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The ace up Apple's sleeve is their full hardware and operating system control on iOS devices. Siri is just another example of this. Third-party software on iPhone is sandboxed in many ways that give Apple apps a competitive advantage.

With regard to Siri and voice control, no third party app is allowed to respond to the critical press-and-hold-home-button shortcut. Another example is the hardware volume buttons, which Apple repurposes for Camera.app shutter control, but access to which was denied for the popular third party Camera+ app for that same purpose. Only Apple's Camera.app gets a lock-screen shortcut. Only Apple apps are allowed to access the carrier's SMS and voicemail. Only iBooks got access to real brightness control (may have changed in iOS 5). Only Apple apps can show a photo preview (e.g. MMS/iMessage) in a notification. Only Apple apps get to put widgets in the iOS 5 Notifications panel. The list goes on...
Rupert Murdoch is the king of News Corp.

Anyway, I see what you're getting at, but I think you're implying a discontinuity between 'change opinion' and 'influence opinion' where one need not exist.
decided they should be paid for their work. There is one slight problem however. Growl is Open Source Software.

So? You can sell open source software. Just because software is GPL/BSD licenced doesn't mean you can't sell it. Open Source ≠ Non-commerical. Closed Source ≠ Commmerical. You can change for open source software. If something is open source you can't complain if someone sells it.

Obviously if the software is open source, everyone who buys a copy is allowed to sell the software themselves and they don't have to give the original author any money. They also cannot stop someone taking an older version of the code and distributing it.
> At that point, you will very rarely search for information any more. You'll still do so from time-to-time, but ultimately I think people will sit on a platform and just have content after content delivered to them. And already, the newsfeed nature of the web has started down this path. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HN - they're all feeds of information, some with primitive filtering methods.

Partly related, or maybe not, I just wanted to share a piece of advice my grand-father gave to me regarding "media manipulation". To add some context, he was a small-town mayor in an East-European communist country in the 1960s. He really believed in Communism. Anyway, he told me that I should always "read the newspapers endorsed by the Government/official establishment", this way "I'll always know what's about to really happen, or anyway, what the powers-that-be want to get happen".

Strangely enough, it was really good advice. For example I watched this in action during the current Greece debt debacle, with The Economist (an establishment magazine) advising for a haircut on the Greek debt at least one or two months earlier than their CDS spread going through the roof, and at least one year earlier than the haircut actually happening. And other examples are also easy to find.
Need Help: What is good alternative for MongoDB?
There is long discussion on mongodb issues/failures at http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=FD3xe6Jt in post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3202081.

I have bet my next product on mongodb. Now I am worried see issued mentioned by others. what are my options now ...

My DB Requirements

Need a database which can handle large load and should be able to scale as the application usage grows. It is some use cases similar to mixpanel.
Need nice query capability also which mongo db was good provided.

What do you guys think is an alternative to MongoDB ?

(a) Riak

(b) HBase

(c) Cassandra

Or I should just give-up noSQL and go back to RDBMS.
As did Cassini in 1997. The protesters have a point (although as ever overstate the problem) but there’s not much option for power that far out from the sun.
I would strongly argue that the re-merging of the Bells has slowed innovation dramatically.

To bring it closer to home a bit - I'm originally from Canada, where up until a few short years ago there was a single GSM operator in the entire country. The country as a whole, when it comes to mobile telephony, is still years behind the USA, not to mention Europe/Asia.

I remember college, when smartphones started taking off, and affordable data plans started appearing. In Canada this was completely unseen. Why? The lone carrier was making a killing charging $300+ per month for enterprise BlackBerry data plans against cash-flush companies willing to pay the price. Introduction of consumer-appropriate data pricing would've gutted that. So they didn't, and there was nothing anybody could do about it.

It took years for consumer data plans to hit the market, and by then the damage has already been done. Canada is still laughably behind the times when it comes to mobile internet use, and while the US was running away with innovative ideas like mobile music streaming, tweeting on the go, sharing pic from your phone to Facebook, Canadians were still texting each other like idiots.

So yeah, long story short, the breakup of AT&T was a good thing. The re-merging of them was bad, though apparently not bad enough to hold the industry at a complete stand-still.
It became popular because it was open source and the community built the brand recognition. Now he went and took the brand recognition to do something that the community didn't expect and doesn't approve of.
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There don't seem to be publicly visible commits after the 1.3 release, though. Compare http://growl.info/documentation/version_history.php with http://code.google.com/p/growl/source/list : the source of version 1.3.1, which includes some important-sounding bugfixes, is nowhere to be found.
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I think the nature of OpenGL's API (internal state, very simple C-style functions - contrast with DX) means it is very portable. Java also interacts nicely with it, as does C++, and I've not worked with WebGL but the very fact it exists says something about it.

OpenGL is great. Really well designed :)
That is indeed the one I'm talking about. Yes, you can see it with the naked eye if you're close enough.
> Everyone here seems to be a big fan of the "no true Scotsman."

This isn't an example of that, because nobody changed definitions partway through.
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In the home page, put "python" on the search. WTF? Is this a porno site?
> manual boxing/unboxing of primitives puts it way over the top

FWIW: https://github.com/NateStedman/FunSize/blob/master/FunSize/N...
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Will Apple open Siri to third party developers before Siri is out of "beta"? It would be nice to be able to ask Siri to do something that involves an arbitrary third-party app. Maybe apps could register to respond to certain voice "intents", similar to Android?
btw, any "fljdjf" will do it.
Orignal article's title is better. Scalaz is a library for Scala, not "Scala's Library". There's some good stuff in there but it's a completely optional third-party library.
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But even Murdoch isn't some kind of tyrant – he can't be, even if he wanted to. There is still a lot of pluralism inside of News Corp. You are, of course, correct: Concentration of media ownership is prevalent and a worrying development.
Would anyone care to comment on the state of Obj-C outside the Mac/iOS platforms? The impression I get from previous posts on this is that the utility of Obj-C is closely tied to the functionality provided by the (proprietary) Cocoa platform.

Since there are so many developers from outside the Apple ecosystem learning Obj-C in order to develop for iOS, is there any signs of a movement in the other direction? Are developers who don't think of themselves as purely Mac/iOS developers trying to take Obj-C back with them to other platforms?

Posts about how great or poor Obj-C is as a language are kind of irrelevant really as long as it's (effectively) the mandatory language for development on Apple platforms, and isn't much used beyond that. In that situation there are no choices to be made based on opinions about the language's merits or flaws, so they are largely moot.
What would you name a service that provides tutoring/ competition to kids?
I wouldn't use my True Name for serious criticism of a tool that may become popular, because I expect that to find that a career-limiting move. E.g., I think MySQL has reckless contempt for data integrity, but that doesn't mean I'd rather starve than ever be considered by a hiring manager at any MySQL shop.
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So the question is. Can you make a fork and call it "Growl" or would the "new" growl try to sue the hell out of you?
It's also important not to leave out his ability to convince people of his vision. From Jurveston:

"During this time, corporate partners came to appreciate Steve’s enthusiasm as the Reality Distortion Field. Sun Microsystems went so far as to have a policy that no contract could be agreed to while Steve was in the room. They needed to physically remove themselves from the mesmerizing magic to complete the negotiation."

He used it in negotiations, with employees, with customers, and partners. I know he certainly used it with me - I eventually had to _force_ myself never to watch a product rollout by Jobs, I was so incapable of not becoming infatuated with the next great thing he would reveal...

Outside of his RDF, I still believe, that essentially, his central accomplishment was to take technical gadgets, refine, demand, and finesse, until they came out so beautifully put together, we just had to have them.

His ability to attract and motivate great talent was probably the third prong that contributed to his success. And you are right, to suggest he was just a tweaker, is a gladwellic troll that he's posing to simplify a scenario to fit in well with his article.
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Lex and Flex both generate C (Flex has an option to output C++ instead, IIRC), yes. There are similar tools for other languages though: Java has JLex, ANTLR, etc. for example.

Re: the config file - how often does it change? Does it really need to be deferred to runtime, or is it just startup time? My (probably out-of-date) understanding of rewrite rules in apache, for example, is that you need to bounce the server for it to pick up changes; that would also be sufficient for it to pick up changes to the flex file and rebuild. Running flex and compiling the output is quick enough to be instantaneous from the point of the admin restarting a server.

If it really can change at runtime, I guess the point is to avoid downtime while updating the configuration? There are ways around this too, some more practical than others. If your servers are behind a load balancer you can do a rolling restart to pick up changes. If that's not an option it's possible, though probably not trivial, to hot-patch the native code. YMMV. :-)
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I was personally a little off-put by Go. Some things just
felt a little odd to me, after an admittedly small amount of time with the language (implemented a trivial app with it to play around).

That said, I did quite like some aspects of it: goroutines, channels, functions can be added to structs.

I am hoping that rust makes it out of the lab at some point.
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"other than the fact they just pissed off a lot of people who beleive strongly in OSS"

If they believe so strongly in OSS, they wouldn't use macintosh would they? Nope they don't want to pony up and take out their wallets.
I don't have a lot of experience in Go either (I'm writing my bot for the AI challenge in Go), but so far I've been very happy with it. What did you feel was odd?
> Bullshit. You, personally, are demonstrating the opposite with redis which is about the same age as MongoDB (~2 years).

Apparently you have no idea how many critical bugs have been fixed in Redis...
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While anecdotal evidence is always suspect, remember that the case in the article is MongoDB's optimal use case. That being of being extremely read heavy (There is no indication that they did more than one write that day).
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If you use the latest BSD released version then you're ok. The code is free for public use. Were you to make it commercial though I think you would be liable as you would need the explicit permission of the original owner to do so.

EDIT: It seems after further research the license that was being used prohibits the name "Growl" being used to promote any derivative works of the same name without explicit permission from the original owners.
[1] - http://growl.info/documentation/developer/bsd-license.txt
To get some of the concepts of computer science and most basic features of programming, see:

http://csunplugged.org/

http://scratch.mit.edu/

For application development, I'd start with an environment that actually tried to make things simpler for the programmer and showed how you can use programming to tweak a design first before programming from scratch - an IDE (see Microsoft's beginner resources http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/default.aspx ) or game development environment (like gamemaker or XNA).

See also actual curricula for high school or non-computer science students (CS0 courses), like

http://csta.acm.org/

http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/mediaComp-teach

I would not throw SICP at someone who didn't already know how to program.
Let's see. On Pg:

postgres=CREATE TABLE alter_benchmark(id bigint);

CREATE TABLE

postgres=# explain analyze

postgres-# insert into alter_benchmark (id) select * from generate_series(1, 200000000);

postgres=# create temporary table alter_benchmark(id bigint);
CREATE TABLE
postgres=# explain analyze
insert into alter_benchmark (id) select * from generate_series(1, 200000000);
QUERY PLAN

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------

Insert (cost=0.00..12.50 rows=1000 width=4) (actual time=1082180.877..1082180.
877 rows=0 loops=1)

-> Function Scan on generate_series (cost=0.00..12.50 rows=1000 width=4) (a

ctual time=87400.737..512954.539 rows=200000000 loops=1)
Total runtime: 1086336.466 ms
(3 rows)

postgres=# alter table alter_benchmark add test text;

ALTER TABLE

takes insignificant time (less than a second).

I feel so spoiled using PostgreSQL :-D

As I understand it PostgreSQL doesn't rewrite the table to change the column. It might to change the data type of a column. EXPLAIN ANALYZE doesn't work with ALTER TABLE because there is no query plan generated, so I have no idea how quickly the statement actually executed. All I know is it completed in under a second.
More info here: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/111194/runtime-error...
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I'm so waiting for your eventual "I was wrong, CoffeeScript is awesome" post. Someday TJ! Someday
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But you cannot talk to Siri like you can talk to people.

The charade breaks after a short while. And after that, if you want to know the weather, you stop saying "Siri, what's the weather like today?". Instead you order "weather". Because you learned that this is what the "AI" triggers to show you the weather.

I think the question if people want to talk to their phone is not relevant today, because we do not have the technology yet to make the phone really understand what we are saying.
> If you use the latest BSD released version then you're ok.

No, I doubt the naming falls under source release. See Firefox.
WinAmp for Mac is crap (as of today).

It cannot scan a large collection, it imported only 65 tracks every time I fired off the import. Each time taking a few minutes to do it.

That's not going to work for 85,000 files. Fidelia at least imports a couple of thousand files before crashing.
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plus you get check all those casing and how they're made for free :)
To be blunt: how much money do you make from them? Compared to what you make from US customers?
http://groups.google.com/group/growldiscuss/msg/0793d15920fa...

The 1.3 SDK also added Mist[0], which means software does not have to install Growl itself (and the user does not need Growl) to get Growl notifications.

The Growl application itself (from the AppStore) essentially becomes a "Growl Pro", offering users more (and centralized) control over notifications display.

[0] http://growl.info/documentation/developer/implementing-growl...
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How did you find out about this? I lost my hearing in one ear due to an acoustic neuroma (the operation damaged my auditory nerve). I've never heard (though, I've also never looked!) that sea salts/oils/vitamins could repair damage.

Where/how did you start your research? Any tips?
Real world uses of Quaternions?
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Is there a need of a student? Cell phones, hi tech gadgets and also a car. But these luxury items are not affordable for those.
This may be what you mean, but a common approach seems to be to create extra tables to create sort-of-implicit-schema-less-indexes, e.g.,:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=496946

A PostgreSQL-specific alternative might be to write triggers in one of the provided procedural languages to turn your JSON into something indexed or materialized elsewhere.

Do either of those work for you?

Also, purely out of curiosity, do you have a design reason for only wanting to store schema-less JSON, or have you just been burned by slow database migrations in the past?

There seems to be a big community of people who really want to reject schema and use JSON for everything, and I'm really curious if they (a) don't understand relational databases, (b) are getting some surprising productivity gains somehow, (c) have been burned by slow database migrations in the past, or (d) some other reason.
To my knowledge, the source to the 1.3.x release isn't public. I wonder whether it's a complete rewrite from scratch or whether 1.3.x still contains patches from external contributors and whether they agreed that their work be sold for money.
There is no doubt the landscape has changed, sure when Microsoft was in it's infancy software patents weren't an issue. However the market at the time was also incredibly small, and it didn't stop Apple from suing Microsoft in the ill-fated look and feel lawsuits.

While the system definitely requires reform, it is the one in place and ignoring software patents is not a worthwhile strategy. Google have been on the sour end of numerous patent lawsuits from companies that seemingly have no other agenda than software patent litigation. Meanwhile Google may be critical of microsoft/apple/oracle, but their own intellectual property is also protected from these companies. Which is probably why google has always presented an ambiguous viewpoint towards software patents, and is indeed stock piling them as well.

Google are guilty of much lip-service against software patents, seemingly using the issue to dissent against their competitors and to feign an underdog status.

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Google provides further details on Google's ambiguity towards software patents.
Maybe. Forsythe might have some claim to the trademark for "Growl", but things like the Growl Network Protocol should weaken it.

Note that the copyright on the code and the trademark on "Growl" are separate issues.
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Exactly what is the need of a student? Cell phones, hi tech gadgets and also a car. But every one of these luxury backpacks are not affordable for many.
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Me too. When oil prices go crazy in the next 10 years or so I'm convinced there's a good market for these somewhere.
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On HN? None. But I personally know people who did not care about programming until they encountered a language or teacher or project which really clicked. LPTHW seems to do that an awful lot, in fact.

I take that back, on HN, at least one, in this very thread it seems: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3205485
How hard would it be to set up a system for startups, or at least mid-sized corporation to get the same tax breaks in mass? For example, could a company handle setting up all the holding companies & bank accounts around the world and make the process more affordable by doing it for hundreds of companies at once? You could share the same mailing addresses for each of the companies and the cost of keeping up w/ all the tax laws would be amortized across a much larger group of corporations.
Your knowledge is incorrect. The 1.3.0 source is available[0], and 1.3.1 should be soon[1], they have not dumped them in the public repository is all.

> I wonder whether it's a complete rewrite from scratch or whether 1.3.x still contains patches from external contributors and whether they agreed that their work be sold for money.

I'm not sure that has any relevance. It would if Growl had changed its license (they have to agree to license changes to their contributions, unless they ceded their copyright to the project or project owner), but selling the product is independent of that. It can be seen as a dick move, but it's still independent.

[0] http://code.google.com/p/growl/source/detail?r=9831a92b05b20...

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/growldiscuss/msg/0793d15920fa...
The books look interesting. Do you manage to write them all yourself?
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As is so often the case with these sorts of posts, there are several issues being conflated here:

1. Growl authors want to ca$h in

2. Widely reported issues under Lion

3. Legitimate conjecture over rights and ethics for pmetzger's fork and whether it can be called Growl

I'd be more than happy to donate (more) to Growl, although I admit that the "suggested upgrade" made me pause. It felt like it crossed that slim line between a premium version and bait-and-switch that is hard to argue either way. It's certainly not strange that people are responding to the fact that this was just dropped on the existing userbase. That pmetzger is getting C+Ds (has this been confirmed) makes me really uncomfortable — it's not in the spirit of OSS as I understand it in my gut.

Ultimately, I don't think people will have a problem with paying, and certainly not such a small amount. It's more the way that it's been thrust upon us that feels slightly off. Am I right?

Of course, we haven't heard their side of the story yet. I urge you all to wait before you cast aspersions on them, because they've worked hard on something many of us have used for years.