I think that it is very context dependent. Think of it this way:

You have an instrument monitoring something, it is remote. You poll it every hour. In the first 10 hours you get some values. One of those values is zero (0) and that is a valid value for that particular measurement. In second 10 hours you notice you have some null's. Should I interpret those as zero or should I interpret those as no data acquired ?

I do know that Oracle will not count null values when doing any kind of averaging.

As someone who is a programmer, but had never had an Apple Desktop or Laptop until my wife and son got me one for Christmas this pas year I have to say X-Code needs more polish.

I say this because I was / Am a heavy user of Delphi ( Yup Object Pascal ). You might think OP is a toy but you could not be more wrong, but that is another argument. What I can say definitively is that Borland and now Embarcadero know how to do an IDE better then just about anything I have ever seen.

Apple needs to take a page out of their playbook. In Delphi when you add a component to a form, it adds ALL the code that you need to the unit that is handling the form. A simple double click on the element adds the code shell for that particular action, either from the object browser or from the form. You simply write the code that makes that action do what it needs to do, nothing else.

Now contrast this with X-Code... It will let you drag a component onto a form, in iOS Mavericks or whatever, but after that you have to and start screwing around in .h files, adding this adding that just so that element will be recognized and will compile. Couple that with the syntax of Objective C and you have a program that can only be written by someone who fairly in-depth knowledge of Objective C. I mean not they should not have to have that knowledge but it should not be a requirement to do basic forms and the like.

As it is mentioned, using the "Story Board" concept you can only write very simple apps that don't accomplish a whole lot. So while Apple is getting there they have a lot of ground to cover.

That's not strictly true, at least not in some big cities and college towns that had decent coffee shops pre-Starbucks. It was really quite sad where I was living at the time when Starbucks came to town and basically started taking over spots that used to be indy coffee shops. Sure, not all of them were great, but they were generally better than Starbucks... Which frankly is terrible. Even if they had decent coffee, I wouldn't prefer to go there because of the pretentious BS of it all. No, I don't find it sophisticated or even cute to call sizes by some bizarre names, no I don't want to be asked 20 questions including my name just to order a plain standard drink. In Italy, you can find better coffee on any block at the local bar, and they don't need any of this crap "grande white chocolate mocha 1% with whip" to serve up something decent. You don't need white chocolate syrup and whipped cream to make a decent espresso taste good. I'd personally rather get a coffee from Dunkin Donuts than Captain Ahab's mate's joint.

Gun Control. Legalized Drugs. Health Care. Terrorism. Tough on Crime. Gay Marriage.

We, the electorate, have a laundry list of issues that are important to us. While the wealthy care about just one thing: their pocket books. It's easy to divide and conqueror us.

IBM Rational has a product called CLM, an expensive software lifecycle management system, for which the bug and backlog lists are public. So your marketing might want to consider this. Then again, CLM is targetting developers, a crowd that is used to the notion that software has bugs. If you are selling your product to marketing, sales and other professional liars, you might want to hide the bugs. Reality frightens these guys.

It sounds a lot like chronic fatigue. Something breaks and your body just doesn't deliver energy to the muscles properly any more, including the brain. As well as being tired you can think straight and become forgetful. There is no way to fix it.

While this is certainly true, I don't think your general conclusions follow from this fact.

The biggest expense is getting things into orbit, as you point out. It requires a certain amount of fuel for every pound or kilo of stuff we want to lift up there.

Given that space isn't exactly filled with random supplies (food, fuel for other missions, etc.) floating around, most of it is still going to have to come from Earth. So, exactly HOW is it cheaper to launch a mission from space if we still need to lift all the supplies from Earth anyway? Eventually, if we start being able to ferry people between a space station, the moon, other places, etc., we wouldn't have to lift the PEOPLE up again (if they're willing to basically live in space), but it's going to take quite a while until we can actually have a mechanism for deriving most of the other necessary SUPPLIES for missions from space... which will just have to be lifted up off the ground from Earth anyway.

So, what you're proposing is rather than flying ONE "high cost" mission up through the Earth's atmosphere, we should spend years or decades launching dozens (hundreds?) of times that material up through the atmosphere to build a giant space station or moonbase or whatever. And meanwhile, we have to keep sending up supplies continuously for any people there.

How exactly is that supposed to save costs??... except perhaps in a REALLY long term, assuming that space travel becomes an established thing in the next few decades (which is far from determined... maybe it'll catch on a few decades, maybe in a century or more).

From my perspective, this whole "Mission to Mars" idea is mostly a kind of propaganda move, though not in a negative sense. As other posters have said, why else bother sending humans? Robots can do just fine. But, just like the moon missions in the 1960s and 70s, this is supposed to reignite the public interest in space travel, which will make it easier to raise the kind of funds necessary to build your space station or whatever.

The first missions will be sort of "proof of concept." You're proposing investing in a giant infrastruction that will likely cost hundreds or even thousands of times the cost of one mission just to save some phantom money on not having to lift things out of Earth's gravity to launch a mission to Mars (when we had to lift most of that from Earth anyway to the space station or whatever).

I'm not saying your idea is bad in the (VERY) long term. But right now the psychological effect of launching one slightly more expensive mission that achieves a bigger goal may provide a spark. And that spark may get more people interested in the much larger amount of funding necessary to create the incredibly expensive infrastructure which you argue should make things cheaper.

The 6502 may have run at a little under 1MHz, but it was efficient. Most instructions were one or two cycles and they did a lot. It's actually a really fun processor to write for because it's both a nice architecture and very challenging to get the most from.

That's how Steve Jobs always presented new iPhones. Faster, thinner, longer battery life, one or two major new features. The major new features no one else has part seem to have gone, and while faster the 6 is in most common operations about the same as a Nexus 5. Battery life is about the same. So they cling to being slightly thinner.

I had a funny thought. The only other product I can think of that is obsessed with getting thinner is condoms.

Last I heard they were admitting to nine reports of bending, but the reality is we don't have a true figure at this time. It was the same with the antenna problems. They denied many people had them but eventually fixed it anyway with a free bumper.

I imagine somewhere in Apple's labs they are testing strengthened cases

The problem seems to be twofold. Firstly it's weaker than average for a high end phone, and people probably associate metal with being stronger than plastic so expect more from it. It's also a big change from the pervious model.

Secondly phones made of other materials return to their original shape much more easily. Of you look at most of the images of iPhones that were bent in people's pockets the bend is slight. Other phones recover from that, the iPhone 6 remains bent.

The film did its level best to condense a really great book into 90 minutes. The actors were genuine, they really got into it and they took some of the themes and made them poignant yet not overly so.

While it will never be among the worlds best movies, it really did better than I have ever seen trying to take a book like HGTTG and give it cinematic life.

And their use of actual costumes ( created by the late Jim Hensen's company ) was so MUCH better than CGI. All in all it was a good film.

As is the case a lot (not all) of the time with Apple. They're worth a lot in click-bait, so what you do is try to find something outrageous to say about a popular product, put adverts on the page to generate you cash, and try and profit from the massive public interest in yet another Apple product...

Or maybe I'm getting too cynical in my old age.

Simon

they are capable for a little while. Usually the 90 days to get out of any warranty work. Maybe a few of 'em even run at the clock freqs without crashing. It's not just clock freq either. Nvidia shuts off broken cores in software. You're games might run but they'll crash a lot. What Nvidia's worried about is that You'll blame them for a buggy card and go buy AMD. It has major brand damage potential especially with Alibaba about to become a household word what with their IPO.

I'm guessing this is a response to Alibaba, where you can buy a $300 graphics card for $100 so long as you're OK with being an $80 card with a flashed bios. Remember folks, if it looks too good to be true it probably is :(.