Sounds like you don't know much about Erlang. Erlang processes are MUCH lighter weight than unix processes, and are designed to scale to millions of processes. Generally, you want one Erlang process for each concurrent task in the system, like maybe one process for each active chat session. So, having 5 million Erlang processes would be as designed.

It has nothing to do with scary bad coders, it has everything to do with them keeping people from getting videos outside of what they control (itunes).

I'm not sure how you could be more wrong about this. Since the very FIRST iPhone, you have been able to put ANY video you want on it as long it is H.264 encoded in the proper profile. It is TRIVIAL to use Handbrake to rip DVDs to an iPhone compatible format and import them into iTunes. I know this because I used to work for a company that sells video content in iPhone compatible formats.

Well, we have the subject of this article, Grand Central Dispatch. We also have Darwin & XNU, their version of the Mach kernel. There is also Bonjour, their version of zeroconf, and their streaming server (Quicktime Streaming Server). They also purchased the source to gimp-print (now called Gutenprint) so they no longer have any obligation to keep it open source, but they do, and they keep releasing the source. How much more do you need?

Dude, I think you're hearing things that people aren't saying. The article describes how apple has improved their dynamic loading. The author doesn't claim they invented it. Apple doesn't claim they invented it. Nobody said anything about amazing new technologies Apple created.

So I just googled "study of apple marketing" and nothing on the first couple of pages shows me any sort of statistically significant study indicating why people who chose to buy Apple products did so. I did see a lot of "case studies" and glorified opinion pieces.

If we were going to accept anecdotal evidence, I could tell you that none of the many developers I know who have switched from Windows to Mac in the past couple of years give a shit about brand - they just want to get their work done in the easiest way possible - for them that turned out to be a mac.

Of course, we would both be idiots to assume that our personal group of acquaintances were representative of the many millions of people who buy Apple products every year.

I do agree that marketing can be quite powerful. I also agree that there are probably people out there buying Apple products just for the brand. However, I think you're crazy if you think that the vast majority of Apple customers are buying Apple just for the brand, regardless of any advantage in hardware or software quality.

Marketing can guarantee a strong opening weekend for a shitty movie, but once people figure out that it sucks the attendance drops dramatically. People would not continue to pay a premium for products costing multiple hundreds of dollars if the quality wasn't there.

If I had to guess, I'd suggest that people are continuing to buy Apple products because they consistently boast the highest customer satisfaction rates in both computers and cell phones, and nothing sells products like positive word of mouth:

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/ByteOfTheApple/blog/archives/2008/08/mac_customer_sa.html
http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/08/14/iphone-vs-pre-satisfaction-bakeoff/

So in the absence of any real evidence, we both have our theories. I just happen to think it's a lot more likely that people are rationally choosing superior products based on positive word of mouth than it is that people are irrationally spending lots of extra money because of some commercials they saw on TV.

Have you looked at the iPhone app store lately? There are plenty of free apps, just like there are plenty of paid apps in the Android store. I don't know about a metal detector app (seems unlikely to actually work well), but everything else you mentioned works fine, including apps like Enkin:

http://www.acrossair.com/apps_newyorknearestsubway.htm

You can of course use GV through the browser, although I admit I'd prefer a good native app. My guess is that Apple will have to approve it eventually - refusing just seems a little too anticompetitive.

There's nothing wrong with the G1 hardware, but it is most definitely NOT as nice as the iPhone hardware. I've spent plenty of time with the G1 and I'll take my iPhone any day - the trackball is OK, but I definitely don't miss it. That said, newer Android phones seem to have much nicer hardware - having multiple different phones is a big win for the end users, but will likely end up being a big pain for developers.

So is your good friend a giant hypocrite? If it is so terrible that she won't eat it, why is she willing to inflict it on the rest of us?

I think that MS's behavior is only seen as anti-competitive because they happen to own such a massive share of the market, not to mention have the financial backing to be able to buy out companies that are suing them.

Do you realized how silly this sounds? The whole point of monopoly law is that things that are legal most of the time are no longer legal when you have monopoly power. That is because when you reach a certain point, you can do things which make it impossible for any competitor to emerge, at which point you can charge whatever you like.

So yes, they are doing things which would be legal if they weren't a monopoly. The fact remains that they are a monopoly (according to a trial) and can no longer do those things.

Aside from that, I hate the current attitude that exists in the US that it only matters what is legal, not what is ethical. If the large banks had acted according to what is ethical, not what is legal, we wouldn't be in the financial crisis we're in. At what point did we as a country decide it was OK to screw over anybody you wanted, as long as you could justify it legally?

Not only is it Posix compliant, it is certified by the Open group as meeting it's Single Unix Specification:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/unix.html

Since the Open group is the current owner of the UNIX trademark, that's about as official as it gets. Whether that makes it "UNIX" all depends on how you define it I guess.

It has supported "Reopen all windows from last session" as a menu item for quite some time, but I don't know of a way to have it do so automatically.

So what would you suggest is a better economic stimulus? Putting people to work building schools IS stimulus. The construction workers get jobs. They buy building supplies, which creates jobs for those manufacturers. They pay taxes which helps the local governments keep spending, which generates more jobs.

Providing money to state & local goverments so they don't have to enact spending cuts and lay people off is about the fastest acting stimulus there is, and the conservatives want to keep cutting it. Crazy.

We clearly disagree on a lot of things, but I would happily put my hypothetical kids in a school system run by you.

My only question is, if we have plenty of money for schools already, where are we wasting it? It's clearly not on teacher salaries, and from what I read our average classroom size is pretty high, so it's not that we have too many teachers. I hear a lot of talk about crumbling infrastructure, so I don't expect that we're building lavish classrooms. So, I'm willing to believe we're already spending enough on education, but can you tell me where's it all going? This is not a rhetorical question - I'd really like to know.

I forgot to add that if you elect people that believe that government is the problem, you get shitty government - they don't believe it can work so they don't actually try.

Look at the difference in FEMA under Clinton and Bush - that's the difference between people who believe in good government and those who don't.

I don't believe that government is the answer for every problem, there are a lot of crappy laws out there, and the federal government has overstepped it's authority in a lot of areas. I might actually agree with you that it shouldn't be involved in education, but providing funding, especially in the current economic environment, seems like it could be helpful.

Oh yes, no "partisan bickering." This is the Obama Way: let's not bicker. Just agree with me!

You're dishonestly trying to frame the debate: I want a good education for my kids, which REQUIRES that the federal government is not involved.

Aside from the useless snipe at Obama, this is a ridiculous statement. Someone who believes the federal government can't get anything right isn't serious about good government. I bet you think our military is pretty well run right? Isn't that the federal government? How about that nifty internet all the kids love - didn't that spring forth from federal research? Despite all the hand-wringing about social security from people who don't want to pay SS taxes, that has been efficiently providing for the elderly for years, and certainly looks a lot safer than my IRA right now - thank god this recession will be over long before I retire.

If the federal government can't get anything right, why do we have it at all?

Right, nobody has any Objective-C code lying around. Despite the fact that both C and C++ code integrates with Objective-C easily.

You have clearly never tried it. I started iPhone development a couple of months ago, and I found 3rd-party BSD licensed code for basically everything I needed.