The point is not that the connector is cheap, an extra piece, ...

Imagine you board the plane, you forgot your earbuds or worse, lost your expensive headphones. It happened to me, just as a flight attendant to give you those cheap ones they have and quality will be horrible, but I'll have something to listen to.

Or rather, I _had_ something to listen to, since my connector was taped to my headphone jack of headphones (I would just leave it there) and I can't connect those freebies now. How this is consumer oriented I don't get.

To me, trips in the backseat of the car with my parents were filled with:

- Talking
- Fighting with my sister
- Being punished for fighting with my sister
- Looking outside, letting my fantasy have free reign over my train of thoughts

It's why now I don't feel bored very often. When getting bored, I phase out the rest and entertain my brain either with work, planning for the future (dreaming as you'd call it) or just playing out various scenarios in my head on how things could or would go.

I believe it's an important skill to learn a child.

Also, the ability of a child to entertain itself correlates very well with intelligence, which is something you can at least partly train. Don't have children yet, but when I do, they'll get to play on 'our' iPad, but with all restrictions I had when a child. I could play, but didn't get to choose for myself when. To me it's parenting 101, you don't let a child decide for itself.

Also a big fan of the method mentioned above. I'm a programmer, but I dig Chemistry and Biology. The main reason for this is that the teachers made it 'fun'.

The best moments in class were the experiments that involved him saying 'Hmm, this should be more than enough to have a reaction by now' and 'Oh a little more sure can't hurt' leading to spectacular reactions. If this was intended or not is besides the point, he entertained the class and taught us something while doing it.

Simple experiments like eloctrolysis to make water and generate a 'plop' sound are fun. Having the teacher give you free reign to experiment as you want to (we scaled up, broke the glass bottle container) only adds to the fun.

I pity the people who think science isn't fun. For them it might be, but I sure hope the scientists don't feel the same way. And I'm sure any scientist who has achieved greatness had great fun while at it.

In regard to dress shirts, you got it all wrong. French shirts or rather, French cuffs are basically folder back cuffs, usually bigger.

If watches in shirts annoy you, have them tailor made. A decent tailor will take into account if you usually wear a watch or not, and slightly adapt the size of the arm you wear the watch on. It's a general complaint if you often wear shirts.

Me I stopped wearing watches after hurting my wrist a couple of times (or arm) when accidently hitting something, slamming into something or just resting my arm too long on a single place, so meh, they'll have to figure that out as well if I'm ever to buy one!

That won't work in all countries though.

For example in many European countries it's not 'driving' but the intention to drive. So to be able to call in your car for example you would have to be parked on the side, key NOT in the ignition (if applicable), engine must not be running, seatbelt must not be worn (wearing it would mean you're "going to drive").

Yes, yes, it's ridiculous.

Those several moves are season 5. So just: 7 seasons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Futurama_episodes

If you'd've played Master of Orion you would have learned that 20 years ago. If you're looking for habitable planets for humanoids, go for the red & yellow stars, avoid the purple and green ones.

There's a flaw in your reasoning there. It's not Windows _or_ Android. People have both a smartphone and a computer you know. And yes, of course, not all people do and some don't etc, but the gamers, the target group, do.

What do you mean "Microsoft or no games at all"?

You Microsoft,
Playstation,
Xbox,
Nintendo,
iOS,
Mac OS X,
Gameboy,
PSP,
Android, ...

or no games at all.

I use Windows at work, OS X at home and no longer have a Linux box. To be honest, I couldn't care less. I organize/customize every machines I own to do exactly what it needs to be doing. If it's a different OS, so be it, hardly changes anything.

If you're even slightly computer savvy, this shouldn't be a problem.

Then why all this hate? All that trash to soft through with people who are shocked about MS (or ANY big company for that matter) lying? Are you SERIOUS? EVERYBODY lies. Discounts happen ALL the time. And as with all statisticsn, it's how you ask the question and how you state your answer. The actual figures don't matter as much.

Many if not all companies selling their products (be it an Office, a PC, an ERP system, a middleware, a broswer) will lie (it's called "(pre)sales") and give sick discounts. You'll be hard pressed to find a company supplying ERP software that doesn't give 50% discount both on initial price and licensing fees for large accounts, or new/risky products ...

That aside ... about that study

- Licenses? Payed? How much discount? Coves all?
- User frustration? You realize a large chunk of the user base (the largest chunk in my opinion) will rage against the new system. Why? Because it's a new system, it's always difficult as IT to sell sth new to the business. EVEN if it's better. You have to take this into account, it can seriously drive up costs (even in sth as simple as XP -> 7 migration)
- Hardware?
- New software/scripts/network settings because of different protocols or whatever used
- 20% overhead for managing such a large project by default
- etc.

Let's at least analyze before shooting it down. That figure must be coming from SOMEWHERE, some analyst was probably wrong, but the data is there and hopfully/probably correct. The calculations he did with it of course are sth else completely. I've seen stated licenses were not included, and that's a huge cost but other than that we don't know a lot ...

Actually the review is here: http://blog.modernmechanix.com/the-lisa-computer-system-apple-designs-a-new-kind-of-machine/

And the actual review of the Lisa on BYTE magazine: http://blog.modernmechanix.com/a-behind-the-scenes-look-at-the-development-of-apples-lisa/

Or not that old. I'm 28 and have fond memories of it :)

I have fond memories of the Apple II. It, among many other things, had some very low entry level programming tools (basically no GUI means this is the case whatever you try to do on it) which was my very first experience with programming as a child. When at 10 I got my first computer, an Apple Classic though... It had HyperCard on it... Oh HyperCard, why did you have to go... It'll never be the same without you.

There's just something that's different now. Computers used to be, I don't know, more like *our* stuff. Now that's it gone from enthousiasts to the whole world it feels... different. Not worse per se, just different, like something was lost. My childhood memories are full of afternoons/weekends with dad on the Apple II or if some friend of his, a fellow enthousiast, came over to experiment on stuff. Those were the best days, ending with stacks of floppys of new stuff! Not that you had that much new stuff, it was just stuffitted :)

Where you getting your figures?

http://investor.apple.com/results.cfm

Quarterly figures you compare to the same quarter, x years ago. Not Q4 to Q3, but Q4-2012 to Q4-2011. Holiday sales, summer slacking, start of school sales, etc. All those have an impact.

On the iPads, as previously stated. Market share is not important here. You don't aim for max market share, you aim for max profit.

The market is bound to grow as a whole, how can it not? iPad sales have gone up 26%, and that was in the quarter just before the release of the new iPad which is bound to have an influence.