I know it's poor form to reply to myself, but I can see that, at least for Apple, Family Sharing was an opt-in:

http://www.macrumors.com/2014/06/04/apple-turns-on-family-sharing/

Any IOS developers care to comment on whether or not you opted in, and if it had a noticeable effect on sales?

The 'rightsholder' question is what puzzles me, also.

I'm surprised that Google (and Apple) can do this. Are they paying out to the rightsholders for the additional copies? If not, I can see this making word-of-mouth a bad thing for artists and developers. I know that a lot of the apps and music that I've bought have come from recommendations from family, but if we can all just share one purchase, that really does cost the rightsholder money.

I'm sure this must be covered in the appropriate license agreements between Google/Apple and the rightsholders, but I suspect it's a case of 'let us do this or be excluded from our platform'.

Well, the computer at least needs to have a good idea of the printer capabilities. I suppose we could put that in a plain-text file, and call it 'printcap' or something. Of course, we'll also need to know how to trigger those capabilities. Maybe some sort of in-band signaling with special characters, like escape codes.

That's all good, but what if we want more advanced features like graphics. We could generate bitmaps, but that would be terribly device-specific and bandwidth-hungry. How about we use an encoding that can encapsulate the way we intend the page to look? We could call it a 'page description language'. Yeah, that'd be cool.

Well, now that we've got that, we do need some software to take the output from a program and encode it in out page description language. Otherwise, each and every program would need to know each and every common PDL. That's dumb -- we should use a standard intermediate representation that each program can speak to the OS, and let the OS transform that into the PDL of the printer it's talking to!

OK, now we've got it: a common, logical way for programs to describe their output to the OS, the OS providing a translation service to send that representation to the printer, and page description languages that let us produce sophisticated output without having to generate and transmit bitmaps and escape codes for every little thing.

That would be much better that this 'printer driver' crap, right ;)

I've had a Sony Z3C for just over a year now, and in that time they have released upgrades from 4.4 all the way to 6.01, and I just received another security update two days ago. I've only had one 'bad' update in that time -- the original 5.0 release cut the battery life way down, and they fixed that reasonable quickly.

They don't get anywhere near the press of Samsung/HTC/LG, but I'd buy another one and have recommended them to others.

My phone is direct from B&H, not from a carrier, which certainly helps, but Sony has done the work to make the updates avaialble.

Yeah, I feel like Slashdot is on the way back, too. Maybe not to it's former glory, but not the craptastic level it hit for a while.

...when I say "Wait; you're killing what?"

Yet another battery breakthrough article for what is essentially a lab demo. While I have not particular knowledge of whether or not this technology is manufacturable, it seems like an awful lot of battery breakthroughs don't really pan out once it comes to building them in to actual products.

Zayo and Level 3 don't just lay fiber and hope someone else will use it, they also provide ISP service to businesses. I've worked with both companies to light up buildings for either multi- or single-tenant use. Single tenant may require a multi-year commitment to make it worthwhile, but they can and will provide complete service from physical layer on up.

I don't see why it couldn't be used for /, as long as the appropriate module is present in initrd (or initramfs, etc.) As for unattended/scripted, the options you put in the script are still choices. As I understand it, the one thing you can't do is compile ZFS directly in to the kernel to avoid the GPL/CDDL incompatibility.

Every time I see news about ZFS and Linux, it's a little bit less of a mess. Eventually, I expect that all of the major distributions will go this route and sidestep the licensing issue by providing distro-supported modules that are installed by user request, sort of like the way that Nvidia drivers are provided.

I'm expecting this to be showcase for VR (and VR sickness?)

Fun fact -- OTA HDTV was for a long time one of the highest (technical) quality sources available. Fairly high-bit-rate MPEG2 can look VERY good, and generally doesn't suffer from the recompression artifacts of a cable or satellite provider working to maximize the number of channels rather than the quality of any particular channel. Yes, a good Blu-ray or stream can provide better quality now, but for a waiting-room situation, OTA HDTV is probably the best bet going.

Not that there will be anything to watch, but at least your daytime TV will only be crappy due to content.

Yes, Visual COBOL is a real thing: http://www.microfocus.com/downloads/visual-cobol-23-datasheet-215624.aspx

According to MF, '...supports Cloud, mobile, .NET and JVM, and a wide range of the latest environments.", so go out there and build your next Web 11.0 (we're up to that by now, right?) app in COBOL*

* MF is not responsible for any resulting substance abuse or psychiatric issues you may experience

Nice work, but it's pretty clear from the article that only the structural bits go together without fasteners (mostly). All of the interior finishes, doors, windows, etc. all clearly use conventional screws/nails. Not surprising, but not really the 'snap-together' house that the headline indicates, unless you plan to live in a bare structure open to the elements.

Yep - nailed it.

I'm shopping for a new laptop now for homework (elementary school), replacing a 2006 Dell D620 (C2D, 2GB RAM, upgraded to SSD). The only reason I'm replacing it is that it died. Otherwise, for what it did, it was still 'good enough'.

I'll grab another business-class laptop (yes, they are worth the premium IMHO), probably a factory refurb, and I bet that will be 'good enough' for schoolwork until the day it dies.