Even so, this represents an edge case, and not the majority of app development by far. Most apps don't do anything special with phone features.

Look at it like this... if you compare IOS 6 to Android 4.x, you get:

IOS: you get 90% of 25% of the market on a single relesae.

Android: you get 75% of 75% of the market.

You end up with more than twice the target audience with Android 56.25% vs 22.5%. Now, IOS people tend to buy more apps because IOS users are "premium" users and many Android devices are "freebie" phones that come with a cell plan. But even so, those numbers should be scaring the piss out of Apple.

For me, it was the VAX 11/750. That computer was gods-level engineering compared to the cheap sh17 we use today.

ECC RAM? Oh please! The VAX would identify bad RAM spots on the fly and remap them as needed, reloading the contents of the RAM from disk as needed and the end user never had to know. There was a utility you could run to identify which RAM card (roughly the size of a dinner plate) to remove, that you could swap out without turning it off!

Similar with hard disks: you could mark a drive to be disabled, and it would move all the files around without shutting down the system (if there was enough space) so you could upgrade the drives.

Kicker: you could hot swap CPUs if you had a multi core system. (The one I used had only a single CPU, about the processing power of an 80286)

Sometimes, I weep a little inside when I see what 1U "enterprise class" hardware today looks like compared to real, manly man stuff like the VAXes.

It's like people are afraid of using a tool (SQL) to do what it does best: join relevant slices of data from a large set of data! (generally called a "database")

When did it become preferred to use SQL more like a NoSQL like file store? No wonder some people are claiming that NoSQL is "better"!

We use ORM for editing data, EG: CRUD. But for the types of complex reports that our customers ask for, there's no higher god than a good, well-written SQL query. Even though some queries take a while (5 seconds isn't unheard of) doing it any other way has (over and over) proven to be far slower and more error prone.

As somebody closely following the development of SSD technology (that we use for our database servers) I would have to respectfully disagree.

You see, our results testing SSDs against PostgreSQL 9.1 showed that SSDs improved performance by at least 90%. In other words, queries, particularly the large, nasty, 10-table joins with combined inner, outter, and meta-table joins that our vertical application is rife with, take 10% or less time to run. That result isn't just dramatic, it's a game-changer. But the truth is that even that isn't enough. Being able to saturate a 6 Gbps SATA III link in a random access read-load is fine and dandy, but write performance is also a very big deal, especially since our system is highly transactional and transaction wait states are painful.

In short, unlike CPUs, SSD technology is still immature enough that every bit of good news counts quite a bit.

Came here to say this. I have a folding iGo stowaway bluetooth keyboard for my phone, and I was honestly surprised and just how useful that thing is! I still have a laptop for my primary "work station" but when I'm on the go, it's surprising how much my bluetooth keyboard and Android 4.1 phone gets used instead.

These numbers clearly came from a questionable source. (perhaps your backside?) The PDF available here indicates a transmission and distribution loss of between 6% and 8% for the United States power grid.

The logic here is simply borken.

They are buying all these other companies and turning their products into crap and nobody buys them anymore because it's crap all the way down, as far as the eye can see...

So, where did they get the money in the first place to buy all these other companies?

Love it or hate it making quality stuff is *expensive*. Making a mid range game that a lot of people buy can be far more profitable than making a stellar game that a lot of people buy. First off, the risk is lower making a mid line game because the up front investment is far less.

If it didn't work then EA wouldn't dominate the games industry like it does. (sadly)

I've gone through numerous BT headsets in the last couple years trying to find a headset that

A) Would allow me to talk while riding a bicycle;

B) Wouldn't cut out randomly;

C) Wasn't more hassle than simply holding my phone to my ear;

D) Could play music when not in a conversation.

Sadly, every one I've tried sucks. Your Jawbone was actually one of the worst for audio noise while riding a bicycle, not doing much better than a sharty freebie headset.

I've pretty much given up on BT/wireless headsets. Every one I've tried is pretty terrible.

The problem isn't so much with voice control, it's with the language.

You can't even talk to your spouse in the car without having him or her clarify what you are saying every few sentences. It's so ingrained into conversation that we don't notice it much. Asking a machine (with no ability to "comprehend" anything we say) to do any better is just silly, at least for the near to mid-range term.

Wife says "Romanesque" and slurs it slightly by mistake, and I hear "row man axe". Typically, I'll wait a sentence or so to see if I can figure out what she meant. I may just drop it if it doesn't seem important, or interrupt her if I still can't figure out what she means.

It's typical. It happens all the time. Rarely are 100% of our words understood by those who listen in the best of circumstances. Asking a machine to do better with a crappy sound quality and lots of background noise is just folly.

Even Google Glass largely works by using a restricted command vocabulary, something like the phonetic equivalent of the Palm Graffiti from yore. Even today, handwriting analysis isn't nearly as fast as Graffiti; I miss it to this day even though I love my Android phone.

As a programmer I rarely have to deal with the types of document scenarios you paint.

However, my wife (who is NOT a technocrat) is an honors grad student at a California State University and has been using OpenOffice for the entirety of her educational journey. She has had to give many presentations and turn in a ridiculous amount of homework papers and in all that time, has never, not once, ran into a compatibility problem.

She gives her OO Impress presentations on a shared computer running some flavor of MS Office/Power Point and has no chance to "preview" to make sure it "looked right" and has still never been disappointed. No, not even one time. I offered numerous times to buy MS Office and she declined, saying that "it works fine" and didn't want to "change anything", especially if it cost $$.

I'd happily grant that she's not getting a degree in the Graphic Arts (actually, Psych) but to say that OO gives "completely alien" results is simply absurd.

1) Microsoft isn't well known for being a Unix vendor, you know? They sold it, and even made some money at it but nothing like DOS/Windows.

2) IBM thought the PC was "ill fated". Note that I did forget a "t" at the end of "IBM though"...

Strangely, the scenarios presented were placed 20 years in the future. Posted in 1993, then-revolutionary Wired Magazine got it exactly, dead on. It's almost strange how they were so dead-on as far as the time scale.

Notice all the dash cam footage coming out of the Soviet Union...

Think about it this way, Microsoft got started in the OS business by being an app provider whose apps a lot of people liked. They then leveraged that and the money to build an OS and then used the app business to build on their OS value. It was only later that the OS and the apps flipped in value, with the OS dominating everybody.

What the.... ?!@#$ parallel universe history are you talking about!??? Microsoft started as a language vendor (not typically considered an "app") selling BASIC, then got into the O/S business by buying QDOS and selling it at a ridiculous markup to IBM, who just wanted something quick for their (they though) ill-fated "personal computer".

They later used the profits from their DOS O/S to build "app"lications like Word to outcompete Word Perfect and Excel to outcompete Lotus 1-2-3. In the future, please take the time to have some clue what you are talking about before posting...

Network Manager is a victim of the 80/20 rule. 80% of the time, it works fantastic. 20% of the time it's better to disable it and edit the config files yourself.

And you know what? That's good enough for me. I use NM nearly always on my laptop because usually I just want to get connected the usual way. When I'm interested in "server level" connections I disable NM and roll my own configs manually.

Damn. Time to change my password...