Not really. Funny thing about math is that, regardless of your political affiliations or position on same-sex marriages, 2 + 2 still equals 4. Science is pretty much the same, as you'd know if you had bothered to learn it.

Funny way of showing it, perhaps you need more nicotine?

I know it's paraded around here to the point of being cliche, but... correlation does not imply causation. I'm the same as you yet I've never smoked in my life, so rather than your nicotine addiction being the cause I'd just bet on you having shitty friends to begin with.

Well... yeah. Is there any reason why someone would believe otherwise?

The interesting thing is that, if you managed to keep it there long enough, it'd actually work.

Let's be honest: if I asked you which are the modern world's wonders, would you check out UNESCO or Wikipedia? and what would everyone else in your family do?

It's kind of scary, in fact.

Ahh, yes, the good old "I have a right to my opinion, and don't you dare criticize my criticism!" cry that everyone holds until they realize their own working field has been driven to the ground by marketing departments paying more attention to the "faux connoisseurs" than to professionals in the area due to the former spending more money than the latter.

Unless, of course, you do work in Marketing and PR in which case you've never had it better.

Nope, nothing in any of the parents showing how Ogg support implies no MP3 support. The conversation went pretty much like this: "there hasn't been many people asking Ogg support" -> "because most stuff already does" -> "which sucks for the rest of us" -> "explain why" -> "no mp3 support" -> me WTFing.

Even ignoring "clones" that ultimately surpassed the original such as Unix, Linux, GCC and so, Miro is already a well-established project that's been going on for years (the project formerly known as "DemocracyPlayer" btw) and has got a sizeable userbase on PCs, this new marketing strategy is merely the result of one guy noticing that, if Miro makes for such a neat app on PCs it'd be pretty cool to have it on Android as well, and since it'd work roughly iTunes-ish they could market it as such rather than explain all its features one by one.

Except it doesn't. Other than purely Free Linux apps and the odd game engine or two, pretty much everything that supports OGGs supports MP3, and given its licensing costs if OGG weren't there chances are they still wouldn't support MP3s.

Honesty. Simply put, both Miro and iTunes have some glaring design issues, but Miro acknowledges them while iTunes merely says "they're not bugs, they're features, or would be if you were using OSX you dirty heathen".

In theory, you'd be right. In theory. You see, in theory the big labels would hire the best bands out there, give them the best resources available so they can do the best work they can, while the indies only have lower prices to compensate for their lack of talent and resources.

However, what happens in *practice* is that the big labels hire whatever's more marketable (read: a young, attractive singer), then hire an engineer that destroys whatever semblance of music was there by making everything LOUD while the indies continue making actual music, many of which had more musical talent than the marketable hires even before they were hired so the end result is that the indie album produced on a shoestring budget ends up being a hundred times more pleasant than the LOUD trash of the big labels.

It's a pity though, as the best non-classical album I've ever heard was from a professional sound engineer making rock albums for pleasure. Makes one wonder how much better the labels' music would be if they didn't cripple themselves at every step of the way.

They did, they failed, and like so many of their failures the loyalists just try to pretend it never happened.

No, I don't waste my time following every single Apple product ever released, why? do you?

Don't worry, that's purely rhetorical.

iPhones do not, at least not yet, but eMacs did in the most garish colors imaginable. They initiated a fad that the Apple loyalists loved to praise as the final nail in the coffin of the "ugly, brown box", only to die a quick, merciful death a few years later. Just as the "haters" predicted, huh, who would've thought.

Good for you, but I practically grew up with Apple idiots calling more than one button "too complicated for non-geeks to use". Until Apple released its own, official model and finally, *FINALLY*, the loyalists... admitted they were wrong? hell no, they just stopped talking about it and started bringing up some obscure third-party accessory produced for a year in the '90s to "prove" how Apple had always been in support of multi-button mice and we'd always been at war with Eurasia.

No, it became so the same way Scientology gained such momentum: a personality cult built around their leader, a massive propaganda campaign to make their members look part of a "distinguished elite" merely for being members, and the insane profits that come from selling new trash to your followers every month.

Face it, the zealots love to parade things like CmdrTaco's infamous comment on the iPod as "proof" of how "haters" always get it wrong but the fact is, they get it wrong just as often as they get it completely right, Steve Jobs isn't a divine, flawless being that can make no mistake and every word of his mouth is the absolute truth, and just because it's got an Apple logo doesn't mean it's the golden standard which all competing products must be measured against.

Still, fat chance of you ever admitting *that*, you're way too invested into the company (both emotionally as well as economically, judging from your initial post) to admit any flaw in your reasoning. Psychology is a bitch, isn't it?

The company with the failed PDA, the company that started the idiotic but mercifully short-lived "fruity colors" fad, the company that shouldn't have tried to replace USB with Firewire, the company that should've allowed mice with more than a single button, the company whose closed ecosystem would lead to its cellphone market being overtaken by a competitor's open alternative.

But I guess in your world none of those ever came to pass either, Android died a quick, merciful death just as Windows did due to its confusing idea of having a "right click", and the bright pink iPhones are a hit comparable only to the original Apple Newton. Pity that you somehow got transported to this world, though.

You're silly, and you've obviously never worked in tech support.

Here's the thing: even in the dreadful, woefully unsafe world of Windows '98 and ME, over 80% of malware infections could've been avoided by having the user learn some simple, seemingly obvious security tips such as do not install fucking Bonzi Buddy EVER AGAIN, you piece of useless, ignorant trash!!!, *ehem*. Yeah, like that.

Social Engineering is still the surest method to gain control of another machine, and the user is still in nearly all cases the most vulnerable part of a given system's security. So far, the only thing that has kept Mac users relatively safe so far has been their relative insignificance in the world of computing as a whole, but if black hats start targeting them seriously they'll buckle just as fast as their Windows brethren.

Alarms themselves are neither necessary nor, for the vast majority of users, useful. But some people do need them and some of them *also* need more than one, so I can't see why we should just aim to please one group but not the other.

And for the record, I don't own any iToy whatsoever and I haven't used an alarm in at least a decade, not even a physical one let alone my freaking cellphone.

Probably because you're maintaining the assumption of old analog clocks of one alarm per clock.

Another poster showed screenshots of the dialogs in question, take a look at them and see if you can think of a better, more intuitive design for a device that can have more than one alarm and turn them on/off on an individual basis.

As much as I generally despise Apple, not only I can't think of a way to improve their design now, the UI it originally ocurred to me when hearing upon the problem was markedly worse.

And for that the only possible solution is for them to pick up a manual and read it from cover to cover. Or just assume they'll break up things eventually and take the appropiate measures (ask their savvy nephew to back up the data, for instance), either way there's nothing the programmer can do to solve the situation.

As the phrase goes, you can't make something completely idiot-proof because when you think you've done it, the Universe goes and throws a better idiot at you. Sure, sure, it's ignorance and not idiocy but the principle is the same: there'll *always* be a way to mess something up, there'll *always* be someone for whom that isn't obvious at first, and so there'll *always* be someone screwing things up by accident and perpetuating the image of computers as "magical, dangerous devices". You can't change that, so you may as well take it as an universal law or whatever rather than a "problem" per se, because it being a problem implies it could be solved given enough ingenuity, and it very much can't.