I have to admit, due to this outage I just logged in to Slashdot for the first time in a year. We're experiencing our own outages at work, unrelated to AWS, but I'd hate to be an AWS admin during one of these major outages. This makes me wonder why Reddit, Imgur, etc., don't have presences in multiple availability zones to prevent this kind of outage.

I'd be willing to bet that if we looked, there'd be prior art before Apple's OSX. I just spent a few minutes Googling, but as you may imagine, trying to find that is rather difficult.

Palm 5? Wow, I haven't seen that in a while! If you don't mind me asking (and you're not being sarcastic), which phone do you run?

You are lucky then. Or rather, perhaps I'm just unlucky. I haven't dicked with any iDevices in a while, so perhaps its a nonissue there, but I continue to see it on my Android device. Once I narrow the reasoning, I'll submit a bug report, but until then, how am I supposed to cite experience?

Or you want reliable email and communications, you know. iPhone and Android suck at ensuring your email and/or text messages get out. Blackberries just don't give up. Email, too. Many times my Android phone has tried to send an email just to finally send it out the next day. My Blackberries have never not been persistent. If signal goes out, they pick up as soon as they can.

Don't get me wrong, I love my Android phone, but the Blackberry holds a place in this world. I would love to have a company issued other-phone, but the Blackberry makes sure I stay in touch. It's all for the better that all of the games on it suck.

PS, have you tried BBOS 6? It's actually pretty slick... especially on the Torch.

Please, oh please, tell me why I am misguided. I'd love to hear your reason. A Blackberry is a phone. A phone is a tool. You choose a tool that does the job you need it to do. iPhones don't always make the cut, or any other phone for that matter. I am personally offended now.

Now, regarding the rest of your post: Yes, and like I said, they just plain work. A lot of people will trade fancy flashlights built in to their phones for stability. I personally would rather have a 100% working phone than flash capabilities. You may not think about the Ford Econoline, Chevy Express, or even the Mack trucks on the road, but without them, the world stops spinning.

I'd like to see that. iPhones don't have that much grab. The market distribution with regards to smartphones seems to be still ~40% iPhone, ~40% Android, ~20% Blackberry. Most of the market research seemed to indicate that last time I saw it, too.

Dude, X is 10. Roman numerals. OSX is OS10, as they were at Mac OS9 previously. Acrobat Reader X was also 10, as the previous version was 9.

Unless you follow RIM closely, you'd probably never know. Most people don't care!

• BBOS 6.0 was announced in April of 2010, then released in Q3 of the same year.
• BBOS 7.0 was annouced in May of 2011, then released in August of the same year.

I'd say that a release a year is about right for what they're doing, and I foresee it being the same.

I urge you to look around and remember how many Blackberries are still being used everywhere. You may not like them, you may have never used one, and your experience may be limited to these sensationalized news articles, but enough people still use Blackberries that it is actually important.

I carry two phones, one company Blackberry and my personal Samsung Galaxy S2. Before I got my GalaxyS2, I carried a personal Blackberry. They are good phones and their software is solid. Not many other smartphones can go weeks without having to be rebooted, especially with the battery life they pull.

Have you ever developed anything with Perl? (Its not "PERL"!!!) It is an elegant language. You just have to be mature with it just as with any other language so you don't get ahead of yourself and stuck with the stereotype Perl maintenance beast. Please remember that Java is not a suitable language for most things (I assume you're a fresh Java developer from your ignorance).

It sounds to be that you wish to idiot proof computing. In regards to that, I urge you to read the following famous quote:

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."