jballanc

82 ms·

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by jballanc 14y ago
iOS, and most of the stuff that comes out of Apple other than the hardware, does not have a single designer. This is one of the greatest myths that Jobs promulgated. He did not hand down directives from on high. Quite the opposite. He waite
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by jballanc 14y ago
I wonder why you think that? I suspect it might be related to the focus on "consumer-centric" (as opposed to geek-centric) features. That is one interesting side-effect of the bazaar model: it's great at building what the majority want. I
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by jballanc 14y ago
First: Have you ever looked at a plot of people for/against mariage rights for gays vs age? I suspect that the clear divergence does exist, but may not mean what you think it means... Second: I worked on OS X. In fact, I worked on Snow Leop
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by jballanc 14y ago
Except that evolution did put a man on the moon...unless you are one of those who don't believe humans are the result of 3 billion years of evolution? What you have to consider is that individual cells evolved, until they created a whole
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by jballanc 14y ago
Reminds me of "the most famous understatement in history" from the original Watson & Crick paper: > It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying
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by jballanc 14y ago
Right, I think where people have to get over themselves is that teaching something is often very different from using something. When I was being trained as a chemist, I was started with techniques that were over 150 years old, and that
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by jballanc 14y ago
Before I learned Ruby, I knew C, Obj-C, C++, Java...all languages that have and use "for" extensively. Coming to Ruby and learning "each" was an eye opening experience for me. Suddenly, the whole notion of iterators become clear to me. (Whi
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by jballanc 14y ago
Well, Ed is the standard text editor... (for those not in the know -- http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html )
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by jballanc 14y ago
True (my own company uses Github private repos for most of our work), but what's nice about that is that the barrier to transitioning a useful internal library into a reputation bolstering Open Source library is nearly zero.
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by jballanc 14y ago
Off topic indeed, but this year's Eurovision singer from Turkey was Jewish ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_Bonomo ). Not to say there isn't anti-semitism, but I think it is much less in Turkey than you might think.
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by jballanc 14y ago
Heh...you really do need to visit Turkey. Turkcell didn't advertise that they were giving everyone unlimited texts. There was no article in the national paper about Turkcell giving unlimited texts. They did it because it was proper, and hos
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by jballanc 14y ago
Well, you're wrong about one thing: that's not just small businesses in Turkey. Even very large chain stores have the same level of hospitality. And it's not just stores. As an example, tomorrow is the start of Şeker Bayramı (literally tran
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by jballanc 14y ago
One thing that occurred to me only after leaving the US: only in America can you consider yourself "educated" or "well cultured" and yet have never been to a place where the people did not speak your language! Isolationism has always been t
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by jballanc 14y ago
Without knowing the details of the statistics, I wonder if the disconnect between perception and statistics has to do with population distribution? I've lived in the suburbs of the US, as well as right in Manhattan. In the suburbs, many nig
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by jballanc 14y ago
This. I've found that business in America have a tendency to try and monetize the entirety of every business transaction. For example, I used to work at Circuit City, and if you came in to buy a TV you'd be amazed how quickly the salesperso
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by jballanc 14y ago
The article focuses on the same things have been hammered on for a while now (other countries do health care better, other countries do education better, other countries do education better...), but I think there's another reason to get out
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by jballanc 14y ago
Another really great resource. It's really encouraging to see the nascent community that's grown up around RubyMotion!
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Get Started Writing iOS Apps With RubyMotion(mobile.smashingmagazine.com)
41 points by jballanc 14y ago|15 comments
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by jballanc 14y ago
I vaguely recall somewhere that Matz commented about how he felt that he was a good language designer, but not necessarily a good language implementor. I've always felt that MRI should be treated as a reference implementation, and the fact
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by jballanc 14y ago
So regexp is easy: the Lua authors assert that their irregular-regular expressions (match library) cover the 80% use case for regular expressions while maintaining excellent performance and avoiding the hell that regexps can all too easily
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by jballanc 14y ago
> If an unlimited use license is $10, it's not worth the patent owner's time to write a letter asking for the license fee. I guess that's kind of the point. Patents only inhibit innovation when they can be used as a cudgel to force inve
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by jballanc 14y ago
Point taken... "equal or better" in every possible way. :-)
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by jballanc 14y ago
Lua is a better language than Javascript in every possible way. I have half-a-mind to hack LuaJIT into Webkit, but I'm afraid that it may be futile at this point. The biggest shame in all of web development is the "type" attribute on the HT
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by jballanc 14y ago
I guess I should clarify: there are different sorts of licenses. Some are per device or product sold. I was referring to an unlimited use license. The idea being (with the formula) that if your idea is good enough that every one of your com
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by jballanc 14y ago
NaCl is a side-long step in the right direction, but it gets almost as much wrong as it gets right: * You have to know what platform you're targeting (ARM vs. x86), which eliminates the browser/JS advantage of architecture abstraction * You
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by jballanc 14y ago
Well, I think my system would actively incentivize the reduction in the number of patents. Fewer patents would lead to higher licensing fee per patent, so you'd have an incentive to only patent the stuff that really matters (since every pat
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by jballanc 14y ago
Browsers do implement Javascript using a bytecode based VM - https://github.com/WebKit/webkit/tree/master/Source/JavaScri... It just isn't standardized, or made available to website authors directly (there would likely need to be signific
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by jballanc 14y ago
Browsers don't need a programming language. Browsers need a standardized bytecode. The problem is, bytecode can have a significant impact on potential performance. So, as long as browsers are still competing on JS performance, they are acti
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by jballanc 14y ago
Not sure if the irony here was intentional but... > But there is no way in hell you can convince me that it’s beneficial for society to not share ideas. See, this is what's broken with the patent system. Originally, patents were suppose
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by jballanc 14y ago
Anyone want to place bets on the nationality of the next human to set foot on the moon?

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