This totally explains why academics love the shit text that comes out of LaTeX (not the layout; it's fine -- I'm talking about that awful default font).

Nope, they just scroll to "Mom" in the Contact List of their cell phones. These *are* 5 year olds; they might not be able to tie their shoes yet but they're not savages!

Almost every business I've worked for keeps workstations around only as long as their warranties before they're surplussed. Given that AppleCare is 3 years, it might not make such a difference.

The other often-overlooked advantage of GCD is that submitting work to a queue is thread-safe, queues themselves are lightweight, and queues can be made internally-serial but parallel to all other queues. Apple's documentation has a lot of good examples of how to use this structure to eliminate almost all locking code (which is usually pretty heavyweight). If you need to serialize access to a resource, just create a serial queue and any other queue can send tasks to it without worrying about any synchronization.

As someone who's struggled with performance from trying to determine how fine-grained to make locks, this seems like an awesome approach.

He's talking about Christopher Kimball, not Alton Brown...

If this were a private, for-profit company that was fighting for IP rights, Slashdotters would be up in arms defending those wanting to use the tech with arguments of Free-as-in-Speech, good-of-humanity, etc. But when it's a non-profit research organization doing exactly the same thing, Slashdotters rush to defend them.

Are the ideals here really about freedom and liberty or just thinly-veiled anti-corporatism?