Why does it matter, as an app developer?

Because each iteration makes a number of things easier, some substantially easier.

You are about to see a huge wave of iOS application updates with iOS7, incorporating lots of advanced system features. As Android updates lag in adoption it becomes harder and harder to maintain parity with iOS versions of applications that are just plain simpler to write and have more powerful features.

Why as an app developer would you exclusively target a version and lock everything else out,

Why as an application developer would not not make use of updated OS features that shaves tens or hundreds of hours of coding time, when you know that 80-90% of the target market will be able to run it?

You are not locking everyone else out. You are helping to provide a reason to move forward.

1 exaflops (10^{18} flops) is 1000 petaflops (10^{15} flops). The Chinese are 3.4% of the way there. Exaflop-scale computers are realistically expected for 2019, i.e. in 6 years' time.

Meanwhile, India is supposedly building a 140 exaflop computer for 2017

Better get a move on I guess.

Yea that was a typo I meant to say well over $4 a gallon. A lot more than we pay for gas here.

Given that I've seen exactly zero PHP programs running as scripts outside of a webserver environment, I'm calling bullshit on the idea of PHP being a scripting language, let alone "the web's most popular" one.

You're reading it as English. Don't do that. It's not English, but legal jargon. We throw our own jargon around all the time, and expect people to understand it as such and not interpret it as literal.

Proof: "Use the mouse to move your cursor on the desktop until it's over Firefox icon, then click it.". A more literal translation would be "Use a small rodent to move your sliderule part on the desk you're sitting at until it has a higher vertical height than a religious depiction of a red panda, then make it emit a sharp sound."

We use tech jargon on tech websites. He's using legal jargon on a legal website. That's wholly appropriate, and it's your job to interpret it through the proper filters.

It's what I assumed. The Panny UI is sluggish where the Sony UI is speedy.

I found this really surprising considering how my Panny E80 DVD recorder always worked flawlessly and still works. Of course I don't use it much but I occasionally find something worthwhile SD to transfer to disc, thankfully the Tivo HD still supports analog/SD downconvert!

My first DVD player was an Apex, back when it was a big deal to reflash it with region-free/no macrovision firmware (circa 2000?). At some point I ran into issues with this player when MPEG2 bitrates went over some threshold (5 Mbps?) -- the player just didn't have the horsepower to handle that data rate.

Eventually that player died and I went through a series of inexpensive Chinese players. Some failed outright after six months, but those that didn't die would often choke on some discs, freezing in the middle of playback or stuttering every 15 minutes.

I finally gave up and spent nearly $100 on a name-brand player and all those problems went away....until I got into Bluray players!

I bought two nearly identical Panasonic Blu-Ray players, hoping that a big name and higher price bought me better equipment, but these players have also been flaky, although not as bad as the Chinese DVD players, requiring full power cycling (pulling the plug) from time to time.

Usually the content (seems most common with HBO discs) freezes and won't continue, like it has a tracking error. Sometimes you can chapter skip and it will continue playing, but usually I pull the plug. Some software updates have helped, but it still happens too often. A Sony purchased in the last six months doesn't do this.

Anyway, the moral of the story is test your discs in better players. I kept home-burned CD-Rs in my car for years and was terribly abusive to them (left on the seat, jammed 3 into one slot in the visor holder, etc) without ever having problems except for the most obviously scratched discs. Other than some very early Kodak CD-Rs I burned in the late 90s optical media, whether factory or burned hasn't been an issue as much as the player hardware has.

Yea that seemed about double what a fill up costs here. That is well over $5 a gallon plus you need to pick up your old battery pack. In other words the Tesla is still not suitable for long trips. You would be better off renting a car for those trips if you want to have a Tesla. AKA it is still a toy for the well to do.

The assumption here is that the bribe is always paid by a company offering substantially above-market pricing for commodity products and that the price differential between fair market prices and bribery prices pays the bribe.

I would argue that this form of kickbacks is much less common and less likely to happen. There almost always is intense scrutiny of costs and substantive overpricing will almost always be noticed, especially on recurring products.

I think kickbacks are probably more common in situations where pricing is opaque (complex and one-time transactions) and where pricing is relatively equal and the value to the kickback payer isn't in the increased margin but in the increased volume or market share.

In the situation where pricing is equal, it's hard to see where the crime is because the company doing the purchasing has nothing to gain or lose switching between vendors.

-funroll-loops, the breakfast of champions.

I've read that by the late 1960s many significant Klan leaders were informers, many of which were paid by the FBI to form their own "klaverns", recruit members, etc.

I don't know what it's like now, but I suspect being a high-profile right wing racist is probably only a hobby you can get away with by being an informant.

Oops, that should read "It's NOT completely clear..."

It's completely clear why this "steering" is illegal. I thought that's largely what sales WAS -- steering to company A over company B for reasons beyond simple differences in product quality or cost.

I have to believe that this goes on all the time, everywhere. I used to get free lunches and unsolicited trinkets from vendors all the time. I never changed my buying habits based on this, but maybe for $7 million I might.

I get why steering is undesirable from an economic perspective -- it's a huge economic inefficiency, but then again, so is paying your CEO a billion dollars when the company loses money. I also get why businesses would fire you if they found you doing it, but then again, they might fire you for not showing up to work, yet that isn't a crime, either.

About the only argument that makes sense is that it is "stealing" indirectly, but this would seem to depend on the product being purchased at meaningfully inflated prices versus simply from the lowest cost vendor. Even when products are identical, it often makes sense to choose a higher priced supplier for service or other reasons.

At some point, while I agree it is shady and not an ideal practice, it kind of seems like it's illegal because business management doesn't like it or get a piece of it, not because it represents material harm.

Not really if you think about it. Let's say that you did move to a more modern system sooner. The logical choice would have been to go to the MicroVax which is also dead. The reason why that would have been the logical choice is that it also used the QBus system. The downside is that the software would have to be ported from the PDP 11.
You could have gone with X86 but you would have been stuck deciding if the hardware should be ISA, EISA, or MicroChannel!. Then you would have to decide what RTOS to use or would you just go bare metal? Then you would have to validate every motherboard, chip set, and CPU that you would use not to mention re-writing the software for the X86.
This is part of the problem with going with COTS hardware in industrial settings. Today there are critical systems running on 486 systems and ISA based hardware running under DOS. If you think about it they are in fact no less outdated than PDP-11 based systems from the same time period. The last PDP-11s were introduced in 1990. There does seem to be a cottage industry building new PDP-11 based computers. They are much smaller, faster, and use modern hard drives and ram but still PDP-11s. Some probably use FPGAs for the CPUs, some use X-86 and are emulated in software, and some may even use ASCs. Just as you can still find people that can rebuild an R-2800 radial engine and by parts for old DC-3s it is possible to keep PDPs plugging along.