jballanc

95 ms·

811.
by jballanc 14y ago
I can't say you're wrong. I only wonder what it would take to change that...
812.
by jballanc 14y ago
I think the outcome of this experiment very much depends on the attitude that parents and students take into it. If they passively accept the technology, don't ask questions, and don't push for more access, more technology, then the project
813.
by jballanc 14y ago
AOL is making probably the biggest concerted push at the moment with its Patch platform. It's an interesting idea, but probably still to soon to say how everything will turn out...
814.
by jballanc 14y ago
As an American citizen living in Turkey, I agree that this effort is a bit cart-before-the-horse. That said, I think that Turkey is in an interesting place right now. Maybe the way they are introducing technology into the classroom is wro
815.
by jballanc 14y ago
Right. You're the product. In this case, you are the marketing product. It's not always bad to be the product. Cows eat for free, right? Just a good thing to keep in mind.
816.
by jballanc 14y ago
If you're not paying, you're the product.
817.
by jballanc 14y ago
Except RubyMotion isn't an intermediary framework. It's implemented directly on the Obj-C runtime.
818.
by jballanc 14y ago
I can't help but feel that the author could've saved himself the time and effort and just posted a link to the Wikipedia page for the "Tragedy of the Commons" instead. Here, I'll help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
819.
by jballanc 15y ago
But what if I want to have my animations in one object, and my elements to animate in another? Yes, you can have an Obj-C method return a block, but you're going to have to do some nasty casting if you want to be able to call those blocks w
820.
by jballanc 15y ago
What you have to keep in mind is that RubyMotion is not "just another wrapper". It is actually implemented on top of the Obj-C runtime . So that means Apple would have to make breaking changes to the runtime (the thing documented here: ht
821.
by jballanc 15y ago
In RubyMotion, you can do something like: def animate(*args) UIView.begin_animation yield(*args) UIView.commit_animation end animate(myButton, &buttonAnimateBlockFromSomewhereElse) animate(myView, my
822.
by jballanc 15y ago
Be sure not to miss all the sample code: https://github.com/HipByte/RubyMotionSamples In particular, for those looking for a side-by-side comparison of what it means to use Ruby instead of Obj-C, be sure to check out the GestureTable samp
823.
by jballanc 15y ago
Ruby has "yield" which, while possible to replicate in Obj-C, it's not nearly as nice. Also, Ruby can yield arguments, and the block being yielded to is free to ignore those arguments. That's the sort of flexibility that can make Ruby so mu
824.
by jballanc 15y ago
I'll simply point you at Laurent's email to the MacRuby-devel mailing list about a month ago. I think re-reading it in light of today's announcement could be...informative ;-) http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/2012-Apr...
825.
by jballanc 15y ago
I think you'll find the difference between working with Cocoa APIs in Obj-C vs Ruby is that it's much easier in Ruby to turn what you've learned into a simple, boiled-down, easier to digest set of helper methods/objects/modules. For example
826.
by jballanc 15y ago
Objective-C's heritage as a strict superset of C means that it's great for doing high-level stuff while still keeping your hands in the low-level (necessary when performance becomes a main concern). Objective-C's heritage as a strict supers
827.
by jballanc 15y ago
The difference is that, as far as I can see, mobiruby is a Ruby interpreter/VM embedded in an Obj-C application. This is in contrast to MacRuby which is implemented directly on top of the Obj-C runtime. So, MobiRuby still has to go through
828.
by jballanc 15y ago
On the upside, CocoaPods support is integrated with RubyMotion. Sure, there is a whole world of useful Ruby gems, but, generally speaking, the libraries you'll find in CocoaPods have been developed specifically for iOS.
829.
by jballanc 15y ago
This is actually a good summary, but it's missing the reason for the DragonFlyBSD fork: light-weight kernel threads. But yes, they've been doing a lot of work around clustering and performance in general.
830.
by jballanc 15y ago
After having worked with Ruby 1.8 (no unicode support in String) and Ruby 1.9 (added unicode) rather extensively, as well as C/Obj-C and a variety of other languages with varying ideas on Unicode support, I am of the opinion that Lua has th
831.
by jballanc 15y ago
There's a page on the Lua users wiki that neatly summarizes the various arguments: http://lua-users.org/wiki/LocalByDefault Essentially, instead of asking "why global by default", you should have to explain "why local by default is a good
832.
by jballanc 15y ago
> This isn't bigotry. This is just the way things are. Indeed, I don't think this situation is all that different from Medicine or Biology. Parts of anatomy, diseases, and taxonomic classifications will forever be known by their Latin n
833.
by jballanc 15y ago
The mathematics of economies falls in the field of evolutionary dynamics. This is a relatively young field, having its origins in the 1960-1970 time frame, and much of the fundamental principles are still being worked out. For one thing, e
834.
by jballanc 15y ago
I don't buy it. When I had a C64, I had a number of games on a floppy. The floppy got lost. The games were gone. With the App store, I buy an app on my iPhone and it magically appears on my iPad. If I loose either device (or, heaven forbid,
835.
by jballanc 15y ago
What are you talking about? I never had any problem booting an Old World Mac with unsigned code. I've installed NetBSD on a number of PowerMac 7100s.
836.
by jballanc 15y ago
I'm curious how you figure sandboxing reduces a user's freedom?
837.
by jballanc 15y ago
What is it about the "geek" mindset that makes one jump to the conclusion that this is part of a vast conspiracy, some cabal of OS vendors, to lock out hackers and prevent anyone from modifying their own machine? Isn't the simpler explanati
838.
by jballanc 15y ago
It's very interesting to read your second paragraph and then follow it up by reading about Hungry Academy: http://hungryacademy.com/ Essentially, Living Social has done just this. They decided that the talent pool was thin, and the usual
839.
by jballanc 15y ago
Well, are you assuming that no one applying for the McDonald's job has a degree? I think the situation has probably gotten to the point that there are so many "useless" degrees on the market, that it no longer even makes sense to talk about
840.
by jballanc 15y ago
Even more so than free healthcare, the one thing that separates the US from the "rest of the world" is the availability of free higher education. Of course, the caveat is that most of the rest of the world is far more restrictive of who m

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