"Look, there is what you intend and what you write. Your bugs are in between the two."

Umm no. Bugs are usually

a) a misinterpreation of the requirements (no amount of comments are going to save you) or

b) a (hopefully) subtle error in the code - again - I don't see how a comment is going to help you unless the comment is practically pseudo-code which I (hope) nobody is advocating.

Anyone have an example of the typical type of bug that is easier to fix when there are comments around? I agree about commenting "non-obvious" code though - at least in terms of it's intentions. Not necessarily as a way to fix bugs, but to prevent the next programmer from removing something that looks superfluous because nobody can remember why it's there. Something like (totally made up):

"Assign the customer id as a prefix to the comment field; SAP expects the format of <customer_id>__<comment> during import".

Or if you're a REAL expert, "Is NYC playing second fiddle to silicon valley?"

And then, for bonus karma, leave a comment to the effect of "The answer to any headline ending in a question mark is no. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines ", as if you're the first and only person to have ever heard of it.

Remember to include a snide remark with a vague reference to some sort of a logical fallacy, in order to demonstrate your superior mastery of logic. Bonus points for using pompous latin expressions.

ipse dixit?

Let's downvote those perfunctory mentions of Betteridge's Law (and similar). (I already do.)

Here is one to add to the list - if you delete records and/or entire collections, you won't reclaim the associated disk space automatically. Once the space is allocated, it remains allocated and will be reused when more data is added later. If you want to reclaim the "empty space", you need to run a repairDatabase() which will lock the entire database while it's busy.

or compact, which you can run on a secondary...good call - missed this one! Will add shortly.

Yes - because whenever you buy hardware, optional upgrades are always available to purchase at cost-price /sarcasm

Although I guess it's not quite as bad with something like a notebook where at least you have the choice of buying your own upgrades and installing them yourself...

He acknowledged this:

"I can understand paying a nice premium over what you'd typically pay for flash memory, but it gets a little ridiculous when you're paying five times what you'd normally pay."

However Apple adds an awful lot onto the price for upgrades. When I bought my iMac a while ago, the only difference between the two 21.5" models was one had a 500MB HDD whereas the other had 1TB. The difference in price was somewhere in the region of £250. It will have cost Apple maybe £20-30 more for that extra price yet they charged around 1/4 of the original price for the upgrade.

In the end, I just got the 500MB iMac. It was a great machine and worth every penny, it's just a shame that they sting the customer on upgrades. When I bought a Lenovo laptop a year or so later, they too were pretty expensive to upgrade (battery, CPU, HDD), but nowhere near the premium that Apple adds.

It would've also had a discrete GPU which would add much more to the total cost than a bigger HDD.

Not that I'm aware of. I looked through the specs for quite some time and was unable to see a difference. I know there are differences between Macbooks of the same screen size, but couldn't spot any other hardware changes.

This attempt at being "clever" has definitely backfired on apple. If they had just done what was asked the first time, that would have been the end of it. Now it has to be dredged up and people will be reminded (again) that they lost the case. I find it hard to believe that their lawyers advised them that they would get away with something like this.

They're also in the situation where had they got on with it it would have been done and dusted by mid November.

Instead they're going to have it on their home page for most of the Christmas shopping period.

I'd never heard of this until this. It only confirms my casual (don't own anything Apple) view of Apple as a corporate two year old that makes great products (I've heard), all the while employing armies of lawyers to shout "No fair! No fair!"

Best if they'd just relax back into the big chair and be the adult.

It's like this for every major product launch - gives the techbloggers something to talk about. Give it a few weeks and they will be bemoaning the next IOS / Android / Ubuntu release. I put this kind of thing into the "Bad News Sells" category. See http://pewresearch.org/assets/pdf/NewsInterest1986-2007.pdf

I've had 8 of these calls in the last month (had two in one day a few weeks back).

For me, the most frustrating part of the experience is that regardless of what you say, they follow their script to the letter - they're like method-actors which never get out of character. Just once I wanted them to say "ok - you got me!" but alas - apparently not having a PC or Windows is not enough to sway them.

If they're so true to their scripts it should be easy enough for someone to listen to a call and formulate a response that can just be played down the phone, requires no time investment from the recipient of the call and because the scammer is so desperate for a sale they'll stick through even when it seems like the person on the other end isn't 100% legit.

Has there ever been an OS release where (at first) people prefer the new one? Windows 7 might be the exception only because the previous incarnation was so awful.

Ubuntu with Unity? we want the old desktop! IOS6? we want IOS5 and our maps! OSX Mountain Lion? We want Lion!

Change is always hard and almost never goes down well - this is not a new phenomenon and occurs naturally at the beginning of most major software versions. People will get used to it and move on with their lives...

Yes. Windows XP and Windows 7.

If you don't recall the abortion that was Windows ME, then you are lucky. Windows 98 was so clunky compared to Windows XP. All the little improvements and features were fantastic.

Then came Vista and that was another train wreck. But Windows 7 was a dream. It magically found drivers, everything "just worked."

I think you can gauge the success of future OS by the enthusiasts (early adopter) reaction.

Windows XP and Windows 7 had lots of love pre-release. The Windows 8 reception is mixed (as was that for Vista).

Some people are going to love it. I am using it on two machines (a dekstop and an HTPC).

Here's they point though. I _won't_ be installing it on the computers of family/friends (I'm the family tech support).

Watching my wife use it (and the issues with slow user switching, multiple versions of browsers, etc) means its just not worth it. I don't need the extra support calls.

Windows 7 is just fine, especially for legacy hardware (those without touch screens and tablets).

I'm not sure early adopters are the easiest people to please... thinking of "antennagate" from iphone4 and now "scuffgate" from iphone5 I would say early adopters (who I suppose are generally experts - or at least technology-orientated) are more likely to pick up and report on things that

a) get viewership (i.e. complaining) and b) are so subtle the eventual mainstream user wouldn't even notice without it being pointed out to them.

I don't have any hard science to back my claim either way ;-)

> Has there ever been an OS release where (at first) people prefer the new one?

Every Linux distro with the possible exception of Red Hat 7 (when they bumped up gcc version and broke some binaries) and the ones that replaced the Gnome 2 desktop with Unity and Gnome 3. Every MacOS version with the exception, perhaps, of 7.5 and 10.0.

It's not necessarily all or nothing - I have worked on several projects now each using multiple database-type options: mongodb for read-intensive, loose-schema type stuff where the growth is generally predictable (e.g. products, suppliers, logs), postgres for relational-type stuff (orders) and solr for searching (I know solr isn't a database but people seem hung up on whether mongodb supports case-insensitive searching - hint: don't use any database for search).

I doubt that, unless it's extremely simple, any set of requirements are an exact match to only one of these technologies... mix and match is the future :P

Here's a little confirmation bias at work... those with kids can't really undo that decision so spending time with the family is a knee-jerk "number one priority" (how many people would really come out and say they would prefer to work than see their kids? even if it's true, I doubt it would be socially acceptable).

Those who prefer the 100-hour weeks will no doubt say work is the number one priority. See "saving money for the future" vs. "spending money in case you die tomorrow" as other examples.