Eggs & Basket

When you're on a local server system (non-cloud basically), all your eggs are still in one basket. HOWEVER, the difference is, you have full control over that basket. You can create a second basket at your secondary (or other) offices (or CIO/CTO's home if needed!). You can take copies of your "eggs" to a bank vault if desired. You can scatter your encrypted backups like salt to the CIO, CEO, and CFO if you like. Heck, take that and dump the highly encrypted year-end into a cloud backup service if you like. Your primary building burns down? Fine, you had last night's backup at your "secondary" location. Both the business and your "other" location got wiped out in a nuke/earthquake/random-act-of-God? You have that copy in cloud storage (perhaps). What makes it even easier is having all your "local" servers as VMs. Building burns down, you reload your most recent backups of the VMs, and restore last night's data (from your "other site") to them and you're good to go. Of course, wimpy outages such as single-server failure can be handled with some Xen/VMMotion setup, or lacking funds for that, a bit of downtime while you swap in the spare part.

The difficulty with the Cloud is backups really. How often do they do them, and how long are they stored, and to what granularity? The most common form of data loss is a user deleted something within the last 24hrs, be it altered recently or not. Can you call your cloud service and get that file restored as it was, even as of last night, within 5 minutes? I've sat in hold queues for longer than that period of time. Even your local server backups can't recover a single word doc from last night's backup in under 5 minutes? Rethink your backup strategy. And no, it doesn't cost thousands of dollars to do it.

Back to cloudy thoughts, I really hope small businesses that can't afford a proper IT person jump on the cloud bandwagon. It will save them money in the long run and perhaps lower prices. Anyone large enough to have IT staff should look into a local setup (as long as their IT guy isn't some CS-degree drone that doesn't have the versatility to be solo in a biz). Really, it's that jack-of-all-trades skillset that is required by small & mid biz, but is commonly lacking in the workforce.

At Risk....

At the risk of turning this into a cable bashing thread.... "expensive monster cables" are pointless. You don't need to pay $200 for a Monster HDMI cable unless you're running 50+ meters (at which point, you'll have to send your data with a wish and a prayer anyway). For your 3-15ft runs, those $0.01+2.99S&H cables from Amazon work perfectly (unless you're unlucky and get the 1in20(ish) defective cable, as any production environment churns out the occasional lemon). Likely these will work fine for 15m runs too, just make sure you get the 1.4b-rated cables so, even with a slight defect, you'll still manage a full 1080p if not the 3D it's rated for. (yes, HDMI will auto-downgrade your quality based on the capability of your link. If the cable can't handle a full 6.4Gb/s, it will step down until it finds a speed that works.)

Extended Battery

One wonders just where this extended battery goes too. Is it the "replace the DVD drive" type? Or perhaps just an oversized 12/15-cell battery wart? The 30hrs most likely means 50% screen brightness, WiFi/BlueTooth turned off, no DVD player (in the machine at all, likely), idling at the desktop. Give me numbers looping a DiVX or AVID at 100% brightness with WiFi turned on (even just idle WiFi is fine) and I might believe it more.

Usefullness

"Gallium nitride - ..... it's an extremely low-resistance material that simultaneously holds off large voltage."

Some info gleaned:

"Gallium nitride, on the other hand, is better [than silicon] at preventing leaks by holding onto the maximum voltage when it’s not delivering power"

Sounds like it will primarily be used to stop leak current.

As for handling peak-to-peak voltages in 400kV range:

"Transphorm’s first product will be in the 600-volt range and suitable for industrial operations such as data centers, solar panels and automotive drives, said Primit Parikh, president of Transphorm. The company is working on 900-volt designs, he added."

So no, the power grid wasn't the target of their product (yet).

Citations from:

http://gigaom.com/cleantech/transphorm-the-new-data-center-waste-power-slayer/

Try google. Great way to find Enlightenment.

Furries

I think it was the author's lame attempt to exclude anyone in The Reg from being part of a Furry Fandom.

A few points

"Beer coz I know where I can buy some unlike a lot of the Android tablet mythical beasts.(not those el cheapo ones running 1.6 thank you very much)"

Archos 70 and 101: Runs Android 2.2, shortly will bump to 2.3, and has promises of moving to 3.0. But even at 2.2, they're a very nice bundle of features (SD card slot! Take that iPad).

And with the mention of iPad:

"With the iPad-2 just days away from launch, there is a lot of catching up still to do to make something a slick as the new fondleslab is likely to be."

Won't the world be a little disappointed when the new iPad2 releases with the usual 1280x900 or somesuch screen, HDMI, no USB (perhaps just USB charging), a wimpy 1.3 or even 0.3MP front-facing camera, vanilla 5.0MP rear camera, a 1.2GHz single-core CPU, a bump to the RAM, bump to the internal Flash (due solely to 25nm as opposed to any good will on Apple's part). With only one device out there running dual core ARM, and that it's nVidia, means Apple either got the scoop from another ARM maker for a dual core, or will only be a single core. (off chance of signing with nVidia).

What else could be missing? 4G support perhaps? Likely, the cell-data version will support Verizon's network in addition to AT&T-type networks. If Apple makes me eat crow on this off-the-cuff speculation on launch day, I say bring it on. It will do the market some good if they go all out and drop an iPad2 with nVidia Tegra tech, 1-2GB of RAM, 64-128GB flash, SD card support, USB connectors, DisplayPort/HDMI (&Thunderbolt?) and 1920x1080+ screen resolution. I might even get one at that point. Or perhaps the 'droid device that comes out to "top" it.

Fight Fight Fight!

Documentation

"Those declarations are order-independent. Different ways of thinking can EASILY result in a different arrangement to an order-independent grouping because it's less a matter of objective logic and more a matter of subjective style."

As for as Unit-Test code goes, I'm unsure, but the actual Java APIs are quite thoroughly documented, including private variables, etc. so one can extend them and use them properly in your own Java code. The need for 100% compatibility with Java forces the Android developers to completely whole-sale rip off the Java docs so custom extends and be supported. The easiest way to do this? Duplicate the Java API classes and member variables then write code that utilizes them. As far as classes such as Array and Iterator are concerned, there's not much leeway in how to implement the code utilizing only the member variables (and functions!) listed in the Java Docs. Given a very small set of pre-moulded Legos and told to build the same simple structure, it's no surprise programmers came to the same conclusion (code). Although, as a side note, they likely did just decompile UnitTest code. What better way to test compliance and compability of their own Java build than to use the actual Java Unit Tests? Bad? Likely. Good to ensure complete compatibility? Definitely.

Sandy Bridge

"The new basis is explicitly drawn from video over WiFi"

The new Sandy Bridge chip has on-die video decoding (H.264 among others), allowing the CPU to effectively idle ~3% while playing high-def content. The power draw would be mostly all from the WiFi as even the HDD wouldn't have to spin up if it was streaming the content. With that in mind, 7 hours is still pretty decent considering how horrid WiFi is to battery life. Best way to get more life out of your laptop? Disable WiFi when not in use and cut the screen to 75% brightness or so. (does the new battery life measurement run vid at full 100% brightness one wonders...)

Anyway, my Core2-based MBP only pulls 2.5hrs with WiFi and actual use (screen at 85% or so), so I don't know what magic sauce you guys are using.

Market

A common tactic to justify higher prices is be having a shortage. Look at what Hurricane Katrina did in Texas (USA). The oil refineries being offline created a shortage causing gas costs to spike. The oil companies, even when the refineries came back online, kept production lower to create a shortage, thus being able to justify keeping prices higher. (The government has a restriction on oil companies to prevent them from raising prices more than a certain amount, except when a shortage occurs). Apple is doing the same thing: create a shortage to cause Sheeple to pre-order to ensure a sell-out at a predictable number.

The other driving factor will be those that wanted a tablet, but bought one of the now readily available alternatives. With the scores of tablets coming out this year, Apple's market share (and perhaps quantity of units sold) will obviously reduce simply due to alternatives in the market.

The sad thing to speculate is if they're cutting due to a "significantly upgraded" iPad3 coming out later in the year, that means they expected to get away with forking out yet another sub-market-standard device at a premium. This is what Apple users don't realize: the hardware they are getting is only physically worth half of what they're being charged. The brand name and the "Oooo" factor makes up the rest of the device's cost.

Unfortunately, with the "subscription-gate" FUD leaking into the rest of the world due to the "your subscription services must be the same InApp as through other channels" line of the "agreement," causing a likely inflation of subscription prices globally, that Apple can no longer be viewed as a self-contained fringe monopoly.

Agreed.

Proprietary code always seems to move slow, and it's likely due to what Open Source was designed to overcome: many eyeballs in the code = more bugs found and fixed. Granted, the "lower quality" of their programming prowess was sometimes blamed on creating more bugs than closed source. But now that programming is being outsourced with everything else to people of wildly varying programming ability and experience, I'd dare say FOSS has moved up a notch in comparison. Open Source Internet Explorer. Let the fanbase make it better.

Part of the OS

Actually, if you take a good look at Windows 98 (for which this "part of the OS" was stated), Internet Explorer is indeed part of the OS. "Windows Explorer" uses the same GUI as "Internet Explorer." I wouldn't be too surprised to hear the file/folder browsing was generated HTML code al la Konquerer-style. With that in mind, it's no wonder even their solution of "uninstalling" it meant only hiding the public face of it. You could very easily type http://www.google.com into the "location" bar and have google pull up in the "Windows Explorer." Nowaways, doing so will cause IE (or default browser) to pop up with your page request. Seems it's no longer hard-baked now.

@IPatentedItSolOwnIt

"Apple won't missing out on their cut, the Publisher can't miss out and reduce it's margins so I'm left paying extra for something Steve Jobs hand no hand in!"

It's even worse than that: EVERYONE will have to pay more for it, not just Apple customers. The New York Times would have to bump their subscription cost 42% to make that 30% tax disappear as far as their margins go. But since the InApp Subscription service is REQUIRED to be the same price as elsewhere, your Droid NYT reader now has to charge that 42% mark-up, making Droid users suffer the same fate as their poor-of-choice Apple counterparts. Likely, NYT and others will find a happy medium, perhaps a 30% sweet-spot to mark everyone up to, taking a margin loss on their App Store subscriptions, and a margin gain (since even Google's subscription service is only 10%, but still allows you to use other in-app payment methods, and doesn't require you to use Google's in-app payment services), which in the end would provide a net gain or perhaps equal margins as before the price bump.

Now, with that global price fixing in mind, Apple simply has to undercut these inflated prices with their own services (The Daily, iBooks, and iTunes) and suddenly no one is buying the New York Times subscriptions. Why? It's cheaper to get The Daily. Even if some rogue few get the NYT, Apple still gets a significant cut. Win Win for Apphole, Lose Lose for the rest of the subscription world (remember, you can't even subscribe on their website to website view at a reduced price). Apple is merely trying to push competitors out of their marketplace. Frankly, in six months when Android Tablets are more prolific (See Archos 101 on Amazon for $300), content providers should simply dump Apple apps en masse and see what Apple does when their precious App Store has nothing in it besides $0.99 fart apps and flashlights.

Agreed

Agreed that they likely didn't test with alternating sides of the head (left or right ears). Another thing they could have done was put the phone against unusual parts of the head (the top, or rear) as opposed to sticking it near the auditory regions. A simple wired headset attached would have accomplished this. If the affected regions shifted with the phone, be they circular or not (as a pole antenna produces a doughnut omni-directional broadcast rather than spherical), then I'd have more interest.

As it is, the mere anticipation of a phone call could have caused the spike. A "muted" phone would still produce EM radiation, to which the brain may well be sensitive, but most likely "trained" to, having used cell phones before. Ever have that sensation of knowing you're going to get a phone call just before your phone starts ringing? Your body is likely reacting to the EMF spike of the incoming call due to some form of subconscious training. Perhaps they should try this test on some South American Rainforest tribe members that have never used a cell phone to eliminate this fringe-but-possible reaction.

Ownership

I doubt it's due to studio ownership, but more due to a different type of ownership: personal items.

Yes, Apple has been a long-time favorite of movie studios. They like have dozens of the kit laying around, from actor/producer's laptops on set to full workstations for review, etc. Why nip down to the corner Apple Store to pick up an atrociously expensive piece of kit when you can just grab one from a nearby backpack or neighboring room? It's product placement due to convenience.

@Pirate Dave

Last I checked, a full apt-get or yum update for a "fresh" Linux install ran into the 700MB range. Surely Linux is better written and wonderful too, right?

The ISOs for SP1-equiped versions of Windows 7 and Server 2008 were on the MS licensing portal for the past week already, just as an FYI. :)

Custom Apps and Configs

Perhaps their Excel VB scripts, or their home-grown Access DBs didn't work in Calc and Base.

3G/4G

Data rates are huge rip-offs, definitely. Unless one is akin to using their Tablet while driving or at a technophobes' home, I can't really see other places that don't have WiFi. (Don't say work, you should be working anyway, right?).

My ideal tablet would be sans-3G/4G. I just can't justify the trickle of data. My email will update when I'm back in a WiFi spot TYVM.

Hiding the URL

The idea of hiding the URL is ludicrous at best. Sure, you get to see it (briefly) while the page is loading, but on a decent broadband, that's all of 2 seconds, if not faster. Seeing the URL is an important anti-phishing check. Even on Google's own search results, the "URL" (the bit of text below the description) says one thing, but pulls up something completely different (common for phishing/scareware sites). These pages load in less than a second in some cases too. They're made to look like part of your OS (like a window or popup), and having the "webpage" go to pseudo-full-screen would just exacerbate the issue. Not to mention phishing sites that send you to "http://bankofamerica.corporateportal.tail.ru" or somesuch. By the time they get half across the URL, the page is loaded and the URL would go away, and that's for us Keen-Eyed that actually glance at the during loads. Then there are the bait-n-switch URLs which start loading a page then quickly shuffle you off to some odd URL (even legitimately). I've caught many-a-website doing this, primarily for "referral" credit or somesuch, but the "store" I thought I was browsing ends up dumping me into a no-name marketplace.

Leave the URL, even if it's as a status bar at the bottom of the screen. And leave it that way by default. People won't ever become security-aware if we keep abstracting stuff away from them as a default.

C'mon!

Half the article was explaining about acronyms and cap/no-cap, etc. Either you didn't actually comprehend what you were reading, or you simply fail.

Fail @OP (Robot)

"and partitioned the SSD into drives C and D, with a clear demarcation between my Windows 7 system in drive C and my data in drive D"

And how did you do that? Pad the "space between" with "sectors"? Data is not stored sequentially on an SSD. That's hard-disk-drive territory. Common SSDs likely have 16 flash chips, with 5-10 "channels" to read/write to those chips. The data is more likely to be physically stored RAID0(ish) style as opposed to sequentially on one chip. That's not counting the fragmentation that will occur as the drive is used, due to the copy-on-write methods of wear-leveling. In the end, there is no "clear demarcation" except logically (in your head and OS). SSDs don't even have sectors. Those 512byte blocks are simply emulated, just like any other sector/track concept. That is why page and block alignment is so important to establish optimal performance on your SSD.

Best thing to do? Use TrueCrypt whole-disk encryption from the start. Your data would not have ever been written to the drive in an unencrypted manner at any time, and thus you won't have to worry about it lingering around. The only thing likely to be vulnerable would be your network configuration and a bit of browser history that it takes for you to get on the network and download TrueCrypt initially after your OS install.

Fail @Owen Carter

wear leveling "hidden space" is in fact extra storage. SSDs are a particular creature. Data tends to be a copy-on-write setup, so when you overwrite your file, the new copy (parts of it at least) end up elsewhere on the drive and the old data gets flagged as available (whether it gets used or not is based on the write-count). That "elsewhere on the drive" can be within the CONCEPTUAL capacity of the drive, or land in that over-provisioned wear-leveling space. The controller doesn't care, it just doesn't want you to fill up the full 120GB of your "100GB" drive, because it is greedy and wants to maintain peak performance with its wear-leveling.

Storage locations on an SSD are a moving target, and that is the point MANY people (including these researchers) seem to forget. They're talking about traditional HDD "shred" techniques and then getting shocked that not even a "defrag" overwrites the data. They tried sequential overwrite methods, which with the above explanation of over-provisioning and a bit of brain power, one would realize would be ineffective.

A bit of intelligence shines through when they say the best way to "sanitize data on SSDs was to use devices that encrypted their contents." Bingo. Many SSD /drives/ do this. Granted they have a point about purging the crypto keys, but that's easy enough by grinding the chippery, or the thermite option.

Lastly: "Furthermore, there is no way to verify that erasure has occurred (e.g., by dismantling the drive)." is utter bullocks, as I can tell straight away that a drive that's had its flash chips melted by thermite (or perhaps dissolved in an acid bath) is cleanly "erased" (in proper Ahhh-nold fashion via "Eraser").

Oh, and a P.S. for Mr. write-spam monkey, when an SSD "fails" due to write exhaustion, the last-written data remains in the cell, perfectly accessible to be read. If you had an entire block or even chip fail in your SSD, unbeknownest to you, the data may still be accessible and no amount of continual rewriting will destroy it. Fail 4 u :)

@Shakje

"The main problem seems to be that they want the visibility of the app store but don't want to have to pay 30% of their income to Apple."

No, they don't want the visibility of the App Store. The problem is that they MUST use the app store in order to distribute their app the first place. So no, no App Store envy. Unless Apple allows other methods to get apps on their devices? Don't mention Jailbreaking, because then you'd just be proving a point.

"If you can't support that 30% then write your app for something else"

Yes, they likely will just jump the sinking ship and go with Android. However, the problem we face isn't just having to pay the Tax. It's a monopoly. In dealing with foreign and domestic products, countries place import taxes and such on foreign goods to ensure domestic (read: Apple) products sell better/make money as opposed to "cheaper" foreign (read: competitor) products. You must consider Apple now has a music store, book store, and newspaper. It's rumored that they'll have a music subscription service. Do all of these services have to inflate the prices or lose profit margin due to the tax? Nope. So, get The Daily for $5/mo or get New York Times for $6.50/mo. The Store-Brand Principle would show people will buy the cheaper "similar" alternative when presented with both. This 30% hike is a way to drive higher sales to their home-brew services, but also gouge a cut off people that still use the alternatives. Apple is using their market control to gain more revenue. Sound like monopolistic practices? Yeah, I thought so too.

Taxes

30% for a glorified credit-card processing system is a bit much, any way you look at it.

As pointed out before, if they lowered the subscription fees, all (most of) the apps would switch to "download for free, but pay a 'subscription'" so they can make a higher profit. However, Apple reserves the right to give such apps the boot, and would be right in doing so. This will preclude (most) said apps from trying to take such an approach.

The thing that rubs wrong in the whole deal is that content providers, such as normal newspapers, are REQUIRED to use Apple's payment API if they offer subscription services /anywhere/. They can't just provide a reader to view their newspaper that you web-subscribed for. Nor can they even put a link to their website to subscribe. They have to provide an in-app payment API-using method, which gives the 30% fee (naturally). Also, the Apple subscriptions method has to be priced the same as other methods. So no simple 30% markup for Apple users to offset the tax, but also no special website-"today-only" deals.

Also, in response to the whole user-information hording, the article was about the 30% tax, not user information. If anyone thinks that their information and habits aren't being tracked by every company that asks (or not), they're an idiot. Everything, down to the contents of your shopping cart at Walmart, is tracked, cataloged, and reported on.

Compile Fail

The compiler, true, does some guesswork at potential parallelism, but the programmer has to write his program threaded to begin with to take full advantage of parallel processing. The nice thing about threads, I can run 5 threads in one program on a single-core computer and get normal performance (minus overhead). But, I can run the same 5-thread program on a quad core with HT and the OS (key word) will assign each thread (hopefully) to the various cores available to it, essentially allowing each thread to run in parallel as opposed to time-slicing on a single core. This is why a recompile isn't necessary: the previous Itanium chips were multi-core already, thus the compiler already optimized for multi-core. More cores simple provide more places for the OS to assign threads. The program itself should (SHOULD!) be intelligent enough to determine the max number of true threads it can take advantage of.

I do agree with the concept of ARM in a server environment though. Likely would have happened already if there wasn't roadblocks. However, it will likely take a bit of engineering to stick ARM cores in a worthy environment for HPC. Perhaps they'll adopt HyperTransport for inter-core/CPU communications?

Apple :)

Welcome to the Apple sword-of-damocles world Facebookers :) Of course, the "Simple. Don't use Facebook" comment is utter rubbish, for the same reason "Simple. Don't use Apple" is: it won't stop anyone. Well, that and it's not entirely feasible anyway: both Apple (yes), and Facebook offer merit in there wares. If that merit is worth having said proverbial sword looming over one's self is another matter altogether.

The Site

The WBC website is likely offline due to the media attention. I think someone phrased it as "The Slashdot Effect"

You should do a little bit of mental work before default-contributing it to Anonymous.

Of course...

"All that is downloadable from the itunes store is the app itself. The content is still hosted and delivered by the publisher."

Of course, we could just save a lot of trouble and allow apps to be downloaded directly from the publishers and not actually be listed in the App Store at all....oh wait...it's Apple... AHAHAHAAHAHA.

Jailbreak your phone. At least then you might actually be able to use it without worrying about your apps disappearing tomorrow.

Additional Fail (for the DoJ if they haven't noticed yet)

"and it may be a question of examining whether Apple is abusing its position in the market."

I think the DoJ gets a FAIL if they haven't noticed yet: Apple sells music from the iTunes store, sells iBooks, and now has a newspaper "The Daily" on their platform, they have directly-competing products to the subscription-based content they're taxing. Basically, they're saying "if you want content subscribers to use our built-in subscription services, you have to pay us 30%. If you don't use our subscription API in your app, but write your own, you're banned from the App Store. Oh, and you can't charge more to have people buy subscriptions through your App. Sound a little familiar to "if you don't only sell Windows PCs, we'll charge you more per license, or not sell to you at all"? Granted, iOS et al is an Apple-defined market, whereas Microsoft did not create PCs and thus a market, but it still falls foul of a few laws I'm sure.

Better than that

"all they need to do is refuse to mention anything Apple based or carry Apple adverts"

They could do one better: have the music industry as a whole revoke licensing of music on the iTunes store. Or perhaps get greedy like Jobs and charge a 30% "online iTunes content distribution" fee (on top of their current licensing scheme). Then we'll likely see Jobs turn into a Ballmer stage monkey throwing chairs....

Exactly

"Tithe" is the root of "Tenth" essentially. So 30% = 3 "tithes".

Spot on. :)

Re:

"I can just comb my back hair over my head. Problem solved."

<--- Icon. 'nuff said.

Note

You would be keen to note that it's the Arctic ice that's melting. The Antarctic is actually gaining ice.

Anyway, of all the places in the world, the Antarctic is most likely going to remain the coldest.

RED

RED was a very good film IMHO. Of course, with Hollywood, they can make anyone look young/old (with a margin of success at least....some actors are exempted by this sweeping generalization too....).

As for content, most movies you watch nowadays are as much BS as watching "The NET" was.... "What did you do to stop the upload????" "I injected malicious code in the upload stream and caused a buffer overflow in the router that broke the Internet." "How many were affected?" "All of them...." (last NCIS: LA episode...). They seriously need to get a REAL tech consultant. Or at least become better at shoveling BS....

Either way, I'll likely was DH5, if for no other reason than why I watched Bond last time...or the time before that....and before that....

Of course

Of course, Apple may not actually move to the "rumours suggest a future iPad will sport a 2048 x 1536 display" at all. The most compelling evidence is:

"iOS coders can add two sets of graphics to their apps: one set plainly named for the 'old' resolution and a second, double-size set with "@x2" suffixed to the filename"

However, it's far more likely they'll move to a 16:9 or 16:10 ratio since it's the current fad, and they're likely wanting to push it as a multimedia/video device for "FullHD" viewing. Granted, a 1920x1200 ratio (16:10), which is used for Mac desktops (possible key-in for portability of desktop apps?), is only 2,304,000 vs the current 1,572,864 pixels, so not quite x2. However, some liberal application of marketing rounding, consideration of "Gen2," and programming consideration of "@x2 is simpler than @X1.46484375," and one can start to string together some compelling considerations.

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits. (previously (untitiled))

"But no....the American way is to bitch and whine and then do what you are told.

Also, if they pass the cost onto consumers buy increasing content cost I will switch."

I think your second sentence was "the American way," so likely expect an across-the-board bump to content provider pricing. Likely not a full 30%, but definitely higher than the 10% Google is charging. THIS is why everyone is whining: they buy a Droid-based platform (or even the eReader from the company) and still have to pay an Apple Tax because iFans can't live without the new shiney.

BS

Google only taking 10% means more money goes to the true content provider. 10% is still a hefty amount for doing no more than just facilitating a transaction, but it's far closer to the realm of palatability than Apple's 30% tax. With more money going to the content provider, the actual author may (likely not) see a small bump to their royalty.

Workaround

Kindle isn't a workaround if they stop providing their reader for the iOS platform due to the 30% cut requirement.

Real workaround? Find something more Open.

Custom Button

My BB has a button on the left side that is customizable. However, the default setting is audio profiles. Press the button, and point at the sound profile you want. I usually pick "Loud", however, very easy to switch to "Vibrate Only" or "Silent" for the movies. If you're concerned about silencing a call, pressing any button on the thing (at least mine) stops the ringing. Since my holster is a stretchy-sides flip-top, it's very easy to do.

Radiation

"The answer to the radioactivity question is more related to the impact on daily life. If you consider the question "all radioactivity that people are worried about is man-made ", then the reason for agreeing is more apparent"

One also has to consider that many of these Russians were likely alive (or heard stories from parents) about Chernobyl. This likely has skewed belief into man-made radiation, since Chernobyl was a very public man-made radioactive incident... Just because a single incident shouldn't be extrapolated to an absolute, doesn't mean Sheeple* won't do so.

* Sheeple commonly encompasses the non-educated masses

Thread Management

"In all likelihood it would run even worse by virtue of the fact that it would be competing with the rest of the page content within the same thread for CPU whereas a Flash app could be running on a separate thread."

Thread management introduces its own additional overhead. Having something in a seperate thread just prevents objects on the page from holding up the "flash app" (kinda like the good'ol days of your cursor freezing when windows dekstop locked up....)

Either way, you're likely to get just as poor performance with two threads (browser and flash) as you would with one thread. Unless, that is, you're sporting a Tegra-based dual-core chip like the LG Optimus 2X. I wonder how long it will take for the iPhone to pick up on dual core... Well, without non-Apple-Apps multitasking, it would be more of a moot point anyway....

Antivirus vs Antimalware

Malware/spyware are likely not considered "virii" by the AV companies. If you want to keep malware off your computer, get AntiMalware products (MalwareBytes has a decent one). It's sad that AV products don't (or in some cases, just not very well) catch malware.

Tools for the job, and all that.

BSODs et al

Apparently you have some configuration issues. Our Symantec EPP runs happily with our VI and actual end points and I have yet to see a single BSOD from it. LiveUpdates, albeit beefy (7GB for the mix of machines on our network) works fine. Reporting is great. Catches most virii, but some malware (browser toolbars mainly) still make it in. I know which machines are affected by such malware because EPP catches the virii that the malware tries to stuff on the machine, thus flagging it in the manager for me to have properly sanitized.

Granted, our setup is no where near as Nazi'd as the situation the poor author ran into, which is why the AC is getting BSODs, likely utilizing such measures.

Not a thing

Not missing a thing. IE9 don't even acknowledge load requests for "blocked" sites. FF & Chrome's method is to respond, but add a meta tag saying essentially "Here's my info, but don't track me." Don't believe it's not your info? They'll have your IP and the referrer site at the very least.

FYI

You are more than welcome to dump a newer version of Android on your phone if you desire. It's out there and free to do. Whether your provider or phone manufacturer will offer any form of support on your new 2.3 install on your old 2.1 device is another matter....

I ask you this

What was earth's global average temperature during the Cretaceous as opposed to now? Climate change happens. We were lucky enough to land in a moderate ice-age period as opposed to a warmer period.