There's still an inordinate amount of padding on everything. It maks my screen feel like 800x600.

On top of that, gnome have an activity bar and each application a window decoration bar and then a menu bar. When running a maximized program, the bars are placed directly under each other and good chunk of the upper screen is wasted.

The activity bar still does nothing and the window decoration bar typically has a single close button. It's a gigantic waste of space.

I've used aliexpress.com (the consumer site for alibaba). It's incredibly scammy.

The prices are not that different to those offered by ebay sellers (usually the same). Ebay accepts Paypal, Aliexpress doesn't. Although they have an ill reputed escrow service.

Aliexpress selers have a lot of things you can't buy on ebay. It's great for buying knockoffs. I used it to be Gameboy and NES clone.

It's very popular with women, who use it to buy cosmetics at very low prices (probably fake brands).

Metro Apps aren't particularly good or useful. They haven't seen mass usage by the Market or Developers, why keep it around on the desktop? It's a design clearly meant for touch interfaces. The design insist on hiding things in a submenu of a hidden side-menu - all that's visibly left is padding.

There might have been a reason for it a couple of years ago, when the world thought all laptops were going to have a touch screen but that's clearly not going to happen. The use cases are thin - and they're just plain uncomfortable to use. What the world really needed was better trackpads.

MS should remove Metro from the desktop and license WP8.1 for tablets.

When Netflix eventually deems fit to grace us with it's presence, it's offerings are going to be nowhere near the same as the US version. It's doubtful if it'll be the same price as well. They might crack down on VPN users to force them to move to the Australian version.

Netflix could play cat-and-mouse and block known VPN IPs until customers simply give up (and probably torrent the shows they want).

Most Aussies use the same couple of VPN services, they could easily fatigue the vast majority of illegitimate Aussie Netflix subscribers.

It takes minimal effort for netflix to do this, but they have no reason to until they launch in Australia.

There will never be an explicit plan to go back to MS. There are too many egos involved - heads may roll if this is perceived as anything other than a huge success. Remember this is a government bureaucracy with all the inherent office politics. It could get embarrassing.

I'm sure they have made provisions for people who absolutely need to use MS products. If they ever want to go back to windows, they will expand the use-case requirements for a windows PC until over time, it becomes a checkbox on a form for new employees.

There was a time when twitter didn't do anything other that links and text. When third-party twitter clients existed they used twitpic to display images.

Twitter doesn't allow third-party clients anymore (basically) and have their own image service embedded into their UI. Third party image services are just rendered as links in the official client. twitpic was dead in the water years ago.

The guy who owns it (It's a small self-funded business) should have seen the writing on the wall and taken the $10M he was offered years ago. I suspect when twitter tightened their grip twitpic's revenue, profit and users dissipated. In it's heyday it was allegedly making ~$700K a year.

How about not asking about gender on account registration and assigning a random username?

It'll make it hard to claim that Wikipedia treats females differently.

Apparently the less affluent use their phones in lieu of a PC/radio/TV. Some parts of the world even use phones to manage microfinancing.

Phones are ideal for these people in many ways especially in rural areas, where a constant electricity is rare.

Considering Google killed off Orkut at the end of last month, and still haven't killed blogspot/blogger i suspect Google+ will hang around for a while longer.

It's a lot more integrated into their other services than Orkut and blogger ever were as well.

I suspect Google+ will morph into a "Value added" social backend for some of their products, youtube, hangouts, gmail all have Google+ hooks. They are starting to use Google+ to rank your searches, I see my friends posts in my search results often now. They could use this to add personalization to Google Now.

In a couple of years Google+ may be closer to Discus's "embed everyone" model than Facebook's silo. They might end up using Google+ to integrate the data across their products, which were (and still are) siloed until recently and just remove the Google+ homepage.

The case for not having a firewall is a lot like the case for unprotected sex:

> The horror stories only happen do dumb people who should have known better (I'm different).
> I know exactly what's coming in and out of my systems
> It adds an extra layer of complexity i don't want to deal with.
> She's taken contraceptive measures anyway.
> It'll probably be fine.

Whenever i hear of local councils (or any bureaucracy) claim that project X has saved $Y i am cautious. They have every incentive to fudge the numbers, and no one has an incentive to debunk them except MS (who no one will believe). I have no reason to doubt their claims, but a third-party audit would be nice.

I have heard of a few municipalities doing this now, perhaps some sort of coalition to exchange knowledge and coordinate development funding is warranted?

I usually have LibreOffice installed on my computers alongside MS Office. I find LibreOffice sluggish and not as responsive or as easy to use as MSO (although this might be a familiarity thing). I am one of those people who like the ribbon. Sometimes formatting doesn't come out properly as well. There is also the question of productivity.

The OP doesn't need Solaris (He currently has a Linux Dev box) or an ARM system. He needs a low powered machine that can compile to ARM (and other things).

I would look into an Intel NUC.

Just build floating factories, sail to international waters and and breed slaves. Fuck paying people, what a waste!

It will save all this wage currency speculation and the burden on having to move once the host country has dried up. Hell, the elites could even live on an adjoined isand-ship and use the slaves for pleasure and work.

The biggest problem would be Energy, a floating nuclear reactor? Something to harness the power of the sea? Perhaps a sympathetic country will relinquish a portion of its offshore oil in exchange for the services a lawless island could provide? Maybe just breed more slaves to push the turbines?

I don't think I've ever seen a large company use anything but RHEL..

Most smaller/mid-range orgs use CentOS or Debian/Ubuntu, maybe more Debian.
Those people comparing it to Arch Linux are cheerleaders/hobbyists.

Apparently the humanities wasn't always so broken. There was a time, before the mythical 60s that a few of our politicians and influencers would have an understanding of the Arts. Having a degree that tried to make you "well rounded" might have been a bonus in some non-technical fields.

Now that culture has deemed that _everybody_ must have a degree, the humanites has become what people who shouldn't have a tertiary education study. It's been dumbed down just to get these people through the course and by the cult of postmodernmism.

On top of that, it's become overly politcal and aggressively liberal - you can only dissect Lincoln's sexuality (btw, the only acceptable anwser is that he was gay) so many times without the whole thing becoming a meaningless farce.

As a result we're governed by technocrats - people with a lot of niche knowledge, but little broad knowledge.