Maybe they just operate on a five-year cycle; just wait when in 2014 they'll announce that spatial was actually better, and they'll return to it yet again.

"... Kate Lister, author of Undress for Success — The Naked Truth about Making Money at Home..."

Admit it, your first thought was "webcam stripper". Mine was :-)

The website at http://undress4success.com/ is actually quite interesting.

And, no, it ain't a webcam stripper :-)

Yes. You could have dusted off a computer magazine from the '80s and then type in by hand a game you found in one of them. On the on-screen keyboard. You could probably accomplish this in few days of typing.

(For those too young to remember, computer magazines in the '80s sometime published printed source code for small games that the readers could type in by hand to play the games.)

That's why Apple's objection was stupid.

“One of the reasons I have long supported the U.S. biotechnology industry is that it is a homegrown success story that has been an engine of job creation in this country.”

So was the chemical industry in Germany in 1940s. Appealing to these arguments is a very weak justification, IMHO. The Big Pharma can certainly hire some better speech writers than this.

As if I'm not distracted enough as it is :-)

So, you think you have it bad that your Atom Hackintosh will forever stay on 10.6.1?

Guess what, my PowerPC *genuine* Mac will forever stay on 10.5.8.

Apple is often not supportive even of older hardware they sold few years ago.

Examples:

As mentioned, Mac OS X 10.6.0 doesn't support the PowerPC CPUs while the 10.5.x did. I have a fairly strong (even by today's standards), last generation G5 PowerPC Mac that I bought in December 2005 (one month before they confirmed the Intel switchover rumors) that is now doomed to never run Snow Leopard. I could now go around and holler "APPLE BASTARDS BLOCKED PowerPC IN 10.6.0", right?

Or I could be annoyed by the fact that even when Leopard came out, PPC experience was already "downscaled" compared to Intel Leopard - i.e. no Java 6, no support for certain HD video codecs, etc.

Heck, not even Macs with 32-bit Intel CPUs could have Java 6 under Leopard. Curiously, they do in Snow Leopard, but I digress.

Recent news was that on some older (2006) Intel Mac models (some of them already 64-bit), you won't be able to install Windows 7 via BootCamp. (This one I don't care much about, but some people certainly will.)

As you can see, even their own hardware gets left in the dust. I'm not ruling out deliberate malice on their part, but I'd rather assume they recompiled the kernel and libraries with compiler options that benefit their current CPU lineup the most, and it turned out to be incompatible with Atom, and they shrugged and said, "so what? We aren't supporting any hardware with Atom CPU anyway". Even if they did it deliberately, they can just claim that they did it as an effort to optimize performance for their current hardware.

At the end of the day, there's many more Hackintoshes out there than just Atom-CPU based ones, why would they go after specifically after the Atom ones? Those aren't even competition to Apple's hardware business - Apple doesn't have a netbook offering, and they don't consider MacBook Air to be one. People buying a netbook aren't a market Apple targets.

So, I think it's much more plausible that end of (accidentally working until now) Atom support is being a collateral effect of them doing some improvements. However, if it's not deeply baked in, then I'm sure the Hackintosh crowd will manage to get around it.

In any case, they have much better chances of it than me seeing Snow Leopard on my PowerPC Mac.

I use "triple double you" when I need to express "www" verbally in English.

In all other languages that I speak, "we we we" works better.

Man, that's a brilliant positive feedback loop!

Yeah, yeah, we got it; you work for Apple.

They wouldn't gain much with ads.

About 80% of Twitter's traffic is through their API (3rd party Twitter apps pulling content and rendering on their own), and only 20% through their website. They couldn't really enforce various Twitter clients to display ads when they pull tweets over the API, so Twitter can't really be monetized by ads. (OTOH, some 3rd party Twitter apps are ad-supported and display ads in their UI).

president != precedent

This place is ripe with eggcorns!

Yeah, Apple yanked the app because of the BASIC interpreter hole, and the developers have plugged it and resubmitted the app.

Way to go, Apple. I mean, what harm could that BASIC interpreter do? It has no means of loading external code - no access to local filesystem of the underlying OS, no network connectivity, nothing. Are they afraid I'll manually type-in a program from a listing published in a magazine or something?

I got tons more "sense of childlike wonder" from toying with the interpreter than I could ever from playing Jack Attack and Dragon's Den combined!

Sheesh...

One of the reasons I switched to Mac back in 2005 is that iSync could seamlessly sync iCal and Address Book to/from my (then already) ancient Ericsson R520m phone. Note it's not even *Sony* Ericsson, just plain old standalone Ericsson before Sony's involvement. Attempts to sync data between it and my Windows PC before that were frustrating to the point of pulling my hair out.

So, I was extremely glad they didn't drop that. I don't have Snow Leopard yet, but I bet its iSync will still support Ericsson R520m. Reason? Sony-Ericsson ain't screwing with Apple like Palm does, violating the USB specification by faking the Pre's vendor ID. Make no mistake, this was political decision. Whether it's smart on Apple's part, I don't know.

In any case, Palm users aren't completely out in the cold. To continue my iSync story, I eventually switched to a Sony Ericsson W850i that at the time didn't have native sync support with iSync. Guess what, I was able to buy a 3rd party iSync plugin for, like, 2 EUR that enabled the syncing. iSync actually has a plugin architecture. So I'm sure someone will step in and fill the void - here I agree with you.

If I'm pissed at Apple for something, I'm pissed that they don't have iSync for iPhone in order to strong-arm people into a MobileMe subscription.

1. Create a moderately funny home video. Heck, create crappy home video.
2. Upload to PirateBay
3. Instruct your 1000+ machine BitTorrent botnet to download it 24/7
4. Ask GGF to pay royalties for downloads.
5. Profit!

Maybe they want to start distinguishing their services from Microsoft's Bing? "Our products are stable, not like that Bing thing; it's still in beta"