Of course you are right to caution against the evils of the marketing literature. That's a good thing to remind people of. God knows I never tire of hearing it. Clearly your goal here is to prevent people from believing things about this technology that are not true, and that is laudable.

That is my goal too. My only skin in this game was to make sure that nobody assumed that the Apple C blocks extension was a necessary part of GCD and its use. A naive reader might have read your emphatic claim that "GCD from the programmers point of view within their application IS BLOCKS!", and left the thread not knowing that GCD can also be useful without these smalltalkish additions to C.

Sure, a lot of the real power of GCD rests on these closures, but not all applications need that sort of thing. Sometimes one is blessed with not having to share state among concurrent operations.

Whatever point you were trying to make didn't matter to me, because your whole rant seemed to be based upon a straw-man argument: wherein you would have us believe that someone claimed that apple invented the thread pool or closures or something.

I couldn't find where anyone actually made such claims, so I was tuning out everything except for those things that might misinform people about the system that was open sourced yesterday.

Apple wants you to buy an iPhone to get a (crappy) camera. Despite all the rumors, I don't see an iPod touch with a camera in the near future.

They mention Freerealms, which basically just uses the browser as a character/server selection lobby and executable launcher.

The Cartoon Network's FusionFall MMO is more accurately browser-based, since it uses a Flash-like rich-media plugin.

They don't restore the annotations. The annotations are still on the Kindle, except they're not tied to a book anymore. By restoring the book, the annotations are just linked back by the device. See the lawsuit about the guy who had taken notes on his kindle for a paper on 1984. He still has his notes, he just doesn't know what they are referring to without the book.

As I said before, all I was looking for was a simple 20-second description to show that the interviewee had some idea of how to program in C++, what OO is, etc. Not, "I don't know". Something along the lines of, "uh... it's a thing that has functions and data, which can be private or public so other classes can see them, ..." Is that really that hard?

So if you're such an expert with "template magic", could you say what a template is in 20 seconds? Or would you just say "I don't know"?

If you buy a stolen stereo on the street, it can be confiscated by the government. Same for a stolen car, that's why we have chop shops that launder parts from stolen cars back out into the market. So, granted IP rights may be different than real world stuff (did anybody suffer harm because unauthorized copies were distributed? was anybody deprived of anything? don't quote anything in parentheses, or this sentence, this isn't what i'm here to discuss), if you are in possession of a stolen item, it can be confiscated. It looks like amazon was just trying to jump the gun and possibly assumed that the copies would equate to 'stolen'.

Other side of the coin, let's say that these were just counterfeit copies. I.E. unauthorized copies of a protected item. I feel that this is closer to the truth. Current law says that it is NOT within the government's rights to seize a single counterfeit item if that is the only copy in your possession and you do not intend to sell it. That's why you never hear about a non-seller's collection of bootleg dvd's or fake-gucci purses being siezed. So had amazon realized that, it would have classified the re-seller as a digital counterfeiter and possibly resolved the matter by shutting off transfer rights (to another account, not another device within the account.)

And Amazon also did the right thing by not going taking the typical non-acknowledgment position and instead admitting -- quite publicly -- that they screwed up big. I still have some problems with how Amazon does particular things (read: Kindle DRM), but it's refreshing to see a company fess up in no unequivocal terms when they do something that upsets their customers.

Ironically, the only kindle owner I know is a 68 yo woman who has no love for technology. She got it as a gift and really loves it. If amazon is winning over technophobes like this then its really just a matter of time until they come around as they realize the convenience. Right near its early adopters only, but its getting there.

Unfortunately she doesn't understand that when Amazon goes out of business her "books" will no longer be accessible. When Penguin, or Bantam Spectra, or Addison Wesley, or O'Reilly go out of business the paper books I have will still be accessible. I have books from I read over 30 years ago and they are still readable. Will the current e-books still be readable 30 years from now? (Oh, and those books of mine will still be accessible in another 30 years.)

Uh, ok. I had watched the program on first-run on CBS way back when, and was lucky enough to be living in Silicon Valley when KTEH ran the series. I was surprised that the KTEH work by Apel was so widely circulated. Good excuse to pull my old tape of DNFMOMD and give it a rewatch.

Having said that, I was trying to provide a service to potential fans of my favorite series of all time. Sorry to upset you.

To be fair, TFA (Nature) wasn't much better. It never actually broaches the topic of molecular vs. particle monopoles which is kind of central to anyone not in the know understanding that this isn't the big deal everyone's been talking about for the last decade+

Where are the stats kept on the phone? I found it once by mistake but haven't found it lately.

Seconded.

The PBS station in San Jose reran the series about 20 or so years ago. Scott Apel hosted bumpers before and after the series, which greatly enhanced the viewing. The biggest move was his re-ordering of the episodes into a sequence that made more sense than the CBS original run, in particular. The re-ordering went as follows:

Arrival

Dance of the Dead

Checkmate

Free for All

The Chimes of Big Ben

Many Happy Returns

The Schizoid Man

The General

A, B and C

It's Your Funeral

Living in Harmony

Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling

A Change of Mind

Hammer Into Anvil (my favorite ep)

The Girl Who Was Death

Once Upon a Time

Fall Out

In this order, the series consists of three cycles. Cycle one (ending with Many Happy Returns) focuses on #6 trying to escape. Cycle two (ending with Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling) focuses on 'intrigue in The Village' as #6 adjusts to his captivity. The final cycle consists of #6 taking charge and subverting The Village from within. Continuity is also improved in this sequencing.

And yes, #6 does have a name: Carl (his fiancee would know his name, after all).

A while back, I recorded 2001 on my TiVo.

The fast-forward button actually turned the movie into a tolerable experience (and I'm willing to tolerate quite a lot when it comes to film -- however, after the first 20-minute sequence of no action in complete silence, I was quite comfortable with the fact that space is big, empty, and quiet. There was absolutely no need for Kubrick to do the same thing 5 more times)

Don't get me wrong. It's a great film, but it could have been just as great of a film at half the length. Kubrick is one of the most "brutal" directors I know of (although David Lynch certainly ranks up there with him)

Kind of like female Night Elves...just real life.