Incidentally, further to my above answer, 4G rollout is in its infancy in the EU because 3.5G (HSPA+) rollout has been so large. HSPA+ is fairly comparable to LTE in speed in real world usage (though LTE can go faster with enough bandwidth and antennas, 300Mb/s vs 168Mb/s); so with 3.5G so widely available, there hasn't been the driving need to push out 4G LTE very urgently.
I understand some mobile carriers are actually calling HSPA+ 4G in the US; which is a bit cheeky, really. On that basis, the EU has had 4G widely deployed for quite a while now...
It's mainly that 4G rollout is still in its infancy in the EU. We're all going to be using the same frequency bands, mainly 2.6Ghz and 1.8Ghz - the plan is to eventually retire all the 2G frequencies and re-use them them for 3G, 4G or other services.
The UK using the same bands as the rest of the EU (and most of asia) has been the plan for a long time. In this specific case, the public auctions of spectrum for 4G have not yet taken place - we have to finish turning off analog TV to free some of the spectrum planned, though it's nearly done. But EE (merged tmobile & orange) already have some spectrum 'in hand', in the 1800Mhz band that is due to be allocated to 4G, so they've been allowed to go ahead with an early 4G rollout on the frequencies they already have in the UK.
In any case, the 700MHz band in the US is already in use by freeview (OTA digital TV), 2100Mhz is in use by 3G; I forget the others, but it's already all in use, so there was never any chance a US-bound 4G device would work in the UK, or the rest of the EU. While the old 'quad band' approach may eventually work, currently there's too many bands to support in each area; you'd need something like a 9 band 4G device for true global coverage! Too expensive, too power hungry.
So currently ipads, iphones ship with US 4G frequency support, no matter where you buy them; which was always going to be useless outside the US, and apple got rapped for advertising 4G support prominently on their devices in the UK when they knew that they would never work in the UK or the EU. Same happened in australia, which uses the same bands.
Eventually they'll presumably ship EU/asia 4G devices, same as they did with the 3G support where the same problem exists.
he Mac App Store is about consumers, just like the iOS App Store. Not creators or 'professionals'. Even if you estimate that 10% of Mac's desktop/laptop hardware sales were 'professionals' (an extremely high estimate) and every single one of them abandoned Mac as a result of these changes (unlikely), that's still only $493 million. 1.4% of Apple's revenue
There is one group of professionals they can't drive off though; the people that write those lovely profitable apps that go in the app stores.
If people can't get their dev environment running, they won't dev apps, and without new and updated apps (to support the new versions of the OS), the platform would be in deep trouble. So I fully expect Gatekeeper to become mandatory at some point; you won't be able to turn it off. You'll still be able to install apps on OSX from outside the app store, but only if they're signed with a dev certificate. Which you need to be an apple dev, i.e. pay the annual $99, to get. And you'll still be able to run apps you compile yourself without a cert. But if you're paying for a dev cert, you might as well distribute though the app store, as you're paying to do so anyway...
For commercial devs, not a major issue as they're already paying for it, and they'll be able to run test builds without signing each one. Open source or non-profit coders though? Crap out of luck. But then they don't make money for apple, so who cares about them? it's not like they write anything useful*... [/sarcasm]
Because cherry G80's look like they're a reject from the 1970s, and take up the desk space to match?
I have a G80-3000 UK cherry blue at the office, and it beats the hell out of a rubber membrane - but the thing's near twice the size of a filco majestouch (my choice at home), and that's not even comparing to say the tenkeyless filco's which are tiny in comparison.
Plus I couldn't find a G80 with cherry browns and a UK layout.
If you're bottoming out a cherry keyboard though, you're probably doing it wrong. Cherry switches have the activation point somewhat higher than the bottom of the key travel - so you can touch type with a lighter 'gliding' motion across the keys, only depressing them as much as you need to to hit the activation point. Some, like the blues and browns give you a tactile 'change in force' when you hit it, so you know you've activated and can start back on the way up. This is hard to learn to do though, especially after years of using a rubber membrane keyboard as your muscle memory is to hammer the key down until you get the 'fingershock' of hitting bottom.
Kinda the whole point of cherry switches is to cushion your finger, so you can get 'sprung' back up before you bottom out, so you 'glide' across the keyboard when typing rather than hammering 'em down. Makes em a lot quieter too.
Buckling spring or scissor switches on the other hand...
Isn't any keyboard with moving parts, i.e., anything that's not touch sensitive a "mechanical keyboard"?
Strictly speaking, they're mechanically switched keyboards, as opposed to the rubber-dome-with-electrical-contacts type most cheap (and not-so-cheap) keyboards are; i.e. 'mechanical' keyboards have a moving parts lever and/or spring based mechanism to register a keypress rather than just a bubbled rubber mat.
It's just a handy way to tell the two types apart - the typing style on a mechanical keyboard is much easier on the fingers, especially if you're a touch typist as you don't need to hammer the key all the way to the bottom to get it to register - a mechanical keyboard with tactile feedback like the cherry blue or brown switches means you can touch type without the 'clack' of the key hitting the bottom at all, so actually ends up quieter overall as well as easier on the fingers because you're never bringing the fingertip to a juddering stop when the key hits the keyboard tray, you're cushioned on the spring travel instead. Takes a while to get used to though, especially if you've been used to typing on a rubber mat keyboard for a long time - you have to unlearn hammering the keyboard as hard as possible.
An alternative to a big expensive cherry switch or buckling spring keyboard (or very expensive topre keyboard) is a laptop-style scissor-switch mechanical keyboard - many people like the imac wireless keyboard without knowing that it's got mechanical key switches underneath, just ones with a short travel; you do bottom out, but because the activation force is light and and travel short, it's still easier on the hands than pounding on a rubber dome keyboard.
For me, as you might have guessed, it's a lot more about avoiding pain at the end of the day of keyboarding than being a super-fast typist, though you can end up improving your wpm too as a side effect.
Now I think about it, I've got that wrong - the cable is USB, but it comes with a PS/2 adapter so it will properly be PS/2 if you need NKRO rather than 10KRO - it has the circuitry for both.
Available with cherry browns, blues or blacks depending on what tactile response you want. Ps2 native with usb adapter if needed.
I have the cherry brown filco at home (I type and game on it) and it's the best keyboard I've ever owned - and that includes my old IBM death spring model m. The filco leather wrist wrest is also worth investing in.
Blues are best for typing (I have a cheaper cherry blue g80-3000 at the office), blacks are better for gaming, but I've found browns to be a good compromise for general purpose use - and since they're non clicky, I'm less likely to be murdered by the missus.
Available with cherry browns, blues or blacks depending on what tactile response you want. Ps2 native with usb adapter if needed.
I have the cherry brown filco at home (I type and game on it) and it's the best keyboard I've ever owned - and that includes my old IBM death spring model m. The filco leather wrist wrest is also worth investing in.
Blues are best for typing (I have a cheaper cherry blue g80-3000 at the office), blacks are better for gaming, but I've found browns to be a good compromise for general purpose use - and since they're non clicky, I'm less likely to be murdered by the missus.
I've been testing it since the developer preview. I won't get to try the RTM till it pops up in a week in my tech net account, but I've doubt they've changed that much about it.
Imagine Windows 7 where the start menu opened at login and took up the whole screen. That's it.
It's a bit more than that. a) 'legacy' desktop shortcuts look like pants. Really pants. b) no shortcut folders. Instead of being able to group similar apps together in a folder, you can either pin them to them individually - taking up a lot of space - or rely on the 'all apps' shortcut via charms, in which case using the keyboard to search by name is about the only practical method. Which is fine if you're a keyboard warrior, but taking hand off mouse, tap in app name, then hand back on mouse is kinda irritating when you do it a lot. Going from the 'mouse only' nav method I've been using for years in windows (and now OSX) is jarring. c) while we're on the topic, auto installers be nasty on windows 8. Remember all those crappy 'pdf manual, uninstall, various customisations' shortcuts that got dumped into a folder in the start menu and forgotten about? Well now ALL of them get dumped in the Modern screen next to your 'real' shortcuts. You have to be utterly ruthless about cleaning that crap out, or you very quickly get overwhelmed. d) and charms? Goddamn that's a hard gesture to do in an RDP session, multiscreen session or virtual machine. They improved the hot corner 'catchers' with the release preview, but it's still very clearly designed for fullscreen, one screen only use. Which is fine for most users, but absolutely sucks for me as a sysadmin, and many of my users - most of whom are teachers, and have a dual-screen setup with a projector as the 2nd screen. Even half the admin department use dual screens these days as it's a lot cheaper to buy two 24" monitors than a single 30" one plus gpu to drive it, as well as more practical - spreadsheet or word on one screen, reference doc or browser on another etc... e) the constant goddamn nagging to integrate your live account. We're perfectly goddamn happy with our Active Directory and NAS storage and central app deployment, stop fracking nagging about goddamn live integration so you can get the user to buy goddamn Modern Apps off the goddamn app store. For this reason alone, we won't be deploying windows 8.
I could go on, but those are just the most irritating things about Windows Phone 8 Desktop Edition.
GCHQ is hardly a security watchdog - the closest US equivalent would be the NSA.
They're the signals intercept and codebreaker agency of the UK government. One presumes they know their shit when they're looking for backdoors planted by the chinese intelligence servives.
There are two main webstats providers - statcounter, and Net Marketshare. TFA uses the former, Ars Technica uses the latter.
Statcounter uses 3 million + sites; net marketshare 40,000. Statcounter counts total page views, net marketshare counts unique visits per site per user per day. Statcounter doesn't weight their stats, net marketshare does by country, using rather elderly CIA stats IIRC.
Basically, their measurements aren't measuring the same thing. I think weighting by country is a fairly large error, especially as the CIA internet usage stats aren't exactly up to date at times; for example, they don't include substantial chinese mobile device traffic, so can rather drastically weight the stats towards desktop users - and given china is a big holdout of old versions of IE on the desktop, and the substantial size of china's population, that kind of weighting will likely show IE usage higher than it is, which does fit one of the differences. Aditionally, unique visitors is hard to measure, and can also give misleading statistics - if a work user browses a single page at work on their elderly stock IE browser (say, checks the headlines), but then catches up on the same site at home and reads a ton of pages from chrome or their ipad, net marketshare would count that as 50-50 usage between IE and chrome or safari; in reality, they're using their home browser much more, which stat counter would reflect.
The downside of statcounter's approach is when a browser inflates their page views; for example, the chrome 'pre-fetch' default option was thought to drastically inflate its marketshare, because it was silently fetching pages in the background, most of which weren't ever viewed. Statscounter now correct for that, and it affected chrome's share by a fraction of 1%, so in the end wasn't a large factor.
While both use plenty large enough samples to be statistically valid, they still have to be representative samples of a very diverse population of browsers and users. I can't help but think a much larger sample is more likely to be representative.
Overall, while both measures have flaws, I think statcounters methods give a closer approximation to real usage than net marketplace does. That said, I certainly wouldn't use the data from either to two decimal places worth of accuracy on month to month drifts, as many sites (such as ars technica) do - the variation is just not measured that precisely to draw the kind of conclusions that the media often do.
What can be said is that IE's share is steadily shrinking other than the odd blip, while chrome and firefox have been the primary beneficiaries on the desktop of that - firefox is fairly static or shrinking, chrome is growing. Whether they're neck and neck, or chrome is ahead depends upon your stats. No matter how you measure, IE is below 50%. Safari is the big beast in mobile browsing by a long way.
Mor than that is rather hard to say with any great reliability.
Windows 8 doesn't require secure boot. At all. It will happily boot on a pc without it, or with it turned off. I. E. All the legacy kit out there running windows 7.
In order to sell an x86 pc as windows 8 certified, you have to have secure boot; it has to have the Windows 8 signing key as default; and it needs to be able to be turned off. The latter matters to Microsoft because all those enterprise users doing their downgrade rights to 7 would be furious if they couldn't buy new new pcs and put older versions on.
The legacy bios option is independent of the disabling secure boot; I have an efi board that windows 7 works with merrily.
So Linux users can either boot efi, with secure boot disabled, which must be an available option; use legacy bios mode; use a kernel that's been signed with the Microsoft key and leave secure boot on; or put their own key in the secure boot store, if the board supports that. Big whoop.
The setup that's much more restricted is windows 8 ARM devices; there secure boot cannot be turned off, so you can't boot anything other than windows 8 RT. Basically the same as ios and android devices. So you won't be able to install Linux on an ARM tablet, but you should be able to do so on an Intel one.
There are 4 major 3g providers - three, Vodafone, O2, and Everything Everywhere (merger of tmobile and orange). O2 used to be part of BT, but was spun off into their own company iirc. Those customers (or customers of a reseller like tesco or giffgaff) get to use BT wifi hotspots.
The other three can be used to create 3g mobile hotspots that have nothing to do with BT, either via smartphone, laptop with 3g dongle, or dedicated 3g wifi device, such as three's fairly popular mifi device. Even O2 users may want to do so if they're not near a BT openzone access point.
All such portable 3g-wifi access points are banned at olympic venues, officially because it may cause interference with olympic wireless devices used for timing, gps etc. In reality, its more about ensuring BT profit by making most pay to use BT openzone wifi, instead of sharing someone elses 3g-wifi connection (or your own, if yiu want to say connect a wifi only tablet via your smartphone 3g plan)
Um, you want government legislating what a private company can and cannot sell?
Um, the government already does regulate commerce.
For example, it's illegal to sell child porn. It's also illegal to refuse to sell to black people, or homosexuals, or women.
Now whether it's worth having the government regulate that companies can't refuse to sell products that mention a competitor is another discussion altogether, but it's a straw man to pretend it'd be the first time government has got involved in commerce between two private parties, and most people think that's a good thing.
Unless you're one of the people that think 'no coloreds' signs should return to shops, of course.
Well this particular app looks like a standard freemium app - in order to progress, you have to buy in-app purchases to get decent weapons and equipment. They start you out with a proper gun, then take it away on the third level - but of course, you can buy it back with real money. And they had the gall to charge a fee for the game in the first place? Not to mention in game ads for their other games, plus the usual obnoxious pop ups to get you to 'get free gold'.
Frankly its a rip off even now it's 'free'. And since they didn't bother to implement the check against the play store to see if you'd bought it, this seems much more a marketing trick to get headlines rather than a decent Dev getting ripped off.
I got the 8GB version as once you include UK VAT, it's a £40 total difference - or 25% more expensive. And if I need much more space, then an extra slow 8GB isn't really going to cut it anyway. So I've got a micro-usb to USB OTB cable coming for a couple of quid, and can use my existing USB 32GB flash drives with it (with the stick mount app) to playback any amount of media on it when I'm travelling, and it means I don't have to faff about plugging the tablet itself in in advance. Factor in sugar sync/google music/online photo storage/plex the rest of the time when I have wifi or 3G, and I don't see it being much of a problem.
I didn't see that being a a shot against apple per se - much more microsoft and the exchange activesync suits.
"when one firm publishes information about an otherwise proprietary standard and other firms then independently decide (whether by choice or of necessity) to make complementary investments to support that standard in their products. Because proprietary or de facto standards can have just as important effects on consumer welfare, the Committee’s concern regarding the abuse of SEPs should encompass them as well."
Microsoft has patented exchange activesync, and then licences those patents to companies that want to talk to an exchange server. That's what has most android makers coughing up money to microsoft for - the ability to talk to exchange as an email/calendar client. Note, android developers, like all exchange activesync licencees, have to write their own code against the standard, which changes whenever MS update Exchange server.
Now, Exchange is pretty much ubiquitous in business. Therefore talking to Exchange is a necessary defacto standard, but everybody does it a bit differently as they write their own code. Should the patents covering exchange activesync, as a defacto essential standard, be under scrutiny for abuse by the same body that's investigating FRAND patent holders for abuse of their essential nature?
Why not contribute the changes you make back to main line Debian?
Well it's not much of a fork, much more a port.
The debian foundation has two ARM binary versions, the 'performance' version (armhf) that's compiled for ARMv7 or better chips, and the 'compatible' (armel) version that's compiled for IIRC ARMv4 or better.
One of the reasons the pi is so cheap is it uses an older SoC, based on ARMv6. The cortex chipsets A9 you see in say, the iphone or samsung SoC are ARMv7 instruction set based. So up to now, the standard raspberry pi debian distro was the vanilla armel squeeze, with a wheezy armel beta. However, the pi ARMv6 does have floating point hardware that allows for 'hardfloat' compilation rather than the 'softfloat' compilation option - which is used in the ARMv7 version of debian, but not the armel version. Using the hardware support for floating point calculation is obviously faster than doing it in software emulation, thus the new port to take advantage of every little bit of performance you can get out of the $5 SoC on the pi.
So raspbian is basically debian ARM, but all the binary packages have been recompiled with the hardfloat option to take advantage of the floating point hardware; they're using wheezy as the target, which is current debian testing IIRC. It's debian armhf, but compatible with the v6 pi. The Debian Foundation weren't interested in supporting a 3rd version of debian on ARM hardware, which is entirely fair enough - the amount of people interested in an ARMv6 with hardfloat who aren't using the pi is going to be very small, though they can of course run raspbian on their hardware too if they also have ARMv6 with hardware floating point; it's not like debian are rolling in money themselves. They were happy for a 'roll your own' version though, which is what has happened.
Last I checked, the raspbian project team (which is basically two guys) had successfully compiled basically everything in the debian package tree, along with keeping up to date with the constantly changing nature of debian testing; they had a compile farm running continuously to keep up, and the setup is worth reading about when the raspbian site comes back; it's a tiny operation that's giving hundreds of thousands of pi owners a significantly faster default distro on a shoestring budget. I think it's brilliant, and is an excellent example of why open source is so awesome. Want an entire OS and software custom compiled to get every ounce of performance out of the hardware? Go for it! And look, these guys have done it for you!
Apple doesn't want to licence their patents. They want to use them at the ITC and in national courts to get injunctions to stop android devices competiting in the marketplace. It might cost them millions in the inevitable court battles on those that don't get immediately dismissed, but they only need a handful to stick long enough to shut the competition down entirely. They've only had limited success so far with this strategy, but the long term goal of being the monopoly mobile device is worth hundreds of billions so they keep trying.
No need to produce a better product when you can just get import bans on the competition. Especially when apple have nicked plenty of design elements from their predecessors (palm etc) and android.
Slashdot Mirror
Incidentally, further to my above answer, 4G rollout is in its infancy in the EU because 3.5G (HSPA+) rollout has been so large. HSPA+ is fairly comparable to LTE in speed in real world usage (though LTE can go faster with enough bandwidth and antennas, 300Mb/s vs 168Mb/s); so with 3.5G so widely available, there hasn't been the driving need to push out 4G LTE very urgently.
I understand some mobile carriers are actually calling HSPA+ 4G in the US; which is a bit cheeky, really. On that basis, the EU has had 4G widely deployed for quite a while now...
It's mainly that 4G rollout is still in its infancy in the EU. We're all going to be using the same frequency bands, mainly 2.6Ghz and 1.8Ghz - the plan is to eventually retire all the 2G frequencies and re-use them them for 3G, 4G or other services.
The UK using the same bands as the rest of the EU (and most of asia) has been the plan for a long time. In this specific case, the public auctions of spectrum for 4G have not yet taken place - we have to finish turning off analog TV to free some of the spectrum planned, though it's nearly done. But EE (merged tmobile & orange) already have some spectrum 'in hand', in the 1800Mhz band that is due to be allocated to 4G, so they've been allowed to go ahead with an early 4G rollout on the frequencies they already have in the UK.
In any case, the 700MHz band in the US is already in use by freeview (OTA digital TV), 2100Mhz is in use by 3G; I forget the others, but it's already all in use, so there was never any chance a US-bound 4G device would work in the UK, or the rest of the EU. While the old 'quad band' approach may eventually work, currently there's too many bands to support in each area; you'd need something like a 9 band 4G device for true global coverage! Too expensive, too power hungry.
So currently ipads, iphones ship with US 4G frequency support, no matter where you buy them; which was always going to be useless outside the US, and apple got rapped for advertising 4G support prominently on their devices in the UK when they knew that they would never work in the UK or the EU. Same happened in australia, which uses the same bands.
Eventually they'll presumably ship EU/asia 4G devices, same as they did with the 3G support where the same problem exists.
he Mac App Store is about consumers, just like the iOS App Store. Not creators or 'professionals'. Even if you estimate that 10% of Mac's desktop/laptop hardware sales were 'professionals' (an extremely high estimate) and every single one of them abandoned Mac as a result of these changes (unlikely), that's still only $493 million. 1.4% of Apple's revenue
There is one group of professionals they can't drive off though; the people that write those lovely profitable apps that go in the app stores.
If people can't get their dev environment running, they won't dev apps, and without new and updated apps (to support the new versions of the OS), the platform would be in deep trouble. So I fully expect Gatekeeper to become mandatory at some point; you won't be able to turn it off. You'll still be able to install apps on OSX from outside the app store, but only if they're signed with a dev certificate.
Which you need to be an apple dev, i.e. pay the annual $99, to get. And you'll still be able to run apps you compile yourself without a cert. But if you're paying for a dev cert, you might as well distribute though the app store, as you're paying to do so anyway...
For commercial devs, not a major issue as they're already paying for it, and they'll be able to run test builds without signing each one. Open source or non-profit coders though? Crap out of luck. But then they don't make money for apple, so who cares about them? it's not like they write anything useful*... [/sarcasm]
* apart from BSD. And KHTML.
Because cherry G80's look like they're a reject from the 1970s, and take up the desk space to match?
I have a G80-3000 UK cherry blue at the office, and it beats the hell out of a rubber membrane - but the thing's near twice the size of a filco majestouch (my choice at home), and that's not even comparing to say the tenkeyless filco's which are tiny in comparison.
Plus I couldn't find a G80 with cherry browns and a UK layout.
If you're bottoming out a cherry keyboard though, you're probably doing it wrong. Cherry switches have the activation point somewhat higher than the bottom of the key travel - so you can touch type with a lighter 'gliding' motion across the keys, only depressing them as much as you need to to hit the activation point. Some, like the blues and browns give you a tactile 'change in force' when you hit it, so you know you've activated and can start back on the way up. This is hard to learn to do though, especially after years of using a rubber membrane keyboard as your muscle memory is to hammer the key down until you get the 'fingershock' of hitting bottom.
Kinda the whole point of cherry switches is to cushion your finger, so you can get 'sprung' back up before you bottom out, so you 'glide' across the keyboard when typing rather than hammering 'em down. Makes em a lot quieter too.
Buckling spring or scissor switches on the other hand...
Isn't any keyboard with moving parts, i.e., anything that's not touch sensitive a "mechanical keyboard"?
Strictly speaking, they're mechanically switched keyboards, as opposed to the rubber-dome-with-electrical-contacts type most cheap (and not-so-cheap) keyboards are; i.e. 'mechanical' keyboards have a moving parts lever and/or spring based mechanism to register a keypress rather than just a bubbled rubber mat.
It's just a handy way to tell the two types apart - the typing style on a mechanical keyboard is much easier on the fingers, especially if you're a touch typist as you don't need to hammer the key all the way to the bottom to get it to register - a mechanical keyboard with tactile feedback like the cherry blue or brown switches means you can touch type without the 'clack' of the key hitting the bottom at all, so actually ends up quieter overall as well as easier on the fingers because you're never bringing the fingertip to a juddering stop when the key hits the keyboard tray, you're cushioned on the spring travel instead. Takes a while to get used to though, especially if you've been used to typing on a rubber mat keyboard for a long time - you have to unlearn hammering the keyboard as hard as possible.
An alternative to a big expensive cherry switch or buckling spring keyboard (or very expensive topre keyboard) is a laptop-style scissor-switch mechanical keyboard - many people like the imac wireless keyboard without knowing that it's got mechanical key switches underneath, just ones with a short travel; you do bottom out, but because the activation force is light and and travel short, it's still easier on the hands than pounding on a rubber dome keyboard.
For me, as you might have guessed, it's a lot more about avoiding pain at the end of the day of keyboarding than being a super-fast typist, though you can end up improving your wpm too as a side effect.
Ps2 native with usb adapter if needed.
Now I think about it, I've got that wrong - the cable is USB, but it comes with a PS/2 adapter so it will properly be PS/2 if you need NKRO rather than 10KRO - it has the circuitry for both.
Best bet would be the filco majestouch tenkeyless - one of the rare UK Patten mechanical keyboards - as already suggested ;)
http://www.keyboardco.com/keyboard_search.asp?SG=10037
Available with cherry browns, blues or blacks depending on what tactile response you want. Ps2 native with usb adapter if needed.
I have the cherry brown filco at home (I type and game on it) and it's the best keyboard I've ever owned - and that includes my old IBM death spring model m. The filco leather wrist wrest is also worth investing in.
Blues are best for typing (I have a cheaper cherry blue g80-3000 at the office), blacks are better for gaming, but I've found browns to be a good compromise for general purpose use - and since they're non clicky, I'm less likely to be murdered by the missus.
Best bet would be the filco majestouch tenkeyless - one of the rare UK layout mechanical keyboards.
http://www.keyboardco.com/keyboard_search.asp?SG=10037
Available with cherry browns, blues or blacks depending on what tactile response you want. Ps2 native with usb adapter if needed.
I have the cherry brown filco at home (I type and game on it) and it's the best keyboard I've ever owned - and that includes my old IBM death spring model m. The filco leather wrist wrest is also worth investing in.
Blues are best for typing (I have a cheaper cherry blue g80-3000 at the office), blacks are better for gaming, but I've found browns to be a good compromise for general purpose use - and since they're non clicky, I'm less likely to be murdered by the missus.
I've been testing it since the developer preview. I won't get to try the RTM till it pops up in a week in my tech net account, but I've doubt they've changed that much about it.
Imagine Windows 7 where the start menu opened at login and took up the whole screen. That's it.
It's a bit more than that.
a) 'legacy' desktop shortcuts look like pants. Really pants.
b) no shortcut folders. Instead of being able to group similar apps together in a folder, you can either pin them to them individually - taking up a lot of space - or rely on the 'all apps' shortcut via charms, in which case using the keyboard to search by name is about the only practical method. Which is fine if you're a keyboard warrior, but taking hand off mouse, tap in app name, then hand back on mouse is kinda irritating when you do it a lot. Going from the 'mouse only' nav method I've been using for years in windows (and now OSX) is jarring.
c) while we're on the topic, auto installers be nasty on windows 8. Remember all those crappy 'pdf manual, uninstall, various customisations' shortcuts that got dumped into a folder in the start menu and forgotten about? Well now ALL of them get dumped in the Modern screen next to your 'real' shortcuts. You have to be utterly ruthless about cleaning that crap out, or you very quickly get overwhelmed.
d) and charms? Goddamn that's a hard gesture to do in an RDP session, multiscreen session or virtual machine. They improved the hot corner 'catchers' with the release preview, but it's still very clearly designed for fullscreen, one screen only use. Which is fine for most users, but absolutely sucks for me as a sysadmin, and many of my users - most of whom are teachers, and have a dual-screen setup with a projector as the 2nd screen. Even half the admin department use dual screens these days as it's a lot cheaper to buy two 24" monitors than a single 30" one plus gpu to drive it, as well as more practical - spreadsheet or word on one screen, reference doc or browser on another etc...
e) the constant goddamn nagging to integrate your live account. We're perfectly goddamn happy with our Active Directory and NAS storage and central app deployment, stop fracking nagging about goddamn live integration so you can get the user to buy goddamn Modern Apps off the goddamn app store. For this reason alone, we won't be deploying windows 8.
I could go on, but those are just the most irritating things about Windows Phone 8 Desktop Edition.
GCHQ is hardly a security watchdog - the closest US equivalent would be the NSA.
They're the signals intercept and codebreaker agency of the UK government. One presumes they know their shit when they're looking for backdoors planted by the chinese intelligence servives.
There are two main webstats providers - statcounter, and Net Marketshare. TFA uses the former, Ars Technica uses the latter.
Statcounter uses 3 million + sites; net marketshare 40,000.
Statcounter counts total page views, net marketshare counts unique visits per site per user per day.
Statcounter doesn't weight their stats, net marketshare does by country, using rather elderly CIA stats IIRC.
Basically, their measurements aren't measuring the same thing. I think weighting by country is a fairly large error, especially as the CIA internet usage stats aren't exactly up to date at times; for example, they don't include substantial chinese mobile device traffic, so can rather drastically weight the stats towards desktop users - and given china is a big holdout of old versions of IE on the desktop, and the substantial size of china's population, that kind of weighting will likely show IE usage higher than it is, which does fit one of the differences. Aditionally, unique visitors is hard to measure, and can also give misleading statistics - if a work user browses a single page at work on their elderly stock IE browser (say, checks the headlines), but then catches up on the same site at home and reads a ton of pages from chrome or their ipad, net marketshare would count that as 50-50 usage between IE and chrome or safari; in reality, they're using their home browser much more, which stat counter would reflect.
The downside of statcounter's approach is when a browser inflates their page views; for example, the chrome 'pre-fetch' default option was thought to drastically inflate its marketshare, because it was silently fetching pages in the background, most of which weren't ever viewed. Statscounter now correct for that, and it affected chrome's share by a fraction of 1%, so in the end wasn't a large factor.
While both use plenty large enough samples to be statistically valid, they still have to be representative samples of a very diverse population of browsers and users. I can't help but think a much larger sample is more likely to be representative.
Overall, while both measures have flaws, I think statcounters methods give a closer approximation to real usage than net marketplace does. That said, I certainly wouldn't use the data from either to two decimal places worth of accuracy on month to month drifts, as many sites (such as ars technica) do - the variation is just not measured that precisely to draw the kind of conclusions that the media often do.
What can be said is that IE's share is steadily shrinking other than the odd blip, while chrome and firefox have been the primary beneficiaries on the desktop of that - firefox is fairly static or shrinking, chrome is growing. Whether they're neck and neck, or chrome is ahead depends upon your stats. No matter how you measure, IE is below 50%. Safari is the big beast in mobile browsing by a long way.
Mor than that is rather hard to say with any great reliability.
Windows 8 doesn't require secure boot. At all. It will happily boot on a pc without it, or with it turned off. I. E. All the legacy kit out there running windows 7.
In order to sell an x86 pc as windows 8 certified, you have to have secure boot; it has to have the Windows 8 signing key as default; and it needs to be able to be turned off. The latter matters to Microsoft because all those enterprise users doing their downgrade rights to 7 would be furious if they couldn't buy new new pcs and put older versions on.
The legacy bios option is independent of the disabling secure boot; I have an efi board that windows 7 works with merrily.
So Linux users can either boot efi, with secure boot disabled, which must be an available option; use legacy bios mode; use a kernel that's been signed with the Microsoft key and leave secure boot on; or put their own key in the secure boot store, if the board supports that. Big whoop.
The setup that's much more restricted is windows 8 ARM devices; there secure boot cannot be turned off, so you can't boot anything other than windows 8 RT. Basically the same as ios and android devices. So you won't be able to install Linux on an ARM tablet, but you should be able to do so on an Intel one.
There are 4 major 3g providers - three, Vodafone, O2, and Everything Everywhere (merger of tmobile and orange).
O2 used to be part of BT, but was spun off into their own company iirc. Those customers (or customers of a reseller like tesco or giffgaff) get to use BT wifi hotspots.
The other three can be used to create 3g mobile hotspots that have nothing to do with BT, either via smartphone, laptop with 3g dongle, or dedicated 3g wifi device, such as three's fairly popular mifi device. Even O2 users may want to do so if they're not near a BT openzone access point.
All such portable 3g-wifi access points are banned at olympic venues, officially because it may cause interference with olympic wireless devices used for timing, gps etc. In reality, its more about ensuring BT profit by making most pay to use BT openzone wifi, instead of sharing someone elses 3g-wifi connection (or your own, if yiu want to say connect a wifi only tablet via your smartphone 3g plan)
Seems more about that they've just published the source code on github under the Apache licence.
So you can run your own chaos monkey on your own amazon cloud systems, or modify it to run on your private cloud, or whatever.
Um, you want government legislating what a private company can and cannot sell?
Um, the government already does regulate commerce.
For example, it's illegal to sell child porn. It's also illegal to refuse to sell to black people, or homosexuals, or women.
Now whether it's worth having the government regulate that companies can't refuse to sell products that mention a competitor is another discussion altogether, but it's a straw man to pretend it'd be the first time government has got involved in commerce between two private parties, and most people think that's a good thing.
Unless you're one of the people that think 'no coloreds' signs should return to shops, of course.
he's a fucking idiot and can't apparently design for shit nor code for shit
Evidence for the prosecution : "John Romero's Daikatana". Yes, he did put his own name in the title.
The prosecution rests, your honour.
Well this particular app looks like a standard freemium app - in order to progress, you have to buy in-app purchases to get decent weapons and equipment. They start you out with a proper gun, then take it away on the third level - but of course, you can buy it back with real money. And they had the gall to charge a fee for the game in the first place? Not to mention in game ads for their other games, plus the usual obnoxious pop ups to get you to 'get free gold'.
Frankly its a rip off even now it's 'free'. And since they didn't bother to implement the check against the play store to see if you'd bought it, this seems much more a marketing trick to get headlines rather than a decent Dev getting ripped off.
Un installed.
For pocket change, why not just get the maxed out one?
The Wife Acceptance Factor. £150 (ish) is an easier sell than £200 for a geek toy.
I got the 8GB version as once you include UK VAT, it's a £40 total difference - or 25% more expensive. And if I need much more space, then an extra slow 8GB isn't really going to cut it anyway. So I've got a micro-usb to USB OTB cable coming for a couple of quid, and can use my existing USB 32GB flash drives with it (with the stick mount app) to playback any amount of media on it when I'm travelling, and it means I don't have to faff about plugging the tablet itself in in advance. Factor in sugar sync/google music/online photo storage/plex the rest of the time when I have wifi or 3G, and I don't see it being much of a problem.
I didn't see that being a a shot against apple per se - much more microsoft and the exchange activesync suits.
"when one firm publishes information about an otherwise proprietary standard and other firms then independently decide (whether by choice or of necessity) to make complementary investments to support that standard in their products. Because proprietary or de facto standards can have just as important effects on consumer welfare, the Committee’s concern regarding the abuse of SEPs should encompass them as well."
Microsoft has patented exchange activesync, and then licences those patents to companies that want to talk to an exchange server. That's what has most android makers coughing up money to microsoft for - the ability to talk to exchange as an email/calendar client. Note, android developers, like all exchange activesync licencees, have to write their own code against the standard, which changes whenever MS update Exchange server.
Now, Exchange is pretty much ubiquitous in business. Therefore talking to Exchange is a necessary defacto standard, but everybody does it a bit differently as they write their own code. Should the patents covering exchange activesync, as a defacto essential standard, be under scrutiny for abuse by the same body that's investigating FRAND patent holders for abuse of their essential nature?
That seems to be Google's argument, anyway.
Oops. Thanks.
Why not contribute the changes you make back to main line Debian?
Well it's not much of a fork, much more a port.
The debian foundation has two ARM binary versions, the 'performance' version (armhf) that's compiled for ARMv7 or better chips, and the 'compatible' (armel) version that's compiled for IIRC ARMv4 or better.
One of the reasons the pi is so cheap is it uses an older SoC, based on ARMv6. The cortex chipsets A9 you see in say, the iphone or samsung SoC are ARMv7 instruction set based. So up to now, the standard raspberry pi debian distro was the vanilla armel squeeze, with a wheezy armel beta. However, the pi ARMv6 does have floating point hardware that allows for 'hardfloat' compilation rather than the 'softfloat' compilation option - which is used in the ARMv7 version of debian, but not the armel version. Using the hardware support for floating point calculation is obviously faster than doing it in software emulation, thus the new port to take advantage of every little bit of performance you can get out of the $5 SoC on the pi.
So raspbian is basically debian ARM, but all the binary packages have been recompiled with the hardfloat option to take advantage of the floating point hardware; they're using wheezy as the target, which is current debian testing IIRC. It's debian armhf, but compatible with the v6 pi. The Debian Foundation weren't interested in supporting a 3rd version of debian on ARM hardware, which is entirely fair enough - the amount of people interested in an ARMv6 with hardfloat who aren't using the pi is going to be very small, though they can of course run raspbian on their hardware too if they also have ARMv6 with hardware floating point; it's not like debian are rolling in money themselves. They were happy for a 'roll your own' version though, which is what has happened.
Last I checked, the raspbian project team (which is basically two guys) had successfully compiled basically everything in the debian package tree, along with keeping up to date with the constantly changing nature of debian testing; they had a compile farm running continuously to keep up, and the setup is worth reading about when the raspbian site comes back; it's a tiny operation that's giving hundreds of thousands of pi owners a significantly faster default distro on a shoestring budget. I think it's brilliant, and is an excellent example of why open source is so awesome. Want an entire OS and software custom compiled to get every ounce of performance out of the hardware? Go for it! And look, these guys have done it for you!
Apple doesn't want to licence their patents. They want to use them at the ITC and in national courts to get injunctions to stop android devices competiting in the marketplace. It might cost them millions in the inevitable court battles on those that don't get immediately dismissed, but they only need a handful to stick long enough to shut the competition down entirely. They've only had limited success so far with this strategy, but the long term goal of being the monopoly mobile device is worth hundreds of billions so they keep trying.
No need to produce a better product when you can just get import bans on the competition. Especially when apple have nicked plenty of design elements from their predecessors (palm etc) and android.
Or clone your repo up to github and use the bug tracker there if you want a bit more structure. Free for open repositories.