I tend to agree. I was slightly upset when the new connector was announced, but I never honestly expected them to go with a standard connector. After using Lightning for a few weeks now, I will say that it's a fantastic connector. It's sturdy, small, and reversible. There's not much more I could ask for.

That said, as you have above, there's no excuse for not having adapters available at launch. I also wonder how much of this was driven by Apple seeing 5 for $1 30-pin to USB cables online and thinking "we need to stop people from making cheap crap that works with our devices."

I also wonder if Apple had pushed up the date of the launch, perhaps to beat this Galaxy S III "Mini" we keep hearing rumored. There were stories of huge overtime mandates in China to make the launch, and it wouldn't be surprising if resources that could have been making cables and adapters were diverted to iPhone 5 assembly. Apple's stores here in the US don't have *any* accessories available for the iPhone 5s. That's a huge missed opportunity in terms of attached sales (adapters, cables, cases, etc.), and very uncharacteristic of Apple. To my mind, it has all the hallmarks of a product rushed to market.

Not only is possible and supported, it's also extremely common. I've worked on iOS game development in the past, and spent a lot of time discussing various cross-platform approaches in the community. Both iOS and Android allow for the possibility of coding your interfaces in their native language, which build on top of a C++ back-end.

Most cross-platform games and apps go this route because it allows a huge amount of code reuse between the platforms. The fact that it is so easy is the reason why you see so many cross-platform games, even from small development houses. Then you have ports of PC games like Grand Theft Auto, which draw heavily from their C++ roots with updated native interfaces. iOS in particular makes this absolutely brain-dead simple. Throw everything at Xcode, and let it sort out which compiler to use and how to link everything.

squiggleslash wants to convey that everyone writes in Objective C and Java so this isn't a big deal, but that's simply not the case. Using a C++ core is an extremely common approach to allow simultaneous iOS/Android development, especially among game developers.

The X has only been applicable since Mac OS has been on version 10. The X certainly wasn't part of the name when it was Mac OS 7, Mac OS 8, or Mac OS 9. Apple's been using Mac OS as the operating system name, followed by a version identifier, for over 15 years.

It does look like you're right in that Apple's not using the Mac part going forward, though, probably in preparation for further merging of iOS and OS X.

Well, to be fiar the claims were that they were immune to Windows viruses. "A Mac isn’t susceptible to the thousands of viruses plaguing Windows-based computers." This is accurate.

However, I agree that the intent was to deceive customers that Mac OS was completely immune to viruses using some deliberate wordsmithing.

it hasn't been called Mac OS for a decade now
Apple Menu -> About this Mac...

Yup, that's what I thought. Mac OS X. Mac OS is the name, X is the major version number.

He was "up to speed" just fine.

Of course, the problem is that there are numerous studies that show that traffic cameras do not "save lives," and go on to explain that the changes made to intersections to support them actually make those intersections more dangerous.

http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2010/03/08/red-light-cameras-pose-danger-safety-studies-find

Red light cameras decrease safety at the intersection primarily because they shorten the yellow light interval, and increasing the yellow light interval is what would actually make the intersection safer. The camera operators actually *require* a reduction of the yellow light interval, a situation definitively proven to case more accidents. States like Ohio have actually banned the use of red light cameras because of this. The operator's intentions are bad enough that if a city increases the yellow light interval to a safe level, the companies that own the red light cameras will actually remove them. They are a money grab and have nothing to do with safety or saving lives.

Speed cameras are a different matter, because depending upon the state, the highways they're installed on may have truly reasonable speed limits. There's still some abuse there, I'm sure, but not to the extent red light cameras are abused.

That might have been true if there weren't such a thing as a residency. Residency is the true limiting factor in the amount of certified doctors in the workplace, not the board certification test. While there are a small percentage of doctors who go through residency and fail boards repeatedly, the majority pass without further incident... even without cheating.

On a slight tangent, what is a cause for concern is that doctors are retiring faster than they're being trained. With the Boomer population aging, we're heading for a major shortage. The number of residencies in the country is primarily set by Medicare (though there are some privately-funded spots), which could be an issue should one of the attempts to slash Medicare funding ever go through.

Grey box and L-3 written on the side: Millimeter wave
Blue box and Rapiscan written on the side: X-ray

What is annoying about the Engineering licensing in the states that do have it is that it's heavily biased towards Civil and Mechanical Engineers, to the point where it is nearly impossible to pursue as an Electrical or Computer Engineer. This is because of the requirement that you train under a certified mentor with the same degree after your Fundamentals of Engineering exam. This is an exam that specifically required all engineers to know the ins and outs of Civil and Mechanical Engineering, items useless to an EE. Since the certification is not very useful to EEs and CompEs, there are very few mentors to train under, making it extremely difficult to get certified.

So the result for an Electrical or Computer Engineer is that you spend somewhere between 4 and 10 years getting Engineering degrees (depending on whether you do graduate studies), only to find you can't actually call yourself an Engineer. If you went to an Engineering school, graduated with an Engineering degree, and work as an Engineer, it is ridiculous to not be able to call yourself an Engineer.

The problem with SpiderOak is that the client is abysmal. The whole "syndication" process is insane, and highly prone to failure. I had SpiderOak for nearly 3 years, and had to completely wipe out the application and start from scratch several times. Each time this needed to be done, or each time you add a new machine, a new syndication process must be started. At least in my case, this process would fail about 80% of the time, requiring the user to start over from the beginning. The data was secure on the server during this time, but I'd be without a backup mechanism for weeks at a time while SpiderOak CS worked to fix it. At one point, they gave up and just made me a new account because there was a server-side issue with my old account that prevented any additional upload/download transactions from occurring.

Another example of how poor the client was: Say you accidentally select a large 20GB file for backup. SpiderOak adds it to the queue. You then realize there's a huge file in the queue you don't want backed up. Your options are: wait for the file to completely upload and then delete it, or run experimental commands from a command line to flush your queue. There's a high probability that commands run in the command line hose your installation requiring the lengthy reinstall noted above, so good luck! 3 years and they never added the ability to remove an item from the upload queue, despite it being requested over and over again on their forum. WTF?

The amount of free space you have available on your account is actually calculated by the client. Unfortunately, the client is extremely poor at it. As you get close to your account limit, it's a nightmare. The client includes files that will be de-duplicated in the backup estimation, which can cause the client to refuse to backup any further files even though you may have plenty of space. As a bonus, after awhile your space calculation can get off, requiring the use of a command line command to recalculate the space remaining properly.

Eventually, I just had no confidence in the operation of the client and decided to switch to a new service. I changed to CrashPlan about 6 months ago, and I have no idea why I endured SpiderOak for so long. The CrashPlan client inspires confidence, and my upload and restore speeds max out my connection. Couldn't be happier to be rid of SpiderOak. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

My post showed pretty clearly I understand, and I was simply conveying my story to illustrate it to others.

iMacs have supported secondary monitors since at least 2009 when I got mine. They may have supported them prior to that, but I couldn't say for sure.

Well, first, a Mac isn't Linux. Apple's in charge of making sure the drivers work with their limited hardware configurations, rather than Nvidia trying to support all hardware and all flavors of Linux.

Second, the iMacs use AMD/ATI graphics cards (mine's a Radeon HD 4850).

Nope.

My late 2009 27" iMac has faulty video drivers to this day, and Apple's acknowledged as much. A secondary display will display digital static every third or fourth time you wake it up. I gave detailed bug reports, and worked endlessly over a period of a year and a half with Apple engineers to track down the problem and get it fixed. I spent countless hours helping them track down the problem, going back and forth on the issue at least 10 times.

I got a notification two weeks ago that the problem was fixed, and updated drivers were released in the latest version of Snow Leopard (and Lion as well, I assume), but only if your hardware was manufactured after December 2010. They had the nerve to ask me to try it on new hardware to see if the problem is resolved.

So I spent all that time helping them, and they screwed me. This issue is a bigger problem than mine is, but I wouldn't expect anything but the very minimum possible to appease customers on anything but the absolute latest equipment.

Yeah, the people at the high end didn't get hammered nearly has hard as those on the low end with this price increase. Yours was just under a 3% increase, while my 1 at a time + streaming plan had a 61% increase ($9.99 to $15.98). The cost of that plan has doubled in just under 8 months, when it first went up from $8 to $10 in November.