If I had mod points, I would mod the parent up. As it is, I will just grumble that Thud457 posted this before I did.

For those with short memories, in the 90s Motorola proposed a similar project with 77 LEO satellites (thus Iridium with atomic number 77). I thought it was such a cool idea that I bought a bunch of Motorola stock. Things didn't pan out very well.

If you actually look at the design of iOS4 you might find that security has been built in very deeply with a hardware key among other things the OS. If you have access to Apple's WWDC 2010 sessions, take a look at session 209.

As a shameless plug, I believe that we have 1Password for iOS (a password management system) well designed to use both our own security layer on top of what is built into iOS.

Igazad van. (You're right). Although I emphatically oppose the current government, those sorts of comparisons are hyperbolic.

My limited understanding of the situation is that the mockery, while loud, is still coming from exactly same the people who would have always opposed such a regime. I've been out of touch with my friends who supported Fidesz back in 1990.

I hope you are right. But according to Fidesz, Hungary only achieved proper freedom when they were (overwhelmingly) elected last year. Do people believe that?

I work in customer support for Agile Web Solutions, the makers of 1Password (a password management system) for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android. Agile development seems to work well for us.

I think that there are two reasons why this has worked well for us while not for others.

• Our managers and our coders are the same people. So this isn't some management fad that is used to place unwanted demands on our coders.
• We are not rigid in our adherence to agile principles. We plan ahead where it makes sense to.

There are drawbacks, of course. What we like to think of as "surprising and delighting" and delighting our customers usually works, but sometimes we have to take steps back from something visible which we've tried. I think that over all this still is a "win" for us and our customers, but it can sometimes be disappointing.

A perceived (but imaginary) drawback is "wasted effort". We put a great deal of effort into getting data syncing among machines and devices to work via webDAV (and in particular, MobileMe). For a variety of reasons we had to abandon that approach and go with Dropbox (with which we are very very happy). To some this might seem like wasted effort, switching to a different approach after a great deal of effort has gone into the first one. But in fact, agile principles in this case simply mean that we don't fall victim to the sunk cost bias.

Probably Debian would have been OK, but I was finding admin of most Linux distros a pain for exactly these reasons. I couldn't find a layer where I could do everything that I needed to do without worrying about one thing stepping on another. No doubt there are ways that I could manage a Linux system without running into different layers of management tools stepping on each other, but it was a struggle.

There were other reasons as well (although there is a lot that I miss about Linux), but I think that this was one of the leading reasons.

(NB: I realize that this is flamebait (I've got karma to burn), but that isn't my intention here.)

In the late the late 80s, Motorola had a scheme to launch 77 LEO satellites to provide global satellite coverage. I thought it was a great idea at the time, and bought a bunch of Motorola stock. It didn't work out very well. They eventually launched 66 satellites, but didn't change the name of the project to whatever has atomic number 66.

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