I'm on my way back to Infinite Loop, and I'm starting on Tim Cook's first day as CEO. Wish us luck.

-jcr

1) Mac users are highly sensitive to the quality of your products' user experience. What this means is, go native or don't bother. Even though Google Earth and Photoshop are rife with UI atrocities, don't imagine that you can get away with ignoring the rules like they can. They're 500-pound Gorillas, and you're not. If you are Google or Adobe, get with the program and write a Cocoa UI, already. It's about time.

2) The native language for the Mac and the iPhone is Objective-C. Get used to it; it's not hard to learn. Any developer familiar with C should be able to learn Objective-C in a day, and be an Objective-C language lawyer within a week if he cares to. Yes, there are Ruby, Python, and other bridges you can use, and they work just fine, but limit this to integrating existing libraries with your apps. DO NOT try to use the bridges as a way to avoid learning the environment you're working with.

3) A cross-platform GUI is neither feasible nor desirable. You can't #ifdef the difference between Cocoa, xlib, and Win32. Don't believe me? Look at OpenOffice. (If OpenOffice looks OK to you, then please, forget about offering your products on the Mac. You'll only cause us pain.)

4) Don't bother with third-party cross-platform GUI libraries like Qt. Yeah, you can make it sort of work, but you'll get a lot of complaints from your Mac customers, and it will be more expensive than properly factoring your code and writing a native GUI for each platform. For every Mac customer who complains about a bad UI, there are many more who took one look at it and decided never to do business with the vendor in question. I just learned from a friend that Qt is far worse than I'd realized: if you use Qt, you wont' get any hardware acceleration , and you won't be able to deliver ADA compliance.

5) If you're shopping for people with years of experience in Cocoa and Objective-C, you should know that they're pretty scarce due to the flood of iPhone projects going on these days. I'm hearing about people getting $200 to 250/hr for iPhone projects. Keep in mind that you're also competing with Apple for those developers, and chances are your project isn't as interesting as Apple's. If you're a start-up and you can offer equity, then it's not too hard to find people who are willing to gamble with you if they believe in your business plan. Mac and iPhone developer tend to be somewhat less risk-averse than the average engineer, in my experience.

6) If you can't afford experienced Mac developers, you'll have to make your own. Save yourself a lot of time and money by sending your people to a class. I recommend Big Nerd Ranch, that's where Apple sent their own people when they quit doing Cocoa training in-house. Keep in mind though, that once your newly-minted Cocoa developers have a year or so of experience under their belts, you'd better be prepared to offer them market rates, or you'll lose them. Back in the NeXTSTEP days, Fannie Mae insisted on low salaries, and they lost people steadily to other NeXTSTEP shops. Attrition is expensive; it will cost you more than you think when your institutional knowledge of your product scatters to the winds.

7) Send your people to the Apple developer conference every year. I can't emphasize this enough. Time is money, and the connections you can make there with the Apple engineers you need to know can save you weeks or months of trial and error.

That should do for starters.

Addition 8/24/09:

8) When interviewing an Objective-C expert, DO NOT try the "Microsoft style interview". (See #5 above.) We are not entry-level, fresh-out-of-DeVry kids who have the time for solving the little brain teasers that someone looked up on the web last night. Talk about the actual work at hand, how the candidate's previous experience is relevant to what you need to do, and ask for some examples of creative solutions they've come up with before.

9) Probably the best place to advertise for iPhone or Mac developers is the cocoa-dev mailing list at lists.apple.com. You have to be a subscriber to the list, and you have to send your ad to the moderator for approval first. In any ad on Cocoa-dev, be very specific about what kind of developer you're looking for, and what the job entails. This is not the place to just list buzzwords or try to lowball anyone.

10) When advertising for candidates, don't hide behind a webform or an e-mail address. Put a phone number in your ad that reaches a human being. People with skills that are in high demand aren't going to mail their resume to recruiter@companyNobodyEverHeardOf, because that kind of thing gets you spammed.

-jcr

Taco,

An entry you wrote on the Slashdot FAQ states:

What sorts of anti-troll filters exist?

A handful of filters have been put into place to try to make sure that people don't abuse the system. The most important is that the same person can't post more than once every 120 seconds. Also, if a single user is moderated down several times in a short time frame, a temporary ban will be imposed on that user... a cooling off period if you will. It lasts for 72 hours, or more for users who have posted a ton.

The vast majority of you will never encounter any of these troll filters. If you do encounter one unfairly, let us know so we can fix it. This stuff is fairly beta code, so there are bound to be problems. [emph mine]

Yet Pudge can post a comment at 12:50, 12:51, 12:52 and 12:53.

In the same story, Pudge posted over 60 times (and counting!) in a five hour period, many times less than 120s since his last post.

I understand allowing the editors certain freedoms that you can't give to a wider audience, but allowing your own editors to troll the Slashdot readers and abuse the filters set to stop such behavior is frankly a little sad.

If you agree that Taco needs to revoke Pudge's editor account, please reply below.

This goes out to every left- or right-wing power seeker, who believes that everything will be just dandy if only they get the right bunch of little tyrants in office.

Ok, time for a bucket of cold water in the face, kids.

First, income is not "distributed", it's earned, and it belongs to those who earn it.
Second, you have no moral right to take someone else's earnings, even if they have more than you do. It doesn't become moral if you hire a thug to do it for you, and it doesn't become moral if you have a group of hundreds of thousands of thugs and bureaucrats to do the dirty work.

The legitimate power of the state can ONLY derive from a delegation of the rights of the people. Free people institute governments to secure our rights, not to interfere with them.

We have a written constitution in this country, and despite its having been routinely ignored whenever government found it inconvenient, it is nevertheless the entirety of the legal basis for the government's existence. If the government doesn't want to follow the constitution, then the government has no legitimate authority, at all.

Maybe you can make a compelling utilitarian argument for some of the currently unconstitutional activities that the federal government engages in, and if so, then propose an amendment, let's have that national debate, and maybe you can get your amendment ratified. Until and unless that happens, the federal government has no legitimate basis to harass sick people for using marijuana, to take our hard-earned wealth and give it to failed banks, to "redistribute" our earnings, to interfere with the choices we make for our health care, to prevent us from traveling to any country we care to visit, or to draft us into "national service."

We are not the property of the state. Get that through your power-hungry little minds.

-jcr

I happened to hear a recording of a fine performance of our national anthem a short while ago, and the question posed at the end of the song suddenly caught my attention.

"O, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave, over the land of the free, and the home of the brave?"

That's really the most profound thing that Francis Scott Key ever wrote. The question isn't whether the symbol of freedom still exists, we can see that it does. The question is: are we still free? Are we still brave enough to demand and defend our liberty?

A year ago, I would probably have said no. Today though, with Ron Paul's book at #1 on the New York Times' bestseller list, I'm rather more hopeful than I have been in a very long time.

-jcr

I've just looked at my 'freaks' on slashdot.

Why are there so many? I just don't understand.

Wouldn't all you freaks rather be my fans instead?

In the long lead up to the US Presidential Elections, there is something that I'm curious about.

How do slashdotters (and particularly conservative slashdotters) feel about Apple's overt and unequivocal support for the Democrats? If you're not sure what I'm talking about, consider the following:

• Jobs has Contributed ¼ of a million dollars to the Democrats in the last 10 years.

• During the last election. John Kerry had Steve Jobs' personal support and friendship, including Jobs' offering himself in the position of technical/PR advisor to the Kerry campaign.

• Jobs has had the Clintons over to his house for an intimate dinner. The Clinton's returned the favor, inviting Jobs to stay a night in the White House's Lincoln bedroom, a privilege granted to big party donors.

• Al Gore (Prominent Democrat, environmentalist & former vice president of the US) sits on Apple's board.

• Steve Jobs organised a fund raiser for Hilary Clinton at his Palo Alto home.

Has Apple's support for the Democrats changed your purchasing decisions?

Are you more or less likely to buy Apple knowing that a non-trivial percentage of your hard earned dollars are going to make there way into Democrat campaign funds?

I'd just like to thank all the other whiney mac fanboys here on slashdot for linking to my slashpage.

Your tireless efforts have resulted in the slashdot wmf homepage becoming the number one google search result for mac fanboy.

Thanks again for all your hard work.

-wmf

Well, 4 years ago, I voted for Kerry (a first for me as I never voted for a Dem candidate before). This election, I pulled a nearly straight ticket Dem (a few libertarians, but mostly Dem's) with NO republicans. And why did I do it? Because I was hoping that there would be a difference. Now, near as I can tell, there is no difference.

The big issues that killed the republicans were

1. Total failure in the Iraq war combined with continuing lies.
2. Near total failure in the terrorists war (different than the Iraq).
3. Obscene Deficits.
4. Corruption that is more akin to a 3rd world country than a superpower.
5. A total failure in morals and ethics.

.
And what are the Dem's talking about doing about this? Nothing. Nada. Zip.

Nowhere do I hear of them pushing a balanced budget amendment. You would think that if they were worried about deficits, that they would be pushing an amendment.

Or that they would be re-doing the lobbying/election funding process. But not a peep. In fact, here in Colorado, we passed an anti-corruption bill that prevents ex-congressman from lobbying for several years and prevents them from taking more than $50 in "gifts". nearly all of the Republicans howled in fear and hatred of it(very much expected). But most surprising was that a large number of Dem's joined that howling. I think that this will take Joel Hefley's ideas to stop all of this. Too bad that they republicans ran out their last ethical member on a railroad.

As to the war, well, the Dem's backed the backer committee as well as it appears that they will be backing Gates for Secretary of War. And who is Gates as well as who is in the committee? All the same ppl who participated in the October surprise AND the Iran-contra affair. Basically, they are all criminals who have learned that you can screw over the nation AND get away with it. It would appear that we are still doing the same antics of the 80's. I only hope that this time we put a all of them in Levinworth.

And as to ethics and morals, well, let's hope that the corrupt DOJ and DHS will be spying on all the Dems and will stop them before they become as bad as republicans.

Well, part of one.

There is one thing I really don't understand about Apple. From the first advertisements for the Apple ][, Apple was proud to call their PC line ""Personal Computer"s". Apple continued to be proud of their PC heritage, billing the Lisa as a reinvention of the "Personal Computer".

This continued until as recently as 2000, when Apple was quite happy to advertise the powerMac G5 as the World's fastest "Personal Computer" (at least until they were ordered to pull the ads for being "misleading".)

I can understand why Mac users use the term PC. It's because of a sense of being an outsider & the feeling of superiority the term gives the user (I use a mac, it's not a generic item like a "PC"). On the other hand, I think if Apple were the company it portrayed itself as being (great products, from an ethical, honest company), it wouldn't use the term PC (in opposition to mac), as well as the term "Personal Computer" (when it suits).

Ironically (in the Alanis sense), Apple's most blatantly incorrect usage (Mac Guy / PC Guy ads) has come after Apple's shift to a far more generic PC architecture, which makes it possible to run windows on a mac or os x on non-mac hardware (the 'standard' definition for a PC used to be 'a machine capable of running windows').

What does everyone else think? In this new era where it's possible to run OS X on a Dell, or windows on a Mac, is Apple being intellectually dishonest using the term "Personal Computer" when it suits them and PC disparagingly?

America (and the west for that matter) is in a pickle over oil. Why? Because we depend on it. Yet, there is only several dependencies.

1. Electricity consumption. This is easily replaceable by Nukes, Alternatives and even Coal. IOW, oil is not really needed for this.
2. Home heating. Again, we have alternatives for home heating by the use of ground based heat pumps (great for cooling too), natural gas, solar, and even electricity.
3. Chemical production. This is not the mainstay of oil, but there are no alternatives. In this case, it would be in the interest of the west (as well as most of the rest of the world) to have the price of oil plummet because it is used for only chemical production.
4. Finally, transportation. This is our Achilles heal.

Transportation is our weakness. At this time, America (and even more so, canada) is spread all over. Worse, we have a minimal infrastructure to support an alternative transportation. In Europe, the companies are intermixed with homes. Many people either walk or take the bus. Big difference. We need an easy alternative to the car, but the entire infrastructure is geared around wheeled vehicles. So what can be done different? Simple; do not depend on a oil based automobile.

Our real problem is that Detroit (and Europe with Japan) is building oil based automobiles. Even the new hybrids are being built all around an oil economy. What is needed for them to survive is a hybrid that works along the lines of train; vehicles with electric motors, a small bank of batteries (enough for say 5-20 miles), and then a empty engine bay. The bay could then hold a number of different energy. The first item in there should be an E85 compliant gas generator. Why? because then it can burn either gas or ethanol mix. The nice thing about that is that for a plain car the generator will need to be on the order of 20K or better. That means that a car can then power a house during an electrical outage (think hurricane, earthquake, or tornado outages) or at a job site (such as construction).
Of course, One might be more batteries. In particular, this would be attractive to somebody who does not drive but say 30-50 miles one way in a day i.e. a house wife or a city person. This person could then recharge at home or at work.
Finally, another might be a fuel cell as these come on-line. So what is the real advantage? Society would not have to undergo massive change to accommodate switching to different energy. All in all, only the refuel point would have issues. But this would mean that we could easily switch to what ever is the cheapest to run.

While I have not gone over 100% of Bush's work (or for that matter, the senates or houses), I am concerned by what is happening.

The real problem is that illegal immigration to USA is rarely a freedom/citizenship issue, but generally one of economics. Most of these ppl come here to make money for a time and then leave after 10-20 years (i.e. once they have enough to be comfortable). This will not be solvable via a legal game. It is only solvable via economic solution (think in terms of the drug war). Bush's (and the others) solutions show that there are other interests here rather than solving the real problems.

One of the first issues is that as long as a person can make lots more money here, then they will flow here. So we really have only 2 solutions. Create higher paying jobs there, or decrease the jobs here (with decreasing pay).
NAFTA is a good starting point for increasing jobs there, but it would be useful to see mexico push venture capital and education.
Now, as to creating a disincentive here, that would mean removing jobs as well as lowering the pay. The only way to lower the job count will be to automate the jobs that are being done. That would mean farming, construction, restaurant, and janitorial. If our gov. put in the money that they are looking into spending on a fence solution, into developing robot tech., then we would see the low-end jobs go away. Interestingly, each industry is rather easy to automate and then market to businesses. One good place would be to automate restaurants and then start selling it to resort restaurants. Think of ski industries which have large crush loads iff the snow is good. But will have very light loads if the snow appears to be bad, or better in other places. Ski resorts restaurants would gladly automate if the robots will actually do the job. Each major industry would automate if the cost of hiring illegals is higher than the costs of the robots.

Another issue is that the admin (and congress) have the choice of allowing illegals or not. For those that are pushing us to allow illegals, they all say that the person had to commit no felony. But there are more problems. In particular, they should speak english. They are in our country. If they have not bothered to learn, then why should we bother with them. Also, if they worked here, then they should have paid taxes. If they counted on the employer to pay, then the employer should be listed and we should dtermine who was not paying taxes. One of them, should have to deal with the consequences of tax evasion, which should be jail time and penalities.

Another problem with Bush's solution is his use of computerized ID. The idea is that somebody tells the employer that they are immigrant and then show their computer card. From there, the card is checked in a central DB along with a fingerprint. Ok. No problem. Right? Wrong. With just this approach, all the person has to do, is say that they are a legal citizen and produce a fake license. IOW, it is the same situation that we have now. Unless the gov. is planning to have ALL of us useing this, which is almost certainly the case. W. is using this as a prelude to having a federal issued ID for all citizens. To really make this work, we will need to be fingerprinted and DNAed (because fingerprints can be faked). Basically, he is backdooring his federal ID which he could not push on us in straight forward fashion. Sig Heil! Bush.

Throughout most of the world, oil/gas is expensive. Every so often, we go through these oil spikes that make a lot of money for OPEC and those that service them. But the question is, how is America (and western countries in general) going to stop being hit by these?

Well, the Republicans will tell you that the way out of all this, is to depend on capitalism. As a good Libertarian, I agree in principal. But the problem is that oil is not under free economic policies. Basically, the bulk of the worlds oil is controlled by just a few entities (OPEC and Russia). OPEC is made up of small countries, but they mostly act in unison. So between the 2 of them and the companies that service the industry (companies such as enron and halliburton being good examples), we literally have a monopoly. It is in their best interest to keep the rates just below what the world will tolerate and then slowly keep raising it. And that is what they currently do. IOW, free enterprise is not in play here.

OTH, the Democrats will now try to legislate the issue. That is, they will either insist on raising the fleet MPG average, or they will ask for subsidies for some pet project (which is not much different for republicans/neo-cons of today). This has already shown that if the republicans get control back, they will simply roll back the changes. Notice where Carter's energy changes and Clinton's electric car efforts are? All ditched. Interestingly, Carter's main work was on alternative esp. solar and wind which are finally paying dividends. In addition, while W. pushes subsidized oil and hydrogen, it is the hybrid car with increased battery size that is making an impact.

So, is there an alternative? Yes. We need to understand that we are in the situation we are because we are so heavily entrenched into oil. So we need to change that. One of the bigger issues is that autmobilies hang around for ages. So the cars that middle class bought when gas was relatively cheap, will filter down to the poor. Since automobiles are long-term issues, then oil needs to be a long term issue.

1. We need to roll back the oil production taxbreaks that has been given. Basically, we are subsidizing keeping our country reliant on oil. Big mistake from a debt and policy POV.
2. W. actually did major cuts into NREL. The money needs to be restored and focus changed slightly; Basically, we should be researching not energy generation, but energy storage. Alternative energy is awesome, but its generation is rarely consistant. Demand is so varied, that if we can store during the off times, and use it during the peak demands cheaply, then all come out ahead. In addition, a storage system would allow for localized distribution.
3. We need to kill off the fleet average mpg requirements. They serve no purpose and only allow the auto companies the opportunity to point to "doing enough". Yet, they are dragging their feet. It really causes them to shoot for the minimum, which is a mistake. If GM wants to create 5 mpg hummers, then let them. Look at where they are today vs. Toyota/Honda who build high MPG cars.
4. Finally, we need customers to buy cars KNOWING that gas will go up. Reagan and W. came in preaching cheap oil. That is a mistake. Since oil is a monopoly, it should be taxed. Basically, we should create a progressive tax on Gas that is known ahead of time. Say every 6 months for the next 2 years, gas tax will go up .25. After that for another 2 years, it will rise .50 / gal / 6 months. That means in 4 years, gas will go up by $4/gal. Now, that sounds harsh. And if you are driving a 5 mpg hummer, it is harsh. Of course, if you are driving a 60 mpg hummer, you really do not mind. This will enocurage those that tend to make long range decision (typically high/middle class) to buy more fuel efficient cars or switch. Why? Because they will not want to be tapped for the gas, and they know that the 5 mpg car WILL depreciate fast. Nobody will want to buy it.

The last item is a real hard thing. First it goes against my beliefs. Second, it will be next to impossible to get it passed. After all, JC and Poppa Bush paid with their jobs for doing what was in national interest. Finally, asking citizens to accept a tax that will grow is unheard of and will be judged Unamerican. Yet, we need a way to encourage LONG range choices to be made.

I wrote this post that comments on abuse of the word "troll". I guess it was inevitable that it should be modded down as "troll"!