Pretty sure that if our Washington politicos can't reach a deal by 12/31, whatever tax law IS set in 2013 will apply to the entire calendar year. As that will likely mean a significant tax decrease from the current law (under which the “temporary” Bush tax cuts expire), you won't find many people sympathizing with your complaint.
Now if you want some sympathy, go with the fact that our state legislature refused to fund essential services, services that the populace wants and needs, due to a minority that blocked balanced budgets again and again. Which led to (a) Prop 30, and (b) the electorate cutting the Republican nihilists off at the knees.
Now that we have a respite, let's get the amendment process going so that we no longer need the 2/3 vote in the legislature to pay for what a clear majority of citizens want.
And if the people whose incomes have benefitted the most from doing business here would rather set up their entrepreneurial shops in Mississippi or some state that has lower educational commitments (but low taxes!), they just proved that they weren't smart enough to have actually earned that high income, anyway, and just got lucky. Let 'em go. Better yet, encourage them to move to Texas and secede so that they won't have to worry about all the immigrants here, too.
“We’re obviously in the middle of two awkward transitions: toward all-Retina screens…”
Maybe you didn't read the same review I saw. In what I read, he chose the right resolution for different uses, his unique choice out of many potentials. Yes, I'd rather that apps for Macs be written to be apps for ALL Macs. But life has a way of sorting that out.
I've had a Mac since the original 64KB model. I remember the FIRST PARAGRAPH of the programmer's manual listing it as a single-user, single-task OS.
Third-party devs led the way, first with installable drivers that munged keyboard, disk, ... and an amazing task-switcher. But those became the bad old days of Macs: OS9 was falling apart due to overload. At huge expense -- Apple almost died from not tackling the issue well -- OSX started with a clean slate. Apple finally took control of the feature set that users wanted: pre-emptive multitasking, multi users, control of various daemons, etc.
Over time, that, too, got overlaid with all sorts of cruft. My upgrade this spring to a new MBP caused me a day's worth of debugging after I migrated files: some long-forgotten and actually no-longer-used third-party system extension conflicted with another module on the new hardware. Over a day's worth of debugging and cleanup, including an hour's worth of tech support (fortunately bundled with the hardware). Cost (very roughly) a thousand dollars.
So I think it's a bit disingenuous to advocate all these "neat" iOS hacks without acknowledging the possibly of really badly busting iOS, even for expert users, and "it just works" -- already a bit tenuous -- with it. Especially stuff running in non-user space can cause issues far-removed from the source of trouble. And unexpected software can either cause bugs or expose OS bugs that were otherwise benign or devs had worked around. A program that was tested only with Apple keyboard features can suddenly fail to work, tarnishing the app developer AND the platform. And like my incident, resolution can be very difficult and expensive for all concerned.
As my history indicates, I've been a big fan of hacks. But I already have seen enough issues with "good" apps such as the NYT crashing, or calendar entries failing to synch, that if I were still a developer, I would NOT want the added burden/expense of the sort of unstable OS that hacks have caused Apple in the past. Especially given the rather modest rewards for so many developers.
I have found this thread blissfully flamewar free regards business motivations. That said, I think this first mention of business issues is both overdue and needing expansion.
How can one look at the deprecation of a particular runtime in isolation from (a) Apple's simultaneous announcement of increasing commonality of iOS and OSX, and (b) Oracle's aggressive enforcement of comm-related java libraries?
Since Apple sells and approves all app-store products, they bear plausible liability for an iOS app, if Oracle was lawsuit-minded. I would hardly be surprised to learn that Oracle will NOT sue Apple over runtimes that could trip up Google, thanks to Apple's agreement to remove possibly-offending code.
Or, alternatively, if you have an iOS app that wants to do comm in java, how could Apple field an alternative library to one that Oracle claims is theirs?
This makes Apple-supplied java runtimes a dead end. We'll see how interested Oracle is in licensing alternatives.
Pretty sure that if our Washington politicos can't reach a deal by 12/31, whatever tax law IS set in 2013 will apply to the entire calendar year. As that will likely mean a significant tax decrease from the current law (under which the “temporary” Bush tax cuts expire), you won't find many people sympathizing with your complaint.
Now if you want some sympathy, go with the fact that our state legislature refused to fund essential services, services that the populace wants and needs, due to a minority that blocked balanced budgets again and again. Which led to (a) Prop 30, and (b) the electorate cutting the Republican nihilists off at the knees.
Now that we have a respite, let's get the amendment process going so that we no longer need the 2/3 vote in the legislature to pay for what a clear majority of citizens want.
And if the people whose incomes have benefitted the most from doing business here would rather set up their entrepreneurial shops in Mississippi or some state that has lower educational commitments (but low taxes!), they just proved that they weren't smart enough to have actually earned that high income, anyway, and just got lucky. Let 'em go. Better yet, encourage them to move to Texas and secede so that they won't have to worry about all the immigrants here, too.