I wonder who the 5th company was?

TFA says there were 5 new companies in this program, then lists 4 of them.

Doesn't sound like the contract is a problem...

It really doesn't sound like the contract is a problem (although I must agree, I would have done it in writing.) It sounds like the estate is not disputing the 6%, but rather the cost of the yacht (which to me seems odd, I would think design would be flat rate, not based on what the tub ends up costing to make.)

FSF *did* protest at Apple stores, and Microsoft is a monopoly

"Microsoft got its "monopoly" just because PC clones were (and are) cheap. I couldn't afford a Macintosh or something like that when I was a student - I could buy a PC clone and thereby MS software. Blame expensive proprietary hardware/software - like Apple - for that, not MS."

Nope, Microsoft is not a multiply convicted monopolist just because PCs are popular; it's because of the nearly continuous anti-competitive behaviors they have shown, forcing their competitors (or marginalizing them at least) in one market after another. Illegal bundling. Contracts requiring an OEM to pay for Windows on ALL computers, whether they want to put it on all of them or not. Lowering prices when there is competition (to undercut them on price) then jacking the price back up afterwards. Making changes to intentionally break competitor's products. Using undocumented features to give themsleves an advantage over their competitors (see Windows 8 -- they allow their own Office and IE to use features that are not just undocumented like in the past, but that NOBODY ELSE IS PERMITTED TO USE.) The list goes on and on.

As for Apple stores -- FSF *did* show up at Apple stores in both 2006 and 2010. They are continously filing complaints against Apple for policies such as disallowing GPLed code in app store apps. I think you'll find FSF will not be showing up at Microsoft stores months from now either, it doesn't mean they are giving them a free pass.

Conflicted...

On the one hand, it is 100% none of Vodafone's business what people are doing off working hours. If they want to control their employee's 24/7, they can pay them for 168 hours a week.

On the other hand -- DON'T USE YOUR PHONE WHILE DRIVING! It's seriously stupid.

Seatbelt? It's stupid not to wear it but it doesn't affect anybody else. Speeding? From what I've seen of India traffic speeding is generally not possible. I would not be happy with my employer worrying about me speeding off-hours here in the states because many many roads have arbitrarily slow speed limits and arbitrarily bored cops (on the other hand, I have a radar detector so I don't get speeding tickets.)

Samsung and Nokia

"Why all the love for soul-less money grubbing, Apple copying Samsung?"

If you looked at the trial coverage, Samsung made SERIOUS mistakes at trial. 1) They fumbled some evidence filings so the fact that Samsung made a phone with rounded corners and etc. BEFORE the Iphone came out. If you claim copying just on what came out first, Apple actually copied Samsung, then patented those features and sued Samsung over it. (Or, the reality, neither copied the other, certain features were indepdently developed by both.) 2) They went for a JURY trial. So of course, jury people are susceptible to Apple's Reality Distortion Field (tm) and sided with Apple.

Personally, I wouldn't buy an IPhone for free, the interface on them is lousy (I know people like it and it's not inherently flawed but it's the exact opposite of what I want out of a phone interface), they are overprcied and pretentious. They tend to be between subpar and average as an actual phone. I'm not specifically a Samsung fan (I've had over the years Nokia, Siemens, Samsung, LG, Motorola, and now another Samsung.) I ended up with a Samsung becasue I wanted a phone with LTE *and* a keyboard, and the Samsung Stratosphere was the only one Verizon was selling. I may have gotten a newer LTE-supporting Droid but they switched it to a non-removeable battery which is REALLY stupid.

Anyway... they way people write off Nokia as dead, I was surprised they were number 2... I would have assumed LG and HTC moved more kit.

@asdf, I find that EXTREMELY unlikely. I see Apple buyers say that a lot, generally there's at least a dozen similar machines on the market. I won't hate on you for buying an Apple, the good news is you don't have to deal with Windows (or install a better-than-Windows OS on your own.)

Awesome

100s of people showed up to whup someone's ass for claiming they were sluts, and then just started wrecking stuff? That's fucking awesome.

notes on this type of attack

Re: "if they are capable of developing nuclear power and (alleged) a nuclear weapons program; surely they can knock up an OS of their own."

I'm pretty sure Seiemens developed their nuclear power. That said, as bad as running Windows for anything important is, hardy anybody likes to reinvent the wheel. Very few people start an OS and few of those reach a useful state.

Re: comments about FAT and such... first, FAT doesn't mean "Windows 95 or older", NT3.5, 4, 2000, XP all supported NTFS but also FAT installs. I've seen FAT installs of Windows 2000 (I don't know why). Secondly, though,from the description in the article this virus was deleting THE USER'S OWN FILES. So, NTFS, ACLs, and proper filesystem permissions, won't do dick against this particular type of attack.

Well... I feel smug now for using Linux... DEL *.* does nothing, I tells ya. Nothing!! Wait, rm -R *? I have no idea what you're talking about 8-). (But seriously, a .sh file won't run without the execute bit turned on. But, if I were running random executables under Linux something naughty could wipe my home directory if it wanted.)

grey market/tasers

Is there really an iphone grey market expanding in China? The other article said how the iphone5 is not really selling in China (probably since there's numerous better phones on the market, and for those who DO want an iphone there's like a dozen iphone clones that are much cheaper and generally have more features than an iphone.)

"Whilst I think the idea of non-lethal weapons is a good one, the problem is training - surely the issue here is that the guy went over the top - using a taser to shut a woman up because she's hysterical and a bit difficult to get handcuffs on sounds like a 1950's solution..."

He spent 10 minutes trying to get her to leave, another 5 (with backup!) trying to get cuffs on. That's not "a bit" difficult. Tasers ARE abused in the US but I don't think so in this case.

Bonding

"Said browser would (I'm pretty sure) try and use the same network interface for all of those multiple connections. The connectify program seems to just make those connections happen over a range of NICs so you effectively get more bandwidth."

Yup, and in Linux at least (see the AC's comment above), the browser WILL see a single interface. bond0 in the case of this example the AC has. bond0 just happens to spread out connections among multiple physical interfaces. I'm sure the OpenBSD solution (per Ru) also presents a single interface.

Anyway... AFAIK Windows *doesn't* do this on it's own, so good on them for having a 3rd-party app to do something like this.

"The only reason google got in the carrier space, isp/cell, was so that users didn't have an option to have their data collected and mined by google. Pffft, pretty easy to profile an advert target when you have ALL their data from the wire. Google has long passed do no evil."

Nope, it's because the asshats at AT&T wanted to double dip, they already charge their own customers for internet access, but thought that Google should ALSO pay AT&T because some amount of traffic was going between their customers and Google (especially Youtube.) Completely ignoring that Google already pays the standard fees at whatever peering points they are at, just as AT&T does. They were pushing congress to eliminate any semblance of net neutrality. So Google told them to piss off, and said if AT&T kept pursuing this Google would just start their own ISP, make sure to build out in all AT&T's wireline markets and take all their customers. After Google started building out, AT&T realized Google was serious and backed off.

As for these speeds.. the image incorrectly shows megabytes per scond, the one on netflix's blog now shows megabits. But, Netflix CAPS at 4mbps, so it's natural that these ISPs all show below 4mbps... it'll be a mix of 4mbps ratings and those times when the ISP is too crapped out to get that speed (or the user has other stuff going on on the connection). I.e. as they say the relative ratings should be useful (to tell which ISPs are either quite slow or overload a lot) but the absolute numbers are not real useful. The US broadband market is pretty bad (especially pricing), but no we don't order 20mbps service and get 2.2mbps or whatever.

Oh yeah...

also, good article, I enjoyed it! And read allt he old Delphi ones as well, also nice. What a saga.

Nostalgia aside....

Nostalgia aside... I did run Linux originally on a 386. But, that said, the hard memory limit on the 386 was 16MB (you could still have 4GB virtual memory...). So, shoving a 386 full of RAM to watch a newer distro crawl to a start is realistically not an option. Even most small distros (puppylinux, damn small linux) are not small enough to run in 16MB. Also most distros have been built for 486+ for years, the few new instructions 486 added over 386 ended up improving performance so significantly that distros dropped 386 years ago (and some are built i686 -- Pentium Pro -- on up.) So I'm not going to cry out over this.

I think cmpxchg (atomic compare and exchange) is probably why the kernel guys are jonesing to drop 386, not having this instruction would make spinlocks and mutexes much harder (these are used on SMP systems to make sure a given resource is only accessed by one CPU at a time).

Like it or not but C# is on the way out

So... yes, C# is a ripoff of Java, and .NET a ripoff of the Java Runtime Environment. Sorry if you don't like it but it's true. Microsoft found Java a threat (seeing as how it was truly cross-platform) and after they were sued for J++ (a Java version with non-standard extensions added on, violating the Java platform rules...) they worked on C# and .NET. This was SPECIFICALLY so they could make a Java-clone, take the wind out of Java's sails, and claim cross-platformness while in reality tying the .NET user tightly to Windows. NOTE THIS IS NOT A QUALITY JUDGEMENT. I did a little C#/.NET programming, and I found the truly portable parts to be well designed and clean.... (the non-portable parts exposed Win32, which is IMHO an unholy mess. I didn't use them.)

@Ian Yates, "So you also believe that Java rips off UCSD Pascal, since that uses a VM for each process? Or that C++ rips off C?"

Yes and yes. When Java was coming out, it was common knowledge it was using techniques gleaned from UCSD Pascal. And C++ is obviously directly based on C. Microsoft had specific motives to take down Java when they released C# and .NET though.

Regarding C#... well, if you look realistically, Silverlight is abandoned, .NET development is halted. Microsoft originally did not include C# support at all in WinRT, assuming people would use HTML5, and only added it due to developer outcry. I think it's safe to say C# is in "legacy' status now. Sorry if you don't like it, but that's the facts. Just to say it again -- not a quality judgement, I really get the impression it's Microsoft internal politics doing this and I think it's a poor decision. But I guess we'll see a few years down the road if new stuff comes out, or if .NET is just allowed to fade. Desktop? Well, you can still use technologies from like the Windows 3.1 days if you want, I'm sure (non-Metro mode) you'll be able to keep making stuff indefinitely if you want.

"ped"

"however, your point is sound, that people confuse paediatrician with a paedophile are pretty stupid, but to be honest, perhaps we shouldn't have chosen words which sound very similar to describe very different things, I blame latin.....or at least, somebody down that road..."

They're VERY VERY stupid. Anyway, nobody choose words which sound similar to describe very different things... paed/ped means "child", so the words for child doctors and child diddlers both have "ped" in the name.

Rare Earth metals?

I wonder how this works out for other rare earth metals. I've read about how for indium, neodymium, niobium, etc. are in short supply to the point that researchers are already looking into how to make LCDs work without them. I honestly don't know, but the supply of these is much tighter than platinum, and yet they are not recycled like platinum (the quantity that goes into an LCD for instance is small but it is not recycled anywhere as far as I know.)

Also, somewhat off topic... re the article quote: "(why, says Mr Apple, “how nice to see you here Mr Samsung!”)", really it's more like "(why, says Mr Apple, "that's a nice phone you already have there on the market Mr. Samsung, I suppose I'll claim I made it first and sue you")." Keep in mind Samsung had a phone on the market BEFORE the iphone that had the features Apple claimed were copied from the iphone; they just managed to persuade the judge to disallow that evidence from being presented.

Database is necessary

"The suggestion that the devices check locally for transmissions seems sensible."

It's not. I am picking up TV stations from 70 miles away or more daily, because there are only a couple local channels. The little "rubber duck" on a access point would not see anything, let alone some wifi-device-sized client, and would gleefully blast signals right over my channels given a "device checks by itself" scenario.

I just hope that any database used is very conservative in determining what is freespace, not just assuming people will use the nearest stations and forget the rest. (I admit, I think this is different in the UK than here in the US, where there aren't just almost the same stations at each TV transmission site.)

Well.... no

First off, 100% correct, there's no tax evasion here, having free trade within the EU does have it's consequences, and one is that companies can operate out of whatever country has the best tax code.

The problems I see with this elimination of corporate taxes here in the US are:

1) You have here these investment firms, that rather than doing legitimate investment will use high frequency trading to put themselves between the legitimate seller and buyer and take a cut that they aren't really owed. The least they can do is keep paying taxes on this ill-gotten gain. They also must be within a matter of miles of the trading floor since they require very low latency. There's private equity firms, too, which buy companies not to rehabilitate and streamline them, but to max out the purchased company's credit lines, pay themselves loads of money while they brankrupt the company and screw over all those who loaned the company money. They should at least pay tax on this too. Businesses here get all kinds of services (FDIC; dairy, beef, and pork companies getting tax-paid advertisements, the list goes on and on), they can bloody well pay for them.

2) These same companies who don't want to pay taxes, have had no problems accepting bailouts and asking for various credits. I feel like, at least here in the states, if corporate taxes were eliminated they would "forget" to eliminate the credits and various payouts to corporations, rather than leaving the value at 0.

Yeah...

I also LOLed at the iPod claims (they really have rubbish wifi, and I took "there's no Android device at this price point" to mean none are that expensive). But, it's hard to argue with results if they had 1300 of them running on opening night and didn't have it all fall apart. I'm not even into art, but if this museum wasn't so far away I'd go to it.

pst? pfffft...

UNIX mbox all the way. I don't have some fancy archiving system, but I do have mbox files going back to ~1994 and I can grep them all I want.

That said, even avoiding the rather terrible .pst file formats, if I were interested in proper indexing and such this sounds like a good presentation to see.

Meh...

I think it is true that the comic market is not what it's used to be. But, I also think you are probably cherry-picking --- I've seen ample evidence of large quantities of 1970s-era comics that ranged from "meh" to absolute rubbish. I think you would find at least one or two current comics that would meet your every expectation, they are just buried by all the zombie and vampire comics.

In a similar vein, I could make similar complaints about the current state of science fiction, reminisce on the great books of the past* and how I can go to Barnes and Noble and find nothing good, the so-called scifi section just has rubbish fantasy novels with zombies and vampires and maybe some Star Wars books. But, the fact of the matter is, although what I say about the bookstore is true (the books are generally rubbish), there's plenty of great new science fiction being produced, waiting to be mail ordered.

*There's a truly amazing used book store in Madison, Wisconsin, Frugal Muse, which last time I was there sold their used books at original cover price... so I could pick up amazing sci-fi for like 50 cents a book or less.

There's a reason this only covers bittorrent....

There's a reason this only covers bittorrent, and not streaming services -- it has been solidly decided in the US, that it is the sender making a copy (and so comitting copyright infringement). Viewing streams, the streaming server infringes copyright (if they aren't licensed, or it's not a short fair use clip...) but the viewer does not. Plenty of streaming services have been shut down, so it's not like M.P. Ass. Of America is doing nothing about this, it's just as much as they and the R.I. Ass. Of America are jonseing to go after more of their own customers, they cannot in this case.

Bittorrent? I've never seen a torrent setup that wasn't set to at least 1:1 ratio (to aviod being a leech). So, with a copyrighted torrent, as soon as your torrent client starts retransmitting it's infringing.

A single change...

If Microsoft (or perhaps just some people there) didn't have such a massive ego, they could make one singular change that'd help sales -- give the end-user a choice between booting into Metro or booting into a more traditional interface. Even people who don't know anything about computers, have been advised by friends of theirs that Windows 8 is change for the sake of change, confusing, and different (not by me, I advise against Windows, period.) Those people who are buying a new computer now are seeking out ones with Windows 7 (or god forbid XP) for that very reason. If Microsoft gave a choice of bootup UI, a lot of them would get Windows 8 machines instead of actively avoiding them.

Well then...

Can't say I'm surprised. This isn't a Microsoft-bash, but if you've seen the ads, the keyboard looks like a floppy piece of rubber with solid bits shoved into it. I mean, I thought it'd last more than a week but it really doesn't look durable.

On an unrelated matter, the ads look dumb (the one people are just repeatedly trading keyboards and slapping them onto each others tablets). The other ones show people a) web surfing b) watching movies/tv and c) using an (actually somewhat fun looking) paint program. That's cool but I'm not going to buy a new windows machine just to web surf and watch movies, thanks.

Two points...

First, I do have two Android apps that do this. Wifi Web Login costs a couple bucks, but makes it so if you connect to an access point with a "captive portal" click-through page, you click through it once and wifi web login records the keystrokes, clicks, etc. you performed. Next time you connect, it auto-replays them. The system used by Star Bucks, McDonalds, Sams Club, etc., doesn't work reliably with Wifi Web Login (I don't remember what wifi "network" these all are); but sbautologin (which is free) works with these.

Second... although I don't take click-through licenses very seriously, wouldn't this solution mean these windows 8 phone users are theoretically being agreed to all sorts of use agreements they have not even had a chance to read? That seems potentially problematic.

Won't diss OSX too heavily

Sorry, but although I won't diss OSX too heavily. But.... 1) It's kind of function over form. I just don't like the appearance of almost every aspect of it, and people are allowed to not like the same things you do. I'm thinking Cody doesn't either. 2) It's not UNIX-based, it's a BSD-Mach hybrid, which actually has pretty strong performance consequences.

Apple's no monopolist (unlike Microsoft) so I'm not going to be all "Oh, Apple should be required to ship a blank system". Unlike the PC market, where... all I can say is I'm glad the State of Iowa kept their lawsuit against Microsoft up so I could get a $200 check from them for forced bundling and price fixing!

I just thought they could take any old machine, and stick hello kitty stickers and glitter all over it. *shrug*

Decline of Facebook?

So first off, I don't really use Facebook -- I have an account JUST for single sign-in on a few sites, but never use the rest of it. If you value your privacy you will do the same (or not put anything on there you don't want everyone on the planet to know.)

But, anyway.... this seems silly to me. Having people pay to have BETTER visibility of their post (like maybe pushing it to the top?) Sure. Changing it so the people who "Like" you (and haven't blocked your posts...) don't actually receive your posts, unless you pay for them to get them? Ugh, it seems to me that breaks a whole tenet of Facebook, just like having Twitter only send tweets to SOME of your followers would break the whole point of Twitter.

As for stock... well, I figured (before the IPO) that fair market value for Facebook was approximately $9 a share based on a reasonable P/E (price to earnings) ratio of approximately 15 (meaning basically that the overall value of stocks is 15 times the current years earnings.). The IPO used a P/E of over 60, which is VERY VERY high -- over 20 (or 30 for a risky investor) is considered overvalued and a likely bubble unless there's some unusual reason P/E doesn't apply*. There's still hype so it won't surprise me if it still sits at $18-20 for a while, but Facebook WILL sooner or later have to bring in more money (or hype it better) to stop a slide down to $9 or so. As for the investors, sorry, but those of you who bought this at $40+ did not follow BASIC economic principles, so I feel for ya and all but it's really your own fault for buying stock based on hype.

*I'm no investor, but off the top of my head P/E could be inaccurate if 1) A company chose to invest profit in some one-off expense like a new factory, rather than taking out a loan for the factory... this would save the company interest and such in the longer term, but make earnings look terrible in the short term. 2) Tax games with deferred earnings and shell companies and such.

Competing users....

The number of competing users is key. If your throughput is dropping to like 1mbps, and you are the only user, then you have all this other bandwidth sitting there unused. If there's loads of others uers on the wifi, then this technique may just give you a higher share of the wifi compared to everyone else.

Still, though, some improvement would be great. I can assure you that throughput truly turns to hell once packet loss gets above 1%. If something like this can fix that, that is fabulous.

Autopatcher or the like?

Well...

a) rolling a bunch of seperate patches into a single service pack SHOULD NOT take away loads of time Microsoft wants to use on Windows 8. The patches are already there.

b) I don't use Windows anyway so I don't give a toss. You shouldn't either.

b.5) This isn't going to push anybody into using Windows 8, if Microsoft actually thinks it is going to they are delusional.

c) WSUS may work for patching EXISTING systems, but this doesn't make up for the lack of a service pack's ability to install a bunch of updates at once to a "fresh" install. Autopatcher, however, does... stick all the patches and autopatcher into some directory (usually on a USB stick) and it'll install them for you, problem solved.

Make it optional?

Why don't they take the middle ground, have the page that asks for donations, BUT put a close button on it? I must agree, after getting these leaks with the promise of making these leaks available to all, putting them behind a paywall after that is greasy. But I think soliciting donations is not.

One correction...

As far as I know, in most countries *downloading* as much stuff as you want is not illegal. It's the uploading that is copyright infringement. People get caught up because they p2p such as bittorrent, so they in fact ARE uploading. (Laws like the one in Japan are unusual in this regard).

For the US this is a steal, since data here is a ripoff

The local Casino here... charges for Wifi! Yes, it's ON the gambling floor, where people are already shoving huge wads of cash into the machines as fast as possible, but they then want additional money to check E-Mail (the cell service inside is poor.)

Anyway.... VZW's minimum is 1GB a month for $20, AT&T's 300MB for $20. Overage? You don't want to go over -- although there even more expensive plans have $10/GB overage, *these* ones... well.. AT&T's is $68.20 a GB ($20 per 300MB) overage... VZW $15/300MB ($51.15/GB) overage. Damn! Oh, yeah... US Cellular also has 300MB for $20 (but their 2GB is $25). I wonder if anyone seriously tries to save that $5/month?

So, in comparison this is a steal. Actually, you can get MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) service through these very same carriers and get data for like half the cost. But it's still more than this costs.

*shrug*

*shrug*, as long as it can be turned off I don't care too much. That said, I'm not about to use Unity anyway.

4G LTE in reality

"Circuit switching is a lot less efficient than packet switching, that's why it's not the best for data and ultimately why it's not best for voice either. When some technical person hands their boss a piece of paper in the future indicating that they can support 10-20% more users by going entirely to packet switched VoLTE they'll see savings and do it."

CDMA and UMTS already effectively do this. I mean, you have a voice "circuit" but really it's not a dedicated timeslot or frequency, it's all virtual; the actual capacity of the cell site is interference-limited, not circuit limited (there is a limit on # of circuits but it's unreachable unless you intentionally load the site down with dead-silent phone calls). There is a symbol to indicate a whole frame is silence, and with variable bitrate voice background noise will not be transmitted full quality while your voice will. Forget 10-20%, they actually increase capacity by over 40% this way! VoLTE should still save since LTE is more efficient in terms of bits/mhz however.

"Is it just me thinking that yet-another-technology will be destroyed by commercial interests, deliberate incompatibilities, differing pricing structures and lack of co-operation?"

Frankly, I think the plan is to just keep billing voice and data just as now. Unfortunately, here in the states... MetroPCS has publicly stated they are intending LTE to lower their costs, which they plan to pass to the customer. Verizon? AT&T? US Cellular? They have increased data pricing significantly as they roll LTE. USCC for instance went from $30 for 5GB to $30 for 2GB.. ouch!

As for delays or whatever.. I have an LTE phone now. From what I've read, Verizon DOES run IMS over LTE, using CSFB to CDMA-1X for voice calls. What can I say? I don't have a 2-4 second delay; I just dialed my voicemail and it took approximately 1 second. Maybe CDMA kicks on faster than UMTS?

As for 4G<->whatever handoffs.. I guess the plan for voice is CSFB. You should realize, though, the chances are good that for the few moments the handoff takes it should be possible to run the 4G and (3G or 2G) *simultaneously*, known as a soft handoff in CDMA/UMTS world. I think this is one reason VZW is not running VoLTE, this type of handoff would require digging into both networks and without this type of handoff it'd be dropped call city.

As for data, my 4G drops back to 3G seamlessly, the 3G will kick up to 4G seamlessly due to some rig Verizon calls eHRPD (I think extended High Rate Packet Data?)...in general. I have had this not work though, instead the 4G will fade, there'll be a huge 15 or 20 second time period with no data, then the 3G will kick in. Kicking into 1X (in roaming areas -- Verizon effectively has at least 3G over their whole network...) takes about 15 or 20 seconds too.

That said these are NOT a significant problem -- we listened to slacker on a road trip (about ~1100 miles each way), I had 4G about 1/3rd of the way and on average had to reset slacker maybe every 300 miles.