蛮有趣的一篇文章，我也赞成作者很多有价值的观点。如果你还没有用过Mac OS或者苹果其他的产品，不管你是不是程序员，我强烈建议你拥有一个，你不会失望的。我还没有上网本，我想我的第一个会是iPad。

原文：http://tiny4.org/blog/2010/02/why-programmers-should-use-mac-os-x/

查尔斯·狄更斯老师的《双城记》里有句非常著名的话，我每次看到都心潮澎湃，所以看了无数次《双城记》总是在那两句话前后打转。心说，开头就这么好，正文无论如何也无法让你觉得精彩了吧？

原文是，“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. ”

译做：“那是最美好的时代，那是最糟糕的时代；那是智慧的年头，那是愚昧的年头；那是信仰的时期，那是怀疑的时期；那是光明的季节，那是黑暗的季节；那是希望的春天，那是失望的冬天；我们拥有一切，我们一无所有;我们全都在直奔天堂，我们全都在直奔相反的方向–简而言之，那时跟现在非常相象，某些最喧嚣的权威坚持要用形容词的最高级来形容它。说它好，是最高级的；说它不好，也是最高级的。”

我认为对于程序员来说，我们正在经历最美好的时代，当然也是最糟糕的时代。

美好的原因在于，这是一个充满机会的年代，近十年每次我们以为世界一切尘埃落定的时候，就会出现新的惊喜。如youtube、facebook、 twitter等等，甚至包括了iPhone以及即将上市的iPad。世界上无数聪明和勤奋的人们正在努力，告诉我们一切还早，我们还活在一个迅速发展着的世界。只要世界还在迅速发展，谁知道你会不会就是下一个twitter、下一个iPhone的发明者？甚至是下一个马化腾，虽然现在腾讯如日中天，但是如果时间倒流到99年，甚至01年，大多数心中可能还是会觉得那只是个玩物吧？

» Read more: “每个程序员都应该用Mac OS X”

一个我个人认为非常重要的新的协议，由Google的两位员工开发，相信很快会普及到大部分的Web2.0站点和BSP。

A simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS.

Parties (servers) speaking the PubSubHubbub protocol can get near-instant notifications (via webhook callbacks) when a topic (feed URL) they’re interested in is updated.

The protocol in a nutshell is as follows:

• An feed URL (a “topic”) declares its Hub server(s) in its Atom or RSS XML file, via <link rel="hub" ...>. The hub(s) can be run by the publisher of the feed, or can be a community hub that anybody can use. (Atom and RssFeeds are supported)

• A subscriber (a server that’s interested in a topic), initially fetches the Atom URL as normal. If the Atom file declares its hubs, the subscriber can then avoid lame, repeated polling of the URL and can instead register with the feed’s hub(s) and subscribe to updates.

• The subscriber subscribes to the Topic URL from the Topic URL’s declared Hub(s).

• When the Publisher next updates the Topic URL, the publisher software pings the Hub(s) saying that there’s an update.

• The hub efficiently fetches the published feed and multicasts the new/changed content out to all registered subscribers.

The protocol is decentralized and free. No company is at the center of this controlling it. Anybody can run a hub, or anybody can ping (publish) or subscribe using open hubs.

To bootstrap this, we’ve provided an open source reference implementation of the hub (the hard part of the protocol) that runs on Google App Engine, and is open for anybody to use.

Official Site: http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/

Google Gears是为浏览器开发的新型插件，使得网页应用可以离线使用，比如离线使用Gmail，存取其中的邮件。但是Google已经下定决心跟 Google Gears 说永别了。

Google为什么抛弃Gears？并不是说Google Gears不够流行不够强大，而是浏览器已经可以通过HTML5这个新的标准来支持Google Gears能做到的那些事情，而且可以让浏览器保持简洁性。Google已经在最近的Chrome版本里添加了对Database API的支持（它类似Gears的数据库API），对本地和共享workers的支持（类似于Gears里交叉worker的概念），对本地存储API和Web Sockets API的支持。而未来新版本的Chrome浏览器里也会有类似LocalServer API和Geolocation地理信息等类似API的支持。

由于现在还没有太简单的方法将之前的Gears应用移植到HTML5应用，所以Google还是会继续支持Gears直到大家差不多都将Gears应用部署成HTML5应用为止，但是Gears不会再有新的功能了，特别重要的是，Google不会支持Gears在Mac OS X Snow Leopard和后续操作系统里在Safari浏览器里的使用，对Firefox和IE的支持则会继续，包括马上到来的Firefox 3.6。

Via Google Code Blog and ZDNet Blog