I once got an Android phone. I didn't do my research and I expected that I would have a normal Linux with root access, some decent package manager and that I could access most everything from the command line, and of course a graphical interface that has all the things on it. I imagined, that I could dial with a script, read sensors, or do IP over USB and other neat tricks easily just like I do with a linux box. I was so freaking wrong.

Now we are comparing a USB stick that has this limited crap on it to a full blown Debian server. I go with the Debian for the servers and back to my iPhone that at least has a neat developer tool (yeah, need to pay $100 a year to develop my own utils on the phone .... big deal, Xcode saves me enough time to justify that $100)....
I by the way run a little java app for automation on the PI. They have arduinos hanging on them doing most of the actual switching/sensing/human IO. It is a perfect architecture because I am allowed to use all the Unix/Linux services that OS has to offer without programming too much micro controllers but taking advantage of both words. I figured that an Arduino with ethernet shield is $70 while the PI is $35. An arduino + pi is $65. A little more juice is used but less coding of basic stuff, more time for logic and you still have a snappy micro controller one i2c or serial pin away.

No, there is an exposed populated header (pins). You can buy a breadboard compatible breakout board that comes with a cable. One version is the cobbler kit http://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-pi-cobbler-kit/overview for 7.95.

You CAN connect 3.3v electronics without this kit (e.g. you can connect an Arduino pro to i2c or serial and double your pins adding PWM, AD inputs and so on.

Nooo, the sites seem to : "Select your region:" North America, South America, Europe, etc :)

So you are the one making those region drop-downs that are missing the region where a couple of us live: Central America.

  Central America consists of seven countries: Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama.

You can sometimes read "Central America and Panama". So according to some here Panama is not officially Central America.

Whether they create low paying factory jobs or high paying engineering jobs they are doing you guys (in the U.S.) a favour: they create jobs. And this is something you need right now.

So yes, I own more Apple devices than I probably need, I think their products are great for work and leisure, and probably I am a "fanboy" or "iSheep", but I have to say, that any American (U.S. American) who criticizes this move is a total moron.

Is this a marketing move? Maybe a touch of it. But from a company who provides good products, being virtually the ONLY company caring for producing more environmentally friendly products (unibody vs pvc and many others) I can imagine that they care for their own country a tidbit.

PS: I would tax the CRAP out of companies who outsource everything in favour of higher profits. You should support your own country's people where ever you are.
Just my 2c ...

No. At any decent shop developers do not even have access to production.

You develop your X hours in the morning (or whenever your contract says so) at a development environment. At smaller shops then the developers or testing engineers move it to the testing environment. (with sufficient documentation on what should go where). At bigger shops it is "middleware ops" who do this after a change request is approved at the change meeting (if the company somewhat follows ITIL).

Then the product is tested by comparing the wannabe you developed to the specification. Testing can be by testers/qa/customer/whoever else. Really depends on the house.

If the product is functionally OK, it is moved to staging/performance testing (one or two environments). These environments are EXACTLY the same as production in an ideal case, the performance testing many times is an environment with both worse and better hardware then production (or something you can throttle/bottleneck artificially).

After that it is production. Production should never be touched by developers (only in extremely small shops where you design, develop, deploy maintain ... errr .. and answer the door and help customers ... and clean the floor sometimes)....

We developed a product that was released early, we had lots of bugs. Our "tech dept" (kinda like middleware, but not too clever) cannot support it, because it is "all too new complicated technologies" they refuse to learn. The owners do not understand these matters very well (being old and not too much into IT), so the problem escalated, that not only our entire environment (small: 5 DBs around 20-25 linux servers (Apache, MQ, APE, some JAVA console apps, and 10 client stations that run some of our web interfaces for intranet) had to be supported by my small team of 5 guys.

Voicing my opinion that our 5 developers should probably not be forced to start setting our clients' environments up too while still finishing the product - an argument you don't want to be part of - got me dizzy today morning, with a high heart rate, sweating and slightly slurred speech. I decided that no money or company is worth ruining your health and when someone expects you to do their job you should either suck it up and do it or stand up and walk. I stood up, packed my stuff and left. Now I am sitting home and wondering what now ....

If your company is starting to push your developers into doing tasks they should not do, they should be informed of the correct procedures and pointed to the dangers of letting a developer deal with systems. Yeah, I also did 10+ years of network and UNIX/Linux before got back into development, so there are some (a lot) of us who can do it - but we should not, unless it is an emergency of some sort.

FYI we have 22.000 + registered users with 5-10K concurrent. Not an environment 5 developers should cobble together then install their crap on.

Once you let the "emergencies" in, they become the norm and you might have to design, develop, deploy and then even troubleshoot, since now they know you can do it. And then there is no going back, you are doomed. Like me. Hopefully not shaking for 10 hours and not out of a job with a family where the 2nd baby is on the way......

OTOH ... it depends a little on the product. An .exe or .jar or .app can be easily given a 3 step install with roll-back. A PHP site with 10.000 files is a little different. For a long time I helped our sysadmins with a replication script I wrote in Curses/shell with rsync doing the heavy lifting. They demanded the source (I had a good reason to keep it back) so I gave it after agreeing, that this was just "nice of me" and that they should be doing the scripts while I develop with my team. They ran the first replication test in the middle of our afternoon rush. A new customer with 10 sites was down for 18 hours. It took 5 of my guys 5 hours to fix the chaos they created. See .. just an example of when you might want to deploy instead of troubleshooting all Sunday afternoon.

But really... it all depends on the brain capacity of your management, their education and experience and the middleware team you have at your disposal. After 20+ years seeing what I have been seeing: the best is if everyone does THEIR job and not someone else's. So no developers on production for anything other than "troubleshooting" purposes or emergencies where ALL CHANGES are carried out by the Win/Lin/OS folks.

Just my 2c ... wow .. how much time you have when you have no job to worry about, eh ? :(

Just to be entirely correct: while I was walking out with my tea-cup, personal laptop, my luch-bag and other personal crap. The general manager pulled me into the conference room and asked me to take the week off (paid) take my vacation (week, already requested) and come back and present my decision. So while I am a depressed shit right now (writing long /. posts) I am not unemployed yet. But money cannot fix me if I get a stroke so I will probably bail to a less paid, less stressed, more organised outfit. OK OK .. that wasn't the OP's question ... just upset and upset and stressed and hate everyone now .....

yeah ... this is the question that should pop in everyone's head as the first thing .....

I suggest you watch "the world according to monsanto", "future of food", "forks over knives" and "flow for the love of water" .... just to name a few.

I do not want to eat plants that are modified to create their own pesticides, create green deserts and at the end use more herbicide than regular crops while creating superweeds.

I am sure there is a scientific approach that can argue why these are not a problem, however all I want (with many others) is a @#$% label on the foods that were produced utilising such technologies, so I can avoid buying them. It is my choice to stick to simple plant based unmodified foods.

I am of course not the usual one: I buy 99% (or more) organic at local markets and do not touch animal products at all. While I did I was sick as hell, so for me it is more than a fashion or trend I should be following....

BTW organic faming does scale. The local universities are just about to offer organic courses after realising that growing quantities without poisons does work even at a place like Costa Rica - trust me, there are a LOT of "pests" here that can eat through your crops if you don't know what you are doing. One key is diversifying instead of a monoculture. Nature does not produce a plantation of one plant specie with one variant as it is designed to be wiped out by one population of one kind of pest in a very short timeframe. Of course there are book-length studies on simple things like this, they (big traditional farming corps) just chose to ignore them and counter-balance with poisons....

Maybe in the US. There are countries that fight it with all their efforts. Monsanto has been kicked out of here years ago (Costa Rica) and many countries follow.

I personally buy 99% of my family's food at the weekend organic market. I spend around $120/week and return with 4 boxes of veggies, pasta, beans, fruits and some import stuff (olives, oil, and some supplements from mostly Peru).

The certification program and requirements are tough and expensive, so the entire weekend fair signed up under one company, posing as one entity with several farms. There are around 50 vendors and their stuff is organic. There are people selling videos, plants and seeds and there is a strong (kind of silent) promotion against modified seeds or anything bad for the environment.

Just to put it out there :) ... of course, even here we are a minority with this diet/mind set. But what's sure, is that GMO crops are not welcome here. BTW my homeland (Hungary) burned all GMO crops on government order last year (or the year before), so Europe is there too, even the eastern part of it.

Why not make an alliance/certification program that puts a label on food that is NOT GMO? Make it cheap and affordable for farmers.

I personally buy 99% organic (100% vegan, 80%+ raw) because I believe it is good for me. People should have the right to know what they eat. Anyone trying to take this right away should be punished, sued, bankrupted as a company. Not less.

I use mc every day. On linux an osx :) I love it!

So what is going to be the rule/law when it comes to displaying the owner of a drone? Country/flag, flight number?

If there is an unmarked drone above my yard what makes me not shoot it down (or capture it ) and take it into my possession?

I can already see a blackhat network of drone trading, and hobbyists who go after drones with their RC/drones armed to the teeth :) .... what was that Gibson novel again in Burning Chrome ...... hmm

Not sure if this is because of the Airplay Mirroring feature, but the Costa Rica stores are completely sold out of Apple TVs (even with the US $167 price). I heard others at the store asking about the Apple TV - something not that popular where downloading is more of the norm than renting/buying.

I went there to get one when I saw the new feature and even though I promised not to be a day1 sucker again I also got the update. Pretty much just to have the feature.

I had no desire to import my videos into iTunes then play them, mostly because most of my files are .mkv - something the device cannot import/play AFAIK.

Either way ... the feature is great and so are all the other additions. Will wait a week to put it on my office machine - coding has to go on, and if my tools are screwed in any way .. well .. went through this with Lion once :) .....

I am not a grammar Nazi (not any kind either), but what bugs me is the usage of the term "American" by US people. I moved to Central America and noticed how the term American is only used for US by the US, while the whole FSCKIN continent is America.

Back to the subject. I am told, that black people preferred "black people", even though it is considered politically incorrect recently. Well.. here at least...

For that reason I buy my apps. I have a $600 phone, pay a $30/month plan, use the standard (and free/app free) apps and maybe 10 apps that cost me an average of $2 a piece. Even if I terribly mis-calculated and I paid $50 for all my apps, some of them I bought on my iPhone, then used it on my iPhone 3GS, then my iPad and now my 4S..... so it is actually not a bad deal to buy them that cheap. Same with my Macs. I buy an app then hassle-free install it on 5 authorized machines (macbook pro (mine), mac mini (home office), macbook (living room media player), my office iMac and my wife's mini. My $10 app immediately feels like more value and Apple seems fine with it. If I had to pay for them again ... well maybe I would get one and pirate the rest. I guess they know it ..