Objective C / C++ is only required for doing the UI. 99% of your project can remain in C or C++ with only a very thin shim in Obj-C for the UI layer. There is no requirement to move your code base to except for the Mac-specific UI layer.

There is no 64 bit Carbon, because it's a relic. Cocoa easily mixes with C code (Obj-C is just C with extra stuff). Unless you're Adobe and you have a huge amount of UI code in Carbon, there is no reason to keep hanging on to it.

Grand Central Dispatch is not required for video at all. Mac OS X supports the standard POSIX pthreads interface for threading.

I run Linux, where's my ZFS? No, FUSE doesn't count.

x | ~x = 0xFF..FF, which is equal to -1 in the 2's complement signed version of the resulting type. Why not (0x2B | ~0x2B) == -1

example:
    main() { printf("%d\n", (0x2b | ~0x2b)); }

No, it's GNU/FreeBSD. It can, however, emulate Linux system calls and therefore natively run binaries compiled for Linux.

I recall Fake Steve Jobs had some rather insightful thoughts on this.

What's wrong with Objective C? You can mix Objective C and "pure" C / C++ in the same project. Any decent C++ programmer can pick up Objective C / Objective C++ in one day of practice[1]. Obj-C is a superset of C, all of your favorite tricks still work. You can program it on Linux or Cygwin using GnuStep and gcc (though admittedly getting it going is kind of a pain). If you really hate it that much, you can get away with writing a pretty thin wrapper of Obj-C to interface to the OSX specific APIs (most of your calls will probably be standard libc calls in C anyway), and have almost all of your code in C/C++. I don't see how it would be an obstacle to anyone.

[1] No True Scotsman would doubt this comment.

I did some research into this a number of years ago (before torrents were around). I found that you can store 64 KB (if I recall correctly) in a slashdot comment. Now, the idea was not to to use slashdot as storage, they'd quickly put a stop to that. The trick is using slashdot and other forums and wikis as a way to get your data into the Google cache, where it will be served rapidly for everyone who wants it. There should also be forward correction data uploaded (like parity files) so that if some segments get lost, they can be recovered. Then what you need is an index file (kind of like a torrent file) that tells you what Google keywords you need to search for to find any given segment of the file, and software that will parse this file, download, and assemble the chunks into the completed data.

I wrote a little bit of code for it. It's all very straightforward, I just never got the time to get enough of it implemented to release anything. With torrents, it seems somewhat worthless to pursue now.

Stop right there. Sun is one of the biggest corporate contributors to open source. Go ahead, count lines of code. I'm betting Sun will be in the top two if not #1.

Here's a brief list of things Sun has open sourced:
Solaris - Their entire OS, including ZFS and Dtrace
SPARC - Their CPU line
Java - Maybe you've heard of it.
OpenOffice - The office suite that ships with every desktop Linux distribution.
VirtualBox - A GPL desktop virtual machine.
NetBeans IDE - A multi-platform IDE.
OpenDS - LDAP Directory Server
High Availability Cluster

Honorable mention:
NFS - The Network File System
vi - developed by Sun founder Bill Joy
MySQL - Now owned and maintained by Sun-paid engineers

So, next time you say Sun hadn't done much for open source, look again. It would be a shame if Sun was bought by Oracle and all of their valuable contributions were abandoned.

Exactly. Scalability problems arise from poor implementation, not from language choices. Scalable platforms have been implemented in the past with PHP, ASP, Perl, C, Java, and I'm sure with Ruby, Python, or your favorite new language. Twitter is a massive-scale site, they should be looking at deep engineering, not a buzzword platform that promises easy scalability for dummies.

Scala may help them alleviate problems they've hit in the Rails framework. What will help them with the problems they hit in Scala?

I know, I'm a bad Slashdotter. Actually someone pointed this poster out to me a while ago, and I verified his claims and have since been more aware of his activities.

You're right that we should not ignore stories from authors we don't agree with. But we should also be wary of sources that are trying to push an agenda through their presentation of a story. Everyone has bias, but it seems that the stronger the bias, the more distorted the truth becomes to fit the author's world view. There is some threshold in which the presenter can no longer be counted on as a source of reliable information, even in seemingly benign cases.

This is yet another story by our friend "Anti-Globalism" (or "Defeat Globalism" in this case). Note the website the name links to (amerika.org). If you follow it, you'll reach a network of nationalist, anti-foreigner, and eventually racist (neo-Nazi / white power / religious hate), anti-democratic sites. The idea is to start you off with something that will get your nerd-rage going. "How dare those judges redefine libel". Then you'll go to a site that builds on that, but broadens the idea. "It's the Massachusetts liberal activist judges trying to take away our Libertarian freedom". Then it's a few more hops to full on "The Blacks, Jews, Mexicans, white-man hating Liberals are trying to take away our freedoms and give them to urban unwed teenage drug moms on welfare".

You can safely ignore this story.

If you need very specific behavior, as a high level developer you should be calling your environment's DoExactlyWhatIWantNotJustWhatIAssume() implementation (which in this case would be something like SyncFileDataToDisk() or TransactionCommit()). Implementing this function is for the authors of the interpreter or library set so that you don't have to understand the disk IO API. If your environment does not provide one of these, you're probably using the wrong tool for the job and you better make friends with some low level programmers.

Apple has 25,000 employees in the United States, 12,000 of which are in Cupertino, California, and the vast majority of those are in engineering and product development. Apple is one of the few computer makers that designs their desktop and laptop motherboards itself, in the U.S. (as opposed to buying a design from Asian ODMs [see Dell]). All Apple products, from phones to iPods to base stations to accessories are designed, programmed, debugged, and tested in the United States.

Apple writes its own OS entirely in the U.S. It does not have any international code development centers (unlike say Microsoft) except for a few small acquisitions. Apple writes an office suite, various other tools, runs web services, and creates professional grade video and audio software (such as Final Cut Pro), all from California offices. Apple now owns a chip design firm in the U.S. (PA Semiconductor).

The only thing that Apple has outsourced is manufacturing.