Anybody bother to check to see if the app has been pulled before providing a billion web hits to this app? No? Great! I have a feeling my app is about to be pulled too.

"How do you keep them interested if the only thing they can do after a week is..."

Then keeping them interested is not your problem. Getting them interested in the first place is your problem. Would you ask a football player if they want a career mowing the lawn, or laying the chalk? When he learns to drive a car, are you going to suggest he becomes a mechanic? How about when he calls his girlfriend? Are you going to suggest being a telecoms engineer or a gynecologist?

My dad bought a computer when I was 11. I wrote my first text-based adventure game when I was 11. When I was 14 I made my dad drive me 50 miles to the only place in the country (the UK) that sold a hardware debugger for my computer so I could debug assembly language properly.

I've worked programmers who didn't start programming till college. Their heart just isn't into it and it shows. I get frustrated with them, and they get confused by my passion and excitement.

Except that they wont tell you how, (the documentation is not detailed enough), and if you reverse engineer theirs then they can sue you.

Do you actually believe words posted on a corporate website? Forget even basic fact checking, you're telling me you're default setting is "believe"?

1. I Believe
2. Take with a pinch of salt.
3. Will fact check.
4. Its probably corporate bullshit, but will fact-check.
5. It all evil corporate lies

You're at 1 on this scale are you?

See, I'm kinda confused on the economical part, as a developer.

Java developer: OS=linux (free). Editor = Eclipse (free) or IntelliJ ($499(
Silverlight developer: OS = Windows $199. Editor = Expression Blend $599
Flash Developer: OS = Windows $199. Editor = Flash CS5 $699

So, Flash costs the most money.

I think the issue may be, however, that jQuery is open source, while Flash isn't. If Adobe open-sourced the flash player, all this trouble would go away.

You seem to be assuming that only Adobe makes a browser plugin that does graphics / video / audio etc.

Uh huh. Yes we all remember how great Flash ran on Linux from the get-go. For a while you had more luck running win32 apps on linux than a flash app. So I disagree with your statement that they have a point. It may be that it currently runs on all PC-based platforms, at this present time but that was not always the case, and is unlikely to be the case in the future. It certainly runs like ass on OSX, and leaks like hell.

When you talk about apple, you seem to be suggesting that what they are doing is bad. So Apple driving people to their platform is bad, but Adobe driving people to their platform is good? How odd.

Flash is a platform, just like win32, windows forms, silverlight, Carbon, Cocoa, X etc are platforms. Some are open, most are not. Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, all want to drive you to their platform because that is how they make money. This is capitalism. But you don't have to buy any of the bullshit any more than you have to buy their products. I find it odd that you like that taste of Adobe's. Apparently even people who eat shit like to argue about whose tastes better...

Windows MCE, Netflix, DVD/HD-DVD/BluRay
Netflix on OSX, Windows, iPad :-)
John Stewart is online.
For "OTA" TV, I just use ABCs internet player.
Ah, speaking of which, there's a new V to watch. When ever I want.

The reason GPUs are so fast at raw number crunching is the same reason that they are bad at general purpose CPU work: they delete everything from the die except what they need for doing the same instruction on many cores at once.

They don't handle random memory access, they don't branch effeciently, and most importantly, they don't do any of this for a single core: a single core executes the exact same instruction stream as 16 or more of its neighbors.

The result is much less cache, and much less instruction logic, which means many more cores per GPU. But all that extra logic is exactly what makes a CPU good at doing what it does. Running apache on a GPU?? Forget it.

Now there are certainly some interesting and esoteric things that we can do with processor and software design to make a massively parallel apache server possible, but turning the CPU into a GPU isn't one of them.

So every single reply has been "don't use your computer for work", or "make them give you one". I have to wonder if you ever read slashdot. That you even asked the question in the first place makes me think that you actually do not know *why* everyone is posting the same answer:

How many times have we read about "stupid companies" that let their employees wander around with sensitive data on unencrypted devices, like credit card numbers and health care information.

Very small bricks, one assumes. Or perhaps you should work out more. Oh, wait, where am I? Sorry!

I agree. The iPad, however, doesn't.

I was ill for two days this week. I grabbed my iPad and watched some new shows that I've not had time to check out. ABC's iPad app let me watch Castle and V in 720p. Then I watched some movies on Netflix. I also bought the latest book from Steven Erikson using iBooks.

It wasn't too heavy.
It has a bigger screen than my netbook, and its stunning.
It didn't get too hot like my netbook does when watching movies. I *hate* frying my balls.
The wife's netbook can't watch 720p movies at all.
I didn't have to have it plugged in, so I could move it about easily while I tried to get comfortable. Charged it overnight.
When I was done puking, I wiped it clean with disinfectant.

I'm not sick all the time, of course. The wife uses it and her iPhone. Her netbook hasn't been touched for months. The iPad is "just" a more usable iPhone for her. Its set up with her email, not mine (and she did it herself - amazing what she can do when I'm not around). I will be buying two more for our children.

Why would it not *be* your cell phone? Motorola Droid: linux, 5mp camera, 3G + wifi, battery.

A jammer would work against the hacker version I just wrote for my Android, but for these devices to really take off, they would have to be immune to such a trick, which is extremely easy to do assuming the military would allow the public to own such a device.

However, if everyone had one, at least it would reduce the chances of some prick in a bar who thinks violence is an acceptable expression of offense, jammer or no jammer. And of course, turning on the jammer would be useful warning in and of itself.

The "right" to not be recorded benefits no one but criminals. It means proof of a crime cannot be admitted as evidence. If *everything* was recorded all the time, we'd live in a much better, and freer world.