I do not think the Author is a complete poseur, so asking him to leave the hall would not be 100% correct solution. He seemed to have some project management experience. However there is a problem with him that I cannot put my finger on (or an appropriate place). No programmer in his right (or left one for that matter) mind can believe that a "programming test" during an interview would provide any meaningful indicator about a coder's abilities. Maybe you can ask the difference between SET versus SELECT and INSERT, but the answer would show the philosophical position of candidate at best. He can say that SET is a three letter command and others are six letter (thus inefficient :) ) commands, that there is a need for a four letter command in between.... He would be right. He can talk about the differences between utilization of read and write pipes amongst those commands and he would be right again. If I were to answer I would talk about offloading some CPU tasks from application server to database server and I would be right too. However a programming test, to see if a programmer can code, especially if you are looking for a possible "cowboy" (which is more suitable to the case than "rock star" I assume) is absurd. It is like claiming that there are already people in staff who can evaluate the code from such people... It would be more likely a case of "You are not expected to understand this", if candidate is really a good programmer. My Assembly instructor used to tell us that "no good programmer can understand their code after a year"...

Just when I was thinking that I am really old. I always wondered that if it was a natural (!) odor of components, or if it is an intentional addition to the box. That smell was the smell of joy and despair, as in the anticipation of a new game, and suspicion of a problem happened during the (naturally illegal) copy process...

:) Producer of the unnamed toy OS, used to supply a toolkit free of charge (probably as an oversight) that provides UNIX utilities. I guess it was the part of their attempt to be POSIX compatible, back then. I fortunately am not with the company anymore, whose general manager believed that any UNIX jockey must be able to run M$ products as well, thus I lost track of the current status of tool box I mentioned....

You know, this is what I hate most about some tech support organisations. Some idiot in the support team managment with an engineering degree and a MBA on top of that, with no field experience, sets some aggressive KPIs for support jockeys. They try to meet their quota. For the first six-nine months he would have a very happy upper management. Then customer complaints reach upper managment via sales, in the form of customer threats for moving away the business. Upper magament fires support manager. KPI stays there, as they cannot believe a customer would prefer slower service, if it means quality -remembe those guys were the ones assigned MBA holder for support management at the first place-. Company would eventually fail.... Management by objectives my ass.....

More importantly, smartphones are expensive. My PC is 300 USD plus several HDDs, my Xperia is 650 USD. When I invest money like this into a device, I want to be sure that I would be able to receive my mail and such as long as the phone is in working order. Also I can pull some strings in my company so I can tell my system management to modify e-mail service if I cannot do what I want thru Outlook and/or one of mail servers I run as a hobby. I do not want to lose almost complete control on my data to a company, which (not if but when) went under would take my data and services with it. A company which is in financial trouble, with a CEO in denial. Also it is a company that is under investigation in several countries, as it denied lawful interception rights of legal authorities, a slow but sure way of suicide where nation states mean business.

Apple has every right to limit services they offer to both their customers, and their solution partners/providers. The interesting thing is that, Apple's business practices are still surprising some people after so many years. If the way they conduct their business is a problem, anybody/everybody is free to move away their own business from Apple platform.

I moved away from IOS to Android. I paid 50 bucks for a data recovery program by which I lifted all my SMS and similar data from my Iphone. The data I recovered includes the cache which keeps every location I went since the summer of 2010. Interestingly (for me at the least) 50 USD is more than I paid for programs in I-tunes during a period of four years. I paid something like 750 USD for a Sony Ericsson.

In short I am free from disturbing business practices by paying 800 bucks and have a better phone now. No one is forcing anybody to use Apple products, which has admitedly one of the best designs in market, but with lots of strings attached.

"Here goes your facebook ID, oops so bad, you had a bank account interconnected to it...."

I do not think it can be even sued properly, so many layers between you and the potential attacker... I am in the sector and so many (naive??) developers believe that the platform OS being Unix, mostly Linux, makes the device secure enough. This is due to the fact that most developers are from household appliance backgrounds, not from the jungle called Internet...

IANAL: Here (in Turkey) a private entity can neglect to follow required procedures to complete the ruling that grant some king of benefit to them, by not filing the ruling with proper authorities, if the case is a civil law case. For example after a divorce to keep track of alimony payments is the responsibility of receiving party. But this is applicable only to civil cases related to real people.

AFAIK USA is the only country that treats companies as real people. In Turkey and again AFAIK our regulations are compatible with EU rules, if a company neglects to follow up such a rule, responsible managers of said company will face charges of criminal misconduct due to, either neglecting duty for protecting shareholders, or even tax evasion, as such lack of activity would cause a loss to the company hence loss of taxes of government, depending on the mood of prosecutors at the day they were given the file...