hydromet

>the company is literally re-writing all of its code > Wow.

Good to know they are "literally" re-writing code instead of "figuratively". Why is the adverb "literally" overused so often?

With crap and hassle like this in the year 2017 for something as "simple" as a web browser, be sure to remind your boss Ray Kurzweil at Google, "the singularity is near" ROFLOL

The 2017 iPad Pro compares favorably on some benchmarks with 2017 13" Dual-Core i7 MacBook Pro.

MacBook hard drives can be removed and replaced.

This is not entirely true. The flash drive on the 2015 and 2016 Retina MacBooks are "soldered to the logic board" according to iFixit [1], [2]. What happens to the soldered-in flash drives if a logic board from one of these MacBooks fails and is swapped out by Apple under, say, AppleCare? is it desoldered and removed from the logic board, or does the entire MacBook logic board get shredded in one fell swoop?

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Retina+Macbook+2015+Teardown...

[2] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Retina+MacBook+2016+Teardown...

nobody is going to let you write a critical system in some new relatively unknown language.

Whose permission do you seek who will "let you" or not "let you" write a critical system in some new relatively unknown language? What if you work for yourself or are creating a startup?

I recently invested in learning Clojure, enough to get some practical things deployed, but I am far from being a Clojure advanced developer. I wanted to learn a Lisp dialect and am glad I chose Clojure. Rich Hickey is a guru. I don't have any gripes with Clojure but I'm not too deeply invested. Several years ago I was also enamored with Julia, which I was investigating for CPU intensive programs, but never had the time to commit and I was concerned about Julia being too youthful and possibly not getting enough traction. Should I learn D for CPU intensive programs? Also, with Clojure I can make use of the many Java libraries for I/O due to Clojure's good Java interop. Does D have the analogous benefit of tried and tested I/O libraries? Thanks for any suggestions, D has me intrigued.

I recently (past few years) invested in learning Clojure, enough to get some practical things deployed, but I am far from being a Clojure advanced developer. I wanted to learn a Lisp dialect and am glad I chose Clojure. Rich Hickey is a guru. I don't have any gripes with Clojure but I'm not too deeply invested. Several years ago I was also enamored with Julia, which I was investigating for CPU intensive programs, but never had the time to commit and I was concerned about Julia being too youthful and possibly not getting enough traction. Should I learn D for CPU intensive programs? Also, with Clojure I can make use of the many Java libraries for I/O due to Clojure's good Java interop. Does D have the analogous benefit of tried and tested I/O libraries? Thanks for any suggestions, D has my intrigued.

Yeah. Apple announced today they've sold 1 billion iPhones: http://www.macrumors.com/2016/07/27/apple-has-sold-1-billion...

How fascinating considering Facebook sends emails to those who have resigned from Facebook, playing and preying on people's emotions with marketing messages the likes of, "you may have more friends than you realize awaiting you on Facebook", implying more is merrier and inducing the emotion of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). Hmm, this is Zuckerberg's way of profiting off of people's emotions eh?

And just think ... Uber and (mostly Silicon Valley) companies like it thought all along how easy it would be for "software to eat the world" and thus merely "disrupt" the establishment, "disrupt" the old school, "disrupt" and "democratize", "disrupt" the 1%'ers / elite power structures which pull the puppet strings of the state and federal regulators. Meritocracy eh?

This will effectively counter IBM/Apple's Swift strategy with iOS devices for the enterprise.

In a similar vein, Satya Nadella's new "vision" expressed in yesterday's keynote, aka the future of chat bots with their AI / personal agents (channeling some of the original General Magic vision of 25 years ago), strikes me as more attainable for "developers developers developers" v.s. the marketing messages / PR spin coming from IBM on the Watson AI.

I'm learning React Native, MS is giving me pause to look at Xamarin.

Likewise. Let's see what Facebook has to say at F8 starting April 12th. The competition is great. We are in a much better place today v.s. 20 years ago when Microsoft was a monopoly and expending time and money trying to kill Netscape and battle Sun's lawyers over Java.

Agreed. This is an astute observation.

The open source advocates (Scott Hanselman, Scott Guthrie, Damien Edwards, and many others) won the internal struggle.

This is truly an amazing feat. Imagine the cultural headwinds these guys were up against. They also won over the Microsoft Board of Directors to eject Steve Ballmer (finally). Hats off to Scott, Scott, Damien et al for staying the course and pulling off a coup.

Even react-native isn't ready yet if you're a windows based shop.

Don't forget, Facebook's annual developer conference F8 is coming up next (April 12th 2016). They will surely have some new announcements in a few weeks.

- Having an open source alternative like this will be a blow to Phonegap's/Apache Cordova's use for new apps.

Really? Do you think Zuckerberg is now shaking in his boots thinking Facebook will have to pull out of React Native?

- Let's not forget Microsoft now owns RoboVM. I wonder what this event implies for it.

Thank you for noting this. It is potentially interesting to Clojurians since Clojure targets the JVM (would be cool if Clojure could be used for cross platform native app development with RoboVM, as an alternative to a convoluted mess of trying to use ClojureScript with React Native).

This is a personal, spare-time project ...

I very much admire and appreciate the work you've done bootstrapping Abot in your spare time. Now that Microsoft is in the game, my concern is we will see a "tower of babel" type of situation develop for bots emanating from the corporate behemoths (i.e., here come the Facebook bots, Google bots, Amazon of course, and Apple might play catch up too at WWDC). I much prefer grass roots growing from open source projects like Abot so as to no be locked in (financially, legally, cognitively) to one platform run by a large corporation seeking world domination.

Forensics specialist Jonathan Zdziarski wrote an interesting post recently titled "Free Software Always Costs Something" it is a good read -> http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=5948

Perhaps Abot would benefit from having its own Foundation similar to the likes of, say, the Apache Software Foundation https://www.apache.org/ ... "The Apache Software Foundation provides support for the Apache Community of open-source software projects, which provide software products for the public good."

As Satya Nadella commented in this recent Bloomberg interview http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-microsoft-future-ai-c... how app stores and Facebook remind him of the walled gardens of 25 years ago (e.g., AOL and CompuServe), its what he didn't say (intentionally omitted?) in this interview which strikes me as more interesting. The rise of chat bots and Nadella's views about them remind me somewhat of the vision General Magic had precisely 25 years ago with their forward thinking ideas about personal digital agents and Telescript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic ... if Nadella has indeed channeled some of the old ideas of 25 years ago and chat bots are to become the next big thing (Nadella thinks chat bots could be as big or bigger than the Internet itself, and the next logical step after app stores), and if indeed its time to break down walled gardens, then it would probably be very important for an implementation of chat bots to be a part of the global commons and available to all of humanity. Abot to the rescue?

If Microsoft ever decided to pull support, nobody would be left unable to run their software. These are the same Ubuntu binaries that run on Linux, and anyone could move over to that if they wanted to.

That's a good point. Its all about having real options (freedom to move) and minimal switching costs. That said, I'm still concerned about a possible Trojan Horse scenario here whereby Linux on Windows is the hook to try and get people into the proprietary Windows dev tools (Visual Studio etc.) and checked into the Azure "roach motel" cloud (easy to check into, hard to check out).

Big companies like Microsoft aren't monocultures. They have some really amazing people, even if not everyone is perfectly enlightened.

Microsoft most definitely has some amazing and talented people, but I disagree with you about culture: the culture of any company is undoubtedly set from the top down (the founders or directors). Please do not be so naive to think Satya Nadella does not set the culture at Microsoft, (hierarchical in nature). This isn't to say there may not be some fiefdoms within a company as large as Microsoft, but there is an overarching culture and it comes from the top.

Many of us don't just use one computer.

This is probably true for some, but some people might only be able to afford one computer. One scenario I can see which might be appealing to a developer, as of this announcement yesterday, is using a MacBook with Apple's Boot Camp to partition the internal drive such that one could have as many options as possible (OS X on one partition, and Windows 10 with Linux on the other).

GNU won against all odds. It's here to stay, proliferating across so many devices. I'm happy to welcome people who might not have ventured outside Windows into the family!

It would be really cool to hear what RMS (Richard Stallman) thinks about this. I wonder if he's be up for an AMA on Reddit to address this seemingly earth shaking announcement by MSFT?

Microsoft during their monopolic era was much more beyond that, they were going for all.

Yes, absolutely. Bill Gates was not a "nice" man. These days many people fawn over him "oh he's so lovey dovey, he's going to save the world with all his money as a philanthropist". LOL -- how many have actually sat at the same table (behind closed doors) with Billy boy pounding the table telling everyone attending (ISPs, major telecoms) how Microsoft was going to run the show, run the world. Microsoft is a ruthless company. Satya Nadella was part of this ruthless culture when he first joined MSFT 25 years ago. Why would the ruthless culture of Microsoft suddenly change because they've figured out how to peg Ubuntu Linux to the kernel? Ever hear of a Trojan Horse? This announcement today sure smells like horse manure.

Yes partycoder, it sure would be interesting to hear what "neckbeard" RMS has to say about this move by Microsoft today, would it not?

"Resistance Is Futile"

Perception is important as always: being perceived as "open source" is now vogue and seems to be more of a marketing function for large corporate behemoths (most mere mortals have no idea what a "pull request" is but the term "open source" seems to have become more mainstream in recent years).

Wow, amazing world progress, "hello world" has finally been deprecated in favor of YAPOD (yet another pizza ordering demo). Quick, someone ping Ray Kurzweil to alert him of the rise of pizza ordering chat bots comprised of hidden Markov models, for the Singularity is surely near ;-)

This makes sense. The tight knit NeXT community used the "app" meme regularly staring at least in 1990 if not sooner.

Its almost certainly a reaction to IBM which has been cackling about how everything is "cognitive" in their marketing of Watson.