Sounds like pretty much every time there's a new industry standard, where the major players all come up with their own incompatible option, trying to be the one that wins and gets to charge everyone else licensing fees for their patents and trademarks. And so, as usual, the innovative new field is fragmented, confusing consumers, wasting money, and delaying or even killing the new industry. These sorts of format wars happen so often that I can only think of one case (CDs) where it didn't happen. You think that after wasting so many years, and $billions, on these pissing contests, and seeing that the one time they didn't screw it up it was a huge success making everyone rich for decades, that businesses would learn that it's better to cooperate on standards rather than compete. But I guess they're so competitive that they do it every when it's a consistently bad strategy.

You can learn some languages that have clean/consistent designs in a few hours. Lisp, C, Lua, Smalltalk ... those languages are simple, clean languages that you can learn the syntax of in a few hours.

That begin said, to really get work done you need to understand the runtime environment, GUI and other frameworks, database/persistence, messaging, performance characteristics, etc., and that's vastly more complex than the syntax of the language. Even if you learn Python in a few hours (you can), there's no way you're going to understand the frameworks and how to get real work done in a real application in a few hours. Even in an environment that takes care of most of the details (like Google App Engine) it takes a few weeks to wrap your head around the High Availability Data Store, Google's APIs, etc.

I suppose you have a chance, if all your code needs to do is run on a command line, process stdin and generate stdout with no persistence. But that doesn't describe most applications these days.

You're picking random numbers to try to make a comparison that's not meaningful. 292 groups applying for tax-exempt status had names contained "tea party", "patriot", or "9/12", who were all given more scrutiny, and only 20 groups applying for tax-exempt status had names contained "progress" or "progressive". Of course, those numbers you care about are only about a third of the groups given deeper scrutiny - the large majority of groups investigated for possibly being political groups (and this not allowed to claim tax exempt status and hide their donor lists) weren't right-wing groups, they had terms like "Democrat", "Occupy" or "Israel" in their names, and only a third of the groups were right-wing groups, so the scrutiny wasn't politically biased against right-wing groups. If anything, it affected more left-wing groups than right. It was still a bad idea to use a list of terms to trigger deeper investigation, of course, but as the "BOLO list" system was put in place by a conservative Republican who was trying to make the system more efficient and consistent, and was applied to groups across the political spectrum, and the outcome was that only a third of the groups affected were right-wing, the evidence suggest that it wasn't politically biased against the right-wing.

The political bias that is most obvious is that the Inspector General's office in charge of the IRS audit had been asked by House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) "to narrowly focus on Tea Party organizations". And, of course, Issa kept most of the testimony secret, selecting a few bits to try to distort the program as anti-right-wing.

The reality is that using a list of terms to watch for is a bad mechanism, because it's substituting a mechanical rule for human judgement in making a determination about a group's being political vs. social, and that's wrong. But if you ignore the rhetoric, the facts don't support the accusation that the BOLO lists were aimed purely at right-wing groups. The real problem is that Congress passed a law requiring the IRS to make an extremely vague determination ("primarily political") so the IRS came up with a system for making that determination that pissed people off.

Looking at the lists, I can't see how most of them were ever granted tax exempt status. How can a group with a political party in its name, that raises money for and donates time to political candidates, not be a political group? The IRS should have rejected far more of the groups, both Republicans/Tea Party and Democrats, and instead of seems like all they did was ask a lot of questions and then approve almost every application, which seems a bit pathetic.

+1 this. The only time I've ever had Mac filesystem problems was when there were unexpected power loss. When you lose power while writing to the drive, bad things can happen. But I've not seen even that since Mac OS 7 or so. :-)

I used to work in supercomputing, and with terabytes of RAM and Petabytes of data I/O, you *bed* everything had ECC and parity bits every step of the way (yeah, extra parity bits in the RAM). And cosmic rays really do flip bits in RAM from time to time, and when you're running a $10M machine running a 2 month computation, you really do care about being able to detect the error, restore the machine's state to the previous snapshot, and keep running.

It's amusing to me that consumers now have enough data that this stuff starts affecting them. It'll be interesting to see if consumers start paying extra for the reliability.

The issue is that the headline and summary have HFS all over the place, and even say that "HFS corrupted files", when HFS wasn't relevant to the corruption - no standard filesystem protects you completely from disk drives' blocks going bad.

That being said, some of the high end SAN/NAS systems do have controls like forcing all blocks on the device to be read and (if needed) rewritten periodically, which would refresh the data and prevent "bit rot". But that's not done by the filesystem, either - it's a layer between the filesystem and the disk drives.

ZFS was a Sun project, and they've effectively killed it. Apple might have been looking at ZFS, but they never made it a part of their OS.

Shame, as it's a really nice filesystem. My previous file server was ZFS, and it was a delight. But it's kinda picky about what hardware it'll run on, and the old file server (dual Xeon) was just too power hungry to keep running at home...

To correct slightly - ECC isn't really about disk capacity. It's there because magnetic media isn't perfect, so even on a well written block there's a percentage chance of a read having a bit mis-read, and even on a failed read there's some percentage of good data read. The ECC lets the drive controller correct for those errors, so the vast majority of errors are corrected by the controller. A really smart controller or driver (GCC Technologies had this 20 years ago, perhaps they all do now) pays attention to ECC errors and re-writes blocks that have errors so that any marginal writes are rewritten with the user's data is protected before the block degrades to an unrecoverable failure, automatically. And if a read is so bad that ECC fails, you can re-try the read until you get a good enough read for ECC to recover the data, which almost always works, then rewrite it. If you do that, it's very, very hard to lose data on magnetic media, because it's nearly impossible for a block to go completely bad with no warning.

That being said, with the huge volumes of data that people use now, even a very rare percentage multiplied by that huge pile of data means they'll lose data. If you really care about that, you need to store your data on two physically separate devices, so a physical failure of one can't affect the other. This is expensive-ish, but that's the cost of protecting data. So an offsite backup is really the only solid option. Anything in your house can be affected by a fire, power spike, etc., so if you really care about the data, get CrashPlan or something like that.

No, in reality the IRS investigated all groups with political parties and movements in their names, since they're required by law (i.e. Congress) to only allow non-political groups to be granted tax exempt status. And the IRS investigated (and rejected) far more liberal groups than conservative groups. So (1) they were required to investigate political groups, so the investigation was not only proper, it was required by law passed by Congress, and (2) they didn't target Tea Party groups exclusively or even disproportionately.

So what were you complaining about?

Wow, the parent company was modded to zero despite being relevant, factual, and linking to more info. What pathetic person is so afraid of these facts that they mod them down instead of engaging in a rational discussion?

True, it's a "hack" but it's a pretty trivial hack.

I think you've hit on exactly the different between the two. Android feels like a computer in your pocket, where you deal with complexity (filesystem, memory management, APKs, etc.), and Apple's goal is to make it feel like a "smart phone", so they hide as much of the complexity as they can. Yes, the internals are similar (Mac OS X is pretty similar to Linux), but the difference is in how it all feels to users. And that's not just "prettier", but deeper - "does what I expect" and "it just works" and "easy to use" are important to most people, than the tech stuff that you think is "fundamental". To normal people, the tech stuff doesn't matter, except indirectly in that it enables the great user experience. So if you want a computer in your pocket, I'd agree, Android is a better fit. If you want a phone that is smart, that's Apple's goal.

Salesdrone recommendations are usually based on which ever company is paying "incentives" when you ask. Not that all sales people can be bought, but if you give a salesperson an extra $20 for selling your product, suddenly an awful lot of them will start insisting that your product is "best".

Really, an AC calling a guy who's been on Slashdot kinda forever of being a shill?! I don't think so...

A cloner might not care about violating patents, but that's not the only factor, because the patents are enforced on import and within the markets. That is, if a cloner violates US patents, they can't sell product in the US, and the same in the EU, Japan, etc. So MBI, like the vast majority of companies doing engineering, files patents in the major markets (US, EU) so that if someone else blatantly copies their products they have legal leverage to stop them from selling into those markets.

This defense works in the real world. A few months ago, one of the cloners copied Makerbot's newer designs (the case design and control layout), and because MBI kept those proprietary, violating MBI's designs locked the cloner out of the US and EU. As a result, the cloner was forced to make their printer look different, and not identical to MBI's products.

The result is that, as I said before, companies that are cloning Makerbot's printers are using the open designs, or doing original work, because they don't want to get shut out of the US and EU. Copying open designs and making them cheaply is easy, they're good at it, and it's entirely legal so it's low risk. Copying proprietary designs is more work, and has more risk. Occasionally they try, but enforcement in the US and EU is effective in preventing cloners from blatantly copying proprietary designs.