You're incorrect. The maps that I just picked up indicated limited-access freeways, divided highways, two-lane highways, lesser paved roads, unpaved roads, and forest service trails. Different lines for each type.

I do actually! It cost less than two smartphones!

Windows, you whore!

I wasn't saying that old smartphones were in any way comparable to modern ones. My point was that smartphone development has been occurring far longer than most people realize, and is in-parallel with PCs in that the performance characteristics of the device have outpaced the capabilities of the software and user experience to the point that there's not a whole lot of benefit in upgrading without an external reason to do so.

And as to your analogy of GPS vs maps, I can use a map without any electrical power, and I can identify on the map, if it's a good one, which roads my low-ground-clearance car can traverse, versus which roads my 2wd small pickup can traverse, versus which "roads" I'll need a 4x4 or truck with significant ground clearance to use. Most of the time the latter aren't even noted on GPS systems.

Smartphones well predate the Apple and Blackberry options. Palm and Qualcomm developed the pdQ-series in the nineties and they were on sale by 1999 and were direct variants on the Palm Pilot series of personal organizers, which themselves date back to the early nineties, and had many of the components that a phone-based device would want like an address book, a calendar, a tasks list, a calculator, etc.

And that's not even going into the other companies that built personal organizers around this same time.

I suspect that a good part of Samsung's slowing sales is consumers that are tired of spending more money all of the time to do the same thing. I've got a Galaxy SII. It does everything that I need it to do. It's paid for. I don't foresee any needs that a newer phone would fulfill, so short of a broken phone or a paradigm shift I don't see a need to shell out several hundred dollars to have essentially the same functionality.

Geek-chic likes to talk about and to chase the latest gadgets, but the hype really isn't as widespread as reports would indicate, and even those that have chased the newest have often gotten tired of doing it without any real, tangible improvements.

Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

Sometimes I wonder if all of the ACs are simply one bot with the electronic equivalent of schizophrenia talking to itself...

You could add to your solution. There's exactly one person that you could kill with a guarantee of facing no legal repercussions for the act...

if a human cannot determine if they just got a hummer from a machine or another human?

Gives a whole new meaning to, "My computer went down on me..."

...why the extremely low power draw requirement? Seems like for a dev box you'd want some horsepower, though you'd want to test on a box that's like your expected production machine...

I'm fully expecting an economic collapse to hit Dubai eventually, and this air conditioned paradise will turn into a blast-furnace hellhole.

Heh. I expect that the 'normal people' as referred to in the original article would find their use for the hammer in this analogy to be more on-par with their needs. They need to occasionally program something so that creation will do something for them.

To your other point, I had to do some maintenance on some 10+ year old perl today on a legacy system. I used vim, and while I'd never worked in perl before it was enough like C that I was able to make do. The script just does some network monitoring and presents an up/down list on equipment and is only about 150 lines long and reads from a 1500-entry flat-file, but that I was able to just jump-in and work on it without experience and that it needs little more than mod_perl says a lot for basic, normal-people languages and development environments.

The thing that bugs me the most is having to use node.js and ruby packages when there are Debian or Ubuntu packages for the same thing. I don't like it when there could be a situation with multiple, competing package managers writing the floor out from under each other.

It also doesn't help that this solution was chosen because it's free, but the vendor that wrote it doesn't even offer paid support, they want you to use their cloud-based solution and this is the hook to get you addicted so that when it breaks, since there's no documentation worth referring to, one basically has to throw them money.

Well, to expand on your analogy, when nail guns were new, they were huge, heavy, hard to operate, and required investment in hoses, and for most jobsites, an expensive gas-powered air compressor. The nails were also much more expensive as they required special rolls/loaders, and those input mechanisms were completely proprietary. Even today, the good nail guns that will last for a long time are not cheap, the gas-powered air compressors are still expensive, and the and the nail rolls/loaders are often still proprietary. One can easily get $2000 into a system right now just to hammer-in nails.

By contrast, a hammer, ranging between $5 at Harbor Freight Tools to $80 for a top-of-the-line deluxe framing hammer forged from olympus steel and quenched in the tears of angels will drive in almost any conventional nail that one needs, and unless abused will probably last as long as the owner will.


I'm working with some web software at the moment. It's the kludgiest amalgomation of crap that I've seen in quite some time. It's got OS library dependencies, but they need to be newer than one stable distribution's version, but older than another stable distribution's version, so one has to use unsigned third-party repositories for those. Then for Ruby on Rails and for Node.js it needs two other sets of proprietary repositories, and it needs specific versions of packages from those repositories too, not default, and it installs some redundant packages that were already covered by OS in slightly different version. Then once you go to put it in it requires MySQL for some of the dependencies but the main program itself only runs on PostgreSQL, so you're stuck with two DBs running, one doing almost nothing but required to be there.

This is sickening. This will make it almost impossible to do OS updates, and will cause all manner of problems if those third-party repositories ever go away, or if the developers for them stop maintaining those specific versions. It's dangerous and stupid to do this.