I live in Dallas. Worked overnight Friday, saw people posting things on facebook about the sirens going off at somewhat random locations across the city. Co-workers saw similar posts from their friends.

"Well that's fucked up. Who tests the sirens in the middle of the damn night?"
"No one. That's done at like 1pm on a Wed... Odds are some jackass managed to hack the control systems."

Now, if he were a super dick there'd be a hidden job to make it happen again in a week or two.

Intel's had an 8core Desktop for a while now.... and there's the shiny new 10core that you're thinking of at that $1700+ price point. And those are actual cores before "HyperThreading" or whatever they're wanting to call it now gets taken into count... so 16 and 20 thread execution respectively. And yes, Desktop product, not Xeon product in desktop boards with wonky support.

I'd say most "geeks" are having that reaction now....

technically doesn't work anymore as rm has some stupidity checking built in....

sudo find / -type f -exec rm -f {} +

Figured I'd take a look at the tools. Download what claims to be the software for windows (first link). Get presented with a Zip file, as expected. Open zip file and find.... OSX software. Thinking I clicked on the wrong link I went back to download a second time... Same file.

So... yeah.. ranking real high on the trust value right now.

When I operated an ISP we had an absurdly effective mail filtering system. 2000 users in the domain, on average 1,000,000 spam messages blocked per day (the owner had sold the customer mail list several times (somuchate)). This required LOTS of work and honestly wasn't worth the effort.

I've had a GMail acct since 2004, haven't had an issue since. Left that ISP job, been through 2 other ISPs since then. Haven't had to change anything about external accounts, still have mail archival going back over a decade now and very few spam messages get through, very few legit emails blocked.

Those 68k Apple Clones weren't signed and blessed by Cupertino while the early PPC era ones were. The 68k clones were more-or-less outright theft as I understood their existence.

Samsung has been threatening that for a while. As far as I know they only have a failed watch to show for it.

I've largely gotten fed up with Samsung in general as things go on. The increased bloat/shitware and device instability would be a reason to move to any other device. So far Apple has not given me incentive to completely abandon the android pool yet.

Apple isn't going after "people who want a phone", they're cultivating a crop of people who are willing to hand over large sums of money for something they believe is superior regardless of it being superior or not. It's been the same for their desktop hardware for ages. Yes the stability is there, but the ability and capability of the computer compared to the competition is lacking.

Years ago, during the early PowerPC era, 2 things happened that I would have sworn to be impossible. (1) Apple allowed for hardware clones, (2) Microsoft had an OS to run on the platform. Apple opened their design and allowed 3rd party manufacturers to produce hardware and Microsoft built a version of WinNT to run on the PPC hardware. Apple then started losing sales to these "white box" vendors who were putting out good hardware (because they had to meet Apple's specs) notably cheaper than the real Apple boxes. On top of that, you also have the big competitor's OS running on comparable hardware and running very nice, very stable. Suddenly all the licensing to produce the clone hardware goes away.

Apple, for quite a while, has only cared about the money. The reason you saw ][e systems in so many schools and earlier generation Macs was that Apple gave a deep discount to Educational Entities. Certain events happened, certain people departed as certain people rose to power and suddenly that all went away. If you can keep people distracted enough and disconnected then you can push anything and it's like magic.

Part of the problem is the "we won't enforce anything" stance of Google. If Google made a requirement that device makers provide "No Bullshit" builds of the OS for their devices (no TouchWiz, no bloatware, no crap) and made the carriers agree to allow for the use of that firmware set I think Android would be better off.

Yes that more of a technical aspect, but it's not like they can't package things up to make it damn-near one-click simple from a Windows desktop. They don't have to advertise or push it, just make it available as an option.

I own 2 Apple ][e, still functional. Still own a Mac Plus that runs OS 7.5.5 and OS8. Somewhere I have a ][gs but I doubt it still runs. I've had multiple other Macs from the Quadra line. I have 2 of the G4 series Mac Minis. As far as Apple goes I've not been immune.

Most people I talk to about their iPhones gush about how great it is and I see hardware that is behind "state of the art" for other things. Very few iPhone owners have I been able to have a real conversation with about the merits of restricted hardware platforms vs the innovation nightmare of an open "wild west" hardware environment.

Apple has had some solid, stable devices. But their innovation has been somewhat flat because there is no competition, no drive to change, no evolutionary impetus.

How many of those people bought a cheap (crap) Android device and then instead of spending money for a "superphone" decided to go the the "cult of iDevices"? I've had a number of android based devices and given the broad range of hardware out there it's easy to get suckered into buying something that's absolute crap and then wind up blaming the part you can see. I've had a few friends that made this kind of switch and when I pull out my current Android device (OnePlus) most of them kinda kick themselves.

There's statistics, and then there's useless bullshit. I'm thinking this is more the latter.

That's the part that Google Licenses. You can't distribute their Services and Play because those aren't part of AOSP. That's where you put the hinge.

Yes you can download and install and distribute the OS. However most devices that do that aren't really well received. They tend to be low quality cheap knock-offs. Most vendors that sell Android devices need the Google Services and Google Play on their device and have a license to distribute those "Non-Open Source" components. The cheap vendors that are including these parts without proper licensing (and there have been a few, mostly China) are in violation and open to legal action.

I'm not sure how it's incompatible.

Requirement to be able to include Google Services and Google Play: You will make and provide a method for users of the device to install a build of Android that is untainted by any 3rd party applications in the firmware. They make the device with their standard extras and ship it. They provide links on their website for a download of the "same" firmware without all the extras and the firmware update tools to install it. The burden is then on the user or their designated 3rd party surrogate to flash the firmware to the device. Most people won't bother unless they have a geek relative or have the necessary tech skills to handle it themselves.

Now, I would expect that the Carriers wouldn't want to Warranty Support the devices at that point, but the Manufacturer would still be on the hook as long as you flashed their firmware with their tools. We're still "out of bounds" on certain things, but at least we'd have devices that didn't suck so much...

I'm not blaming Android/Google for anything other than not making a requirement that a "bullshit free" OS load be an option. If there were a firmware from Samsung that didn't have all the carrier/manufacturer mandated extras and BS added I'd be much happier and I'm sure some of the more tech-savvy users would be as well. Most of the people complaining that "Android Sux" are the ones who've never seen or used anything near an AOSP. They're fighting with Motorolla crap or Samsung crap or HTC crap. If Google made it part of the OS licensing that the vendor needed to provide something close to an AOSP load for their devices people could make a choice on using their "Branded Android" install or going with a "Native Android" setup.

As to "Why not Nexus".... Lack of SD card support and "small" internal storage. Tech specs that were (last I looked) a bit behind current flagship devices. In the case of the Note3 purchase: I can SSH into my servers when necessary and actually have a little bit of screen left after the keyboard is exposed because no one wants to make a device with a physical keyboard. And it didn't help that a friend had one of the Nexus phones that was RMA'ed 4 times in one year because the radio was crap. His wife's phone didn't have issues (another Nexus device), his did.