Anyone else here in the post-PC era?

And, here we are at last. The inevitable result when people accuse me of somehow "misrepresenting" them: they refuse to explain what they did mean and drop the subject as fast as they can, because revealing the truth would mean revealing that they meant exactly what I said they meant.As predictable as clockwork. The accusation is as phony as ever.

Uh, yeah, VLC Player is on the Mac, too. (I did lol, though.)

I can't believe you did. Did you not understand that it was a joke? "Macs are better - look how many times I can type the word 'butts'!" It's a meme, it's like those Bill O'Reilly "You can't explain that!" image macros where the example is something trivially easy to explain, like putting bread in a toaster and having toast come out. No one, to my knowledge, has ever made such a claim. This certainly is not a widespread avenue of Mac evangelism, and I say that as a former Mac evangelist. These videos are jokes, not serious attempts to make an argument about platforms. How did you not get that? Which is weird, since iOS 4 devices do that. Although, my wife didn't know to double-click the home button to bring up the app switcher, either. I don't remember how I figured it out. oh, right, I remember - by accident. I was used to "double-click to bring up iPod controls" on my old Touch, so I did that once on my iPhone 4, and I got the app switcher instead. Which I kind of like less, although I can swipe to the music controls. I wish it came up on that, though.

You're being sarcastic, right? You're aware that doesn't come through very well in text, right?

No, I beg to differ. If I open the MPR app (it streams audio feeds from Minneapolis' public radio stations) it keeps playing in the background. If I open Safari and start to load a page and switch to something else, when I come back the page has already been loaded. Apps are free to respond to being backgrounded however they choose, some will continue running, and some will suspend if that's what makes more sense. Games, for instance.If you don't believe me, you can SSH into your iPhone and run "top"; it's multitasking.

Much of this depends on how smart your smartphone is. If you don't have a phone that runs apps, much of this you won't be able to do.1) Get an app like "Yelp" or "Google Places to find good restaurants near where you are, when you're somewhere where you don't know what the good restaurants are. You can also use mobile web versions of these things.2) Give out a Google Voice number instead of your real cell number; you'll get speech-to-text voicemail and free SMS, plus you never have to pass out a new cell number for the rest of your life. You just update Google Voice with your new number if it ever changes.3) If your phone has a camera, it can be used to read QR codes like this one:You may need an app to do it. You may have been seeing these codes already and wondering what they do.4) Your bank may have their own app. I bank through USAA, and one of the things I can do with their app is deposit checks via the camera on my iPhone. Also, your bank may support some form of "two-factor" authentication; a way to make your online access more secure by requiring both a password and a one-time numeric sequence generated by or sent via SMS to your phone.5) The Amazon app has a barcode reader you can use to comparison shop right there in the store.6) Install a tracking app so that you can find your phone when you lose it.7) Download the Netflix app (if you're a subscriber) for streaming on the go.8) Synchronize its calendar and contacts with the online versions you already use; instant PDA.9) Call 800-555-TELL to access Tell Me, Microsoft's voice-based information service. You can get movie times, internet searches, whatever, all by voice recognition. Sort of like Apple's new Siri which isn't out yet.

Look and see if the camera shows up in the System Profiler (Apple menu, "About this Mac", "System Profiler" unless they changed it in Lion), it's probably a USB or Firewire device so look and see if it shows up under one of those categories. If it's not being recognized by the host controller then I think you're looking at a Genius Bar visit.

It's not available in the UK, or something?

1) Update iTunes. (Use the Apple Software Update tool.)2) Plug your iOS device in, as you would normally do to sync it.3) If your device supports iOS 5, iTunes will ask you if you want to update. Click "Download and Update."4) Wait for the update to download. (It's pretty slow.)If this doesn't happen, your device may be too old for iOS 5. Supported devices are iPhone 3GS, 4, and 4S; iPads 1 and 2; and iPod Touch gen 3 and gen 4.

You have to do it through iTunes on a computer, I think. This maybe is the last iOS update where you have to do that, but them's the breaks. Plug it into your Mac Mini and follow the prompts on the Mini's screen.

If you want to update the firmware on a Zune, Microsoft makes you amputate your own penis. True story!

Well, I think I had the same problem Larni did - after a 4 hour download, it wouldn't update. My suspicion is that iit has something to do with how the firmware image is signed.

Why? Why would I want to put anything on an iOS device but iOS?Building operating systems is what Apple is best at.Apparently I should have tried to update at 3 am last night; still can't authenticate my firmware. Apple's getting hammered again I guess.

So, a suggestion that may go over your head somewhat, but:If the step you're hanging on is actually downloading the firmware you can get the firmware from outside of iTunes. For an iPad 2, you want one of these:iPad 2 (Wifi only)
iPad 2 (AT&T data service)
iPad 2 (Verizon data service)For firmwares for other devices, check out the Giz link below: http://gizmodo.com/...how-to-fix-the-ios-5-update-error-3200Once you've downloaded the firmware, inside iTunes on your computer, with the device plugged in, you can Option-click (Windows: shift-click) the "Update" button, navigate to where you downloaded the firmware, and select it. It should be faster to get the firmware file this way. You may continue to get "Unknown error 3100" (or some other number in the 3000-3200 range), that's going to keep happening until a nation of iPhone users stops needing to individually authenticate the digital signature on the firmware (blah blah blah don't worry about it, in other words, just be patient and try it again later.)Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

That's what Winterboard is for. Inconsistency in UI isn't a virtue. And functionally, they're all Java middleware on a basic kernel, forever doomed to be slower than equivalent iOS hardware.