Hell, just look at the US version of Top Gear which is on a commercial channel (the History Channel because they ran out of WWII video to show and moved on to "reality" programming). The US version just does stunts. They don't do power laps, they don't do the star in a reasonably priced car, they don't do car reviews, they don't do any car news. (They actually did do the power lap times and the star in a reasonably priced car briefly during the first season, but they've since dropped those segments entirely.)

Part of the reason is surely due to time constraints: the US show only has 42 minutes to work with due to the 18 minutes of ads it has to fit the hour slot. But given that the closest to a car review they ever did was a blatant Tesla ad (ironically enough) and the show is almost always "brought to you by $CAR_COMPANY," it's fairly safe to say that the US version doesn't want to offend potential advertisers, and the show is horribly watered down due to it.

Are you talking about D Motor? I've never watched it because as an American I only speak American, dammit, but as I understand it it's a completely separate show done by a completely different company.

Which may be why it's OK.

Honestly, that's not the problem with the US show. I mean, Captain Slow works.

No, the problem with the US show is that they removed the Power Laps, car reviews, "star in a reasonably priced car" and news segments, concentrating solely on the stunts. It just doesn't work because you get no sense of the personality of any of the presenters. You don't see them being "normal," you don't see any banter between them, you get no chemistry because they're always out driving cars and doing stupid things. It just doesn't work.

It also has the side-effect of making the "silent racing car driver" (apparently you can't call the Stig "tamed" in the US) a character that has absolutely no context when he shows up. Why is there suddenly a silent racing car driver driving a random car for them to race against? Oh, and now he's gone, never to show up for the remainder of the episode. Uh, OK, that was sure wacky!

Have you ever watched any of the spin-off Top Gears, like Top Gear US or Top Gear Australia? They've already tried to "reinvent" the show, multiple times. It's yet to work.

The simple fact of the matter is that Jeremy Clarkson is the reason people watch Top Gear. Without Clarkson, there's no reason to watch.

And I agree, the BBC really has no choice, and the blame should be placed on Clarkson for being an idiot. But that doesn't change the fact that losing Clarkson will kill Top Gear. He made the show what it is.

It may not be Apple's fault (exactly), but it sure as hell is their problem. If more than 1 in 20 ApplePay transactions are fraudulent, what merchant in their right mind is going to accept it as a payment method? (Remember that fraud is paid by the merchants, not the banks.)

Even if it isn't Apple's fault, it sure is their problem to solve.

I would assume the repositories themselves could be moved. The thing is that they provide additional services beyond just hosting a git repository like issue tracking, wikis, and continuous integration support. Presumably that stuff can't be moved.

When the company I work for moved from Gitorious to GitLab we were able to migrate the git repositories with all their history relatively painlessly. GitLab had an automated process for doing it, but due to reasons apparently the Gitorious side would randomly flake out if you tried to use that. (It had to do with ulimits or something.) However you can still just clone a git repository and push branches from it to a new remote, which is the way I ended up transitioning most of the repositories.

The issue tracking and other features weren't an issue because we weren't using the built-in Gitorious/GitLab support in any case.

GitLab, not GitHub. GitHub is a different solution that provides pretty much the same software.

Strangely enough the company I work for recently (like six months ago) transitioned our internal git repositories from running on Gitorious to running on GitLab. From my experience GitLab is indeed the better product.

GitHub still seems to be better than both but I've never used that in a commercial setting.

I once had someone rip out a stream copy I'd written (int r; byte[] buf=new byte[1024]; while((r=in.read(buf)) >= 0) { out.write(buf,0,r); }) and replace it with a third-party library, because "we shouldn't reinvent the wheel."

Granted, I sort of agree, it's ridiculous that such a common thing isn't part of the standard Java library, but it isn't, and we didn't really need to add another 1MB of library dependencies just to do that...

You'd think that (hell, I'd have agreed), but people already pay by smart phone even without Google Wallet or Apple Pay. The obvious example is people paying by the Starbucks app, although there they get free drinks for paying that way so whatever. (However they could also pay by card, the app is just another method of getting free drinks.)

Another example is that you can apparently pay by smartphone in the cafeteria at the company I work at. I have no idea why you'd want to do this, but it's another "scan the barcode" thing, and people do it.

I have no idea why, but apparently some people find pulling out their phone and using that to be easier than using a card. Even when it takes longer because I'm not talking about NFC systems here, I'm talking about scanning a barcode on a phone.

Yeah, when my work MacBook was upgraded to Mavericks, they just flat-out reimaged the entire thing because they knew that the upgrade wouldn't work. For the forced Yosemite upgrade (really wish I could have skipped this one) they offered an actual upgrade, but it didn't matter, because I had to reimage anyway after Yosemite refused to boot for reasons I still don't understand.

Granted some of that may be due to the IT department's software, but I'll take missing features (it's not like the Samsung laptop was unusable with the Microsoft drivers) over flat-out won't boot like you get with the past two OS X upgrades.

Of course, that's just my work MacBook, and it's working (for the most part) now. Apparently other Yosemite upgraders lost wifi and DNS. I suppose I could have lost wifi too for all I know since I just leave it plugged in to the network.

Gladly. They linked me to the correct drivers for my laptop after the Windows 8.1 upgrade had trashed them. As I recall there were a bunch of drivers I needed to reinstall since Windows 8.1 had decided to revert to Microsoft stock drivers, and they told me to where to get them. (Which was necessary since by default Samsung uses a driver download program which at the time didn't know what to do with Windows 8.1 and therefore refused to download anything. So in essence they were solving a problem they themselves created.)

Basically I didn't even ask Samsung for help but got it anyway. Try doing that with Apple.

What, do you think the first thing I did for tech support was to whine about a problem on Twitter? I was trying to figure out a problem I had with Windows/my Samsung laptop and complained about it on Twitter, and because Microsoft/Samsung actually want their customers to be happy they reached out through it and helped me solve my problem.

With Apple, you search the web for your issue, find a ton of enthusiast sites where people are having the very same issue, and discover that there's no solution from Apple yet but they're sure there will be oh so soon now. (Originally posted: 2009.)

No, they just don't offer support. At all. So it's less that they flip you the bird and more that they just entirely ignore you. Except at the Apple Stores, I guess. Or did you mean I was supposed to shell out for Apple Care if I wanted their software to actually goddamned work?! (Another example: in OS X Yosemite, Apple flat-out broke DNS. Solution: copy over the DNS resolver from the previous version.)

Well, not their forums, obviously, but like the MacRumor forums or other enthusiast forums. Because like you said, Apple deletes comments rather than admitting issues.

If you want another example, I've complained about problems with Windows and my Samsung laptop on Twitter before. In both cases Microsoft and Samsung contacted me through Twitter and managed to solve my issues.

Issues with Apple products, on the other hand?

Forget it, they don't exist. They have no Twitter presence, their online tech support consists entirely of "find an Apple Store." Their online support is completely useless because their "knowledge base" doesn't include many incredibly common issues, even when you can find forums with threads that go back years and many, many pages of people with the same issue.

Apple's stance is "it just works" and if for any reason it doesn't work, fuck you, it just works, clearly you're holding it wrong. If something goes wrong in Windows you can probably fix it. It may not be easy, it may take some time, it may involve registry tweaking, but it can be fixed. If something goes wrong with Apple, well, you'd better go buy a new shiny because it won't be fixable! (If anyone wants specific examples, iCloud loves to randomly flake out and refuse to sync anything, and I've literally never seen AirDrop work.)

Well, he could always go work at Arby's.

If you watch his actual announcement (why isn't this in the story?), he says he doesn't have any specific plans yet, but he will be doing something.