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Comment Another score for my N900... (Score 2, Informative) 140

...in addition to APT, general hackability and real qwerty for fast typing.

It has resistive touchscreen and thus works well in -10 C, or so, when the gloves are not particularly thick.

Not that well in -25 C though, as using thick mittens tends to make touch somewhat imprecise. ;) But at least I can use thinner gloves underneath them so that I won't have to take them completely off.

Comment Re:Blended or Single Malt? (Score 1) 172

As a sidenote, Scottish whisky production, at least single malt, is actually nowadays somewhat dependent of bourbon production. This is because maturing bourbon requires new casks and single malts require used casks.

I took a tour of Talisker distillery in July, and our guide explained us that as sherry is no longer as popular product as it used to be, they nowadays use mostly bourbon casks to mature their whisky, and the regular stuff that has been matured ten years is entirely matured in bourbon casks. (Their double matured variety gets a second round in sherry casks.)

Personally I prefer stuff that's matured entirely in sherry casks; it usually has smoother and sweeter finish. Something like this Bowmore. Not that “normal” bourbon cask matured malts are bad, either.

Cellphones

Nokia Trades Symbian For MeeGo In N-Series Smartphones 184

An anonymous reader writes "Nokia announced that moving forward, MeeGo would be the default operating system in the N series of smartphones (original Reuters report). Symbian will still be used in low-end devices from Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson. The move to MeeGo is a demonstration of support for the open source mobile OS, but considering the handset user experience hasn't been rolled out and likely won't be rolled out in time for its vague June deadline outlined at MeeGo.com, could the decision be premature?"

Comment Re:Sounds like sour grapes to me! (Score 1) 503

I'm Finn, and I think that GP wasn't all that insightful, but you're neither.

We fought well in Winter War, because the nation was very well united. It was, because Stalin's purges of the late 30s had largely targeted Finno-Ugric people in the area just behind our eastern border, and were a rather well known fact among us, even among the political left. That's why everybody knew that it was pretty much a fight about our nation's very existence, and the alternative for that existence would have been a nightmare. Stalin's establishment of Terijoki puppet government and his other known-to-be-rubbish propaganda also stressed that fact. Everybody also knew that Stalin had started a war of aggression (see Shelling_of_Mainila; Yeltsin agreed with that interpretation at 1994).

Soviet army was also very poorly led (again, due to Stalin's purges), had poor winter equipment (and that winter was harsh!), and had been led to believe that Finns would welcome them as liberators. In reality, Finns had enjoyed economic upswing during late 30s, its democracy had gradually became more stable, and the unwelcome war only messed up everything, so the war nothing but fed hatred toward Russians and united the nation.

If Stalin had shown friendly or at least neutral policy towards Finland in first place, neither Winter nor Continuation War had never happened, and we'd been able to concentrate in blocking any German invasion attempts (remeber that Sweden did just that; see military spending). But after Winter War, Finns wanted justice; they wanted back their beloved territory that had been illegally robbed off them (some among us still want it back, even though most of us now understand that it wouldn't make sense anymore). And in that situation, Germany was seen as a lesser evil. We were simply too small to cope alone any longer.

The East Carelian conquest and occupation policy pursued during Continuation War by the wartime goverment generally wasn't supported by the political left, and despite of it and the co-operation with Germans Finns still weren't sympathisers of Nazi policies. Remember that we also had some Jewish soldiers and there were field synagogues for them, all under the very nose of the Germans. (Despite of this, Finland did extradite eight Jewish refugees to Germans at 1942 under murky conditions; they ended up in Auschwitz, and this has later been seen nationally as a very shameful event.)

Former Finland's UN ambassador, who is Jewish, and who fought in Finnish army during the war, once said that he didn't even think about the German danger until 1944, when Finland actively started to seek a way out of the war; only then he started to fear the consequences of Finland's possible separate peace with the Soviets (without German approval), and started to be afraid, whether Germany would attempt to occupy as a result. Before that he only cared about the Soviet danger.

Read English Wikipedia's articles about Winter War and Continuation War. They're very informative, and fairly well balanced, at least comparing to many other sources that often take too single-sided (either Finnish or Russian) viewpoint.

Comment Re:Glossy only? (Score 1) 774

It'd be really nice if there was a laptop for people who actually need a mobile computer to work with instead of an oversized portable DVD player.

There are, but if Apple was manufacturing those, they'd offer an option to replace that DVD drive with an extra battery so that you could actually work through the day without recharging.

Alas, they don't, so my next box will most likely be some PC that can be configured with loads of batteries, as I'm tired of carrying around a power adapter and an empty optical drive.

(Sure, batteries are heavy, but inside the case they're still quite tolerable.)

Media

Apple Updates iPhone and iPod Touch 316

u-bend writes "With little publicity Apple has released new, higher-capacity models of the iPhone and iPod Touch. The new iPhone boasts 16 GB of storage and is priced at $499 (the 8 GB model remains at $399), and the new iPod Touch has 32 GB, also priced at $499. Although the price is still pretty hefty, it indicates that the capacity/price ratio on these wireless flash-based players is starting to move in the right direction."

Fedora 8 Released 194

Cat in the Hat writes "Fedora 8 has been officially released. Ars Technica has a run-down of what's new in Fedora 8, including the PulseAudio sound daemon, Nodoka visual style, and a new authentication system. 'Another major change in Fedora 8 is the new PolicyKit authentication system that makes authority escalation more secure. Instead of providing root access to an entire program when it needs higher privileges, PolicyKit makes it possible to isolate individual operations that require higher privileges and put them into system services that can be accessed through D-Bus. Another advantage of PolicyKit is that it will give administrators more control over which users and programs have access to individual operations that use escalated privileges.'"
Quickies

Submission + - Germany to build new maglev railway. (bbc.co.uk)

EWAdams writes: "According to the BBC, the Bavarian state government has announced that it has signed an agreement with Deutsche Bahn, the German state railway system, and the Transrapid consortium, to provide a maglev railway between central Munich and its airport. The only other maglev in full operation at the moment is in Shanghai, again as a city-to-airport service. No completion date has been announced."
Music

Submission + - Amazon DRM-Less Music Store goes Beta 2

LowSNR writes: Amazon this morning moved their DRM-Free music store into open beta. According to the release, "Since all our digital music downloads are DRM-free, you can play them on anything that plays mp3s including PCs, Macs(TM), iPods(TM), Zunes(TM), Zens(TM), iPhones(TM), RAZRs(TM), and BlackBerrys. Plus, our Amazon MP3 Downloader application makes it easy to add your downloads to iTunes(TM) and Windows Media Player(TM), so you can sync up your devices or burn your music to CD hassle-free." Not to mention Linux.
Education

MIT's SAT Math Error 280

theodp writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that for years now, MIT wasn't properly calculating the average freshmen SAT scores (reg.) used to determine U.S. News & World Report's influential annual rankings. In response to an inquiry made by The Tech regarding the school's recent drop in the rankings, MIT revealed that in past years it had excluded the test scores of foreign students as well as those who fared better on the ACT than the SAT, both violations of the U.S. News rules. MIT's reported first-quartile SAT verbal and math scores for the 2006 incoming class totaled 1380, a drop of 50 points from 2005."
The Internet

Virtual Earth Exposes Nuclear Sub's Secret 355

NewsCloud alerts us to a story a few months old that has been getting a lot of play recently. A Seattle blogger, Dan Twohig, was browsing in Microsoft's Virtual Earth when he accidentally came across a photo of a nuclear sub in dry-dock. Its propeller is clearly visible — this was a major no-no on the part of someone at the Bangor Sub Base. The designs of such stealth propellers have been secret for decades. Twohig blogged about the find and linked to the Virtual Earth photo on July 2. The debate about security vs. Net-accessible aerial photography has been building ever since. The story was picked up on military.china.com on Aug. 17 — poetic justice for the Chinese sub photo that had embarrassed them a month before. On Aug. 20 the Navy Times published the article that most mainstream media have picked up in their more recent coverage. Twohig's blog is the best source to follow the ongoing debate. No one has asked Microsoft, Google, or anyone else to blur the photo in question. Kind of late now.
Google

Thailand Sues YouTube 435

eldavojohn writes "Thailand is hitting YouTube with charges of lese majeste (up to 15 years in prison) regarding the recent videos on YouTube showing the king next to feet, something extremely offensive in Thailand. 'Since the first clip, more new videos mocking the king have appeared on YouTube, including pictures of the monarch that had been digitally altered to make him resemble a monkey. Thailand's 79-year-old king, almost universally adored by Thais, is the world's longest-reigning monarch, and one of the few who is still protected by tough laws that prohibit any insult against the royal family.'"

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