With a bit of cleverness supported by a bit of automation, and not only can change control not get in anyone's way, it can effect a tremendous productivity increase across the board.
Allowing untracked changes to be made at will has a cumulative effect; The system is ever less and less well known and becomes more and more tedious to work with. Before long the only way you can even replicate a system is by block copying its hard drive...precisely because no one actually knows what was done. What that means to the software lifecycle are pure black box production updates and being completely in the blind when problems occur.
If something worked yesterday and doesn't work today the first question to ask is "what is different?", quickly followed up by "why", "who did it". After the fire drill you'll also need "who approved it". Without rock solid change control you can't answer any of those questions. You're left with only two unpleasant options: Grasping in the dark, or doing a full rollback (and hoping you'll find it in dev...again by grasping in the dark).
Of course you can't just stick your finger in the wind of the forums to design your game. You do need to actually judge and filter ideas that come up in forums; Design is not a democracy.
But more then a few games with great potential have shot themselves in the face repetitively by ignoring the forums. They either never were aware of huge game-destroying issues or came up with their own incredibly horrid solutions, when in fact the users had suggested exceptionally good ideas in the forums.
The nice thing about game forums...the users do much of the filtering for you already. Bad ideas get torn apart by other users with great haste, exuberance, and detail. They figure out every possible angle much better then developers could ever do.
----
It's very disheartening to watch your favorite game crash and burn while the developers implement bad idea after bad idea, despite really great suggestions flooding the forums.
"I seriously doubt that WoW devs had the thought 'We need to beat Everquest' running through their heads."
Of course they did. Just as Everquest had 'We need to beat Ultima Online' running through their heads.
The only other way is to take the MMO into a radically different direction, such as Sony's PlanetSide (FPS MMO) or NetDevil's Jumpgate (FPS space flight sim MMO). What, never heard of either? Yah...exactly... The point is, BioWare is going to have to do a hell of a lot more then simply rename "Rusty Broadsword" to "Rusty Lightsaber".
This is the organization that won a lawsuit on the grounds that under the 1st amendment they had the right to knowingly and deliberately lie.
Fox News is the reporting equivalent of fictional movie dramas that are "based on a true story". They selectively include, exclude, and/or outright manufacture whatever they need to in order to craft the story they wish to tell. Even The Daily Show, a satirical comedic spoof show, is wildly more factually accurate and far less biased then Fox News. That's how bad Fox News really is.
The point is not if Fox is "flat-out" false or not. The point is that for any given story the odds that Fox got it anywhere near correct is in the single digits. Why waste time evaluating a story when you know before you even start that there's a 95% chance it's bunk? Especially on Slashdot...before you waste everyones' time, go find a real news agency that has actually reported on the story.
Because in all seriousness The Onion has more journalistic credibility then Fox News.
These have been very popular with San Francisco cyclists for at least three decades now. It originally started with bike messengers, but since has expanded to commuters.
It should be noted however, that while this design seems absurd to the casual rider, it actually makes a lot of sense for well seasoned regular riders:
* Harder to steal - For all the reasons you note (lack of traditional breaks, fixed/locked gear, etc) the casual rider can't just jump on and ride away...they'll crash and burn in less then a block.
* Much lighter - The design is actually from velodrome race track bikes, ditching all that gearing and breaking hardware is a significant weight savings, important when riding a city that's filled with steep hills (eg, San Francisco) and/or needs to be carried up and down stairs a lot (bike messenger).
* Not worth stealing - This is the big reason why they started being popular. Commonly made out of some old beater bike, there's no resale value for these things. For bike messengers it's handy to be able to lean a bike against any random wall (w/o wasting time locking it) and not worry too much that it won't be there when they get back.
It's a bit of a myth however, that these bikes "don't have breaks". They use fixed gearing (if the wheel is turning, the peddles are turning, always) and so you use back-pressure on the peddles to break. For the casual rider that won't be nearly enough breaking force, however for the riders that actually use this design...they have far more then enough leg strength to easily supply ample breaking force. It's a hardcore bike for hardcore riders; Sunday park riders need not apply.
Facebook -> Account -> Account Settings -> Download Your Information
Works great...provided your data, after compression, is less then 1 GB. For some unknown reason any attempts to download a profile larger then 1 GB stop downloading (with no error...) at 1 GB, resulting in an incomplete and broken.zip archive.
"perhaps fell just short"...wow, ain't that the understatement of the year.
The 2nd Deus Ex was such a complete and utter failure in every way possible even its own developer was on record saying it sucked. The real tragedy however, was that while the designers know it was trash...they don't know why (no matter how obvious it was to everyone else). The largest reason it failed is because they tried to recreate what was great about Deus Ex 1...except, they didn't actually understand the slightest bit about what made 1 so great, instead emphasized the side-features and simply threw out the core of Deus Ex wholesale.
And of course, they forced 2 to be a console game first and a horrid hack job for the PC second.
Sadly 3 (a prequel as you note) looks like it may just be doubling down on the epic failure of Deus Ex 2, still not really understanding what made Deus Ex 1 one of the all-time best games.
---
I'd love to see many old games redone with new graphics, but not a "remake". Almost without fail when anyone "remakes" a game they botch the actual game badly...
Your emphasis is misplaced. The point of the rule is about stored energy, which this kart never has (aside from it's normal momentum).
Energy is transferred from the wheels to the fan, but it is never stored. Any momentum from mass in the transmission system is negligible.
If there was an energy storage system the vehicle's speed would oscillate. It does not; Once at full speed it maintains consistent speed until either the wind changes or the kart is forcibly stopped (breaks).
Because it couldn't be that the later levels were rushed, sloppy, unimaginative, and ultimately just boring. Or the game in general wasn't that good to begin with. Nah, it must be the gamer's fault. *facepalm*
Good games hook you all the way through and still leave you wanting more, enough so that you play it through again a few times. When you first finished the game you did it at 6am, because you just couldn't put the game down, it was that good.
If your achievement spying system indicates half your players aren't finishing your game, it's most likely because your game sucks! It's analogous to people walking out of a movie theater half way through or stop watching a TV show half way through the season. The answer is not to shorten the game time, but to improve the game.
And you don't think the FBI wouldn't have ready access to the exact same reset codes and tools that your car's dealership and/or security device maker has?
That lockdown mode is a counter to casual thieves using very crude methods. It won't even slow down a more sophisticated thief, much less the federal government.
Don't confuse "Full 1080p HD Support!" with not being a 16x10 monitor. Look at the actually resolution/ratio. Hanns.G for example (available on Newegg) has a plethora of fantastic 16x10 (1920x1200) monitors at very reasonable prices.
Because protests actually affect anything in the slightest anymore?
In the heyday of protesting the huge protest was new, rare, impressive, and scary. News media outlets were limited and protests were big new(s), which amplified their impression, excitement, and scary nature (scary to those being protested against). And they protested things that actually, really mattered. War and peace, freedom and oppression.
But today?
At least in the US protests are a dime a dozen. Huge protests maybe a quarter a dozen. Decades of ever increasing protests for every single cause from global threats against humanity to legalizing pet ferrets, protests have lost their bite. They've lost it because protesting never had any real bite. The huge over use of protesting taught The Man that protests really don't mean anything...they don't really don't hurt...they are mostly all bark, no bite. In the flood of 24/7 news outlets, protests rarely get much if any attention. There's just too many for too stupid of causes for anyone to care to pay attention when real ones for real causes happen.
Social media "protests" may be too weak to have any real effect...but neither are actual, feet on the ground, protests.
Fresh & Easy has nothing but self-checkout machines and they are all frighteningly accurate and fast. They find bar codes anywhere and manage to scan them with the package still a foot away from the scanning table. And somehow are that sensitive without double scanning anything.
Fast check out doesn't even begin to describe it.
The stores tend to be as busy as any other market, but there's almost never a line at all. At most a single person ahead during a rush.
They do still employ workers to help bag, which commonly are so fast even if you're scanning at rocket speed they rarely haven't finished bagging your entire cart before your credit card has authorized.
---
Don't knock self-checkout. Knock crappy self-checkout machines like the junk Home Despot uses in their self-checkout lanes.
The more developers work in production, the more they can ONLY work in production.
I'm all for read access (the more eyeballs the better), but actual access to change anything is a train wreck. The devs will forget to check the changes in to the source repo, or they'll check them in differently (bad copy/paste), or they'll check them into the wrong branch/tag. Regardless the next release that goes out silently adds the bug back into production.
And if developers think it's difficult to fully clone a prod environment configuration into dev now, wait until they try to do it after developers have been hacking on it directly for a while.
Pretty soon every release is a train wreck requiring tons of post-release tweaking and hammering to get it in place. Every release is a stressful mess as you're all crossing your fingers because you really have no idea what you are actually changing and no way to find out.
Just don't do it. Hire a good build engineer/release manager/software configuration manager that can sort out, automate, and track environment management well enough that yes, you can reliably clone an accurate representation of production in a matter of minutes. He'll cost you about as much as a good sr developer, but the savings across the board will easily dwarf his salary.
Tech support is a corporate scam to monetize crappy software.
Now that "free" software is all the rage, the "support services" business model is taking its place. The problem is that the better the software, the less support it requires. This monetarily incentives crappy software, bad interfaces, meaningless error messages, and thin or non-existent manuals. Sadly, even non-free software companies have figured this out and quality has suffered greatly as a result.
It's gotten so bad that for a lot of software you're directed to a "partner" company that can install and configure it for you. So unintuitive that they can get you to spend thousands of dollars on "training".
So really, I don't give a flying poo about new ways companies can further shake me down for using their half-baked products. I'm much more interested in products that do what they claim to without requiring support.
If I need to call tech support your product has failed!!
Giving the cases away free would be openly admitting fault and invites all kinds of problems in PR, competition, and legally.
Legally: There are already lawsuits in progress against Apple about this and other issues with the iPhone 4. Admitting guilt like this seems to me (not a lawyer) would be a huge smoking gun for all those lawsuits and almost assuredly far more. It could be bad enough to force a full recall and ban on selling new phones until fixed...and it can't be fixed. It could take Apple completely out of the market for an entire generation of phones (really, who's going to buy a 3Gs at this point?).
Competition: Two major selling points of the iPhone 4 are the slim size and design, both of which even the minimal bumper "case" harms greatly.
PR - Apple is infallible; Keeping their fanboi base truly fanatical is strongly tied to this image. Without rabid fanbois Apple is just another tech company...and frankly not a very good one. If Apple phones have to compete against Android phones without the artificial perception boost of Apple's company image, people may realize the truth...that Apple is actually playing catch up now technologically. The last thing Apple needs are customers actually honestly evaluating the competition...because the iPhone 4 (minus the antenna problems..) is what Apple should have released last year.
In the real world the #1 programming skill by a good margin is debugging. Simply put, if you can't debug you can't write software. Additionally part of debugging is writing debugable software in the first place (good use of diagnostic code (good logging practices, quality error messages, etc).
Additionally there's the fact the vast majority of software tasks simply do not call for complex algorithms (which themselves are intrinsically more error prone and more difficult to debug).
CS majors are taught a plethora of skills that have at best highly selective utility. -Yet, since it's what they've been taught..they'll try to use them everywhere. It's the hammer and nail problem. They'll write their own sorting methods for "speed", despite the fact they're only ever going to sort a dozen items. Coupled with few if any have been taught any real debugging techniques. -Which in their partial defense, debugging is far more an innate talent then a learned skill.
The combination frequently results in over-engineered, yet fragile solutions that are difficult or impossible to maintain or debug. And that's the best outcome, the ones that are actually trying to do a "good job". Mostly the Jr level people, high on whatever the latest wiz-bang language or toolkit of the month is. The rest, the majority, can't engineer any solution.
There's a few here and there that really get it, that have the rare combination of computer understanding, real world application sense, and good communication skills. They'll know when to hack together something cheap and easy, when to use something off the shelf, and when to build something highly scalable from the ground up. But they aren't common. Being generous, in 15 years I've worked with maybe a half dozen.
------
It's probably a function of the fact the most critical skills for most real world software development aren't found in "computer science" at all, they just aren't part of that school of knowledge. The most valuable skills required are ancillary to computer science. Along those lines I have worked with many incredibly smart people that sadly, lack those ancillary skills and as a result have extreme difficulty engineering good real world solutions.
After some 15 years in the industry one thing is amazingly clear; Formal computer science education is more of a warning sign then a merit badge.
The vast majority of people I've worked with that actually had a CS degree have been inept to put it kindly. Regardless of experience, if they went to college for computers chances are good they have trouble wiping their own ass. While I've worked with a few very notable exceptions, the rule still firmly stands. Maybe it's because I'm a product of the dot.com boom, but most people that get a CS degree did it purely for the money and not at all because they had a talent or interest in computers.
The one unifying trait in good, practical computer professionals is an aptitude for music. Pretty much all played an instrument and most still regularly do. Any college degree they have tends to be in something random that interested them, like sociology, if they have a degree at all.
Used medical equipment can be worn, broken, mistreated, maladjusted. It's just cheaper over all to give the next guy a new pair of crutches then to pay someone qualified enough to inspect your used ones and ensure they are still in good working order. Even inspected, if the guy falls he could sue that the crutch foot was worn, a bolt was loose, whatever. The insurance risk is just too great for something as cheap as crutches.
Wheelchairs are borderline. There's probably less risk in a wheelchair too (a faulty crutch means a fall while a faulty chair probably just means the seat rips through).
"Location Services allows applications such as Maps, Camera, and Compass to use information from cellular, Wi-Fi1, and Global Positioning System (GPS)2 networks to determine your approximate location. This information is collected anonymously and in a form that does not personally identify you.
About location precision or accuracy
Depending on your device and available services, Location Services uses a combination of cellular, Wi-Fi, and GPS to determine your location. If you're not within a clear line of sight to GPS satellites, iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS can determine your location using Wi-Fi3. If you're not in range of any Wi-Fi, iPhone can determine your location using cellular towers."
Do you know how they figure out your relative location via Wi-Fi? Yep...they've already got a map of transmitters in the wild to refer to, just like the map Google is building.
It was an example of history, challenging the story's claim of "legendary reliability of Macs". One of dozens. The point being Apple has never had great hardware in their Macs, the entire idea is a complete myth from their fanboi armies. And really, why should they? Their entire business model is to sell you the new shiny and they've fought tooth and nail to prevent anyone from being real competition that might try to compete with build quality. It's the reason you'll never see authorized Mac clones, the risk of quality hardware that's still a "Mac" would be death to Apple.
Practically everyone I've ever known with a Mac has had major hardware issues with it, especially laptops with things like weak power plugs breaking off at the motherboard requiring a full main board replacement.
Apple's service has always seemed outstanding, issues get resolved well and quickly, but the basic hardware... When there's a choice to be made between looks and function or reliability, Apple takes looks each and every time. Apple sells style, not quality.
Considering Uranium has been extensively used in relatively safe glass dishware, I'd venture to say it's safer to handle then say, Plutonium for which if so much as a single molecule gets into your system it is 100% guaranteed to cause a cancer.
No, equal amounts of different hazardous waste types are not even remotely equal in safety concerns. Doubly so when one considers security issues as a pound of some of the worst waste products in the wrong hands can do a hell of a lot more damage then a pound of many of the lessor waste products.
Slashdot Mirror
It can be, sure.
With a bit of cleverness supported by a bit of automation, and not only can change control not get in anyone's way, it can effect a tremendous productivity increase across the board.
Allowing untracked changes to be made at will has a cumulative effect; The system is ever less and less well known and becomes more and more tedious to work with. Before long the only way you can even replicate a system is by block copying its hard drive...precisely because no one actually knows what was done. What that means to the software lifecycle are pure black box production updates and being completely in the blind when problems occur.
If something worked yesterday and doesn't work today the first question to ask is "what is different?", quickly followed up by "why", "who did it". After the fire drill you'll also need "who approved it". Without rock solid change control you can't answer any of those questions. You're left with only two unpleasant options: Grasping in the dark, or doing a full rollback (and hoping you'll find it in dev...again by grasping in the dark).
Agreed.
Of course you can't just stick your finger in the wind of the forums to design your game. You do need to actually judge and filter ideas that come up in forums; Design is not a democracy.
But more then a few games with great potential have shot themselves in the face repetitively by ignoring the forums. They either never were aware of huge game-destroying issues or came up with their own incredibly horrid solutions, when in fact the users had suggested exceptionally good ideas in the forums.
The nice thing about game forums...the users do much of the filtering for you already. Bad ideas get torn apart by other users with great haste, exuberance, and detail. They figure out every possible angle much better then developers could ever do.
----
It's very disheartening to watch your favorite game crash and burn while the developers implement bad idea after bad idea, despite really great suggestions flooding the forums.
"I seriously doubt that WoW devs had the thought 'We need to beat Everquest' running through their heads."
Of course they did. Just as Everquest had 'We need to beat Ultima Online' running through their heads.
The only other way is to take the MMO into a radically different direction, such as Sony's PlanetSide (FPS MMO) or NetDevil's Jumpgate (FPS space flight sim MMO). What, never heard of either? Yah...exactly... The point is, BioWare is going to have to do a hell of a lot more then simply rename "Rusty Broadsword" to "Rusty Lightsaber".
This is the organization that won a lawsuit on the grounds that under the 1st amendment they had the right to knowingly and deliberately lie.
Fox News is the reporting equivalent of fictional movie dramas that are "based on a true story". They selectively include, exclude, and/or outright manufacture whatever they need to in order to craft the story they wish to tell. Even The Daily Show, a satirical comedic spoof show, is wildly more factually accurate and far less biased then Fox News. That's how bad Fox News really is.
The point is not if Fox is "flat-out" false or not. The point is that for any given story the odds that Fox got it anywhere near correct is in the single digits. Why waste time evaluating a story when you know before you even start that there's a 95% chance it's bunk? Especially on Slashdot...before you waste everyones' time, go find a real news agency that has actually reported on the story.
Because in all seriousness The Onion has more journalistic credibility then Fox News.
These have been very popular with San Francisco cyclists for at least three decades now. It originally started with bike messengers, but since has expanded to commuters.
It should be noted however, that while this design seems absurd to the casual rider, it actually makes a lot of sense for well seasoned regular riders:
* Harder to steal - For all the reasons you note (lack of traditional breaks, fixed/locked gear, etc) the casual rider can't just jump on and ride away...they'll crash and burn in less then a block.
* Much lighter - The design is actually from velodrome race track bikes, ditching all that gearing and breaking hardware is a significant weight savings, important when riding a city that's filled with steep hills (eg, San Francisco) and/or needs to be carried up and down stairs a lot (bike messenger).
* Not worth stealing - This is the big reason why they started being popular. Commonly made out of some old beater bike, there's no resale value for these things. For bike messengers it's handy to be able to lean a bike against any random wall (w/o wasting time locking it) and not worry too much that it won't be there when they get back.
It's a bit of a myth however, that these bikes "don't have breaks". They use fixed gearing (if the wheel is turning, the peddles are turning, always) and so you use back-pressure on the peddles to break. For the casual rider that won't be nearly enough breaking force, however for the riders that actually use this design...they have far more then enough leg strength to easily supply ample breaking force. It's a hardcore bike for hardcore riders; Sunday park riders need not apply.
A non-problem (well, almost):
Facebook -> Account -> Account Settings -> Download Your Information
Works great...provided your data, after compression, is less then 1 GB. For some unknown reason any attempts to download a profile larger then 1 GB stop downloading (with no error...) at 1 GB, resulting in an incomplete and broken .zip archive.
But the idea is there...
"perhaps fell just short"...wow, ain't that the understatement of the year.
The 2nd Deus Ex was such a complete and utter failure in every way possible even its own developer was on record saying it sucked. The real tragedy however, was that while the designers know it was trash...they don't know why (no matter how obvious it was to everyone else). The largest reason it failed is because they tried to recreate what was great about Deus Ex 1...except, they didn't actually understand the slightest bit about what made 1 so great, instead emphasized the side-features and simply threw out the core of Deus Ex wholesale.
And of course, they forced 2 to be a console game first and a horrid hack job for the PC second.
Sadly 3 (a prequel as you note) looks like it may just be doubling down on the epic failure of Deus Ex 2, still not really understanding what made Deus Ex 1 one of the all-time best games.
---
I'd love to see many old games redone with new graphics, but not a "remake". Almost without fail when anyone "remakes" a game they botch the actual game badly...
Your emphasis is misplaced. The point of the rule is about stored energy, which this kart never has (aside from it's normal momentum).
Energy is transferred from the wheels to the fan, but it is never stored. Any momentum from mass in the transmission system is negligible.
If there was an energy storage system the vehicle's speed would oscillate. It does not; Once at full speed it maintains consistent speed until either the wind changes or the kart is forcibly stopped (breaks).
Because it couldn't be that the later levels were rushed, sloppy, unimaginative, and ultimately just boring. Or the game in general wasn't that good to begin with. Nah, it must be the gamer's fault. *facepalm*
Good games hook you all the way through and still leave you wanting more, enough so that you play it through again a few times. When you first finished the game you did it at 6am, because you just couldn't put the game down, it was that good.
If your achievement spying system indicates half your players aren't finishing your game, it's most likely because your game sucks! It's analogous to people walking out of a movie theater half way through or stop watching a TV show half way through the season. The answer is not to shorten the game time, but to improve the game.
And you don't think the FBI wouldn't have ready access to the exact same reset codes and tools that your car's dealership and/or security device maker has?
That lockdown mode is a counter to casual thieves using very crude methods. It won't even slow down a more sophisticated thief, much less the federal government.
Nonsense.
Don't confuse "Full 1080p HD Support!" with not being a 16x10 monitor. Look at the actually resolution/ratio. Hanns.G for example (available on Newegg) has a plethora of fantastic 16x10 (1920x1200) monitors at very reasonable prices.
Because protests actually affect anything in the slightest anymore?
In the heyday of protesting the huge protest was new, rare, impressive, and scary. News media outlets were limited and protests were big new(s), which amplified their impression, excitement, and scary nature (scary to those being protested against). And they protested things that actually, really mattered. War and peace, freedom and oppression.
But today?
At least in the US protests are a dime a dozen. Huge protests maybe a quarter a dozen. Decades of ever increasing protests for every single cause from global threats against humanity to legalizing pet ferrets, protests have lost their bite. They've lost it because protesting never had any real bite. The huge over use of protesting taught The Man that protests really don't mean anything...they don't really don't hurt...they are mostly all bark, no bite. In the flood of 24/7 news outlets, protests rarely get much if any attention. There's just too many for too stupid of causes for anyone to care to pay attention when real ones for real causes happen.
Social media "protests" may be too weak to have any real effect...but neither are actual, feet on the ground, protests.
Fresh & Easy has nothing but self-checkout machines and they are all frighteningly accurate and fast. They find bar codes anywhere and manage to scan them with the package still a foot away from the scanning table. And somehow are that sensitive without double scanning anything.
Fast check out doesn't even begin to describe it.
The stores tend to be as busy as any other market, but there's almost never a line at all. At most a single person ahead during a rush.
They do still employ workers to help bag, which commonly are so fast even if you're scanning at rocket speed they rarely haven't finished bagging your entire cart before your credit card has authorized.
---
Don't knock self-checkout. Knock crappy self-checkout machines like the junk Home Despot uses in their self-checkout lanes.
The more developers work in production, the more they can ONLY work in production.
I'm all for read access (the more eyeballs the better), but actual access to change anything is a train wreck. The devs will forget to check the changes in to the source repo, or they'll check them in differently (bad copy/paste), or they'll check them into the wrong branch/tag. Regardless the next release that goes out silently adds the bug back into production.
And if developers think it's difficult to fully clone a prod environment configuration into dev now, wait until they try to do it after developers have been hacking on it directly for a while.
Pretty soon every release is a train wreck requiring tons of post-release tweaking and hammering to get it in place. Every release is a stressful mess as you're all crossing your fingers because you really have no idea what you are actually changing and no way to find out.
Just don't do it. Hire a good build engineer/release manager/software configuration manager that can sort out, automate, and track environment management well enough that yes, you can reliably clone an accurate representation of production in a matter of minutes. He'll cost you about as much as a good sr developer, but the savings across the board will easily dwarf his salary.
Tech support is a corporate scam to monetize crappy software.
Now that "free" software is all the rage, the "support services" business model is taking its place. The problem is that the better the software, the less support it requires. This monetarily incentives crappy software, bad interfaces, meaningless error messages, and thin or non-existent manuals. Sadly, even non-free software companies have figured this out and quality has suffered greatly as a result.
It's gotten so bad that for a lot of software you're directed to a "partner" company that can install and configure it for you. So unintuitive that they can get you to spend thousands of dollars on "training".
So really, I don't give a flying poo about new ways companies can further shake me down for using their half-baked products. I'm much more interested in products that do what they claim to without requiring support.
If I need to call tech support your product has failed!!
It's not that simple.
Giving the cases away free would be openly admitting fault and invites all kinds of problems in PR, competition, and legally.
Legally: There are already lawsuits in progress against Apple about this and other issues with the iPhone 4. Admitting guilt like this seems to me (not a lawyer) would be a huge smoking gun for all those lawsuits and almost assuredly far more. It could be bad enough to force a full recall and ban on selling new phones until fixed...and it can't be fixed. It could take Apple completely out of the market for an entire generation of phones (really, who's going to buy a 3Gs at this point?).
Competition: Two major selling points of the iPhone 4 are the slim size and design, both of which even the minimal bumper "case" harms greatly.
PR - Apple is infallible; Keeping their fanboi base truly fanatical is strongly tied to this image. Without rabid fanbois Apple is just another tech company...and frankly not a very good one. If Apple phones have to compete against Android phones without the artificial perception boost of Apple's company image, people may realize the truth...that Apple is actually playing catch up now technologically. The last thing Apple needs are customers actually honestly evaluating the competition...because the iPhone 4 (minus the antenna problems..) is what Apple should have released last year.
In the real world the #1 programming skill by a good margin is debugging. Simply put, if you can't debug you can't write software. Additionally part of debugging is writing debugable software in the first place (good use of diagnostic code (good logging practices, quality error messages, etc).
Additionally there's the fact the vast majority of software tasks simply do not call for complex algorithms (which themselves are intrinsically more error prone and more difficult to debug).
CS majors are taught a plethora of skills that have at best highly selective utility. -Yet, since it's what they've been taught..they'll try to use them everywhere. It's the hammer and nail problem. They'll write their own sorting methods for "speed", despite the fact they're only ever going to sort a dozen items. Coupled with few if any have been taught any real debugging techniques. -Which in their partial defense, debugging is far more an innate talent then a learned skill.
The combination frequently results in over-engineered, yet fragile solutions that are difficult or impossible to maintain or debug. And that's the best outcome, the ones that are actually trying to do a "good job". Mostly the Jr level people, high on whatever the latest wiz-bang language or toolkit of the month is. The rest, the majority, can't engineer any solution.
There's a few here and there that really get it, that have the rare combination of computer understanding, real world application sense, and good communication skills. They'll know when to hack together something cheap and easy, when to use something off the shelf, and when to build something highly scalable from the ground up. But they aren't common. Being generous, in 15 years I've worked with maybe a half dozen.
------
It's probably a function of the fact the most critical skills for most real world software development aren't found in "computer science" at all, they just aren't part of that school of knowledge. The most valuable skills required are ancillary to computer science. Along those lines I have worked with many incredibly smart people that sadly, lack those ancillary skills and as a result have extreme difficulty engineering good real world solutions.
After some 15 years in the industry one thing is amazingly clear; Formal computer science education is more of a warning sign then a merit badge.
The vast majority of people I've worked with that actually had a CS degree have been inept to put it kindly. Regardless of experience, if they went to college for computers chances are good they have trouble wiping their own ass. While I've worked with a few very notable exceptions, the rule still firmly stands. Maybe it's because I'm a product of the dot.com boom, but most people that get a CS degree did it purely for the money and not at all because they had a talent or interest in computers.
The one unifying trait in good, practical computer professionals is an aptitude for music. Pretty much all played an instrument and most still regularly do. Any college degree they have tends to be in something random that interested them, like sociology, if they have a degree at all.
Used medical equipment can be worn, broken, mistreated, maladjusted. It's just cheaper over all to give the next guy a new pair of crutches then to pay someone qualified enough to inspect your used ones and ensure they are still in good working order. Even inspected, if the guy falls he could sue that the crutch foot was worn, a bolt was loose, whatever. The insurance risk is just too great for something as cheap as crutches.
Wheelchairs are borderline. There's probably less risk in a wheelchair too (a faulty crutch means a fall while a faulty chair probably just means the seat rips through).
And http://skyhookwireless.com/howitworks/submit_ap.php
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1975
"Location Services allows applications such as Maps, Camera, and Compass to use information from cellular, Wi-Fi1, and Global Positioning System (GPS)2 networks to determine your approximate location. This information is collected anonymously and in a form that does not personally identify you.
About location precision or accuracy
Depending on your device and available services, Location Services uses a combination of cellular, Wi-Fi, and GPS to determine your location. If you're not within a clear line of sight to GPS satellites, iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS can determine your location using Wi-Fi3. If you're not in range of any Wi-Fi, iPhone can determine your location using cellular towers."
Do you know how they figure out your relative location via Wi-Fi? Yep...they've already got a map of transmitters in the wild to refer to, just like the map Google is building.
Meh to both of you and the moronic mod.
It was an example of history, challenging the story's claim of "legendary reliability of Macs". One of dozens. The point being Apple has never had great hardware in their Macs, the entire idea is a complete myth from their fanboi armies. And really, why should they? Their entire business model is to sell you the new shiny and they've fought tooth and nail to prevent anyone from being real competition that might try to compete with build quality. It's the reason you'll never see authorized Mac clones, the risk of quality hardware that's still a "Mac" would be death to Apple.
Practically everyone I've ever known with a Mac has had major hardware issues with it, especially laptops with things like weak power plugs breaking off at the motherboard requiring a full main board replacement.
Apple's service has always seemed outstanding, issues get resolved well and quickly, but the basic hardware... When there's a choice to be made between looks and function or reliability, Apple takes looks each and every time. Apple sells style, not quality.
Considering Uranium has been extensively used in relatively safe glass dishware, I'd venture to say it's safer to handle then say, Plutonium for which if so much as a single molecule gets into your system it is 100% guaranteed to cause a cancer.
No, equal amounts of different hazardous waste types are not even remotely equal in safety concerns. Doubly so when one considers security issues as a pound of some of the worst waste products in the wrong hands can do a hell of a lot more damage then a pound of many of the lessor waste products.
This is news? Linux has been playing musical schedulers for years now. I've yet to be impressed by any of them, for any use, with any hardware.