Why does Slashdot post such nonsense? To get suckers like me to reply I guess. Google buying Android was not in the least bit strange. The way Google makes money is adverts on web searching. People start to search web on mobile phones. Microsoft Windows phones would put their rival Bing as the default search engine. Google is looking to protect its core market.

Oculus and Facebook makes no sense at all. Microsoft and the Kinect makes sense as it's a controller they can use with their XBox. Oculus and EA, Valve, Microsoft, Sony, or even Samsung makes sense. How can Facebook help Oculus scale? What experience do they have in custom hardware manufacturing? In running a MMORPG or even a FPS?

Oculus is dead, the Sony headset will be locked to the PS, and we can forget about cheap VR headsets and playing our favourite games with it for the forseeable future.

Phillip.

Ah KDE, oh I so would love to love it. Instead it looks terrible, is glitchy, and suffers so many usability issues I give up after a day. I stuck with it at 4.0, through the dark days, all the way to 4.3. I tried to give it another go not long ago, as I look to move from Unity, but double-clicking on a movie file on a network drive insists on copying the 1Gb file to /tmp before playing it. No thank you.

Go to kde.org to look at the latest screenshots. Can't find it? You didn't think to look at menu item "Workspaces" and click on "Plasma desktop"?

I'll take another look after they've refactored the codebase for the umpteen millionth time. The moment I try installing I am sure they will tell me it's already deprecated as they are releasing Frameworks 6 Plasma Ultra 3.14 which won't be backwardly compatible but is waaay cooler underneath.

Make the thing usable godammit!!!

Phillip.

Yup the Facebook of Linux distros. The worst thing is when you are wiping all your friends and families Ubuntu and putting on Mint instead, you get the groans "I have to learn a new desktop AGAIN?". It was an uphill battle shifting people from Windows to Unity. Having to shift people between distros makes it look pretty unstable and fragmented.

On the plus side, nothing like an impending reformat to remind people to back up their data!

Phillip.

I disagree. All those things you mentioned should be standard but have suffered from a mess of standardisation. With the light switch, would you like it to work with Zigbee, Insteon, Crestron, Lutron, etc? The whole HA scene is so fragmented. Where I live, all the front doors to the buildings are being replaced with RFID because people don't want a brass key to unlock stuff. The credit card industry is locked up by VISA and Mastercard so you will take what you get given.

Kids want new stuff, but they grow up getting their fingers burnt and realise that time = money and will wait for a mainstream commercial version of whatever they can buy in the supermarket. Same as you start with Gentoo as your OS, but after a couple of borked upgrades end up using Ubuntu as you can't afford for your work machine to be down for over a day.

I disagree with your last two sentences. I think people want security and safety, and often they find that in what they know. You only have to look at the crap that gets sold on something like QVC to see that gadgets sell if they appear to be backed by the apparent 'security' of seeing it on TV.

Phillip.

With FaceBook money, they can build their own OLED factory if need be.

Facebook are buying Oculus for $400M in cash plus some shares. The OLED factory LG just built cost $650M.

VR is not a Facebook killer, a Facebook killer will be a better version of Facebook. Google+ could have been if they hadn't screwed it up. Oculus relies on early adopter geeks, the antithesis of the Facebook supporter. Unlike Instagram and Snapchat, VR is not encroaching on the FB domain and won't be for many years. This is clearly not a good fit, hence the pundits predicting the demise of Occulus.

Phillip.

I work in real estate and will daily go through several thousand properties for each and every client. I go through all the inter-agency databases and agency web sites, hitting open in a new tab each time there is something interesting. Having 150 tabs open is not unusual if working on more than one client at once. I have tree-style tab installed, which makes it easy to manage. I can drag and drop duplicate properties from different agencies onto each other to group them. I will then, after many many hours, eliminate properties by closing each tab until I have a top 10 open for each client.

I do not care if you do not believe me, and are telling everbody I am a liar, to everyone else I can confirm OP is not the only person.

Phillip.

If you don't mind home appliances, then the Synology one is the best I have experienced. Easy to use, stable, one click installs for everything, intuitive. It does the desktop metaphor but unlike all the JS libraries I've come across this one doesn't appear to lag. Well suited to its application.

In terms of server management, er probably none of them. Including the web based ones like cPanel, webmin and Plesk. OpenPanel has pretty screen shots, though you don't want to read phrases like "Please note that OpenApp always expects a clean install! Installing OpenApp packages on a non-clean system is likely to lead to data-loss or a non-functional system" so I wouldn't actually install it. All the ISPs present bottom-up approach to management, making it piecemeal. I'd rather have a top-down approach.

Phillip.

My wife has Windows 8.1 which installed itself last night without asking on her new ultrabook with Windows 8. It's a pretty unusable OS. The tiled front screen is full of spam with no obvious way to remove anything. No obvious way to shut it down. I gave up working out how to uninstall software. The new added Start button is a help but the whole UI experience is awful. Also Chrome is messed up out of the box, everything looks blurred compared to IE, but fixable through some options. They have a LONG way to go to make it run on a laptop. I can understand people upgrading to Windows 7, it will be a while before iterations make Win8 usable.

Phillip.

According to the BBC the new Director of the NSA says:
"There's no place where it's an analyst and a database and you can search for whatever you like and there's no record and no after the fact," Mr DeLong says.

So it should be pretty easy for them to figure out which information Snowdon got and when. Unless nowhere means unless outside of Fort Meade...

Phillip.

The UK government has been in Microsoft's pocket since the 1980's, with hundreds of millions flowing non-stop from the British tax payer into Microsoft's coffers. Most comments are saying this is a license negotiation tactic, and this is probably true. The decision makers have spent decades paralysed by fear, brainwashed into believing Microsoft is the "safe" option much like in the prior decades people used to say "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".

The government needs to clearly define a set of document interchange formats. The ODF format for word-processing is a good start. This makes the software a level playing field for all vendors, closed and open source. Only 100% compatible software gets onto the government buy list.

Until now there is no incentive to anybody to write a decent competitor to Microsoft. It's a huge investment and at the end of the day the government will buy Microsoft anyway even if it squeezes the British public's purse until it bleeds. You cannot even attack markets attached to the government as Microsoft will keep shifting their file format to make any competitors subtly incompatible. With a level playing field suddenly the incentives change. The government is a huge win and a fixed goal means the game is on to try and provide the government with best value for money.

Open Office still has an important part to play as it can set the baseline. GCHQ can vet the source and then make available a version for government employees to download (Microsoft Windows, OS X, Debian, etc). It can come pre-installed on all new government machines. If Microsoft can convince a gov't department to install Microsoft Word alongside it and pay for it, good for them. It must be adding extra value.

Francis Maude is definitely on the right track, if the article is to be believed, but he has a lot of inertia to overcome. Good luck to him.

Phillip.

I have a Note 2 and depends on the ROM you install. Some support all the features, some not. Eg Paranoid Android won't, but Jedi X will. There is also a Note3 ROM for the Note. Flashing a new ROM takes about 10 mins to root and reinstall. Very easy indeed. I highly recommend trying some of the ROMs, they blow away stock in terms of security and features. You should root the device anyway so you can run Adblock Plus.

Phillip.

I span the NAS down as soon as the hard drive went, but booted it up just for 1 day as it was also the shared print server. I thought 24 hr only would be safe enought :-(. On the other hand if the drive was about to fail would a failure during rebuild be any better?

Phillip.

I have RAID 5 with 4 x 3TB seagate drives. 1 drive failed after a year and the 2nd in the same NAS failed a couple of days later before a replacement could come in the post. So far 3 / 8 Barracuda drives failed in just over 1 year. After just losing 4TB of data, including my entire photo collection, I've sadly realised RAID 5 isn't enough.

Phillip.

Plenty of good advice here, especially having a central cupboard where you can run your wiring and have your media centre and putting Cat5e everywhere. I would add:
* put the cupboard not next to a bedroom, the whirring can get annoying
* run HDMI and speaker cables to your media cabinet
* tvs you don't include in above, put 2 plug sockets behind so you can power a Roku/mk802/etc
* run light switch cabling and lighting cabling back to your switch cabinet rather than in series, then you can connect how you want
* you can put IR control light switches in, Google "livolo", then make sure your controller (android tablet) has IR blaster
* for my next project I will definitely buy from here for controllers, including dimmers and sensors
* you can put IP cameras rather than motion sensors, or you can combine with IR, but placement is important
* might want to put cabling to above windows should you decided to have curtain controllers

Like others, I would put insulation as a top priority. Heating is one of the major costs in running a house.

Phillip.

What about construction zones? What about school zones? It's not the movie Speed where if the car goes below a certain speed it explodes. It's about well trained operatives driving as appropriate to the situation. The limits are so ridiculously low in the UK the population could drive 2x the speed limit without problem.

If an MI5 agent is following a suspect, it seems a bit absurd that the suspect could get away because they were driving 35mph.

Phillip.