" AOSP is the proprietary part"

No, AOSP is the free and open part. Android Open Source Project - https://source.android.com/

The Google cloud services are the proprietary part (Gmail, Hangouts, G+, etc). AOSP is a fine mobile operating system without any cloud services. Many third party ROMs for Android devices are pure AOSP. You can also put different cloud services in place of the Google services and distribute that to your hearts content, i.e. the Amazon Kindle.

I agree that Windows Phone is a very nice operating system. I tried an htc 8x for a few months and found it very capable in the basics. Email, phone calls, MMS were really quite good. For some people it may be a better choice than Android, though Android improves so fast that it's hard to be confident there. WP is absolutely not "crap" and honestly if we are comparing only the OS itself it is in league with any other modern mobile OS.

There are two serious problems with WP, IMHO. First we all know that the selection of apps is just awful. This is a chicken and egg problem, something Microsoft has had more success than most in solving before, so perhaps that can be corrected. However, the more serious problem is Microsoft's current strategy to create some sort of universal environment (I think a universal environment could actually work, but so far they are just doing it wrong) For example, you mentioned Win 9 providing unified apps that run on a desktop and a phone. This sounds like a perfect recipe for apps that *suck massively* on both the phone and the desktop. I can't see that helping either platform. Same with the desktop vs Metro issues in Win 8... I like Metro on my surface pro but it's worse than useless on my traditional desktop. There may be a way to have one OS to rule them all, but I'm not sure MS is going to figure it out.

Where did I leave my keys?

Does Billy like me like me, or really like me like me?

"Say what you will about Jobs, and from what I've read I'd say he was probably a sociopath, but the man did care about the quality of his products. If given the choice of shaving pennies and making something low quality or going for the better tech and raising the price Jobs always seemed to go for the latter which is probably why they built up a rep for quality products. "

I am not so sure about this. I readily agree it is a common belief that Apple has (or had) some kind of commitment to quality, but for years their products have been using the exact same components as basically everyone else. Open up a Mac from any of the last 10+ years and you will find the same CPUs, RAM, hard drives, graphics cards, etc as found in most PCs. I think by charging a lot more for the same components, putting them in a pretty case, and doing some very effective advertising they created a sense of added quality in their fan's minds without actually spending any extra pennies on actually providing anything above average. I don't know how well these same concepts apply to the iThings as they are not so easy to open up and look at the vendor names on the components :) but I suspect it's much the same as Apple's strategy with PC hardware. There have certainly been a fair number of hardware and software defects in the iPhone line (antenna-gate, the daylight savings fail, the daylight savings fail II (aka revenge of the incompetence), various crazy bandwidth consumer glitches, and so on), most of which predate Jobs untimely demise.

There is quite a bit of evidence to support how irrelevant factors can make huge influences on perceived "quality", for instance I recall watching a video where utility water out of garden hose was served in a fancy bottle and folks were asked if they preferred it to some major brand bottled water. Vast majority picked the hose water if it's packaging was made to appear "premium" compared to the alternative. Apple seems to have found ways to package their products to inspire a similar reaction.

Sorry, but one of my biggest clients has had nothing but problems with DreamHost. Given such different experiences, I recommend some serious research to anyone considering them.

This is the company that can't correctly implement daylight savings time in an alarm application. You expect them to handle something as complex as implementing an ages old industry standard correctly?

Apple is known for selling lots of shiny bobbles, not for writing solid code.

So Metro apps are really for game consoles, now I get why they make so little sense on a computer.

Point 1: The fact that you mention mac addresses and dos in the same question shows that you do not know enough about networking to assess this situation properly.

Point 2: Home internet connections don't get DOSed. There is no profit in it to justify the the effort or risk. Anyone with the skill and capability to attack a network most certainly has better things to do.

Point 3: All of your symptoms fit perfectly with a local problem. None of them match a DOS very well.

You very likely have a compromised PC or a PC running something like torrents/other P2P software that isnt properly configured. Use up all your outbound bandwidth either way and you will have exactly the situation described.

obligatory: wtf is this doing on slashdot? Its a basic home user networking issue.

Your computer is broken. Have it repaired. (Or stop trolling... Sometimes it's hard to tell so apologies for giving a serious answer if so)

The typical Win 7 machine is impressively stable. I haven't seen a blue screen in years.

Here is video of an older iPhone and os making exact same blue screen/restart.
Seems to take different actions to trigger, but not sure this is a new bug.
From the comments sounds like it wasn't too uncommon either..

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KjyQLlEHomQ

Apple just released a 64bit processor, and now AMD is copying it TEN YEARS ago?!?

Can the industry please do something original and quit just following wherever Apple leads it?

I think pretty much any opinion on the primary question already been offered. However I would add that whether or not you feel that your needs are challenging and/or require great programmers, a great programmer may very well be worth every penny they cost you and more.
Take a look at the daily wtf or other similar sites to see the huge cost a mediocre programmer can be to a company even in very simple applications. Even a minor change to a system can be done well or done poorly, and too many items done poorly can be a catastrophe.

You might not be doing mission critical projects, but when generating a TPS report coversheet brings your network to its knees because some mediocre programmer doesn't know or care what she's doing, it sucks and it costs money.

1. Us government creates Tor.

2. Us government can audit Tor traffic.

Who exactly is surprised by this??

Seriously, isn't Apple supposed to do all my thinking for me? Why the hell should I have to use my brain and think critically about what software I install on a computer I own is doing? I pay Apple to do that for me. This is bullshit.

I'll bite..

I want a surface (pro) tablet because my users want tablets but like millions of businesses, mine is run using software that cannot execute on iOS or Android and porting everything would suck or be impossible at this time. The surface pro solves a very real problem for my IT dept. We have deployed hundreds and receive positive feedback constantly.

The non pro surface, on the other hand, is of no interest.

Totally agree that putting GPS and the internet into a phone is pretty great. However... the iPhone wasn't the first device to do this, not even close to the first device that did this. I had multiple Windows Mobile devices, a Nokia, and an HP/Compaq device that *all* did all those things long before the iPhone was released, as in years before. Hell, the original iPhone didn't even have apps, yet I was installing my own programs on my WinMobile phone long before the iPhone came out.

You can argue that the devices prior to the year the iPhone came out kind of sucked at doing all those things, and I would absolutely agree. But they did exist and they did perform all of the functions the iPhone could and more. To give Jobs so much credit for simply improving on those things some seems pretty wrong (and most of the improvement attributed to the iPhone was actually made possible due to *other companies* improvements in technologies like mobile CPUs and batteries that occurred that same year, which is the real reason why "after the iPhone came out everybody made similar phones").