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Apple introduces macOS Mojave

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Re: Apple introduces macOS Mojave

#331

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And OpenCL too. This is terrible. I was thinking about adding GPU support to a numerical simulator I am working on, and I was planning to have nice cross-platform support with OpenCL. Whelp, that's no longer the case. My code is in C++, and I refuse to use proprietary, vendor-locked, Objective-C-only Metal. If people want GPU support, they'll just have to use Linux, which doesn't artificially constrain you with corpo…

The deprecation of OpenCL is especially crappy given how heavily Apple were pushing OpenCL back in 2014 or so with the Mac Pros.

Apple lost interest in OpenCL after learning Khronos wasn't steering it into the direction they wanted it to go.

For example, Metal compute shaders are C++14 and Khronos only adopted C++ in OpenCL after the beating they took from CUDA, which supported it since the beginning.

Re: Apple introduces macOS Mojave

#332
post #310

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I guess we will be saying our last goodbye to “write once, run on all major platforms” graphics code. Does this mean that the only choices now are 1. Fork your graphics code into two separate implementations or 2. Go up the stack and use a cross-platform “game” engine like Unity? I suppose 3. Stop supporting macOS is another (sad) option.

> “write once, run on all major platforms” graphics code. This was never true for game consoles, regardless of urban myths regarding OpenGL support.

Fine. All major desktop, laptop, and mobile platforms not including game consoles. Still, more portable than any other existing alternative.

Re: Apple introduces macOS Mojave

#333
post #213

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"Whole new way" is a bit hyperbolic, but an emoji definitely brings layers of meaning that are normally only feasible in in-person conversation into the written realm. It would be pretty hard to express the sentiment the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ emoji can, and even if you put the effort into writing it, you'd lose the immediacy. It's also interesting how they work as reactions. If you hit "like" on something, for instance, you don'…

> It would be pretty hard to express the sentiment the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That's what acronyms were used for. Back in the day of AIM/ICQ I never felt I had issues expressing myself with just text. It was text supplemented with a healthy dose of emoticons and acronyms, which leads me to believe that emoji are redundant

Emoticons are severely limited in their range of expressivity. It’s hard to do much more than :) :( and :/. Acronyms are limited in both range of expressivity and audience size. Acronyms require prior agreement on what they mean, so there’s a barrier to their basic use and another barrier separating people that don’t know what they stand for. This severely limits your audience size and the number of acronyms you can use.

What’s really interesting about emojis is that they can transcend even hard language barriers. An emoji used by an exclusive Japanese-speaker can be understood by an exclusive English-speaker. The range in expressivity for emojis obviously isn’t as great as a full language, but it’s surprisingly large and can grow without cognitive costs to users (unlike acronyms). Unlike acronyms, the audience size is effectively universal. So I 100% disagree with your claim that emojis are redundant.

Re: Apple introduces macOS Mojave

#334
post #6

I'm continually amazed at how much Apple hypes up the most pointless, useless, basic things. This is a new version of a major operating system, and we get... the desktop organized by filetype. A built-in stock application. How is an App Store update considered part of an OS update?

The keynote is for the masses, who mainly notice things like changes in color schemes.

The WWDC technical sessions are about the changes that really matter.

Re: Apple introduces macOS Mojave

#335
post #85

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Night Shift (and perhaps Dark Mode as well) work to decrease the amount of light towards the blue end of the spectrum as in the evening to mimic the natural spectrum shift and help people sleep, rather than mimic bright mid-day light. It's not to reduce eye fatigue and get people to work more: it's to help them relax and sleep better at night. Here's an article that discusses it in a bit more depth. http://www.busine…

No ones forcing you to use it.

No one is forcing you to breathe, and yet you do it anyways

Re: Apple introduces macOS Mojave

#336
post #60

But... where are the new macs?

September now. It also means the MacBooks will likely be shipping with a new keyboard, Coffee Lake and we will see 6 core/32GB variant for the 15inch.

Hopefully, a keyboard that actually works, this time!

I have no idea why even after the class action no one talks about how embarrassingly flawed their thin keyboards are.

Mine (EUR 1799 laptop) broke after 2 months, was fixed by Apple, then broke again. People I talked to experienced similar problems, with missing keystrokes, double letters, etc.

Re: Apple introduces macOS Mojave

#337
post #300

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When Metal was introduced for the Mac they had the Modo devs at WWDC and they ported their code to Metal in like a week or two. Not really the apocalypse.

Wat. Metal and OpenGL two completely different APIs, shading languages and probably a whole host of other things. I've ported my fair share of things from fixed-function to programmable shader pipelines and you'd be effing naive if you think you can do that in a couple weeks on anything more than a toy demo.

I worked with a AAA gamedev recently who had written a Vulkan renderer for their game to demo quality level in 2 weeks. It all depends on existing level of abstraction for the rendering API and shading language (and to some extent assets), and how much performance and efficiency you’re happy leaving on the table.

Re: Apple introduces macOS Mojave

#338
post #78

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Great! Go and found a company that makes 10 bn USD a quarter in profit.

Well that's a pretty inane reaction. Next time I see a bad movie should I just keep my mouth shut and make my own movie?

A more apt comparison would read: You watch a mediocre preview of a new movie from a company that has made the most successful movies ever and continuous to do so. They're doing something right. Instead of complaining, maybe, just maybe, we should consider whether we're the ones misjudging reality.

Re: Apple introduces macOS Mojave

#339
post #219

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Good riddance. OpenGL has been an awful API for many years now. The drivers are way too complicated, and applications don’t have enough control to deliver smooth performance. All OpenGL does now is let you kind of mediocrily put things on the screen.

What do you think about them forcing you to use Swift or Objective-C for this? Forcing you to use languages that use ref counting and object oriented pointer tables that are traversed at runtime? How much of the gains does objc_msgSend eat up? I though you are against such things? How ugly would the JAI code to need to be to interface with this? I wish they had a simple Metal C API, but their new API comes with a bun…

I think it is about time industry relevant OS vendors start to move away from C, kudos to Apple.

Re: Apple introduces macOS Mojave

#340

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The lack of a desktop client is the main reason I don't use Apple News. If I were Feedly or any other RSS reader I'd be scared right now. Granted, what Apple News could really benefit from would be an option to log in and read from my sources through a web browser. It would be nice if I could check up on things from, for instance, a public library.

Absolutely. A unified subscription model would be a boon to readers. It's proven complicated to implement due to no standard among publishers for handling subscriptions. Outside of the more innovative companies, it seems a bit ad hoc as new technologies rise, appreciate into maturity, settle into mediocrity (where they are adopted), and fall (while they're increasingly difficult to maintain until the next third state…

I'm not sure we even need something that elaborate honestly. I was imagining just a straight up RSS reader.

It doesn't seem like we need to invent anything new here, just make a version of RSS that can natively serve rich multimedia content and be gated behind a subscription.

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