Your anecdotal experience does not make the problem any less real for others.

Objectively, for example, I have a reasonably well-known web app running on a few servers. It's written in Ruby and runs via Passenger. Between the official documentation and generally sensible tutorial/reference material on-line, I have literally seen four completely different recommendations about just where to install the related scripts, from directly under /var/www to places under /opt. As with many web applications, it also wants configuration files in certain places, often related to where those scripts are. Those configuration files should be properly backed up, and just like that, with hosting a single web app and without even installing any OS-level packages, you've got a real question about which areas of your filesystem contain data that should be safely backed up.

Now scale that up to the number of applications and packages you might have installed on a traditional Linux server used for multiple purposes or multiple teams, and it's not hard to see why configuration management tools and running separate servers (or virtual servers) for each application have become the standard practice in corporate sysadmin and devops world.

It's hard to do actual research as an end user when you're talking about devices costing hundreds of bucks and you have a software environment that won't let you move back if you "upgrade" and it renders your device effectively unusable. This is a very convenient situation for the device manufacturers and the people who don't want to bother with things like backward compatibility and long-term support of their software, of course.

But count me in for at least half a dozen similar anecdotes among friends and family with various mobile devices, particularly the expensive ones like Apple/iOS and Samsung/Android phones and tablets.

I am increasingly of the view that there should be a certain degree of mandatory regulation in these industries, where the commitment (or lack of it) to future proofing such devices against software-related breakage must be clearly stated before purchase and failure to do so is automatic grounds for a refund if the device does then get bricked or otherwise rendered effectively useless. I am generally very wary of regulating software and liability issues, because of the difficulty in establishing objective standards for what is reasonable, but there is so much abuse in our industry now because of continual updates and built-in obsolescence that I'm starting to think consumer protection authorities should actively intervene.

Coincidentally, the staff also do most of their work during the daytime.

Yes, damn those idiots who take their laptop out of the office so they can actually do their jobs. Those crazy kids are messing everything up.

Seriously, if you have security policies that are interfering unreasonably with your staff's ability to do its job -- and if you are dramatically slowing down their systems or causing disruptive behaviour like reboots during the working day, that is undermining the staff's ability to do its job -- then you're doing it wrong. IT is there to help people do whatever it is you do, not the other way around.

You and I have very different experiences of Linux-based systems, though admittedly I am mostly using Linux on servers rather than workstations, and really the problems are more about the distro/software running on top of Linux than Linux itself.

My experience of trying to back-up a real world Linux system is that you start with backing up /home. Then you also figure out what you need to back up from other places, like /root, /etc, /opt and /var. Some of the configuration files in there will be automatically generated from others, but if you overlook any of the underlying ones, you'll be running at 640x480 forever or your RAID won't be as redundant as you thought. Some of the configuration data will be specific to the particular version of something you currently have installed, and the new version will fail to initialise properly after you've upgraded because it doesn't update the previous configuration completely and correctly without user intervention. Some of the executable code you run will be under those directories too, because web apps and scripting and interpreters.

And that's just with standard applications that are provided with your distro. $DEITY help you if you want to install anything else or need to build anything from source, because no-one else is going to. Try not to allow too many breaking conflicts under /etc or /usr/local, where there are essentially no naming conventions and everything just gets a short/abbreviated name and goes into the global namespace. Oh, never mind, we forgot to add the important things under /usr/local/somedirectorymylastdistrodidntevenhave to the back-up scripts anyway.

And then you upgrade your distro to the next major revision because the price of OS stability in the Linux ecosystem is falling behind with all your applications as well, and... Well, in my entire career, across different organisations and with different teams of sysadmins, I can probably count the number of completely smooth major distro upgrades I've seen on no hands. On the server side, I now see a lot of "one install only" policies: the expectation of success with any in-place update process is so low that the standard MO is to set up a new clean machine with the new software required, figure out how to migrate specific configuration and data from the essential applications from the old system to the new one, and then retire/reformat the old machine. Even then, the actual applications and packages installed are tightly controlled; there is an entire industry these days making tools like Puppet or Chef or Ansible because trying to manage these things manually on modern Linux systems is crazy, and making any local changes to standard configurations is frowned upon. Personally I prefer to run Windows for my main workstations for various reasons, but I work with several colleagues who prefer to run Linux workstations and they seem to run into analogous problems with end user/client applications too.

Linux is great in many respects, but with most popular Linux distros, having a clean filesystem structure and code/config/data set-up are not among them. Maintaining most real world Linux-based systems is absurdly complicated as a direct result.

Just about everyone in the polling industry was significantly off-base in the recent UK elections. Literally no-one in the mainstream was calling the actual result in the run up to election day, as far as I know. The debate was all about who would be leading a coalition and how the electoral math would stack up to determine which parties would be likely to join. Even the party leaders changed their tune in the last days of the campaign to reflect an assumption that they wouldn't be governing alone and who they governed with would be a significant question.

Ironically, having won an unexpected absolute majority this may have left David Cameron and the Conservative Party leadership in a bit of a bind. I suspect some of the policies they were promoting before the election were things they didn't really want to do but advocated for popularity reasons, hoping that after the election they would be able to "reluctantly" negotiate away some of those commitments as part of a coalition agreement. Similarly, some of their more unpopular policies now won't have a partner party or two to act as scapegoats next time if those policies don't work out well. Given that their working majority is also very small, which leaves the leadership very vulnerable to disruption by rebel MPs on controversial issues such as Europe, ironically they might have been better off leading a strong coalition than winning. The pollsters and commentators and political journalists didn't consider any of these issues in much detail in their pre-election coverage, if they even acknowledged the possibilities at all.

Well, I guess they are never ever getting back together, then.

It's interesting that so many of the examples you gave are based around more traditional geek/hacker/sharing culture, not just making as much money as possible. And yet, no-one could say that for example Linux hasn't had as big an impact on the tech world as anything out of the giant US businesses. Most of those giant US businesses probably run a significant amount of their infrastructure on Linux!

Perhaps the term "loose change" suggests something different where you are. To me, it would be more like "the money you have in your pocket" than "almost everything you have in your savings account".

Interesting idea, but I think you might be taking it a little too far. For example, who would you say is the one giant energy company here in the UK? We refer to the "big six" for a reason. Looking at another tech sector, communications, although we have various infrastructure that is technically owned by BT, which was formerly the national telecom provider, much of that has now been opened up through regulation. Today you can get landline, mobile, Internet, and TV services from numerous providers.

I think if it takes several years to save up enough to buy something, calling it "loose change" is something of an overstatement.

I'm not disputing that Intel is a much bigger business financially, on scale where it could make an offer for a business like ARM. It was the implication that it could do so casually and if things didn't work that would be a minor distraction that I was challenging.

I think you missed my point on both counts.

ARM don't mass-produce processors, they design them. And they're so good at it that numerous other businesses do mass-produce processors based on those designs. (Also, you're being rather optimistic about Intel being able to buy them with loose change. Intel is a much bigger firm, but not that much bigger.)

And I'm not suggesting that HP are British. I'm saying that despite their size they were willing to pony up ten billion dollars for a British company rather than try to enter the space themselves.

As I said, the tech companies we produce in Europe aren't always the biggest or highest profile, but we already have our successes both technologically and commercially without the boom/bust culture of SV.

Finally, you do realise that Siemens is German, and therefore another example of a very successful European firm involved in a lot of tech industries, right?

Most of Silicon Valley isn't amazing. Most businesses supported by that venture capital culture you're talking about fail.

The peculiar thing about SV is the glorification of failure. It's rather like the traditional American Dream, where everyone is going to be rich one day so huge numbers of ordinary people irrationally support policies that actively go against their interests and probably always will. The venture capital model is based on the idea that if you support 100 businesses, it doesn't matter if 99 of them blow your whole investment and then die, as long as the last one becomes the next Facebook or Google or Amazon.

You can get away with this in the US partly because there is a seemingly endless supply of kids who are willing to basically give up any sort of work-life balance for a while in the hope that they too will be the next Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg. In Europe, you'll be hard pressed to find even a newbie in the industry who actually thinks stock options are worth anything these days, and several popular employment practices in the tech industry are literally illegal and would be viewed as worker exploitation.

In other news, look at the electronic devices around you, and tell me who designed the processors driving the majority of them. It's probably ARM, which is based here in Cambridge, UK and has an 11-figure market cap. Also here in Cambridge we have what is now HP Autonomy, and whatever you think about Autonomy and/or the HP acquisition, it is a matter of fact that someone paid 11 figures USD for that business, too. We do grow some substantial, widely influential tech businesses in Europe, they just aren't always the very biggest or highest profile ones.

My friends typically respect my wishes as well, and it sounds like actually the two of us are in a similar position.

But most people aren't.

I think perhaps you misunderstood my point.

It doesn't matter whether you have a smartphone; many of your friends and family do.

It doesn't matter whether you choose to share your photos on-line; many of your friends and family do.

It doesn't matter whether you don't use on-line mail services like Google Mail; many of your friends and family do.

A data mining exercise could easily determine that only a very small number of people have the same substantial group of contacts in common. Your social group is like a very public fingerprint. That lets the analysts put together the recurring face in photos, the recurring number in phone address books, the recurring e-mail address in mail history, and so on. And just like that, there is a shadow profile of you that is probably very accurate and comprehensive, without you volunteering or agreeing to a single aspect of it other than actually interacting with other people.

This is possible not because of any individual item of data that anyone collected about you, but because of the combination of data from many sources and of many types, which is a far more powerful thing. The ability to collect and work with such vast amounts of data is why privacy standards built around individual interactions and observations no longer make sense in 2015.

Thanks for the data. So if this actually affected millions of their customers (i.e., they didn't just have millions on that plan but millions who actually did not receive the level of service they paid for) and it was ongoing for a period of years (i.e., this wasn't some slip up for a single ad run, it was a sustained campaign of misleading information) then the fine in question is negligible. That's a pity.

Sure we can. When people don't act like that, you get places like Somalia or the region currently controlled by ISIS. While our systems in the West are far from perfect and have plenty of problems with bias and corruption, I think we can all reasonably agree that they are still better than actually throwing civilisation and organised government out the window and reverting to the gang with the bigger guns being in charge no matter what. At least the gang with the biggest guns over here has some semblance of democratic accountability and ethical mandate, flawed as they may be.