Yet another phone without a full QWERTY hardware keyboard, so I'll be keeping my Epic 4G even longer.

Thinness is an anti-feature. If people really wanted their phones to be paper thin, there wouldn't be a market for phone cases.

Standards compliance.

Seriously, all the solutions to those plans have been staring them in the face for 20 years. Ironically, MS's own desire for a monoculture on the web prevented them from seeing that.

You accidentally your links, but if one of them was SureWest, go with them.

Did you post this comment from 2010?

I've been following this rather passively, but all of this talk seems to only mention specific internet access methods: broadband and/or mobile broadband. However, we know there are a myriad of parallel methods, from satellite to dial-up. Unless all US Internet access is brought under Title II, the market will attempt to shift toward whichever methods are most exploitable for profit.

I don't have one, and it's unlikely that I will have any tablet, ever.

Touchscreens are a regression in human interfaces. Yes, it's more intuitive than a mouse, but it lacks any way to even emulate buttons after the first, "cursor" positioning is imprecise at best, and worst of all there's just no substitute for a keyboard.

Now that the market is correcting itself, Oremus can finally reveal the sad truth about tablets that many here knew at first sight of the iPad: tablets are for consumption, not production. Jobs thought his reality distortion field could hide that, but it's been powered off for a while now. Tablet sales are slipping because the hype is over and the masses are realizing that they need to get stuff done, so back to laptops they go.

We shouldn't let MS get away with trying to portray Edge as a completely new rendering engine. It's not... cutting a branch and cleaning it up does not create a new codebase.

Until the Edge branch receives significant rewrites, edge == trident.

mshtml.dll still exists. It loads when Wndows boots because it's the core of IE and Windows Explorer.

It wouldn't even take a new crop of IE exploits in the wild to make MS stock drop in price. The first two weeks would be a constant flood of blog posts detailing how crappy the code is. Trident is 17 years old, and many of us have heard how much of an unmaintainable mess the codebase has become in their attempts to implement web standards. Even then, MS would have to release it under a fully open license otherwise no one will taint themselves.

The "new thing", Spartan, is just a rebrand of IE with a new skin. It'll still be built around Trident and Chakra, so web developers will have no reason to have a different opinion of it from IE.

MS needs a new rendering engine, but they'll never use an open source one. Their only real option is to write one from scratch, which they haven't done since IE1, and that engine was replaced with Trident (which they bought) in IE4. There was IE5 for Mac, but that was pretty much a one man crusade and its rendering engine was nothing like regular IE.

I was told that by a former employee in a store a couple months ago. I wouldn't put it past RS execs to be doing creative accounting to justify wasting half the floor space with products that don't belong there. They'll get their golden parachutes before anyone else gets anything from a buyout, we've seen it all before.

Why is it only now, three decades later, that they are finally going under?

The answer: Cell phones.

Upper management lost its vision long ago, but the coup de grace was when they started selling cell phones to cash in on an exploding market. Trouble is, RS buys the phones at retail cost and loses money on every unit.

In the last couple years someone in RS management sniffed out a bit of a clue, because they started stocking Arduino, RaspberryPi, and most recently LittleBits. A slight correction, but everyone knows RS should be the non-big-box side of Fry's.

The problem, and ultimately the reason most people are up in arms, is that this new "solution" (to a largely non-existent problem for most sysadmins) takes away something fundamental and core to Linux (and UNIX in general): freedom. As in the ability to freely choose what software to use and how to use it on your own systems.

In this particular case, a unilateral decision was made by the major distros at the cost of that freedom. That kind of decision making was not something people, who have lived and breathed the free (as in liberty) software movement most of their careers, ever expected to see in their own community - in Microsoft/Apple's manicured gardens sure, but not here. It's easy for most people to forget that the Linux community came to be largely what it is /because/ of the freedom to choose - not in spite of it.

PHP gets bashed because a) the language maintainers are rather bad at language design, and b) so much shitty code gets written in it. I'm in a similar boat as you, having done primarily PHP development since 4.0 was released.

Drupal 7 is ok (I haven't looked at 8 yet), but if you really want to see good PHP code, look at Laravel.

Yes, PHP is easy to write, therefore it is easy to write badly. WordPress is the poster child for PHP's bad reputation, because:

• It's written badly
• It's written badly even in the context of PHP4, from which it is a relic
• The project management refuses to break backwards compatibility

Granted, PHP is the only language where a result like WP is possible. Shitty code hyped by an army of self-described "developers" who proudly and incestuously pass around bad practices like STDs.

That being said, JavaScript outside the browser is a convenient, unnecessary solution looking for a problem.

It should be very clear by now that at least one party doesn't want more people to vote in general, only more of the people likely to vote in that party's favor. The establishment only accepted electronic voting so that they can game the outcome. They'll never take the next step to allow it to be widely exercized.