Gosh, why not? I can see someone looking at their MBA saying, "It works perfectly, has a great OS, awesome battery life, and does everything I could ask for and does it fast. I need to dump this for a barely functional device with an actively antagonistic OS sold by a company unable to secure a wet paper bag or make software that works acceptably. All this for far less battery life and far more money. I wish I had 2 MBAs to trade in!",

Back to the real world....

Did I mention that the day after the S3's release I was at a press event on a bus full of journalists. Anand has his S3 and in less than 24 hours it broke. The entire bus full of tech journos all concluded it was better that way.

That said, some people do like it. Microsoft traded in an absolute monopoly lock on the desktop to cater to 10% of their base. Clever that MS management, clever.

                                -Charlie

It's like there's some strange black hole of information available on the internet that only happens around the super specific topic the Ask Slashdotter is interested in. I'm pretty sure all of these folks are the ones that were our best horses in Keener Bingo:

http://www.mathnews.uwaterloo....

Ding ding. Fuck, C# is fine and dandy and pretty fucking fast, if your target platforms and related asset and tool ecosystems are cool with it, and you're not boneheaded about what you're doing. Questions like these are so silly - if you do so much homework to know what you know and what you don't know, I'm pretty sure you're smart enough to find the right information, books, etc. What a passive aggressive inquiry. If you're convinced you can write an intelligently framed question with tons of context, then why on earth can you not do a little google mining for books that focus on C# game development? This discipline is hardly a secretive cabal.

Yes, I wasn't disagreeing, only commenting on how bad the current state of affairs is.

Oakland is so redlined that my local loop is over 3 miles long. AT&T one day fucked up the loop. They've never fixed it. DSL speeds went from 1MB to 300Kbps.

Only the FCC dismantled any requirement that infrastructure owners be required to sell access to their lines at all, and certainly not at any kind of fair rate back in the mid-2000s, so the other providers over AT&T's fiber or copper will never be real competitors. They only exist at the whim of the wire owners.

Take that overshoot to 11!

I'm a medical minimalist, but refusing to sterilize cuts is kind of stupid.

Your immune system doesn't need a significant exposure to antigens to trigger the normal hypothalamus reactions and induce immune-system learning and memory reactions. Meanwhile your immune system isn't guaranteed to win arbitrary scale battles and you don't really know what was on whatever cut you. It's not like really unfortunate bacteria are all that rare.

You should also realize that you get away with this because you live in a relatively low-bacteria environment, such as an arid or temperate one. By your logic you should move to the tropics because you'll get far more exposure to diseases. Only there refusing to sterelize cuts will lead to some really bad situations.

I mean, with the recent dumbing down of fine-grained authorizations when installing apps, it's Google Play itself that feels like a security liability.

Less productiviy.

Visually appealing stuff is nice, but the best way to use a word processor or a spreadsheet is still the good old flat desktop with no bells and whistles.

It seems like anybody can make an Android compatible phone these days so I'll assume that Blackberry has the ability to do that. Now, will they be able to sell their hardware? They have a well-established channel. However, the Android phone market is pretty competitive so the question is will they be able to sell enough and make enough profit to sustain themselves as the large company they've become?

Spoiled? You mean they've seen non-sucky applications. That's not spoiled, that's being a discerning user.

Applets and Flash both suffer from the problem of continually downloading code over the Internet, slow startup times, and then all the handicaps of running inside a browser window and running inside a sandbox.

Browsers still suck for running applications. If the browser crashes it takes all your windows with it. The "Back" button is usually there and gives inconsistent results.

Browsers suck for running applications because they're for displaying web pages, not for running interactive UI's.

Amen! I am sick and tired of people trying to write "applications" instead of just serving up a web page that you can read.

Some sites have started going to this system where they load portions of the article as you scroll through it. Is there a benefit to me? Not that I can see. The only reason I can think of why they do it is to track what you're reading.

Well, you get to program in a paradigm that regular GUI programmers understand, that is an event loop type environment. You also get to program everything in ONE language (that isn't Javascript) and you don't need to manage the client/server communications.

Google uses it for some of their stuff and it works reasonably well. I wouldn't use it for implementing, say, a word processor in a browser, but for things like interactive forms it's quite reasonable.

An EXTREME case would be when someone is bid-ridden.

What's that? Too much eBay?