My wife and i started to go to drive-in when my daughter was born and while the quality isn't super duper imax 3D, there's nothing quite like laying on the hood of my car and sipping a beer or laying out on blanket with a radio besides us. Next summer, we're picking up a portable grill to get a little tailgating action going on. Honestly, I see no reason to go back to the traditional theaters. The experience is just too miserable for the money plus, we're guaranteed to see our drive-in movie in 2D which for me is worth the price of admission (I get headaches after awhile, plus the 3D glasses never fit right over my own glasses - chafing the shit out of my nose)

I will say in all my years in professional development, I have only met one legitimate Mac fan boy and this was in the past three months. Maybe they're more prevalent on messageboards or hang out in the Apple store, but the stereotype (in my experience) is far different than the normal mac user.

The funny thing about this guy ... we were all talking about the iPhone 4 fiasco and the people around started to pile it on. So he turns to me with a beseeching look because I was the only other mac user in the group. I was like, "yeah, these guys are right. Apple has made some boneheaded moves." and he was crushed. He just couldn't understand how another mac user could abandon him. I tried to tell him that I prefer unix and that the mac is a marriage of convenience for me since I have yet to find a linux distro that scratches an itch for me, but he didn't really pay attention to my arguments.

If you tried to develop native apps using the current default Apple setup, you'd realize it's hardly ideal as well. And by way, the open source JVMs are not as incomplete as you imagine, considering they are being used by the majority of Disney's internet engineering team to develop the infrastructure. I'm speaking of SoyLatte in particuliar)

Honestly ... if you're so paranoid, don't buy Apple products. Or don't upgrade. Problem solved. But as a former Java developer who worked exclusively on a mac ... I can say that the Apple has slowly been distancing themselves from Java for awhile now. The fact that it took them two goddamn years to release Java6 was pretty telling and when they did release it, it was only for 64bit machines. It was truly maddening, especially considering how opaque apple can be.

But this fear of lockdown? That's just traffic driving sensationalism. And if it isn't ... if we do reach a day when you can't install an application on your macbook without apple's permission then that will be the day OSX itself becomes deprecated. That will probably be the year of the Linux desktop. Go knows, I wouldn't stick around.

Sorry ... that posted as HTML Formatted as opposed to plain old text ... uggh, they really need to do some housecleaning around here.

The writing has been on the wall for awhile now since they deprecated the cocoa-java bridge so I'm the sun/oracle folk saw this coming for awhile. Plus updates have been few and far between. I'm guessing we'll see an Oracle JVM in the next year or so. Otherwise, SoyLatte still works really well. But here's the problem with desktop Java on the mac -- it's pretty easy to write a crappy UI but it takes a lot of work to write a seamless native one. The code gets riddled with if statements, checking the OS type. Also, using apple classes will cause compile errors on other platforms. In fact, you'll spend so much time bending backwards (possibly using third party libraries like MacWidgets since the Swing ones suck) that you'll wonder why you didn't code the fucker in objective c in the first place. And my god ... Interface Builder is lightyears ahead of any Java interface building tool (aka Matisse and some Eclipse plugins). So in summation, this sucks for the two desktop developers coding for the mac, but most other developers will be fine. Where I work we use a lot of Apple Java and now we have absolutely 0 idea on whether we should invest any more in Apple at all. Buying new hardware and transitioning to a new platform is expensive, but at least the other major platforms(Windows and Linux) do at least provide some certainty as to the future of those products and the platforms they will support. Unless your company is developing Java desktop apps for the Mac, you should be fine. When I worked at ESPN, most of us developed on Macs, using SoyLatte then deployed to Window boxes using the official JVM. I'm guessing Oracle will be releasing some sort of announcement in the near future.

There are still open source equivalents of the JVM such as SoyLatte and the like. Plus, I really don't believe Gosling on this. I imagine we will be seeing an Oracle branded JVM for the mac in the next year or so. The apple audience is just too big to ignore. It won't have first class citizenship like it used to have with the OS, but then again, Apple has been gradually pushing Java to the side. Java updates have always been incredibly slow for the mac and trying to make a Java app look native takes a tremendous amount of work that sort of goes against the spirit of Java and also creates compile headaches.

The summary is misinformed. Apple isn't restricting anything. Apps not being delivered through the app store can still use all the apis. End of story. Nothing to see here.

Um, no. People will still get those Java and Flash apps from the same place they have always been getting them ... drumroll please ... the internet. This is different from iOS whereby the app store is the ONLY way to install applications. This is just ANOTHER WAY. And come on ... use your noggin ... if Windows created an app store that didn't allow Java or Flash, do you think Java and Flash apps would disappear from that platform as well? It's not like Java is installed by default on Windows machines either.

From where you get them now. You know ... the maintainer of the Java language.

This is not a sign of lockdown ... java support on Macs having been drying up since Apple deprecated the Java-Cocoa bridge years ago. Nevermind it took them two years to release Java 6 which required users to have 64bit intel boxes. So, if you were doing any sort of Java desktop work (yes, this does exist), you were stuck on Java 5. If you were doing any server side work, you'd need to install SoyLatte to use the updated class libraries, nevermind dealing with performance issues from moving from JVM to JVM.

This is a GOOD THING as now Mac's will have a better supported and up-to-date JVM and updates should come quick and fast compared to Apple's sluggish almost apathetic attitude towards releases.

The money they make in developer keys would be far offset from the money they would lose in hardware sales. Such a move would enrage their users, not to mention their own developers. All but the hardest of the hardcore would stay with them. No business in their right mind would use them. Apple has made some dumb choices in the past (headphone controls ipod, anyone?) but they aren't suicidal.

A few years ago when I worked at ESPN.com, the home page would start autoplaying a video with an ad before it hit Sportscenter. The higher ups loved it because it generated excellent ad revenue, but there was a near revolt in both the tech teams and editorial teams. They ultimately pulled it, looking for revenue elsewhere. I wouldn't be surprised if a similar revolt took place at Apple over locking down general purpose computers.

fyi ... that law was in place until 1903.

How does this experiment hold up against the Militia Act of 1792 whereby Congress mandated that every able body male between eighteen and forty five years of age purchase their own musket? Mind you, they weren't provided a musket, but were mandated to buy one.

ummm ... mods, i believe the comment is being ironic. and no, I'm not a teabagger with a grudge ... just google obama and transparency to see how much things haven't been changed.