I still think you're not fully getting the point I was making. The behavior of cat doesn't change in theory. The behavior of the terminal when confronted with a bunch of garbage matching the mimetype of a png is what changes. It present it in a useful form. It is exactly like ansi escape codes for color output, no more no less. I still have no idea why you'd want to see the garbage in the first place, because it is just that, garbage. It's not even the bytes in the file, it's the bytes mistakenly interpreted by your terminal, which results in bleeps and borps, and other terrible fuckups until you reset it. If you pipe or redirect the output stream to something else, you're still working with data, because the view isn't involved.

It's simply a different view on the same data. This is what I meant by separation of view from data, which *is* in general, a good idea. Again, I am not saying I would love to see this in my shell. I'm just saying it isn't necessarily broken.

In short, it basically makes your terminal, the view layer, handle the garbage graciously and display the png. It doesn't mean that cat can now render pngs. If that was the case, it would indeed be broken because I don't expect cat to do this. I expect cat to con(cat)etnate files and toss the output to stdout.

It is a subtle difference, but it is quite significant, and indeed the difference between broken and just arguably useful.

Just being devil's advocate here, but did you actually read the article? Only the view intereprets the bytes which makes sense. If you pass it over a pipe, bytes are sent. I think that is what you meant, because no one actually like cat'ing a PNG in their terminal to see a bunch of garbage that may even break the terminal until you reset it. Or maybe that is a very obscure use case you have?

He separates view from data. Which is okay. Not something I particlarily like or find it useful, being a unix greybeard at heart, but it doesn't break it as you suggest. I suggest you read it over in detail again and don't stop at the first sentence.

Oh god, are you trying to tell me the billion fart apps, soundboards and shitty glorified flash applets from the early 2000s are written by professional programmers? Or that hobbyists don't have 100$ a year to spare for their hobby? Say it ain't so! :(

A platform has a feature that is not present by default, unless the user manually enables it. An application requires or targets that feature and makes no sense for those not having it to run it.

Then another depends on another application because it doesn't make sense outside that context, and thus states so. (on a sidenote in this case often the application will just ask you to download to the other if you wish to use the feature).

How is this ridiculous again? Are you implying the applications could, or should have worked for the phones that somehow don't have the feature? Was that just feature envy or...?

Using the same logic: The other day I downloaded an app from the App Store that says you have to have a camera on your device for it to work. Another one says you need something called iOS 3.0 or later. Ridiculous.

It sounds like you're implicitly demanding something unreasonable. Or am I really missing something?

Also for the record I just switched my iPhone 3G for a Samsung Galaxy S Capivate. It suits me very well and I found most of the apps I found on the app store were also available on the android market. I don't miss anything from the iPhone. At all. I have the same apps, and much, much more interesting ones.

I mean, I'm not trying to be argumentative here because it all boils down to personal preference, but honestly, let's face it -- the App Store may have thousands of apps, but most of them are useless toys, so that figure sounds very inflated to anyone who has actually owned iDevices, Certainly the core group of actual applications is much smaller. I'm not specifically talking about games here, because I still don't think that's the main use of a device, just a nice added bonus.

However, I do agree that the iPad is a much better device than the alternate offerings. I am still debating the actually /need/ for a tablet if you have a laptop, but it is very nice to have. I especially like using it in bed or wherever I'd use a book. That includes the can.

Yeah, you do -- PEP8 style guide recommends 4 spaces soft tabs. If your editor shows hard tabs as 4 spaces you can easily find out. Python code won't run if you use a _mixture_ of both. You have to pick one and stick with it. So it's only a perceived issue, really. If what you're pasting isn't how you're writing code, it's a simple matter of hitting ':retab' in vim.

I have ADHD you insensitive clods.

Okay seriously, because of that condition, reading that article just made me think "No shit, sherlock". Because I get that on a much smaller scale, so it felt pretty obvious to me ;)

Uhm... no. They own the copyright in the first place. They can relicense it on the fly under any terms they see fit, including binary-only-proprietary-release. They are not under any obligation to give you the source code, unless they have integrated GPL code in their codebase. And even then, they only have to give you the source to these.

Also, the CDDL != the GPL. I'm fairly sure you know this already but, Sun originally chose the CDDL exactly because it was incompatible with the GPL.

So, in short, no, not going to happen.

Truth. The only one who was very vocal about Objective-C back then was John Romero, who was writing all the tools and editors, and he did so in ObjC on NeXT.

The games were written in C, and the tools in Objective-C. Everything was being developed, tested and debugged on NeXT, and then ported to DOS.

I am annoyed at how I have been 'defending' Microsoft lately -- but you might want to revist that analogy since IIS7 is actually a pretty decent web server now :)

On topic, I think it's worth mentioning that the current OpenSolaris codebase doesn't support sparse root zones, which makes me sad. IPS apparently doesn't account for them at this point. Last I checked, they were still discussing wether to implement them or just scrap them in favor of full root zones with ZFS deduplication.

OpenSolaris is still useful, though.

I uh.. what? I'm sorry but you just lost any kind of coherence you previously may have had.

#2: Not lying. Check your shit before your flail your arms around dismissing my point. Standard library is available under the Microsoft Reference license, i.e., you can step into System.console.writeline() if that is your wish, and that is exactly the point that list argues -- i.e. "you cannot see the source to the .NET standard library without resorting to scary evil illegal means". Which can be refuted easily if you spend five seconds on google. It was never argued that .NET isn't open source.

You don't even seem to understand that list fully, don't keep yourself updated on the current state of affairs, you just blindly swallow it and spit it back out on demand, and then resort to calling people fanboys as your only argument when someone challenges them.

I think we're through here. I don't have anything to add.

Not really. Here:

• 1. Yes
• 2. No.
• 3. In practice they're the same.
• 4. Worthless. MORE PEOPLE USING IT MEANS BETTER RIGHT?
• 5. No. It is the /more awesomer/ platform for webservices, but most of the webservices I've seen consumed over the past years were .NET junk that failed SOAP standards and killed my cat.
• 6. That point is highly, highly debatable. I don't like either.
• 7. Irrelevant to technical merits.
• 8. I have seen an equal amount of equally shitty programmers in both languages.
• 9. Codeplex does exist, and I doubt this is still true today, although it is also irrelevant to technical merits.
• 10. I don't understand this one.
• 11. You fail to grasp that you /can/ mix managed and unmanaged hybrid code but you don't /have/ to. By the same logic JNI is such a hybrid and is bad because it exists.
• 12. That was patently wrong before and is only slightly less wrong now.
• 13. That would be a concern if .net wasn't already installed everywhere or so.
• 14. ...

I have up here. I'm annoyed. And I like Java better than .NET, and I argue this point once in a while. But I don't set up a crappy list with lies and fud to do that.

And most importantly you failed to mention the one largest selling point to Java: real multi-platform support. And no, Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7 don't count as "multiple platforms".