A one-off investment in Codeweavers' Crossover Office (the commercial offering by the company that does the core development of Wine) is much more cost-effective, time and money wise, than spending the effort on Windows. Don't get me wrong, I have Windows on my laptops (you don't get nice laptops without pre-installed OSes where I live), so I'm not objecting to the purchase price. But the Windows update experience is shoddy - I've been bitten with broken updates for .NET that are never registered as being done, and other annoyances like that.

It's a broad alliance that includes many manufacturers - I don't see it as a racket myself. And of course the customer still has to take his/her old computer to a recycling center if they want it recycled - there's no magic involved. The point is that adhering to the standards makes recycling easier, and Apple's recent moves, starting with the battery and now having the non-detachable Retina display on the 15" MBP, are regressive in terms of recycleability.

The financial industry cut a deal and got a partial reform that only fixed the situation for them. No, really, I'm not joking! [arstechnica]

The social login is not new -- they've used it for location verification for a long time, if you suddenly log in from, say, another town within the same day. My pet peeve is that some profile pictures don't contain actual faces, and some tagged pictures are tagged incorrectly -- so sometimes there's no way to correctly ID a person. You are allowed a few misses, but it calls for (a) Facebook to perform facial recognition to make sure the pictures they show at least show recognizable faces, and (b) for us to prune friends list to keep only those contacts whose profile pictures we recognize (either because it's their actual face, or because one knows them well enough to recognize silly non-facial logos)

Darwin code is under APSL, not BSD. It is incompatible with the GPL.

women are in fact just as shallow as men: they always choose the taller men, and excuse character shortcomings if the guy is tall

That's interesting, actually. In most US presidential elections, the taller candidate wins. Now, if we break the votes down by the voter's gender, do female voters prefer the taller candidate more, or are both genders equally biased in preferring the taller candidate?

If anything the reasons a woman has a baby has nothing to do with her looks and everything to do with her sense of well being, security along with cultural beliefs.

Everything else being equal, a better-looking woman has more chance of securing a more prosperous male, and therefore has a better sense of well being and end up having more kids, no?

The Haskell School of Expression by Paul Hudak actually is surprisingly multimedia-oriented. The only problem is its price.

I'll have to respectfully disagree there. Having TA-ed a programming class that used Alice and Python, my experience is that students find 3D a distraction: they spend too much time tweaking their objects' positioning and not enough on actually writing code.

Plus, Alice's lack of physics modeling makes it rather unintuitive to use at times. I'd rather recommend MIT Scratch -- it's 2D, object-oriented, with a visual drag-and-drop approach that makes it really hard to make syntax errors.

Free software advocates tend to be more likely to prefer the entire stack to be free, though. FSF's Richard Stallman, for instance, does not even consider Fedora to be free enough.

That was a succint overview of the difference between open source and free software, though to be fair, even pragmatic free software supporters would find this new contribution by Microsoft as a positive thing.

Not sure why Palm does not bundle Salling's <a href="http://www.salling.com/MediaSync/mac/">MediaSync</a>, which allows syncing of multiple smartphones with iTunes (without pretending that the device synced is an iPod).

Maybe they could license a version that only sync the Pre, or pay Salling to create a version that performs fast sync on the Pre but not on other devices (if you download directly from Salling, the free version does basic sync; paying gives you a faster experience).

Interesting looking game. How does the gameplay compare to Oolite, which is open-source and cross-platform? Graphically, it looks superior to the default Oolite graphics -- which can be customized, and Oolite uses fixed maps, but it's hard to tell before playing it.

Ironic that of the three main desktop platforms, the Mac is now the only one without this feature (Linux has Pulseaudio)