Touche

This is Google demonstrating that their platform for abstracting a client's hardware is robust and performant. I suspect that Amiga emulation is just because it's cool.

Having this layer of abstraction protects Google from the machinations of software vendors who might want a piece of their action.

Looks like they used a Multics box at MIT. http://www.frankston.com/public/?name=ImplementingVisiCalc

Really?
http://developer.android.com/tools/sdk/eclipse-adt.html
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/IDEs/Conceptual/iOS_Simulator_Guide/GettingStartedwithiOSStimulator/GettingStartedwithiOSStimulator.html

Rather subjective. They do quite a bit more than Apple DOS or MS-DOS ever did.

Same as it ever was:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Quest

Ever use a BBS back in the day?

The PC made computing accessible to commonfolk where it was previously the province of large institutions. Mobile continues this trend.

We invented a new platform. Web Applications and APIs facilitated by cheap, commodity hardware have changed the nature of human communications and learning in the last 15 years.

Huh? None of those are proprietary. If a young person chose to learn about and use Haskell, I think they'd be well-equipped to learn quite a lot about how computers work.

Because he's trying to make an interface for a convergence device where it no longer matters if you're running it on a phone, tablet, or desktop.

You know, a Unified interface. It's a hard problem--you need only look at Windows 8 to see how badly it can go wrong. Apple started to move in that direction with Launchpad too, but I don't really know if they can make it work either. In the not-too-distant future, you'll be able to sync your computing environment between all your various devices and persist settings and whatnot through the cloud (like a very distributed home directory or roaming profile).

Anyway, Mark Shuttleworth is trying to go where the puck will be, not where it is. And he's trying to do it with open source software. I wish him the best of luck.

It's amazing the kind of sociopathy one can rationalize by saying, "That's what corporations do."

First they ignore you, (IE6, "What other browsers?")
then they laugh at you, (IE7, "LOL we got your tabs right here")
then they fight you, <-----(You are here)
then you win.

No. No, they weren't.

Did you miss the "Free data" link on the website http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/mpp/freedata.html? NCDC tries to limit the charging of "$$$$" to only commercial and private entities in order to help offset the enormous cost of ingesting, archiving, and processing one of the world's largest datasets; we're not fully funded by Congress.

Charging for data is a touchy subject around here, though--the scientists, developers, customer service people, and management would all love to give away as much of our data as possible (and we give away a lot of it), but the money is always an issue.

I Groovy'd it:

println str.tokenize().collect({(char) Integer.parseInt(it, 16)})

Not as good (it returns a list), but quick...

Here is a writable closure for some KML:

def kmlDocument = new groovy.xml.StreamingMarkupBuilder().bind{
    mkp.xmlDeclaration()
    mkp.declareNamespace('': 'http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2')
kml{
Document{
    Folder{
        name('*** stations')
        description('http://some.place.on.teh.webs/qry')
        open('1')
        stationTypes.each({type ->
            Folder{
                name(type[0])
                description('Station Type: ' + type[0])
                type[1].each({platform ->
                    Folder{
                        name(platform)
                        description('Platform: ' + platform)
                        stations[type[0] + platform].each({station ->
                            Placemark{
                                name(station.name)
                                description('http://some.place.on.teh.webs/qry/station?idtypeabbr=stnid&idvalue=' + station.stnidnum)
                                styleUrl(station.getIcon())
                                Point{
                                    coordinates(station.coord)
                                }
}})}})}})}}}} //lameness filter ate my whitespace; doesn't look like LISP in real life
def f = new File('doc.kml')
f.delete()
f << kmlDocument

The cool thing is that I get all this plus seamless Java integration (i.e. every class in the standard library -- GregorianCalendar, for instance), all my Java tools work, and I can replace lots and lots of boilerplate Java code with one and two liners of Groovy.  So:

ArrayList<String> list = new ArrayList<String>();
list.add("Blah");
list.add("Blah");
list.add("Blah");
list.add("Blah");
System.out.println(list);

Becomes:

def list = ["Blah","Blah","Blah","Blah"]
println list

And hey, with closures, if you want to do something like capitalize the first character of each string in that list it's really easy:

println list.collect({
    it[0].toUpperCase() + it[1..it.length() - 1] //there's a better way to do this; I'm being pedantic
})

Which is not to say that Python couldn't do all that, but Groovy makes life for Java monkeys much easier.

Yet