Most of you probably don't remember back in the sixties when Radio Shack was the retail distribution arm of Allied Radio (yes, it was known as Allied Radio Shack), a major components distributor. It was a real parts store the. Eventually Tandy picked up the chain, began selling branded parts, and it was never quite the same. The reality is that the advent of the personal computer, the death of manufacturing in the U.S., and an educational system that no longer valued engineering skills combined to kill the electronics hobbyist market that the Radio Shack depended upon. Their change of focus to consumer electronics was a reflection of that new reality, but unfortunately that is a saturated market. This was, alas, a long time in coming.

What about Kickass Torrents?

Boys have an inherent fascination with the concept of using symbol manipulation to change the functionality of physical machinery. By changing how machines work by typing words and code. Boys are absolutely obsessed with the concept that you can create machines that do what you tell them to do by changing mere symbols (which is what source code is). It is a way of creating life from dead objects by using 'magic' symbols. Religions are based on this. Programming is a type of religion. Boys are very much into this.

Girls, on the other hand, are absolutely fascinated by their ability to create actual living, thinking, unique human beings with their own bodies. They don't need magic symbol manipulation to create artificial life from physical objects. Their bodies create life from their interactions with other life. The lives that girls create can't be controlled like the robots or machinery that boys create, but their human-life creations are infinitely more complicated than what the boys can do.

This is the basic primal fundamental reason why boys are much more attracted to computers and science. Boys spend their lives and careers trying to gain and master the life-creating abilities that girls are endowed with at birth.

Lots of embedded projects are done on Raspberry Pi. If Windows does not run on the Pi, the company who decides to do a Pi based project will decide to develop under Linux. If Windows is available on the Pi and they have Windows developers available, they might decide to do the project with Windows. Also, its less expensive to hire Windows developers than Linux developers right now. Microsoft likes selling embedded windows because its a great way for them to sell lots of Windows licenses.

After struggling with VirtualBox for a while, I broke down and bought VMWare. I use it for running Linux and running other versions of MacOS X on my Mac. I have found it to be well worth the money. In general, I like free software and I don't mind something that is a little harder to use if the non-free alternative is expensive, but at $79 VM Ware has saved me so much time its well worth it.

Look into music apps that pros and Semipros use. It's one of those niches that I think apple has always nurtured, and for good reason.

No, it would appear that Foss's software is non-f/oss.

Apple tries to control as much as they can on their platforms. Other platforms like Android and Windows take an approach of sharing responsibility for the overall quality between several different companies who can each point at each other and say "not it!" when a problem arrises.

I had hoped that SpaceX might hold higher principles :(

Why would you say that?

There more than one reason behind this:

1) everything that is online only has a potential to earn a rent at some point.
2) cloud providers are better at keeping data backed up than the typical home user
3) advertising revenue for provider.
4) some features like the aforementioned teamwork do work well if applications and shared data are centrally hosted
5) new features can be added and tested with minimal effort.
6) customer retention. Even if there are no ugly tricks to prevent paying users from leaving, having to migrate 500GB of storage bundled with the word processor is a barrier to leaving.

Could it be your bullshit alarm is really sensitive? If you take the user-friendly UI and familiarity of Facebook, Twitter, etc and apply it to internal web applications like a document library, would you not get an easier adoption, and through network effect have more benefits for everyone? Would you not be steering users away from using email for everything?

The way I see it, home computing and enterprise computing influence each other and that's not something that just happened when Facebook became big. There's terrible enterprise application UIs out there which would definitely benefit from copying good things from the properly design websites. In comparison, Yammer, Podio and Jive look like tools that people would actually use rather than accumulating local copies of every email and Office doc they've ever received, missing out on a good search function. "Enterprise social media" can work, let's not dismiss it just because it looks like something hipsters would approve.

Reading between the lines, I think this is a company that specializes in greasing palms/pulling levers in Congress and the Senate, as well as constructing sophisticated internet campaigns that include releases to key susceptible news outlets/columnists and hiring fake posters to post on certain widely read comment boards.

So, highly-paid, professional astroturfers.

I tend to agree with this. Until now, I have not seen any good reason to think of the islamic state of Iraq and Syria to be better or worse that the islamic state of Pakistan, or IS of Saudi Arabia or any other I'm not even aware of... It looks like there are important conflicts between being a devout muslim and a law-abiding citizen in a western Europe secular country. Following the Charlie Hebdo attack, this Amjed Choudary cleric chap explained things with little room for error - he is defined by media as "radical", but who's got a way of benchmarking a moderate religious guy?

Where I'm getting is that it might not be that worse to treat the IS of Iraq and Syria as a country rather than a ... place where there are terrorists? ISIL seems to have strong appeal to some of the most undesirable Europe-based muslims, to the extent they actually pack up and go live there. Recognizing ISIL as a country would certainly have many effects I can't predict, but with optimism I'd say it would give some clarity about muslim's world view, while giving those unhappy to live in secular Europe a place to live according to the rules of their sect of Islam. Maybe the great power of having a new country would also give them the feeling of responsibility not to live in permanent war with Shia/Sunni/infidel neighbours.

These last few of years I was signed up for Lovefilm (DVD Delivery) and then Netflix. After a while the convenience was beat by the limited offering and the annoyance of Netflix UK trying quite hard to hide away what's available and what films will be on in the future. Last month, for the first time in years I watched 3 movies at the cinema and this year I'll sign up for a Cineworld £16/month subscription. There's a couple of months in 2015 that won't have very appealing releases but from the list I saw so far, there will be 2 worthwhile films every month, plus those that I will watch now and wouldn't if I had to pay extra. Yes, there will be road traffic to get there and noise from others eating popcorn but I'll be watching current films.