Just leave it alone and think of the bounty of intelligence you will harvest - infiltrate or set up some phony jihadist / paedo / drug & weapons dealing / carding sites and wait for the perps to come to you.

Disabling isn't the same as removing. It's still there, unnecessarily eating up space. Worse than that, if you do use that app you will incur a double penalty as soon as you install an update. So that Facebook baked into your phone might eat up 30MB of space and then you get hit for another 30MB+ in the r/w partition when an update arrives. So if you don't need the app it wastes space and if you do need the app it wastes space. So why bother in the first place?

And of course all that baked in crapware means you won't be getting firmware / security updates for your phone in a timely fashion, if ever.

Google should do is change the terms so certain apps *must* reside in a read/write partition and *must* be removable from the device. Not just hidden but completely removable. That would include every carrier app which is normally redundant and broken anyway. I would include some of Google's own apps in that category - GMail, Chrome, G+, YouTube etc - basically any app that resides on top of the handset OS as opposed to being part of it should be removable by the user. Not just hidden - removable.

Apart from that choice is good. Personally I prefer the vanilla experience, or the CM one (which is a relatively light enhancements). The worst replacement I've seen is the one from Huawei which decided that the all apps view and the personizable desktops should be combined into a single thing creating the most unusable experience I've seen in any smart phone.

Android did the skeumorphic thing first. If anything iOS is aping Android these days with stuff like skeumorphism, swipe down notifications etc.

Talk about paranoid. The guy just wants people to install cameras that actually get clear enough shots to ID a perp. It isn't about mass surveillance in the slightest.

That's a really long time whether it is solar powered or not. If they're waiting for windows as the article says it suggests this plane runs a serious risk of having the crap kicked out of it by the weather when it attempts to fly certain legs.

You can't "improve" X11 without making it not X11. e.g. make IPC async and it's not X any more. And at that point you may as well ditch the lot and write it properly, taking advantage of the hardware that every modern PC has to render a desktop decently locally first (the common use case) and taking advantage of existing remoting tech to take care of the uncommon use case. And that's what Wayland does - it describes a protocol for a client application to talk directly with a window manager that cuts X11 out of the picture.

Weston already demonstrates built in RDP support. It wouldn't be a stretch to imagine VNC or other protocols appearing in time to serve different remoting scenarios. I'm sure that unless you're expecting to play video or games in realtime they would suffice and if you are expecting to play video or games in realtime there are better ways to do those things already.

Even Microsoft supports git these days through Visual Studio and its online team foundation server backend. That should say something.

The only reason Mir exists is because Canonical wanted to slap their dual GPL / proprietary licence on it. It lets them release Ubuntu branded phone handsets with any proprietary display driver, DRM or extensions they like in the display stack but competitors are hamstrung by the GPL part. I recall reading a blog which justified Mir with some fairly dubious technical reasons that Wayland wasn't suitable but it seems clear to me it was more than that..

Anyway, the licencing has become a double edged sword. Contributors like Intel walked away from the project, other open source projects adopted Wayland (which uses the same licence as X and so is a slot-in replacement) and Canonical left with all the work of writing backends for QT, GTK and porting apps.

I've never read such irrational and ludicrous objections to a piece of infrastructure.

Yes it's all a vast conspiracy. Meanwhile back on planet earth...

And this horseshit is modded insghtful?

Deluge isn't very well integrated with windows (e.g. magnet links) but it's adequate and infinitely preferable to a client which installs unwanted software.

Yes of course it would be bad. Google is the new Microsoft and Chrome is the new Internet Explorer. Without competition or choice they would be just as inclined to throw half baked standards as Microsoft. They've already done it a multiple times with SPDY, WebM, NaCl etc. and without competition to reject, criticise, formalize or standardize these things would have been a fait acompli.

It is better for everyone to have strong competing implementations of web standards. Firefox is still a great browser (better IMO than Chrome) and takes privacy far more seriously. I have no inclination to switch browser at this time.

You can thank Mozilla for being the first browser to seriously disrupt Internet Explorer's monopoly and bring us back to a standards based internet. It did plenty more besides that and continues to do so.