Sure, that's why the chief prosecutor threw it out but a new one took it up. Why the women didn't want to press charges then suddenly they did. Why there was so much confusion in the extradition warrant whether it was for questioning or to face charges. Whether a rogue prosecutor with a point to prove totally without pressure from the US, or whether the women just wanted media attention and that's the reason for the flip-flopping, who knows. What we do know is that rape was not involved, not the violent act we associate with the word, and that even the Swedish are not trying to convict him of it.
Well he was charged with a crime. Then he wasn't. Then he was again. Then it was for questioning him for a crime. Then it was a crime again. They arrest him on made up charges, and then retro-fit the charges and the warrants to try and make it legal. I am so disappointed in the UK legal system, locking up random people on the request of the US for things that we don't even consider crimes. Worse is the guy that ran a links directory than contained references to copyright material. Boom extradited to get locked up in the US. The incredibly fast-tracking of throwing Assange into solitary IN THE UK is pretty horrible though.
It's pedantic because it's unlikely anybody will be working in an empty building with the lights off until 5.15pm, then read on Slashdot ir's a bank holiday and suddenly feel a bit of a fool and realise they can go home instead of waiting 15 more minutes.
I don't think you are right. The only source trusted by the BBC, Florian Mueller, clearly states on his site it was actually a big mistake on the part of the jury and that this verdict can be over-turned. According to his web site Oracle are quite clearly going to win this case.
Yes I meant the British government. CSA springs to mind wasting £539M, along with the Fire Services failure costing another £500M. Apparently the last Labour government managed to waste £26bn in botched projects and 7/10 UK government projects are failures.
The Brits in the private sector are quite excellent. However they are rarely used with government contracts outsourced abroad (usually EDS).
The Tories are not the government, their are in a coalition with the Lib Dems. The massive debt was run up by an incompetent Labour government who ran up a massive deficit and sold off all our gold reserve for pennies. The coalition inherited a complete mess just as the financial world was sliding into a global recession. All of which doesn't have much to do with open sourcing or not some app they developed. From the article: "We had said that we wanted to move to an open source solution but it has not been possible to do so in this version of CloudStore,” said a Cabinet Office spokesperson.
“We are still committed to considering a full open source solution as part of this ongoing development and are hopeful we can include API, product rating and reviews in future iterations too.”
They are not the first to want to clean up the code before releasing it OS, eg Google did the same with Honeycomb. The British have always been staggeringly incompetent when it comes to software projects. Mind-blowingly bad. Billions wasted. It's always been this way no matter who has been in government.
It would be good to have a set of peer reviewed books that covers education all the way up to 16 years old. Maths, languages, etc. This way no child will have to pay for books ever again. Children can get a Nook loaded with every book they will ever need the day they start school, so advanced students are able read ahead. A developing country could then simply localise a selection to create its own curriculum. Those deciding which modules to do can read the books they will be studying for that subject before choosing. Children moving country can download the new set in advance and familiarise themselves so they don't start their new school at a disadvantage.
So many countries are bitching about ThePirateBay which is an international repository of arts and culture, but can't be bothered to create an international repository of where people can learn basic reading, writing and math skills.
UK is very different to France also. I am the only person I know here that doesn't drink and drive, having been brainwashed by the stigma whilst in the UK. The police did a check down the end of my road here in Nice and over 80% of drivers were found to be well over the limit. On a Monday. Just yesterday some drunk driver drove his Ferrari right into the sea, and this is just a normal occurrence. The girls are worse than the guys, as they will quite happily finish most of a bottle of vodka and not be able to walk to their car without falling over several times before driving home.
Driving for fun means not pootling along at 30mph, paranoidly watching your speedo more than the road due to the vast network of cameras that will flash you at 33mph, worrying about the cost of your over-priced fuel the car is running on, avoiding the areas of London that will trigger a congestion charge fine, then being able to stop off for a quick pint somewhere hoping you didn't miss them reducing the alcohol limits to zero and you go to jail, before worriedly returning to your car hoping it hasn't been clamped or towed away because it was on a single yellow line.
With the number of Ubuntu varients like Mythbuntu and Mediabuntu (ignoring different DEs for now) having a Webuntu not actually a bad idea. It would be nice to drop to the command line from a fresh install and just type "pip install x". Or have a nice system settings menu where I can click and add "django" running "nginx" on port "8001" then click again to add "wordpress" running "apache/wsgi" on port "8002" etc. Have Firebug installed in Firefox by default. Double-clicking a HTML file should open it in an editor, not web browser.
Not sure if it would gain any traction unless Dell was a hands-off sponsor though.
"Bottom Line: I'm sticking with incandescents, until the U.S. or EU outlaw them (2014?)."
Bottom line is that ignorant people like yourself are a major part of the problem, especially when they spread misinformation. If you want to be selfish then just do it quietly.
Philips produces their bulbs in Germany? Why would they shift their factories from Holland to another EU company rather than outsourcing to the Middle-East?
I don't know. I loved my Nokia E71 before Nokia suicided, and many of my business friends swear by their Crackberries. Most of the business people that jumped on the iPhone train are now sick of it and looking to switch. Much as I love my S2, I miss the proper keyboard and battery life is as bad as the iPhone once you put on several VoIP apps to speak with friends abroad for free.
If Blackberry produced a razor thin phone that lasted for days on end and had keyboard plus slick integration, then I would love to have one for business which I put in my suit pocket and then a Note for personal use.
Heh you think that's bad you should try reading the articles. I only got as far as the choosing a database one. Apparently the guy that uses Postgres thinks people should use Postgres but the guy that uses MSQL thinks you should use MSQL. Oh and apparently there is database called MySQL. There is no comparison between them, mention of features, or in fact anything you would expect to find in an article on a tech site. The article reminds me of those churned out by Indian freelancers who write copy for search engines.
Think of the site as an unfunny The Reg, or Techdirt without the comments. The word 'pathetic' best sums things up.
The day Couterstrike started running better on Linux than Microsoft was the day I wiped my partition. New PC and MW3 and BF3 need to be ported to run flawlessly before I hit format again. Obviously for doing anything real Linux is far superior. Fortunately I keep my OSs on a SSD drive now, so booting into Ubuntu takes around 1 second.
Sure. Imagine developing stuff for this TCP/IP thing. Sure you can write something that runs on it now but what about in a few years time? Come up with a decent API that everybody agrees on and legacy stuff will work for decades. If you can take the SIM card out of a Galaxy S3 and plug it into a early '90s "brick" GSM phone and still work then there should be no problem doing the stuff with HA hardware.
The problem with X10 is that the protocol is slow and unreliable. Great for its time, but there is so much better now. The problem is that the market is totally fragmented and none of it inter-operable.
The big problem however, is once you automate the lights, temperature, and coffee pot what else is there that makes any sense
Home security?
even the lights are more of a novelty than much practical benefit
You are mixing revenue and profits. Samsung sold 44.5 million phones generating $37.3bn in revenue, $16.7bn from the mobile division, and $5.1bn profit of which $3.8bn is from the mobile division.
Apple sold 35.1 million phones and made $11.6bn profit in total, but this includes 11.8M iPads as well as its iPods, PCs, OSX, and iTunes. If the iPhone made up 50% of Apple's profits (a guess as random as your 30% margin) this would make Apple around 25% more profitable than Samsung with the same profits for 3/4 of the handsets.
You don't "kill on profit" if two companies are immensely profitable, there are no losers there. It depends on how those profits are used (in the case of Apple frivolous lawsuits to drive any competition out of business). However Apple is more vulnerable. They run on inferior hardware, are over-priced, and rely on remaining a must-have fashion item. Samsung's market was forged in the ultra-competitive Android market against players like Motorola, HTC, LG, etc, and have created a genuine range of value for money products. In terms of hardware and value for money, the S2 is the best in the market.
Apple will start to wane, Nokia dying is inevitable, and now Motorola has Google's cash behind them. Samsung is king for now but they have some great competitors snapping at their heels. The story is far from over.
Gentoo is fun and you really get to learn how the system works. If you like Mint then good, use what suits you now. Unity probably gained more users than it lost. I really liked KDE4 but am now hooked on Unity. I especially love the way I just type the app name and filter rather than hunting and pecking through a "Start"-type menu.
I personally think Ubuntu made a great choice, and it's a big win in my opinion. After all the positive reviews of 12.04 I am tempted to upgrade tonight (though I usually prefer to wait until a.10 release on my main machine). I never really liked Gnome and KDE is now really polished but now Unity brings the GTK-based desktop back into contention.
As for distro getting people away from Windows, forget it. Windows is about apps (especially games), laziness, and dirty tactics by M$. It's not a competition. My Ubuntu desktop blows away anything Windows 7 can offer me so I am happy. What my neighbour runs... well that's up to him.
Now here comes the Unity crap and she's like "Now I have to REMEMBER all the fucking programs names? WTF?"
Or you can just right click on the icon and tick "Keep in launcher".
What's with people and the "won't be supported anymore"? It doesn't stop working after a couple of years. All the apps will still work fine and upgrade as normal. There are still millions of people that use Windows 95 for goodness sakes. Downgrade to a version you like and stick with it. By the time you feel the need to format in a few years time there will be a plethora of new options available.
Er running the latest version of a distro is like running a new version of Microsoft Windows before the first Service Pack comes out. I'm not sure what you really expected. And it's certainly not cramming it down your throat, the official site mirror for the US has installs all the way back to 8.04.
Ridiculous argument. "I used the alpha and though the finished product is 100x better I will use something completely different to spite myself". There was all the hate for KDE when it launched 4.0 and that was way worse. By 4.2 it was actually something quite usable. Unity was a bit basic when it launched in the 11.04 days but it wasn't the unstable mess KDE4 was when it launched.
If you just want something you know and don't like change then go retro and stay with Mint or Debian. Everybody else will just ignore you and enjoy the latest KDE/Unity/xfce/etc.
So you don't get hundreds of megs of useless libraries installed that you don't need. Kubuntu won't install the Gnome shared libs, and Ubuntu won't install the KDE or xfce4 libs.
Of course many of us tend to just install software based on both GTK and QT4 so end up sucking a lot of them in anyway whether under Unity or KDE4.
Slashdot Mirror
That's all there is to the story
Sure, that's why the chief prosecutor threw it out but a new one took it up. Why the women didn't want to press charges then suddenly they did. Why there was so much confusion in the extradition warrant whether it was for questioning or to face charges. Whether a rogue prosecutor with a point to prove totally without pressure from the US, or whether the women just wanted media attention and that's the reason for the flip-flopping, who knows. What we do know is that rape was not involved, not the violent act we associate with the word, and that even the Swedish are not trying to convict him of it.
Phillip.
Well he was charged with a crime. Then he wasn't. Then he was again. Then it was for questioning him for a crime. Then it was a crime again. They arrest him on made up charges, and then retro-fit the charges and the warrants to try and make it legal. I am so disappointed in the UK legal system, locking up random people on the request of the US for things that we don't even consider crimes. Worse is the guy that ran a links directory than contained references to copyright material. Boom extradited to get locked up in the US. The incredibly fast-tracking of throwing Assange into solitary IN THE UK is pretty horrible though.
Phillip.
It's pedantic because it's unlikely anybody will be working in an empty building with the lights off until 5.15pm, then read on Slashdot ir's a bank holiday and suddenly feel a bit of a fool and realise they can go home instead of waiting 15 more minutes.
Phillip.
I don't think you are right. The only source trusted by the BBC, Florian Mueller, clearly states on his site it was actually a big mistake on the part of the jury and that this verdict can be over-turned. According to his web site Oracle are quite clearly going to win this case.
Phillip.
Yes I meant the British government. CSA springs to mind wasting £539M, along with the Fire Services failure costing another £500M. Apparently the last Labour government managed to waste £26bn in botched projects and 7/10 UK government projects are failures.
The Brits in the private sector are quite excellent. However they are rarely used with government contracts outsourced abroad (usually EDS).
Phillip.
The Tories are not the government, their are in a coalition with the Lib Dems. The massive debt was run up by an incompetent Labour government who ran up a massive deficit and sold off all our gold reserve for pennies. The coalition inherited a complete mess just as the financial world was sliding into a global recession. All of which doesn't have much to do with open sourcing or not some app they developed. From the article:
"We had said that we wanted to move to an open source solution but it has not been possible to do so in this version of CloudStore,” said a Cabinet Office spokesperson.
“We are still committed to considering a full open source solution as part of this ongoing development and are hopeful we can include API, product rating and reviews in future iterations too.”
They are not the first to want to clean up the code before releasing it OS, eg Google did the same with Honeycomb. The British have always been staggeringly incompetent when it comes to software projects. Mind-blowingly bad. Billions wasted. It's always been this way no matter who has been in government.
Phillip.
It would be good to have a set of peer reviewed books that covers education all the way up to 16 years old. Maths, languages, etc. This way no child will have to pay for books ever again. Children can get a Nook loaded with every book they will ever need the day they start school, so advanced students are able read ahead. A developing country could then simply localise a selection to create its own curriculum. Those deciding which modules to do can read the books they will be studying for that subject before choosing. Children moving country can download the new set in advance and familiarise themselves so they don't start their new school at a disadvantage.
So many countries are bitching about ThePirateBay which is an international repository of arts and culture, but can't be bothered to create an international repository of where people can learn basic reading, writing and math skills.
Phillip.
UK is very different to France also. I am the only person I know here that doesn't drink and drive, having been brainwashed by the stigma whilst in the UK. The police did a check down the end of my road here in Nice and over 80% of drivers were found to be well over the limit. On a Monday. Just yesterday some drunk driver drove his Ferrari right into the sea, and this is just a normal occurrence. The girls are worse than the guys, as they will quite happily finish most of a bottle of vodka and not be able to walk to their car without falling over several times before driving home.
Phillip.
Driving for fun means not pootling along at 30mph, paranoidly watching your speedo more than the road due to the vast network of cameras that will flash you at 33mph, worrying about the cost of your over-priced fuel the car is running on, avoiding the areas of London that will trigger a congestion charge fine, then being able to stop off for a quick pint somewhere hoping you didn't miss them reducing the alcohol limits to zero and you go to jail, before worriedly returning to your car hoping it hasn't been clamped or towed away because it was on a single yellow line.
Phillip.
With the number of Ubuntu varients like Mythbuntu and Mediabuntu (ignoring different DEs for now) having a Webuntu not actually a bad idea. It would be nice to drop to the command line from a fresh install and just type "pip install x". Or have a nice system settings menu where I can click and add "django" running "nginx" on port "8001" then click again to add "wordpress" running "apache/wsgi" on port "8002" etc. Have Firebug installed in Firefox by default. Double-clicking a HTML file should open it in an editor, not web browser.
Not sure if it would gain any traction unless Dell was a hands-off sponsor though.
Phillip.
"CFLs and LEDs don't live any longer than incandescents because of many factors"
When your first statement is nonsense, we can hardly take the rest of the post seriously.
"The electronics are sensitive to heat, electric spikes, or frequent on/off cycles by the users"
LEDs are tough, and the last one made me laugh. The word "blinking" is almost attached to the word "LED".
"BUT CFLs and LEDs are only built in China, and only recycled in China, so you need to add ~20,000 miles of fuel usage"
The UK has over 800 free recycling points for CFL and will do free pickup for businesses recycling LEDs.
"Bottom Line: I'm sticking with incandescents, until the U.S. or EU outlaw them (2014?)."
Bottom line is that ignorant people like yourself are a major part of the problem, especially when they spread misinformation. If you want to be selfish then just do it quietly.
Phillip.
Philips produces their bulbs in Germany? Why would they shift their factories from Holland to another EU company rather than outsourcing to the Middle-East?
Phillip.
I don't know. I loved my Nokia E71 before Nokia suicided, and many of my business friends swear by their Crackberries. Most of the business people that jumped on the iPhone train are now sick of it and looking to switch. Much as I love my S2, I miss the proper keyboard and battery life is as bad as the iPhone once you put on several VoIP apps to speak with friends abroad for free.
If Blackberry produced a razor thin phone that lasted for days on end and had keyboard plus slick integration, then I would love to have one for business which I put in my suit pocket and then a Note for personal use.
Phillip.
Heh you think that's bad you should try reading the articles. I only got as far as the choosing a database one. Apparently the guy that uses Postgres thinks people should use Postgres but the guy that uses MSQL thinks you should use MSQL. Oh and apparently there is database called MySQL. There is no comparison between them, mention of features, or in fact anything you would expect to find in an article on a tech site. The article reminds me of those churned out by Indian freelancers who write copy for search engines.
Think of the site as an unfunny The Reg, or Techdirt without the comments. The word 'pathetic' best sums things up.
Phillip.
The day Couterstrike started running better on Linux than Microsoft was the day I wiped my partition. New PC and MW3 and BF3 need to be ported to run flawlessly before I hit format again. Obviously for doing anything real Linux is far superior. Fortunately I keep my OSs on a SSD drive now, so booting into Ubuntu takes around 1 second.
Phillip.
Sure. Imagine developing stuff for this TCP/IP thing. Sure you can write something that runs on it now but what about in a few years time? Come up with a decent API that everybody agrees on and legacy stuff will work for decades. If you can take the SIM card out of a Galaxy S3 and plug it into a early '90s "brick" GSM phone and still work then there should be no problem doing the stuff with HA hardware.
Phillip.
The problem with X10 is that the protocol is slow and unreliable. Great for its time, but there is so much better now. The problem is that the market is totally fragmented and none of it inter-operable.
The big problem however, is once you automate the lights, temperature, and coffee pot what else is there that makes any sense
Home security?
even the lights are more of a novelty than much practical benefit
Only if your electricity is free.
Phillip.
Why do they think implementing mass censorship on a national scale will affect piracy?
The dumb starts on a much higher strata than the workings of DNS.
Phillip.
You are mixing revenue and profits. Samsung sold 44.5 million phones generating $37.3bn in revenue, $16.7bn from the mobile division, and $5.1bn profit of which $3.8bn is from the mobile division.
Apple sold 35.1 million phones and made $11.6bn profit in total, but this includes 11.8M iPads as well as its iPods, PCs, OSX, and iTunes. If the iPhone made up 50% of Apple's profits (a guess as random as your 30% margin) this would make Apple around 25% more profitable than Samsung with the same profits for 3/4 of the handsets.
You don't "kill on profit" if two companies are immensely profitable, there are no losers there. It depends on how those profits are used (in the case of Apple frivolous lawsuits to drive any competition out of business). However Apple is more vulnerable. They run on inferior hardware, are over-priced, and rely on remaining a must-have fashion item. Samsung's market was forged in the ultra-competitive Android market against players like Motorola, HTC, LG, etc, and have created a genuine range of value for money products. In terms of hardware and value for money, the S2 is the best in the market.
Apple will start to wane, Nokia dying is inevitable, and now Motorola has Google's cash behind them. Samsung is king for now but they have some great competitors snapping at their heels. The story is far from over.
Phillip.
Gentoo is fun and you really get to learn how the system works. If you like Mint then good, use what suits you now. Unity probably gained more users than it lost. I really liked KDE4 but am now hooked on Unity. I especially love the way I just type the app name and filter rather than hunting and pecking through a "Start"-type menu.
I personally think Ubuntu made a great choice, and it's a big win in my opinion. After all the positive reviews of 12.04 I am tempted to upgrade tonight (though I usually prefer to wait until a .10 release on my main machine). I never really liked Gnome and KDE is now really polished but now Unity brings the GTK-based desktop back into contention.
As for distro getting people away from Windows, forget it. Windows is about apps (especially games), laziness, and dirty tactics by M$. It's not a competition. My Ubuntu desktop blows away anything Windows 7 can offer me so I am happy. What my neighbour runs... well that's up to him.
Phillip.
Now here comes the Unity crap and she's like "Now I have to REMEMBER all the fucking programs names? WTF?"
Or you can just right click on the icon and tick "Keep in launcher".
What's with people and the "won't be supported anymore"? It doesn't stop working after a couple of years. All the apps will still work fine and upgrade as normal. There are still millions of people that use Windows 95 for goodness sakes. Downgrade to a version you like and stick with it. By the time you feel the need to format in a few years time there will be a plethora of new options available.
Phillip.
PS Both xfce and kde4 are nice
Er running the latest version of a distro is like running a new version of Microsoft Windows before the first Service Pack comes out. I'm not sure what you really expected. And it's certainly not cramming it down your throat, the official site mirror for the US has installs all the way back to 8.04.
If you want an easy life, just install Gentoo...
Phillip.
Ridiculous argument. "I used the alpha and though the finished product is 100x better I will use something completely different to spite myself". There was all the hate for KDE when it launched 4.0 and that was way worse. By 4.2 it was actually something quite usable. Unity was a bit basic when it launched in the 11.04 days but it wasn't the unstable mess KDE4 was when it launched.
If you just want something you know and don't like change then go retro and stay with Mint or Debian. Everybody else will just ignore you and enjoy the latest KDE/Unity/xfce/etc.
Phillip.
Superior in what way? Certainly not in terms of licensing. And there is no guarantee that h264 doesn't infringe on patents.
Phillip.
So you don't get hundreds of megs of useless libraries installed that you don't need. Kubuntu won't install the Gnome shared libs, and Ubuntu won't install the KDE or xfce4 libs.
Of course many of us tend to just install software based on both GTK and QT4 so end up sucking a lot of them in anyway whether under Unity or KDE4.
Phillip.