"Seriously, I used pre-iPod MP3 players, I used pre-iPhone smart phones and i used pre-iOS tablets.
They REALLY sucked. The OSes were difficult to use, the interfaces were unfriendly and for the price you paid, it was a goddamned joke."
you know why? because the executives of those companies were complete and utter morons. They would have had a brilliant UI and OS if they made them opena nd invited the OSS community to work with them. But no. Diamond wanted to be raging assholes with their RIO and refused to share with the community. they COULD have owned the market if they did so.
I'm not sure this is the case. I've used and contributed to a lot of open source software. For the most part, they have been very functional and have done the job well. I am not unhappy with how they worked. But, let's be honest here. The UI sucked. Sucked badly. I have yet to see any OSS that has a usable UI. That's fine for me, I'm an engineer. I can cope with arcane settings and the need to do some things through the command line. Engineers, by and large, cannot develop something that looks good, only something that performs well. For the non-engineering world, they are an unusable mess. This is the second biggest reason why OSS hasn't become the desktop replacement many hoped it would be.
A simple iRule in an F5 LTM will allow you to manage a metric shitload of unique domains and services, on multiple servers, behind a single IPv4 address and TCP port. They've been doing this for years. I've personally set this up for several companies whose domain names might surprise you.
As for tablet and such devices, yes it's true that Apple ones come with Safari and generally make it difficult to install other browsers (though they are now available, if in more limited quantity and not quite the same as the 'native' on-device Safari browser).
It wasn't very difficult for me to open Safari, download Firefox, open the disk image and drag Firefox to my Applications folder. Firefox even popped up a modal dialog box on first launch asking if I wanted to make it the default browser.
Have you looked at techBASIC from Byteworks? It's a great, easy to use BASIC that runs directly on the iPhone and iPad to let you write programs on it.
I'm also an "old expensive" computer professional. It recently took me a total of 18 hours from the time I put my resume online to my first job offer, and 4 days to have 6 offers and to have accepted a new position.
The longest it's ever taken me to find a new position once I've started looking in earnest is 2 weeks. The shortest is 36 hours. Recruiters see my resume and my phone gets 100's of calls a day.
There is definitely a shortage of experienced talent in the marketplace here (Washington, DC).
It sounds like RealBasic might be a fit for what you're looking for. Have you tried them? http://www.realbasic.com/
I think if you want to compare iphones with other smartphones you need to focus on this differing philosophy. Neither Apple nor anyone else makes much money on their phone OS, they make money selling hardware. Apple will charge you a small amount ($5 iirc) to upgrade your phone to their later OS when released, but that amount is trivial and is probably more tied to making it a purchase and making their TOS more binding than anything. (remember the laptop 802-11N updater they also sold for $5 so long ago?)
Um, no. Apple doesn't charge anything for an iOS update. Not $5. Not $1. Not $0.001. Nada. I don't know who told you that you have to pay for an iOS upgrade, but as long as you have a supported model of iPhone, it's free.
You work at NatGeo too I guess.
Sorry, but there was a stretch of several months this year where there were no security updates released for CentOS 5.x while they worked on 5.6 and 6.0.
https://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=29685&forum=53
My fiancee speaks 6 languages fluently, like a native, and switches between them with an ease that impresses the shit out of me. They are Korean (she is Korean), Tagalog, Mandarin Chinese, English, Japanese and French. The first time she came to America, Immigration didn't want to let her in because her English was so good they didn't believe that she had never been here before.
So, yeah, there are lots of people that speak multiple languages. Just not, unfortunately, in America.
A quick "cont" in the EEPROM would zip that 16-way server back to life faster than anyone noticed it was frozen.
Cutting the strings.
I understand your evil plot now! By stuffing a 16 bit value into an 8 bit location, you're actually inserting the upper 8 bits into the next memory location. Everyone knows that the value 00000001 when put into address 8676 is the "brick my phone" value. By sneakily tricking the user into memory location 8675, you've bypassed the internal security.
My hat is off to you sir!
All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to Gaussian noise. -- James Martin
