The man who sells a phony vacuum cleaner is a liar. The man who buys one is an idiot.

If you use the wrong tool for the job, I call that failing. But it's not the tool that failed. It's you.

bite-proof mosquitoes? I didn't realize that there was a big problem with people biting mosquitoes!

You haven't been to the west, have you?

What the hell? I go to kings games. In LA, in march, on a Saturday afternoon. I've been to hockey games were it was 90 degrees outside. The capitals stadium must have really poor air control if they have problems with that.

Confirming this. In my experience, most jailbreakers do it to run "illicit" apps, rather than to "pirate" legitimate ones. You want to run an emulator? You want to customize your phone in a non apple-approved way? you want to run an X rated app? Jailbreak. Note that I have seen jail broken phones doing all of those things, and in most cases, the apps were all paid for.

If apple allowed an open market, or, at most, did some basic sanity checks (to filter out malicious or incompetent apps that can cause harm), there would not be a jailbreaking problem.

The adoption of a new technology is generally not driven by those who dominate once it is widespread. It tends to be driven by early adopters, who are willing to spend the money to try out a new technology. They either prove it, or they have tons of problems. As soon as somebody proves a technology is viable, a business shmuck at some large company can make a successful pitch that "This is the future, etc, etc...and it's already proven technology so the company doesn't have to worry about hiccups, etc, etc".

That is why Porn killed Betamax. Not because Porn represents a large market share, but because Porn was willing to be an early adopter of VHS. They proved that video sales and rental via VHS was viable. Once that happened, the major video players we unwilling to take a bet on Betamax, no matter how superior it was, because they looked at the Porn industry and saw that VHS was already in use, and therefore, the business plan and technical hurdles were done for them, guaranteed.

We didn't do 1984, but HS Freshman English we read Animal Farm

It's not off topic. There is no topic in the original post...

'how can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?'

I say mod this +1 just for having a post which deserves to be modded down, but manages not to fit into any of the -1 categories.

But, But, But...if they name things consistently, people will learn the scheme and be able to properly identify the varying levels of suckage...

No, it's not that anything is possible in Vegas, just that whatever _IS_ possible stays there.

Don't Tase me Bro!

I think I know the story first hand thank you.

Generally, yes. My point was that older programs like that (hell, new programs too, who are we kidding) tend to have poor behavioral documentation, meaning that small features and bits of logic which are important to the company are captured only in code. Meaning you needed to start the rewrite before the old geezers who maintained the old system retired, because otherwise you will have new engineers who are not familiar with the language or tools, trying to dig ultra-deep into unfamiliar software for answers.

Hell, to your point that the language being COBOL doesn't matter that much, you're probably right. Take any competent C programmer who has never looked at large open source project X, and ask him to find and modify the code for feature Y. It will take him waaaaay longer on his own than if he has access to a programmer who has been hacking on the source for a while.