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Of course, you'll have to look really hard to get your laugh -- like every Apple outage since the great 2008 outage (which everyone forgot about immediately) it will be almost completely ignored in the press. Hell, they had a huge outage Sept. 30th -- no one seems to have noticed.

Speaking of which, Siri has been offline all day.

Apparently no one thought that was worth mentioning either. I'm sure it'll make it to Slashdot... some time next week. Maybe.

1) We get to claim 30% of your revenue

... and we paid out 2.5 billion dollars so far to developers. Also just out: The Apple app store (the one where you can buy apps for Macs only) is the _largest_ seller of PC software! Beating Walmart, Best Buy and anyone else. And can you tell me any other store that lets developers keep 70% of the revenue.

Uhh for Mac software not the largest seller of PC software...
http://nexus404.com/Blog/2011/06/06/wwdc-2011-mac-app-store-1-mac/

What?!?! I'm not familiar with that story, but if it's this one, the Blender press release highlights the problem:

The Blender Foundation has issued a press release, a portion of which reads:
On their web pages they intentionally hide that the products are distributions of GNU GPL licensed software, and that the software is freely downloadable as well. More-over, even after contacting them several times, they don’t remove copyrighted content from their websites. A lot of text and images have been copied from blender.org and random images – not even from blender – were copied from various CG websites.

In short, the problem is not that FLOSS is being sold, which the FSF itself endorses and which has a long history going back to Emacs early days, or even that someone other than the original developer is selling FLOSS (which the FSF doesn't care about in the least), but that there were copyright violations both on the product's website and on the program itself for not following the GPL requirements.

This is completely unlike the Banshee / Canonical situation because Canonical is complying with the license. Banshee isn't even GPL -- it's MIT:

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software. [emphasis mine]

You need to learn more about the licensing of specific projects before you pull out the paintball gun to start smearing.

The screenshots I've seen (like the one here: http://nexus404.com/Blog/2011/01/16/facebook-applications-can-now-get-your-phone-number-address-change-in-facebook-code-lets-developers-access-your-home-address-mobile-number/) suggest that it is a new option when adding applications. So unless they were criminally stupid (and I'm not discounting that as a possibility, but let us follow the other train of thought for a moment) and setup some form of grandfathering whereby apps with certain existing rights to access your account can just request the new right without your intervention, Zynga got their disreputable mits on nothing by default.

Of course the app could ask the system for the extra info (I'd hope the system would prompt the user before handing it over), and apps you newly allow in might request it too - but you can always say "no" to the stupid app/quiz/whatever and get on with the rest of your life. Anyone who clicks "yeah, go on then" to an app having access to their info then not being happy about the app maker using that info are their own worse enemy.

Top tip: don't give FB *anything* you don't want the rest of the world to know, then there is no need to worry. Other than what your contacts may post about you, of course...

I've never said "yes" to an app as they *all* seem to request basic details about my friends. Not that my friends care (half of the idiots say "yes" to every app/quiz/other-shite anyway so there info is as good as public) but I'm old fashioned enough to think it is not my place to give the app permission to access the info. I don't care if the info is public anyway. If you want to just take it, then just take it and deal with your conscience yourself if it has trouble, but if you feel the need to ask then you should be asking *them* not me.

I'm fairly happy with my cheap-ass HTC Slide running CyanogenMOD . You can get them for about half the price of the big expensive Android phones.
http://trumblings.blogspot.com/2010/11/migrating-to-android-for-palm-linux.html

Keyboard pic

The ConnectBot SSH client can do port forwarding, so you can set up a secure tunnel for androidVNC (which is probably better than X forwarding as far as maintaining persistent sessions across mobile networks go). The phone supports T-mobile HSDPA network, which can give you noticeably lower latency than EDGE / GPRS, and near-DSL speeds. Your ssh sessions stay connected in the background until you tell them to disconnect, and the keyboard is pretty comfortable to use.

Some random notes:

• + Terminal with default font is 80x25!
• + the trackpad button is the Ctrl key, hitting it twice sends the Esc key. Works great with screen.
• - no cursor buttons, and the trackpad can be quite finicky when trying to send several l/r u/d
• - the HTC Slide uses the older ARMv6 cpu, so no 3D-intensive apps like Google Earth Mobile or high-end games. Other than that, it runs everything fine
• - sending some special characters in ConnectBot can be a chore, such as pipes and < > ... need to call up the softkeyboard for those, by first closing the physical keyboard, tapping on the softkeyboard icon, then calling up the "num" then "alt" keyboard :-/ . Probably better to make aliases for your often-used command strings. But that's something that could be remedied in software, hopefully... ConnectBot doesn't appear to use the physical Symbol key well.

How should he have released the key to the rest of us? We all have a sacrosanct right to own our property, and I don't give two *$#% if somebody uses it for piracy. I applaud what he has done here, and in fact, it has finally made me consider actually purchasing a PS3.

If Sony does brick all the consoles, don't blame GeoHot. Blame Sony, because they are the ones that have acted in a morally repugnant fashion for years.

Just remember though that the way Sony make money on the PS3 is by charging people a percentage for the privilege of selling a game for the PS3. Sony also charge development houses a fortune for kit they need to write the games in the first place. They need some sort of special console that will run unsigned code then Sony keep final control of what comes out for the console by charging the games house to sign the code for release.

When the PS3 first hit the market it was sold by Sony at a loss and carried on like that for years. If Sony could not engage in all these practices they would have to do one of two things:

1) Abandon the market. Sony is a business, if they cannot make money by doing something they will not do it.

2) Charge more for the console so they do not need to make up such a huge loss on every console sold.

Some links:

http://nexus404.com/Blog/2010/02/05/sony-still-posts-a-loss-for-every-ps3-sold-ps3-costs-sony-18-more-than-it-costs-you/
http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2010/06/29/ps3-no-longer-sold-at-loss/

If Sony did not know they were making a fortune from every game sold they would never be able to risk selling the console at the stupendous loss they were to start with in 2006 when it first came out. This would push the price of buying a PS3 to something comparable to the price of a new PC unless Sony could find another way of ensuring that they were paid a percentage for every PS3 game sold.

http://nexus404.com/Blog/2010/10/04/new-iphone-privacy-issue-uncovered-by-hacker-the-iphone-is-now-said-to-send-udid-through-apps-serious-privacy-concerned-raised-probably-a-non-issue/

There may not be much mobile love between Google and Apple, but I'm quite sure that neither one wants Microsoft to win anything in such a market.

It's already much more fucked up than one would think possible. Go ahead, draw another line there - but making any conclusions about who's a friend of who from it seems to be unwise given the lack of overall clarity. So far it looks more like a free-for-all "last man standing" than anything else.

"Free" as in ad-supported. But what happens if/when vendors or phone companies start making "de-Googled" Android builds? Apparently, Verizon's version of the Samsung Galaxy S uses Bing instead of Google, and fixing that is a bit convoluted (for a non-techie).

Well the anecdotal experience of "what your friends did" doesn't match up to real world statistics.

If you want to talk about evidence, you could provide some.

Of course people were pirating music. But in the context of purchased digital music, since iTunes came on-line its been by far the dominant digital music retailer.

And since it came on-line, certainly when it was DRM'd, it was a worse experience than piracy, money aside. Maybe my sample set is skewed, but I did find that people who bought from iTunes once or twice were not likely to repeat the experience once they understood the implications of that DRM. And yes, a few were bitten by it.

As opposed to Android devices that have to be "rooted" to install applications of your choice

Um, bullshit.

Yes, they have to be rooted to make some changes -- possibly including removing crapware. They do not have to be rooted simply to install applications of your choice.

Try installing any apps that are not on the market place on any Android phone sold by AT&T.

Ah, you mean this -- good to know, but these are far from the only android phones. Good thing I'm on Verizon.

Sony totally boned the PS3 lifetime, though.

But not in any sort of way they actually care about. The lifetime of a PS3 they care about is the amount of time you can use it to carry on consuming their content (ie, licensed PS3 Games and BlueRay Movies). Other crap you can do with the device that does not make them any money they don't care about.

Even on the PC Linux is a niche market amongst home users that carries very little commercial weight as a result. I bet on the PS3 it was even more so so when the Other OS feature became a security hole in the platform it was simply not worth fixing when it could be removed far more cheaply and the only people it would annoy a few geeks.

Remember also that they did not force you to apply the update so if you wanted to you could have carried on playing all the single player games you already had and never upgrade. The only legitimate customers it affected were people who used the Other OS feature and also played games online.

The simply fact is they removed a feature that most of they customer base did not care less about having. They did this to make sure they carried on getting revenue from games producers. Sony's big selling point to game producers is the enhanced security over the Xbox360 which has more users. If they lost this selling point more and more developers would just abandon the platform and save the money they spend supporting it.

I know the PS3 has better capabilities but that is a selling point to end users, not game development companies since they usually have to support both platforms anyway and have to deal with lowest common denominator hardware. They can improve the rendering a little on the PS3, but the bulk of the gameplay will be identical between PS3 and Xbox360.

The truth is that I am amazed the PS3 is still getting any game development anyway. It has long since been overshadowed by the XBox360 and Wii in terms of userbase. It may have been by far the best console on paper, but it was just priced too high to manufacture. This made the console expensive to buy and even then it was being sold at a loss and still is apparrently, long after the Xbox360 is being sold at a profit per unit.

http://nexus404.com/Blog/2010/02/05/sony-still-posts-a-loss-for-every-ps3-sold-ps3-costs-sony-18-more-than-it-costs-you/

This leaves Sony's only hope being that it will take off as 3.5 generation console and creep back into the market as the Xbox360 and Wii start to look dated in terms of technical specs (ie - no BlueRay). This will only work though if Sony can cling onto game developers producing content for it. They can only do this by screaming to the world that their console is the most pirate proof in a big old PR game with the managers of the game development companies. PR games are very rarely based on fact anyway so whether the Other OS feature actually made it more secure is largely irrelevant.

Sorry, but different Poreche. the hybrid is a 918 spyder, your linking to a Boxster spyder. Basically the Boxster has a 320hp flat 6 while the hybrid 918 has a 500hp V8 plus 2 109hp electric motors. Also it looks to be 4 times more expensive then the Tesla at about $650,000!

http://nexus404.com/Blog/2010/07/29/porsche-918-spyder-goes-to-production-kind-of-confirmed-back-in-march-the-green-light-on-the-porsche-918-spyder-is-now-officially-on/

most phone users do not really "own" they phones during the initial 2 years

You do own the phone (physically), but in consideration for the discount you got on it, the phone company pwns joo for a $350 early termination fee if you stop sending them their monthly ransom on the service contract. The phone is still yours to do with as you please.

Mobile phone carriers have just tried to give you the impression that you don't own the phone, by making the phone you own useless for doing anything other than connecting to their network and buying ringtones on their web portal that cost more than the full song download.

They do this through technical hindrance such as unique protocols (cdma vs GSM), unique frequencies (3G on 1900MHz vs 2100MHz), carrier SIM lock (or no sim at all), or vendor-specific firmware (see CDMA phones), auto-jamming your phone with their service books and restriction software (i.e. put the carrier's SIM card into the unlocked Blackberry you bought outright [don't even need to connect to their network] and your phone's wi-fi & GPS mapping software is disabled so they can sell it back to you for $10-$30/mo), and by black-listing the device's IMEI if they didn't like how you left their service.

Hence why I just get a hard copy of the contract and actually read it. There's no gray font BS, etc. Although IANAL, tiny gray text that isn't legible on a hard copy of your contract is obviously going to make it hard to enforce the contract. The technical nitty-gritty is minimal, so even a non-techie should be able to read both pages of it, and know what the scoop is.

I recall some issue with Telus in Canada trying to terminate 3-year "unlimited" contracts for iPhones (I think it was some sort of "blogger plan", if I recall). I don't know what became of that though.

More recently, they've implemented a 5GB cap on iPads without informing the public.
http://nexus404.com/Blog/2010/06/01/telus-stealthy-adds-ipad-data-limit-canadian-ipad-data-plan-isnt-unlimited-as-telus-adds-5gb-limit/
A 5GB cap seems pretty fair, but Telus doesn't offer the option to just pay another $30/month if you go over your limit, no way: they'll ding you a fortune per 10MB you go over your limit. So using 10GB, instead of being 2x$30/month=$60/month, ends up being roughly $500. Fun times are had by all.

The numbers, as they stand is Google at #1 (with 65.5%), Yahoo at #2 (with 16.8%), Bing at #3 (with 11.5%), Ask.com at #4 (with 3.7%) and AOL Search at #5 (2.5%). Google and Bing both saw increases in their market share (yes, somehow Google got bigger last month) while Yahoo and Ask.com lost some marketshare. AOL Search somehow still relevant in 2010, didn’t lose or gain marketshare. [1]

That quote is from last month. I hardly see 65% as some insurmountable number. All the search engines have the same data to work with. Google has website tools. Bing should have them, too.

Some countries (the U.S.) are hugely Google -- 85% -- but some countries barely know what it is. The number one search on Google last year in Korea was for Naver, a portal / search engine. The number two result was for Daum, another portal / search engine. People in that country only use Google to get to another search engine.

Google has such computing power that there are things that normal companies can't compete effectively in -- voice recognition seems to be one. Maybe you could get Google for having too much computing power and being "too good" because of it, but I doubt any court is going to say "Hey, this is hurting the consumer" and punish Google for it.

Google's big. It's powerful. I'm still much more afraid of Facebook. There's a monopoly that 's locking people into its platform..

It should be said that so far the only Apps to be pulled are those that actively scan for WiFi hotspots and not those that employ a database paired with the iPhone's GPS capabilities

So the ones left are totally lame.

Let's try this again. What came out first, the HTC Hero or the HTC HD2? Which one was designed to look like the other again?

Please remind me, because, oh wait, why would I trust you? I prefer fact. htc hero: October 11th

HTC HD2: November 11th .

Maybe you should think again, since you don't understand anything. People hack windows mobile because it's atrocious as it exists currently. XDA devs is for hacking of all HTC devices, whether winmo or android. If you think xda devs is all about windows mobile then I take it you don't even realize that HTC magic (g1) is a huge part of android hacking?

Or maybe I should say the name cyanogenmod? I looked into every site in your list, and unless the name was pocketpc, it didn't cover exclusively windows mobile. Really, what do you expect from a site like that? Do I expect a site that says "windowsfans" to cover android? I can cite a whole lot of android sites too, but it still doesn't show for any actual interest (and marketshare will show you that) for windows mobile, which is drifting around 5% or less at this point, and shrinking.

Thanks for reminding me that apparently you love windows mobile. That's about the most embarrassing piece of software I've ever heard anyone being associated with.

I haven't seen much talk about this, but it seems pretty potentially ground shaking to me that they could use something like this GSM/CDMA chip that has been in testing since 1998. Even though some articles suggest availability of the Qualcomm chip wont be until 2011, do any of you think this shines light on the possibility of Apple pulling something like this off early?

Panasonic has announced plans to create 'home batteries.' They are lithium-ion batteries large enough to power a house for a week, making energy sources such as solar and wind power more feasible. Also, you can buy energy when it is cheapest, and don't need to worry about power outages anymore.

Sorry, but if they have only just "announced plans", then, for the foreseeable future, I still can not power a house for a week, and I still need to worry about power outages.

Wake me up, when I can pick these up at Lowe's... Or, at least, order them online somewhere...

Indeed, TFA itself uses the proper tenses and gives the ETA for what currently can only be called "vaporware":

Panasonic is going to create one of the hottest batteries available to date. The new lithium-ion storage cell should power up a whole house in 2011 when it could be available to the general public. [...] No specific details about the future home battery from Panasonic have been given yet. In two years time we should know more about the device and Panasonic will definitely want to periodically show everyone its progress.

CmdrTaco, WTF?..

There is one platform out there that's resistant to the dancing bunnies problem.

The iPhone.

Unfortunately, that's the only way to be resistant to it - don't allow third-party software unless it's been inspected by real people whose job it is to inspect it.

There's an app for that. http://nexus404.com/Blog/2009/12/05/report-says-iphones-are-subject-to-spywaremalware-infection-non-jailbroken-iphones-not-as-safe-as-expected/

wonder why they don't make mini 802.11n dongles then? Oh wait, they do.

They would probably get really freaked out if a big black guy with a white camera showed up!

Yeah, I'd ask him why he bought that POS limited edition white Pentax DSLR: http://nexus404.com/Blog/2008/12/17/pentax-limited-edition-k2000-white-dslr-k2000-double-zoom-slr-kit/. I would have told him an Nikon was a much choice. ;)

a friend of mine does large boat electrics and control systems, the interface they have to the engines and statistics monitors/dead man alarms etc is in fact a touch screen core 2 duo, while I'm fairly sure the ones he chose were more cost effective, there are lots of things like these about.

it only really lacks in the video card, more than enough power for any kind of video or audio you could want

My sets:
Normal headphones, best quality sound I've heard.
Noise-Cancelling headphones: sound distortion, but does a good job removing things like fans.

The best part of the Sony's are the breakaway cables. The headphone cable is actually a male-to-male patch cable, so it just pops out of the headphones if they get yarded on.

Having used a variety of chairs, I'd say the following are important:

o Wheels - being able to push the chair back when you move away from the desk (otherwise you will probably just tear the carpet).

o Adjustable height - make sure you are not hunched up in front of the keyboard or bending your neck looking down.

o Armrests - definitely needed for sitting back and letting your arms rest. As others have pointed out, make sure these are adjustable.

o Rotatable - maybe you want to have a side desk alongside your main desk

The Aeron seems to match these.

For a desk, I'd go for the B747 Engine cowling desk

My brother built something like this LEGO panoramic camera mount using Mindstorms. His digital camera screw-mounts to it, and it turns a precise number of degrees and pushes the camera's shutter button, then turns again... A lot of other people have done similar things. I'm in the midst of building a LEGO-based robotic arm to grab rings and feed them into a spotwelder. LEGO is a great prototyping tool and with the addition of mindstorms you can build amazing things: the LEGO rubik's cube solver is pretty old, but the LEGO car assembly line is pretty spectacular. That's like $5000 of LEGO right there.