Re: Internet taxes

Well, not completely. They didn't pay for the utilities infrastructure they use (power stations, water processing plants), for the education of their staff, for the infrastructure that enables them to cheaply ship things around the country and internationally, for the fire departments that protect them from disaster, for the military, for the courts and police who enforce the laws and for the politicians who make them. Thus they need to pay taxes. Although, I'll give you that they seem to be keen on paying for the politicians.

Re: Shills Out In Full Force

Nor do they sync MP3s, pictures or documents. And my Linux PC and Android phone somehow manage to sync the address books and calendars ... so what's your point again?

Re: Translate me a Spaceship

"All you need to do to fix the 'problem' is to ensure that a jury of my peers comprises people with a similar level of intelligence and skills."

So, you are advocating a 'self-appointed elite' approach then.

Re: Just to add

Yes, let's all switch to MS so that our stuff "just works!". Like how I spent the last two days fixing an issue with buggered roaming profiles (random app crashes, including Outlook). Or the recent SP2 for the Windows Update server that dies in the process of upgrading. And the MS official solution? Reinstall WSUS. And reboot. A production server. Several times. If you think using the *nix console is close to black magic you haven't seen anything untill you try to do stuff in Powershell. Incantations galore.

Honestly I don't care about consumers adopting Linux. After all they are called "consumers" for a reason ... we wouldn't get much back from them. The secondary effect people talk of (big OEMs investing in Linux development bcos of all the people using it) is always just out of reach and is probably not worth the effort.

IMO the primary desktop focus should be on power-users and integration of clients into some kind of a backend (AD / LDAP / messaging server). Personally I'm happy with the state of the UI for the moment. KDE is good enough, Gnome 3 will be in a few years and there are several other good, stable options out there.

Re: Give me an Ultrabook with Secureboot turned off

Ummm, no.

It does make the machines more secure but it does it by restricting the user.

For a Win 8 sticker the "Secure Boot" /must/ be /on/ by default and if you turn it off you can't dual boot Windows. AFAIK the only distro with signing keys for "Secure Boot" is Fedora but there is still a lot of uncertainty about revocation and other fluff.

Re: Thunderbird has been going downhill

OS X Mail is horrible. Heaps of non-standard crud, stupid mail indexing and a clunky interface. Yuck!

Re: This really is a horrible bit of journalism

Yes, then all we have to do is shuffle a few billion people around the planet to the newly available land and we can all go our merry old way. What could go wrong?

We are killing off species left and right and despite many people trying very hard to save some species, almost always, the efforts fail. Reading the wiki about the current extinction event is thoroughly depressing. The current efforts to stem the tide are another case of 'too little, too late' that seems to be the result of a standard human approach whenever we confront a global problem.

What do you mean do we have the right?! We are the primary cause of this extinction event! And that is not even taking into account global warming, in case you don't believe in it. We have reduced the variety of plants and animals on this planet so much that it's literally mind-boggling. It will take millenia for the planet to regenerate.

oh please

As if MS never 'stole' any technology. The only difference is that they have the face to claim moral superiority. If they truly are in the right they would sue Google, win and be done with it. This has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with lawyers.

Somehow, somewhere, the lawyer brigade in MS and Apple has morphed from a defensive department into an offensive one. And if they have to kill the spirit of the patent system to earn a buck, so be it.

ho hum

XP on 128 MB is a painful experience. 512 is the recommended ammount for normal use. Just Firefox can gobble up 200-300 GB no problem.

AFA Android efficiency is concerned, it's not Android eating up all that delicious memory, it's the 3d games and the assorted apps.

probably useless

It would probably be difficult to implement for little gain. Although it could be done, I guess, in software with something like UUIDs. But then you would need to think about protecting from UUID spoofing. And it would be a total PITA to constantly manage hardware replacements.

It's easier to deny access to USB/PS2 ports completely and then you're safe(er).

alternatives?

and gas, coal & oil mining is sooo much safer and cleaner

http://goo.gl/fDGRR

in short: 61 mining disasters in the last 60 years in the USA alone.

because they say it matters

If you are silent then you have no voice in the shaping of your country. And it does shape it through the laws already in the books and the ones yet to be made. So, by not giving an answer you potentially weaken a side you sympathize with or at best remain irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. I like that I have at least a small say in the matter and exercise it whenever I can.

The loud minorities have proven that it can reshape our world.

right on

Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

true for science, true for religion.

on robots and oracles

Google respects robots.txt for search results. If you don't want Google specifically scraping your site, but for some reason Bing, Baidu and others are fine and dandy, block their IP addresses. If you don't trust the opt-out nature of the robots.txt then you can always password-protect your site.

As for the Sun^h^h^h Oracles and the alleged theft of the Java IP, well, Google is innocent until proven guilty. I for one don't buy it. Oracle is more evil then Google and this emanates the heady aroma of software patent trolling to me.

Beer, bcos I want one....

Stats? What stats?

Android already has a bigger market share:

http://goo.gl/IO74a

http://goo.gl/6LiGt

Sooo....32% for android and 16% for IOS on the phones and soon there will be a much bigger market for the fondleslabs. The main difference is that the profit from Android doesn't go directly to Google or any single company. There's also the problem with fragmentation but that will pass if Google slows the release cycle as is expected.

If I was a business looking for a big phone app market my bucks would go on the Android side.

Ummm....

He said:

"Apple insist that you *must* use the App Store and that you *cannot* make it cheaper anywhere else"

And then you said:

"Apple's rules only demand that you must *ALSO* support the App Store method of payment, not JUST your own web-store one. You also cannot undercut the App Store pricing on your own site."

Methinks you just confirmed what he said using different words. And did you just now say that they could 'reduce' their profit so as to make up the loss on the Apple tax? If their profit is 30% and they need to pay a 30% tax....ummm....they get nothing?

And please don't bash people with webkit and darwin. Webkit is cool but considering the quality of the browsers that use it Apple is the least responsible for it's success and darwin is flop as a FOSS project, pretty much nobody uses it besides Apple.

not true

Lack of a response is unlikely and wouldn't prove anything anyway. It's impossible to prove a codec doesn't infringe so the burden of proof is on the MPEG LA side. And since software patents are so nebulous it's probably in their best interest to rattle their sabre now and again and go on collecting their tithe as usual.

By the way, don't you understand that even if some predating patent is found that doesn't mean anybody was ripped off? It is more probable that certain things can be coded only in certain ways. Does that mean that whoever writes the code first is forever the sole owner of that method? What if we apply the same logic to medicine?

I invented this procedure so if you save a person on the operating table your hospital owes me money!!

destroying what exactly?

The point is to regain control over the hardware. And as someone who has used pirated software I can tell you that I have stolen from noone. Nobody lost a single penny because of me because I couldn't afford original games. All my money went into a few music CDs. Now that I can afford it I find better ways to sink my money and time.

Is breaking the PS3 security an acchievment? Hell yes!!

maybe so, but

Is that clearly stated on the packaging? Can they then change the terms under which they leased me that software? Is there a license agreement (a physical copy in the store) that I can read before buying the console? Can I return the console when they _do_ change the terms (like when OtherOS option was removed)?

This is soo evil and is getting more so.

Errrr....

He _did_mention he's a sysadmin. It's, like, his job to care. And his job provides him money to spend on important things in life (beer? also women, but beer first I think). And as I am one too I assure you he is correct - most users are idiots and refuse to learn how to use their tools effectively. Or at all.

How else do you excuse people that fail to grasp the few basic mechanisms of an email client after 3 years of use (Apple's Mail.app in this case)? The sheer level of ignorance I encounter has made me numb to such situations so it doesn't faze me anymore.

please read more carefuly

This is about 2,5" laptop drives. So your post is relevant only if you manage to cram a RAID setup into a lappie and then install Win7 on a ZFS partition.

not the point

The problem with Google Frame is that it increases the level of complexity for the end user. The user is suddenly running Chrome but everybody who doesn't explicitly know that will assume they are running IE.

That opens a whole can of worms as far as security is concerned.

Not to mantion hat complexity is the enemy of secure design.