The "app" Start Scratch is a scam, in my opinion. My daughter (9) is quite keen on programming using Hopscotch on the iPad, but it is very limited at the moment. At school, she's been introduced to Scratch which can do a lot more, so I figured that it would be good to get Scratch for the iPad so she can use it at home. So I do a search on the iOS App Store and find Start Scratch, which appeared to be the Scratch environment as an iOS app. So I bought and paid the $1.49 - admittedly not a lot. But after some time trying to use it, it dawned on us that it is merely a welcome mat for the Scratch website, and not an actual programming environment at all. It's not even a good front end for the website! And it turns out that Scratch requires Flash, so it can not actually be used with the iPad or any iOS device at all. Totally and completely useless.

I didn't complain because I felt it was as much my own fault for assuming that the app did something useful, since Scratch is otherwise a trustworthy name. Fool me once...

To be fair, that last one per cent is a bear for human drivers as well. That's why there are so many crashes.

Windows had a colour graphics API; the Macs of the period were still black and white

Nope. Colour Quickdraw was written in 1985 and shipped with the first Mac II in 1986. It had a full colour RGB model, though initially only had 256 colour hardware - 32-bit hardware came in 1987. Even the original "black-and-white" Quickdraw had a simple colour model to support colour printing on Apple's dot-matrix printer.

You could also do colour graphics on a C64, BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum (hint - the name "Spectrum" was for that very reason). Rewrite history all you like - some might even believe it - but there are plenty of us still around that actually remember how it was.

the user interface needs to compete

No. A thousand times no. The UI of in-car equipment must not compete in any way for the driver's attention. A good UI would require no sight at all, but would provide a consistent placement, easy to find without taking your eyes off the key task you have as a driver - driving, provide consistent and non-visual feedback, and work 100% reliably every time. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you... the "switch".

Point is though, that an airship (or any aircraft) is only actually useful if it makes some progress OVER THE GROUND. So sure, it doesn't need more power to maintain a particular airspeed, put it does to actually get somewhere in a headwind. And with that huge frontal area, that's a lot of drag to overcome.

Most people seem to focus on the safety of airships, in the light of the Hindenburg, R101, etc. Surely a more significant problem is the wind? Any amount of wind is going to make landing and takeoff hazardous, and making much headway against a strong headwind is going to take a lot of power with that much windage. Good luck to them, maybe there are enough fair-weather opportunities to make it pay, but this aspect is seemingly never discussed.

Staphylococcus Aureus, aka "Golden staph" is not exactly synonymous with MRSA. The MR part means 'Methicillin Resistant', which is a mutated form of SA that can't be killed with Methicillin, a common antibiotic. SA is extremely common - it's everywhere, all over your skin, right now. It's only dangerous if it starts to infect a wound and gets into the bloodstream. Most SA will still respond to antibiotics, only the MRSA strain won't. But this strain is still thankfully fairly rare, though it's a growing problem. One solution would be for everyone to stop taking antibiotics for minor ailments such as the common cold which it does nothing for, but adds a lot of unnecessary antibiotics to the environment, thus prompting common bacteria such as SA to evolve into the MRSA form. If we lose the benefit of antibiotics, it will be a disaster, and we can thank all the stupid people for that.

And if it's not? Plenty of others can take up the slack. They're only hurting themselves, not the Arduino community.

Do what now? I can buy Arduino boards from any number of manufacturers, and I can get Arduino software from the open-source community and/or write some myself. Nothing here changes that - it certainly does not and cannot render the platform unviable.

Bullshit. I refuse to let the ignorant decide what's right and wrong. You should too.

it's history

Pity they didn't teach you basic grammar.

You cared enough to type four sentences on your tedious rant.

I thought these arguments disappeared in the early noughties, but clearly there are those that want to wallow in nostalgia. While I've always lived in the Apple/Mac world, I've never been one to indulge in this, even when it was slightly fashionable, which it most certainly isn't these days. However, I've had reason to engage with numerous Windows computers this week for the first time in ages, over a range of versions from XP to 8, and I have to say that in every case it was a reminder that even now, fifteen years on from when those arguments raged, it still sucks. My assumption has been for the last, ooh, eight years-ish, that basically there was no argument, the differences were just quirks and it was whatever you're used to, and for the price you pay extra to be on the Mac side of things, it wasn't worth it. Maybe that's true for a lot of people, but the frustration, general bad temper inducing, sheer passive-aggressive baulkiness of the damn thing made me very glad I don't have to deal with it regularly. And that whatever I pay extra, if I do (meh, my company pays for my hardware, so I don't give a shit how much it costs, personally), is worth every single penny.

Point is, a lot of people like Windows for some reason, and lots of other people like Apple stuff, for some reason. Maybe there will never be much understanding either way, but the silly finger-pointing name-calling from one camp to the other is childish, tribal and idiotic. No matter how sincerely the sentiment is meant.

Still no SDK for the Apple TV? What a missed opportunity that is, and easily two years overdue. If it had apps that anyone could develop, it would be the ONLY STB device of its kind by now.

I still have all of the original Inside Macintosh manuals and SpinCursor isn't a system API listed in any of them - that's up to volume VI which covered System 7. I don't have the later reorganised Inside Macintosh that was 'horizontally ' organised rather than the 'vertically' organised original series. SpinCursor() rings a vague bell though, maybe it was something that came in with System 7.1 or later.

I do know that while the spinning watch hands and 'target' cursors were commonly seen pre-System 7, you had to roll your own solution using either a vertical interrupt handler or simply periodically going to a new cursor frame. It's likely that the code for doing that was widely shared and copied among developers and it could well have been called SpinCursor(). Since System 7 was cutting edge in 1990, hopefully if my memory has gone a bit dim on the complete API it offered I'll be forgiven.

The original Mac didn't have a spinning anything. Animated cursors were something you had to write the code for yourself if you wanted them - involving messy and tricky vertical refresh interrupt handlers if I recall correctly. Later versions of the classic Mac added colour cursors, but no standard support for animation (though there was a standard resource type for a series of cursor animation frames, just nothing as standard that understood it - rather odd really, I'm guessing that was a MacApp (Apple's Application framework) thing).

Mac OS X introduced the "spinning pizza of death", I think inherited from NeXTSTEP. But a lot of people misunderstand what it is. It's not an indication of a crash, it's an indication that the main run loop has been executing user code for longer than a preset interval. In other words, the run loop has to be entered often enough to stop the system automatically showing the SPOD - a bit like how a watchdog works in embedded systems. So if your code takes too long or hangs, you see the SPOD.