In terms of revenue, Apple is following the money. iOS has made Apple the wealthy powerhouse that it is today, not OS X. They don't want to lose the installed base or be perceived as just a phone company; OS X gets them mindshare and stickiness in certain quarters that matter (i.e. education and youth) for future iOS revenue.

But they don't actually want to invest much in it; it's increasingly the sort of necessary evil that is overhead, so it makes sense for them to shift to an iOS-led company. In the phone space, where the consumer upgrade cycle is tied to carrier contracts and upgrade cycles, it's important to have "new and shiny" every single year; consumers standing in AT&T shops are fickle people that are easily swayed by displays and sales drones that may or may not know anything about anything.

So the marketing rationale at Apple is (1) follow the revenue, which is mobile and iOS, (2) do what is necessary to stay dominant there, which means annual release cycles at least, and (3) reduce the cost of needed other business wings as much as possible so as to focus on core revenue competencies without creating risk, which means making OS X follow iOS.

It makes perfect business sense in the short and medium terms. In the long term, it's hard to see what effect it will have. It's entirely possible that they could wind down the OS X business entirely and remain dominant and very profitable as a result of their other product lines. It's also possible that poor OS X experiences and the loss of the "high end" could create a perception problem that affects one of their key value propositions, that of being "high end," and that will ultimately also influence their mobile sales down the road in negative ways as a result.

I'm a Linux switcher (just over five years ago now) that was tremendously frustrated with desktop Linux (and still dubious about its prospects) after using Linux from 1993-2009, but that has also in the last couple of months considered switching back. I switched to OS X largely for the quality of the high-end applications and for the more tightly integrated user experience. Now the applications business is struggling (the FCP problem, the Aperture events, the joke that is the iOS-synchronized iWork suite) and third-party applications have declined in quality (see: MS Office on OS X these days) as other developers have ceded the central applications ground to Apple. Meanwhile, the user experience on iOS remains sound but on OS X it has become rather less so as a result of the iOS-centricity of the company.

What to do? I've considered a switch back to Linux, but the Linux distros I've tried out in virtual machines have been underwhelming to me; the Linux desktop continues, so far as I can tell, to be in a worse state for my purposes than it was in 2008. I have no interest in Windows (I have Win7 and Win8 installations in VMs for specific applications, and even in a VM window they make me cringe; just complete usability nightmares).

It's a frustrating time for desktop users in general, I think; the consumer computing world has shifted to mobile/embedded devices and taken most of the labor, attention, and R&D with it. The desktop, needed by those of us that do productive computing work, has been left to languish on all fronts. It's completely rational in many ways at the macroeconomic level, but at the microeconomic level of individual workers and economic sectors, it's been a disaster.

to the media by making it easy to browse through, search, access, and stream.

And they're paying regular price.

We live in a very strange world when "piracy" has gone from "armed crews of criminal specialists seizing tonnage shipments of goods on the high seas with cannon and sword" to "a regular schmo paying the regular price to use a regular product in the regular way in his regular living room."

Hard to believe that the word still retains any of its negative connotation at all.

"Piracy" these days sounds an awful lot like "tuesday afternoon nothing-in-particular with tea."

Nice rhetorical argument with yourself -- however, the issue from my point of view is Wikileaks is being targeted for being one of the last few "journalist' organizations. Corporate Media investigates it's holding companies and advertisers in the USA and they never find anything wrong. However, on sweeps week you will find out from Action News that there is a repairman who charges you for a new muffler but puts in an old one, and there are some government workers they caught napping.

The real issue from my point of view is that Wikileaks is not being investigated for wrong-doing -- they are being investigated to find out who their sources are. It's supposed to be a Democratic Representative government here and that's impossible without an informed electorate -- so any group; CIA, NSA or Al Qaeda that wants to keep you from the truth and put out false information is against what America is supposed to be about.

Wikileaks is not untouchable and above criticism, but they are one of the most important and precious things to America and the world right now, and the NSA and CIA look like the fascist dirt bags we were warned about. At every turn they prove why they should be mothballed. Keeping us safe from worse bad guys? Right. And next year the bad guys will get worse because they can't fight back against a drone. They attack what they can attack where it gets the most attention because we live in a world of asymmetrical warfare. Going head to head doesn't work. Protesting murders for marketshare doesn't work.

We have Wikileaks because our news media dropped the ball, and we have terrorism because we don't listen to people who suffer.

Very little useful learning goes on in school. And the top students need time outside of school to visit libraries, pursue intellectual hobbies, do independent reading, and generally do all the academic stuff that will actually matter in their lives later on (and matter to society later on).

By continually extending the school day and the school year, we increasingly ensure that we lock our best and brightest into mediocrity by tying up all of their time in institutionally managed busywork designed to ensure they don't deviate from the mean, which is pretty piss-poor.

After 30 years working in software development I've not seen a return to the bad old days as you suggest.

Well, I suppose if things are good for you then the problem is solved for all time.

Union negotiated rules are laws means you've got benefits on the backs of the efforts of others -- you're welcome. The fact that a lot of hourly employees at blue collar jobs work unpaid hours due to task quotas is also not your problem.

As soon as some Jim Crow Laws were repealed in red states because "we didn't need them any more" -- lawmakers went about abusing the election system before the ink was dry.

There is so much that is getting worse for workers and most people I know don't think their kids will have more opportunity than them. Have you heard some Republicans leaders talk about repealing certain labor laws because we don't need them any more? Probably not your problem.

It's irrelevant what the conditions on those other products are because the companies haven't shouted from the roof tops how much they are doing to prevent the situation

So the fact that Forbes and other news agencies only mentioned Apple as "having slave labor camps" and not mentioning the thousands of other US companies using the same facilities, which required Apple to YET AGAIN go out of their way to try and improve conditions --- now leads to more responsibility on Apple's part because they've tried to improve conditions, they state on a web page that it's their intent (that's not really wanky advertising -- nobody finds that page unless they search for it).

So fuck -- here we are with another story that ONLY mentions Apple and you have no problem with that, but it's still "all Apple" because they had to defend their reputation. WTF?

Apple has no damn control in these factories other than moving their business. They have pressured to improve conditions -- but the workers are all clamoring to work at these factories and they fall asleep on other assembly lines. Why does it matter if it's an iPhone or a Sony Tablet?

There's also a lot of smog in these worker districts. I think a lot more corporations need to step up and have standards. The only real way to improve worker conditions is to support tariffs on imports and labor unions -- but that's gone out of style in America.

Wow, "on the internet" means the FBI is always involved because -- hey, it crosses state lines!

So now some media side show and innuendo flame war has caught the attention of three letter agencies. Good, they need another excuse not to go after bankers and people with power doing lot's of crimes and bust some more hippies saving trees.

My guess is that some corporations or interest groups are sending money to politicos in these neighboring states because they want to stop the legalization of drugs.

Or the cops are complaining because they can't get what they used to on confiscated marijuana.

Honestly, if they could hand out pot at high schools to keep kids off Meth -- that would be an improvement.

Isn't thunder created by the vacuum of a collapsing ion trail from the lightning itself?

So the lightning creates a super charged plasma, and that heat and ionization forms a vacuum. Coupled with anti-matter and xray burst you get your perfect Gamma-Ray engine.

Now I did read that we could scan for life outside our solar system by looking for ionized light -- seems that the "left-handed chirality" of amino acids is do to the right-handedness of the more common organic compounds that a Yellow star creates. The right and left-handed carbon compounds cancel out over many reactions and the slight nod to right-handed means they are more plentiful. Since "more building blocks" equals less energy, life -- at least on earth, ended up being left-handed chemical bonds.

A plethora of left-handed carbon compounds on a planet full of life means that the light that bounces off of it will be polarized.

However -- if we can say that Lightning is created on planets with magnetospheres and oxygen, and likely is the catalyst for life (well, that's my guess -- regards to Mary Shelley). Then we might "more easily" find likely life-baring planets by detecting Gamma-Ray bursts. Should stick out more than polarized light.

Detecting both gamma-ray and polarization might give us a statistical probability for life. We will need some actual sample data more than one, however.

An English major is NOT getting into a STEM Ph.D. program, no matter what.

Even if they were, job prospects are worse for STEM Ph.D. holders than for MS/BS holders—there are far fewer jobs that require Ph.D. level qualifications outside of the professoriate and academics, and for Ph.D. holders in particular, employers are absolutely loathe to hire overqualified people.

Inside the professoriate and academics, the job market is historically bad right now. It's not "get a Ph.D., then become a lab head or professor," it's "get a Ph.D., then do a postdoc, then do another postdoc, then do another postdoc, then do another postdoc, really do at least 6-7 postdocs, moving around the world every year the entire time, and at the end of all of that if you've managed to stay employed at poverty wages using highly competitive postdocs that you may not even get, while not flying apart at the emotional seams, you may finally be competitive enough to be amongst the minority of 40-year-old Ph.D. holders that gets a lab or a tenure-track position, at which point the fun REALLY begins as you are forced onto the grantwriting treadmill and feel little job security, since universities increasingly require junior faculty to 'pay their own way' with external grants or be budgeted out."

And that's INSIDE STEM, which this person is almost certainly likely to be uncompetitive for as a B.A. holder trying to get into graduate programs.

Much more likely is that with great grades and GRE scores they'll be admitted to a humanities or social sciences Ph.D. program, with many of the same problems but with CATASTROPHICALLY worse job prospects due to the accelerating collapse of humanities budgets and support on most campuses.

Ph.D. is absolutely not the way to go unless you are independently wealthy and are looking for a way to "contribute to the world" since you don't actually have to draw a salary.

For anyone with student loans, it's a disastrous decision right now, and I wouldn't recommend it.

I say this as someone with a Ph.D. who is on a faculty and routinely is approached by starry-eyed top students looking to "make the world a better place" and "do research." Given the competition out there right now, only the superstars should even attempt it, and then only if they're not strapped for cash. Hint: If you don't know whether or not you're a superstar, you're not.

I think in a decade I've strongly recommended that someone enter a Ph.D. program once, and greeted the suggestion favorably maybe three times total, out of thousands of students, many of them with the classic "4.0 GPA" and tons of "books smarts."

In short, I disagree strongly with the suggestion. Unless you absolutely know that you're competitive already on the academic market, DO NOT GO. Don't listen to the marketing from the schools; it's designed to drive (a) your enrollment and tuition, and/or (b) your cheap labor as a teaching assistant/research assistant forever once you're in the program. It's a win for the institution, not for you.

The easiest sanity checks: Do you know exactly what your dissertation will be about and what you'll need to do, in broad strokes to conduct your research, as well as what resources you'll need? Do you already have personal contact with faculty on a well-matched campus in a well-matched department that are championing you and that want to bring you in as one of their own students/assistants?

If you answers to either one of these questions is "no," then while you may be offered a position somewhere, you will be on the losing end of the deal and would be naive to take it.

You can paint a sign on an elephant and call it a Petunia for all I care. Hitler has more in common with our Republican/Conservative Party in the USA than almost anything you could mention right now.

Both sides are allowing the wealthiest to buy the rules -- so in a few more years, it won't really matter who runs the stage show. I want a living wage, and I don't want to panic about health care and retirement. Even risk-taking super trapeze artists can use a safety net. Hitler was Progressive only in the sense that he made progress. He was socially regressive however. Remember, they persecuted people.

Whomever is not for war, not for companies over people, doesn't manipulate currencies, and above all else, values human life the most -- well, that's the person who is not like Hitler. Which group is suggesting we send a bunch of latin American refugees back across the border when the drug cartels are slaughtering school buses full of people? A lack of compassion and blind obedience to ideals is the direction of fascist pricks -- call it anything you want.

From the look of things, this is already happening:

http://www.terapeak.com/blog/2...

Congress does understand. And if you keep a copy of the Fourth Amendment on your computer or cell phone, that's one of the many things that will flag you as a trouble maker.

So you agree with Johnny Ives then?