Er we were not fine. I'm not sure who you know that went through the post WW2 years in Britain but according to my grandparents it was pretty austere. A large chunk of debt was to the USA / Canada, and we only finally paid your WW2 loan off in 2006. If you don't mind your future generations being under the yoke of debt until 2075 or so then go ahead...

Phillip.

People staying at luxury hotels often aren't paying. If you are on a company card you don't care about phone/internet prices, and you don't bother looking at the prices on the restaurant menu. On business trips people can run up $10,000 a month on a mobile phone bill and not blink because it's the "company that pays". A company like Apple has to launder all that tax it's avoiding, so why not burn off some in 'expenses' for top executives? Luxury hotels, yacht and jet charters, etc are great black holes to throw money at whilst having an awesome time.

Phillip.

I totally agree. With the Unity spyware I will be moving away from Ubuntu, so I was trying different distros. I tried not long ago the latest KDE and the word "clunky" is so apt. It looks unpolished. There were lots of annoying quirks and bugs (I didn't make a list). It's not very nice to use. I really don't understand it. I suffered through the KDE 4.0 mess, and it rapidly improved from there into something approaching nice with 4.2... then just stagnated on the usability front. Such a waste considering the effort that has gone into the back-end.

I am moving friends and family away from Microsoft Windows and Ubuntu onto Xubuntu at the moment. Most of them are on laptops and they are impressed with the increase in speed. It does feel a little basic, but a new convert told me yesterday "it doesn't feel like I am booting a laptop, it seems like I am turning on my telly with a remote control. It loads so fast!".

I would like one of 3 things to happen:

a) KDE have a massive push on the usability front
b) Unity make the spyware opt-in rather than opt-out (though it's probably too late for many people)
c) momentum grows behind xfce4

Or maybe somebody will create a new desktop based on the QT libraries?

Phillip.

British Leyland is no longer costing the government a fortune. British Airways has gone from a loss-making airline to one that provides considerable employment. BP is doing well, as is Rolls-Royce. BT has done ok, though giving exclusive area franchises for cable providers hampered competition and this lack of competitiveness has left them still too powerful.

Phillip.

Does no damage what so ever. Making a joke is hardly being an abusive asshole. I don't think anybody talented would want to work with a sensitive flower such as yourself, but that's besides the point. It was about a 3rd party making an attack on the Linux kernel, which he refuted. If the guy isn't "ignorant" then he can prove it. Otherwise take it on the chin and admit you might be wrong. It's not like he was being rude to his colleagues.

Phillip.

I'm not an idealogue, I just buy a lot of phones. Yes I buy Android on lower spec'd hardware like that, either for holiday where I don't want a $900 phone stolen or for presents. It's slow but incredibly cheap, very good value. I gave my old S2 to my girlfriend and the battery didn't last a day. I bought a cheap battery off eBay, put a custom rom on, and now it lasts for 3 days no problem. Android isn't a flash media centre on those specs, like my Note 2, but it's perfectly usable.

Not only does Microsoft produce poor software, slow, bloated and locked down, but the Microsoft tax directly affects the prices of the device. You are trying to argue why wouldn't you buy a WinPhone, but the argument is more why would you?

Phillip.
PS yes I accidentally wrote 0.5MB instead of 0.5GB. Apologies.

Microsoft Windows 8 has mimimum requirements of 4GB of flash, 1GB of RAM, and a dual-core processor. The latest Android requires 340MB of RAM and 0.5MB of flash. Windows Phone is bloated, buggy, and an awful UI that cannot be changed (unlike Android where you can put any launcher, or indeed custom rom, instead).

People are not buying Microsoft Windows phones. The reason is that both the hardware and the software is inferior.

Phillip.

The Nokia 41Mpx with Symbian costs $480, with Windows 8 it costs $910.

You are paying the usual $200 per handset for your Windows 8 license. Where does the extra $230 go?

Phillip.

Well obviously Win8 is better than iPhone. Apple is riding off 6 year old design and tech. Even Symbian makes for a more usable phone that either of those two though. Win8 is bloated, unattractive, and has no apps.

At the moment the only two serious contenders are Blackberry, with their superior QNX underneath, and Android with its wide range of handsets and weight of apps. At the moment, anybody would be mad not to buy an Android handset for personal use.

Phillip.

Microsoft crushed its competition via illegal and immoral tactics by controlling the underlying operating system. Throwing up fake error messages when running rival products to make them seem unstable, using hidden APIs to give their own products an unnassailable advantage, even pretending IE was built into the OS to ensure it came pre-bundled onto every computer. The one I didn't like was when a new company announced a great new product, Microsoft would fake having the same product coming out shortly after. Everybody would wait for the "official" Microsoft version, the new company would go bankrupt, and Microsoft would buy them for pennies and release their software.

On an even playing field Microsoft has never done so well. On phones and tablets their propensity to launch slow and buggy products has come back to bite them. The Xbox did ok but they took an awful hit to get it where it is today. The best product they ever made was their mouse, so I guess they can do hardware :-)

Phillip.

As far as I'm concerned, the Samsung Galaxy S and Note series blow the competition out of the water for value for money. They are currently well ahead of the pack. The risk/reward of a stunt like this simply isn't worth it. If they want to attract people to their platform, unlock their phones and spend that money on giving out prizes for xda developers for adding cute new features to custom roms.

Phillip.

Eyeglasses are a great idea! My friend has 2 kids that break the frames all the time, she would pay for the 3d printer just with replacing those.

The key hanger is also a great one, I just spent a couple of hundred bucks getting kitchen and bathroom stuff: wall-mount spice racks, toilet roll holder, coat hooks, key hangers, soap dish, soap dispensor, ice-cube trays, fruit bowl, vase... each is only $15 or so but once you've bought 20-30 items it adds up a lot.

My girlfriend would definitely be printing a new back for Galaxy S2 every month. She's already ordered a couple, which are around $30 each once she finds the design she likes and adds p&p.

I would believe the printer could pay for itself, if I could be sure of a good free database of objects.

Phillip.

Two politically motivated crimes. The first the leak of intelligence in an apparent bid to prevent Middle Easterns getting killed. The second the massacre of 77 people, mostly children, in a bid to sway people against allowing Middle Eastern people to settle in Europe. The latter got a sentence of 21 years. Let's see what Mr Manning gets. On the one had he betrayed the confidence of his employers and his country. On the other the extraordinary level of torture the US inflicted on him, the kind of behaviour no civilised society should allow. It would be fair 20-30 years, but 5-10 years taking into account time served.

Phillip.

It's what everybody predicted when Elop jettisoned everything that was unique about Nokia and turned them into a corpse trying to flog a dead OS. Their patents flogged to trolls, Maemo and even the low-end Symbian in the bin, QT offloaded, they have zero intellectual capital left. The number of MP in the camera is not going to make me buy their phone. The share value has been trashed, the good engineers jumped ship, and now it's just a question of how many pennies on the dollar Microsoft can pick Nokia up for. The great thing for Microsoft is that with the exclusive agreement Nokia is now worthless. They will probably buy them up for $1 on the grounds of paying all the severance packages and debts. Love my last Nokia phone, but it was sadly the last.

Phillip.

No wonder you are posting that drivel as anon. Those USB sticks are terribly under-powered, I have a $99 one lying in a drawer as it couldn't handle playing back non-H264 video. There is no way they can handle the kind of uses I hear the Pi is being used for. Even high bit-rate video make the thing blisteringly hot to the touch.

And Android is poor for a general purpose educational device. You can't drop straight into C, Python, etc. You can get some hacks but they are no substitute. As an educational tool, Android is a very bad joke.

The Pi is a great device at a great price, but please keep Android the hell away from it.

Phillip.