Indeed, it buys them time. How much time, I'm not sure about.

Clearly, Yahoo! has decided that they simply can't compete on search. Why not let MS chase google, they figure, and take a cut for simply lending them the Yahoo! name. In the meantime, that removes a lot of search related R&D and infrastructure headcount, and they can free up those resources to chase the next big thing (well, or lay them off).

This is a desperate move, though. It only works out if people continue to use Yahoo! branded Bing search, and it's unclear to me why anybody would do so. Yahoo! needs to find some kind of value add that lures people to use their Bing frontend, otherwise this deal buys them months, not years. Indeed, this is why it's such a good move from MS - it gradually migrates people to Bing and kills off the Yahoo! brand, without them having to buy Yahoo! and shut them down directly. There's always the *chance* that Yahoo! will recover, but I'm sure MS is assuming that they won't.

The short length of our school year is another piece of bullshit that hurts both teachers and students. It's true that teachers only work part of the year, and that seems to be a consideration for their pay scale, but what sort of professional job is going to be available for only two months in the summer? They may work less, but they have no way to convert that extra time to (decent) revenue.

Good point. Not only is the actual banning free publicity, but they now have the opportunity to look like the 'good guys' by refusing to cave to the nanny state.

Most game companies simply release sanitized versions of their games for such territories, but I wonder if the free press (and general positive vibe for standing up to the 'man') will more than counteract any sales lost in countries like Australia.

Google first, rtfm later. This is what Linux's great popularity and google's great indexing has given us.

Most Linux distributions do indeed have poor or incomplete documentation. The interesting realization I had with respect to this is that it usually doesn't matter - with the massive power of a search engine like google and the large number of users asking questions, you seldom really *need* the docs to figure out how to do something. You can almost invariably ask your question (in English!) to google, and get an answer in seconds that would take you minutes or hours to cobble together from fully reading man pages and online manuals.

I came to this realization when I was recently evaluating FreeBSD as a replacement for Solaris. In truth, both of those systems have excellent documentation, but getting things done with either system can actually take longer because the volume of 'internet wisdom' surrounding them is less due to their smaller user bases. With Linux, almost every question has been asked by some clueless newbie, answered, and indexed. With less prevalent systems, the question may have never even been asked in public. People just read the docs and figure out the answer on their own. And google never indexes this.

Good documentation is good. It's also hard. And in projects run by volunteers, it can easily slip through the cracks. In a lot of cases, though, what people need is not proper documentation, but knowledge of how to do something - and in such cases, documentation may no longer be the easiest way to find out how to do it.

I agree completely. If what you want is a solution that simply works, this is clearly the best choice.

There are a few use cases for the media PC that TiVo can't fill or can't fill very well (transcoding files for use on portable devices, local network streaming, playing media from certain web sites, etc), but you have to ask yourself 1) how much those matter to you and 2) whether another appliance (like the WDTV deals) might do some of it instead.

I love MythTV, warts and all, but its UI is clunky and its care and feeding can be a hassle. I really can't recommend it to anybody who wants something that just works and just works well. Perhaps the Windows offerings are superior, but I'm personally not interested in running Windows, and I enjoy tinkering, so MythTV works for me.

I tend to agree that this shoots the product out of true impulse buy range, but I do think it's a reasonable price point compared to other game peripherals. Unlike (for example) plastic guitars or traditional controllers, you only need one of these things for up to 4 people, and it works out to be cheaper than buying up 4 controllers/wiimotes/whathaveyou.

Of course, unlike adding additional controllers, you don't have an incremental purchasing option with this thing, and there's a good chance that you don't have a game yet that will actually *work* with it.

I think the smart thing is to do what Nintendo did with the Wii motion plus: bundle it with a tech demo 'game.' If it's 80 USD for *just the hardware*, you're suddenly talking about 140 USD in order to actually *use* it, and that starts to look pretty sketchy. But 80 USD for the device *and* a game looks like a pretty decent value proposition.

Yeah... it's an odd name to English speakers, who will either associate it with the Latin "ovum" (and modern derivatives) or just be perplexed by it. Apparently "ovi" means "door" in Finnish, which makes a great deal of sense, as it's a portal service of sorts. But what percentage of Nokia's sales come from people who will actually recognize this?

Despite being the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer, from my perspective Nokia takes a very Euro-centric (and even Finn-centric) approach to their design and branding strategies. But as odd as Ovi is, I still think it's a good step up from "N-Gage," which I would assume has negative connotations in pretty much every market that saw the original device.

No, it's not N-Gage the device, it's N-Gage the platform.

A while back - 2 years, maybe - Nokia decided that they wanted to seriously push gaming on S60 phones. I think this was even before the iPhone opened the app development floodgates, but I'm not sure.

For some reason, they decided that the best name for this brand new gaming delivery platform would be... well, would be the same name as one of their most famous hardware failures of yesteryear. It would be akin to Apple calling the iPhone's browser "Cyberdog" or something equally ludicrous.

At any rate, Nokia "soft launched" the new N-Gage throughout various markets, finally making it to the US only late last year (Nokia's really ignored the US market in recent years). Of course, by the time this project was starting to ramp up, the iPhone had already proven itself a capable gaming platform and... well, you can guess how well it went over.

Don't worry, though, if you're a hardcore Nokia gamer. Everything that "N-Gage" the "platform" does will continue to exist, presumably, in "Ovi," which is their new unified branding for app delivery / social networking / whatever else. This is really more of a branding change than anything.

From my perspective, WoT is no better or worse than the average fluff fantasy fare, and while that genre hasn't evolved much in the last 15 years my own standards have. Had WoT stopped at 3 books, I would have been satisfied with it as a largely unremarkable but mostly competent series.

Instead, the series now certainly is remarkable, albeit more for its astounding length than for its actual quality. I imagine that it rivals or exceeds the volume of everything Tolkien ever published about Middle Earth, making the Lord of the Rings trilogy look like a short story in comparison. What about the WoT universe demands such a thorough treatment?

Personally, I became bored with the entire fluff fantasy genre before the series was completed, so I suppose I'll never really know.

There's really no reason to have all of these different devices, when the functionality can be properly collapsed into one.

We're not there yet, and there will always be some standalone GPS devices for very specific purposes. But as the general purpose devices get smaller and better, the single-function units will gradually be relegated to the margins.

There are many ways to do the things you describe. I personally make extensive use of Puppet.

This is a great solution for your configuration files, but note (directly) your code. This is where your distribution's packaging system comes in.

Build packages of your code for your OS package manager (be it RPM, portage, apt, whatever... it's usually not that difficult). Give the packages version numbers based on svn revision, if you need that granularity. Create an automated mechanism to build your package and insert it into a local repository.

Tell puppet to ensure that your 'dev' environment is always using the latest package. Tell puppet to ensure that your production and test environments are running whichever specific version they're supposed to be running.

A downside of puppet is that it's a 'pull' based system, by default every 30 minutes. For most situations, this is adequate - but not all. You might also investigate Func as, at the very least, a convenient way to tell a group of notes to phone back home to puppet on demand.

This is a well executed movie by most counts. The CGI is excellent, and I happen to like the choice of "documentary" style filming (oh, people will bemoan the "shakycam," but I feel like it helps integrate the CGI with the live action components). The main character's role is well cast. and his flawed and human responses to his bizarre circumstances are quite refreshing. With the exception of the 3rd act (more in a bit), the pacing is very well done and the movie flows quite well.

Any claims of originality are a bit overstated, though. By setting the story in South Africa, parallels to human-on-human behavior are much less subtle than you'd normally find (and I don't think that this is to its credit). In truth, the story is a combination of many familiar sci-fi tropes: the grotesque but misunderstood aliens, the nearly omnipotent greedy multinational corporation, the *SPOILER* horribly cliched (but very well realized) transformation of the main character *END SPOILER*.

I think the movie is at its worst in the 3rd act, when it devolves into a full-on action flick for an unnecessarily long 30 minute stretch.

Again, very well executed. It may even be the best sci-fi flick of the year, though it seems a bit early to judge that. Just don't go into the film expecting it to cover any new ground.

I hear you. I'll often find products using google or deal sites, then go through bing just for the cash back - it would be really silly if that sort of usage counted as a bing success story.

TFA doesn't specify whether this sort of usage is included in the comparison.

Well, I don't think there's an ideal solution, but I can tell you what I do.

For software, I find Bacula to be a very effective solution. It's open source, cross platform, and very flexible. Bacula was designed with tape in mind, so it takes a bit of wrangling to make it work well on hard drives - but once you get it set up properly, it works quite well with disk.

Now, I back everything "critical" up using bacula onto my ZFS array of cheap drives on my Solaris box. I just let ZFS itself do the compression (I didn't benchmark this, Bacula's compression may be more effective) and retain the backups on disk for about 2 months. I do nightly incremental backups and monthly full backups, but Bacula gives you lots of different options in this respect.

I then take the Bacula backups and rsync them over to external media weekly. I also take and keep 4 zfs snapshots of these backups on my external media, so that I can go back 4 weeks prior if I need to. I also rsync over to a separate smaller external drive "every now and then." I keep that other drive in the opposite side of the house (better would be to leave it at a friend's house, but I'm lazy - I just have to hope that one end of the house survives a fire / theft unscathed).

I have another class of data - data that I deem important, but also capable of being re-acquired at minimal expense. This data gets no incremental backups, and is only rsync'd around. It gets put on the larger external hard drive, but not on the smaller secondary drive. Beyond that, I have a third class of data, which I deem completely expendable. This is mostly normal recordings from my MythTV machine, which I consider an acceptable loss, and these aren't backed up at all.

At the end of the day, there really is no magic bullet. I really like disks + bacula, but what works best for you will depend on what you're trying to back up (and how much value you place on making sure that this happens properly).