Does Canada have anything remotely similar to the TSA? I live somewhat near the border and the thought of watching a high school dropout paw my four year old makes me somewhat livid. And the idea of self-imposed radiation treatment is also quite unpalatable. I think I'd rather drive eight hours to Canadian airport than use the one the down the street. Is this doable?
Some developers over promise. Other developers have no money skills. Even other developers don't know what they are doing. Failure is a part of life. And sure, there are scammers just like there are scammers everywhere. Hell, some scammers make big money (see Best Buy).
When I back a project, I'm backing it's potential. I'm backing a product that I would like to see in the world. I ask for nothing and expect nothing. If the product makes it to market, then I'll buy it. If it doesn't, and the developers blow it all on hookers and booze, so be it. I just won't contribute to that developer again. If I ever contribute to a scammer, then sure, I'll report them and move on. But I'm not going to beat my breast and gnash my teeth at the horrors of the world.
Look -- the act of doing nothing and letting an interesting project die in the wild costs me more than hiding in fear. And besides, I'd rather have that money spent by an indie developer instead of some mega-corp who views creativity as as a different font size on their earnings reports.
If there are any Valve folks reading this -- just a couple of notes, questions, etc...
1) Please fix the site so that mac games will only recommend mac games. The same goes for the upcoming linux section. It kind of sucks to click on a recommended game only to find it's window's only.
2) When are you guys going to answer Facebook Connect? Seriously, it'd be killer to integrate our mobile game apps into steam to either replace game center or to add to it.
3) steam console... Ouya sounds great but steam would be divine:) How about a steam branded android device?
And hey, if you guys need to html++, give me a call;) Or, maybe a discount:)
Wow... I didn't realize Peter Moore posted on slashdot! How's the stock holding up these days:) Maybe you need more ads in your premium mobile games?
Tell me, if current games are truly worth sixty dollars a pop, then why do they plunge in the value within the first six months? There are only a handful of titles that can maintain that price for over a year while a vast majority of them fall to the toilet. That tells me that the majority of games are over priced and guess what... they are. God - duke nukem forever went from sixty dollars to ten dollars - new - in six months. Overpriced much?
Comparing two prices from two different decades without taking into account other factors is incredibly naive. The gaming market has exploded in that time. It's gone from a handful of millions to billions of paying customers. Computing power has gone through the roof. The necessary skills to build these games has substantially dropped and while budgets have increased so has the profits by a wide margin. By all accounts, these games should be far cheaper than they are. Not the silly inflation math you are using. The used market would not be so out of control if this were the case.
A funny thing has also happened in this time period. Sequels are pushed out faster, content is held back in the form of consumables, we're watching the rise online passes, and now the most odious of all - free to play games that end up becoming quite the cash cow (75% of apple's top twenty grossing games are free to play). Games like Call of Duty, Mass Effect, Assassins Creed, and lets not forget Madden are repurposing the same technology, the same assets what would arguably called expansion packs not twenty years ago. And the hilarious thing is that some of these "AAA" games are just flat out broken on launch.
Now look - if you feel you are getting value for sixty bucks, all the power to you, but seeing as you hitting the Walmart bargin bin, I'm guessing you don't. Well the real bad news is almost upon us. Digital distribution completely screw us. Whereas games drop like a rock on retail shelves to make way for other games, digital games can stay high in the upper fifties or sixties as long as they like with an occasional "deal" of five dollars off or some other nonsense. I'm not talking Steam (they get it) but stores like xbox live, origin, and I'm guessing the playstation store (I never use it so I don't know). And this is without any distribution costs except bandwidth which is dirt cheap. The last game I bought for sixty bucks was Battlefield 3 last year. I played it for a month and will probably sell it on Amazon in a few weeks. Meanwhile I buy a ton of games on my iDevices. If they suck, I hardly bat an eye. That's how it should be.
Buying games should be an impulse purchase, not a saving money purchase. Hollywood got this with dvd purcahses. The real question... when will game publishers?
Yeah... I've been posting here for ten years and the one day I forgot to preview is the day, of course, I write a crap load of text... curse the HTML formatted option!
Wow... I didn't realize Peter Moore posted on slashdot! How's the stock holding up these days:) Maybe you need more ads in your premium mobile games?
Tell me, if current games are truly worth sixty dollars a pop, then why do they plunge in the value within the first six months? There are only a handful of titles that can maintain that price for over a year while a vast majority of them fall to the toilet. That tells me that the majority of games are over priced and guess what... they are. God - duke nukem forever went from sixty dollars to ten dollars - new - in six months. Overpriced much?
Comparing two prices from two different decades without taking into account other factors is incredibly naive. The gaming market has exploded in that time. It's gone from a handful of millions to billions of paying customers. Computing power has gone through the roof. The necessary skills to build these games has substantially dropped and while budgets have increased so has the profits by a wide margin. By all accounts, these games should be far cheaper than they are. Not the silly inflation math you are using. The used market would not be so out of control if this were the case.
A funny thing has also happened in this time period. Sequels are pushed out faster, content is held back in the form of consumables, we're watching the rise online passes, and now the most odious of all - free to play games that end up becoming quite the cash cow (75% of apple's top twenty grossing games are free to play). Games like Call of Duty, Mass Effect, Assassins Creed, and lets not forget Madden are repurposing the same technology, the same assets what would arguably called expansion packs not twenty years ago. And the hilarious thing is that some of these "AAA" games are just flat out broken on launch.
Now look - if you feel you are getting value for sixty bucks, all the power to you, but seeing as you hitting the Walmart bargin bin, I'm guessing you don't. Well the real bad news is almost upon us. Digital distribution completely screw us. Whereas games drop like a rock on retail shelves to make way for other games, digital games can stay high in the upper fifties or sixties as long as they like with an occasional "deal" of five dollars off or some other nonsense. I'm not talking Steam (they get it) but stores like xbox live, origin, and I'm guessing the playstation store (I never use it so I don't know). And this is without any distribution costs except bandwidth which is dirt cheap.
The last game I bought for sixty bucks was Battlefield 3 last year. I played it for a month and will probably sell it on Amazon in a few weeks. Meanwhile I buy a ton of games on my iDevices. If they suck, I hardly bat an eye. That's how it should be. Buying games should be an impulse purchase, not a saving money purchase. Hollywood got this with dvd purcahses. The real question... when will game publishers?
Well... considering that io6 will be including a layout manager makes this "marketing ploy" more than just a rumor. There's little reason to use a layout manager on the current hardware since everything scales by 2. Of course, that all changes when a different screen size enters the mix.
Nope... it's just the editor trolling for comments, for the story itself isn't that interesting. This has been happening a lot since Malda left. Apple has become a rather polarizing issue on slashdot so any article with even the slightest mention of Apple tends to draw a lot of people out of the woodwork to throw feces at each other. It must be great for ad revenue, but as a long time reader, I'm quite bored with it and find myself skipping over a lot Apple related discussion even though I'm an iOS dev.
These days I find myself more at Ars than I do here which is a shame since I used value the discussions here in such high regard. Oh well.
Please, mr coward - I'm the guy who reads the specs. I'm the guy who pays close attention to stuff as they are developed so my users to get experience new standards as they are implemented. I'm also the guy who builds his sites to gracefully degrade so people with older browsers can still read the content because at the end of the day, that's WHAT USERS WANT TO DO.
Sure, my sites take longer to create but they work in real world conditions whereas yours probably flops like a dead fish the moment a user exceeds your narrow specifications. Do yourself a favor, turn off JavaScript, and check out your sites. Now do your users a favor and make it work. Living up to higher standards takes work but your audience will appreciate you for it. Mine certainly does.
Inconsistency is one thing all browsers share and if you are a developer worth your salt, you learn to innovate around them instead of blaming the technology. And yes, if the bean counters use ie6, you support ie6.
Like I said, by using conditionals to produce extra markup and load css sheets, support isn't that difficult. I also recommend you learn the try/catch block in javascript which is present in IE6. .
A lot of these local authorities are slowly starting to upgrade to Win7 platforms (just in time for Win8), but just like a chain being only as strong as it's weakest link, we have to ensure we are developing for the slowest common denominator.
I see this point of view a lot with web developers and when fully realized, it means that you're stuck writing markup and scripts that are a decade behind current standards.
I argue the reverse. Write for current browsers but provide support for older browsers. That way, you remain current as a developer. Besides, with IE conditionals and writing scripts that check for features as opposed to implementation, IE6 really is not that big of a deal. I find the the hard part is supporting older versions of FireFox or Opera or developing pages that gracefully fail without ruining my user's experience. .
At least until the end of life of Windows XP, the role of holding everybody back falls to IE8. HTML5? No show.
Funny... I've been writing HTML5 for awhile now and it works fine in ie6 and up. Granted it requires conditionals and some clever use of css, but it renders fine in older browsers and modern browsers get to experience some of the latest features. And no - there is no "best viewed" anywhere in my sites. Everything just works with or without JavaScript all written in standard markup.
Umm yeah... so the guy who equates Dell Servers to anal rape is giving lessons on what-is and what-is not offensive? RIght...
My problem with the GIMP name is that we are all talking about what-is and what-is not offensive instead of discussing the actual program. That alone would make me change it.
You do realize that the US spent A LOT of money during World War 2? You know -- the event that most say ended the great depression. Or am I missing something?
I can totally sympathize with this pilot. True story.. I was driving through Yukon a few years ago and I had been on the road for twelve hours that I could barely stay awake so I pulled off in a rest area, climbed in the back seat, and fell asleep.
At some point, another driver pulled into the rest area and his lights woke me up. All I saw were trees and I thought I had fallen asleep at the wheel and crashed in the woods. I panicked. I climed out of my sleeping bag, climbed into the front seat, started my car, and pulled a 360 before I realized what the hell was going on. The other driver probably thought I was nuts.
The button doesn't read "flag as spammer" or "flag as robo-troll". It reads "flag as inappropriate". Are you guys looking for a whole slew false positives? You'll be getting notified about minor argument on the site.
And honestly, in the ten years I've been visiting this site, I've rarely seen the robo-trolls. You guys are doing a fine job already. You don't need our help.
The folks in Redmond were caught by surprise again. Only this time, it was by tablets (which is surprising since they tried to push it ten years ago) and they are reacting how they always react. That is, by leveraging their desktop monopoly to break into new markets.
The new ui in windows 8 is forcing people to learn how to use their new fancy tablet UI so users can transition between Microsoft devices with little adjustment. That's the idea. While this ui appears to be pissing off the technical crowd, I'm wondering how it is being regarded by the non-techies as they will ultimately determine the fate of this effort.
Honestly, I though the Kinnect was a dud, but Microsoft really pulled it off so I'm hesitant to dismiss this effort. One thing is certain, though. I will not be using it. Or so I hope:/
Many of the blogs compromised in these recent attacks were running outdated WordPress versions, had vulnerable plug-ins installed or had weak administrative passwords susceptible to brute force attacks, said David Dede, a security researcher with website integrity monitoring firm Sucuri Security. "It seems the attackers are trying everything lately."
I feel the same way about game consoles. But with smart phones and tablets, I think both Microsoft and Apple see the writing on the wall.
Just for the record, I'm an iOS dev. I've avoided Android devices pretty much because I wasn't interested in the OS. Well, recently, I've been expanding my skillset and started branching out. I picked up a Galaxy Tab for a learning / development machine. I didn't like it at first but it became a slow burn and I found myself really enjoying the os (I find the back button for applications to be a brilliant os concept).
While I still prefer the overall experience of an iPad, it's painfully obvious that the "tablet gap" (cue strangelove) is being closed. I can't see Apple staying on top much longer and I'm guessing with their litigation spree, neither can they. It's literally Apple versus the world and those aren't very good odds.
If both companies manage to get a chuck of every tablet phone sale, they kind of win in a very shady way. The real thing to do is get rid of software patents or limit them to an ultra small window (a year at most). I don't see that ever happening unless we somehow divorce money from politics, but that's a whole different issue.
Not sure if you are joking (I'm guessing you are), but pro tip - only mod down items that contribute nothing to a discussion like trolls or flamebait. I've been using the site for over a decade and I've probably modded down five or six people over that course.
Mod up the arguments that speak for you and contribute something. If someone says something that you dislike, look for a counter argument and mod that up.
Lately, I've been seeing a lot of well thought comments modded down (check any smartphone discussion) for disagreeing with the groupthink. This is like group censorship which is never a good thing for any community.
Honestly... this wouldn't have happened if the mother didn't live within a walled garden. Also because she also utilized proprietary windows, her sandwich making was a closed model affair. People couldn't see into the house to check the sandwich source. I mean, jesus, no one really knew what was in the damned thing until the kid unwrapped it. Who knows what the mom could have put between the layers of cheese? Thankfully, the sandwich was caught by a security inspector in the wild and the kid was given a second helping of ketchup. I can tell you one thing -- this sort of thing would not have happened had the family lived out in the open or at least provided the recipe of the sandwich with the lunchbox. That's why living on the street is superior model of living. Just saying. You heard it here first.
Slashdot Mirror
Does Canada have anything remotely similar to the TSA? I live somewhat near the border and the thought of watching a high school dropout paw my four year old makes me somewhat livid. And the idea of self-imposed radiation treatment is also quite unpalatable. I think I'd rather drive eight hours to Canadian airport than use the one the down the street. Is this doable?
This really isn't news. Well, maybe to the naive.
Some developers over promise. Other developers have no money skills. Even other developers don't know what they are doing. Failure is a part of life. And sure, there are scammers just like there are scammers everywhere. Hell, some scammers make big money (see Best Buy).
When I back a project, I'm backing it's potential. I'm backing a product that I would like to see in the world. I ask for nothing and expect nothing. If the product makes it to market, then I'll buy it. If it doesn't, and the developers blow it all on hookers and booze, so be it. I just won't contribute to that developer again. If I ever contribute to a scammer, then sure, I'll report them and move on. But I'm not going to beat my breast and gnash my teeth at the horrors of the world.
Look -- the act of doing nothing and letting an interesting project die in the wild costs me more than hiding in fear. And besides, I'd rather have that money spent by an indie developer instead of some mega-corp who views creativity as as a different font size on their earnings reports.
If there are any Valve folks reading this -- just a couple of notes, questions, etc ...
1) Please fix the site so that mac games will only recommend mac games. The same goes for the upcoming linux section. It kind of sucks to click on a recommended game only to find it's window's only.
2) When are you guys going to answer Facebook Connect? Seriously, it'd be killer to integrate our mobile game apps into steam to either replace game center or to add to it.
3) steam console ... Ouya sounds great but steam would be divine :) How about a steam branded android device?
And hey, if you guys need to html++, give me a call ;) Or, maybe a discount :)
Keep up the great work!
Wow ... I didn't realize Peter Moore posted on slashdot! How's the stock holding up these days :) Maybe you need more ads in your premium mobile games?
Tell me, if current games are truly worth sixty dollars a pop, then why do they plunge in the value within the first six months? There are only a handful of titles that can maintain that price for over a year while a vast majority of them fall to the toilet. That tells me that the majority of games are over priced and guess what ... they are. God - duke nukem forever went from sixty dollars to ten dollars - new - in six months. Overpriced much?
Comparing two prices from two different decades without taking into account other factors is incredibly naive. The gaming market has exploded in that time. It's gone from a handful of millions to billions of paying customers. Computing power has gone through the roof. The necessary skills to build these games has substantially dropped and while budgets have increased so has the profits by a wide margin. By all accounts, these games should be far cheaper than they are. Not the silly inflation math you are using. The used market would not be so out of control if this were the case.
A funny thing has also happened in this time period. Sequels are pushed out faster, content is held back in the form of consumables, we're watching the rise online passes, and now the most odious of all - free to play games that end up becoming quite the cash cow (75% of apple's top twenty grossing games are free to play). Games like Call of Duty, Mass Effect, Assassins Creed, and lets not forget Madden are repurposing the same technology, the same assets what would arguably called expansion packs not twenty years ago. And the hilarious thing is that some of these "AAA" games are just flat out broken on launch.
Now look - if you feel you are getting value for sixty bucks, all the power to you, but seeing as you hitting the Walmart bargin bin, I'm guessing you don't. Well the real bad news is almost upon us. Digital distribution completely screw us. Whereas games drop like a rock on retail shelves to make way for other games, digital games can stay high in the upper fifties or sixties as long as they like with an occasional "deal" of five dollars off or some other nonsense. I'm not talking Steam (they get it) but stores like xbox live, origin, and I'm guessing the playstation store (I never use it so I don't know). And this is without any distribution costs except bandwidth which is dirt cheap. The last game I bought for sixty bucks was Battlefield 3 last year. I played it for a month and will probably sell it on Amazon in a few weeks. Meanwhile I buy a ton of games on my iDevices. If they suck, I hardly bat an eye. That's how it should be.
Buying games should be an impulse purchase, not a saving money purchase. Hollywood got this with dvd purcahses. The real question ... when will game publishers?
Yeah ... I've been posting here for ten years and the one day I forgot to preview is the day, of course, I write a crap load of text... curse the HTML formatted option!
Wow ... I didn't realize Peter Moore posted on slashdot! How's the stock holding up these days :) Maybe you need more ads in your premium mobile games?
Tell me, if current games are truly worth sixty dollars a pop, then why do they plunge in the value within the first six months? There are only a handful of titles that can maintain that price for over a year while a vast majority of them fall to the toilet. That tells me that the majority of games are over priced and guess what ... they are. God - duke nukem forever went from sixty dollars to ten dollars - new - in six months. Overpriced much?
Comparing two prices from two different decades without taking into account other factors is incredibly naive. The gaming market has exploded in that time. It's gone from a handful of millions to billions of paying customers. Computing power has gone through the roof. The necessary skills to build these games has substantially dropped and while budgets have increased so has the profits by a wide margin. By all accounts, these games should be far cheaper than they are. Not the silly inflation math you are using. The used market would not be so out of control if this were the case.
A funny thing has also happened in this time period. Sequels are pushed out faster, content is held back in the form of consumables, we're watching the rise online passes, and now the most odious of all - free to play games that end up becoming quite the cash cow (75% of apple's top twenty grossing games are free to play). Games like Call of Duty, Mass Effect, Assassins Creed, and lets not forget Madden are repurposing the same technology, the same assets what would arguably called expansion packs not twenty years ago. And the hilarious thing is that some of these "AAA" games are just flat out broken on launch.
Now look - if you feel you are getting value for sixty bucks, all the power to you, but seeing as you hitting the Walmart bargin bin, I'm guessing you don't. Well the real bad news is almost upon us. Digital distribution completely screw us. Whereas games drop like a rock on retail shelves to make way for other games, digital games can stay high in the upper fifties or sixties as long as they like with an occasional "deal" of five dollars off or some other nonsense. I'm not talking Steam (they get it) but stores like xbox live, origin, and I'm guessing the playstation store (I never use it so I don't know). And this is without any distribution costs except bandwidth which is dirt cheap.
The last game I bought for sixty bucks was Battlefield 3 last year. I played it for a month and will probably sell it on Amazon in a few weeks. Meanwhile I buy a ton of games on my iDevices. If they suck, I hardly bat an eye. That's how it should be. Buying games should be an impulse purchase, not a saving money purchase. Hollywood got this with dvd purcahses. The real question ... when will game publishers?
Well ... considering that io6 will be including a layout manager makes this "marketing ploy" more than just a rumor. There's little reason to use a layout manager on the current hardware since everything scales by 2. Of course, that all changes when a different screen size enters the mix.
Nope ... it's just the editor trolling for comments, for the story itself isn't that interesting. This has been happening a lot since Malda left. Apple has become a rather polarizing issue on slashdot so any article with even the slightest mention of Apple tends to draw a lot of people out of the woodwork to throw feces at each other. It must be great for ad revenue, but as a long time reader, I'm quite bored with it and find myself skipping over a lot Apple related discussion even though I'm an iOS dev.
These days I find myself more at Ars than I do here which is a shame since I used value the discussions here in such high regard. Oh well.
Right on brother ... I don't even leave my basement anymore. It's all tin foil hats and sturdy pair of depends.
but on the positive side, it looks like they're hiring! ;)
:/
In light of recent events, I'd advise the site developer to update that page but I'm guessing he or she was just fired
Please, mr coward - I'm the guy who reads the specs. I'm the guy who pays close attention to stuff as they are developed so my users to get experience new standards as they are implemented. I'm also the guy who builds his sites to gracefully degrade so people with older browsers can still read the content because at the end of the day, that's WHAT USERS WANT TO DO.
Sure, my sites take longer to create but they work in real world conditions whereas yours probably flops like a dead fish the moment a user exceeds your narrow specifications. Do yourself a favor, turn off JavaScript, and check out your sites. Now do your users a favor and make it work. Living up to higher standards takes work but your audience will appreciate you for it. Mine certainly does.
Inconsistency is one thing all browsers share and if you are a developer worth your salt, you learn to innovate around them instead of blaming the technology. And yes, if the bean counters use ie6, you support ie6.
Like I said, by using conditionals to produce extra markup and load css sheets, support isn't that difficult. I also recommend you learn the try/catch block in javascript which is present in IE6.
.
A lot of these local authorities are slowly starting to upgrade to Win7 platforms (just in time for Win8), but just like a chain being only as strong as it's weakest link, we have to ensure we are developing for the slowest common denominator.
I see this point of view a lot with web developers and when fully realized, it means that you're stuck writing markup and scripts that are a decade behind current standards.
I argue the reverse. Write for current browsers but provide support for older browsers. That way, you remain current as a developer. Besides, with IE conditionals and writing scripts that check for features as opposed to implementation, IE6 really is not that big of a deal. I find the the hard part is supporting older versions of FireFox or Opera or developing pages that gracefully fail without ruining my user's experience. .
good point .. but my real concern ... how the hell did the expression 'pinch a loaf' get coined?
At least until the end of life of Windows XP, the role of holding everybody back falls to IE8. HTML5? No show.
... I've been writing HTML5 for awhile now and it works fine in ie6 and up. Granted it requires conditionals and some clever use of css, but it renders fine in older browsers and modern browsers get to experience some of the latest features. And no - there is no "best viewed" anywhere in my sites. Everything just works with or without JavaScript all written in standard markup.
Funny
It takes work, but so does anything worth doing.
Umm yeah ... so the guy who equates Dell Servers to anal rape is giving lessons on what-is and what-is not offensive? RIght ...
My problem with the GIMP name is that we are all talking about what-is and what-is not offensive instead of discussing the actual program. That alone would make me change it.
You do realize that the US spent A LOT of money during World War 2? You know -- the event that most say ended the great depression. Or am I missing something?
I can totally sympathize with this pilot. True story .. I was driving through Yukon a few years ago and I had been on the road for twelve hours that I could barely stay awake so I pulled off in a rest area, climbed in the back seat, and fell asleep.
At some point, another driver pulled into the rest area and his lights woke me up. All I saw were trees and I thought I had fallen asleep at the wheel and crashed in the woods. I panicked. I climed out of my sleeping bag, climbed into the front seat, started my car, and pulled a 360 before I realized what the hell was going on. The other driver probably thought I was nuts.
Moral of the story ... Thank god I'm not a pilot :)
The button doesn't read "flag as spammer" or "flag as robo-troll". It reads "flag as inappropriate". Are you guys looking for a whole slew false positives? You'll be getting notified about minor argument on the site.
And honestly, in the ten years I've been visiting this site, I've rarely seen the robo-trolls. You guys are doing a fine job already. You don't need our help.
The folks in Redmond were caught by surprise again. Only this time, it was by tablets (which is surprising since they tried to push it ten years ago) and they are reacting how they always react. That is, by leveraging their desktop monopoly to break into new markets.
The new ui in windows 8 is forcing people to learn how to use their new fancy tablet UI so users can transition between Microsoft devices with little adjustment. That's the idea. While this ui appears to be pissing off the technical crowd, I'm wondering how it is being regarded by the non-techies as they will ultimately determine the fate of this effort.
Honestly, I though the Kinnect was a dud, but Microsoft really pulled it off so I'm hesitant to dismiss this effort. One thing is certain, though. I will not be using it. Or so I hope :/
Actually, I'd argue that Martians invading New Jersey would be a public service but that's another issue altogether.
From the fine article:
Many of the blogs compromised in these recent attacks were running outdated WordPress versions, had vulnerable plug-ins installed or had weak administrative passwords susceptible to brute force attacks, said David Dede, a security researcher with website integrity monitoring firm Sucuri Security. "It seems the attackers are trying everything lately."
I feel the same way about game consoles. But with smart phones and tablets, I think both Microsoft and Apple see the writing on the wall.
Just for the record, I'm an iOS dev. I've avoided Android devices pretty much because I wasn't interested in the OS. Well, recently, I've been expanding my skillset and started branching out. I picked up a Galaxy Tab for a learning / development machine. I didn't like it at first but it became a slow burn and I found myself really enjoying the os (I find the back button for applications to be a brilliant os concept).
While I still prefer the overall experience of an iPad, it's painfully obvious that the "tablet gap" (cue strangelove) is being closed. I can't see Apple staying on top much longer and I'm guessing with their litigation spree, neither can they. It's literally Apple versus the world and those aren't very good odds.
If both companies manage to get a chuck of every tablet phone sale, they kind of win in a very shady way. The real thing to do is get rid of software patents or limit them to an ultra small window (a year at most). I don't see that ever happening unless we somehow divorce money from politics, but that's a whole different issue.
Not sure if you are joking (I'm guessing you are), but pro tip - only mod down items that contribute nothing to a discussion like trolls or flamebait. I've been using the site for over a decade and I've probably modded down five or six people over that course.
Mod up the arguments that speak for you and contribute something. If someone says something that you dislike, look for a counter argument and mod that up.
Lately, I've been seeing a lot of well thought comments modded down (check any smartphone discussion) for disagreeing with the groupthink. This is like group censorship which is never a good thing for any community.
Honestly ... this wouldn't have happened if the mother didn't live within a walled garden. Also because she also utilized proprietary windows, her sandwich making was a closed model affair. People couldn't see into the house to check the sandwich source. I mean, jesus, no one really knew what was in the damned thing until the kid unwrapped it. Who knows what the mom could have put between the layers of cheese? Thankfully, the sandwich was caught by a security inspector in the wild and the kid was given a second helping of ketchup. I can tell you one thing -- this sort of thing would not have happened had the family lived out in the open or at least provided the recipe of the sandwich with the lunchbox. That's why living on the street is superior model of living. Just saying. You heard it here first.