Way to completely miss the point. This wasn't built in order to provide a lot of processing power for the price. It was done as an economical way to provide a platform on which the PhD student could develop massively parallel software without having to share access to the university's "real machines". In case you still don't get it, this was NOT his PhD project, it was something he built to help him with his PhD project.

Re: No surprise here - It is DRM that increases piracy

So, you've seriously convinced yourself that there is no extra inherent cost associated with chopping down thousands of trees, pulping them, pressing them into flat sheets, running those flat sheets through machines which cut them to an appropriate size, printing ink onto those smaller sheets, gluing those sheets together, and finally physically distributing all those heavy objects to thousands of locations throughout the target country.

Really?

Re: I'm gonna start up my own social network

I've always preferred 'Twatter'.

Also 'Arsebook', and the useful portmanteau 'FaceTwatter'.

Re: 'specialist' eh?

Securing one machine is relatively easy. Securing every machine out there, many of them running (for example) ancient copies of XP which haven't had a patch in years, is basically impossible. What you're saying is correct, but it's not an easy problem to fix.

Re: last paragraph...

The article you quote states that "Apple’s iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S together accounted for 1 in 5 of all smartphones shipped worldwide in Q4 2012". Obviously that's impressive, but I don't see that you can really describe it as 'dominating the sales' in the way that they used to. Clearly Apple "own the profits" as you say, but since they don't seem to do much with it other than store it off-shore from the US so as to not pay tax, I'm not sure that this really matters much in terms of the article concerned.

I have owned both Apple and Android smartphones and currently own neither, so really I'm not deeply bothered, but as a 'neutral observer' it still seems to me that the market is distinctly shifting away from Cupertino and towards the little green robot guy. Perhaps I'm just wrong, I guess time will tell.

At any rate, I get the strong impression that you care more about this than I do so I'll leave you to it :).

Re: last paragraph...

The thing you are missing is that not so long ago Apple WAS the smartphone market, more or less, with more apple phones selling than all android phones combined. The article you linked lists an 'others' figure, which will be almost entirely android smartphones, with a number which dwarfs the units shifted by Apple. So the trend is most definitely towards Android gaining market share.

Re: Meanwhile...

As someone working in retail for a company with margins (i.e. difference in cost and retail price) typically around 10%, I can forsee some major problems with your 'tax everyone 10% turnover' plan..

Re: Google Doing Good Things

The point is not to teach them about how specific applications on computers work such that they can become effective office drones in 10 years time. The idea is to inspire a new generation to tinker with the nuts and bolts and teach themselves about computers from the ground up, in the way that many of us did with 8 bit computers back in the 80s.

Whatever your thoughts on FOSS vs. Microsoft or whatever is, there is no doubt that Linux provides more (i.e. complete) access to it's internals than commercial software.

Re: Looked good...

Curious to know what you're doing that requires more than 4GB. That's plenty for regular office tasks.

Re: Beats me

The Kilogram is really no more of a specific physical entity than a Meter, what is important is that as a unit of measurement it should be constant such that measurements taken today hold true tomorrow.

Because of this such a unit of measurement should be based upon universal constants rather than a single physical object subject to the tender ministrations of entropy. This chunk of metal may be a physical entity, but the conceptual kilogram (which is vastly more important than some historical conglomeration of atoms) is a mathematical entity.

Re: "popular Japanese Reddit clone 2channel"

Came here to mention this, you beat me to it. For those who aren't sure why this is nonsense: 2channel was established in 1999, and was already very popular when reddit was established 2005.

Re: This and many other reasons...

Linus is just providing an unusual frank form of 'peer review', which is why the linux kernel is actually a very robust piece of software. In a many more 'traditional' development environments bad code gets allowed through because everyone is busy just watching the clock and dealing with their own little jobs, and nobody steps forward to say "sort this sh*t out" when it's actually necessary.

Not in the date range covered by the graph. Also missing the other big seller, the Amstrad CPC 464, for the same reason.

Re: getto fan install

Looks like a perfectly regular case fan which has been fitted to the case using the ventilation slot provided by the case manufacturers for an additional fan. Most cases, including the very high end ones (which, admittedly, this one isn't) don't come with fan slots fully populated, instead they provide locations for enthusiasts to mount their own fans as required beyond the basic number which they provide with the case.

I doubt very much that the 120mm case fan was the cause of the fire, and I don't really see why you are calling it 'getto' (sic). If the ventilation was (badly) self-drilled or the fan was stuck to the case with sellotape that would be 'ghetto', but I can see nothing particularly out of the ordinary in those pictures.

Re: Only 2: GParted and Libre Office

"And seriously, where is emacs?"

This was an article about applications you should install, not operating systems.

Re: No comprende

Google 'seaside rock' and you should get the idea. Basically a traditional treat sold at seaside resorts such as Blackpool here in the UK made from pure sugar (granulated and syrup form) in the shape of a cylinder, brightly coloured and usually with writing (typically the name of the resort/attraction) embedded all the way through it, like the rings in a tree trunk.

Re: What a system

Don't think he's been shown to be a criminal?

Creepy overpaid lowlife scumbag, maybe, but he was acquitted of the criminal charges.

Re: Ummm

@That Steve Guy

Although Apple would like the world to think otherwise, they do not in fact have a patent on all touchscreen interfaces or the concepts of 'smartphones' and 'tablets', or on stores where you can buy software online ('App Stores') or indeed smartphone 'Apps' themselves. Hardly surprising since they didn't invent a single one of these things.

What Apple are trying to protect in court right now their 'look and feel', and Metro / RT etc are sufficiently non-Apple in style that MS are clearly sticking to their side of that agreement, nobody could really mistake Surface for an iPad, or the Nokia WP8 handets for an iPhone.

Re: Feature phones ?

Yes. Remember this is globally. Quite a lot of parts of the world are well behind the USA / Europe / richer parts of the far east, which is really how Nokia has clung on to this point, this still shift a lot of basic Symbian phones in some places.

"Swedish design house Day4 ........ Deciding to test peoples’ gullibility... "

Deciding to grab themselves some free publicity. Worked like a charm anyway, can't fault them for that.

Re: If it's legal

Jimmy? Is that you?

Re: truthfully

Yup, this is what annoys me, the sheer greed behind it all. Apple have, from their successful execution of ideas which were really all already out there, accrued a pile of cash large enough to ski down.

But is that enough? No, they want to be the only child in the schoolyard which is allowed to play with the toys.

I know that this is the corporate world where greed is institutionally encouraged, but really it's sickening to watch, especially from a company which purports to 'think differently'. Doesn't look too different from where I'm sitting.

Re: Wikipedia isn't that bad...

"Not that bad?" Personally I think it's the best website on the internet, and probably the single biggest repository of easily accessible human knowledge on the earth. Sure there might be more words in the library of congress or the reading rooms of the London library, but until that all gets digitised and made available copyright free (not going to happen) I'll stick to using Wikipedia and checking references rather than physically visiting London or Washington.

Seems like it's fashionable to bash Wikipedia. For some reason people seem to think it makes them look clever to knock a magnificent and completely altruistic co-operative human endeavour which has probably made more information and knowledge publicly available to a wide audience than anything in history since Gutenberg decided that a machine to quickly produce books would be a good idea.

Re: PLEASE

Damn straight. If we want the brief rantings of random keyboard warriors we already have the comments section here on El Reg, no need to start embedding them into the articles themselves.

Re: Not that simple surely

Well if you are going to be picky, the quote from the article said that using Tor and a disposable email would be "would have been enough to muddy the trail". This is completely true.

But let's pretend that the article had claimed 'complete untraceability'. Would GCHQ possibly be able to untangle your trail through tor? Realistically, probably not since it is HIGHLY unlikely that ISPs keep records of sufficient depth (they would need to basically record ALL your packets). Maybe they could see that you had used tor, that would be about it, since tor is a decentralised peer-to-peer system and as such doesn't provide them with any handy server room doors to kick down.

Unless you know something which nobody else knows, using TOR and a correctly anonymised email account does result in more or less complete untraceability, unless they were already logging everything you were doing at the packet level. And if you were to combine this with mobile access through fresh-from-the-shops disposable PAYG phone, I strongly suspect that even if GCHQ were to get involved they would still be out of luck. I'm don't doubt that they have a lot of clever people, but they are certainly not omnipotent or in possession of magical powers.

Re: 3 Words

He does seem to be a bit of a "Keith Vaz", yeah.

Re: Not that simple surely

Do you really think that GCHQ get involved in this kind of garbage? Really? They are not there for civil or even criminal cases, which are the internet equivalent of cats stuck up trees, they are responsible for providing signals intelligence to the UK government and armed forces. Get a grip.

Re: Anonymous has "rules"?

Indeed, "we are not your private army". Anyone claiming to be part of any 'Anonymous Collective' just clearly identifies themselves as somebody who completely missed the point.

Re: Innovation Required - Apply WIthin

I would agree if you are looking at the big publishers. However there is a growing and healthy 'indie' market out there, which I would say means that there are more 'small companies' and one man bands producing innovative games than at any time since the era of the 64/spectrum/amstrad. Some games from this 'leftfield' have even gone on to success which the likes of EA would envy (think 'Minecraft', 'Plants vs Zombies' etc).

Of course those are almost all purely digital distribution, which is another reason for the decline of physical sales highlighted in this article.

Re: If it wasnt for free hotmail accounts

People actually used AOL/Compuserve? I always viewed those CDs as free coffee coasters, and used Demon Internet for dialup.

Re: How about this for an idea

Drop box would not need to have the key under the proposed system. You're right that no system is foolproof of course, but in this scenario the fool would need to be the client.

Re: Prosperity

I think that the idea is that making us a more 'connected' nation will improve our performance in the tech industry. I agree however that beyond a certain point making connections faster doesn't change much, better CS and IT courses in schools would be much more effective.

As for internet-streamed TV replacing antennae, I think this is the way things are going but I can't see it happening any time soon. My parents still don't even have the internet, although I know they are a dwindling minority.

"There is nothing wrong with good old porn."

Some of the moustaches are pretty dodgy.

Re: Steve Jobs..

Contrary to popular opinion, Mr. Jobs was very far from infallible.

Re: What the company is missing ...

>Have you seen HipHop?

Yeah, although I've not really used it.

My main point is that for the large majority of web projects which are not in the facebook/google scale and needing massively optimised code, programmer time efficiency is more relevant than the number of processor cycles a given task eats up. I'm not a ruby guy myself (perl and PHP background) but the whole point of the language as I understand it is the 'on rails' rapid application development methodology which comes with it, so knocking it because it's (obviously) not as optimised as C or C++ seems to me to be an academic argument which misses the point entirely.

Re: What the company is missing ...

And how long would it take to write that web application in C compared to Ruby?

Obviously the C app would probably be faster, once written. But in the real world people have deadlines and budget constraints - pretty much nobody writes web applications in C, and this is for a reason.

Re: Money is waiting

I think you're confusing Ingram with a retailer of some kind. They are distributors, and as such they won't touch actual customers with a twelve foot bargepole and will not be taking your insignificant sums of end-user money under any circumstances.

Even if they were retailers, some of your complaining seems to be more relevant to manufacturers - retailers can't sell laptops with >>1080p displays if manufacturers can't sell them.

In general you seem to be confused, and are conflating the whole manufacturing / distribution / retail chain into one amorphous entity against which you can rage blindly and ignorantly.

Re: Fanboi

At least half of his stuff isn't really SciFi, it's mostly just a label which was hung on him after Snow Crash. Cryptonomicon is his masterwork still as far as I'm concerned, and that's not SciFi at all. Neither is the Baroque Cycle, or REAMDE.