Yeah... a freak - but we keep combing through his rants for those little notions that ring true. They're obtuse truths most of the time and you don't have to agree with a bit of it, but it's an interesting perspective. Let's hope it was an open source malady.

The Germans have their Air Force Tactical Training Center in New Mexico for their fighter pilots. In fact, the German Air Force and other NATO pilots were flying CAP around our country while we were running around like idiots after 9/11.

As far as bombing random Afghans - I don't like it. We're shooting at the specific people in Afghanistan (mostly foreigners) who have been trying to get the attention of our military for YEARS and finally succeeded. Leave them alone and they'll be right back over here.

It doesn't exist anymore on the Internet, but recall reading a piece on the Norton web site that stated there were 40 viruses for the Mac (OS 9). That was in 1998 or so.

Because Apple was Microsoft's R&D Department.

You're right. No evidence. Supply make & model of your equipment and we'll see.

This isn't my battle but it's interesting. Where is MrHanky's evidence that you're wrong? What is he typing on? Get make & model and it can be correlated with factory and facts. I doubt he'll supply it because he really doesn't want to chance learning how wrong he is.

Otherwise, I suggest you have a better stance in this pissing contest. Anything made by Apple has been falling under heavy scrutiny for a long time, mostly because Apple keeps more places busier than anyone else, and it sells news. All of the manufacturing is done by third parties without any obligation to follow U.S. labor laws. That goes for whatever he's typing on as well. I'd venture to guess that factories with increased scrutiny are in better shape (labor wise) than factories which escape that scrutiny, like the factory which made MrHanky's equipment.

Theory: China had a huge head start when Britain's lease on Hong Kong expired and it was turned back to the Chinese. It was already an enormous manufacturing and economic hub, very much unlike most of the rest of China. The Chinese government wisely created an expanded special economic zone there, giving assurances to existing business so they wouldn't leave and enlarging the zone around Hong Kong. The Chinese understood what they had and fostered its growth rather than stamping it out over some Communist idealism. This is the region where you'll find much of China's current manufacturing might. Couple that with the fact that they have millions of workers, plus the Asian culture generally fosters intelligent thinking and respect for authority. China also began allowing individuals to prosper in their own right around that time, a very un-communist concept which unlocked the perfect storm of what they had at their disposal.

About the intelligent Asian comment... I was around in the '70s when we had an enormous influx of Vietnamese coming to the US with absolutely nothing. They were willing to take nearly any job and I saw them starting businesses left and right. Their working habits were brutal and relentless. Within a few years, they were driving Volvos and living in nice houses. A few years after that, their kids were part of a statistic where a disproportionate amount of the University enrollments were Asian kids. Contrast that to some of our indigenous population who had nothing and had no concept of achieving anything, all the while complaining that they never had a chance.

Just a theory.

All my HP servers have Foxconn labels on them here and there. I've seen a lot of other non-Apple equipment with Foxconn labels as well.

I still think you're Verizon's customer (or Sprint or AT&T or [insert_carrier]). The Google software comes with the phone, installed by the carrier which makes you a user of Google's software but not their customer.

The carriers are Google's customers directly. Google doesn't care about you as a customer, otherwise you'd be able to get updates on your device directly from Google. You're not receiving anything from Google directly. Google gives Android to the carriers and they receive billions of nano-pennies as the consumer uses the phone, getting ad revenue and tracking customers to their own favored advertisers and service providers.

Android is installed at the pleasure of the carrier to serve their own purpose, namely running a phone customizable to what the carriers want you to see and what they can get paid for. Gradient to Google, you're just a consumer. The big surprise is the carriers haven't returned to the time when they could sell the pictures you took with your phone back to you for 25 cents apiece. Remember the days when they disabled OBEX on their flip phones so they could prevent access to photos and ringtones?

That's what I think, anyway.

You're definitely new here.

I'll postulate that "speed to market" is accurate. It took several years of Microsoft sitting on their ass, basking in the glory of XP, threatening some futuristic Longhorn bullshit to keep competitors scared and corporations comfortable, thinking "that'll show them" before they realized the competition was still coming at them. Then, after a long vacation, they cobbled together all the superficial veneer they could copy from other OSs (just the sizzle off the steak), added some bullshit to make it look like your computer liked you and hurriedly released it with missing features and half of everything broken. They quickly threw it together in a panic. That's speed to market.

They're over there checking it out, aren't they?

I agree that essentially milking a product with little actual improvement will lead to problems, although it's done Microsoft very well for decades. It helps to have an entrenched monopoly to pull that off. The switch to Intel created more opportunity for the Mac platform than less, so overall that was a win. I don't think anyone should be releasing products that aren't ready, as you singled out OS X which was nearly unusable until about 10.2.

However, Apple had less to lose by gutting their entire hardware and software platform and starting over. Apple also created some very smooth pathways through the migration; 68k code emulation on PPC, Classic environment on OS X, Carbon, Rosetta and a few others. They did the right thing for the long run.

The area where Apple excelled was the iPod and they avoided exactly what you warn against. They released upgrade after upgrade plus several variants for many years in the face of essentially no competition. They captured huge market share, massive brand loyalty and the most illusive variable; trust. Trust was the missing element in all of Microsoft's dalliance with music players. They never had traction and the lack of trust was already spreading to just about every other aspect of Microsoft's business. True to everyone's expectations, Microsoft fucked it all up when they released the Zune and that was the end.

... which is why Asian companies kick the American's asses. Long range thinking in the US is having a 5 year plan. In Japan, they have 100 year plans [and a dozen other links].

It's the most misunderstood thing in business - do good work, make the customers happy, create good value and profit becomes a side effect.