You're a little off target.

Apple take a 30% cut of all revenue - you choose a price, sell it, they take 30%.

Here, Canonical are splitting (75/25) of a 10% affiliate award. So they're taking 7.5%, GNOME gets 2.5%. The other 90% is also then split between the record label and Amazon (I don't know what ratio that is - probably variable).

The cut they get on a £10 record versus the cut Apple would get on a £10 app is chicken feed.

It should also be noted that Canonical run their own music store (Ubuntu One). They have decided to also split their own profits in the same manner. This has nothing to do with Banshee or Amazon so is purely a good will gesture. Or if you're cynical, a PR exercise.

It's also irrelevant. Whether the users know or not, whether they gave permission or not, Bing is still receiving *and using* direct search data from another search engine! The click-through is monitoring two pieces of data and then providing that back to Bing - the search term entered into Google, and the page the user goes to after the results page is returned.

Let's go back here a bit. Google builds up it's search results by a variety of methods, but mainly through:
* Web crawling and categorising web sites.
* Recoding what results people pick whne they do a search on google.

This is more or less how we expect every search engine to work. The success of the engine hinges on the methods and algorithms used to piece all that data together in a meaningful way, thus providing useful results that keep us coming back for our search needs.

In this case, Bing has, in essence, spied on another search engine. It's taken this data deliberately (the tool bar or the server that processes the data that is monitoring the end user would need to be aware of how a search term is entered for google. It has to have been coded for this).

The fact that Google did this deliberately is irrelevant to the simple, plain fact that Bing is indeed deliberately recording Google search terms and results. And they aren't even checking such data against their own database in any meaningful way. If their own web crawling and search data was halfway competent it would have identified that the search terms didn't match the results in any meaningful way - from a simple text index to a multi-faceted category/semantic classification approach, this was a nonsense phrase unassociated with the page in question.

Are you arguing that the way this data is obtained means it's not stealing? It's only the difference between looking for something yourself or asking someone else to do the looking for you. Either way, they are relying on the results of other search engines to bolster or ammend their own. There's a degree of dishonesty and desperation about that.

Yes, but like many others here this misses the point of this particular "experiment" - this wasn't about which group of players had better twitch skills (where the keyboard/mouse combo does have an advantage) but simply about which platform had more team oriented players.

The reward was for performing team actions. Like stand next to comrade, press one key or controller button to give them a medkit. There were nearly twice as many console players as PC players yet the PC players raked in the achievements so much faster.

The implication has nothing to do with the FPS twitch skills of console gamers vs PC users but all to do with the difference in attitudes.

My initial thoughts would be that a PC user is more likely to be older, possibly with a job that involves responsibility or teamwork since a gaming PC is usually a bigger investment than a console. This translates into players who are more used to working together to achieve long-term aims vs. the instant gratification approach of potentially more selfish console players. As ever, this is a gross generalisation of course.

The .org thing was both silly and annoying but there's a reason. Shortly after becoming OpenOffice, they found out that there was already a pre-existing product with the same name. A few legal minutes later, and they decided to add the .org, deeming this small modification to the existing name would be less disruptive than renaming the entire project - product, website and marketing materials.

Whether they made the right choice is moot now though!

One of the key points of CSS is the ability to override/disable styles on the client side.

You want that site in plain text? Turn off CSS altogether. Instead of embedding fonts tags, italics, background images and so on in the HTML, it's all removed to the CSS file. Makes the HTML more useful as raw information. Makes it easier to make seepintg changes to the layout of a whole site (change one shared CSS file and voila!) and allows users to override the sites style and layout anyway they choose.

CSS makes it easier to get at the raw information and makes it easier to manage the style and layout of entire websites. If IE played nicely with the spec, then I'd be happy as pie.

Ah, much as I'm disinclined to rush to Apple's defense, they didn't "leave out" multitasking. Full pre-emptive multitasking is part of the Darwin kernel already. What Apple did was deliberately spend effort modifying the API to *hide* this capability. They made a conscious choice to not allow third party apps to multitaks, believing that this would result in a better user expierience. Tru multitasking is only available to the core OS - such as playing music in the background and the various daemons that monitor and control the phone hardware.

Whether you agree or not is another matter. But that's also why the new "multitasking" features are still not true preemptive multitasking.