I have owned a number of Apple products; workstations, laptops, iPods etc. I had one super bad incident with Apple which they will never live down. (After 6 months of phone calls, and visits to their 'geniuses'. It ended with them giving me a brand new $2000 workstation in exchange for my $1300 brick.) But that was it. If you are having problems with everything you by from them, you're doing it wrong.
mySQL 'SELECT zip FROM '.insert table here.' WHERE (POW((69.1(tablelongitude-"'.$obj->longitude.'")cos('.$obj->latitude.'/57.3)),"2")+POW((69.1(tablelatitude-"'.$obj->latitude.'")),"2"))<('.$radius.''.$radius.') ';
You need the origin long and lat, and the radius (distance), but the nice thing is the database does all the radius distance calculations internally without passing it to the scripting language, in a fraction of second depending on the server and DB. This is the query I used in http://mybandsupport.com. You can see the result by entering the zipcode in the splash screen and clicking search. The function takes your zip, gets the long and lat, then the DB compares it to every zip's (4500) long and lat to find every zip within 20 miles.
Just a note: comparing every zip code and its distance and recording the distance to a DB would create upwards of 12 million records. This might be the breaking point for some.... I was thinking about doing it myself. Once I worked out the numbers I backed away.
If you know the origin and destination long and lat this works well to calc distance.
$dist = sin(deg2rad($this->lat1)) * sin(deg2rad($this->lat2)) + cos(deg2rad($this->lat1)) * cos(deg2rad($this->lat2)) * cos(deg2rad($theta));
No. zdnet is one of the most miss lead online journals available. This debate has been peaking its head for the past 5 years. Again and again companies walk away fed up with Apple's 'we are good enough, deal with it' attitude toward game developers. I don't think Apple will be willing to couture to game developers because they will ask Apple to change its course ever so slightly and Apple will change for no one but its own will. That and Apple is currently advertising it base model workstation for $2799.