Even with a Macbook, it varies on what you're doing on battery. If you're playing something like Civilization V on battery, you can drain the sucker in 90 minutes.

It's a voice search tool that seems to work a hell of a lot better than Siri.

Seriously, find a buddy with an iPhone or newer iPad and try it yourself. Do a search on Siri, and then install the Google app and try the same searches. I consistently get better results with Google.

Siri ends up doing a web search on anything but the most basic of questions, so you might as well just cut out the middle man and ask Google directly.

It doesn't help that most POS systems that I've recently used at fast food restaurants still run unpatched copies of Windows XP and often have other unpatched systems sitting on the same network switch with them.

That's a PCI compliance violation, by the way, but they never bother to fix it until they fail an audit. The store owners are just too busy slinging fries to learn about IT security or even give a damn about their systems unless they are completely down.

So, yeah, pay cash for your fast food unless you're at some big corporate run store.

It certainly didn't end music piracy, but it helped to send it back underground a bit. Limewire was a hell of a lot easier than pulling multipart file archives from a Usenet server, so non technical people could figure out how to use it.

One of the reasons that Adblock is great is that it doesn't require knowledge of things like hosts files to blacklist the hostnames of ad providers. An end user can configure this on their own without any help from a "computer guy".

Maybe the power grid software in that area was designed by the same person who designed "Close, and never show this again" functionality for the Slashdot Deals notification.

Nah... at least the power grid works at least some of the time. I still get that damn Slashdot Deals message every time I visit the site.

The joke is on China, really. Obama has no chance in getting any CO2 emission legislation passed with a Republican Congress in charge, while China just went on record saying that they're at least going to attempt to reduce their emissions in the future. That's something that they were never willing to say before.

That China statement will come back to haunt them in future climate change negotiations, while Obama can just blame those "evil obstructionist Republicans" for not meeting his end of the bargain.

Do you think that giving the POS terminal the GNOME name was just a piece of viral marketing tactic to begin with?

Think about it.... nobody on Slashdot (or many of the other technology web sites covering this story) would be talking about Groupon's new product if the Gnome team didn't make such a stink about their brand name. Many of the people reading those sites are potential buyers of this product.

Maybe they should call it the "iPOS" next, so all of the Apple news sites will get their chance to talk about the product as well :)

I'd imagine that the person who did a "-1 Disagree" on this post has never lost data due to a web service suddenly being shut down or signifigantly changed.

I'll bet that a bunch of the former Megaupload customers out there have learned this lesson the hard way. Google is likely to give you more advanced warning than that, but it's still something to be concerned about.

Yeah, the guy gets paid to write about Microsoft products for a living. Not exactly a guy to go to for an unbiased opinion.

Something tells me that UNIX compatibility had little to do with Mac OS X's growth in popularity. Most end users simply don't really care about the command line. Instead, I'd consider these to be the primary reasons why people started buying a lot more Mac's around 2007:

1) Windows Vista came out around this time, and many people didn't like it. Mac OS X looked like a good alternative in terms of both ease of use and better stability.
2) People were getting sick of seeing their Windows XP systems getting infected with malware, so they switched to the Mac where drive by malware downloads are less of a problem.
3) A lot of people wanted their computer to "just work" like their iPod did. Mac OS X just seemed easier to use to them.

This OS update is free for 10.8 and 10.9 users, no?

You really think so? I bet that Fox News would have a field day if they found out that Mrs. Obama only worked out twice a week considering how hard the administration has been pushing to get mandatory Phys Ed activity requirements in schools.

Likewise, I'm sure that other organizations would love to know how often they eat stuff like Fried Chicken in their private dining quarters as well.

This story isn't about the iOS version of the App Store, it's about the Mac OS X version.

Either way, it doesn't surprise me much. When I want a Mac version of an App, I just Google the product name and download the .dmg file from the vendor's download site.

The developers probably like it better that way anyway, since they don't have to wait for Apple to review product updates before they are posted AND they aren't giving Apple a 30% cut of any sales if I decide to buy it after the trial is up.