Bad analogy. I have both a BlackBerry and iPod, and both sync just fine with my iTunes library using their respective applications. Palm could take the same approach as RIM instead of picking fights with both Apple and the USB folks.

SNOBOL dropped out of high school and ended up working for a car dealership, last I heard. He was always the sleazy sort.

You sound like a sociopath more interested in winning at politics than delivering a good product...but you present an important perspective and good advice because there are many like you in the real world.

But the idiots are apparently the ones who pay the bills, so they get what they want. What's wrong with that?

That's bizarre. No Linux allowed? At least in my field (biophysics, involving molecular dynamics etc.), everything runs on Linux. Anyway, your bureaucracy must be completely broken if your IT department won't let you have the tools you demonstrably need to do the job you are paid for.

Citation? That would be monumentally stupid of Apple. Surely they'll figure out how to sell their new OS to 10.4 users on Intel.

That already happened. It's called Windows.

I think there are three main hurdles to comprehending scientific literature:

1) Obtuse grammar. This is universal. Why describe something in five words when you can use twenty?

2) Jargon: Every field has its jargon, and may co-opt words from the vernacular and give them very specific meanings. This gets in the way of a simplified description.

3) Intuition: Quite a lot of papers don't properly explain the intuition behind what they do. This is particularly rampant in fields that depend strongly on math. The reader is often expected to recognize the form of an equation without any explanation whatsoever. If you can do this, the intuition often turns out to be surprisingly simple. If you cannot do this (say, you're a new grad student) it looks like an impenetrable wall of Greek letters.

We can do something about (1) by journals forcing submitters to simplify their language. But fixing (2) by avoiding jargon would interfere with meaning. And fixing (3) would make papers much longer. So it's a tough problem.

You can build a Hackintosh yourself. Bootloaders and such are out there - you can run Leopard on a regular PC, as long as you are careful to only use supported components. Amazingly enough, Apple has been remarkably nonchalant about this. So why do they have such a big problem with Psystar?

Running OSX on a white-box PC takes technical know-how and a willingness to put up with some level of brokenness. This is the polar opposite of 99.9% of Mac buyers, who want their computer to just work - that's why they bought a Mac in the first place. So Hackintoshes do not meaningfully decrease Mac sales - indeed, they might even (very) slightly increase Mac sales because they get people invested in the Mac ecosystem. (Once you've wrangled with getting OSX to run on your white-box PC, only to have to do it again for the next point update, the convenience of a real Mac starts looking like a pretty darn good upgrade.)

The problem with Psystar is that they were promising to make their white-box Mac clones easy to maintain, thus destroying the selling point of a real Mac.

Um, Google is responsible for quite a bit of Mozilla Foundation revenue.

Google's motivation is just to get people away from IE, because MS controls that, and has had little incentive to improve it. Now, with a substantial installed base of competing browsers, all of them are of much higher quality (Firefox memory leaks aside) and Google can build more neat stuff for you to use so you can click on ads.

With respect to small, efficient diesel engines - Europe is full of them. In the US, diesel fuel is of low quality, because there isn't enough refinery capacity to make high quality diesel fuel. It's difficult to make a diesel engine that runs well on it, and satisfies stringent California emissions requirements. And, Americans still have the perception that diesel is loud and smelly, despite modern diesel engines being neither.

So don't. If it's GPL you can fork it yourself and do what you like within the GPL.

The BlackBerry network does have outages from time to time. But the linked article is from April 18, 2007!

Of course there isn't a fundamental difference - but by this point MS has fixed enough bugs and removed enough crap from Vista that people are more willing to buy the upgrade. Who cares what they call it?