ya, because getting the message to the wrong person really fast is much more important than getting it to the right person. I would also argue that a message being sent to the wrong recipient is a security issue also.

Not really. If you read the bug, they were checking the vendor string to test whether a certain set of command line args could be passed into the jvm on startup. So, yes it's better to make runtime decisions based on something more structured like reflection as opposed to some string compare. But no, reflection, in the context you're using it would not have helped. They need to look for some identifying feature of the sun/oracle vm. I don't think java reflection can help you there . I'm not a web developer, so when I look at something like you're doing with checking for browser identity based on whether a method is present, I'd say, "what's more likely, Microsoft decides to remove "Microsoft" from the browser id, or you encounter a second browser with an addEventListener on the Document?" Neither is 100%, but you pick the one you like and go with. Unfortunately for the Eclipse devs, they figured sun would probably never change the vendor tag from "sun"?

Do these two numbers actually differ by one bit? 0x0000000000001a70 0x401a70 It looks to me like a byte is getting zero'd somewhere. Bad ram.

Ya, but it still looks really cool.

Considering the current price, the NASA folks just assumed that Macs included "Space Storm Resiliency". (Unibody models only).

No there shouldn't. I'm typing this message on a notebook computer and I can assure you that all of the critical components (processor, mainboard, etc) are not duplicated anywhere. If the thing were to suddenly have an unrecoverable hard failure, I'd at worst be out of a few hundred dollars. Point is that in a lot of cases, one can simply tolerate the downtime of performing a complete drop-in replacement in the event of failure. From the article "Officials stressed, however, that no data was lost during the shutdown because of automatic nightly backups at an off-site location" So again, the criminal records system can a.) pay millions for a hot stand-by or say, you know what, when a 100 year old water-main breaks, we're gonna be done for a few days while we restore. My advice.... fuck the stand-by, save millions + recurring power/maintenance costs on something useful.

sort of like the iPad and printing?

I think you train/car analogy is almost correct. I'd rather say put it this way... Are you going to sell your car now that your local transport agency provides bus routes past your house? I doubt it. Same thing with "cloud computing". The bus being available is a "service", but it's not a service I choose to use, because I like to be on my own schedule and the bus doesn't drive right by my house, it goes two blocks away, and I'm too lazy to walk the two blocks. The same issue will exist with cloud services. There WILL be lots of them, and everyone will want a slight variation of the exisiting services. I'll want a little laxed security, but with more bandwidth. Someone else will insist on very high security and lower performance. I'll insist on being able to make 2 orders in a batch instead of just the 1 at-a-time the service provides. This will ultimately drive up the cost of the "service providers" and they'll go the way the network computers went. At some super high level, it seems great (as does a lot of stuff), but once it's actually implemeted, people will realize they can do it themselves cheaper with those pc things.

And I'll write the app that creates a chat room and joins all the people who just received the offer, so they can collude and fix the price by all denying the offer. Of course, version 2.0 will require no user intervention. Eventually, I'll just call the power company, threaten to turn on my bank of 100 Air Conditioners, and they offer me free power for the weak in exchange for only using 1. Of course, by then, I've patented the process of extoring energy, whic means I license the process to all of you and I've effectively become the owner of the all the power generting facilities. Steve Jobs, goes on TV claiming, "yes there's an app for that".

Sort of. I have two older macs, a g4 ibook, and a g5 imac. I'd like to do some iphone/ipod hacking and maybe some hacking around with objective-c in general for kicks. To do so, I need an intel mac. BUT, I'm in the market for a new notebook and want one capable of being a all purpose machine, possible even running some vm software. i.e. run windows as a guest in a vm. To do this, I need something moderately powerful, and for the base price of a 13" macbook pro $1199, I could get a pretty powerful p.c... likely for a lot less. I do agree, I went into BestBuy the other day, and the macbook pros are wihtout a doubt nicer than the rest of the stuff on display.

I would seriously like a serious opinion from other people. Are apple's machines, in particluar their notebooks overpriced?

I would also suggest applying your specific knowledge you may have gained in your experience working as a night guard. How many people writing code can say they know first-hand what it's like to work that job? Try building something like a time tracking tool for nigh watchman or some other app that may be useful for your job. Try applying basic object oriented design to to the project too. It may prove entertaining to you to model, in software, the things you are familiar with in real life. E.g. you can have a class called "Nightguard" and an instance for all the people you work with, and then finalize() the ones you don't like.

Mono currently does not have a compacting garbage collector. One is in the works, and can be included as an unsupported feature when building from source.