I've had two die on me over the years. I always wondered why. I had no idea it could have just been me running nmap on them...

Right, but the MacBook Pro and the iPad ultimately appeal to very different kinds of people. The MacBook Pro has a uniquely broad appeal these days, because it combines a pretty decent UNIX (with all the familiar tools that we know and love) with a beautiful and easy-to-use UI. The former appeals to those that peruse Slashdot; the latter, to Apple's stereotyped traditional customer (though, these days, plenty of UNIX geeks appreciate a pretty UI too).

The iPad is very different. Despite its UNIX underpinnings, Apple is not interested in exposing them this time round. In the eyes of us geeks, this seems outrageous - how dare they restrict what we can do with the hardware!? But these simplifications make the product more appealing to - I would wager - >95% of the people out there, so, if only to appease its shareholders, Apple is pretty much duty-bound to deliver the most appealing product it can. If that means disposing of the concept of disks and drives and replacing it with ubiquitous in-the-cloud storage that syncs magically between related devices, most people will thank them for it.

Ultimately, it comes down to how you want to use a tablet. Apple's view seems to be that tablets are good at some things (web browsing, book- and magazine-reading, watching videos, etc.), passable at some things (they've made a laudable effort at porting their productivity suite to the iPad and the iPhone, but it probably needs a little more work to be truly brilliant on a tablet) and terrible at others. For the things a tablet is not suitable for (e.g. development), you use a more traditional laptop or desktop. The Android approach seems to be rather less radical - the stance on Flash is a good example (what use is Flash on a device without a permanent keyboard and, more crucially, a mouse?). That said, the Android stance is infinitely more radical than Microsoft's - Windows 8 is promising to provide an innovative and attractive touch interface (good), but will still run all the existing Windows apps (oh fuck), thus removing any incentive developers might have to create tailored apps for it.

Sent from my iPad

And likewise Paintbrush (pbrush.exe), which became Paint (mspaint.exe).

To this day, I still type 'pbrush' into Run to start Paint.

...we schedule our Linux boxen to reboot weekly. Without fail.

I work in an investment bank. There, they don't have time for this uptime-dick-size-contest shit. The longer a box is up, the greater the likelihood that some hardware failure is going to fuck it up and it won't boot again. A reboot is a great way to tease weird issues out into the open so that they don't screw you over at the critical moment. Of course we have redundant servers, but that's not the point.

Ultimately, the 3 year uptime on that web server you brag about is a disaster waiting to happen. I can give a pretty much cast iron guarantee that when it does go down, whether by choice or unexpectedly, it won't come back up again smoothly. And then you're fucked.

No, those figures are from their tests. The iPad is that good. (Basically because it's a battery with a screen and a small PCB attached.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Warrant

By appointment to HRH Queen Elizabeth II
Facebook UK Limited
Social Networking Services

...or something along those lines.

Not sure if you can use a string for a switch statement

This is just syntactic sugar in .NET actually. If you look at the IL it compiles to, for short switch blocks, it's a set of if statements; for longer ones, it creates a Dictionary and then does TryGetValue.

You can't do:

int i = null;

...in C# either. You can do:

int? i = null;

...though. I was sceptical at first, but it is a genuinely useful way of indicating the absence of a value when dealing with, for example, stuff that has come out of a database.

What, you mean, MONTH/DAY/YEAR bothers you? It's just a convention.

Yes, and a fucking stupid one, which causes no end of pain. What does 3/12/2009 mean in a bit of text? To most of the world, it means 3rd December 2009. But, for some bizarre reason, it means 12th March 2009 in America. The result? It is impossible to determine whether a given date is in sane or bizarre format for values of dd < 13. The only meaningful date format now is the Asian format (yyyy-mm-dd), which is the ISO standard.

Some will argue that this is because you say "March 12th", but I'm sure you also say "ten past nine", and you don't write that 10:9. Why? Oh yes, because that would be stupid.

:|

It is now, but it wasn't. A British billion used to be 1,000,000,000,000.

Or was interpreted differently. 1,000,000,000-as-billion is pretty much standard here now, at least in this limey's experience. Ordinarily I would lament such a happening, but the world is better served by a consistent definition of "billion".

Now if only you guys could sort your stupid date format out, we'd be set...

Not sure what CacheViewer is, but on Safari, there is ClickToFlash to block Flash, which is wonderful (and, IIRC, very similar to FlashBlock). And one can turn off JavaScript in the preferences, if one is suitably paranoid...

Heck, my old (circa-1991) Latitude did 1680x1050...

Bullshit. Pure bullshit. You're off by about a fucking decade...

In that fragment you undermine everything else you have say.

Not sure about on Windows, but on the Mac, it doesn't install the VoiceOver Kit unless you have one of the new Shuffles. I was a bit disappointed by this, as I would quite like my Mac to be able to speak something other than English.

Interestingly, Japanese Mac keyboards still use that very layout. Though the addition of a couple of extra buttons either side of the space bar for switching between English and Japanese might put you off a bit...

:)