect as many people's freedoms as possible. Your free will may be to drive with a BAC of .15 but my free will is to not be killed because you didn't have the concentration to control your vehicle. Hopefully in the near feature some form of preventative control can be implemented that reduces the frequency of death that occurs due to chemical impairment that is generally accepted.