You're quite correct. Slavery is just the same as brand preference in mobile phones.

PDF is a document format. It's an output format. It's not a form-entry language. It's not the web. It's not an operating system. It sure as hell shouldn't be able to trigger any open-ended OS action.

You've never dealt with a marketing department, clearly.

"Hey, you know what would be cool? What if PDF documents could also play videos?"
"Um.. well, it's technically possible but I don't think that-"
"Great! WE MUST HAVE THIS FEATURE! NOW! DROP EVERYTHING AND GET TO IT!"

i have tried many homeopathic remedies and have never got any effect from them.

That's because they do not work.

Don't you know anything? If every citizen is not armed to the teeth, the King of England could just waltz right in, take over and make everyone his slave.

Is that what you want? 'Cos that's what'll happen!

Don't you mean "Too bad ATI card royally suck ass at implementing OpenGL"?

It's difficult to compare with modern operating systems, but the sliding windows were really clever. Each screen could be a completely different resolution with a different colour map and screen format. If you Alt-Tab between full-screen applications of different resolutions, you can still only see one at a time. With the Amiga, you could see all of them at once. For example, if you're playing a full-screen game today and alt-tab to the desktop, the game will typically switch back into a window and the screen will switch to the desktop resolution. The Amiga method would let you simply drag the full-screen game screen to reveal the higher-resolution desktop behind it, without forcing the game to swap back to a window. Even virtual desktops aren't as clever or flexible as that.

Right now, all we can do is pray.

Oh, I'm sure there's an even more futile thing to try. It just might take a bit of research to figure out what.

...unless it's raining. Or cloudy. Or foggy. Or dusty. Or smoggy. Or snowing.

You severely underestimate future requirements for porn storage.

Just wait a week and they'll announce that solar power from human hair causes cancer.

A lot of terrible code is a result of management forcing unrealistic deadlines on developers, or refusing to slip a deadline to accommodate some unforeseen problem.

I worked on a large data visualisation application with an unrealistic deadline, which our department was writing for another department, on their budget. In order to prevent it from eating into our budget money, it had to be released by a certain date. It needed several months more than that to be even nearly ready, but when the deadline came the managers announced that it was finished and released on time. Management high-fives all round. Then it immediately announced that the customers couldn't use it yet because there were some minor bugs which had suddenly been discovered (i.e. all the missing features which would make it any use at all).

I also had a boss who would give you something to do, make changes to the design on a daily basis while you were doing it, then before it was anywhere near ready demand that you stop work on it immediately, check the (unfinished, untested, part built) code in and start work on something completely different. He did this to all the developers, and the code was riddled with overlapping #ifdefs around chunks of unfinished code just so the build didn't break. Then of course he announced "Good news, everybody! We're going live in three weeks!" when the cobbled-together mess was at least six months from being usable. Cue more panic-coding just to make things work, and then the deadline came and went because he'd thought up yet more wacky features to add, starting the cycle all over again. Bug database? Change requests? Unit tests? Peer reviews? Documentation? No such luck. Even the features he wanted weren't clearly defined, you just got a two-hour rambling phone call which contained about five minute's worth of useful information (but it didn't matter, because he'd change his mind when you half-done developing it, or forget how he wanted it doing and yell because you doing it how he originally asked).

It's like those sci-fi films where the ship breaks down.
Captain: How long will it take to fix the engines?
Engineer: At least 24 hours, sir.
Captain: You've got 8, now get to it.
Engineer: No sir, really. 24 hours minimum if nothing else goes wrong.
Captain: We take off in 8! You have your orders.
Engineer: But seriously, we can't...
Captain: La-la-la-la I can't hear you!

Shouldn't they, like, fix all the massive problems in the current game before introducing a thousand new massive problems with an expansion?

Sky customer services are shockingly incompetent. I've to deal with them plenty of times (due to the shoddy nature of the set-top boxes mainly) and it is hard to believe that they are simply useless and not actually malicious. I'd like to get a HD box, but I don't think I could face the weeks of soul-destroying hassle it would involve for them to get it installed and working correctly. The engineers they send out are generally great, but actually getting them to send the right engineer, with the right gear, to the right address, at the time they said they would is almost not worth the effort.

This may be a silly question, but apart from causing a nuisance, what would be the point of doing this?
Hacker 1: Hey, watch this! I'm sending messages to let me control a million iPhones.
Hacker 2: Cool, it worked. What now?
Hacker 1: Um... I could, like, turn their cameras on or something...

From an evil hacker point of view, aren't PC botnets much more useful to control than mobile phones (which will have less power, less bandwidth, less memory and be connected to the net less often)?

I agree it's a vulnerability that clearly needs to be patched quickly, but who would bother exploiting it on a large scale (knowing it will probably get patched soon anyway)?

I played it at launch, and stuck through many of the patch cycles hoping it would get better.
It looks *great*, and the first 20 levels (through Tortage) are indeed good fun, but after that it went downhill very quickly.

Each patch fixed one problem and introduced half a dozen new problems. PvP was horribly unbalanced - it was common to be one-or-two-shotted by players several levels *below* you without you being able to do anything about it at all. Players could evade PvP by simply running into water. Major changes were introduced to classes, changes that should have been decided upon well before launch. Elite "grey" mobs would kill you in seconds (this was one of the "improvements" they added). The whole thing seriously felt it was launched a good six months early and we were just paying to beta-test it for them. I didn't play of the siege matches, but all reports at the time were that it was horribly broken (as was crafting). People would engage in PvP just to get killed so they could respawn at a graveyard the other side of the zone, using PvP simply as a convenient method for travel.

Unfortunately, I'm not convinced that all of those issues were fixed. It's a shame, as I went into it expecting great things and thought that the Conan universe had enormous potential for a great game, but Funcom completely wrecked it. If you look at the stock value graph for the time after launch, you can almost see the little spikes where big patches were added, and then see the value drop as people realised how much they had broken at the same time, until it took a nose-dive into penny stocks as players quit en masse.

Had potential, fun for twenty levels, sucked after that when all the terrible problems became evident. Have they managed to turn it into a decent game yet?