The facts don't really matter, "You're holding it wrong" is still relevant and funny.

Your Palo Alto firewalls only work because the (self signed) global wildcard certificate they use has been manually installed on every client on the network, and is trusted by those devices.

Unless you can trick a user on a public wifi hotspot into accepting your self signed global certificate their browser will not validate the connection or pass data without a big red warning screen.

Does this remind anyone else about Hawat and the cat he has to milk daily to keep the Baron's poison from killing him?

This is precisely why I am not worried about outsourcing. Look at India, China, or any other 'cheap labor' country. The average income is increasing by leaps and bounds, their *standard of living* is increasing substantially. At some point it becomes too expensive to outsource and those jobs come back home.

No, money isn't the "divine paper, the one and true savior of all mankind" as a child post put it, but in the world we live in it's the best way to allow for fluid bartering between man hours and standards of living.

The hope (and reality) is that all "third world" nations will become educated competitors which increases the overall education and happiness of all mankind, quality of products, and technology in general. Too many Americans are liberal idiots that think that government handouts are the solution when there are many people in poorer nations that are hoping for the opportunity to *WORK* for a living and *EARN* their income.

Fuck the '99%', turn off your cable/cell phone/internet, sell your iPhone/PowerBook/designer clothes and get a real job.

Google already has a standard for pushing those control signals over a dedicated persistent TCP/IP connection (when your signal indicator goes from white to green it's connected). Many apps choose not to use it for one reason or another, Facebook Chat for example posts a huge XML request every minute or so to poll for new messages.

Also, Jabber sucks mostly due to its use of XML.

I don't see anyone else selling pitted aluminum laptops or fractured glass backed phones. I do see companies selling Gorilla Glass displays though, it's actually quite sturdy.

As for 'hard to use', there's a balance between 'what I want to do' and 'remove everything that isn't absurdly trivial'. Apple leans towards the latter.

The hardware is meant to be seen, not used. As for the OS, Apple has always stripped out what they couldn't make idiot proof for your grandmother.

When you narrow down your customer base to zealots and people that still think color television is neat it's not hard to impress.

Sorry, I intended to reply to the parent of your post.

My vehicle was recently stolen in Daytona Beach, FL so I've put quite a bit of thought into this.

I'm using an HTC Incredible (busted screen, but it has composite output!) firmly embedded in the vehicle itself in an inconspicuous location, wired into its own battery + small 12v battery + vehicle battery (all properly fused to avoid battery shorting attacks)

Using perl via ASE the Incredible polls the vehicles location every 5 seconds, determines if the vehicle is stationary or moving, and keeps a log (on sdcard) if it changes within 10 meters from the previously logged location.

If the vehicle is moving the bluetooth subsystem is polled to determine if my current phone (HTC Thunderbolt) is within range, if not, it starts emailing me location changes. I can also email the phone and query its location if I happen to forget where I park.

I plan on supplementing this with an Arduino in the future to automatically lock/unlock the vehicle depending on if I'm nearby, some type of ignition cutoff, flashing headlights/interior lights, horn and perhaps some very loud air horns inside connected to a compressor to at least deafen anyone that breaks into the vehicle and attract a lot of attention.

Future plans also include a pico projector (once the laser pico projectors have a high enough lumen output) for a HUD on the windshield using the same HTC Incredible or a small low power PC. There are various OBDII bluetooth interfaces that would work well for displaying various gauges on the HUD.

It's quite a fun project for a very small investment.

You don't understand. The price is right for Apple fans because they find value in the perceived 'coolness' of being in the Cult of Steve Jobs. They can flash their Apple branded devices at the coffee shop and gain a few self esteem points.

Those of us who have our own self esteem based on merit instead of trendy product collections find the pricing absurd because there is no perceived value in the Apple branding alone.

I stopped caring about vmware when their marketing people got editing rights over their technical documentation. Seriously, go to their website, try to figure out what product will work for you (if you can make it through the marketing drivel) then look at the documentation for it.

Technical documentation is supposed to be .. technical. If you screw over the IT admins managing your product they're going to search for alternatives.

You're doing it wrong.

Red Hat is a stable server platform.

Ubuntu is *not* a server distribution.

Stop letting your developers (or yourself) think think that you need MongoDB/NoSQL/Sphinx/Ruby On Rails/whatever the latest trash is this week. They're all reinventing the wheel, once they mature and actually have safety/error checking they'll be just as slow as whatever they were intended to replace and the kids will be talking about the next wheel..