I think this is probably the most interesting thing about Apple, and probably almost entirely down to the powerful control exerted by Steve Jobs and his laser-like focus: they drop technologies and features just as fast as they invent them.

If you look at Microsoft, you see a company that is dragging around everything they have ever created, but Apple just throw it overboard as soon as it seems to be weighing them down. It's hard to imagine any other company that would have had the balls to suddenly drop the floppy disc and all of their proprietary interconnect standards. They abandoned their original OS in favour of something completely new, they drop legacy APIs at a moment's notice, features, product lines, everything.

Every time they do this they get a huge number of people bitching about their cluelessness here on /., but they still seem to sell more products and make more money each year. Say what you will about them, they are clearly getting something right, and that thing *must* be understanding their market. So if they drop the camera and other features from the nano, you can be sure they spent a lot of time thinking about it and decided they didn't need it.

Presumably they discovered that the kind of people with a nano probably have some other device, like a camera-phone, and weren't using the camera or the contacts app.

...UK Music are not the UK music industry. Sharkey is a lobbyist with a bunch of artists on his side, but he doesn't speak for any of the publishers/labels.

I mean it's a refreshing opinion, but it doesn't represent any grand outbreak of common sense.

It's maybe worth noting that the BSDs have been source distributions for a very long time and that rebuilding the world is ingrained in the being of BSD developers. There's no real reason why they wouldn't be upgrading daily.

I've used both for serious commercial development and I personally prefer C# to Java. If it means anything, I consider myself pretty impartial, as Java and C# are just two of the dozen or so languages I've worked in and I consider neither to be the most interesting.

C# and Java are only really similar in the way that you would expect two garbage-collected, object-oriented, C-derived languages to be similar. People who say C# is 95% the same as Java are missing the point: it's the small differences that make one language nicer to use as a developer.

Your mileage may vary. You should give both a go and make up your own mind.

You missed Turkey. They are the second biggest nation in NATO militarily (after the US).

+1 on PCalc

PCalc, in dashboard widget and iPhone app form, is the only calculator I use now. I never bothered to replace the batteries in my venerable HP28c when they ran out a few years ago (although I keep it on my desk as a fetish).

PCalc supports reverse polish notation and has an HP-a-like skin. The ability to switch into binary and hex is pretty useful as a programmer.

(Disclaimer: I know the guy that writes it and have been a beta user since the first version. Doesn't stop it being an excellent calculator though.)