Free software advocates tend to be more likely to prefer the entire stack to be free, though. FSF's Richard Stallman, for instance, does not even consider Fedora to be free enough.

That was a succint overview of the difference between open source and free software, though to be fair, even pragmatic free software supporters would find this new contribution by Microsoft as a positive thing.

Not sure why Palm does not bundle Salling's <a href="http://www.salling.com/MediaSync/mac/">MediaSync</a>, which allows syncing of multiple smartphones with iTunes (without pretending that the device synced is an iPod).

Maybe they could license a version that only sync the Pre, or pay Salling to create a version that performs fast sync on the Pre but not on other devices (if you download directly from Salling, the free version does basic sync; paying gives you a faster experience).

Interesting looking game. How does the gameplay compare to Oolite, which is open-source and cross-platform? Graphically, it looks superior to the default Oolite graphics -- which can be customized, and Oolite uses fixed maps, but it's hard to tell before playing it.

Ironic that of the three main desktop platforms, the Mac is now the only one without this feature (Linux has Pulseaudio)

Or get the sources straight from <a href="http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Using_Fedora_CVS">CVS</a> -- the downside is you won't know whether a particular revision results in a successful build or not, without checking Koji.

Doesn't matter either way to IBM, since they designed the Cell CPU as well, and it's also POWER-based.

Cell is potentially much more powerful, it's just harder to program (trust Sony to pick such designs, recall the PS2's Emotion Engine?)

F-15 has the radar profile of a barn, and is inferior to the Eurofighter in maneuverability, and worse, the current batch of Russian fighters (Su-30 and derivatives) that are being sold for $30m a pop to anyone with money to buy them.

The only country I can think of still purchasing F-15s is South Korea (custom-made F-15Ks) but the decision was widely believed to be political. And it's not as if North Korea could afford to operate many modern planes; their pilot training is supposed to be barely sufficient due to lack of avgas.

I'm quite sure not all the pilots shot down by MiG-21s over Vietnam managed to bail out. Unless pilots don't count as soldiers...

Unless you're German...

I guess it really depends on the details. The two bottlenecks are certainly worrisome: 1) the need for analysts familiar with both the system, and domain experts, to classify the data; 2) that the data is made available to a a wide range of users.

Let's hope the trial is realistic enough to bring up potential problems before real people get pulled in because of an overreliance on technology...

You could say the same thing about search engines back in the mid-90s, before Google's PageRank. What's the point of indexing more and more information if it's impossible to find the relevant page? Necessity is the mother of all inventions. The only regret here is that whatever they come up with, probably won't see daylight until someone outside reimplements it.

Thanks for the reply. Both options certainly are valid, and it's not as if Apple has a clear-cut policy w.r.t. ebooks on the App Store (though Jobs is known to have a rather bizarrely dismissive attitude towards reading). I guess it boils down to two separate issues: usability, and ease-to-publish.

Usability-wise, for light reading having individual book "apps" might save time. Then again, for heavy readers, or for readers who like organizing their book collection (sort by author name, sort by title, by year etc.) individual apps can't cut it. Also, different ebook apps will inevitably have different interfaces.

This ties it to the second point. As long as Apple acts as a gatekeeper, and with its current byzantine approval process, any bugfix, as you pointed out in the article, cannot be pushed in a timely manner. Worse -- say you have n books, all prepared in the same way. You'd have to push n updates, all of them might have to be resubmitted if they get rejected!

Both suggests that, while yes, Apple's App Store poses commercial risks (wasn't there a commercially-developed emulator that got rejected too), it might not be an effective conduit for books anyway. Between Stanza (for free books) and Kindle (for paid books), there are ways to publish digitally without running afoul of the censors.

... this example is not necessarily the best way to publish electronic books. Wouldn't it be better to put the book (both editions) up on Amazon Kindle, and let people use the Kindle app for the iPhone?

Imagine the horror of having a 1,001 authors all packaging their books as separate apps...

It's a modified bsdiff algorithm; it does not actualy reuse the original bsdiff