I keep hearing this, and it doesn't make sense to me. What works for the iPhone & iPad doesn't necessarily work for the Mac, and vice versa. That's why Apple developed iOS instead of just slapping OS X on the iDevices. There's no guarantee that the Mac and iDevices are headed for the same destination.

Have they acquired some similar features? And will they acquire more? Sure. For one, that boosts the halo effect since anyone who has used an iThing will feel right at home using a Mac and vice versa. And the more similar that Apple can make iOS and OS X (while still retaining the features that make each appropriate for their respective platforms), the less code they have to maintain. This is just sensible business, it doesn't have to be about lockdown and control.

What's more, the Mac is a popular tool for non-Windows developers. It's a certified Unix and has all the command line goodies one would expect, like grep, sed, awk, ssh, etc. not to mention more complex tools like Apache, gcc, gdb, sqlite, Python, Perl and Ruby. Apple is raking in cash from the iProducts line of business but the Mac was still nearly 20% of Q1 revenue. If they lock down OS X, then they can kiss goodbye to the Unix certification and all the developers who want access to a command line (which would be about 95% I'd think).

Those developers might only make up a small chunk of the $5.4b in Mac sales but if Apple alienates its 3rd party developers, then who is going to create all of the content for the App Store? And how are those devs going to write code if Macs morph into iPads with built-in keyboards?

Apple has more to lose than to gain by making the Mac into another iDevice. I just don't see it happening anytime soon. I have no doubt they'd do it in a heartbeat if they thought it was to their benefit. I just don't think it is.

One would expect that the attendees of a software developer conference would be rife with early adopters of all things digital. Well, at PyCon this year, old school, dead tree business cards were alive and well. I don't think anyone there would have had the reaction described in the summary -- "A business card. How precious." If they're on the way out, it was not evident there.

I disagree. She was not a decent novelist.

I live in the USA. When I first encountered a gas pump that asked for my zip code, I was traveling with some Europeans who couldn't use their credit card in the pump because it demanded a zip code. As an experiment, I put my card in the pump and entered a fake zip code. My card was refused. Tried the same card, entered the correct zip code, the pump was happy.

Maybe it just didn't read my card correctly the first time. But the conclusion I drew from that small sample size is that the zip code matters, at least sometimes.

You talk as if someone proposed a huge increase in the fuel tax. If the fuel tax went up one cent per gallon, I doubt you or anyone else would notice the change in prices at the pump or at the grocery store, hardware store, etc.

Besides, unless you believe that the USA can continue living with its addiction to fossil fuels, people need to be given some incentive to use less fuel. Any incentive you pick is going to make someone unhappy. We can't just sit on our hands and wait for cold fusion to come true.

I'd change "but" to "because". Those far-reaching repercussions are exactly why many people believe increasing the fuel tax can solve or at least ameliorate a number of problems.

A minor quibble -- PyPI doesn't install anything from anywhere. PyPI stands for Python Package Index, the key word there being "index". It's a catalog that tells you where to find packages. Once PyPI points you to the package, it's up to you to decide whether or not you want to install it.

My 1997 Saturn SC has driver & front passenger airbags, front/rear crumple zones and side door beams, although no ABS. It has enough power to let me pass people without shifting out of 5th gear, and I still get 40MPG (5.88 l/100km) on the highway. When it was new, it was a mid-priced passenger car and not what you'd call state-of-the-art.

The auto industry has had 13 years to improve on that and has very little to show for it, especially in the USA. They did come out with a bunch of Hummers though. My suspicion is that the lack of improvement on fuel efficiency stems not from lack of ability but from lack of interest.

TFA and TFS fail to mention that SciPy, Numpy and Matplotlib have been added only to the Business, Enterprise, and OEM Editions of ActivePython. The Community Edition (the only one that's free) doesn't contain these libraries.

http://www.activestate.com/activepython

Everyone benefits except for the aforementioned species and habitats that will get destroyed, and any human or other animal that depends on those species and habitats for its survival.

I prefer solar over fossil fuel power and this program sounds like it could be a big improvement over, oh, I don't know, say offshore oil drilling as an example that comes to mind for some reason. But "everyone benefits" ignores the fact that there will be losers. On average, everyone benefits. In specific, some do and some don't.

Wendell Berry said it very nicely:

Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm -- which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of America farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.

The Unsettling of America : Culture & Agriculture (1996), p. 62

Citation needed, as the saying goes.

Furthermore, industrial agriculture also has negative side effects (like the one in the TFA) that reduce our ability to produce food elsewhere. Another example is the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico (unrelated to the recent and ongoing oil spill) which is largely a result of nutrient runoff from industrial ag. Cheap midwestern corn has a price not reflected in the tag on the shelf.