You're right! Apple should totally have put RCA + S-Video jacks on the original iPod in addition to the original FireWire cable. I'm sure if they had done that, the iPod wouldn't have been such a commercial failure!

Don't forget that once Apple switched to the Lightning connector, they also didn't release any sort of adapter that would let a person connect to a 30-pin device, nor did anyone else

No, you're thinking of Vulva.

... and in the interest of "balance," (again, as I have little firsthand knowledge, it is difficult for me to ascertain how balanced this actually is) here's a rebuttal from an employee at Google:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/neither-microsoft-nokia-nor-anyone-else-should-fork-android-its-unforkable/?comments=1&post=26199423

(via Reddit)

I would agree that it *was* open-source, but these days it's open in name only. Google has been chipping away at its openness for years, making it almost useless/impossible to fork.

I'll be the first to admit that my knowledge of this topic is almost completely second-hand, so if I'm talking out of my ass, please correct me. However this article sums up fairly well my understanding of the current situation:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/neither-microsoft-nokia-nor-anyone-else-should-fork-android-its-unforkable/

The article is largely about Microsoft's relationship to Android (or lack thereof), but talks quite a bit about the current state of Android's "openness."

... what a joke.

Haha, I don't hate you at all. Thanks for the clarification. I was really confused.

Is it Glass or is it Metal? This may sound like a dumb question, but I really can't tell:

"'Crucible Intellectual Properties, LLC' (...) laid claim to a manufacturing process for creating 'bulk amorphous alloy sheets', also known as bulk metallic glass (BMG)."

"The process, called 'float glass' ..." (Incidentally, float glass is nothing new, let alone patentable)

"and the result is a glass-like metal" ... and all that said, I was under the impression this stuff was metal. Either way, this is a pretty shitty article if I can't even get that basic fact straight, unless I'm just being really stupid here.

What exactly are you trying to say? That "firing up the furnaces" implies Apple is behind the times, therefore the dip in their stock price is justified? That 3D printers will somehow scale up to meet manufacturing needs at an output level that Apple needs? Or that people are stupid, which is why their stock price is low? I can make no sense of what you wrote.

Comedy Central

And no, that's (sadly) not a joke.

lol, not sure that I trust a "publication" that uses comic sans in its logo.

Not really sure how your personal needs are at all relevant in this situation, as this post is about servers and supercomputers (ie computers that typically deal with highly parallelized tasks), not about home gaming rigs.

Whoops, I wasn't logged in when I wrote this. Der.

I'm gonna wager a guess that the Sony "Viao" X505 didn't have an SSD, for one. But ignoring that for a second, the Ultrabooks literally *are* copies of the MacBook Air. We're not just talking about the concept of a super small laptop, which Sony obviously did years ago, we're talking about computers that almost visually-identical clones of the Air. So, no, the X505 looks nothing like the Air, except that it's small and that's it's a laptop.

Instead of farting out the word, "fanbois" any chance you have, how about you actually read what used2win32 said — "Do an image search for "macbook air" and look at the pics. Then do one for "ultrabook" and compare the images." God, you're an idiot.

Maybe they'd be doing better if they weren't named something stupid like, "Ultrabooks." Talk about a super-generic, utterly meaningless name.