Well, I can't speak for the failure rate but my iPhone 4 is now 3.5 years old and during Easter I used it a lot, even after a day of heavy use I still had 20% battery left. Today it's at 67% after a 2 hours of GPS tracking. For daily use it's still fine and I'm guessing will be fine for years to come. For weekends and vacations away from a charger I'm considering getting a battery pack - compared to the original 1420 mAh battery you can get a 7000-10000 mAh external charger for cheap. You put it in your backpack or luggage, plug it in where you sleep at night even if that's a remote cabin or a tent in the wilds. Or for that matter just turn off the "smart", if I kill data traffic it'll last very long as a dumb phone as I've done that abroad due to cost. Basically as long as the battery works it's not really a problem.

Astroturfing Microsoft on websites, duh...

Well the cops did get a tip of one reckless maneuver that allegedly forced the tipper off the road. They tailed the truck for five minutes, saw no traffic violations or poor driving to collaborate the story. Then they pulled the truck over instead of being on their way. I'd agree with the dissenters, there's no reasonable suspicion of an ongoing crime - that is, drunk driving - and they pulled him over on a fishing expedition. One incident, observed by nobody but an anonymous tipper who may or may not have called it in just to be mean - I mean it's quite impressive to get a full license plate down while you're really being run off the road so some generous exaggeration may have happened. She didn't even accuse them of driving drunk, that's the court's argument that maybe they were while completely ignoring that the officers saw no sign of it.

Or maybe you just have a pack rat obsession with owning things while the rest of us as just looking to get some entertainment. I "buy" a non-transferrable license to a DRM-locked online-tied sandbox, even a DVD which also has DRM is more liberal as I can sell, lend, play anywhere without anyone's approval or activation but even that one I can't back up or format shift legally as I expect to do with my own property. None of that is an absolute necessity though, what matters if if the value (utility, desire) exceeds the costs (money, inconvenience) and if I am confident that I'll get my money's worth from it before Steam goes under and the service disappears in a puff of smoke I come out ahead. If I desperately want to play it 10+ years down the line I suspect it will be available somehow on GOG (legally), TPB (not so legally) or whatever so it's not a "now or never" situation.

Yes, I get pretty pissed when you abuse DRM to deliver use control like unskippable commercials and region locks, crap that acts more like malware (hello StarForce) and such things but ultimately I am looking to get entertained, it's in the same class as Netflix (subscription), Spotify (subscription) not about having my documents and data trapped in proprietary products with lock-in. Realistically if Steam said all games are now a 5 year lease it'd probably not change my habits at all. If they start acting like asses I always have the option to say here are the letters F and U, I'll be sourcing my entertainment elsewhere from now on. It's not like there's a shortage or anything, particularly since it won't cost me a moral fiber to download games I used to have on Steam off TPB should that ever become necessary.

The last time I bought a dedicated device like this, I got a PC Engines WRAP, which is similar to the boards that Soekris sells. For about £100, I got a 266MHz AMD Geode (x86) CPU, a board that could boot from a CF card, and had 3 wired sockets and 2 miniPCI slots (with an 802.11g card in one), a metal case and a couple of antennae. That was quite a few (actually, almost ten) years ago.

The first search result has a similar kit for £139, which is a bit more, but if you shop around you can probably get it for cheaper. That includes a 500MHz x86 CPU and 256MB of RAM, so it will happily run most stock *NIX distributions, or something firewall-centric like pfSense.

Well, if we do an experiment on gravity we determine it only in a point location at a given time, the rest is extrapolation/intrapolation that gravity remains constant between locations and across time. Take two sections of forest, build greenhouses around them and pump more CO2 into one and you have a pretty good scientific experiment. Yes, putting the pieces correctly together is complicated but as long as you accept that things obey the laws of physics and chemistry and don't magically become different at a macro scale you can build bigger and bigger pieces of the puzzle from small blocks. There's no "irreducable complexity" here as the relgious like to trot out when they don't like the science.

No, you shouldn't, but the laptop is probably drawing something on the order of 60-85W and there's no reason why it couldn't get that from a power supply in the display, rather than a separate wall wart...

Thunderbolt doesn't do USB, however the fact that it does PCIe means that you can run a USB controller on the other end. You wouldn't want a Thunderbolt mouse, because it would require sticking a USB controller in the mouse as well as a Thunderbolt interface and a load of PCIe bus logic. USB is nice because the client component is relatively simple and can be made very cheap. It's also nice because there are a number of standard higher-level protocols built on top of it (e.g. HID for keyboards, mice and so on, DUN for things that look a bit like modems). Thunderbolt doesn't replace USB, it's the connection that you use between your laptop and the display or docking station that has all of the USB devices plugged into it.

With Thunderbolt, since it can carry two DP signals, you can plug in one cable to drive two monitors. Since it also carries PCIe, you can drive a USB hub and SATA controller and NIC in one display and also connect the keyboard and mouse and an external disk and network at the same time. Having the same connector able to deliver power would mean that you'd be able to drop a phone in a dock and have it gain access to all of those things and charge, which sounds pretty compelling to me.

We're also finding it useful because you can get PCIe enclosures so we can plug FPGA boards directly into laptops, rather than needing to have a desktop sitting under the desk doing nothing except exposing a high-speed JTAG interface, but that's a fairly niche use.

To quote AMD (pdf) in their 2014 Q1 earnings, a couple days ago:

In short, they're transforming away from their "traditional" business and of the PC market graphics revenue is going to be significant. AMDs x86 CPUs/APUs are going to be a small part of their business, there's a reason Intel is aiming all the big guns at ARM because AMD has already in their strategy decided to get out of the head-to-head competition with Intel. If you don't believe that, read the above lines again. They couldn't compete with Intel when they bet everything on one horse, now they're riding five others as well? That's a slow exit strategy, milking the CPU/APU revenue to execute their transformation. The FX line is probably already dead, Kaveri/Beema/Mullins will keep AMD present in the consumer market a while longer but the revenue is funneled into all those other key areas.

False dichotomy, it's not one or the other.

Time and material contracts basically means renting consultants by the hour, short of outright criminal behavior there's no promised time frames, deliverables or guarantees of functionality or quality. The upside is the lack of formalism, I've developed many reports on a T&M basis and basically if you want a filter here and a total there and to add one more column and add a traffic light here and a drill down there just say it and I'll keep working on it until you're happy. Heck, I've taken "requirements" from a single yellow post-it note, as long as the client is happy and the invoices get paid it's a win-win for everyone compared to bids and change orders.

The problem begins if you need anything other than yes-men because basically you're going to lead these people and point them to tasks that need doing and make sure it all comes together to a working solution. Consider it a bit like building a house where every contractor assumes that the rest of the work to bring it up to code will be done by somebody else, you tell the plumber to put a pipe here, the electrician a wire there and the carpenter to board up that wall and they do it, but they don't take any responsibility on whether it's done to code or the overall result. My guess is that Oracle have their asses well covered legally, but often they have to play the scapegoat when the client has been incompetent. Usually they don't want to throw eggs in the face of the manager who hired them, unless it becomes an even bigger PR problem not to.

Which is why this is a never-ending competition, one thing is size but what about mass/gravity? Does it have a magnetic field? Does it have a Jupiter to clear the solar system of debris? Does it have a moon to produce tidal forces? Still, we know there's some slack in that life is almost everywhere on this planet from Sahara to the Arctic.

The flip side of that is that Canonical has been pretty clear that they're not building this for their existing users but rather to get new users on phones, tablets, phablets, convertibles, touchscreen laptops, TVs and whatnot other household devices. To trot out the old Henry Ford quote, if I asked my users what they'd wanted they'd say a faster horse. Well that's you, you want a better "classic" desktop the way it's been for the last 20 years or so but the users they have is 1% of a declining PC market that's being swarmed by other non-PC devices. That's why they won't listen when you complain that they're trying to put a steering wheel and pedals on your horse cart, they're trying to build a car and going back on that is clearly a step backwards compared to their goals.

Yes, he's trying to be Steve Jobs just like Google is, just like Microsoft is and when giants like that throw their weight around it's easy to get flung into irrelevance which is why the new business isn't exactly rolling in and the old business is cranky. Particularly now when Android has rolled in almost everywhere he wanted Ubuntu to be. He could just tuck his tail between his legs, admit defeat and say we'll be building a desktop of the geeks, by the geeks, for the geeks and that's that. Or at least aim the sights back to Microsoft, the old archenemy even though Ubuntu never managed to get very far there. But my impression is that he's too ambitious and stubborn to do that, besides "We're making this new Unity thing that no one wants and we'll force it on our users before its ready" sounds like GNOME 3, KDE 4 and a bunch of other projects so he fits right in.

If you look at Microsoft's pricing, it's fairly obvious why. If you're first getting Outlook for 135 euro then another 135 euro to get everything else is an easy sell-up, particularly since I'm guessing the sales reps will give you a volume rebate on the Office suite but never on Outlook alone. For at least a decade I've heard product after product being called "Outlook killer" but they all seem to fizzle and my impression mostly because they focus on being POP/IMAP clients. Calendaring is probably more essential to an organization, and I don't mean the simple one-off meeting.

When are people available and what meeting rooms are available. Setting up recurring meetings (like say a weekly staff meeting) that lets you easily modify single instances (because this week is easter), calendar sharing, forwarding events with proper notification to the meeting owner, overviews of who will/will not attend or haven't answered, including the agenda or attachments, corporate directories, personal directories, all that practical stuff like that if I start writing a mail to someone in-house it warns me right away they're going to send an away message instead of waiting for me to send it, get the auto-reply, realize what I just send won't work, then another email to say forget that, let's do something else when you're back on Monday.

Geeks hate meetings and scheduling, every one of them myself included. Good calendar software which makes it easy to drown people in meetings is just begging to be swamped with them so it's not exactly an itch we'd like to scratch. We're very busy trying to invent and push non-meeting solutions like email or IM and claim we're solving it better. I'm not going to fire up debate, but the fact of the matter is that getting all of the people involved in the same room at the same time to discuss/decide matters is still a very popular idea. And if you want to get rid of Office, you need to get rid of Outlook and if you want to get rid of Outlook you must handle this well. I'm sure there's lots of people who'd like to drop Exchange and the CALs, using non-MS products despite still sending around MS documents so it should be easier than taking down all of MS Office at once.