And here is a lesson in how to damn with faint praise.

Of course you're right.

That's exactly what has happened with mobile phones. (cough).

If your desires were representative of the general population then the huge number of windows-based PC tablet computers that have been around for pretty much a decade would have taken off in a big way, but no, they didn't. And I say that as the owner of a HP-TC1000 tablet from circa 2001 which was *awesome* at the time.

Um...

USB 2.0, even at its theoretical maximum is 20 x slower than Thunderbolt. USB3.0 at its theoretical maximum is 2 x slower. The thunderbolt architecture means that you get a full 10Gb/sec in both directions unlike USB which has so much processor overhead that you never get anywhere near its theoretical maximum. So no, USB is not "Almost as fast".

RS232 Serial ports used to be ubiquitous.

I'll take that bet. If only because they are still including firewire ports, and they have been useless for years and years and years. You must not earn very much to make such a bet.

You need to get over yourself.

Nobody has told you to shut up or that you "aren't allowed" to express your opinion.

What they *have* done is tell you in many (some humorous) ways that you are wrong to hold that pretty self-centered opinion

I find it reasonably amusing that you are accusing *me* of censorship when your original post said:

Nowhere did I tell you to shut up, I just told you that you were acting a bit short-sightedly. I think a bit of self-awareness might be in order.

Just because you personally are not interested in a story - because you are "not a developer" - doesn't make this story "not news". If you want a broad range of well-supported apps for your Droid, then you are pretty shortsighted not to care whether the people who write those apps can actually make a living or not.

The real reason behind this is that Apple knows that Nokia won't be a threat now that they have decided to go with Windows. This way they get a license for all of Nokia's patents, and they get rid of one arm of the litigation. I bet the story would be different if Nokia had chosen Android.

But you can't legally run it on hardware that isn't "Apple Branded" according to the EULA.

Agreed. The one thing that gets forgotten in the hullabaloo about the iPad is that when it was announced, the prices were significantly cheaper than many people had been expecting, and that this caught a lot of the 'me-too' manufacturers off guard. If the Galaxy is more expensive than an equivalent spec iPad, then not only does it lose out to the 'buy the cheapest' crowd, it also gives Apple ammunition to say: "see: we aren't expensive". TBH though, because of the app-store lock-in, Apple ought to be able to virtually give-away iPads and still make lots of money, so I can see this battle going on for a good while yet.

You could argue that they are currently also being screwed over by Intel, who can't offer an i5 or i7 with decent graphics, hence the ridiculous shenanigans that Apple are doing with graphics processor switching in MacBook Pros, and the lack of i5 or i7 in the latest Mac Mini.

Someone please mod parent clueless rather than insightful. Neither IIS nor SQL are at fault in this case, it is a third party add-on that is being exploited. There is nothing here that uniquely makes IIS or SQL more or less vulnerable than, say, Apache and MySQL. It is perfectly possible to code a LAMP application that is equally vulnerable, and recent attacks on applications such as Wordpress prove this is true. The article IMHO is being needlessly attacking towards IIS. It's like saying 'Mass SQL injection attack hits x86 servers' therefore somehow implying that servers running on Arm would be secure.

And there you go, proving my point.

According to you, I must be an Apple fanboy, and a "dishonest prick" simply because you don't accept a point of view that I have expressed.

Therefore pretty much proving yourself not to be such a "reasonable" person as you would probably wish to be.

I agree that if you buy an iPod or an iPhone you are likely subject to lock-in. You, as a clearly well-informed person, do not want to get locked in. But you DO want the lovely shinyness, dont you? Otherwise why do you get so angry and start calling people pricks? - I think you protest too much!

There is one fundamental difference between Microsoft and Apple. Apple don't have a monopoly (virtual or otherwise) on PCs or Phones. You have a choice. If you don't like their DRM or their App submission policies, don't buy a Mac/iPhone/iPad and don't develop software for them. Other people may make a different choice. Why does this have to mean that Apple are somehow "evil" ? they aren't holding a gun to your head if you don't buy one of their products. What I think most people have a problem with is that Apple stuff definitely looks and feels "nicer" than everything else, and in this day and age that's all that appears to matter to the average (non nerd, non /. reading) consumer. Ranting on to other /.ers and Mac zealots is simply naval gazing.

Yes. It's called Bluetooth.