Insofar as serious Science Fiction goes I would agree with you (and I don't consider Star Wars serious Science Fiction).
However, Zahn from my perspective has written the only decent books in the Star Wars universe, which counts for something in my books (Admiral Thrawn, etc...).
MOO3 is the only game (and the last) I have ever pre-ordered. To say I was excited, and then dissapointed would be an understatement.
I think I can sum up the distinction between MOO2 and MOO3 pretty easily, MOO2 was fun, and MOO3 was not. More specifically MOO2 was a game, whereas MOO3 tried to be a simulation. There is also a subtle difference between micro management and auto management. MOO3 tried to be both, micro if you want it, and auto if you didn't. Thing was micro wasn't really A) possible, or B) worth it, so you just auto everything, then you are more like running a simulation of a game...
Anyway I would be interested in this new game. Zhan, mention of "MOO", sounds good to me!
iPhone barely likes giving away 16GB STORAGE. Never mind RAM.
It sets price points on cheap memory. It is going to install expensive memory now?
Likely this is just a strategic next step in technology. The chip is going there anyway, Apple along for ride. Much like 95% of desktops out there that have 64bit cpus and don't utilize I iota of them, neither in size or RAM, special instruction sets, or in programming.
As I got a mSATA SSD which plugs into the back of my motherboard, and my case has no removable back plate.
I hope that thing never fails, as if it ever does there is no way in hell I am going to disassemble everything just to get that POS out.
That said, if it is still under warranty I will probably have to, sigh. Word to the wise, if your building a system using a mSATA SSD, you might want to make sure your case has a removable back plate.
Though the thought of using a dremel to cut a hole just briefly passed through my brain, though I suppose the MB wouldn't react too kindly the the pile of steel shavings it would produce...
Note to Fractal Designs: Your Node 304 uses ITX format motherboards, most of which support mSATA SDD, and there is limited HDD space in the case. How much more would it really cost you to make a removable back plate? Not to mention the back plate that most modern heat sinks now require also (and yes I forgot this and had to redo).
HDD give you plenty of warning now. In fact most of SMART tech, and a host of other things to run continuous tests looking for potential failure, as well as OS that specifically look for indications as well. Now.
Years ago, this was not the case. You MIGHT get some warning depending on how it decided to fail (bad sectors etc.,,), however most back in the day gave you about one second of actually notice before dying in a grinding crunching sound, or in a small black puff of smoke. I suppose in that light, you aren't wondering what the matter is, as you know it died, as it had the good measure to give a last death rattle before departing into the dark night.
Backups had to be done all the time, because at any time, it could go poof. Now you get like a weeks warning and can go pick up an external drive at your leisure (which is what I did the last time I had a HD fail).
The reason we have the protections is because they were so bad, and consumers demanded better drives, driven by consumers. SSD drives have only been mainstream commercial for a handful of years. It is pretty new technology compared to HDD. Give them a second to catch up!
It is more like a lack of empathy and total disregard for anything other then themselves.
It would be like Louis the 16th running over a bunch of peasants with his carriage. It may be that there was no intent to purposely run over poor peasants, but then again neither does he care other than perhaps the mess or damage to said carriage.
The 1% may look like they are working in concert, but I think it is more of matter of them all being pretty much the same. If many are using HFT to bleed free money out of the market which further imbalances the concentration of wealth, it is because they are able to. Make up some other method, or product (eg. derivatives), and what I can only call law/regulation as that is how corrupt government is these days, and that is what they will do. Ethics, morality, even legality really doesn't really come into play. If they think they can get away with it and a profit made, it will be done. It has been shown time and again that government is in bed with big business, politically that is how they get elected, with money (and yet fools still vote for them). It has been shown time and again that you can do blatantly illegal acts, and steal HUGE amounts of money, with little or no repercussions. There has only been a few instances where anyone has ever been punished. Bernie Madov for example did get jail time, however he stole more money from people than anyone else in the world EVER, also I suspect that because many of the people he may have stolen from were also rich and powerful may have had something to do with that. Heck there was a guy in Toronto, Canada that basically did the same scam, except he also stole from friends and family. These people simply do not care past their own desires. So long as we allow it, in that there are little repercussions, and the government is actively courting these individuals for favors for legislation nothing is about to change. This would require the total decoupling of Corporate and State, just like the Church and State years ago.
Anyway not sure how likely that is about to happen, the entanglement is pretty complete. When the people making the decision are the ones that need to be limited it usually doesn't work out so well. People would really have to take notice and actively do something, which given the apathy and the political machinations to keep people (base) stupid and compliant, and the mainstream media hasn't been all that helpful in this regard either.
OK. I fail to the the point (market) of the Atom processor. Ditto for the AMD counterpart.
The reason I say this is because of A) miniaturization and power efficiency gains in traditional processors, and B) ARM and Motorola.
I just bought an i5 Haswell on an itx format. I could have got an i7 (or an i3 for that matter). They make laptops with all of those. Power usage is way down. If looking for "cheapness" past an i3, they still over Celerons more less. AMD likewise has some cheap lower powered chips.
ARM and Motorola (A# and Snapdragon basically) own the phone/tablet market. Nothing Intel or AMD do to their lines is going to change that.
For Atom and it's AMD counterpart fall somewhere in between the very cheap low end chip, and the ARM/Motorola chips. What are you making with these chips? Shitty netbook laptops? Sorry the processor is only part of the price of these things. Not to mention the death of the netbook due to the popularity of Tablets.
Anyway I just do not see the point of this processor segment at all.
I think I would agree with the whole race to the bottom, and eroded image et al.
However I would add two things about perhaps WHY they are doing it.
1) Other markets. If the 5C is destined for markets overseas, for say areas where a 5S is unattainable, and the two would never be sold side by side, makes it a more reasonable decision.
2) I am not sure about the US, but I know here in Canada most Provinces (and it might even be coming Federally) have either passed or proposed laws about contract terms and mobile phone companies. Basically mobile phone companies (of which there are only a handful Canada) are so dodgy with their contract terms (due largely to phone subsidies, which is fueled by iPhone), cancellation fees, conditions, etc... that actual laws had to be made to keep them from ripping consumers off (or to limit how much they rip them off anyway). It could be that Apple management is seeing a trend where the subsidies are not tenable anymore, and rightly see that consumers when actually confronted with the sticker shock of what an iPhone actually costs up front, may go another way. A cheaper 5C version might give those consumers an alternative. So while yes this would erode image, it wasn't something that perhaps Jobs had to deal when when he was opposed to the idea.
Also whoever decided on "C" is an idiot. It is going to take the world about 5 seconds to come up with the name "iPhone Cheap". Not a very positive connoting word.
How the heck is there a reasonable politician in Texas?! I mean I would vote for this guy and I am from Canada! Not to mention he appears to be literate:
"So because Tesla doesn’t go through a completely unnecessary middleman who turns the pleasant experience of buying a car into something resembling haggling for a donkey in Marrakesh, they can’t sell their cars in Texas."
OK. Having bought a new car myself years ago, "haggling for a donkey in Marrakesh" made me really laugh at work. I remember at the time thinking, this is so weird, how is it this is the only thing we "haggle" over, what an outdated system, I wonder why that is? (this is Canada)
Anyway nice piece, and I wish him luck politically. Jokes aside, I travel down to Dallas every other year to BGGCON and it is full of reasonable Texans (who still sound a bit funny), so I know for a fact that they are not all nuts. I also am long time friends with a girl from the big state, and she seems reasonable enough. It does seem they could use some reasonable political representation for a change.
That said we currently have our own nutbars in power in places around Canada as well as out dated laws and corporate interests directing corrupt politicians... As the churchies might say "Judge not, lest... blah blah blah...
Actually Greece has been fucked over by the Greek people not paying taxes and expecting government to provide them with services. Greece ironically is a democracy so far as I know, and people voted these governments in place.
When the one government tried to tow a hard line saying, "hey we are broke now we better start cutting back on things" there were mass riots by people.
The only thing Wall Street did was make holding MASSIVE debt and then trying to get even more MASSIVE loans more difficult. Also in Porrifying (I just made that word up) the rest of the developed world it made it hard on tourism all around the world, and when 90% of your economic GDP is tourism...
They have no one to blame but the person looking back at them in the mirror.
It isn't that management doesn't care, or doesn't understand (which probably happens a lot anyway), it is the fact that the things they DO care about and DO understand are all negatively effected by "Security" issues.
Basically application development becomes more complex, expensive, cumbersome, requires more approvals, documentation, oversight, etc...
All things that a manager doesn't like to hear all summed up in a word. Combine this with FOI and privacy, well he is in for a bad day.
Oh and it has to be hosted on a more expensive server that is harder to get to, and is inconvenient for all your clients, and other applications to talk to, requires additional regular IT support you are required to pay monthly, etc....
So yeah, when you work for a boss that "doesn't want to hear it", likely he only does when he absolutely has to (and some might have subjective degrees of when that is).
I recently built a new computer (this week!), and found my invoice for my last one.
I think I paid close to 200$ for 2GB. I believe a couple months later it cost half of that. This was back at the beginning of 2007 I believe.
I just bought 16GB for 135$. I was sort of bitchy about it, however when put into perspective... However it has gone up a bit for whatever reason, 6 months ago 16GB would have cost about 100$.
At least you have a choice. I had pretty much the same conversation with IT support at work about UAC and my admin privileges.
Out of nowhere I was forced to enter my network, username, password, etc... for every admin action I took. First two people I talked to swore up and down it had always been like that, forever. I was like, it wasn't like this a week ago, a month ago, or ever, do you think I am making things ups? Finally I got a guy who said that I was on the wrong list, and "fixed" it. Until it immediately started happening again. If I was doing a single thing it is annoying. If I am doing repetitive admin privileges type of work, say 40 times, I have to enter 130 pieces of information, not including any typos that might drive me to the edge of violence. In the end as it turns out Corporate Security made/changed a policy basically saying that UAC had to be on the most severe setting for everyone. Yes you can go in with admin access and change the UAC settings, but they instantly revert when you login again. Final response was, not our problem, take it up with corporate security, if you know you are doing a lot of repetitive stuff, temporarily change your UAC settings. One hand not knowing what the other is doing really. Don't have much choice but to put up with it, just takes longer and is more frustrating to do certain tasks. However like you, initially they swore up and down that it was always like that forever and that I must be making things up! Never mind it was a security policy change from the week before that they were either clueless about or were trying to downplay....
You missed two. -Massive population
a) Demographically most of that population will be old soon, with a small (relatively of course) working base supporting it.
b) Demographically most of the younger population will be men, with no marriageable prospects, and thus a generation with much less children. (Due to the 1 child policy and the "preference" of families to have a boy child.
People talk about Japan, and even the West and the baby boomers, aging population, and collapse of any sort of welfare etc... Well China will make that look like nothing I think. I recently heard about a law whereby children were legally obligated to take care of their parents into old age...
I never said "Android" in any of my posts, only Google and Samsung. Not talking about the OS, only the Maps application on phones (in this case one on the Android OS and one on iOS). So yes I know Android belongs to Google who licences it out to phone makers such as Samsung.
All Apple got was the version of Google Maps they were already getting prior to the spat in the first place. I know I had an iPhone, which got upgraded to iOS 6+, lost Google Maps, got Apple Maps, then later was able to download independently the Google Maps app again when it got into the media how badly Apple had messed up.
I thought Apple did buy one of the GPS providers, or at least the Mapping division of one of them anyway. I believe it may have been Nokia, though upon looking I see nothing, perhaps that was just a rumor at the time regarding how to fix their situation. I see Apple has acquired 3 mapping companies in the past year, however all of them are additional content, not actually mapping.
Mapping is all about currency and detail. The more detail you have, the harder it is to keep up. There are a whole host of strategies you can use to tackle this, but essentially it still requires a lot of work, and only so much of that can be automated. So even if Apple were to acquire the mapping data of one of the big guns, they still have to have the infrastructure (or a licence, and hope that whoever they get it from keeps it up) to be able to manage it moving forward, getting additional details, and updates to keep it current. Even if they spend billions, if most of the data hasn't been updated since 2009, they will still have their work cut out for them. Google actually has a freaking fleet of cars that just drive around mapping (which is nuts in itself, first hand data collection). What does Apple have?
Likely in the end it will be the memory that drives the issue. As applications require more memory, OR users become accustomed to multitasking which may require more memory, specifically more then 3.5GB worth it is only then where a 64bit OS will be *required*. There are still a lot of basic users, and basic machines with the 4GB of RAM out there. At a certain point OS will move to ONLY 64bit, which will in turn start to offer incentives to developers. So bring on the glut of background services and system bloat!:) You sort of have to go backwards to go forwards it seems.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly a terrorist!
I got that app as well. As a game I thought it was OK, as an iOS game not so much.
Either A) the game was designed poorly, or B) iOS and hardware not sufficient to handle it.
Takes forever. AI takes too long. Everything is slow.
It is essentially a game from 1995. It should play ultra fast on anything.
Insofar as serious Science Fiction goes I would agree with you (and I don't consider Star Wars serious Science Fiction).
However, Zahn from my perspective has written the only decent books in the Star Wars universe, which counts for something in my books (Admiral Thrawn, etc...).
Also the Conquerors trilogy was enjoyable.
MOO3 is the only game (and the last) I have ever pre-ordered. To say I was excited, and then dissapointed would be an understatement.
I think I can sum up the distinction between MOO2 and MOO3 pretty easily, MOO2 was fun, and MOO3 was not. More specifically MOO2 was a game, whereas MOO3 tried to be a simulation. There is also a subtle difference between micro management and auto management. MOO3 tried to be both, micro if you want it, and auto if you didn't. Thing was micro wasn't really A) possible, or B) worth it, so you just auto everything, then you are more like running a simulation of a game...
Anyway I would be interested in this new game. Zhan, mention of "MOO", sounds good to me!
4GB RAM. Please.
iPhone barely likes giving away 16GB STORAGE. Never mind RAM.
It sets price points on cheap memory. It is going to install expensive memory now?
Likely this is just a strategic next step in technology. The chip is going there anyway, Apple along for ride. Much like 95% of desktops out there that have 64bit cpus and don't utilize I iota of them, neither in size or RAM, special instruction sets, or in programming.
As I got a mSATA SSD which plugs into the back of my motherboard, and my case has no removable back plate.
I hope that thing never fails, as if it ever does there is no way in hell I am going to disassemble everything just to get that POS out.
That said, if it is still under warranty I will probably have to, sigh. Word to the wise, if your building a system using a mSATA SSD, you might want to make sure your case has a removable back plate.
Though the thought of using a dremel to cut a hole just briefly passed through my brain, though I suppose the MB wouldn't react too kindly the the pile of steel shavings it would produce...
Note to Fractal Designs: Your Node 304 uses ITX format motherboards, most of which support mSATA SDD, and there is limited HDD space in the case. How much more would it really cost you to make a removable back plate? Not to mention the back plate that most modern heat sinks now require also (and yes I forgot this and had to redo).
OK LOL!
HDD give you plenty of warning now. In fact most of SMART tech, and a host of other things to run continuous tests looking for potential failure, as well as OS that specifically look for indications as well. Now.
Years ago, this was not the case. You MIGHT get some warning depending on how it decided to fail (bad sectors etc.,,), however most back in the day gave you about one second of actually notice before dying in a grinding crunching sound, or in a small black puff of smoke. I suppose in that light, you aren't wondering what the matter is, as you know it died, as it had the good measure to give a last death rattle before departing into the dark night.
Backups had to be done all the time, because at any time, it could go poof. Now you get like a weeks warning and can go pick up an external drive at your leisure (which is what I did the last time I had a HD fail).
The reason we have the protections is because they were so bad, and consumers demanded better drives, driven by consumers. SSD drives have only been mainstream commercial for a handful of years. It is pretty new technology compared to HDD. Give them a second to catch up!
Treason is only a drone strike away from terrorism.
Crash testing might be either really good, or very bad, depending on perspective.
War implies a concerted effort of will.
It is more like a lack of empathy and total disregard for anything other then themselves.
It would be like Louis the 16th running over a bunch of peasants with his carriage. It may be that there was no intent to purposely run over poor peasants, but then again neither does he care other than perhaps the mess or damage to said carriage.
The 1% may look like they are working in concert, but I think it is more of matter of them all being pretty much the same. If many are using HFT to bleed free money out of the market which further imbalances the concentration of wealth, it is because they are able to. Make up some other method, or product (eg. derivatives), and what I can only call law/regulation as that is how corrupt government is these days, and that is what they will do. Ethics, morality, even legality really doesn't really come into play. If they think they can get away with it and a profit made, it will be done. It has been shown time and again that government is in bed with big business, politically that is how they get elected, with money (and yet fools still vote for them). It has been shown time and again that you can do blatantly illegal acts, and steal HUGE amounts of money, with little or no repercussions. There has only been a few instances where anyone has ever been punished. Bernie Madov for example did get jail time, however he stole more money from people than anyone else in the world EVER, also I suspect that because many of the people he may have stolen from were also rich and powerful may have had something to do with that. Heck there was a guy in Toronto, Canada that basically did the same scam, except he also stole from friends and family. These people simply do not care past their own desires. So long as we allow it, in that there are little repercussions, and the government is actively courting these individuals for favors for legislation nothing is about to change. This would require the total decoupling of Corporate and State, just like the Church and State years ago.
Anyway not sure how likely that is about to happen, the entanglement is pretty complete. When the people making the decision are the ones that need to be limited it usually doesn't work out so well. People would really have to take notice and actively do something, which given the apathy and the political machinations to keep people (base) stupid and compliant, and the mainstream media hasn't been all that helpful in this regard either.
I apologize to the Slashdot community in advance.
KATE: Indeed. RISC architecture is gonna change everything.
DADE: Yeah. RISC is good.
OK. I fail to the the point (market) of the Atom processor. Ditto for the AMD counterpart.
The reason I say this is because of A) miniaturization and power efficiency gains in traditional processors, and B) ARM and Motorola.
I just bought an i5 Haswell on an itx format. I could have got an i7 (or an i3 for that matter). They make laptops with all of those. Power usage is way down. If looking for "cheapness" past an i3, they still over Celerons more less. AMD likewise has some cheap lower powered chips.
ARM and Motorola (A# and Snapdragon basically) own the phone/tablet market. Nothing Intel or AMD do to their lines is going to change that.
For Atom and it's AMD counterpart fall somewhere in between the very cheap low end chip, and the ARM/Motorola chips. What are you making with these chips? Shitty netbook laptops? Sorry the processor is only part of the price of these things. Not to mention the death of the netbook due to the popularity of Tablets.
Anyway I just do not see the point of this processor segment at all.
I think I would agree with the whole race to the bottom, and eroded image et al.
However I would add two things about perhaps WHY they are doing it.
1) Other markets. If the 5C is destined for markets overseas, for say areas where a 5S is unattainable, and the two would never be sold side by side, makes it a more reasonable decision.
2) I am not sure about the US, but I know here in Canada most Provinces (and it might even be coming Federally) have either passed or proposed laws about contract terms and mobile phone companies. Basically mobile phone companies (of which there are only a handful Canada) are so dodgy with their contract terms (due largely to phone subsidies, which is fueled by iPhone), cancellation fees, conditions, etc... that actual laws had to be made to keep them from ripping consumers off (or to limit how much they rip them off anyway). It could be that Apple management is seeing a trend where the subsidies are not tenable anymore, and rightly see that consumers when actually confronted with the sticker shock of what an iPhone actually costs up front, may go another way. A cheaper 5C version might give those consumers an alternative. So while yes this would erode image, it wasn't something that perhaps Jobs had to deal when when he was opposed to the idea.
Also whoever decided on "C" is an idiot. It is going to take the world about 5 seconds to come up with the name "iPhone Cheap". Not a very positive connoting word.
How the heck is there a reasonable politician in Texas?! I mean I would vote for this guy and I am from Canada! Not to mention he appears to be literate:
"So because Tesla doesn’t go through a completely unnecessary middleman who turns the pleasant experience of buying a car into something resembling haggling for a donkey in Marrakesh, they can’t sell their cars in Texas."
OK. Having bought a new car myself years ago, "haggling for a donkey in Marrakesh" made me really laugh at work. I remember at the time thinking, this is so weird, how is it this is the only thing we "haggle" over, what an outdated system, I wonder why that is? (this is Canada)
Anyway nice piece, and I wish him luck politically. Jokes aside, I travel down to Dallas every other year to BGGCON and it is full of reasonable Texans (who still sound a bit funny), so I know for a fact that they are not all nuts. I also am long time friends with a girl from the big state, and she seems reasonable enough. It does seem they could use some reasonable political representation for a change.
That said we currently have our own nutbars in power in places around Canada as well as out dated laws and corporate interests directing corrupt politicians... As the churchies might say "Judge not, lest... blah blah blah...
Actually Greece has been fucked over by the Greek people not paying taxes and expecting government to provide them with services. Greece ironically is a democracy so far as I know, and people voted these governments in place.
When the one government tried to tow a hard line saying, "hey we are broke now we better start cutting back on things" there were mass riots by people.
The only thing Wall Street did was make holding MASSIVE debt and then trying to get even more MASSIVE loans more difficult. Also in Porrifying (I just made that word up) the rest of the developed world it made it hard on tourism all around the world, and when 90% of your economic GDP is tourism...
They have no one to blame but the person looking back at them in the mirror.
It isn't that management doesn't care, or doesn't understand (which probably happens a lot anyway), it is the fact that the things they DO care about and DO understand are all negatively effected by "Security" issues.
Basically application development becomes more complex, expensive, cumbersome, requires more approvals, documentation, oversight, etc...
All things that a manager doesn't like to hear all summed up in a word. Combine this with FOI and privacy, well he is in for a bad day.
Oh and it has to be hosted on a more expensive server that is harder to get to, and is inconvenient for all your clients, and other applications to talk to, requires additional regular IT support you are required to pay monthly, etc....
So yeah, when you work for a boss that "doesn't want to hear it", likely he only does when he absolutely has to (and some might have subjective degrees of when that is).
Well done sir, well done.
http://xkcd.com/538/
#OBLIGATORYXKCD
If the NSA has referred to encryption as "Digital Scrambling" I think we are just fine.
I recently built a new computer (this week!), and found my invoice for my last one.
I think I paid close to 200$ for 2GB. I believe a couple months later it cost half of that. This was back at the beginning of 2007 I believe.
I just bought 16GB for 135$. I was sort of bitchy about it, however when put into perspective... However it has gone up a bit for whatever reason, 6 months ago 16GB would have cost about 100$.
Hmmmm, I simply assumed that all Slashdot responses were simply in the context of the USA.
At least you have a choice. I had pretty much the same conversation with IT support at work about UAC and my admin privileges.
Out of nowhere I was forced to enter my network, username, password, etc... for every admin action I took.
First two people I talked to swore up and down it had always been like that, forever.
I was like, it wasn't like this a week ago, a month ago, or ever, do you think I am making things ups?
Finally I got a guy who said that I was on the wrong list, and "fixed" it.
Until it immediately started happening again.
If I was doing a single thing it is annoying. If I am doing repetitive admin privileges type of work, say 40 times, I have to enter 130 pieces of information, not including any typos that might drive me to the edge of violence.
In the end as it turns out Corporate Security made/changed a policy basically saying that UAC had to be on the most severe setting for everyone. Yes you can go in with admin access and change the UAC settings, but they instantly revert when you login again.
Final response was, not our problem, take it up with corporate security, if you know you are doing a lot of repetitive stuff, temporarily change your UAC settings. One hand not knowing what the other is doing really. Don't have much choice but to put up with it, just takes longer and is more frustrating to do certain tasks. However like you, initially they swore up and down that it was always like that forever and that I must be making things up! Never mind it was a security policy change from the week before that they were either clueless about or were trying to downplay....
You missed two.
-Massive population
a) Demographically most of that population will be old soon, with a small (relatively of course) working base supporting it.
b) Demographically most of the younger population will be men, with no marriageable prospects, and thus a generation with much less children. (Due to the 1 child policy and the "preference" of families to have a boy child.
People talk about Japan, and even the West and the baby boomers, aging population, and collapse of any sort of welfare etc... Well China will make that look like nothing I think. I recently heard about a law whereby children were legally obligated to take care of their parents into old age...
I never said "Android" in any of my posts, only Google and Samsung. Not talking about the OS, only the Maps application on phones (in this case one on the Android OS and one on iOS). So yes I know Android belongs to Google who licences it out to phone makers such as Samsung.
All Apple got was the version of Google Maps they were already getting prior to the spat in the first place. I know I had an iPhone, which got upgraded to iOS 6+, lost Google Maps, got Apple Maps, then later was able to download independently the Google Maps app again when it got into the media how badly Apple had messed up.
I thought Apple did buy one of the GPS providers, or at least the Mapping division of one of them anyway. I believe it may have been Nokia, though upon looking I see nothing, perhaps that was just a rumor at the time regarding how to fix their situation. I see Apple has acquired 3 mapping companies in the past year, however all of them are additional content, not actually mapping.
Mapping is all about currency and detail. The more detail you have, the harder it is to keep up. There are a whole host of strategies you can use to tackle this, but essentially it still requires a lot of work, and only so much of that can be automated. So even if Apple were to acquire the mapping data of one of the big guns, they still have to have the infrastructure (or a licence, and hope that whoever they get it from keeps it up) to be able to manage it moving forward, getting additional details, and updates to keep it current. Even if they spend billions, if most of the data hasn't been updated since 2009, they will still have their work cut out for them. Google actually has a freaking fleet of cars that just drive around mapping (which is nuts in itself, first hand data collection). What does Apple have?
Likely in the end it will be the memory that drives the issue. As applications require more memory, OR users become accustomed to multitasking which may require more memory, specifically more then 3.5GB worth it is only then where a 64bit OS will be *required*. There are still a lot of basic users, and basic machines with the 4GB of RAM out there. At a certain point OS will move to ONLY 64bit, which will in turn start to offer incentives to developers. So bring on the glut of background services and system bloat! :) You sort of have to go backwards to go forwards it seems.