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Given that China has historically been the nominally-communist-but-attractively-cheap-and-open-for-business destination, they can't be entirely surprised that Vietnam is now cutting into their action.

That aside, though, I wonder if this is more or less purely cost focused, or whether the quasi-mercantalist Chinese government policies aimed at aiding domestic firms and speeding up acquisition of foreign firms' tech has a bigger role? They aren't necessarily irrational, given that competing on price and low environmental standards isn't exactly a fun game, even when you are winning it; but such policies presumably do encourage foreign firms to head for the exit more quickly at the same time as they reduce the impact of their doing so.

There are far, far more Android users, so even if each one spends less that doesn't mean you will make less money in the long run. Also, if you are developing apps for developing nations, good luck selling many copies on iOS.

Unfortunately we don't have stats broken down by country. I bet they would paint a very different picture though.

Your first link also shows that 90% of iOS apps are free. Clearly most developers think the right price for their apps is $0.

You are also missing the fact that while on average Android user spend less, there are a lot more of them. The ones in developing countries probably drag the numbers down a lot. It would be interesting to see stats for just Europe, say. Also, those developing nations are only going to spend more and more over time, which is why Apple is desperately trying to break into China.

Apple actively encouraged developers to target specific resolutions, especially in the early days when the hardware was quite weak. In order for everything to look good they told developers to create graphics for the iPhone and later iPad's specific resolution.

That's why when later models with better screens came out they preferred to exactly doubled the resolution when possible. All those apps written for the old resolution then at least scaled 2:1 and only looked as bad as they did on the old low resolution screens. When widescreen finally came along they letterboxed apps because so many of them didn't scale properly.

It's all because the original iPhone and iPad hardware was pretty low end, so in order to make everything move smoothly and apps look slick they went with monotasking and UIs developed for specific screens. Don't forget that the 1st gen hardware was a Samsung single core CPU running at 400MHz with a mere 128MB of RAM.

Android went with device and resolution independence from day one, and although that meant that early devices were a bit clunky compared to iOS it has paid off in the long run.

CR was also useful for double-printing. When you ribbon was worn out you could just rewind it and re-use it, but have the printer overwrite every line so each character was printed twice, giving you about 80% as much ink as a new ribbon would provide.

That's not a very good test. You can run more than one copy of Firefox, but only if you hack around making sure that they don't use the same profile directory etc. In other words, the default install doesn't support multiple concurrent versions running at the same time.

Same with Chrome. Same with Safari. None of them support portable mode with separate profiles and the ability to run multiple copies at once. In fact Firefox used to fail to run if it noticed "firefox.exe" was already running, so you couldn't even run the installed version along side the portable one, or multiple portable installations.

IE is fairly well separated now. Explorer uses a separate HTML engine that is much more limited than IE. Updates for the Windows core HTML engine and IE are separate. You don't need to upgrade IE to keep your Windows installation secure any more.

Seems like a lot of effort. I just get a serial cable and press my tongue against the TX pin. Then type "copy COM1:" on the source machine and open up Notepad on the target. By hovering my hand over the keyboard on the target the little electrical shocks from the serial port cause spasms that make my hand type the file out. It's slow and painful but some people like that.

Get a genuine FTDI USB serial port, or better still a real hardware serial port. They still make them on PCI-E cards, and they work just as well as the old ones even at high speeds.

Having said that, the OP states his laptop has a serial port so it should be no problem to run it at 256 kbaud or above with a little error correction and a reasonable quality cable.

On the other hand if people know that Facebook is watching them this way they may be less likely to contact friends to talk about their problems, so it could actually have the effect of isolating people even more.

Facebook is not a good way to prevent suicide.

the problem is corruption. which is not our fault

any other great insights genius?

Did ancient astronauts build those adapters?

If that unit has been willing to work for the Good Magician Humphrey for a year to get the answer to that question, there can be only one answer.

My methodology:

If someone gives me their estimate for a software project or task, I double it and add 30.

If someone asks me for an estimate for a software project or task, I rough it out, then double it and add 30.

It's really amazing how much stress that avoids (oh, and it also does a passable job of converting Celsius to Fahrenheit.)

Ever heard of a brain break?

(Of course you have. You're doing slashdot.)

The idea that you can get better productivity out of scientists and engineers by preventing them from taking brain breaks in between their manic periods is ridiculous newbie MBA talk.