At least quote properly

He gives the kids free samples,

Because he knows full well

That today's young innocent faces

Will be tomorrow's clientele.

Tom Lehrer, "The Old Dope Peddler"

You are forgetting something

Google also operates the Android Market. The Android Market, the Kindle/Amazon market and iTunes in the long run are something which will make most of the piracy go away.

1. They allow the individual developer a distribution channel including all the financials associated with it.

2. They lock paid apps and app-wrapped content to a _UNIQUE_ user identity maintaining naturally both user rights (move from device to device, etc) as well as user contractual obligations (where and how you can access stuff).

3. They handle revocation, app and content killing as required by contract and do that once again as per "UNIQUE user"-supplier relationship.

They are exactly what RIAA/MPAA do not want to do. They do not want to sell to _YOU_ because this entails all of the responsibilities by contract law and other laws and regulations. They want to get money without going through all of that rigmarole and give nothing in return.

Same as most "supporters" you are clueless

The key problem of the MAFIAA is that it continuously refuses to _SELL_ _TO_ _CUSTOMERS_.

Coming back to your example. If I want, I can (and there is more than enough technical means out there) to:

1. Sell my software for 50 quid (or even for 5) and uniquely identify this clone of the software as sold to user A.

2. Identify any "shared" or "leaked" software from user A and sue user A as per current legislation. There is _MORE_ _THAN_ _ENOUGH_ laws and treaties out there to do that. No need to invent any new legislation.

3. I would not even bother with anti-copying provisions. Identifying who leaked it enough to sustain most forms of business model.

4. In a connected world you can make 99% of that fully automated and transparent and there is nothing wrong with that.

That is the problem of the MAFIAA and their BSA bretheren. They do not want to sell to an individually identified customer because this entails the responsibility to that person as a customer instead of treating him the way a racket mob treats someone being shaken for money. They do not wan the customer to have rights (as customary and as specified by law). They want them to have only obligations and those obligations enforced by the state without giving anything in return.

Wrong question

Battery life, pixels etc are not interesting...

The _INTERESTING_ question is: "Will it come with IMS?"

If it does - operators have won and the application revolution is officially over.

If it does not - operators can kiss their cunning plan to charge for breathing in, breathing out and allowing to do so on 4G good bye. The data shall be gobbled regardless of their delusional "internet multimedia system" ideas.

A Camel?

A Horse designed by a committee?

Exactly

Also, on planet Earth the platters in a hybrid drive spin _ONLY_ when necessary, not all the time. In fact, it is in a spun down state most of the time.

So the ultabook, platters, spinning, blah, blah argument is an outright piece of fud. That problem is not present (especially with hybrid drives updated to a more recent firmware build).

In any case, the size of the flash drives will _NOT_ dent Seagate's markets. The post-flood cost of platters hower will do so because the cost of the hybrid is now comparable with the flash drives. Prior to the floods a 250G hybrid momentus was priced at about the same amount of money as a low-end entry level "boot" flash drive making the decision a no brainer. Unfortunately, as a result of the floods it is now priced at the same mark as mid-tier 128G-256G drives.

I wish they tought office

Do they teach how to use styles, bibliography, macros, etc? Do they teach excel properly - with excel basic, functions, stats, etc? Do they teach access? Yes, indeed access - it is part of office after all and people should know when to stop being silly and drop excel for a more advanced tool.

Do they teach the stuff that really distinguishes someone who knows how to use Office from the muppet that just clicks at random around the pretty ribbons? Do they teach the stuff that saves you 75%+ of your time when working with it? Do they teach the fundamentals which allow you to move to another platform in a jiffie?

NO.

So in fact they are not teaching office either. They are teaching font-turbation.

That may be the reason for the entire bruhaha

Errr... Did not Lord S*** support the losing party at the last election? That explains a lot...

I have yet to see one that cannot

XvMC + vlc (you had to tweak the build options on the older vlc) delivers 1920x1080 video on any netbook I have tried. This means no h264 though. MPEG4 :(

Close but no cigar

It the business plan of any _SANE_ company - build what people _WILL_ want and guess what they are _LIKELY_ to want _TOMORROW_.

The idea of building what people WANT today makes no business sense because by the time you are building it someone like Apple comes along with the correct guess of what they will want tomorrow and you are out (or nearly out) of business.

Nokia was building "what customers wanted" and had mandated all of their design process around the "customer connected" mantra. Look what it did to them.

So all in all Apple is right to build cool things and make you want them. That's a swell business plan.

A bit difficult

It is the season for a S.A.D. person to be sad in the northern hemisphere :)

If the only way to communicate is the Internet...

It is not a human right yet...

It is however on its way to become one by the nature of being the only way (or the only sensible no/low cost way) to do things.

While you are correct in general you are wrong for this one

IMHO - Hawthorne Effect got nothing to do with this particular one.

I work mostly from home and my home office is in a loft. 80% of the roof is windows exactly for this reason. I have long noticed that my productivity is fairly proportional to the natural light level - blinds fully closed == productivity to min, blinds open == productivity to max. Similarly - looking back at 20 odd years I have been most productive in offices where I was next to the window (especially on the south side) and least in a "modernistic neon lit windowless cave".

There is a simple explanation too. Most of us have some form of S.A.D. even though we do not care to admit it. There is nothing "hawthornic" to this Fraunhoffer gadget - it is just a big S.A.D. light.

Try fencing saber

Try fencing saber (especially without full protective gear). Hint - it hurts even with the protection.

It is also total bollocks

"Activity" and "Activity oriented workspace" are sheets of the _ANDROID_ songbook, not Apple's. Both KDE4 and Gnome 3 are such a trainwreck because of copying _THAT_ obsession without copying any of the state management and workstack management which goes with it. iOS is still application based, not Activity + Intent based.

Just read the frigging Android and iOS developers manuals for crying out loud, look at the changes in KDE 3-4 and iOS and it becomes immediately clear who copied whom.

Whatever

If you decide to shell 2k on plane tickets from EU or USA it ain't going to be just for the sunset.

The switch to driving on the left is interesting though. Someone should show that one to Polish legislators (I know that safety has little to do with them sprouting bullshit and banning registration of right wheel drive - it is all to protect those precious "indigineous" car manufacturing in violation of the EU treaties).

What do they teach kids in school nowdays

Take two very nicely defined and clearly visible stars from the edge of the _BIG_ dipper, draw an imaginary line and the first bright star is Polaris.

The problem with finding the small dipper is that most of its stars are fairly non-descript and not particularly bright. So the method using an extension of the big is what they used to teach on survival (and civil defense) courses throughout the northern Hemisphere. At least outside UK. I remember having this explained to me in the 3rd or fourth grade and repeated several times later on.

So despite being unable to locate the small dipper (or most of the constellations) I can still find you Polaris straight away.

So the name is right - it should be the "Big" not the small dipper.

Agree - enough is enough

The USPO's default position should that the patent is *not* granted unless the *applicant* can show that it is novel

Correction your honour

IT should be:

The USPO's default position should that the patent is *not* granted unless the *applicant* can show that it is _WORKING_. No working prototype - no patent. No more "patent style numbered graph diagrams". Picture or it did not happen.

By the way, the usual "garage inventor" argument is invalid here, because garage inventors _ALWAYS_ try to build their stuff. It is "researchers" in large companies which invent mental concepts and patent them before they are built. As far as parity between big and small anyone who has had to deal with POC budgets in a big corp knows that it is often easier to build your prototype with your own money buying bits of eBay than to get the muppet in charge to allocate you budget and sign your requisitions.

This will solve it once and for all/

Just the new fashion

Before that it was WWW and Internet. Add that to something old and obvious and voila - here you have a large chunk of the IPR portfolio of some of the "tech giants" :) Mobile is just the new Internet (in IPR terms).

You almost hit the point

@ShelLuser

You nearly wrote what it is all about and went into unnecessary details yet again.

Microsoft is once again about layout. Exactly as you noted. OO is about _CONTENT_ (which you failed to note).

If you have to manage unnecessary complex layouts (something rare in sci/engineering writing) Word may be better. In fact it is better.

If you have to manage content - formulae, integration to biblio, integration to data sources that is not an embedded excel BLOB but is actually using them - OO rulez. All of that saves time and as you go along and work more in an area it saves more and more of it exactly where most effort is applied - CONTENT.

Compared to that Word continues to improve and save you time on LAYOUT. Same for PowerPoint vs Impress, etc. So it all depends on what you call business writing. If you are writing a marketing paper with dancing squirrels jumping from paragraph to paragraph and fornicating on top of the punchlines - yeah, Word is the right tool for that kind of business writing.

If you are writing a paper which describes a different pricing strategy, a different supply chain model, a new product idea or anything else that is about CONTENT you are better off with OO (especially if it is your job to do that on a daily basis).

By the way, I have seen the MSFT formula addon and it "did not set my soul on fire". It is still sub-par to the OO one which is not surprising considering the OO editor origins.

Depends what you use it for

There is a number of areas where LibreOffice/OpenOffice is miles ahead of Microsoft Word.

1. Math. After all this years Microsoft has still to deliver a passable formula editor and formula editor integration. Openoffice editor is way better which is not surprising as they have lifted a lot from (La)TeX including the "switch to manual" syntax and do we like it or not LaTeX is and shall be the standard for scientific math writing.

2. Bibliography. Database integration for bibliography, biblio-formats, bilblio separation, etc. Once again it is from the same book as the math. Microsoft simply does not grock it. With LibreOffice every next paper you do in an area is _LESS_ effort. With Microsoft it is about the same as you cannot reuse a shared external bibliography database and the autocomplete dictionary is not learning your area (or not as good as OO).

They are meaningless

As a comparison to the previous GPU they are meaningless - different arch altogether.

Abandoning VLIW is interesting though. This leaves Itanic as the last survivor in the Jurassic forest.

All of their phones I have had so far use MicroSD

I have a couple of Experias - they all use microSD

I think we skipped it

We skipped it somehow.

We are straight into the "timid", "politically correct", "no tits on display" days of the Vizantium post- Julian the Apostate.

Time, effort and sobriety

Time, effort and sane evaluation of what can be done, what makes money and whatnot.

RedHat is more of a posterchild of pragmatism and "make money instead of going on about 'just how cool is this'".

Dynamic IP by any chance?

1. Are you on a dynamic IP?

2. Does your ISP do transparent proxying?

The globe is small

The container shipment economy has made it small. There are however a number of disproportionately high cost elements. Crossing the Panama canal which is needed for Far-East to Brazil is one of those.

Depends on how do you count failures

Russians landed _FIRST_ on mars - 1971. However not a single one of the scientific experiments on board of Mars 1 and Mars 2 worked. The orbiter components worked in both. Ditto for Mars 3-6 launched in the 70-es: all returned some data but lander components did not manage to complete all of their program.

NASA numbers are correct at some level - not a single Russian mission managed to fulfill its complete scientific programme. However out of 17 around 6 managed to return something useful and most importantly new from a scientific perspective - f.e. the discovery of some level of ionosphere, etc.

Now let's revisit that thought

Quote:"Do we know it was actually being flown over Iran? It is possible that the Iranians are not being entirely truthful here."

Now, let's hold that thought for a while. All NATO airspace assets above Afghanistan playing pocket tennis while a Be-50 (or whatever DIY Iranian equivalent was used here) is flying in Afghan or Pakistani airspace on top of a Predator drone (probably with escort) and retransmitting GPS signals at 10-20db above what they should be.

I know my tax dollars are being massively wasted but that massively? Surely not...

You should be doing that anyway in an automated vehicle

If you are not doing that in a semi-autonomous vehicle your design team should have their Xmas bonus booked.

And what exactly will they pay in return

Have you thought of that by any chance?

Some people are sufficiently popular not to need Googling

So Steve's position in the zeitgeist not surprising.

Incorrect

Replaying will not work. Encrypted GPS is _SUPPOSED_ to be replay-attack resistant. If Iranians have found a way to do a replay attack (and sell that to someone else) we are in deep deep deep sh***

Delaying by a few micro-seconds to skew the fix and rex-mitting at significantly higher power

- sure, especially if you gradually increase the delay. Any of the safeguards in the system will not kick in until the delay is equivalent to a few hundred km skew. That is more than enough to land it somewhere else.

You missed one thing

A drone which was not where it was supposed to be. This means it was above Iranian territory in the first place.

And does it fall back to civilian?

And does it fall back to civilian? What does it do if the encrypted signal is corrupted/jammed and the civilian is blaring at 20db above the real SAT signal?

In any case - if they managed this, applause.

Continuing the old adage about "You know that the world is mad if the best rapper is white, the best golfer is black..." - "And the Iranians do a successful reenactment of a Bond flick hijacking real western equipment"

Not all cars have a TC off button you know.

Not all cars have a TC off button you know. I can think of at least one major make which had dispensed with the TC off button on their major model lines.

The fact that you and me agree that this is a criminally stupid idea does not mean that 10%+ (more for fleet cars) out there are not from said manufacturer.

I beg to differ

Traction control - definitely. If you drive sanely you do not need it. The failure described in the article is a classic traction control blooper. I used to have a car with VSA (aka traction control + selective breaking) and I hated it. It was of no use in really slippery situations and it sucked royally in marginal ones - unpredictable acceleration, etc. I am now back to proper "fully manual" fleet and it is a welcome change (especially at this time of the year).

Lane departure warning - definitely. WATCH THE F*** ROAD YOU F*** TWIT!!! If you cannot watch the road you do not belong on it.

ABS - I beg to differ. A well behaved ABS tends to kick in only in emergency situations and is of no consequence to normal driving. If you have gone as far as ABS usually you are in emergency stop mode. While emergency stop is something that is being tested and exercised for the practical driving test it is not something that is practiced regularly. If you drive normally you end up doing it once every 6k+ miles (if not 10k) so you are guaranteed to be a bit rusty on it. There is nothing wrong with some judicious assistance on that. I have had it kick in all in all 3 times in the last year or so and each time it was right, proper, needed and appreciated.

Hanlon's razor

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

Same as today - your fan spins into hovercraft mode on webpages where the cretin designing them has put a "DIY" ad in javascript without waiting between frames or has made a "DIY" adobe flash ad or has put flash videos for no reason whatsoever.

They use BBM instead of texts - it is usually flat priced.

You are indeed correct - the hoodie is the new BB core market and it is one market it will be able to rely on long after everyone else has switched to a touchscreen slab of some description.

Calm down, it is just the vehicle manufacturer lobby speaking

See, if it is installed by a vehicle manufacturer it is OK. If not you are at fault.

So now, vehicle manufacturer bundles LOUSY bluetooth integration with their own LOUSY SatNav with 6 spoke alloy wheels gold plated sign "I am an arsehole" and puts it only on the "Clarkson-Approved Invincible" model of the vehicle. They also price SatNav at 600+, Bluetooth at 400+. You should not forget the mandatory "Daemon" wheels for 1200 more too. They also have the Bluetooth deliberately crippled so it does not take announcements from the SatNav so you actually buy and use theirs instead of that on the phone.

You should not complain about big corps using politicos to mandate their source of income. That is how the world is supposed to run. You are a consumer. Consume and shut up. Capiche?

In any case, texting while driving is a pickup truck is a Darwin award. 2 tons of metal (unladden) require some respect when operating. I drive mine at 60 mph as a truck most of the time (despite it being perfectly capable of more and tested at 90mph on the Autobahn in cross-EU trips).

My exact thought

BlackFruity things, damn cheap ones and with a free messaging service to boot.

That is not a market which can be taken over easily with a good margin.

As far as real "bored with iPhone fashionistas" (quotes intended) when they are done with iPhone they will start with iPhone accessories like the iPhone integrated BMW, Pioneer AppRadio and all the other similar stuff. None of that dances to tunes from the GooglePlex or Redmond. World has changed. The people who _HAVE_ spending power no longer want just a phone. They want to take that phone and it to plug into their car, music system, house, etc - anything up to and including washing the dishes. That is an area where MSFT has got about zero attention from manufacturers and developers... Unless you want a Fiat with Blue and Me which speaks _VOLUMES_ about your disposable income :) Nokia has even less leverage there than Microsoft.

This is just a continuation from February. Probably a good idea in some parallel universe. In this one not so much.