Exactly this. Samsung user now!

I tolerated them for a while because they made the best technology in its class (IMO) a few years ago. When it came to Jobs' holier-than-thou blanket banning of porn on iPhones I tolerated that along with their other restrictions because they weren't exactly difficult to jailbreak and they were either turning a blind eye to keep their technical user base (an agreeable approach - "protect" the dumb masses but turn a blind eye to techies), or pretty incompetent at stopping it.

But the increasing arrogance of it all and the tightening squeeze against jailbreakers (it's now far from a blind eye - it takes a year just to get the first tethered jailbreak, and take something like the 3rd gen AppleTV which is outright unjailbreakable) drove me to look elsewhere and as of the Android 4 devices there is far better stuff out there than iPhones, iPads and iOS. Apple thought they were invincible because of the iDevice success and so rested on their laurels and stagnated. When combined with this kind of behaviour the result is people leaving them in droves.

In the history books the decline of Apple will be put down to the death of Steve Jobs, but I think the rot set in before then and it's largely the legacy of his arrogance that is continuing to reverberate through Cupertino.

Kirk, or the Caretaker?

Keep it DRM free, maybe a basic serial number registration system.

Add on your site and in the app "please be honest, I'm just trying to put food on the table"

Those who want to crack it will crack it. You cannot stop that, so there's no point in even trying to encrypt the registration key to the nth degree. Anything more than a basic registration system will just
a) take more effort on your part
b) inconvenience legitimate customers of your software

I trust this doesn't mean they'll be bringing Flash back though *shudder*

It's one of those interesting points with Steve Jobs. At the time, the decision seemed awful and a lot of people were cheering on alternatives such as Android for including it. But a couple of years on it would seem that many share my view of: hey, he was right! Flash IS an awful resource drain, and because of him banning it from iOS there's been great progress towards HTML5 and the drive for efficiency. I seem to recall even Adobe have agreed it's the correct move at this point. Android has had Flash for a while but the latest versions have dropped it. It'd be so ironic if (unlikely) iOS gained Flash and everyone flocked to Android to get away from it this time.

In the process of reading this , and especially when responding, I'm already in a public venue exposing a camera lens at an angle where I could have an app running in the background taking regular stills or videos without you suspecting anything. I'd mostly be capturing your feet and your dog, but could easily be recording your small children.

As it happens I'm already conscious of this and if there are kids running around or something I'll casually rest my finger over the camera or move slightly to reassure anyone wise enough to watch and wonder that no, I'm not filming them.

But I would bet that no, it doesn't cross anyone's minds.

I think it's that secret kind of recording people need to be concerned about, not something strapped to someone's face in plain view with a red light telling you when it's recording. And you wouldn't even know about the secret one

The important bit is "if they ask", so there's no jamming of anything down any throats.

I'll grant that "teach" can seem a bit arrogant, it's just the way of those who believe though, if someone has a really solid faith they'll believe it as the absolute truth. I'm more of the opinion that we should be fully open-minded on both sides of the coin, but again, opinions.

That's stretching the GP's comment a little far, I don't think s/he is saying that nobody should ever get angry or sad (or joyful).

What I was saying is basically that if someone wants to believe in a bearded ghost that I don't believe in, I respect it. It's none of my business. If they believe that said bearded ghost says that those who have sex out of wedlock or are gay or whatever else are sinners who will burn in Hell if they don't accept Jesus before they die, and choose to abstain from sex or suppress their sexuality it's all absolutely fine and none of my business either. So long as they don't make MY beliefs and decisions THEIR business (which is where I'm proud of the religious friend that I do have and the mutual respect we share of each others beliefs), why should it matter to me what they believe in?

I don't think anyone is saying you can never get angry about anything. I get pissed about work all the time :)

Agreed, with KDE. It's ugly as sin and won't win any hipstery screenshot awards, but it actually lets you have some buttons for things instead of the more recent GNOME approach of "treat you like an idiot and hide the controls". I wouldn't mind if there was even an advanced "show me more controls" button but there isn't.

With the ugliness, by my personal taste I found that it helped to use one of the alternative themes for the controls - clearlooks I think? and go into the window border settings and disable the blue glow. It looks fairly decent now, though IMO the bottom panel and menu are still ugly.

I'm not angry at Apple with regards to their desktop OS (I am a bit annoyed at how locked down their iOS devices are, but I switched to Android).

However I am *wary* of the future of OS X, specifically the fact that the late Steve Jobs was always talking about the "post desktop era" and that much like Microsoft they seem to be trying hard to move everyone over to tablets. So I've been catching up with Linux as a contingency for if/when Apple turn around and say "the Mac only accounts for 2% of our sales, so we're withdrawing them from sale". It could be 5, 10 years from now but the whole industry seems to be predicting the death of the desktop in favour of tablets and I'm pretty certain I'm going to end up one of those stubborn old fools who likes his 30" monitor, physical keyboard and mouse and the freedom to customise my own hardware. By then Linux may be the only desktop OS left, and us old-farts-to-be have to be prepared.

The problem it has at the moment is that developers and users alike have kind of invested quite heavily into the GNOME/GTK environment, only for GNOME3 and Unity to get "Tabletification Disease" and end up dumbed down and buggy. I feel that they were right to update the ageing GNOME2 and I don't personally believe that MATE is the answer in the long term, but that they jumped the shark in the process.
It's actually gone kind of backwards from when I was properly into Linux about 5 years before, when GNOME2 wasn't so old and.. 2D. Everything was solid, stable, mature. Now it's like the Linux Desktop, at least on the G side, has gone back to square 1. Basic features are missing and it's just not right in 2013 that the desktop should show graphical glitches and/or lock up on popular AMD cards for example, nor that I should have to do command line incantations to repair my wireless driver after an update, both of which are examples of my recent experiences with it. I'm capable of fixing things but do that for a living and have better things to do with my time at home.

On the positive side, I tried KDE and gosh.... relative sanity! They actually dare to give us controls and buttons and not treat us all like retards who will flip out if there's more than one button on the screen. But most of the decent software (IMHO) is GTK/GNOME based because we all had faith in Ubuntu (and look where that's led us - nowadays with Canonical doing their own thing with everything it's one step away from closed source). *sigh*

It's just..... a mess.

Getting a new camera (Panasonic LX7) and finding that Corel haven't added RAW support for it to Aftershot Pro and "goodness knows if/when they will", then going to my Macbook and having it work instantly on Aperture, was the turning point for me when I thought "why am I back to wasting my time messing with Linux again?". (Plus Aperture is so much nicer to use, but I was willing to make a sacrifice if Aftershot would actually work). I'm now severely tempted to about-turn and flow my way right back to OS X on the desktop and consign Linux back to a secondary drive for playing with occasionally and seeing if it ever matures. Life's too short, you know?

Half true. One such person is a close friend and doesn't shove it down anyone's throats (he will "teach" people if they ask, but never without asking) nor would he go around telling me or anyone else how to live their lives. He doesn't let differences in beliefs stand in the way of friendship (neither do I), which is wonderful. It's how all religious (and non-religious) people should be.

It doesn't stop him listening to and believing what the pastors say though, and at least being quietly concerned about the future wellbeing of friends who do things they consider sinful.

But yeah, I don't really mind. I'm all for the Trek-like vision of religion where we just respect each others' beliefs, love them for who they are and get on with life. The only reason I think the Pope is an asshole is because (as is his job) he's trying to shove his views onto everyone else all the time.

It's "stuff that matters" because he's the leader of a religious group that comprises 1.2 billion people. And I guess it's no huge surprise but it's worth knowing that he's another of those bigoted assholes who will be telling those billions about how all homosexuals are evil and that no-one should be using contraception, and we won't miraculously be getting a nice pope who would modernise religion just yet.

Please remember however that the Mint most people are recommending is actually based on Ubuntu.

I'm not saying that everyone who switches to Mint is doing so to spite or boycott Ubuntu/Canonical/Shuttleworth, however it's worth knowing that by using the Ubuntu-based version of Mint you are still indirectly supporting and relying on Canonical and their Evil Ways :)

LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) is another story, although I'm not too sure where it stands in terms of maturity at the moment.

It worked for the old Star Trek movies :P They were looking positively ancient by the time VI came around.

Can I play that on the Symantec Cloud?

YMMV - I use my Nexus 7 very heavily (especially at the pub, being antisocial as I am) and find its book-like format perfect. While my full size iPad sits gathering dust.