> I'm just waiting for them to abandon the hard drive entirely, in favor of a coin slot. Using your computer will be just like internet video poker.

We use Bitcoin in this community, you insensitive clod!

Surely the issue is not how much data you have, but how much bandwidth you need.

You can physically perform the initial transfer, so no problem if it's 1GB or 100TB.

The question is, do you need to access more of that than the bandwidth can carry?

If you need to extensively modify all of that data each day, then clearly cloud won't work for you if those modifications require lots of data from outside the cloud data centre.

RS

> if you need something that "just works," Debian is definitely the way to go.

Now there's something you'll never hear in an Apple store. Only on Slashdot :-)

> Seriously, the 30% cut just for managing the payment stuff *alone* is a bargain, as anyone who has ever had to handle a merchant account and payment processing will tell you, especially for small transactions. It is very expensive and time consuming to deal with.

Nonsense. Payment transaction charges are nothing like 30%.

I used to work for a company that handled credit card processing, hosting, bandwidth, web servers and designed web storefronts for third party companies. Our cut was nowhere near 30%. AND we warehoused, sorted, picked, packed, and dispatched real physical items. They just told us what products they wanted to sell, and we did the rest.

So, yeah, 30% is a lot for the actual services being provided. What Apple are charging you 30% for is the ability to appear in the App Store, which they have a monopoly over.

RS

That statistic is answering a different question, and a survey like that carries limited meaning. For example, 'intention' is not as meaningful as 'actually have gone out and bought a new iPhone'. Just sayin'.

From what I've heard / seen of Android, and extensively using iOS, I'm not surprised that more crashes happen on iOS. It got much, much worse with recent iOS updates (for me at least), so I think it's more an OS issue than app quality.

Regarding the question "Would you buy another iPhone?"... I'm mulling that over now. ok, so iOS is probably more buggy than Android, but when it does work it seems to be prettier and faster, with a better UI. That's from limited experience... anyone able to give a personal opinion having owned both devices themselves? I'm tempted to 'stick to what I know' rather than taking a gamble and finding that Android's apps are inferior, or the GUI is sluggish, etc.

RS

Safari crashes on my iPhone quite often. I don't see any correlation with tabs, looks more like a parsing or rendering bug.

RS

I just heard that the Raspberry Pi website CSS has been tweaked.

A new element "checkout_button" has been referenced in the CSS.

Rumours that this is an indication that the Pi will launch soon have reached fever pitch!!!

It's like iLaunch hysteria, but for techies! Yey!

RS

Difference being we CAN do the stuff that Required Snark was talking about. Whilst I'm quite happy to solder or write assembly code, I'm not so hot on legal issues (but I have made a few movies and am about to make a few more).

I think "do it yourself is just a silly excuse" only works when we can't do those things ourself - but we can. We are the geeks. If we don't do it, sure as hell no-one else will.

RS

Does BitCoin run on Raspberry Pi?

I can't wait for my Raspberry Pi.

Google is evil. No, wait, it's good.

Apple are evil. No wait, they're good designers.

I for one welcome our new story meme overloads.

Recursive post is recursive.

RS

Having been using Ubuntu since I returned to geekland about 5 years ago, my next install will be Linux Mint. I've been running it in VirtualBox on my Mac, and it's fairly decent.

Gnome 2.x was such a great interface. It was simple, clean, efficient. ok, it wasn't as beautiful as OS X, but window management was so much easier. Simple things like file open/save dialogues, the way menus were arranged, were logical and well-designed.

Innovation is good. I think Unity is OK, and an interesting experiment, but it was introduced too early. I also think that fundamentally users need to know what applications they have open - I know iOS doesn't do this, but I think it causes problems even on existing mobile devices, and would be even worse on a desktop for a content-creator.

This new idea is just bonkers. It's a step backwards.

I actually think that Desktop Linux may have a big future - perhaps in education (specifically IT / Computer Science classes at high school and university) - especially as hardware becomes dirt cheap and MS and Apple begin to neglect their full desktops. Ubuntu could (should?) have been aiming for that market, but it seems to me that they're chasing the same opportunities as Android. Android has already won.

RS

> Apple had something like 4 billion dollars in the bank

Citation needed. I've never read that before. AFAIK, Apple did not have that kind of cash available - that's why they needed it from MS.

And yes, the reputation side of things (Office, etc.) were also vital.

RS

That wasn't a rate of defection that was quoted, it was a rate of "announced intended defection". Just because 50% of Android users might have said in a poll that they wouldn't buy another Android, doesn't mean they would. They may, for example, remember why they didn't get an iPhone in the first place - because it's much more expensive. The survey doesn't show much, other than perhaps more 'brand loyalty' amongst iPhone users. Hardly a surprise given the almost religious devotion many Mac users have, is it? (for reference, I own an iPhone, Mac Mini, and use both Linux & OS X at work).

RS

Fair point, although just because the difference in CO2 levels is numerically small wouldn't exclude the possibility that it was that small CO2 different outweighing the effects of large differences in other variables.

RS

Indeed. And look how the Pyramids got built! Wow! You wouldn't see that kind of efficiency nowadays, with our penchant for keeping (most) of our employees alive during the construction of our products.

> To Apple it's flexibility and speed that are the main advantages.

We all know that is BS. America is the biggest manufacturer in the world.

Perhaps what they really mean is that *flexibility of labour laws, taxation and morality* are the main advantages.

RS