As a metaphor, God and spirituality can be positive. However, here they are simply being used as instruments of politics and power, and as such, they are negative and dangerous.
seems to be a common theme with free software and free services - it often starts out as the cheap option, but ends up costing more
And the evidence for that would be... what?
i'm fine with people using free stuff, but seriously don't complain when it blows up in your face.
And how does complaining do you any good when commercial, expensive stuff blows up in your face? When Microsoft discontinues products? When Apple kills your app in their App Store? When DEC goes out of business? When Symbolics takes a research project, makes it proprietary, and then proceeds to kill it? Open source and free software were founded because commercial software had blown up in people's faces time and again. With open source, you at least have options for dealing with the problem, with proprietary software, you're stuck.
As for Google, if you want for-pay services, get a Google Apps domain. Those applications that you pay for are supported. And Google offers you the ability to download and backup your data so that you aren't stuck.
Even if you use the free services, so far, I have had a lot less trouble with free Google services than with any of the for-pay hosted web services I've used.
People should really be aware of the history and context of these companies.
This is British Petrol, the same company that is effectively responsible for the mess in Iran today. They have a history of blatant disregard for safety.
And the platform is owned by Transocean, a Swiss company, the same company that had a nearly identical accident in 1979 that was the second largest oil spill in world history, the Ixtoc I (the largest being the oil spill that was part of the Gulf War).
The reinsurance companies are two German companies; insurance companies are supposed to assess the risk, insist on necessary safety measures, and price insurance accordingly. They dropped the ball too.
It's disturbing that Europeans are so quick to point the finger at the US. This is a problem that has been primarily created by European companies. It would have been nice if US regulators had regulated them more strongly, but that doesn't transfer responsibility to the US government.
Face it, your populace have turned into a bunch of overweight zombies. Bush, Obama, whats the difference? The corporations own your government and your asses.
And which magical kingdom do you live in where this is better than in the US?
The zombie here is you because you mindlessly repeat the stereotypes that your own media and government want you to believe.
The prohibition against making images of Muhammad in Islam is to prevent idolatry, to keep people from confusing symbols of the religion with the spiritual content of the religion. Ironically, that's just what is so prevalent in Islam today: strict enforcement of the symbols and rules of Islam has turned much of the Muslim world into idolaters, people who don't worship God, but instead worship symbols and submit to clerics.
Empathy is something biological that happens when you see another human being in distress; the brains of most people are hardwired for it. You can measure it physiologically, you don't need to ask people questions about it. I doubt that has changed much today.
What they actually tested wasn't empathy, but instead responses to some vague questions. The changes in the responses to those questions probably have more to do with people being more honest and seeing through the bullshit of psychological questionnaires than any changes in empathy.
It has the most accurate capacitive screen. Even the cheapest resistive screen Palm from a decade ago had more accurate pen input.
And you can of course use a stylus on the iPhone. There are many varieties sold specifically for the purpose.
I have a couple. They are a very broad rubber tip (think "pinky") on a stick. It's nearly impossible to write or draw with them.
They are all desperately trying to copy Apple. The fact is they are behind because they are copying today's Apple technology whilst Apple is working on the next thing.
The fact is that you're an utter moron who doesn't even know the difference between a capacitive and resistive touch screen, which means that your opinion about phones and tablets is worth zilch.
Seriously? A better screen with better viewing angles isn't more useful? Longer battery life isn't more useful or productive?
They are better on their own, all things being equal. But all things are not equal. You pay a premium for that, and you have to live with numerous restrictions. On balance, Apple's products are just another compromise among many.
I don't own any of Apples products.
Well, and I do. How about that?
I think it is sad that some people can only be happy with their own choices by attacking (often irrationally) the alternatives.
Well, apparently I'm attacking my own choice. Is that sad, too?
What a stupid question. Do you get paid to trash them?
No. Who would pay for that? Let me know, maybe I can make some extra money.
It's really not so hard to find people that appreciate Apple products.
Well, and Apple makes decent products. They just don't live up to the God-like image the company has created for itself.
You're convincing no one with your pretence to be a disillusioned Apple customer, rather than Linux using Apple hater.
I never had any illusion about Apple and I never like them company, so I'm not a "disillusioned" Apple customer. I use their hardware because I port software to it. That's why I bought them 25 years ago, and that's why I still buy them.
The public in general couldn't give a damn.
The public in general also didn't use to care about pollution, global warming, or racism. Now they do.
It also comes when companies engage in censorship and anti-competitive behavior.
But that brand perception was hard earned through releasing many excellent products. Branding is a virtuous circle.... Apple's success will only recede when they stop delivering on their promise of quality products.
Oh, come on, do you get paid for marketing Apple products? I've been an Apple customer for 25 years, and their record has been rather mixed. They have made some high quality products and some really shitty products. Their software and usability have also been mixed.
aren't merely choosing branding as you claim, they are choosing a higher quality product.
The money you pay extra for the iPhone or iPad doesn't translate into more utility. Actually, because of Apple's restrictions on what you can do with their devices, it translates into less utility and a whole lot of follow-on costs.
So, Apple may choose "high quality components", but that doesn't translate into a more useful or productive device, but merely into a more expensive, more luxurious device.
That's actually pretty common among luxury goods: they are "higher quality" but actually less useful in practice.
Example: Brilliant industrial engineering and packaging.
No, just luxury components and packaging. You pay for it. Brilliant would be to deliver the iPad for $199.
Example: High Quality IPS screen: Apple is using a better screen here than practically every product shown so far.
Yes, they buy expensive and high end components. Your point?
Example: Battery life. Apple engineer it to use the lowest power envelop possible
Same thing: they use expensive components.
Example: Capacitive multi-touch. Many competitors are single touch resistive (Yuk).
The choice between resistive and capacitive is not so clearcut. Capacitive is good for fingers, resistive is good for pens. iPad and iPhone are lousy for drawing, and handwriting input is a no-go. I hope someone will start making Android tablets with resistive input (or Wacom or hybrid input) because the Apple iPad input sucks for anything other than poking at oversized on-screen buttons.
Example: HW/SW integration. This is the special sauce that make enables them to build something that is greater than the sum of its parts.
There's nothing "special" about it; it's marketing fluff. iPhone batter life, screens, hardware integration, etc. is no better than on the Droid or the X10 or any of numerous other phones, and those cost much less.
So I would like a more open tablet with and SD-Slot/USB port, but I serious don't think we will have anything with remotely as good technology (Screen/digitizer/battery life/industrial engineering/HW-SW integration) all in one package for a long time to come.
The reason you won't see anything like that is not because other companies don't know how to build these kinds of machines, but because their customers aren't willing to pay as much.
To say Apple is just branding and not technology is completely ridiculous. Did you take any time to consider the technology and execution before you made that claim?
Yes, I did. Nothing you say contradicts what I said: Apple is a luxury brand delivering a luxury product made from premium components. They do use new technology, but most of that they just buy elsewhere.
The reason their competitors don't compete with Apple is not because they don't know how to, but because it's not rational to compete with Apple for a small part of the market. Google, Microsoft, Nokia, HTC and others are going for the mass market.
If you look at the iPod, iPhone and iPad, they're all cases where Apple chose the right time to capture the second mover advantage.
Apple sells premium products a little ahead of the mass market. That's neither "right" nor "wrong". Nokia or HTC couldn't have sold the same devices in their markets.
Now if things go true to form, the third generation competitors will scramble for scraps from Apple's table by copying whatever they can, repeating the mistakes made in the first generation products,
If things go as they usually go for Apple, Apple will get stuck at a few percent market share, while the mainstream companies saturate the market with more powerful and much cheaper devices. The only time Apple ever managed to hold on to a significant lead was with iPod/iTunes. And the reason people copy prior products is not necessarily because they are better, but because users don't want to have to learn new systems all the time.
and trying to come up with bullets for a side by side comparison. It'll take several iterations before a credible competitor to the iPad emerges.
Apple's market niche isn't technology, it's branding. A competitor to iPad is like a competitor to Nike shoes: it doesn't really matter what the shoes are--they all get the job done--it matters how people perceive the brand. Can Apple maintain its brand perception as a supposedly innovative brand for create people? I don't know; they're getting a lot of bad press.
The iPad seems to be a huge success. Tablets have never been hugely popular before. Now everyone wants to make one. Why all of a sudden?
Because battery and screen technology has improved to the point where you can have $200 tablets weighing 2 pounds, with a big screen, and 10h battery life.
As usual, Apple has rushed out this kind of product a little earlier at a premium price and marketed the hell out of it. But tablets were going to happen now anyway, Apple or no Apple.
Firstly, the new license Google is using for the project is one that's not been submitted to the Open Source Initiative for approval.
[sarcasm]Well, yeah, like that's never happened before.[/sarcasm]
As it stands it possibly can't be approved due to Google's ironic inclusion of a "field of use" restriction in the patent grant (which is restricted to "this implementation of VP8" rather than the more general grant in the Apache license from which the text started). That means WebM is not currently open source,
That's not a field-of-use restriction, and it's a restriction that exists in many other open source licenses as well, even the GPL: you don't get a patent grant in general, you get a patent grant for that implementation and all its derived code.
Secondly, the patent situation around WebM is unclear. Apple's Steve Jobs has previously claimed that the reason Apple does not support Ogg Theora as a video codec on the Mac is that, unlike H.264, Apple can't buy an indemnity to patent action for Theora.
H.264 doesn't come with "indemnity" either, it only comes with promises by other members of the consortium not to sue each other. It's an assumption that there are no other patents, but there is no guarantee.
One H.264 partisan has already asserted there's a patent problem.
Yeah, like that hasn't happened before either. The H.264 patent holders, just like Apple, have an interest in spreading FUD.
Wanting insurance isn't an accusation of infringement. It's just a desire for mitigation of risk in a world where software patents have gone out of control.
Apple can't get "insurance" for H.264 either (well, except from Lloyd's, but they can get that for anything.)
Despite their claims that WebM was been checked for patent risks when ON2 was acquired, Google has neither made its research available nor does it offer a patent indemnity.
Neither does H.264.
Thirdly, as codec consultant Rob Glidden points out, simply making the code for VP8 open source does not automatically make it an open standard.
No, but it's the most open standard there is, and the only thing that keeps it from being completely standard is companies like Apple refusing to support it and spreading FUD.
"When companies like Google ignore standards and go on their own in such important areas as video codec standards, they just undermine the very standards groups the open Web needs to thrive and grow."
There currently is no open video standard, there is only the pseudo-open H.264, which some companies have been pushing because it disadvantages open source.
We need open standards.
Yes, we do. And Apple is to be condemned for preventing the adoption of open standards for video.
"Contributing VP8 to a standards group with a strong patent disclosure policy would be a good corrective move; it would force lurking patent holders to come fully into the public."
Well, and if that makes sense, I'm sure they will do just that. However, it may not make sense if companies like Apple use a standards body simply for spreading FUD. And there's a good chance that they will do that.
Yet Google's do-it-all-ourselves mentality has made them forget or avoid addressing three very important issues - open source licensing, patent indemnity and open standardisation.
(1) Nobody gives you indemnity for any of the video formats.
(2) Google didn't do it themselves, they spent a lot of money on the best vendor of something they could open up.
(3) Standards bodies like ISO, ANSI, ECMA, and IEEE have become corrupted; companies like Microsoft and Apple are using them to obstruct open standards and push patented standards instead.
I think tablets are going to be a successful, but most of them won't come from Apple.
Apple is great at pushing out up-and-coming technologies quickly, but they are really just a little ahead of mainstream trends that are coming anyway.
Look at the Macbook Air; it was basically a very overpriced netbook, but it was just too expensive and too late relative to the mainstream netbooks, which arrived shortly thereafter.
Apple is a threat to the software industry and software innovation. Even if they were innovating themselves (a doubtful proposition), their litigiousness and possessiveness mean that everybody else who wants to innovate is at risk from lawsuits by them.
I was using Sun workstations for a long time. Their hardware was decent and cheap. As for the software, the best thing about it was that you could remove most of the Sun crap and replace it with GNU software. And when the Linux kernel was reasonably stable and we got cheap PC hardware, it was time to ditch the Sun hardware too. That's the history of Sun and Sun software R&D in a nutshell (except for Java, which is another sad story).
Maybe because that would double the likelihood you would get a blowout?
You drill three holes. One is for production. The other two you don't drill all the way through; you use them as a safety for the production hole. You know, like if you had drilled the relief holes they are drilling now 99% to completion.
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I feel exactly what you're feeling, and I empathize with you completely!
A Windows 7 tablet and a Windows CE tablet, both lousy software platforms for tablets. They should be shipping Android, ChromeOS, and MeeGo.
As a metaphor, God and spirituality can be positive. However, here they are simply being used as instruments of politics and power, and as such, they are negative and dangerous.
seems to be a common theme with free software and free services - it often starts out as the cheap option, but ends up costing more
And the evidence for that would be ... what?
i'm fine with people using free stuff, but seriously don't complain when it blows up in your face.
And how does complaining do you any good when commercial, expensive stuff blows up in your face? When Microsoft discontinues products? When Apple kills your app in their App Store? When DEC goes out of business? When Symbolics takes a research project, makes it proprietary, and then proceeds to kill it? Open source and free software were founded because commercial software had blown up in people's faces time and again. With open source, you at least have options for dealing with the problem, with proprietary software, you're stuck.
As for Google, if you want for-pay services, get a Google Apps domain. Those applications that you pay for are supported. And Google offers you the ability to download and backup your data so that you aren't stuck.
Even if you use the free services, so far, I have had a lot less trouble with free Google services than with any of the for-pay hosted web services I've used.
People should really be aware of the history and context of these companies.
This is British Petrol, the same company that is effectively responsible for the mess in Iran today. They have a history of blatant disregard for safety.
And the platform is owned by Transocean, a Swiss company, the same company that had a nearly identical accident in 1979 that was the second largest oil spill in world history, the Ixtoc I (the largest being the oil spill that was part of the Gulf War).
The reinsurance companies are two German companies; insurance companies are supposed to assess the risk, insist on necessary safety measures, and price insurance accordingly. They dropped the ball too.
It's disturbing that Europeans are so quick to point the finger at the US. This is a problem that has been primarily created by European companies. It would have been nice if US regulators had regulated them more strongly, but that doesn't transfer responsibility to the US government.
Face it, your populace have turned into a bunch of overweight zombies. Bush, Obama, whats the difference? The corporations own your government and your asses.
And which magical kingdom do you live in where this is better than in the US?
The zombie here is you because you mindlessly repeat the stereotypes that your own media and government want you to believe.
The prohibition against making images of Muhammad in Islam is to prevent idolatry, to keep people from confusing symbols of the religion with the spiritual content of the religion. Ironically, that's just what is so prevalent in Islam today: strict enforcement of the symbols and rules of Islam has turned much of the Muslim world into idolaters, people who don't worship God, but instead worship symbols and submit to clerics.
Empathy is something biological that happens when you see another human being in distress; the brains of most people are hardwired for it. You can measure it physiologically, you don't need to ask people questions about it. I doubt that has changed much today.
What they actually tested wasn't empathy, but instead responses to some vague questions. The changes in the responses to those questions probably have more to do with people being more honest and seeing through the bullshit of psychological questionnaires than any changes in empathy.
This is woefully mis-informed. iPhone has the most accurate touchscreen of all the touchscreen mobile phones, as demonstrated here: http://labs.moto.com/robot_touchscreen_analysis/ [moto.com]
It has the most accurate capacitive screen. Even the cheapest resistive screen Palm from a decade ago had more accurate pen input.
And you can of course use a stylus on the iPhone. There are many varieties sold specifically for the purpose.
I have a couple. They are a very broad rubber tip (think "pinky") on a stick. It's nearly impossible to write or draw with them.
They are all desperately trying to copy Apple. The fact is they are behind because they are copying today's Apple technology whilst Apple is working on the next thing.
The fact is that you're an utter moron who doesn't even know the difference between a capacitive and resistive touch screen, which means that your opinion about phones and tablets is worth zilch.
Seriously? A better screen with better viewing angles isn't more useful? Longer battery life isn't more useful or productive?
They are better on their own, all things being equal. But all things are not equal. You pay a premium for that, and you have to live with numerous restrictions. On balance, Apple's products are just another compromise among many.
I don't own any of Apples products.
Well, and I do. How about that?
I think it is sad that some people can only be happy with their own choices by attacking (often irrationally) the alternatives.
Well, apparently I'm attacking my own choice. Is that sad, too?
What a stupid question. Do you get paid to trash them?
No. Who would pay for that? Let me know, maybe I can make some extra money.
It's really not so hard to find people that appreciate Apple products.
Well, and Apple makes decent products. They just don't live up to the God-like image the company has created for itself.
You're convincing no one with your pretence to be a disillusioned Apple customer, rather than Linux using Apple hater.
I never had any illusion about Apple and I never like them company, so I'm not a "disillusioned" Apple customer. I use their hardware because I port software to it. That's why I bought them 25 years ago, and that's why I still buy them.
The public in general couldn't give a damn.
The public in general also didn't use to care about pollution, global warming, or racism. Now they do.
Laugh while you can, monkey boy.
Bad press comes with being successful.
It also comes when companies engage in censorship and anti-competitive behavior.
But that brand perception was hard earned through releasing many excellent products. Branding is a virtuous circle. ... Apple's success will only recede when they stop delivering on their promise of quality products.
Oh, come on, do you get paid for marketing Apple products? I've been an Apple customer for 25 years, and their record has been rather mixed. They have made some high quality products and some really shitty products. Their software and usability have also been mixed.
aren't merely choosing branding as you claim, they are choosing a higher quality product.
The money you pay extra for the iPhone or iPad doesn't translate into more utility. Actually, because of Apple's restrictions on what you can do with their devices, it translates into less utility and a whole lot of follow-on costs.
So, Apple may choose "high quality components", but that doesn't translate into a more useful or productive device, but merely into a more expensive, more luxurious device.
That's actually pretty common among luxury goods: they are "higher quality" but actually less useful in practice.
The hostility people feel towards "religion" isn't towards a belief in the transcendent; a belief in the transcendent really is something private.
No, the hostility is towards the behavior and politics of people that are members of religious organizations.
Example: Brilliant industrial engineering and packaging.
No, just luxury components and packaging. You pay for it. Brilliant would be to deliver the iPad for $199.
Example: High Quality IPS screen: Apple is using a better screen here than practically every product shown so far.
Yes, they buy expensive and high end components. Your point?
Example: Battery life. Apple engineer it to use the lowest power envelop possible
Same thing: they use expensive components.
Example: Capacitive multi-touch. Many competitors are single touch resistive (Yuk).
The choice between resistive and capacitive is not so clearcut. Capacitive is good for fingers, resistive is good for pens. iPad and iPhone are lousy for drawing, and handwriting input is a no-go. I hope someone will start making Android tablets with resistive input (or Wacom or hybrid input) because the Apple iPad input sucks for anything other than poking at oversized on-screen buttons.
Example: HW/SW integration. This is the special sauce that make enables them to build something that is greater than the sum of its parts.
There's nothing "special" about it; it's marketing fluff. iPhone batter life, screens, hardware integration, etc. is no better than on the Droid or the X10 or any of numerous other phones, and those cost much less.
So I would like a more open tablet with and SD-Slot/USB port, but I serious don't think we will have anything with remotely as good technology (Screen/digitizer/battery life/industrial engineering/HW-SW integration) all in one package for a long time to come.
The reason you won't see anything like that is not because other companies don't know how to build these kinds of machines, but because their customers aren't willing to pay as much.
To say Apple is just branding and not technology is completely ridiculous. Did you take any time to consider the technology and execution before you made that claim?
Yes, I did. Nothing you say contradicts what I said: Apple is a luxury brand delivering a luxury product made from premium components. They do use new technology, but most of that they just buy elsewhere.
The reason their competitors don't compete with Apple is not because they don't know how to, but because it's not rational to compete with Apple for a small part of the market. Google, Microsoft, Nokia, HTC and others are going for the mass market.
If you look at the iPod, iPhone and iPad, they're all cases where Apple chose the right time to capture the second mover advantage.
Apple sells premium products a little ahead of the mass market. That's neither "right" nor "wrong". Nokia or HTC couldn't have sold the same devices in their markets.
Now if things go true to form, the third generation competitors will scramble for scraps from Apple's table by copying whatever they can, repeating the mistakes made in the first generation products,
If things go as they usually go for Apple, Apple will get stuck at a few percent market share, while the mainstream companies saturate the market with more powerful and much cheaper devices. The only time Apple ever managed to hold on to a significant lead was with iPod/iTunes. And the reason people copy prior products is not necessarily because they are better, but because users don't want to have to learn new systems all the time.
and trying to come up with bullets for a side by side comparison. It'll take several iterations before a credible competitor to the iPad emerges.
Apple's market niche isn't technology, it's branding. A competitor to iPad is like a competitor to Nike shoes: it doesn't really matter what the shoes are--they all get the job done--it matters how people perceive the brand. Can Apple maintain its brand perception as a supposedly innovative brand for create people? I don't know; they're getting a lot of bad press.
If you use vertical swipes for scrolling, you can't use them for something else. It's also hard to see what you're scrolling while your scrolling it.
Having said that, a separate scroll area is not going to catch on; the lowest common denominator wins, and that's scrolling with vertical swipes.
If you ask most people, they wish they had that button on absolutely every device they have to use.
That button is standard on most phones, including all Android phones.
What Apple is missing is the "go back", "search", and "show me my options" buttons. Those functions are inconsistent among many iPhone and iPad apps.
The iPad seems to be a huge success. Tablets have never been hugely popular before. Now everyone wants to make one. Why all of a sudden?
Because battery and screen technology has improved to the point where you can have $200 tablets weighing 2 pounds, with a big screen, and 10h battery life.
As usual, Apple has rushed out this kind of product a little earlier at a premium price and marketed the hell out of it. But tablets were going to happen now anyway, Apple or no Apple.
Firstly, the new license Google is using for the project is one that's not been submitted to the Open Source Initiative for approval.
[sarcasm]Well, yeah, like that's never happened before.[/sarcasm]
As it stands it possibly can't be approved due to Google's ironic inclusion of a "field of use" restriction in the patent grant (which is restricted to "this implementation of VP8" rather than the more general grant in the Apache license from which the text started). That means WebM is not currently open source,
That's not a field-of-use restriction, and it's a restriction that exists in many other open source licenses as well, even the GPL: you don't get a patent grant in general, you get a patent grant for that implementation and all its derived code.
Secondly, the patent situation around WebM is unclear. Apple's Steve Jobs has previously claimed that the reason Apple does not support Ogg Theora as a video codec on the Mac is that, unlike H.264, Apple can't buy an indemnity to patent action for Theora.
H.264 doesn't come with "indemnity" either, it only comes with promises by other members of the consortium not to sue each other. It's an assumption that there are no other patents, but there is no guarantee.
One H.264 partisan has already asserted there's a patent problem.
Yeah, like that hasn't happened before either. The H.264 patent holders, just like Apple, have an interest in spreading FUD.
Wanting insurance isn't an accusation of infringement. It's just a desire for mitigation of risk in a world where software patents have gone out of control.
Apple can't get "insurance" for H.264 either (well, except from Lloyd's, but they can get that for anything.)
Despite their claims that WebM was been checked for patent risks when ON2 was acquired, Google has neither made its research available nor does it offer a patent indemnity.
Neither does H.264.
Thirdly, as codec consultant Rob Glidden points out, simply making the code for VP8 open source does not automatically make it an open standard.
No, but it's the most open standard there is, and the only thing that keeps it from being completely standard is companies like Apple refusing to support it and spreading FUD.
"When companies like Google ignore standards and go on their own in such important areas as video codec standards, they just undermine the very standards groups the open Web needs to thrive and grow."
There currently is no open video standard, there is only the pseudo-open H.264, which some companies have been pushing because it disadvantages open source.
We need open standards.
Yes, we do. And Apple is to be condemned for preventing the adoption of open standards for video.
"Contributing VP8 to a standards group with a strong patent disclosure policy would be a good corrective move; it would force lurking patent holders to come fully into the public."
Well, and if that makes sense, I'm sure they will do just that. However, it may not make sense if companies like Apple use a standards body simply for spreading FUD. And there's a good chance that they will do that.
Yet Google's do-it-all-ourselves mentality has made them forget or avoid addressing three very important issues - open source licensing, patent indemnity and open standardisation.
(1) Nobody gives you indemnity for any of the video formats.
(2) Google didn't do it themselves, they spent a lot of money on the best vendor of something they could open up.
(3) Standards bodies like ISO, ANSI, ECMA, and IEEE have become corrupted; companies like Microsoft and Apple are using them to obstruct open standards and push patented standards instead.
I think tablets are going to be a successful, but most of them won't come from Apple.
Apple is great at pushing out up-and-coming technologies quickly, but they are really just a little ahead of mainstream trends that are coming anyway.
Look at the Macbook Air; it was basically a very overpriced netbook, but it was just too expensive and too late relative to the mainstream netbooks, which arrived shortly thereafter.
Apple is a threat to the software industry and software innovation. Even if they were innovating themselves (a doubtful proposition), their litigiousness and possessiveness mean that everybody else who wants to innovate is at risk from lawsuits by them.
I was using Sun workstations for a long time. Their hardware was decent and cheap. As for the software, the best thing about it was that you could remove most of the Sun crap and replace it with GNU software. And when the Linux kernel was reasonably stable and we got cheap PC hardware, it was time to ditch the Sun hardware too. That's the history of Sun and Sun software R&D in a nutshell (except for Java, which is another sad story).
Maybe because that would double the likelihood you would get a blowout?
You drill three holes. One is for production. The other two you don't drill all the way through; you use them as a safety for the production hole. You know, like if you had drilled the relief holes they are drilling now 99% to completion.