I simplified. The actual contractor subcontracted to a foreign subcontractor (with the appropriate requirements). Their actual failing was that they didn't test that the supplied parts met the specs. (This would have been difficult to do without disassembling the subcomponent.)

So, yes, I agree that it was criminal fraud. But I don't think it was ever prosecuted.

Windows, you whore!

I wasn't saying that old smartphones were in any way comparable to modern ones. My point was that smartphone development has been occurring far longer than most people realize, and is in-parallel with PCs in that the performance characteristics of the device have outpaced the capabilities of the software and user experience to the point that there's not a whole lot of benefit in upgrading without an external reason to do so.

And as to your analogy of GPS vs maps, I can use a map without any electrical power, and I can identify on the map, if it's a good one, which roads my low-ground-clearance car can traverse, versus which roads my 2wd small pickup can traverse, versus which "roads" I'll need a 4x4 or truck with significant ground clearance to use. Most of the time the latter aren't even noted on GPS systems.

Smartphones well predate the Apple and Blackberry options. Palm and Qualcomm developed the pdQ-series in the nineties and they were on sale by 1999 and were direct variants on the Palm Pilot series of personal organizers, which themselves date back to the early nineties, and had many of the components that a phone-based device would want like an address book, a calendar, a tasks list, a calculator, etc.

And that's not even going into the other companies that built personal organizers around this same time.

I suspect that a good part of Samsung's slowing sales is consumers that are tired of spending more money all of the time to do the same thing. I've got a Galaxy SII. It does everything that I need it to do. It's paid for. I don't foresee any needs that a newer phone would fulfill, so short of a broken phone or a paradigm shift I don't see a need to shell out several hundred dollars to have essentially the same functionality.

Geek-chic likes to talk about and to chase the latest gadgets, but the hype really isn't as widespread as reports would indicate, and even those that have chased the newest have often gotten tired of doing it without any real, tangible improvements.

Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

Sometimes I wonder if all of the ACs are simply one bot with the electronic equivalent of schizophrenia talking to itself...

You could add to your solution. There's exactly one person that you could kill with a guarantee of facing no legal repercussions for the act...

if a human cannot determine if they just got a hummer from a machine or another human?

Gives a whole new meaning to, "My computer went down on me..."

...why the extremely low power draw requirement? Seems like for a dev box you'd want some horsepower, though you'd want to test on a box that's like your expected production machine...

I'm fully expecting an economic collapse to hit Dubai eventually, and this air conditioned paradise will turn into a blast-furnace hellhole.

Heh. I expect that the 'normal people' as referred to in the original article would find their use for the hammer in this analogy to be more on-par with their needs. They need to occasionally program something so that creation will do something for them.

To your other point, I had to do some maintenance on some 10+ year old perl today on a legacy system. I used vim, and while I'd never worked in perl before it was enough like C that I was able to make do. The script just does some network monitoring and presents an up/down list on equipment and is only about 150 lines long and reads from a 1500-entry flat-file, but that I was able to just jump-in and work on it without experience and that it needs little more than mod_perl says a lot for basic, normal-people languages and development environments.

Personally I usually prefer geany or Kate. Vim is ok if you're already in a terminal environment, or if you're in a tight RAM situation, but that is a rare condition.

Note, though, if I'm working on Java, I prefer NetBeans, because I don't know Java all that well. So it's nice to have a tool that says "you need to include this particular library", or "that syntax is invalid". If I were to really learn Java, however, I'd probably prefer geany or Kate.

Bad example. The $10,000 hammer was because of the paperwork required to buy a single hammer for a high security project. Yes, it was extreme idiocy, but it WAS following the rules as specified, and the CIA wasn't involved.

If they'd been buying 100,000 hammers it would have made a lot more sense, and the increment in the cost wouldn't have been so absurd.

What's really sickening is that there was a project that carefully specified the particular alloys and heat treatment that the nuts and bolts were to have, paid for them, and the contractor supplied off-the-shelf nuts and bolts from a hardware store. This was determined after the cause of failure was found to be a split nut. The spec'd one wouldn't have failed. The cheap nut ended up costing a lot more than $10,000.

The thing that bugs me the most is having to use node.js and ruby packages when there are Debian or Ubuntu packages for the same thing. I don't like it when there could be a situation with multiple, competing package managers writing the floor out from under each other.

It also doesn't help that this solution was chosen because it's free, but the vendor that wrote it doesn't even offer paid support, they want you to use their cloud-based solution and this is the hook to get you addicted so that when it breaks, since there's no documentation worth referring to, one basically has to throw them money.