I fully anticipate that the two parties will now settle the Apple/Samsung lawsuit out of court by announcing a cross-licensing deal. Basically, as I suggested before the whole lawsuit was so that Apple could validate its position to strongarm Samsung into basically creating a "free licensing" deal for Apple to use the LTE tech in the iPhone 5. Welcome to the world of business lock-in by patent.

Good grief; the stats if you read the actual survey tell you everything you need to know. 51% of the survey participants think that the cloud is affected by the weather... but 54% don't even know what it is.

And this is news? When did Oprah start talking about "The Cloud"? I am not kidding either; the average person doesn't know about it because the average person doesn't care. Also, believe it or not the average person doesn't NEED to care. "The Cloud" is an industry buzzword that happens to be one in the industry that most Slashdotters work. I am in San Francisco this week at VMworld, and when people ask what I'm doing in town and I reply I'd say that probably 1 in 4 actually know about the conference (at least once you get a couple of miles from Moscone), and fewer than that actually have any idea what VMware is or what virtualization is. And they don't need to care; that's our job. It doesn't matter that more than likely almost all of them use VMware indirectly in most of their dealing with their bank or some other web site every day. They only care that they can get to the information that matters to them, they don't care about how that data gets there any more than they care about how the electricity to run their lights gets there so long as it does when they flip the switch. And believe me, I doubt many people here have any REAL clue how that happens either because it's FAR more complex than you might think. I didn't know until I started reading about it and it's fascinating.

So what's the real story here? That most people don't know what "The Cloud" is? Yeah, not exactly news to me and I'm actually surprised that the number was as low as it is. I'd also bet the survey would be vastly different based upon where they ran it; San Francisco might have a very different ratio of people who know than Topeka.

Truly, spoken like one who doesn't actually keep up with market trends or the news. I wish you all the best as you sit in the garden; they're already building the wall but you're obviously far too focused on your own navel to notice.

Seriously? You think Windows 95 was the first version of Windows? Not by a long stretch... and obviously you're missing the point that compared to anything else around at the time it WAS a huge step forward. Windows prior to Windows 95 was a train wreck... I was an OS/2 user because of it. Mac OS at the time was beginning to creak under its own weight, and Linux for a desktop was pretty much a nonentity. Oh and OS/2 was a fine OS except for the lack of application support and the feeling that IBM was doing it as a hobby. I also contend that 98 SE can't be considered an OS in its own right because in many ways it was a bug fix and feature release for Windows 98... much the way that I consider Windows 7 to be "Vista SE".

Wait.

For the record, I'm currently a Mac user (13" Macbook Pro) but suspect this will be my last Mac because I believe it's only a matter of time.

echo 'alias sudo="sudo "' >> ~/.bash_aliases (the space after sudo is important!)
echo 'alias ag="apt-get"' >> ~/.bash_aliases
exit

Log back in and voila; you have a short-hand for apt-get that works with sudo. You're welcome :)

But it also encourages scientific thinking in children who are watching it. For that alone, I applaud them even if their methodologies are flawed.

Near Field Communication is a buzzword? And here I thought that unlike "cloud", NFC referred to an actual technology with very specific implementation and use cases. I will join the choir here wondering why the technical knowledge of editors and submitters seems to be dropping precipitously.

Simplemobile is a T-Mobile MVNO... so if your coverage sucks now it'll suck just as bad with them.

Because storage vendors sell their gear to CxO's with unformatted, RAID0 storage capacities... and leave it to the storage admin to explain to said CxO why his 110TB SAN is full with about 50TB of data (once formatted and RAID'ed). And quite often these purchases are made without any real knowledge or often consulting the storage admin to explain why the salesman for EMC is completely batshit crazy. Simple fact is; RAID 5 maximizes the storage capacity while allowing some semblance of redundancy. Is it a good solution? Oh hell no... I'd love to build everything RAID10 but until someone who has actually been a storage admin elevates to that level and knows to ask the awkward questions it just isn't going to happen. We are going through this right now with a storage refresh where I work... and yes, I'm the storage guy. The thing is; the people writing the checks are going to be the ones who dictate usage of RAID 5 because the sales rep oversold the capacity and my job is to make it work. I have worked for a number of different companies and they all have varying degrees of the same problem (I've also been the storage engineer on the other side). And the sad thing is, no matter how many times you go through this with your management they never quite seem to understand.

Then you have the problem of explaining to them why your storage costs 10 times per gigabyte what a hard disk from Best Buy will cost.

RAID 5 has its place until the storage vendors start getting honest and selling their gear as FORMATTED, RAID'ed capacity. Not going to happen because they all think that bigger is better.

Ah... but a business jet requires a flightplan since they all fly IFR...

Patently false. About 90% of all private flights are without flight plans; flying under VFR or visual flight rules does not require a flight plan and that's how all pilots start out. You CAN file a flight plan if you like, but few do. Also, about 80% of all airports are uncontrolled, as in no tower. They have planes sitting out on the tarmac and all you need is a key (or the ability to hotwire) to get them flying. Trust me; taking a small aircraft is dead easy.

However, if you knew anything about aviation you'd also know that with a single pilot and full fuel, you'd barely be able to get enough explosives on board to make a dent in a building. Have you seen what happens when a light aircraft hits a building? It's akin to hitting a deer in your car; it'll cause some damage but the odds that even one person is going to die is pretty slim. The odds that the pilot/deer will die is pretty damned close to 100%. A Cessna 172 (which I learned to fly in) with full fuel (50 Gallons) and a pilot (175lbs) has about 200lbs of available capacity before running afoul of not actually being able to control the plane any more. And the more heavily loaded the plane, the tougher it is to control... and thus aiming for a building becomes extremely difficult.

Do you know how much good explosive weighs? 200lbs of explosive will make a decent bang but no way enough to take down a building. And what about timing and detonation? Do you know how complex that is? You need a mechanism to detonate the explosive at exactly the right moment to cause damage... too early and you hit the building with just a lot of small bits of aeroplane... too late and you probably destroy the mechanism on impact thus preventing detonation. Don't believe the movies; most explosive don't spontaneously erupt.

And don't start on the 50 gallons of fuel either; it's 100 octane which means that it resists ignition even more than the stuff you put in your car. It's VERY hard to light and gasoline needs to be a vapour in order to actually cause an explosion. Otherwise it's a fire... and a fire from 50 gallons of AvGas will take the average building sprinkler system and fire department about 30 minutes to bring under control.

So... paranoid much?

On the bright side, we can at least then start to explore if there's any intelligent life in LA.

Well then they can damned well go and get their stuff back before I win my lawsuit. Damned messy apes...

You're confusing your semantics here. This is about the difference between "open" and "closed", not "open-source" and "closed-source". The two are not synonymous. The article writer's point is about open systems, and he's using the term correctly to refer to systems on which you are free to install any software you like without a curator telling you that you can, or sandboxing. By those terms, Windows is an open system as is Android and even Mac OSX (though I fear this may be changing for the worse, soon). The only curated and sandboxed environment that has been commercially successful to the masses is iOS, and he likes it because of this. I agree with GP; the author is an idiot.