If the startup made the same huge profit margins that Apple does, I don't see why doing any of these things would be a problem.

The real lesson is that you'll need your customers to pay *a lot* more than it costs to make something if you want to do silly, expensive things while making it.

I see a lot of "I can already do the same things on my phone" posts, but that doesn't close the book on smartwatches for me.

A phone can do everything a tablet can do. A laptop can do everything that a phone or tablet can do. A desktop can do everything a laptop can do. Go back to the start of microcomputers and there is the "the office mainframe can do everything a PC can do" argument.

All of the above platforms succeeded because they helped people do mostly the same things (or a subset of overlapping things) but added some advantage in portability, cost, ease of use, etc.

Google's official vision for Android Wear is interesting because it clearly explains where Google thinks the advantage for watches will be: timely notification of important information *without* interrupting what you are doing. If you're not understanding why you'd want to own a smartwatch, it is worth reading:

https://developer.android.com/...

I wouldn't say the current crop of hardware and software delivers this vision all that well, but if this is the goal then I will remain interested. Apple's strategy seem less focused and more of just "hey, it's yet another thing like an ipod or an iphone or an ipad, but tiny". Maybe that isn't accurate, I haven't spent as much time reading about their platform yet, just a first impression.

I gave up on the Pebble long ago (found it mostly useless), but one thing I do remember is that I was constantly running out of battery while out and about. I've been using an LG G watch for quite a while now, and running out of battery has never been an issue.

It is counter intuitive, but the LG's ~36 hours better life actually works much more reliably for me than the Pebble's two days (when it goes all buggy) to 7-8 days (when it doesn't, and you mostly ignore it), The reason is that I *know* I charge the LG every night, just like my cell phone. I quickly got into the habit of setting the watch down on it's charger thing as I put my wallet, phone, whatever on the nightstand etc. The LG is forgiving enough if you do forget to charge that you'll probably make it at least till noon the next day, but I almost never forget for the simple reason that it's a short, consistent pattern.

With the Pebble, I didn't want to wear out the battery by partially discharging each day then charging back to full each night (TBH I don't know if it's battery works that way, I just figure less charge cycles is probably "good" somehow.. shrug). So I tried to remember to check, pay attention to the low battery alert, whatever. It just didn't work. It was much more tedious and failure prone then just knowing I set something in a certain place each night. Sure, I could have just said screw it and charged it every night regardless, but then it's only equivalent to the Android options at best.

yeah, except for the part where it actually works fine in sunlight.

I've been messing around with an LG G watch for several weeks now (part time android dev, just getting to know the platform). It lasts over 24 hours on a charge, often approaching 48 hours if I don't fool with it a whole lot and turn off the "always on" display. To me, this is quite reasonable. Set it on the charger when you take it off each night, but if you do forget, it will still work for a good part of the next day. FWIW the battery life on the Moto X is similar, about 36 hours, and being able to use the phone all morning even when i fail to charge the night before has been very, very handy. I suspect if you're a heavy watch user you would appreciate the "day and a half" range of battery life in a similar manner.

As for the 360.. Initial reports from early users said they were getting "almost two days", which would correlate with what I've seen on the LG G, and make it perfectly reasonable in the battery life department IMHO. However, as the official reviews come out today it seems they are reporting ~25% of the LG G lifespan, which is insanely awful... If true, that puts the 360 firmly into the useless category.

definitely won't be people

Since we can assume XP will never change once support is over, can't we then do new things to secure it that were impractical in the past?
Hard coded file checks, read only filesystems, out of band checks and so on.. It wouldn't take much to install Linux on a USB key and have it check the local HDD or even just overwrite the OS files at boot, and that's just the first idea that comes to mind. Maybe a bios that won't boot if any of the xp boot files are changed, etc. I'm not saying it's ideal, but it seems like a once moving target is now static, so maybe that can be leveraged to create some safety, especially for the types of systems that are required to continue using XP (I.e. not consumer desktops).

Many of those subjects *are* required in American high schools. Electricity and the principles of combustion engines/mechanical systems are covered in physics and chemistry. The math used to manage finances and in food recipes is covered by traditional math classes, even in elementary school. Biology covers the mechanisms behind producing a child, if not the parenting.

There is value in understanding the basic concepts of computing, just as there is value in the basic concepts of chemistry, physics, biology, etc.

" 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.