why would Apple keep such a thing quiet

Because it's a sealed diagnostic port for a non-end-user serviceable product, not a feature. They aren't wishing anything up, it's just not something they have a reason to publicise.

when the Apple Watch's battery-life isn't what most people would consider impressive?

Actually, people's opinions on this are very mixed. Some people are reporting great battery life and improved battery life on their iPhone as well as they switch the screen on less. Some people report the opposite. Chances are, people who have just got a new gadget are playing with it all day, which obviously isn't representative of normal usage patterns or battery life.

Apple's lack of transparency here doesn't much matter, though

Why are you describing lack of publicity about a sealed diagnostic port for non-end-user serviceable goods as a "lack of transparency"? That is bizarre. You wouldn't expect that for any other company, let alone Apple.

Geez, is the idiot running this the same one who was going to have a Koran burning?

How 'bout I have a Bible burning? How would any of you feel about that (ok, I see the guns coming out, that answers that).

Wonder how fast I could burn a Bible... maybe add liquid O2?

                  mark

Or maybe I'll pirate views of them. Give Disney money for screwing the US?

                mark

... to come in on their side. I resent having to pay for a ton of channels that I will NEVER, EVER watch.

                      mark "interest in sports approaches zero as a limit"

These are Aggies, if not the ones at Bryan/College Station. I believe the professor.

Relevant points of information: when I relocated there in the late eighties, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that every sexist, racist, nationalistic, religious and every other kind of insulting joke was suddenly an Aggie joke. For example,
Q: How can you tell when an Aggie's doing word processing?
A: White-out all over the monitor.

And it goes downhill from there.....

                              mark "but then, what's led to the decline of the US is the MBA degree...."

That's really what this sounds like - you go to your lecture class, along with 200-400+ other students, get the lecture from the prof, phat chance to actually sit and talk to him, even in his "office hours", and go to your classes with the t/a.

This works *so* well in huge colleges, let's do it for kids and little kids.

Instead, say, of massively increasing funding for schools, and ensure NO CLASS IN THE COUNTRY in k-12 is over 24 kids.

                    mark

Moon? Oh, the convicted and served time in prison foreign agent? The one who thinks he is the Second Coming?

                    mark

Funny, where I work these days, and the contracts I had before, it was Dell, with a rare HP, and some Macs. I will note that I've only dealt with *enterprise* grade PCs and workstations, not "consumer" grade; certainly, Dell's enterprise support beats everyone else hands down. (And one that shall remain nameless, but who's retiring honcho owns a Hawaiian island and a fighter jet, is below "none of the above", and equal to "self-abuse".)

And it *did* say "PC", not "laptop", or anything else, or I'd have mentioned Lenovo.

                mark

the search algorithms at google are so much worse than they were even five years ago. These days, the noise-to-signal ratio is *terrible* - I frequently do searches, and put a phrase, or couple of words in quotes, and put a + in front... and I see a para for a "hit", 2 or 3 down, and there's part of the phrase, without the rest, bolded. They're not even getting good hits for advertisers - it's anything that can vaguely be construed as related to your search.

                  mark

Why is this a report on slashdot? NewsMaxx is an extreme right-wing flakes and kooks site, for folks who think Faux News is liberal.

                            mark "Boomer, and I'd be happy to shake Snowdon's hand in appreciation for what he did".

Ah, yes, non-readable logs, because they're Poettering's brilliant idea of binary logfiles that require a special tool to read....

                  mark

I mean, energy deregulation and the "free market" worked *so* well in California a dozen years ago. (This assumes that slashdotters reading this are old enough to remember that, or are at least willing to read the news stories about the criminals selling the energy....)

                mark

Google is far worse than it used to be, signal-to-noise ratio. Part of the time, it does not appear to respect quoted search terms, even with a "+" in front. I now frequently see part of a word that was quoted, bolded in the non-sponsored results.

It also refuses to allow explicit literal searches: I have an artist friend who uses a period as part of her name - google says "nope, not gonna look for name. lastname, I'll ignore it and look only at name lastname".

Finally, I've found too many times in the last year that one of my search terms isn't even mentioned on the page from the results.

                      mark

The Apple Watch has pretty severe resource constraints to fit into such a small package. At the risk of oversimplifying things, current third-party Apple Watch applications are essentially remote iPhone displays, so they aren't going to perform amazingly well.

As developers learn how to work with this new platform best, things will improve. Also, Apple have already said that they are going to open up the SDK further to allow for applications truly running on the watch itself, which will be a big improvement. My guess is they'll open that up in a couple of months at WWDC.

in order to make native Apple apps to seem better.

That makes no sense. They don't achieve anything if their apps look better than the other apps on the device, they just make the entire experience worse. It would be like cutting off their nose to spite their face.