From the article:

I wonder when this will finally be solved. Previously, the lag was blamed on poor hardware. With this beast, that excuse really does not hold at all anymore.

I do have a ZFS setup of currently 6 disks and I really recommend buying server-grade HDDs, unless you have set up a monitoring system that tells you whenever a HDD is failing so you can buy a new one.

Until half a year ago I used normal USB HDDs that you can buy everywhere. My experience was that they simply aren't meant to be always on and fail pretty soon. I usually had a failed HDD once every quarter year. It drove me mad. Almost one year ago I started using these HDD docks where you can put two 2,5" or 3,5" HDDs into and bought HDDs that where labeled for server use. After half a year they still ran fine, so each time a normal USB HDD failed I replaced it with another dock. Haven't had a single failure since then. Nice bonus: double the amount of HDDs I can connect to the server (speed isn't so much an issue as space in my case). The solution with these docks with better HDDs costs more at first but turns out to be cheaper in the long run.

Maybe he has a girlfriend and doesn't want to lose his homemade porn. I like mine and want them to be safe, too ;-)

You didn't get the memo ? That's out a loooong time ago already.

Somehow, I don't expect this to create the same outrage as back when Apple did something similar...

I also find it totally amazing that Konrad Zuse's Z3 is always and consistently omitted by americans when it comes to determine which one was the first real computer. My guess is most of them simply don't know about the Zuse and the Z3. It's quite sad, because the achievements of this man are astounding.

Yup, the processor was alright... Intel's Linux drivers were not. Just to enable the embedded ethernet driver I had to compile in a whopping 1MB of driver madness from Intel. On a system where the kernel itself was only 600kB. And where we only had 16MB NOR flash for storage. Hurray. I have never seen such a shit before, it looked like they implemented their own kernel besides the kernel.

They're dominating the market, but it's not a monopoly (any more, now that there are more competitors).

If you play the game, you have to play by the rules. Nobody forces anybody to use the AppStore. It's the developer's decision (I know because I do play this game). But if you want to distribute your app through it you have to obey to Apple's rules, it's their playground.

You can always use Cydia instead or serve a different platform (Android, Nokia, RIM, WP7) if you don't like Apple or the AppStore.

Psssst, don't spoil the fun of mindless Apple bashing by providing a totally valid reason for the app removal ! Or at least provide another possible victim to direct the nerd rage at.

Thanks for that link, that's an interesting site.

Tourist, Rincewind decided, meant "idiot".

— Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic

When the deal regarding the Transrapid was announced in Germany most people didn't take notice that the deal involved China wanting to eventually build the trains themselves which of course means licensing the technology and transferring a lot of know-how. So people who now accuse China of stealing obviously didn't pay attention back then because at least to me and a few of my friends it was immediately obvious that eventually we would get cut out of the picture. So what, we've got the Transrapid for over 20 years now and all we have in Germany is a test course. In Shanghai, at least it's really transporting people even if in the long run it won't be our technology any more. Better than not making use of it at all.

Almost, now it's: "In Corporate America, movie watches you" :-) I'm not from the US so I can't tell how bad it is, but one can get the impression that the level of surveillance is even worse than during the cold war... but most surveillance seems not to be done by the government any more but by corporations.

Well, over the past 20 years I've played around with a lot of languages and a lot of environments and I do enjoy writing in Objective-C. It makes a few neat things that I like easy, like Duck Typing and delegates. But more than the language I enjoy Apple's APIs. They are very consistent and nicely done. I know it wasn't always like this, and there are still a few dark corners if you really dig into non-common areas, but all in all it really is fun to use. More fun than most C++ APIs, IMHO, and to me also more fun than .NET or Java. I like C# as a language, but I can't stand the .NET API. Likewise, Java as a language is OK (neither great nor bad) but the API is so-so. It's good, but I never really enjoyed using it. But I can say that I do enjoy Cocoa.

One thing in particular that I like is that due to a few Objective-C language features you can often avoid creating yet another subclass of something, thanks to Duck Typing.

Now they even added support for C blocks allowing easy anonymous callback functions, which enables a few more neat programming patterns. My favorite scripting language is Ruby and Objective-C is the compiled language that comes closest to it allowing me to make use of design patterns that I learned to love via Ruby.

People don't want them here in Europe, either, at least on the countryside. People don't care about them in the cities, I think. At least I never heard somebody even talking about these towers here in Munich, except if the reception is bad.

There was a very funny story a few weeks back here in Germany (I'm citing off the top of my head, maybe I don't get it 100% correct, sorry for that): A company erected a new cell tower and people began to complain about health issues like headaches that they directly blamed to the tower. After a few weeks there was some kind of meeting between the people and company officials where the people demanded that the tower gets switched off immediately because of their health problems. Turned out the company switched the tower off three weeks before said meeting due to some technical problems :-) Fine example of a negative placebo, IMHO.