There are many different types of disasters, and certainly plenty that won't necessarily cause the Internet to go down. And as far as people panicking if grandma isn't tagged as safe, that's the whole point of letting friends mark other friends as safe. Maybe grandma was able to call uncle Jimmy 1000 miles away and so he was able to mark her as safe.

My company has been using the MVC framework CakePHP for quite a few projects over the last few years. It never seems to get any public attention, but it works really well for us and has a lot of nice features.

Obligatory remark about how Mac OS X and iOS are BSD and are used by tens of millions of people everyday, blah, blah, blah.

Maybe because when you give your employees a bit of freedom, they don't feel like they're working under a fascist regime and are therefore happier to be at work and become more productive.

It's been awhile since I've been in school, but aren't percentages like this supposed to add up to 100? Also, if this is [somehow] correct, how can a 23% difference be called slight, as the title says?

I'd reckon that a team of console players would get completely slammed by a team of K&M players. This would be especially true if the console players had the auto-aim disabled (which is present by default in nearly every console FPS). I don't see how personal preference enters into it. Clearly, one of these tools is better for the job.

It's believable that the GPS system got disrupted, but it's hard to believe that this somehow forced them to land. If they were doing recon, then GPS is pretty critical so that they can exactly pinpoint what they're surveying. However, even the lowliest pilots can navigate without GPS (this is required to pass any level of flight school, let alone military-level). I can understand the mission being scrapped due to this type of disruption, but I can't believe that they were in any sort of danger.

The iPhone 4 is 777 MHz while the Nexus S is 1 GHz. Both are based on the ARM Corext-A8 and both have 512 MB of RAM. Given the difference in CPU speed, the results of the page load tests don't seem far departed from what would be expected. While the Nexus S is still proportionally a little faster, it isn't so wildly so that it can't be attributed to some minor tweaks in the OS or browser software. Using the term "spanked" seems a bit sensationalist in this instance.

In the practical sense, I don't see why Android is considered more "open" than iOS. I realize more of the OS components for Android are fully open source. However, developers are still subject to the rules of the Android store. The phone manufacturers are carriers still have the final say on which features of the OS are actually shipped intact. Users still have to jailbreak Android phones to side-step these artificial limitations. Maybe I'm missing some critical bit of information -- and if so, I'd love to be corrected -- but I don't see much of a difference between the "openness" of the two platforms when it comes to practical usage.

Right now, Minecraft saves worlds by making a huge tree of directories that stores individual data chunks in various sub-directories. Even though the total amount of data is small (my server is only about 10 megs), any time a copy needs to be made to backup or test, it takes an eternity because there are literally over 10,000 files on the disk.

I'm hopelessly in love with the game, but with the frequent software updates, there is also a need for frequent backups to make sure I don't lose all the work of everyone on the server.

So, where's the part where you explain why it's not going to happen? AT&T had branding all over their phones before the iPhone came around, so what makes you think Verizon would be unwilling to make the same concession? As far as hardware is concerned, if they go with a combined CDMA/GSM chip, it's likely that the cost to buy the chips from the supplier will be nearly the same, or negligibly higher (~$1-2). For that price, they get access to close to half of the US cell phone market that they didn't have previously. Seems like a good deal to me. If history is any indicator, most of Apple's partners eventually concede to Apple's way of doing business (see: everything in the iTunes store).

This shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Software (or firmware, if you want to make the distinction) has been used to control fans on GPUs, CPUs, northbridges and plenty of other components for many, many years. I think people don't think about the alternative: putting hardware exclusively in charge of fan control. If you choose the hardware method, there is just as much chance of it becoming fucked up due to lack of testing, poor design choices, etc. However, if you ship a million units with faulty hardware, that means you have a million broken units and there is no choice but to recall/replace them. If you use software and you fuck it up, you can patch it, saving your customers the time and hassle of having to return their product or being stuck without a solution for an extended period of time, and at the same time saving your company from potentially devastating financial losses. Frankly, I think all parties benefit with a software solution.

Details:

AT&T (per usual)
$15/mo for 250 MB or$30/mo for unlimited
Free use of AT&T Wi-Fi hotspots
Uses GSM Micro SIMs and will work with any GSM provider that has these cards, all models are "unlocked" and not bound to a carrier

I have both an iPhone and a MacBook and I use and love both everyday. However, I've never thought to myself, "how great would it be to have a 10-inch iPhone?" After watching the live coverage for the last hour, that's basically all this is. The OS and UI are basically the same, just upscaled and optimized in some places for the larger screen. As far as I can tell, there are none of the clever innovations that are typically present in a new Apple product. The only people that I can see this thing appealing to would be people that have a strong fascination for touch screens and people that don't feel that they can properly lounge about with a laptop (as exemplified by Steve Jobs lounging in a love seat during the presentation). I think the only obvious application would be as an ebook reader (side note: I nearly had a fit when they decided to reuse the term iBook to brand their ebooks). The presentation still isn't done so there isn't a word on price, but if it can't come within range of the Kindle and similar devices, I'd say this thing is purely novelty.

A quick look at the Windows Media Player 12 Wikipedia page indicates that h.264 in an MP4 container (and by extension, a renamed M4V) plays fine in the current version of WMP that ships with Win 7. However, the post says that Handbrake dropped DivX and XviD, which were only given support in the latest version of WMP as well. So really, Handbrake has never supported native WMP formats before WMP 12, unless more was dropped than just DivX and XviD (I'm too lazy to do the research).