And OS X isn't the worst for that. Windows 8.1 has this lovely thing where if you drag a file over the directory tree in Explorer, it will spin up every single goddamned disc and network drive and freeze the drag operation until it's done.

Nope! You need to pay them to do that, and there's a limit to how many devices your organization can install apps to. I'm not sure what the limit is for the base plan since I only have ever used the Apple developer program through my employer. But there's a whole process to get a device "provisioned" to be able to run apps you're developing and there's a limit based on your plan with Apple.

No, of course not, Xcode is a free download and you can write programs and apps for any iDevice for free. (Ignoring the cost of the Mac you need to buy in the first place, of course.)

You just can't let other people use them without forking over $100/year. (At all for iOS or without making users disable scary security dialogs for OS X.)

My best guess is that they really wanted to include a "massively multiplayer" game in some fashion and what better representative of MMOs is there than WoW?

But I agree, they would have been far better served just leaving MMOs out entirely than including WoW in the first iteration. WoW probably deserves to be in a "gaming hall of fame" - eventually.

There's a huge catalog of games and genres that are just flat-out more deserving of recognition than MMOs in general and WoW in particular. WoW can wait.

Microsoft hasn't made a JVM in - well, over a decade, at this point.

Java applets are "safe" because they're sandboxed. By default a Java application can do anything a native application can, and just blindly running a native application in the browser is clearly a horrible, horrible idea.

The majority of Java vulnerabilities are new and clever ways to escape the sandbox, thereby gaining the ability to do anything the user could do.

Of course there have been other neat vulnerabilities like CVE-2014-6601 where apparently Java's JIT can be tricked into just running native code and this can be exploited remotely. I'm unclear on the exact details of that one.

Yep.

First thing a new installation of Skype does is download every single message you've received for the past several months, I think.

I haven't tried deleting a history file (they're actually SQLite databases) but I think the same thing happens in that case: Skype sees that it isn't up to date on messages and redownloads them.

Half the point behind the Nvidia Shield devices is the ability to stream games from your Nvidia GPU-powered PC. So you're not limited to Android games, at least in theory.

Of course, based on the Steam version of game streaming, this isn't a thing you're ever going to be doing in reality, but at least that's the theory. (I mean, it works, almost, but you're still adding a whole bunch of lag.)

Hell, I've run into Java code that only runs on 32-bit versions of Java.

I'm not sure how they did that, but it absolutely requires you to have 32-bit Java 6 prior to a certain patch level.

Thankfully the part of IT demanding we run that software eventually caved to the part of IT demanding that the software running on every computer was, y'know, not full of security holes.

Why not? I mean, they're just getting into the "HD re-release" market that seems to be all the rage these days.

I mean, if Square Enix can resell a nearly 15 year old Final Fantasy "HD remake" for about half the price of a new game, why not full price for a two year old game?

Define "fast." This is apparently not about download speed but about latency. The idea is apparently to keep the majority of traffic that doesn't care about latency on fiber and move only that which does to a microwave network. (How do you do that? They didn't say.)

I'm not sure why they think latency is a big issue. Latency simply isn't a concern for the vast majority of Internet applications. They admit as much in the article and claim the majority of traffic would remain on fiber links.

So what's left that requires extremely low latency, lower than what we already have? They didn't say, other than mentioning that high frequency traders already use microwave links to reduce latency.

This thread is about Apple Maps, so yes, Apple has a maps search engine. It's limited to searching for POIs that exist on Apple Maps, but it's there.

Even so, there's nothing preventing Apple from gathering anything you search through using their browser anyway. Whether or not they actually do I can't really say: the privacy policy is vague on what exactly counts as "Apple services" where they absolutely do collect search queries.

Huh? Apple collects the exact same user information Google does, the change is that they now keep it in-house instead of sharing it. If you value privacy, you won't be using either Google or Apple's products. (And if you value "getting to where you're going," you still won't be using Apple's maps.)

Guess who pushed that rule through, though.

Did you guess "the New England Patriots quarterback who we now know was cheating using that rule?"

Because, guess what, you'd be right!

It's a report written by a lawyer. "More probably than not" is a legal term meaning "guilty in the civil sense, but not in the criminal sense." Essentially the lawyers writing the report are saying "yes, they're definitely guilty, but I'm not willing to say this meets the standards of criminal justice."