The updates are only available for Snow Leopard and Lion. If you're on Leopard (10.5) (still sold up until summer 2009) or older, you don't get the security patches OR the latest fixes to remove infection. Apple only support current and previous OS versions for security. Once Mountain Lion comes out in a couple of months, anyone who's running an OS older than october 2010 goes under the bus. Note, they're still selling snow leopard right now, as you need to install it first to go to lion - you can't jump from leopard to lion direct, as leopard don't have the app store needed. You can of course download and make a USB clean installer from an existing lion Mac, but if you've only got one physical machine and no-one can help you make an install, leopard -> snow leopard -> lion it is (pre-made lion install usb keys not available here)
We criticise microsoft for ending support for XP after 13 years, and Apple drops all support after TWO and get a pass? Something like 25% of mac users are using Leopard or older - not least due the removal of PPC support in snow leopard. Mountain Lion looks pretty pointless unless you're also an icloud user, and the steady of killing off of carbon library support in Lion and Mountain Lion means you may have to stick to snow leopard if a key app doesn't run on Lion yet - and you'll be in the same boat as Leopard users right now, running an 'obsolete' unsupported OS with no security patches that's still for sale right now!
Now apple are switching to an annual OSX release, they REALLY need to still support older OSes - such as the soon to be EOL'd snow leopard - longer than they do for critical security patches, such as this one. Apple decided they wanted to control java installation on OSX, they should have the decency to get security patches out for it in a prompt timescale. Don't forget, the whole reason this happened is Apple sat on upstream java security patches for months for even current OSX users - if they'd pushed out the patches THEN, instead of waiting for half a million + users to get infected...
Dalvik is released under the Apache licence, as it's partly based upon Apache Harmony - a free Java implementation. Note, Harmony wasn't an 'official' java implementation at the time, as it couldn't use the TCK testing kit (that showed compliance with the java spec) under licence terms that didn't conflict with the apache licence - specifically, field of use restrictions. Sun stonewalled, as they wanted to have their own GPL-licenced java implementation up and running for linux before working with the Apache Foundation.
Oracle argues that by using Java-like methods in the API - ie. to write code against before compilation to bytecode and then conversion to dalvik executables - infringes their copyright and patents. The dalvik virtual machine itself is quite different to java VMs as it's optimised for low memory/cpu devices, but the code is very java-like before it goes through the compiler.
GPL does imply a certain amount of patent protection, but as you say, it's somewhat of a moot point as Dalvik doesn't reference that code, having been written earlier against Harmony.
Now, the interesting question is - what DID he mean when he wrote that email? It's quite reasonable for Google to argue that he was wrong - not being a lawyer - and that they didn't need a licence, but wanted one (as they did attempt to do) in order to avoid this exact expensive legal battle - licencing being cheaper than lawyers - but that went out the window when they couldn't get one on sane terms and now they're fighting because Oracle want silly money for what is marginal infringement at most. After all, Oracle haven't sued the Apache Foundation for harmony, so why is code based on it - and open-sourced using the same licence - suddenly infringing?
But google's actual defence? get the guy to say, Oh, when I said we needed a licence, I didn't mean we actually NEEDED a licence, or know who we should get that licence from? Please. Not very convincing, and I'm on Google's side on this one.
Left to nature, contra-survival traits like these weed themselves out in any population, not just human. But nowadays they're being kept alive and allowed to breed wantonly, which might be admirable from a moral standpoint... but it's not doing the human gene pool any favors.
Further to my previous answer... Why don't you tell us what makes YOU such a gift to gene pool? You arrogant twat.
Left to nature, contra-survival traits like these weed themselves out in any population
Left to nature, I wouldn't be working a shit job with shitty hours stuck inside in a noisy hot office all day dealing with a workload you'd normally assign to three people and a boss you want to push out of a high window - a boss who has no problem texting you xmas morning expecting you to fix an internet access problem in one department. Nor would I be forced to stay in that job to pay the mortgage on the house that's underwater and unsellable due to recent subsidence. In a decent world, I'd be able to find another job except nobody is hiring at anything other than entry-level salaries in IT in my area (within a several hour commute range) and even those have 50+ applicants per post.
Glad to know I should be sterilized along with my wife, and my existing children should be killed to make sure I don't pollute the gene pool with my depression. Helpful.
And of course, it's only come up as news because London has just done its analogue switchoff so the digital channel transmitters can be upped to their full broadcast power.
For almost everyone in the rest of the country, we went through the digital switchover quite some time ago; years in many cases. And of course, ceefax went with it back then. My own switchover happened in may 2009 - I barely noticed, as I'd already been on freeview (digital broadcast) for several years before that.
To be honest, I haven't looked at ceefax in many years, so I won't miss it. The 'net has long since superseded it for me as a source of news, weather, info etc.
If you don't think mobs in the street don't frighten governments, just look at the Arab Spring. Or any other revolution. With democratic governments, at least the people have the power to replace their politicians with ones that represent them rather than the 1% or the corporations they own without having to stage an actual armed coup.
Tackling wall street is only part of the problem, you're right - you also have to tackle big money in politics, and the corporate media that tells lies to the populace. And get rid of the lobbyists, and the politicians that are bought by them.
To be blunt, there's not enough anger in the US public yet. Once you have 10's of millions of people on the streets every single day in every single city? Once people actually vote for politicians who aren't beholden to corporate slush funds, or based upon who the media tell them to? New ballgame.
Government can be co-opted by the public, in the public interest, if the public actually care enough to try. Corporations can't be.
As I understand EU free-trade rules, as long as the appropriate taxes are paid in the country where goods are bought (inside the EU), the government cannot then levy additional taxes when imported, either directly (in the boot of a car) or when shipped.
So this just seems a great proposal to kill all domestic sales of electronic goods with drives in - iPads, smartphones, photocopiers, laptops - and relocate them to Spain instead. I'm sure the Spanish government wouldn't mind, but it doesn't like it's going to do much to help Portugese debt.
who simply don't feel like forking out a couple hundred dollars to fix something that isn't broken?
a) Windows 7 home premium OEM is $99. b) Windows XP is, in fact, broken.
The underlying security model of XP is fundamentally flawed. Despite a vast amount of plaster work on top, security capabilities of OSes have moved on a long way. There are significant improvements in Win 7 over XP under the bonnet when it comes to being a secure OS. I use OSX, android and linux myself, so I'm no windows fanboy, but to be fair they have learned a lot from their mistakes and the decade of attacks.
Windows XP is over 10 years old for heaven's sake. It hasn't been sold for what, 4 years now? How long exactly do you expect microsoft to provide security patches for that creaky old boat for, for the $50 your system builder originally paid for that OEM licence? Forever? Hell, Apple generally end-of-life's their desktop versions every couple of years - they only really support current and previous version. So if you're older than 10.6 (august 2009) you're no longer getting patches. And you're complaining that your 2001 operating system has only two more years of free security patches left?
We actually had to downgrade a laptop to vista the other day. You can install clean windows 7 on it, but one of the built-in drivers causes it to straight up blue screen after a couple of minutes, but without telling us which driver in the stack trace, just a generic error. We *think* it's the hard-drive controller after various eliminations, but various versions of the intel drivers don't help. We spent days on it trying to debug the damn thing.
Stick vista on it (which it came with). Works fine out of the box, no bluescreens, just keeps working. Just needs drivers for the touchpad and optional better intel GPU ones.
Same problem with the newer kindles - they use the same generation pearl E Ink display as the kobo. I don't have a significant issue with ghosting - it's there if you look VERY closely, or have a black-heavy image on a previous page, but it's not an issue when you're just reading text. You can set it to do a full refresh every page, same as the kindle 3, or up to every 6 page turns, which is the default. I have it set on every 4 turns on my kobo, which provides a decent balance between the two for speed/vs ghosting. Even on 6, my kobo touch shows nothing LIKE that amount of ghosting in that screen shot.
(ignore the slight orange cast, that's a combo of lighting and my fairly naff phone cam - the rectangular shadow middle-bottom in the first one is the phone shadow)
Nooks are not officially for sale in the UK (I don't think they ever have been), and you pay import duty to bring em in. They're not a bad price at all on ebay uk (£70), but that's US resellers, so £20-£30 shipping plus you're still liable for import duty if customs spots it. So ~ £90 to £100 even if you avoid duty. Found a UK seller, it's £105, so that's amazon touch pricing. And of course, no recourse to B&N, as it's a parallel grey import, so even if they would warranty a resold product, I'd have to ship to US in the event of fault. Plus of course the official store is in dollars, so I'm paying conversion fees to buy the books if I want bookmark sync etc.
Much simpler to buy a kobo touch for £80, I get a local warranty from a physical retailer with wide presence, UK ebook store, and as you say, I'm not feeding the Amazon lock-in behemoth.
What I'm incredulous about is the fact that Apple users spend an average of more than $600 on apps & markup.
They don't. Well, not in that way, anyway. The $800+ comes from two things; AT&T paying $18 per month per phone to Apple for the privilege of being an iPhone carrier (presumably why they had an exclusive for so long), and the cost of the phone itself, at $399. That ignores that Apple does actually have to pay for manufacture, shipping hardware, labour etc to make the things. Though most of that is parts; they only pay $8 to foxconn for labour per phone. That, plus ruthless pressure on suppliers to cut costs that makes Walmart look slack, is why they have a ~40% profit margin on the hardware.
Google of course, doesn't make the phones - even the google branded nexus line are made by OEMs. Samsung make the Galaxy Nexus, for example, and samsung have been making out like bandits on the galaxy line - they sell more android galaxy smartphones than apples does iphones by quite a big margin, even though they make them mostly in Korea at considerably lower margin than Apple gets from China. This may all change once google finish acquiring Motorola of course; they might start seeing some of that hardware profit for themselves.
Bear in mind, google makes quite a chunk of money from iOS users, because Google licence google maps etc to Apple, and get paid for that. They don't get to charge the same licence fees to themselves for shipping google maps on android!
So android is not a very profitable OS in and of itself for google. It may even operate at a loss, once you include all the costs of updating it, working with carriers and OEMs for all their custom versions, having the market cope with all the different versions out there etc etc.
However, it does provide google an excellent platform for their webapps - google maps, google mail, google search - where they DO make an excellent amount of money from advertising. Apple could yank googlemaps from iOS at any time, and I've heard they're looking at doing just that. Look at the fun google had getting google+ on iOS, and google voice. Even if android makes no profit at all, having their own open source wide spread competitor to iOS and windows phone* gives them a huge opportunity to support their other services, and avoid iCloud etc eating their lunch in their core market.
* ok, windows phone might be a minnow now, but they owned the pda/smartphone market once and destroyed palm and psion in the process. Blackberry used to be a big player, and look what's happening to them. Apple and Google can't assume microsoft aren't willing to buy their way back into the mobile market, just as they did going from 0 to big player in the console market. Hell, microsoft are willing to toss most desktop and server users under a bus with windows 8 in order to get developers to make metro apps which will then be usable on tablet/phone, and that's a big gamble even with their massive cash pile.
Agreed that asda sometimes are a bit 'flexible' with availability, but I know a few people who've got their hands on one, I saw them in stock at my local a few days ago, and they're currently listed as in stock on their website : http://direct.asda.com/Kobo-Wireless-eReader---Onyx/000518285,default,pd.html - you can pick up in store, or have home delivery.
I think this one is a legit drop, rather than a gimmick special offer.
IIRC, Asda helped drive the price of the kobo touch down from £99 to its current £80 pretty much everywhere, which I paid a couple of months ago. I wouldn't be surprised if £49 becomes the new price for the kobo wifi, down from its current £70 standard (though you can get it for £60 elsewhere, as you say). It still beats the crap out of the £89 for the kindle basic at either price.
Into their 2nd biggest market after the US 7 months after the US - september 28th 2011 in the US, April 27 2012 in the UK. And there will probably shortages making it even longer before general availability. They withdrew the kindle keyboard without 3G (the model I had) leaving only the kindle basic @ £89, or the kindle keyboard @ £149.
Seven months is a long time in consumer electronics. Amazon had the e-ink market pretty much to themselves for the previous couple of generations. We still don't have the kindle fire or any projection for it. (which to be fair, really involves getting all the rights for the amazon app store, the movie store etc which aren't in the UK either, so I'm not terribly surprised at that).
But the kindle touch? No extra rights needed there, it's just an e-reader, same as the kindle 3. You can buy a kobo touch, and have been able to for months and months (backed by one of our biggest book/stationary retailers, WH Smith) for less than the kindle basic! Even when the kindle touch comes out, it's going to be £30 or 27% more expensive for what is virtually identical hardware to the kobo. If you want cheap, the kobo basic is almost half the price of the kindle basic, for again very similar hardware. You couldn't even import the touch, unless you went grey market for even more money and no warranty support.
Amazon don't have the e-ink market to themselves in the UK any more, even if the Nooks aren't available here. For a while, the kindle beat the crap out of the alternatives for both hardware, and better pricing, but that's no longer true. Amazon need to be aware of that now with their pricing and treating us like a captive market that will hang around and wait if they don't want to lose significant share to the competition. They've still got significant mind share - everybody knows about the kindle - but that won't last forever if they keep treating us like marks to be fleeced.
Much as I loved my kindle 3 (with surplus keyboard), I've since switched to the kobo touch after a problem with the kindle screen out of warranty - it's gone all 'ghosty'. Same idea as the kindle touch, except that _still_ isn't available in the UK yet; they wouldn't even ship a US version to the UK. It's up for pre-order now, finally, at £109 - or the kobo touch is available now from a ton of places, has been since xmas, and is only £80 (or the non-touch version for £49 @ asda, vs £89 for the kindle basic). Plus it reads epubs (drm-free or adobe digital editions), so you can buy books from all sorts of places that may be cheaper without having to sod about with calibre conversion, you don't have to use the kobo store.
While amazon after sales support is admittedly 2nd to none, they're not automatically the best value for e-ink readers any more. I do agree that e-ink is the way to go for reading books though. Small, light, portable, cheap, and a battery life measured in weeks not hours, as well as a well-stocked library in something smaller and lighter than one paperback. I'm saving so much weight in my luggage alone it's been worth it!
I did have a separate light for the kindle - it fitted into the leather case - and it did prove handy on the odd occasion when travelling and didn't have a decent light to read by - planes, trains and hotels especially. I would use it in bed at night, but my wife happily falls asleep with her own light on, let alone my bedside one. I can see how a built in light would be useful if your partner was more sensitive to bed-side lights, as a strap on light does add weight and alter the balance quite a bit. I haven't had the need to light up my kobo yet, but will probably just duct tape my current bendy one to it if needed!
Amoral corporations don't believe in right and wrong, only in legal and illegal, and to expect them to have compassion or any sense of social responsibility is equally stupid.
And it's this kind of thinking that is destroying capitalist nations like the US and the UK (I'm british, btw). You know, it's within living memory that large corporations switched to focusing solely upon short term shareholder 'value', back in the 70's and 80's. Before that, many big companies recognised they were only part of a giant collection of people, and that shitting in their own front yard was of short-term value only. Where they paid their workers sufficiently so that they could buy the very products they made. Where training, looking after your workers and ensuring a good work-life balance rewarded you with happier and thus better performing and more loyal employees. Where they recognised the social value of investing, via taxes and direct contributions, into the social lifeblood of their communities - schools, roads, hospitals. Where CEO's were stewards of their companies, not just there to strip much as much personal compensation as possible then get the hell out before anyone asked awkward questions.
Of course, not all companies were like that. But now, virtually none of them are. the 'Greed is Good' mantra has won.
In 1953 - "When he was asked during the hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee if as secretary of defense he could make a decision adverse to the interests of General Motors, Wilson answered affirmatively but added that he could not conceive of such a situation "because for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa". Can you imagine a CEO of a current multinational - or one of the big casino banks - saying that with a straight face now?
We should expect more than 'I can get away with it because it's within the letter of the law'. No, we should damn well DEMAND it.
*WHY WAS THE NORMANDY INSIDE A MASS EFFECT FIELD IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BATTLE FOR EARTH?*
And in my case, WTF is Garrus doing on board the Normandy doing a mass relay jump when a couple of minutes ago he was running for his life alongside me trying to avoid getting blown away by a Reaper on the final attack? And where the hell did the Illusive Man come from?
And after some 120+ hours game time, it comes down to some deus ex machina responsible for the whole business? I could have shot some power conduit back in Mass Effect 1 and saved us all the trouble?
I can live with an unhappy ending - my shepard giving up her life, anderson's life, even that of everyone on the Normandy to save the galaxy and stop the reapers fits with the story - giving up everything for the mission. But at least have some consequences to my prior actions. It didn't matter one goddamn how well or poorly I did in the build up to retaking earth in single player, it makes basically no difference. If I'd spammed multiplayer to get my 'readiness' rating up higher than its possible to in single player, I'd get a few seconds clip of N7 armour moving, and that's it. No impact upon how many reapers there are, how hard the final missions are, whether my companions live or die at the end. Nuttin.
Worse than that, the final scenes have no relevence or are barely related to any of the game I've just played, or the two predecessors. When my final suicide mission companions somehow end up on the Normandy heading out the Mass Relay when last I saw the ship was deep in the fighting, trying to buy me time... What the hell?? And when you've just stranded millions of aliens in earth orbit due to the destruction of the Relays, you only zoom in on stories told about the Sheppur some time in the future on the planet the Normandy crashed on?
I didn't need a HAPPY ending (though having the happiness relate to how hard I freaking worked or not would be nice) - as said, making a final ultimate sacrifice having said my goodbyes fits - but after the amount of time we've all put in to get here, I thought they'd at least put a bit more effort into having them make SENSE instead of the same weird ending upon your final choice amounting to a button which chooses which colour explosions you get.
It feels like the outsourced the ending to the same guy who came up with the one for Deus Ex: HR. At least with that it was only one game, instead of a series conclusion we've been waiting since 2007 for.
Except that the LTE frequencies the ipad supports are already occupied in the UK by freeview; our over-the-air digital TV network that is pretty much rolled out country wide now, and is the way the vast majority of people watch TV. The odds of those frequencies being available for use in the UK for LTE wireless are... slim, to say the least. IIRC, general-use LTE spectrum is earmarked to be taken from the current analog TV bands, once the last transmitters are switched off - the auctions are scheduled for 2013. And the ipad radio won't work on those frequencies. The same is true across most (all?) of europe.
Long story short - the new ipad will only ever be a 3.5G (HSPA+) device in the UK, same as the previous version and virtually everything else with a 3G chip in it that's on the shelves. Marketing it as a '4G' device - against others which WILL offer LTE support in the UK, either on the current limited trial networks (O2 have a couple), or when it starts to roll out more generally next year - is a big fat marketing lie. Putting it in big print as a feature - the 'Wi-fi + 4G' model - will mislead people into thinking it will work for them _here_ not only if they go on holiday to the US and get a data-roaming sim there.
I hope the ASA slaps them with a fat fine, orders them to revise all their adverts to remove the claims, and compensation should be made available to those customers who bought the product because they were mislead by the headline advertising into thinking the ipad 3 can do something that it cannot, and never will.
I've just finished reading the series myself (on a kobo, natch). I liked them. They're not going to win any awards for great literature, but they're significantly better written than Harry Potter or the first couple of chapters of the first twilight book (I couldn't stomach any more than that). I wouldn't even classify them as young adult; they're pretty violently brutal with quite a few analogies to our current day politics. It's only that the protagonists are teenagers that makes it 'young adult' really.
OK, I found the story interesting. the characters fairly well written and it was a page-turner; you do want to see what happens next, even if you can see it coming. It's hardly Asimov or Neal Asher or Iain M Banks or George R.R. Martin - but then sometimes it's nice to read a book that's more about the people in it than the hugely complicated and imaginative world that they're living in, and is more about entertainment than being weighty literature.
Oddly enough, I'd rate them about the same as one of Pratchett's latest, say Snuff in terms of fun to read. Though I love him and his work dearly, and feel deeply sad about his illness, it's clearly affecting his books.
People do read all sorts of crap and enjoy it though; Twilight, for example, or some of those dreadful self help books, or Andy McNab's fiction. It takes all sorts, and I'd rate Hunger Games considerably higher than that kind of dross - so if that's all they're comparing it to, you can see where they're coming from. While any reading is better than no reading, I'd rather people read something that isn't total crap, and there's nothing wrong with populist material in and of itself.
I admit, I read the series because of all the fuss (and I needed some new books for my new kobo touch!) but I don't regret the time reading them, which is all that really matters for me. I read enough 'great literature' to allow myself some lighter reads in between the weightier stuff.
Advere possession only applies if the owner knows (or should know) you have it, but doesn't care. So if you find a mobile phone and tell the owner that you've got it, and they never turn up to claim it, after a while it becomes yours. Same goes for land; if you occupy it (by for example, building your fence over part of their land), and they allow it without some specific contract lease or something, then eventually it becomes yours - after 10 years, I think.
Picking something up, keeping it and telling nobody, does not qualify under adverse possession.
Much as I see where you're coming from; actually it is under the law. Lost property remains the property of the original owner, they don't give up ownership to anyone that finds it - just as your house remains yours when you leave in the morning, so your phone remains yours if you leave it on a bench. There are means to legally acquire abandoned property though - adverse possession for example.
So if you were to notify the owner that you have their property, and they can't be bothered to collect it, after a period of time it legally becomes yours. You can also hand it into the police, and again, after a period of time of non-collection they may return it to the finder to keep (in the UK; a friend of mine when we were kids handed in a found £50 note, and got it back a few months later when it was unclaimed).
This is why if you unknowingly buy a stolen car, and the owner finds out and claims it back - via reporting it to the police - you get stiffed. The person that sold you the car had no legal right of ownership to transfer, so you own bupkiss, and the original owner gets to claim it back.
Of course, in practise physical possession is 9/10's of the law, especially for small objects that are hard to track down once mislaid. But picking up a dropped/mislaid item and keeping it, is in fact, stealing - you're intentionally depriving someone else of their property, even if you don't know who that someone is. Best choice is to hand the item into a responsible person where you found it; the barman or shopkeeper for example, as it is fairly likely the owner will attempt to find it via them. Alternatively, hand it into the police with details of where you found it. Keeping it and attempting to return it directly is of course an option, but you might get accused of stealing it in the first place! Leaving it exactly where it was is also an option often forgotten - the owner may well come back for it in a minute.
Personally, I've returned a fair few items ( though mostly to someone who's literally just dropped it or left it), but including a lady's purse that had all her things that she left in a supermarket trolley, via the shop-keeper. They contacted me later to say that she was extremely happy and surprised to get it all back untouched - apparently there was her pension in there, and she'd expected that at least to go missing. On the other hand, I've had a dropped camera disappear in the 5 minutes it took to come back for it; a wallet that wasn't mine popped back through my letterbox (turned out to be a neighbours); and my dropped wallet returned by a guy walking behind me. A friend of mine also got his laptop back that he left in a taxi; the taxi driver tracked him down and dropped it off personally.
So you never know; there are a lot more honest people out there than you'd think.
Personally, I've started the switch to OSX as my primary - given my boss is an Apple nut, it wasn't too hard to talk him into buying us imacs in the end. I run a windows 7 vm for system admin tools (vmware/AD) and RDP. I've a hackintosh at home, and though it took a bit of getting used to, the learning curve is way less than that of windows 8 - with a magic trackpad, it works really nicely. With some add-ons; iterm2, totalfinder, gitbox, sublime text etc, I've grown to quite like it. Finder in Lion is a mess, but I've more or less got the hang of that now.
I wouldn't be at all surprised that windows 8 prompts a bunch of people to stick with windows 7, or try out the alternatives (osx/linux). It's really that bad for classic desktops/laptops, and without substantial surgery prior to release, it's going to make vista look like a storming success story.
I also suspect it's going to directly accelerate the growth of post-pc devices; between iOS and ICS, microsoft doesn't stand a chance in that space, especially if they think this half-baked fiddly UI is a real contender. In an attempt to remake windows to take on iOS - and failing badly - I think they're going to hammer their marketshare in both.
I do the same stuff, but with my smartphone that always lives in my pocket or close to hand. It's portable, has 'net access, and has all my key data on it via sugarsync/evernote/pocket informant. I do have a tablet, but that's reserved for 'net reading on the sofa when I don't fancy sitting up at my desk. And as soon as I try and type on it, I end up going to the desktop if I need to write more than a sentence. At least on my smartphone I can double thumb type pretty quickly; on a 10" tablet, it's too heavy to do other than hold one handed and peck with the other, or awkward to balance on my knee and try and type with both. And there's zero point using a keyboard, when my real computer is Just There.
My wife on the other hand, is inseperable from her laptop. She's forever looking stuff up on it, she uses it on the coffee table, on her lap, always travels everywhere with it.
It's not the tablet is anything special; it's the device you always have with you that is, whether it's smartphone, tablet or laptop.
Did they remove the mouse support in Windows and I didn't get the memo?
They might as well have with the new gestures. They're really quite fiddly, and I'm a veteran FPS player. Swipe into the hot corner - and it's a pretty narrow hotspot, you've basically got to 'overshoot' to hit it; then swipe up or down in a straight line into the middle-ish to bring up either the running apps sidebar, or the charms sidebar. Slide too far off line? Disappears. Not far enough, or too far? Disappears. Move off the 'start' hot corner by a few pixels, to try and click that popup metro that appears? Disappears and you end up lauching the far-left icon on the taskbar instead. It usually takes me two or three goes to bring up the charm bar, and I've been testing the CP since it came out, and the DP before that.
Also - have two displays? run in a virtual machine or RDP session in a window on another host? Now you can't 'overrun' into the corner, you have to hit it absolutely precisely and stay there; trying to swipe down and stay in the narrow accepted line? Rediculously hard. I'm familiar with windows from 3.1 up to current, OSX and its predecessors, KDE 2, 3 and 4 for years, gnome for the last few, now unity, CDE and XFCE and BEOS and god knows how many other UIs have been and gone. None of them have made me want to throw my mouse through the screen at the UI. But windows 8? God-damn it's awful.
Couple of pop quizzes - how do you shut down? Not in the metro window. No icons, shortcuts or squares. It's under the charms bar, settings, then there's a little power icon at the bottom. Log off? Ctrl-alt-del, or goto metro and click your name picture. While we're on charms/settings; half the stuff you need has moved there into a new arrangement; half of it hasn't. Finding which bits are still under control panel, and which are under metro is basically guesswork, especially as some app stuff is not under charms, it's right click on a blank area and get a new options bar at the bottom. On the Metro mail program, you have a little bit at the bottom of the accounts side-bar to add a new account, with a close button. Click that close, and there's no way to bring it back. If you right click and then click accounts, it brings up the accounts side bar, but not the button. You now need to go into charms, and do it via settings - but only when you're in the mail app full screen, there's no other way to get to it.
It is a mess, it's completely illogical and it feels like you've got the old and new interface half-bodged together glued together with gestures that don't make sense on a pc, especially if it's not a full-single-screen pc. Dual screen isn't that uncommon - all our teaching classrooms are setup as dual screen with one on the desk, and the 2nd being the projector - they drag windows to which one they want to display on, so they can put something up for the pupils while having a private desktop for reference while they're at the board or desk. Doing precise mouse gestures at the edge of the screen without wavering, possibly while standing and leaning over the desk? It's ludicrous. I cannot possibly see deploying windows 8 anywhere on our network to replace 7. I'd get lynched.
I'm not even going to start on the insanity of the same interface with tricky gestures for VM-hosted or RDP-managed server 8 boxes; and while the remote admin-tools from a client box work for say, AD operations and file management, they don't work for 3rd party apps that use a local management app on a server, of which we have several.
And no, you can't turn it off. The registry hack and file replacement methods have been removed in the current versions. Now you need to fake it with something like Stardocks software, but there's nothing native to revert to windows 7/2008r2 behaviour.
Metro in and of itself is ok, if a little sparse; I'd actually quite like it as an OSX dashboard equivalent available on a hotkey/gesture for an over-view of various live tiles; I could even live with it as a start menu replacement if it handled a
Just be careful with this recommendation - the rape committed by the main character very early on in the first book (Lord Foul's Bane), including the lack of consequences for it (at first...) can be pretty polarising, I know more than one person that got that far and gave up pretty much immediately afterwards as a result. There are consequences though, spread throughout the series - but given Covenant is such an irritating dick as well as a rapist in the first book, it can be a bit tough going if not forewarned. The series does develop though, and it's much more character driven - and dark - than similar tolkein-lite fantasy-travelling-quest series it can be mistaken for at first.
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The updates are only available for Snow Leopard and Lion. If you're on Leopard (10.5) (still sold up until summer 2009) or older, you don't get the security patches OR the latest fixes to remove infection. Apple only support current and previous OS versions for security. Once Mountain Lion comes out in a couple of months, anyone who's running an OS older than october 2010 goes under the bus. Note, they're still selling snow leopard right now, as you need to install it first to go to lion - you can't jump from leopard to lion direct, as leopard don't have the app store needed. You can of course download and make a USB clean installer from an existing lion Mac, but if you've only got one physical machine and no-one can help you make an install, leopard -> snow leopard -> lion it is (pre-made lion install usb keys not available here)
We criticise microsoft for ending support for XP after 13 years, and Apple drops all support after TWO and get a pass? Something like 25% of mac users are using Leopard or older - not least due the removal of PPC support in snow leopard. Mountain Lion looks pretty pointless unless you're also an icloud user, and the steady of killing off of carbon library support in Lion and Mountain Lion means you may have to stick to snow leopard if a key app doesn't run on Lion yet - and you'll be in the same boat as Leopard users right now, running an 'obsolete' unsupported OS with no security patches that's still for sale right now!
Now apple are switching to an annual OSX release, they REALLY need to still support older OSes - such as the soon to be EOL'd snow leopard - longer than they do for critical security patches, such as this one. Apple decided they wanted to control java installation on OSX, they should have the decency to get security patches out for it in a prompt timescale. Don't forget, the whole reason this happened is Apple sat on upstream java security patches for months for even current OSX users - if they'd pushed out the patches THEN, instead of waiting for half a million + users to get infected...
Dalvik is released under the Apache licence, as it's partly based upon Apache Harmony - a free Java implementation. Note, Harmony wasn't an 'official' java implementation at the time, as it couldn't use the TCK testing kit (that showed compliance with the java spec) under licence terms that didn't conflict with the apache licence - specifically, field of use restrictions. Sun stonewalled, as they wanted to have their own GPL-licenced java implementation up and running for linux before working with the Apache Foundation.
Oracle argues that by using Java-like methods in the API - ie. to write code against before compilation to bytecode and then conversion to dalvik executables - infringes their copyright and patents. The dalvik virtual machine itself is quite different to java VMs as it's optimised for low memory/cpu devices, but the code is very java-like before it goes through the compiler.
GPL does imply a certain amount of patent protection, but as you say, it's somewhat of a moot point as Dalvik doesn't reference that code, having been written earlier against Harmony.
Now, the interesting question is - what DID he mean when he wrote that email? It's quite reasonable for Google to argue that he was wrong - not being a lawyer - and that they didn't need a licence, but wanted one (as they did attempt to do) in order to avoid this exact expensive legal battle - licencing being cheaper than lawyers - but that went out the window when they couldn't get one on sane terms and now they're fighting because Oracle want silly money for what is marginal infringement at most. After all, Oracle haven't sued the Apache Foundation for harmony, so why is code based on it - and open-sourced using the same licence - suddenly infringing?
But google's actual defence? get the guy to say, Oh, when I said we needed a licence, I didn't mean we actually NEEDED a licence, or know who we should get that licence from? Please. Not very convincing, and I'm on Google's side on this one.
Left to nature, contra-survival traits like these weed themselves out in any population, not just human. But nowadays they're being kept alive and allowed to breed wantonly, which might be admirable from a moral standpoint... but it's not doing the human gene pool any favors.
Further to my previous answer... Why don't you tell us what makes YOU such a gift to gene pool? You arrogant twat.
Left to nature, contra-survival traits like these weed themselves out in any population
Left to nature, I wouldn't be working a shit job with shitty hours stuck inside in a noisy hot office all day dealing with a workload you'd normally assign to three people and a boss you want to push out of a high window - a boss who has no problem texting you xmas morning expecting you to fix an internet access problem in one department. Nor would I be forced to stay in that job to pay the mortgage on the house that's underwater and unsellable due to recent subsidence. In a decent world, I'd be able to find another job except nobody is hiring at anything other than entry-level salaries in IT in my area (within a several hour commute range) and even those have 50+ applicants per post.
Glad to know I should be sterilized along with my wife, and my existing children should be killed to make sure I don't pollute the gene pool with my depression. Helpful.
And of course, it's only come up as news because London has just done its analogue switchoff so the digital channel transmitters can be upped to their full broadcast power.
For almost everyone in the rest of the country, we went through the digital switchover quite some time ago; years in many cases. And of course, ceefax went with it back then. My own switchover happened in may 2009 - I barely noticed, as I'd already been on freeview (digital broadcast) for several years before that.
To be honest, I haven't looked at ceefax in many years, so I won't miss it. The 'net has long since superseded it for me as a source of news, weather, info etc.
If you don't think mobs in the street don't frighten governments, just look at the Arab Spring. Or any other revolution. With democratic governments, at least the people have the power to replace their politicians with ones that represent them rather than the 1% or the corporations they own without having to stage an actual armed coup.
Tackling wall street is only part of the problem, you're right - you also have to tackle big money in politics, and the corporate media that tells lies to the populace. And get rid of the lobbyists, and the politicians that are bought by them.
To be blunt, there's not enough anger in the US public yet. Once you have 10's of millions of people on the streets every single day in every single city? Once people actually vote for politicians who aren't beholden to corporate slush funds, or based upon who the media tell them to? New ballgame.
Government can be co-opted by the public, in the public interest, if the public actually care enough to try. Corporations can't be.
As I understand EU free-trade rules, as long as the appropriate taxes are paid in the country where goods are bought (inside the EU), the government cannot then levy additional taxes when imported, either directly (in the boot of a car) or when shipped.
So this just seems a great proposal to kill all domestic sales of electronic goods with drives in - iPads, smartphones, photocopiers, laptops - and relocate them to Spain instead. I'm sure the Spanish government wouldn't mind, but it doesn't like it's going to do much to help Portugese debt.
who simply don't feel like forking out a couple hundred dollars to fix something that isn't broken?
a) Windows 7 home premium OEM is $99.
b) Windows XP is, in fact, broken.
The underlying security model of XP is fundamentally flawed. Despite a vast amount of plaster work on top, security capabilities of OSes have moved on a long way. There are significant improvements in Win 7 over XP under the bonnet when it comes to being a secure OS. I use OSX, android and linux myself, so I'm no windows fanboy, but to be fair they have learned a lot from their mistakes and the decade of attacks.
Windows XP is over 10 years old for heaven's sake. It hasn't been sold for what, 4 years now? How long exactly do you expect microsoft to provide security patches for that creaky old boat for, for the $50 your system builder originally paid for that OEM licence? Forever? Hell, Apple generally end-of-life's their desktop versions every couple of years - they only really support current and previous version. So if you're older than 10.6 (august 2009) you're no longer getting patches. And you're complaining that your 2001 operating system has only two more years of free security patches left?
We actually had to downgrade a laptop to vista the other day. You can install clean windows 7 on it, but one of the built-in drivers causes it to straight up blue screen after a couple of minutes, but without telling us which driver in the stack trace, just a generic error. We *think* it's the hard-drive controller after various eliminations, but various versions of the intel drivers don't help. We spent days on it trying to debug the damn thing.
Stick vista on it (which it came with). Works fine out of the box, no bluescreens, just keeps working. Just needs drivers for the touchpad and optional better intel GPU ones.
So screw it, vista it is.
Same problem with the newer kindles - they use the same generation pearl E Ink display as the kobo. I don't have a significant issue with ghosting - it's there if you look VERY closely, or have a black-heavy image on a previous page, but it's not an issue when you're just reading text. You can set it to do a full refresh every page, same as the kindle 3, or up to every 6 page turns, which is the default. I have it set on every 4 turns on my kobo, which provides a decent balance between the two for speed/vs ghosting. Even on 6, my kobo touch shows nothing LIKE that amount of ghosting in that screen shot.
I took a couple of quick snaps to demo;
Here's the kobo on a mostly blank page after 5 page (back) turns before refresh (next would do a full refresh)
https://picasaweb.google.com/103418843325186142125/Kobo#5729046541116884130
and what it looks like in the middle of text, again after 5 turns without refresh.
https://picasaweb.google.com/103418843325186142125/Kobo#5729047194047324946
(ignore the slight orange cast, that's a combo of lighting and my fairly naff phone cam - the rectangular shadow middle-bottom in the first one is the phone shadow)
Nooks are not officially for sale in the UK (I don't think they ever have been), and you pay import duty to bring em in. They're not a bad price at all on ebay uk (£70), but that's US resellers, so £20-£30 shipping plus you're still liable for import duty if customs spots it. So ~ £90 to £100 even if you avoid duty. Found a UK seller, it's £105, so that's amazon touch pricing. And of course, no recourse to B&N, as it's a parallel grey import, so even if they would warranty a resold product, I'd have to ship to US in the event of fault. Plus of course the official store is in dollars, so I'm paying conversion fees to buy the books if I want bookmark sync etc.
Much simpler to buy a kobo touch for £80, I get a local warranty from a physical retailer with wide presence, UK ebook store, and as you say, I'm not feeding the Amazon lock-in behemoth.
What I'm incredulous about is the fact that Apple users spend an average of more than $600 on apps & markup.
They don't. Well, not in that way, anyway. The $800+ comes from two things; AT&T paying $18 per month per phone to Apple for the privilege of being an iPhone carrier (presumably why they had an exclusive for so long), and the cost of the phone itself, at $399. That ignores that Apple does actually have to pay for manufacture, shipping hardware, labour etc to make the things. Though most of that is parts; they only pay $8 to foxconn for labour per phone. That, plus ruthless pressure on suppliers to cut costs that makes Walmart look slack, is why they have a ~40% profit margin on the hardware.
Google of course, doesn't make the phones - even the google branded nexus line are made by OEMs. Samsung make the Galaxy Nexus, for example, and samsung have been making out like bandits on the galaxy line - they sell more android galaxy smartphones than apples does iphones by quite a big margin, even though they make them mostly in Korea at considerably lower margin than Apple gets from China. This may all change once google finish acquiring Motorola of course; they might start seeing some of that hardware profit for themselves.
Bear in mind, google makes quite a chunk of money from iOS users, because Google licence google maps etc to Apple, and get paid for that. They don't get to charge the same licence fees to themselves for shipping google maps on android!
So android is not a very profitable OS in and of itself for google. It may even operate at a loss, once you include all the costs of updating it, working with carriers and OEMs for all their custom versions, having the market cope with all the different versions out there etc etc.
However, it does provide google an excellent platform for their webapps - google maps, google mail, google search - where they DO make an excellent amount of money from advertising. Apple could yank googlemaps from iOS at any time, and I've heard they're looking at doing just that. Look at the fun google had getting google+ on iOS, and google voice. Even if android makes no profit at all, having their own open source wide spread competitor to iOS and windows phone* gives them a huge opportunity to support their other services, and avoid iCloud etc eating their lunch in their core market.
* ok, windows phone might be a minnow now, but they owned the pda/smartphone market once and destroyed palm and psion in the process. Blackberry used to be a big player, and look what's happening to them. Apple and Google can't assume microsoft aren't willing to buy their way back into the mobile market, just as they did going from 0 to big player in the console market. Hell, microsoft are willing to toss most desktop and server users under a bus with windows 8 in order to get developers to make metro apps which will then be usable on tablet/phone, and that's a big gamble even with their massive cash pile.
Agreed that asda sometimes are a bit 'flexible' with availability, but I know a few people who've got their hands on one, I saw them in stock at my local a few days ago, and they're currently listed as in stock on their website : http://direct.asda.com/Kobo-Wireless-eReader---Onyx/000518285,default,pd.html - you can pick up in store, or have home delivery.
I think this one is a legit drop, rather than a gimmick special offer.
IIRC, Asda helped drive the price of the kobo touch down from £99 to its current £80 pretty much everywhere, which I paid a couple of months ago. I wouldn't be surprised if £49 becomes the new price for the kobo wifi, down from its current £70 standard (though you can get it for £60 elsewhere, as you say). It still beats the crap out of the £89 for the kindle basic at either price.
Into their 2nd biggest market after the US 7 months after the US - september 28th 2011 in the US, April 27 2012 in the UK. And there will probably shortages making it even longer before general availability. They withdrew the kindle keyboard without 3G (the model I had) leaving only the kindle basic @ £89, or the kindle keyboard @ £149.
Seven months is a long time in consumer electronics. Amazon had the e-ink market pretty much to themselves for the previous couple of generations. We still don't have the kindle fire or any projection for it. (which to be fair, really involves getting all the rights for the amazon app store, the movie store etc which aren't in the UK either, so I'm not terribly surprised at that).
But the kindle touch? No extra rights needed there, it's just an e-reader, same as the kindle 3. You can buy a kobo touch, and have been able to for months and months (backed by one of our biggest book/stationary retailers, WH Smith) for less than the kindle basic! Even when the kindle touch comes out, it's going to be £30 or 27% more expensive for what is virtually identical hardware to the kobo. If you want cheap, the kobo basic is almost half the price of the kindle basic, for again very similar hardware. You couldn't even import the touch, unless you went grey market for even more money and no warranty support.
Amazon don't have the e-ink market to themselves in the UK any more, even if the Nooks aren't available here. For a while, the kindle beat the crap out of the alternatives for both hardware, and better pricing, but that's no longer true. Amazon need to be aware of that now with their pricing and treating us like a captive market that will hang around and wait if they don't want to lose significant share to the competition. They've still got significant mind share - everybody knows about the kindle - but that won't last forever if they keep treating us like marks to be fleeced.
Much as I loved my kindle 3 (with surplus keyboard), I've since switched to the kobo touch after a problem with the kindle screen out of warranty - it's gone all 'ghosty'. Same idea as the kindle touch, except that _still_ isn't available in the UK yet; they wouldn't even ship a US version to the UK. It's up for pre-order now, finally, at £109 - or the kobo touch is available now from a ton of places, has been since xmas, and is only £80 (or the non-touch version for £49 @ asda, vs £89 for the kindle basic). Plus it reads epubs (drm-free or adobe digital editions), so you can buy books from all sorts of places that may be cheaper without having to sod about with calibre conversion, you don't have to use the kobo store.
While amazon after sales support is admittedly 2nd to none, they're not automatically the best value for e-ink readers any more. I do agree that e-ink is the way to go for reading books though. Small, light, portable, cheap, and a battery life measured in weeks not hours, as well as a well-stocked library in something smaller and lighter than one paperback. I'm saving so much weight in my luggage alone it's been worth it!
I did have a separate light for the kindle - it fitted into the leather case - and it did prove handy on the odd occasion when travelling and didn't have a decent light to read by - planes, trains and hotels especially. I would use it in bed at night, but my wife happily falls asleep with her own light on, let alone my bedside one. I can see how a built in light would be useful if your partner was more sensitive to bed-side lights, as a strap on light does add weight and alter the balance quite a bit. I haven't had the need to light up my kobo yet, but will probably just duct tape my current bendy one to it if needed!
Amoral corporations don't believe in right and wrong, only in legal and illegal, and to expect them to have compassion or any sense of social responsibility is equally stupid.
And it's this kind of thinking that is destroying capitalist nations like the US and the UK (I'm british, btw). You know, it's within living memory that large corporations switched to focusing solely upon short term shareholder 'value', back in the 70's and 80's. Before that, many big companies recognised they were only part of a giant collection of people, and that shitting in their own front yard was of short-term value only. Where they paid their workers sufficiently so that they could buy the very products they made. Where training, looking after your workers and ensuring a good work-life balance rewarded you with happier and thus better performing and more loyal employees. Where they recognised the social value of investing, via taxes and direct contributions, into the social lifeblood of their communities - schools, roads, hospitals. Where CEO's were stewards of their companies, not just there to strip much as much personal compensation as possible then get the hell out before anyone asked awkward questions.
Of course, not all companies were like that. But now, virtually none of them are. the 'Greed is Good' mantra has won.
In 1953 - "When he was asked during the hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee if as secretary of defense he could make a decision adverse to the interests of General Motors, Wilson answered affirmatively but added that he could not conceive of such a situation "because for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa". Can you imagine a CEO of a current multinational - or one of the big casino banks - saying that with a straight face now?
We should expect more than 'I can get away with it because it's within the letter of the law'. No, we should damn well DEMAND it.
*WHY WAS THE NORMANDY INSIDE A MASS EFFECT FIELD IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BATTLE FOR EARTH?*
And in my case, WTF is Garrus doing on board the Normandy doing a mass relay jump when a couple of minutes ago he was running for his life alongside me trying to avoid getting blown away by a Reaper on the final attack? And where the hell did the Illusive Man come from?
And after some 120+ hours game time, it comes down to some deus ex machina responsible for the whole business? I could have shot some power conduit back in Mass Effect 1 and saved us all the trouble?
I can live with an unhappy ending - my shepard giving up her life, anderson's life, even that of everyone on the Normandy to save the galaxy and stop the reapers fits with the story - giving up everything for the mission. But at least have some consequences to my prior actions. It didn't matter one goddamn how well or poorly I did in the build up to retaking earth in single player, it makes basically no difference. If I'd spammed multiplayer to get my 'readiness' rating up higher than its possible to in single player, I'd get a few seconds clip of N7 armour moving, and that's it. No impact upon how many reapers there are, how hard the final missions are, whether my companions live or die at the end. Nuttin.
Worse than that, the final scenes have no relevence or are barely related to any of the game I've just played, or the two predecessors. When my final suicide mission companions somehow end up on the Normandy heading out the Mass Relay when last I saw the ship was deep in the fighting, trying to buy me time... What the hell?? And when you've just stranded millions of aliens in earth orbit due to the destruction of the Relays, you only zoom in on stories told about the Sheppur some time in the future on the planet the Normandy crashed on?
I didn't need a HAPPY ending (though having the happiness relate to how hard I freaking worked or not would be nice) - as said, making a final ultimate sacrifice having said my goodbyes fits - but after the amount of time we've all put in to get here, I thought they'd at least put a bit more effort into having them make SENSE instead of the same weird ending upon your final choice amounting to a button which chooses which colour explosions you get.
It feels like the outsourced the ending to the same guy who came up with the one for Deus Ex: HR. At least with that it was only one game, instead of a series conclusion we've been waiting since 2007 for.
Except that the LTE frequencies the ipad supports are already occupied in the UK by freeview; our over-the-air digital TV network that is pretty much rolled out country wide now, and is the way the vast majority of people watch TV. The odds of those frequencies being available for use in the UK for LTE wireless are... slim, to say the least. IIRC, general-use LTE spectrum is earmarked to be taken from the current analog TV bands, once the last transmitters are switched off - the auctions are scheduled for 2013. And the ipad radio won't work on those frequencies. The same is true across most (all?) of europe.
Long story short - the new ipad will only ever be a 3.5G (HSPA+) device in the UK, same as the previous version and virtually everything else with a 3G chip in it that's on the shelves. Marketing it as a '4G' device - against others which WILL offer LTE support in the UK, either on the current limited trial networks (O2 have a couple), or when it starts to roll out more generally next year - is a big fat marketing lie. Putting it in big print as a feature - the 'Wi-fi + 4G' model - will mislead people into thinking it will work for them _here_ not only if they go on holiday to the US and get a data-roaming sim there.
I hope the ASA slaps them with a fat fine, orders them to revise all their adverts to remove the claims, and compensation should be made available to those customers who bought the product because they were mislead by the headline advertising into thinking the ipad 3 can do something that it cannot, and never will.
I've just finished reading the series myself (on a kobo, natch). I liked them. They're not going to win any awards for great literature, but they're significantly better written than Harry Potter or the first couple of chapters of the first twilight book (I couldn't stomach any more than that). I wouldn't even classify them as young adult; they're pretty violently brutal with quite a few analogies to our current day politics. It's only that the protagonists are teenagers that makes it 'young adult' really.
OK, I found the story interesting. the characters fairly well written and it was a page-turner; you do want to see what happens next, even if you can see it coming. It's hardly Asimov or Neal Asher or Iain M Banks or George R.R. Martin - but then sometimes it's nice to read a book that's more about the people in it than the hugely complicated and imaginative world that they're living in, and is more about entertainment than being weighty literature.
Oddly enough, I'd rate them about the same as one of Pratchett's latest, say Snuff in terms of fun to read. Though I love him and his work dearly, and feel deeply sad about his illness, it's clearly affecting his books.
People do read all sorts of crap and enjoy it though; Twilight, for example, or some of those dreadful self help books, or Andy McNab's fiction. It takes all sorts, and I'd rate Hunger Games considerably higher than that kind of dross - so if that's all they're comparing it to, you can see where they're coming from. While any reading is better than no reading, I'd rather people read something that isn't total crap, and there's nothing wrong with populist material in and of itself.
I admit, I read the series because of all the fuss (and I needed some new books for my new kobo touch!) but I don't regret the time reading them, which is all that really matters for me. I read enough 'great literature' to allow myself some lighter reads in between the weightier stuff.
Advere possession only applies if the owner knows (or should know) you have it, but doesn't care. So if you find a mobile phone and tell the owner that you've got it, and they never turn up to claim it, after a while it becomes yours. Same goes for land; if you occupy it (by for example, building your fence over part of their land), and they allow it without some specific contract lease or something, then eventually it becomes yours - after 10 years, I think.
Picking something up, keeping it and telling nobody, does not qualify under adverse possession.
Claiming discarded items is not "stealing."
Much as I see where you're coming from; actually it is under the law. Lost property remains the property of the original owner, they don't give up ownership to anyone that finds it - just as your house remains yours when you leave in the morning, so your phone remains yours if you leave it on a bench. There are means to legally acquire abandoned property though - adverse possession for example.
So if you were to notify the owner that you have their property, and they can't be bothered to collect it, after a period of time it legally becomes yours. You can also hand it into the police, and again, after a period of time of non-collection they may return it to the finder to keep (in the UK; a friend of mine when we were kids handed in a found £50 note, and got it back a few months later when it was unclaimed).
This is why if you unknowingly buy a stolen car, and the owner finds out and claims it back - via reporting it to the police - you get stiffed. The person that sold you the car had no legal right of ownership to transfer, so you own bupkiss, and the original owner gets to claim it back.
Of course, in practise physical possession is 9/10's of the law, especially for small objects that are hard to track down once mislaid. But picking up a dropped/mislaid item and keeping it, is in fact, stealing - you're intentionally depriving someone else of their property, even if you don't know who that someone is. Best choice is to hand the item into a responsible person where you found it; the barman or shopkeeper for example, as it is fairly likely the owner will attempt to find it via them. Alternatively, hand it into the police with details of where you found it. Keeping it and attempting to return it directly is of course an option, but you might get accused of stealing it in the first place! Leaving it exactly where it was is also an option often forgotten - the owner may well come back for it in a minute.
Personally, I've returned a fair few items ( though mostly to someone who's literally just dropped it or left it), but including a lady's purse that had all her things that she left in a supermarket trolley, via the shop-keeper. They contacted me later to say that she was extremely happy and surprised to get it all back untouched - apparently there was her pension in there, and she'd expected that at least to go missing. On the other hand, I've had a dropped camera disappear in the 5 minutes it took to come back for it; a wallet that wasn't mine popped back through my letterbox (turned out to be a neighbours); and my dropped wallet returned by a guy walking behind me. A friend of mine also got his laptop back that he left in a taxi; the taxi driver tracked him down and dropped it off personally.
So you never know; there are a lot more honest people out there than you'd think.
Personally, I've started the switch to OSX as my primary - given my boss is an Apple nut, it wasn't too hard to talk him into buying us imacs in the end. I run a windows 7 vm for system admin tools (vmware/AD) and RDP. I've a hackintosh at home, and though it took a bit of getting used to, the learning curve is way less than that of windows 8 - with a magic trackpad, it works really nicely. With some add-ons; iterm2, totalfinder, gitbox, sublime text etc, I've grown to quite like it. Finder in Lion is a mess, but I've more or less got the hang of that now.
I wouldn't be at all surprised that windows 8 prompts a bunch of people to stick with windows 7, or try out the alternatives (osx/linux). It's really that bad for classic desktops/laptops, and without substantial surgery prior to release, it's going to make vista look like a storming success story.
I also suspect it's going to directly accelerate the growth of post-pc devices; between iOS and ICS, microsoft doesn't stand a chance in that space, especially if they think this half-baked fiddly UI is a real contender. In an attempt to remake windows to take on iOS - and failing badly - I think they're going to hammer their marketshare in both.
I do the same stuff, but with my smartphone that always lives in my pocket or close to hand. It's portable, has 'net access, and has all my key data on it via sugarsync/evernote/pocket informant. I do have a tablet, but that's reserved for 'net reading on the sofa when I don't fancy sitting up at my desk. And as soon as I try and type on it, I end up going to the desktop if I need to write more than a sentence. At least on my smartphone I can double thumb type pretty quickly; on a 10" tablet, it's too heavy to do other than hold one handed and peck with the other, or awkward to balance on my knee and try and type with both. And there's zero point using a keyboard, when my real computer is Just There.
My wife on the other hand, is inseperable from her laptop. She's forever looking stuff up on it, she uses it on the coffee table, on her lap, always travels everywhere with it.
It's not the tablet is anything special; it's the device you always have with you that is, whether it's smartphone, tablet or laptop.
Did they remove the mouse support in Windows and I didn't get the memo?
They might as well have with the new gestures. They're really quite fiddly, and I'm a veteran FPS player. Swipe into the hot corner - and it's a pretty narrow hotspot, you've basically got to 'overshoot' to hit it; then swipe up or down in a straight line into the middle-ish to bring up either the running apps sidebar, or the charms sidebar. Slide too far off line? Disappears. Not far enough, or too far? Disappears. Move off the 'start' hot corner by a few pixels, to try and click that popup metro that appears? Disappears and you end up lauching the far-left icon on the taskbar instead. It usually takes me two or three goes to bring up the charm bar, and I've been testing the CP since it came out, and the DP before that.
Also - have two displays? run in a virtual machine or RDP session in a window on another host? Now you can't 'overrun' into the corner, you have to hit it absolutely precisely and stay there; trying to swipe down and stay in the narrow accepted line? Rediculously hard. I'm familiar with windows from 3.1 up to current, OSX and its predecessors, KDE 2, 3 and 4 for years, gnome for the last few, now unity, CDE and XFCE and BEOS and god knows how many other UIs have been and gone. None of them have made me want to throw my mouse through the screen at the UI. But windows 8? God-damn it's awful.
Couple of pop quizzes - how do you shut down? Not in the metro window. No icons, shortcuts or squares. It's under the charms bar, settings, then there's a little power icon at the bottom. Log off? Ctrl-alt-del, or goto metro and click your name picture. While we're on charms/settings; half the stuff you need has moved there into a new arrangement; half of it hasn't. Finding which bits are still under control panel, and which are under metro is basically guesswork, especially as some app stuff is not under charms, it's right click on a blank area and get a new options bar at the bottom. On the Metro mail program, you have a little bit at the bottom of the accounts side-bar to add a new account, with a close button. Click that close, and there's no way to bring it back. If you right click and then click accounts, it brings up the accounts side bar, but not the button. You now need to go into charms, and do it via settings - but only when you're in the mail app full screen, there's no other way to get to it.
It is a mess, it's completely illogical and it feels like you've got the old and new interface half-bodged together glued together with gestures that don't make sense on a pc, especially if it's not a full-single-screen pc. Dual screen isn't that uncommon - all our teaching classrooms are setup as dual screen with one on the desk, and the 2nd being the projector - they drag windows to which one they want to display on, so they can put something up for the pupils while having a private desktop for reference while they're at the board or desk. Doing precise mouse gestures at the edge of the screen without wavering, possibly while standing and leaning over the desk? It's ludicrous. I cannot possibly see deploying windows 8 anywhere on our network to replace 7. I'd get lynched.
I'm not even going to start on the insanity of the same interface with tricky gestures for VM-hosted or RDP-managed server 8 boxes; and while the remote admin-tools from a client box work for say, AD operations and file management, they don't work for 3rd party apps that use a local management app on a server, of which we have several.
And no, you can't turn it off. The registry hack and file replacement methods have been removed in the current versions. Now you need to fake it with something like Stardocks software, but there's nothing native to revert to windows 7/2008r2 behaviour.
Metro in and of itself is ok, if a little sparse; I'd actually quite like it as an OSX dashboard equivalent available on a hotkey/gesture for an over-view of various live tiles; I could even live with it as a start menu replacement if it handled a
Just be careful with this recommendation - the rape committed by the main character very early on in the first book (Lord Foul's Bane), including the lack of consequences for it (at first...) can be pretty polarising, I know more than one person that got that far and gave up pretty much immediately afterwards as a result. There are consequences though, spread throughout the series - but given Covenant is such an irritating dick as well as a rapist in the first book, it can be a bit tough going if not forewarned. The series does develop though, and it's much more character driven - and dark - than similar tolkein-lite fantasy-travelling-quest series it can be mistaken for at first.