Cheap upgrade also a factor

I know a lot of people who just upgraded for 35 euros.

Before you needed to buy a full version for about 170 euros or so, if you didn't buy a new machine with an OEM version on it/with it.

That always got me, when my hardware was getting a bit old. The 170 euros seemed like a waste of money, when I would 'save' about 80 euros if I could get an OEM version with new hardware.

Nowadays hardware doesn't really get old. (Well older but not much slower). And when you plug in a new GPU card and an ssd you are as good as new.. So thats 35 euros + 400-500 euros for some hardware upgrades. So why buy a new PC for a 1000-1200 or so?

Humans cannot do 2 things that require concentration.

Its a limitation of how our brain works. There is no need to fund research for every individual case. You just have to prove a task requires concentration, if you prove that you cannot do it with any other task that also requires your concentration.

So for example its not a good idea:

to shave while writing a letter.

to ski while writing a letter.

to ski while having a conversion.

drive while having a conversion.

drive while shaving.

etc etc..

And yes some conversions you can do with other tasks, but that are the ones where you werent really listening (thus not concentration), and just 'ehehing' the gaps in noise from the other side. So in the future when a cop pulls you over because he sees you were talking in the car, you can get away with it by claiming it was your mother on the other side of the line ;-)

The first casualty of war is the truth

It is no longer about gathering facts, but it is about twisting the facts to fit your own belief. So we have one camp that BELIEVES we are causing global warming which will lead to doom and destruction, and the other camp that BELIEVES we are not causing global warming and trying to fix it will cause economic doom and destruction. Both sides are heavily funded by companies/interest groups who have a vested interest in seeing one side prevail.

Seems like we have the right ingredients to start a war:

* Suspicion.

* False information.

* A perceived threat.

* A real opponent, which if we kill em will take away the threat.

Ps. Would be kind of poetic justice if the dinosaurs reign got ended by sudden climate change and our reign gets ended by the fear of it leading to a war in which we wipe ourselves out. I wonder what Darwin would have said about that one.

If you are not on the ball, you will Perish..

Things change, Warner just thinks they can keep stuff the same. Evolution will just make sure they perish. People want content on their devices, so if a device maker wants to display your content on their devices you better take notice and embrace. Or history will welcome you as yet another cu de sac...

What are you going to do when Apple just hires a bunch of producers and actors and start to provide their own content.. Sit in the corner and sulk?

he has a point (kinda).

We have all been poluted with science fiction. Especially the one where a certain captain would drop out of warp and at almost every solar system, and it would have at least 2 class M planets capable of life, and on landing, he found out it had life, and the race was obviously mostly an all female race with mini-skirts.

But that is because it is science-FICTION. Noone would like to watch a spaceship travelling through space, never finding any life. (Let alone girls in mini-skirts). It is boring and depressing.

Also it is kind of heavy on our responsibility to even consider that we might be the only life in the universe. This would suddenly give us a great burden not to mess it up. Now we can just say: Ah well theres an infinite number of solar systems so there is bound to be other life forms, implicitly concluding that if we mess it up it doesn't matter.

So the chances that curiosity finds what we are really looking for: "The proof that we are/were not alone", are extremely small (2 class M planets in one solar system are extremely remote, and probably only happens in science fiction). So no Martians will be found...

However Curiosity serves a far bigger purpose. It is the stepping stone to more useful inventions. You can see it as Formula 1. Racing in circles has no purpose, but the inventions made in Formula 1 benefit every car manufactorer in the world. (active suspension, abs, traction control, power steering etc etc). So when we do find a planet capable of sustaining us, we can try to go there and fullfil our ever tingling urge..

the urge to multiply..

The lack of NFC will not be a problem until next year....

But that is no problem because then the IPhone5S comes out? Surely not for a reviewer which gets a free IPhone if he writes a positive review. But most people have to pay real money for a phone. (Lots in case of an IPhone). I would hope that if I would ever be foolish enough to pay 500+ euros for a phone it would last longer than a year. Otherwise I would be pretty upset.

Minority Report style control: The only way I see 'touch' work on the desktop.

But it has to be enormously precise, So probably they will need Kinect 2. So you can just resize move rotate and swipe, by holding your hands in front of you, and making gestures.

When I first saw the adds about Kinect I thought it was an advertisement trick, but to my surprise it actually worked. Hope for Microsoft they can deliver with Kinect 2. Otherwise the whole 'Metro' idea on the desktop is dead in the water, because driving it with the mouse is just awkward.

QT has come a long way.

I remember in its early days it was a bit flacky, but nowadays it is very good. Although I can understand if you are not using the framework yourself anymore, because you went full DotNet that maintaining an open source C++ gui framework with a hunderd developers that will not generate any revenue doesn't make much sense, financially speaking. But strategically it might be a poor choice to sell it off.. Time will tell.

I'll wait out for anything with near field communication.

Any other phone is outdated if it doesn't have that.

Its a psychology 1-2-3.. The safest bet is to say no..

I consider myself quite 'tech-savvy'' but a lot of these popups I don't know how to answer myself. It's more like if I say yes, I might be doomed but if I say no I might be doomed as well.

The problem with these auto-updaters is that you don't know who is asking you the question, the producer of the product or the hacker that has hacked the update protocol of that product, to infect you with a virus..

At least on windows when you install something through the windows installer you get a windows popup with a signed certifficate of what the company is that is trying to install stuff on your machine.

So when you really choose to install some software with a unknown certificate you know you are putting yourself at risk.

Maybe windows elevation should have been a lot stronger, and just not allowed in program elevation.. But as many windows users were complaining already about elevation, I guess user convenience did win against safety one more time...

Obviously a conflict of interest, but he got one thing right..

Theres is this difference between:

* Consuming information/creativity.

* Producing information/creativity.

When consuming, a touch pad is more than enough, you are basically reading a book with pictures/movies.. But when I am producing information/creativity I feel like I need 6 more arms, and a lot of keyboards/input devices to keep up with me. So even a PC with fancy logitech keyboard, and mouse with 10 buttons will just not do.

I am not sure that surface can deliver, or that I will be running to my desktop as soon as I want to input something more than a few sentences, like I do now.

This kind of stuff should be punished severly..

It is a serious invasion of privacy, and I can very much understand the psychological effect this can have on someone.

Obviously here most people think its a laughing matter, or somehow justified just because we 'all' probably want to see miss Scarlett in the nude.

What was meant to be private should be treated with respect and not published for the whole world to see. If you do that then in my eyes you are a rat, and if you wilfully steal that mail/pictures you are a also a thief.. So he basically is a thief and a rat..

If you'r pro.....

You could be fragging and nail clipping at the same time!

Nobody works for free.

So if you want to have real quality content, I am willing to pay for it. If the price is fair, and it is easy to pay for just that one item. And not have to have a subscription set up you can't get rid of any more.

Let me give an example: I am not a big football fan, but there are some games during the year that I want to see.. So a subscription is a nogo. I would gladly pay something like 3 or 4 euros for viewing Barcelona vs Real Madrid.. but I don't want a subscription to all football matches during the whole year.

I am pretty sure that theres a lot of money lost now, because companies just want to tie us into subscriptions. Thats a much bigger problem than the drm itself. drm is just a means... you first have to have a goal.

It does not matter.. we are still alone

Most of those systems are so far away that even if we detect life, and try to fly there to contact them, they will be most likely be extinct once we get there. And even if they are not, if we fly back we will find out humanity has become extinct.

So even if we are surrounded by billions of races, we are still alone. (unless of course we invent space folding).

Which part of MicroSOFT don't you understand?

Microsoft is about software. not hardware. So I find it extremely unlikely that Ms will ever buy a hardware company (which Nokia is).

Their whole bussiness strategy is about leaving hardware to 'partners'. (hp, dell, htc, samsung, .. just about everybody that matters) So I don't see them turning that strategy around any time soon, because it will just rub their remaining partners the wrong way, and not to mention that it will bring counts of monopoly probes and lawsuits on their doorstep.

Handheld gaming consoles are dead.

Rendered obsolete by smartphones. Or should I call them multipurpose transportable multimedia devices (where actually calling someone has just taken a backseat to all the other stuff you can do with it).

So here's the recipe for a gamer for you:

1. You want to game on a holiday you take your gaming laptop.

2. You want to game while travelling you use your smartphone.

3. You want to game at home, you take your 800 watt PC with dual graphical cards, and SSD's to match. (or gaming console, if you prefer being owned by PC gamers at any shooting game).

Browsers should not have access to your harddrive, period.

They should have some seperate program where I can enter/store my credentials per website, For which the browser should supply them with the appropriate entry in this collection which a specific website then can read and log me in automatically. Any other reason why websites would want to be storing any data is bull anyway.

And yes, fix http so it is session aware, or store the session in the url. But don't misuse cookies for that either.

And the funny thing is: The Register is as bad as any of them, why did I get advertisement of a certain clothing website I visited on your site? Adsense is bad, it's one of the worst offenders of cookie/browser history misuse.

Still as an european it hurts me to say that boeing has done the right thing.

Carbon or not that does not matter. What matters is that they have read the market better. Local small airports are booming, while the big ones are losing bussiness quick. Why?

People just like to travel from their small town to their destination, not first travel by train or by car or airplane, to another city then take a big plane, just to land close to where they want to be, and then take another bus, train, car or airplane to the final destination.

Best anti virus fail ever.

If you are too lazy to test your virus definition files against your own binaries, then that probably says enough about testing it against other non-malware like operating system files, and other innocent victims of your anti-virus products appetite for destruction.

Rip my friend..

exit(INT_MAX);

More choice != more freedom

Look up "The paradox of choice" on youtube by Barry Schwartz.

I think Steve Jobs has watched that, and Stallman probably didn't.

Do you really think that an OS where you can choose loads of filesystems, desktopmanagers, distributions in all kinds of weird combinations will bring more freedom? Or will all these choices just bring paralysis..?

The problem with programmers is, they always want to make systems that suits them (with thousands of wild options to toggle on and off), but they forget to take into account that the majority of users are not programmers.

Steve Jobs got that fact straight. Although maybe restricting to programmers, Apples products are usable for users, its does not make sense to create a program (or os) that is handy for programmers but just wildly confusing for the people you are really writing it for.

Ps. and no, I don't own any Apple soft- or hardware. But that's just because I find it too expensive for what they offer.

A patent on time..

Darn why didn't I think of that...

Great add.

haven't listened to a word she said.

Really interested in what kind of patent(s) Microsoft has..

It must be something good and un-refutable.. Samsung is one of the biggest IT/Hardware/electronics companies in the world, I don't think you can just bully them into paying you money.

They have more than enough to buy an army of the best lawyers to defend themselves...

Security is always a hassle.

So you are saying you want to run a 'maybe' rootkitted OS on your machine?

Signing a kernel is a hassle? Sure, yeah any security measure is a hassle. I think Linux wants to be a safe OS too right? Or are we going to play the Apple game and state that there is no reason for that because the OS is so secure it can't be rootkitted?

For development purposes I agree. There should be an option to disable, but normal customers would surely want an OS that they can be reasonably sure that it isn't easy to be rootkitted.

An IPad is still a PC.

PC just means Personal Computer. Its yours you can do with it what you want, it can compute.

Tadaaaaa: It's a PC.

Just because it doesn't have a keyboard and mouse (by default) doesn't make it something else all of a sudden.

Please look up the word native

It might not mean what you think it means. There are many languages with JIT compilers that compile write-once-run-anywhere code to native code, so it can run faster.

It does not have to mean they will extend html 5 with the an <asm> tag and put a bunch of x86 specific assembly code in there.

Its not about linux, its about creating a judicial president

Sony advertised the PS3 to be able to perform a certain amount of functions:

- gaming

- surfing/browsing

- blueray player

- running another operating system. (turning it into a 'real' computer).

- media player.

- etc

They even made commercials advertising it as such. So if you buy such a product, it should perform as advertised. And it should continue to perform as advertised.

I have a PS3 and I never even bothered to install linux, because thats not why I bought it, but I can understand if you bought it 'partly' for that, and that function is now denied to you as a consumer you would feel cheated.

If this stands, then what is to keep sony from disabling the ps3 from being a media player? (and yes I do use it for that, next to gaming).

You can say that you dont have to agree with the eula, but that is not really an option, because they advertised the ps3 to be a multipurpose machine, and if you don't sign the aggreement you can't go online anymore, disabling another purpose: Being online and doing online gaming.

So Sony basically offer you the choice of chopping of your hands, or your feet.. Doesn't sound like a nice choice you offer people who are supposed to be your customers.

yes! more ads..

So phone A is beating phone B because it has more ads?

Thats what everybody wants right? Ads are cool adds are fun!! Maybe we should have a 24/7 radio ad channel.

The world starts to look more like the world from Demolition man each day. Schwarzenegger already made it to govenor, guess president is just a step up.

Damn I hate adds...

You are fined one credit for a violation of the Verbal Morality Statute.

Ok I will shut up now..

Doh: there is no fooling consumers?

Anybody that has ever read a book using e-ink technology knows there is no substitute (other than a paper book).

I went on Holiday a few years back, to lie on the beach (mostly). Brought my B-Book, had lots of fun with it. Its as easy on the eyes as paper, gets better with more sunlight (and there was lots). It doesnt try to radiate your eyes.

So people trying to fool consumers saying that you can use an lcd device to read books will only catch the unaware. It is not very well suited for that purpose (same as e-ink is not suited for any other purpose than reading static content, its just to slow for dynamic content).