It is not like trolltech was some gigantic company to begin with. Qt will live on, perhaps way better as Nokia gave up the stupid idea of pushing Qt framework to host OS which -itself- needs radical changes to begin with.

Ask a N97 user what he/she feels about Qt when the device C: (yes it exists!) has only 20 MB of free disk space. If Nokia gets the hell out of the way, trolltech has pretty much guaranteed the future readiness of qt with the radical 4.x changes. Same for KDE too.

Remember one thing, people buying Symbian phone have made their choice for battery life, stability and some degree of freedom.

Anyone thinking they will all line up for iOS is wrong. Android? Perhaps. The real winner here is Blackberry once their QNX based devices start to ship (or handsets upgraded). Now the rumor is BB/QNX has also Android compatibility (that micro kernel can do anything), things will get real interesting.

Issue isn't MS OS (which is a joke, at least now). The issue is, Nokia boss did a quick patch which really failed to impress anyone.

If that IDIOT (ask all Symbian users) who still asks for access point while there is a perfectly working wi-fi in range is still there. Or, the other idiot who doesn't embed Birdstep Smart Connect (which is globally licensed) to device menu/ROM to fix issue is still there, what has been fixed? Now they will code the same junk in Windows language, that is all.

Only Apple could figure the real problem and proudly erased their own, decades old OS and switched to OS X. If you think it was smooth, ask any Mac user who had bad luck to install the first incarnations of it. It sucked, 3rd parties were clueless and community were flaming at them. What did they do? They basically did "so don't touch there", ignored.

As a Symbian user, I wished death of Symbian was because of MeeGo, e.g. "Now we have made up our mind, we are allocating all resources (they are gigantic) to MeeGo and Qt development. Qt will soon officially run on anything having a CPU, equally".

Instead of fixing anything other than kernel (it had no problem), they went with someone else 1.0 kernel. EKA2 kernel is the only victim here. Here we rewind progress again, 10 years this time.

Funny is, RIM, who is always being blamed to be old fashioned did take the radical decision. They have chosen QNX, no matter whoever says anything, just remember the 1.44 MB floppy having a web browser and imagine their head start.

For people who choose Bing, the reason is likely they are fed up with SEO which became like a cancer or some kind of human powered worm and the stance of Google against user privacy.

If they copy Google that way and openly admit they already "spy" (OK OK, anonymous data) users who trusted them by installing the needless toolbar, what is left as a reason? It is clearly not Microsoft since they know their image and childishly take measures to hide their brand from Bing.

Slashdot is the messenger who is repeatedly getting shot by people who claims to have larger IQ than Joe Public.

For years, I have chosen Yahoo just because it is less popular, SEO idiots doesn't care, I got an account from 1998 so they already spied the hell out of me and they had these tiny inventions like integrating MCafee sitechecker to results.

Now, it is just another interface to Bing with horrible spam results (just like Google!) and Mcafee started to disappear sometimes. Perhaps their "partner" doesn't like the fact that anything regarding windows software download may and will have "red" results.

So thanks to super elite Google fans and Tech media/clueless business guys, we lost the only real alternative to Google search.

It would be very hard to explain it English but, the broken/robot like turkish of Windows versions is legendary. Even Steve Balmer when visited Turkey got surprised when he heard it "first time" from reporters.

Considering English version of Windows sells at least 30% more expensive and still being bought by IT professionals and businessmen, you can imagine the degree of broken Turkish.

As I don't really like anything number 1, especially a one with very questionable/spam results in Turkish, I decided to give a try to Bing Mobile on my Nokia/Symbian handset. It took 5 secs for me to give it up and post feedback to MS. The reason? I saw the EXACT, made up Turkish in a single line on 320x240 mobile screen. The rest was? Logo! So they spent billions of dollars, risked their "get along" with Google, I am betting there are way more than 1000 Turks working at that company who absolutely knows the horrible Turkish of Windows and they end up with the very same language (can't claim it is turkish) on their latest project, Bing.

Copying Google? Oh well, I didn't need proof. When Bing was first launched, it was clean. I didn't get virus/trojan/spyware infested sites as results when I look for a software title. I said "Just the Windows and support searches may keep it afloat" jokingly. Recently did a search again, download3k and various known suspects with "red" ratings from any sane search security product (e.g. mcafee) started to appear. The results were the very reason I gave up Google for search on any not so secured computer/device. So, lets say, what left? Yahoo search gone too, ask.com? I started to use dmoz directory more&more, the problem is, it is not 1997 anymore.

Turkish Windows not being fixed can be explained by millions of pages of documents needing to be updated with training/manuals and even their exams. So lets say the disaster already happened without any kind of possible fix. What is the issue with SEARCH service which started months ago?

BTW, for Grammar guys on Slashdot or MS supporters: English is not my native language and I didn't charge $140 to write this message so, don't waste your time.

It is all about geography. Nordic had to have best of class wireless/broadband because of weather conditions and gigantic mountains which you can't reliably "wire" or even if you did, you can't maintain.

It is why Ericsson, Nokia kind of companies came from that area.

The issue with the USA is the huge area which has to be covered. Compare USA to entire Scandinavia area.

Except "anti government" types (many exist), most of security professionals will happily serve their country or the globe, it can be NSA or Interpol or FBI. Of course, I don't speak about "the code to watch everyone" kind of contribution, perhaps some serious quirk (like the DNS one) which may effect entire country or globe.

It is not like 1990s anymore, every machine is connected and I am betting there are many serious security issues being found, fixed behind closed doors.

Anyway, it really seems impractical to add "backdoors" to operating systems rather than watching/tapping the entire network which is OS/device neutral itself.

For iOS devices? As Apple doesn't allow antivirus/firewall to their devices, some trojan may already exist without anyone knowing about it. That is the problem with iOS/App Store. You can't have "extra security" even if you want to pay for it. On Symbian/Android and even Pre-Win 7 mobile, if you are paranoid or carry sensitive data, you cough some money to Kaspersky/F-Secure and have extra security/firewall.

As a person who still only uses Apple computers, I think Apple's "security issues", once exploited will be at computer Armageddon levels.

The reason is simple. Windows users have learned their lesson in Blaster era and figured the importance of firewall/antivirus and what the heck is a zero day. For Apple community, this didn't happen and there are millions of people who thinks they are somehow using some kind of "secure NSA terminal", downloading/running all kinds of junk out there and believing every promise naively.

I personally know my daily newspaper almost didn't print one day because some guy insisted on using Quark Classic on Mac OS and somehow managed to get infected by some archaic MacOS virus. To fix the situation, they really had to do some insane trickery as he was reviewing final copy which was supposed to sent to print. Why have all happened? Basically, he didn't believe the concept that Mac can be infected by a virus so he didn't bother to run antivirus on an operating system which viruses really exist.

Just imagine some kind of Blaster.OSX and remember in this community, they harass the security professionals and amateurs instead of thanking them. Some companies even gave up writing about OSX security in their blogs as they are tired of thousands of "snake oil seller!" comment on their blog comments.

Recently, BBC started to do really dumb things like disabling poor old "wap" site which may be still needed by some people (right, 1%) and wouldn't cost them anything. Some poor African having only access to a wap device may have been ended up out of BBC news for this reason.

They also messed up the entire news.bbc.co.uk making it like a tabloid newspaper site (they call it red top I heard) and even changed the domain to www.bbc.co.uk/news forcing millions of browser redirects.

A year earlier, we also saw Yahoo who also tries to save itself from doom with childish tricks rather than real fixes to rm -rf entire Geocities. The reason? How much money it would save? Nothing. They just swept entire 1990s web personal/general public culture without return and trendy IDIOTS here, on this very same /. site, cheered about it.

So, even if you know how Slashdot works, you can easily believe the headline and the scoop since these days, facebook/twitter bound idiots have no respect to web history.

Sell iPlayer subscriptions to non UK citizens, even for a higher price. Start with Apple universe if you don't trust to people having "more open" devices.

There are people who will happily buy "access right" to BBC TV starting with Americans.

Deleting sites of historical significance or making your top 10 site look like a tabloid newspaper with gigantic fonts and 3rd party spying "share this" buttons won't save you. Selling content will. Believe or not, not all "foreigners" are pirates and some are already paying similar amounts of money for VPN services in UK, for iPlayer.

Recently, I have read this article at The Register which itself is British.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/21/computer_history_museum_revolution/

There were some whining in article and the comments about British computers not being featured. It really seems to me that UK has lost their respect to old things even founded by legendary figures like Douglas Adams. So that was basically the reason, nobody really bothered to participate in that multi million project which even entities like BillG spared time and money.

Funny is, only organization I can come up for "saving" the site is American, Archive.org. Hope they fired up downloading already.

Today, data can be compressed to amazing levels, especially html/image data and very cheaply.

I can bet there are thousands of "P2P downloaders" in Britain who does consume the data/space the poor old site uses, in a month.

They could have excuse for tape as tape is a really expensive medium, some idiot may really have come up with the idea of saving money like that. For digital data, even idiocy isn't an explanation.

It can be old fashioned, not up to Google quality of search, no web 2 trickery but really, what kind of harm it does?

Fsck the Godwin law, it really started to look like nazis burning last copy books without return or the famous Alexandria library fire.

People have built the content so it should stay. Perhaps donated to a organization like Archive.org or its British equivalent.

I am pissed about the Geocities rm -rf as well, I guess I am one of rare people who really knows the consequences of rm -rf of personal/organic data.