@VeganVegan

It's actually a mis-transliteration of 'busy corner' in the local dialect. The real transliteration is "Wong Kok" - actually "Wong Gok" would be more accurate - anyway, legend has it the that person responsible for putting up the sign with the road name hung the W upside down hence Mong Kok. In a similar vein there's a road in Hong Kong called "Rednaxela Terrace", which again legend has it that the person responsible for putting up the sign inadvertently reversed the order of the letters.

adware sponsered spyware

"Once our platform is installed we know everything that happens on that phone," - no thanks.

iphone-whore

Despite jokes about the jesus phone etc, the Reg are devout iphone worshippers and will mention it at any opportunity possible.

Faulty analogy and analysis

The competing OS's of yesteryear were basically incompatible with each other so when one OS reached a critical mass it will dominate because everybody wants to be "compatible".

The OS in today's mobiles provides:

a) the ability to call and talk with other phones and send/receive SMS

b) the ability to go online and do your email/surfing/etc

No matter what OS your phone has you can still call and talk to other phones.

No matter what OS your phone has you can still do internetty stuff.

Because of this interoperability (real one not MS's version) the likelyhood of any one OS completely dominating the market is slim.

MS's frand

Didn't MS used to (or still?) have a "FRAND" policy whereby they charge PC manufacturers for a copy of the OS whether or not a machine shipped with an OS?

Read before commenting

Read the actual complaint (conveniently linked to in the article) before commenting. The complainant "is a Washington, DC based Graduate Fellow at the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University, and a Ph.D. Candidate in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University." and he does mention how to get the major browsers to stop sending the http referrer info (in this case "major browsers" does NOT include IE and Safari).

More interesting is:

"For more than ten years, Google has tracked the links that users click on from the search results page. During the search engine’s first few years, this was done by redirecting all clicks from the search engine results page through a script on Google’s servers, before then redirecting the users’ browser to the server hosting the content they actually wished to view."

That's something that's news to me. I stopped using Yahoo way back when they started obscuring the search results making you click on yahoo links which then redirect you to the target website. Anyway before I started using Firefox and the refcontrol addon I had always copy+paste the cleartext links that Google provide in their results - which is a good thing if the above claim is true.

unlawful activity

"It makes one wonder why why HTC is even bothering to make a Win 7 handset"

Probably because they get paid by MS per unit they make?

"I don't think that smartphone OS's have the same sort of "lock in" that desktop OS's have, so Microsoft still has a large window :) of opportunity left."

It is precisely this lack of lock in that prevented MS from fully leveraging their Windows monopoly. MS can never be competitive in a free and open market.

More importantly ...

Where is the CTRL-ALT-DEL button?

8 years' of royalties??

Seeing as Nokia owns nearly half of Symbian and presumably gets a corresponding share of the profits wouldn't that make it something more like 16 years?

@Welcome to the future

"Methinks the crocodile has lost its teeth"

They still have enough ill-gotten money in the bank to be a destructive force - the ramming of OXML into ISO, the derailing of the OLPC.

scorched earth policy

MS has won a major victory here. Whether or not OLPC goes on to selling any units from now on is moot. They have managed to decapitate OPLC by forcing the top people to resign and destroyed any credibility that Negroponte may have had. And most importantly they have prevented millions of people from getting acquainted with computers using something other than Windows. If the OPLC does still manages to be a success then MS would have indoctrinated a whole new generation who grows up believing the 3 Rs (restart, reboot, reinstall) are the holy tenets of computing.

@Ask before you download

"Even Firefox, that has its annoying "download all to Desktop" 'feature' by default, "

Probably to make life easier for dumb lusers, or the people who have to provide support to them.

I provide tech support over the phone to family & friends and often I have to tell to download this and install that. Before they download I specifically tell them to remember WHERE they are saving the file - 9 times out of 10 right after the download they say they can't find the flipping file.

@Free Trade versus Security

"Just because their gear is cheap and appears capable does not mean it is in our interest to use it. I want to make the argument that strategic equipment (CPU, RAM, display, networking, software) must come from sources we (democratic countries) trust."

You must be living in cloud cuckoo land if you think democratic countries have an agreement not to spy on each other and not to use underhand tactics on each other.

"Joking aside, the single most important organisation in the capitalist world is headquarted in Belgium. It is a place so prestigous that it's employees are banned from ever using the word 'prestige' in internal documentation. That is not NATO, it is SWIFT. It is much more secure than NATO. When you hear of hacking attacks on Belgium, don't think military, think financial. Or beer."

Or they just do what the US did/does, blackmail SWIFT and other corporations to give them whatever info they want:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorist_Finance_Tracking_Program

bonus?

they get bonuses for having not sold a product that isn't available yet?

@I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects

"Almost any body hu is anybody in China uses Yahoo. "

It may have been true 5-8 years ago. These days people and companies use homegrown sites like 163.com or sina.com etc.

@How to *really* scare Microsoft ...

"Implement an office suite that uses OXML correctly. Wouldn't it be hysterically funny if the first OXML-compliant application was FOSS?"

It won't be funny at all. Not it is possible.

But assuming it was, they'll respond by saying "see it is possible to do 3rd party implementations" and promptly starts charging patents licensing fees.

Then after they get their own implementation out they'll extend it making it incompatible with the "standard" (cf. java). The changes they make will of course take years to filter back to ISO (if ever) - of course MS won't be fast tracking the changes.

@ US dud what ?

"Perhaps you could ask each of China's neighbours - they seem to be in dispute with all of them."

Perhaps you're talking from your rear-end? China has no significant disputes with any of its neighbours.

"China has invaded India (1962), Tibet (1949), Vietnam (1979), East Turkestan (1949), and then of course there's Korea."

Tibet and Xinjiang are both within China's internationally recognised borders. It's funny how China "invaded" India when China had spent years building a road in the disputed area and the first that the Indians knew of it was when they saw the newly built road marked on Chinese published maps.

I'm surprised you have the audacity to mention Korea. The US invaded Korea, China repeatedly warned the US not to cross the 38th parallel, the US with their customary arrogance dismissed those warnings and the rest is history. If you feel there's no justification for China's intervention in the Korean War then try justifying the so called Monroe Doctrine.

@Wireless Cr*P

You just got a dud one. FWIW my eeepc can consistently pick up more APs than my Thinkpad Z61. At home the eeepc on average sees about 20 APs whereas the Thinkpad only manages around 10.

Windows' useability?

It makes me sneer to hear people mention Windows' useability (lack of). Features that I take for granted such as auto-focus (on the window under the mouse) and multiple virtual desktops, and which I have been enjoying since my Amiga days, are still missing from Windows. Major time saving conveniences such as having your session saved when you log off and having it restored it when you next log in (which even the old OS/2 had) are obviously non-existent in Windows - it is all the more strange considering that a Windows user would benefit from that feature much more so than a Linux user, since the former would encounter BSODs (or whatever MS disguises it as these days) so many times a day.

Little things like text highlighted with the mouse being automatically copied to the clipboard (and can be pasted using the middle mouse button) are major time savers - and I don't need to worry about accidentally overwriting the clipboard because klipper allows me to keep a clipboard history.

bloody marketing depts

"That's the front thickness - HP didn't say how much bigger the 2133 gets at the back"

WTF would one want to know the thickness of the thinnest edge? I want to know the thickness of the thickest edge TYVM. Bloody tw@ts.

@Easy to avoid

"In that case, all you need to do is take one shot, and immediately duck behind a wall. By the time the gun has slewed to your position, you're not visible anymore!"

No, in that case the jerks will fall back to SOP and call in airstrike(s) to level the wall/building that you're hiding behind/in, and maybe the surrounding ones too for good measure.

@ Ominous

"where is the US / UK government?"

Too busy having fun with Echelon.

@Swap + Flash Usage

"I expect they've simply removed the restore partition that takes up quite a bit of the flash on the 4GB version (it's not really needed anyway, as you can restore the OS from a USB key or external DVD drive anyway)."

It does not have a separate restore partition. The base system which doubles up as the restore partition is mounted read-only, and is merged with the partition holding the user generated files using the magic of UnionFS. Why is it that MS with its self-proclaimed "innovative" prowess haven't come up with something as useful as UnionFS?

various

@Surely a better solution ..... would be a new international treaty which outlawed robotic weapons altogether?

Why would a country which had the technological edge agree to such a ban? It's only when you have technological parity, when the other guy can hurt you as much as you can hurt them, will there be any moves towards such a ban (whether it be ICBM's, nuclear warheads, space based weapons, or even white phosphorous).

@Just imagine what we could have done if all that money had been spent on clean water and sanitation instead of thinking of new ways to blow people up.

If the hundreds of billions that the US spent in their war of terror had been invested in productive research we could have cures for cancer, aids, malaria, and maybe even the common cold by now. Instead the money has been squandered in nurturing a new generation of disaffected youth in the Middle East and Central Asia who grows up knowing that it was the Americans who killed their brother/sister/father/mother/uncle/dog.

@US Govt do what they like with foreigner's code? Don't theink WTO etc would stand up to that. So that isn't a threat to OSS.

That assumes that the present US Govt gives a toss about the WTO and its rulings.

@What we should be concerned about..

"Is the fact that China is doing so many, many deals buying up Countries oil production for many decades into the future ... We, the West, need to get much more pro active."

So you're saying that it's bad for China to be *buying* oil and instead they should follow the proper procedures like invade oil-rich countries under the pre-text of WMDs, and when none are found change the mission objectives to (1) making said oil-rich country into a "beacon of democracy"?

@Don't be so dismissive

"I know from a relative who works in the government, and has to deal with this stuff on a daily basis, that China is indeed waging cyber-warfare against us"

And are you too naive to realise that the US is also "waging cyber warfare" against every other country of significance? I don't see other countries making a song and dance about it.

@When you run with the Devil, don't be surprised when you get burned!

'I find it ironic and funny that these companies that rolled over, er I mean "cooperated" with the Chinese authorities are rewarded with their sites being blocked.'

They had to comply with the laws of the land in which they were doing business in. How is that different from:

1) the US forcing non-US banks to hand over financial details of their customers (who are not even US nationals FFS)

2) the US forcing airlines to hand over passenger details

under the pretense of Bush's War of Terror.

@US patent law forbids ...

"I guess USPO knows that if third parties were allowed to dispute patents, 99% of us patents would be proved invalid."

The USPTO is self-funded by the application fees. Hence it would be in their interests to grant as many patents as possible. Who cares if they're invalidated later.