Except for when they weren't doing just fine and were teetering on bankruptcy. So how wildly popular and successful were they when Bill Gates had to loan them several hundred million to keep them as a competition?

Except those are both Zombie Urban Legends. At the time Apple had 10 times the size of Bill's investment in liquid assets, so they weren't even close to even thinking about bankruptcy.

You mean considering how many slashdot geeks hate Apple don't you? The general public likes Apple.

That sounds like fanboy talk to me.

Sounds like impotent Hateboi rage to me.

Corporate executives, government employees, and any other high-powered types who are already tied deeply to Blackberry might not care to pay extra for a feature they'll never use.

As if you look sideways at new TV's with Hulu or Netflix integration, Hateboi.

and not driving down private driveways insisting "this is the best route to Roundtop Mountain!!!"

As the other guy pointed out, all nat-nav systems have errors, Hateboi. Apple's only mistake was not pulling a Google and calling their product "beta" for oh, I don't know, half a decade or more. Then all sins are forgiven!

Keep cloning them from the same DNA sequence for zoos and such? Wildlife that's threatened by extinction because of us is fine, reintroducing wildlife that died out many thousands of years ago due to natural selection seems like an overall bad idea. Despite there being cave paintings of them, there's no place on current day earth where they belong in the natural environment. And even if we could set up such a preserve it'd have to be huge to function.

Microsoft also sells millions of products a year and we hate them too.

But Apple isn't in the habit of releasing actively user-hostile shit like Windows 8 while being a convicted monopolist.

You're of course technically correct, as long as you run a plain X application. Which is xterm and.... what? Nothing that uses KDE, Gnome, wxWidgets or any other form of toolkit from the last 15 years at least. If you talk about remoting anything that actually looks like a GUI there's a 99.99% chance it won't be network transparent, but if you cover your ears and chant "xterm" real loud you can ignore that. And if xterm is all you need you might as well use plain SSH, it's basically SSH with a server drawn border instead of a client drawn one.

It was all demoed to Jobs in 1999 as it happens.

Ahem. Development started 12 years before 1999.

The people who keep insisting that Apple did everything first essentially know nothing about the history of mobile devices.

You were saying?

A presidential car would never, ever under normal circumstances be allowed to run close to empty. It must be able to drive the President around all day and still have the range for any emergency that might occur at the worst possible moment and where boarding a helicopter or plane to get out of there is unsafe or unavailable, the nearest safe haven far, far away and getting out to swap cars totally out of the question. Yes, it weighs 20000 pounds and gets 8 MPG but one gallon is about 6 pounds. My guess is that it has a 50-100 gallon gas tank, 300-600 pounds for a 400-800 mile range is still less than half of the Model S's 1200 pound battery pack and I'm sure they always keep the tank over half full. By comparison the Tesla would have to drag around literally tons of batteries. Long, single haul emergency drives is pretty much the worst possible case for an electric.

As well it should, compared to designing, building, testing, and launching a new probe manning the ground station has to be downright cheap so as long as they are getting useful scientific information out of it it seems shortsighted to cut the funding.

According to the latest market statistics 66% of PCs overall use embedded graphics. Even Steam has a 16% Intel share and probably some AMD APUs that aren't separated out. I don't know about you but anything "serious" I do like work doesn't push the GPU one bit, the only thing that does is gaming. And not everybody is a gamer or their idea of gaming is more like Candy Crush. On that note, I loved The Walking Dead, here's the system requirements:

Windows Operating system: Windows XP / Vista / Windows 7
Processor: 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent
Memory: 3 GB RAM
Video Card: ATI or NVidia card w/ 512 MB RAM
Direct X 9.0c
Audio card required

Oh so that's like any CPU and graphics card made in the last 10 years or so. What about something like Civilization V (okay it's a bit old but there's no Civ6 yet)

Operating System: Windows XP SP3/ Windows Vista SP2/ Windows 7
Processor: Dual Core CPU
Memory: 2GB RAM
Hard Disk Space: 8 GB Free
DVD-ROM Drive: Required for disc-based installation
Video: 256 MB ATI HD2600 XT or better, 256 MB nVidia 7900 GS or better, or Core i3 or better integrated graphics
Sound: DirectX 9.0c-compatible sound card
DirectX: DirectX version 9.0c

Scary requirements yeah? What about World of Warcraft, that's some million gamers:

Windows XP / Windows Vista / Windows® 7 / Windows 8 / Windows 8.1 with the latest service pack
Intel Pentium D or AMD Athlon 64 X2
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 or
ATI Radeon X1600 Pro (256 MB)
2 GB RAM (1 GB Windows XP)

I could go on, but long story short unless you're into the latest and greatest 3D games no it's not really required. Sure I need a discrete graphics card, but I know I'm in the minority. And I just need it to run Skyrim and stuff like that, I don't need the worst SLI/CF setup for twitcher FPS games either.

I think that says more about their politics than their broadband...

ReFS on a parity storage space also solves bitrot and it's built into Window 8.1. Plus you can use an SSD as a cache.

You can do the initial seed as a local backup and then take that offsite to the friends location, that's what I did with my brothers, we traded HDD's around to seed the backups to each other.

1. Start your own cryptocurrency
2. Make the world use it (Implementation: ???)
3. Profit!

Granted, it was much the same with Bitcoin but there everybody was pooling their work and pulling in the same direction, so either Bitcoins would fly or cryptocurrencies would crash and burn. What does 100 copycat currencies run by people who figured the best way to get in early is to start a new currency get you? It reminds me of the guy who in the dotcom boom made a 1000x1000 pixel page of pure ads and sold space at $1/pixel. He made almost a million dollars because it became a "thing" to see, creating money out of thin air. Of course afterwards there were tons of DIY kits and whatever to set up your own page, naturally they all bombed. Who'd really watch a copycat page with nothing but ads? These "altcoins" are the same kind of halo hype, my guess is most if not all of these will be worth $0 in five years.

Exactly. I very much doubt he has 20TB of data that changes very often, plug in a 4TB external drive, fill it to the brim, take note of what you've backed up. This is how I used to do it with CD-R/DVD-Rs back in the day, I had one "incoming" directory and one "archived" directory. When I had enough to burn a full disc I'd burn it and move it. Keep a text file saying what's on the different discs. It's very very low tech but it's simple and it works. Unless he's for some reason keeping a 20TB database at home with random changes everywhere.

You can find a bunch of SAS LTO4 drives on ebay for ~$50-75, and adding a SAS PCIe HBA doesn't cost much more (if you have 20TB I assume you already have a tower).