That is not necessarily a good analogy. Apple has already proved with the publishing industry that it isn't above meddling in the affairs of content providers, telling them how much they are going to charge for things.

http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/11/technology/apple-doj-ebooks/index.htm

If UPS bought Exxon-Mobile (which I know is ridiculous) do you think there would be a problem? Apple, being the big boy now will have to deal with these sort of claims when entering into smaller markets in which they have some level of control of how the market work.

Microsoft got sued for Internet Explorer, for fucks sake. It's a free product in a the market full of other free products.

My pithy saying was gunning for +1 Funny, not +1 Insightful. I genuinely believe that Apple's influence has either peaked or is peaking. This doesn't mean that they aren't going to be the major player for a the foreseeable future. I find it unlikely that they will be able to maintain their rate of growth and if they start to grow much more vertically they are going to start getting a lot of unwanted government attention.

Additionally, past the iPad there hasn't been a whole lot of innovation coming from them. They haven't showed up in the 7 inch market yet. That is not to see that they won't sell a bajillion iPad mini's when they drop, but that is going to come primarily from within the segment of the market that they already own. The iPod was a great device that had no peer so it got a ton of people on the platform. The iPhone was a great device that had no peer so it got a ton of people onto the platform. The IPad was a great device that had no peer so it got a ton of people onto the platform. The mini isn't even out yet but already there are bunch of peers on the market that work pretty darn well, so I think the opportunity there is missed. We will have to wait and see where Apple will be innovating from here out, but I am betting that there days of first to market are shortening.

I didn't say they wouldn't be on top, but they aren't going to be a growth stock as they have in the past. Additionally, if you think Apple will be immune from the anti-trust problems that you saw with Microsoft, I think you will be surprised in the coming years. It gets hot under the spotlight and with the way they are pushing the lawsuits around it is quite obvious that they are transitioning their posture to defend their share as opposed to growing it.

Issac Newton knew a thing or two about apples. What goes up must come down.

I will accept your answer, though in all likelihood they won't get along.

I remember booting it up and thinking to myself "Neat! ......Now what?" and then going back to playing Gunship or Roadwar 2000.

Why would you want to clone a spose/Significant other? It's hard enough keeping one of them happy.

Yeah, find me a language that doesn't allow for sloppy coding and I will show you a language that no one uses.

Perl gets a bad rap because you can, if you are so inclined, write horribly useful, exceptionally terse and completely unintelligible code with it. That has historically been one of true beauties of the language. "There is more than one way to do it" is the axiom of the Perl programmer and learning different ways to do things helps with the fundamental understanding of what the interpreter is doing to get the computer to accomplish the task you want to accomplish.

What makes Perl a good learning language may not necessarily be a good business case for its use, but I have seem plenty of well written Perl in my time, and I am sure that I will see a lot more.

I have started substituting the phrase " The Fog" for "The Cloud". It's starting to get kind of thick.

Did you push up your glasses when you typed that?

If I don't recognize Missouri as a state, I sure as heck don't have to count OSX as a Unix.

Red Hat != Linux || Free != !(Money)

time == money

free != not(money)

I assume you are trolling, but I will indulge you.

Linux != cheap. Linux == Free.

As a Unix guy I think OSX is a lot like Unix in the following ways.

* It is over priced for what it does.
* Support is generally good if you pay for it, though it is not inexpensive.
* It is generally picky about what sort of hard it runs on. Often you don't upgrade a machine, you buy a new one.
* The people who are proponent of it will seriously not STFU about it.

Seriously, go look at a prison and then look around you.If it truly resembles that, then go some where else cause where you are is no good. Don't take that as "Leave America" jingoism. It is okay to be pissed off at the world as there is a lot to be pissed off at, but you don't have to make it out to be worse than it is to make your point.

And I would say that you are prone to hyperbole as well. You are devaluing the barbarism of the past to speak of indignities today. You do us a disservice from how far we have come, even if we still have a long way to go.