I have no trouble running a Windows 7 desktop for months without a reboot. Typically I'll work all day and sleep it at night. That's a desktop which is hammering resources for most of the day. Some poxy media system is not going to trouble a kernel even assuming the kernel leaked (which I doubt any modern kernel does).

The next thing that will happen is Russia will copy China / Iran and throw a massive firewall around the entire country which blocks sites, restricts VPNs and does its utmost to stop people from hearing what is going on in their own country.

The thing is here it's being used for an in-car entertainment system. It doesn't have to be realtime, it doesn't have to require stability beyond what a regular kernel would offer. In fact it shouldn't matter a damn what kernel is powering the system since most of the functionality is going to be sitting in an application layer well above the kernel itself.

I'm not sure what motivated Ford to switch. Maybe QNX uses less memory or is more performant with the chipset they want to use, or is simply cheaper to licence. Or maybe the automotive industry is naturally conservative and comforted by some extra certification QNX offers that Windows doesn't. Whatever the reason, I doubt the end user experience or reliability would be appreciably different whether they had used an NT, Linux, BSD or a QNX kernel - any modern kernel would have served the software well. Whether the application itself is good is an entirely separate matter altogether.

I'm not saying it's hard but it's still has usability that's all over the place. A done button in the top left, an install in the bottom right, where's cancel? The post install welcome screen puts its buttons in the top right! And it's not clear the tasks are actually clickable since they don't look like things to be clicked on (a slight background might help). Another confusion is the exclamation mark sometimes means "you must do something" and other times "you might do something" e.g. I must set my partition but during installation I don't have to create a user, or rather if I change the root password, the exclamation point disappears from add user task.

It's not insurmountable. It's just a bad first impression.

Bandwidth isn't cheap on mobile data networks. On the other hand, requiring phones to execute battery sapping image decompression in Javascript is hardly a great idea either.

NOBODY should want Mantle until it becomes an open standard or something analogous to it appears in the likes of OpenGL. It's great that it offers performance improvements but proprietary APIs still stink. I expect most of the improvements it offers largely boil down to minimize the amount of memory being copied around between CPU and GPU rather than anything inherent to the chipset.

I hate the Fedora installer. I can see what its trying to do but the usability is all over the place. It's not a wizard, the buttons are in unconventional positions, and oftentimes it is unclear whether you have applied things or not because there is a substantial delay between doing something and it reflecting in the UI.

Once its installed and running it's fine though.

I've used Eclipse extensively and I've used Android Studio extensively. So far I have mixed impressions of Android Studio.

In its favour the Android integration is far better - obviously. Android Studio provides all of the tools out of the box to build an Android app from end to end which includes all the packaging and signing at the end. In Eclipse you can can develop and debug easily enough but if you want an apk you have to manually invoke a dialog to package and sign APK. This is a huge pain.

Note that AS doesn't actually build anything. Everything is farmed out to a gradle script. This means you can build from AS, or the command line or even from Jenkins from the same script. This is very useful and you can your own custom tasks, unit tests and other goodness to your scripts. But... gradle is goddamned slow. As in REALLY slow. Even if you configure it spawn a daemon so it doesn't respawn all the time (yes I've done that) it's still slow. The problem is if you change a Java class it still has to run through every task checking the dependencies to see what needs to be built and it takes too damned long.

Eclipse is extremely good at incremental building so you can make a change and hit run and in seconds you're debugging. Eclipse is also superior for marking code in error - AS only tends to know about errors local to the file, e.g. syntax errors. If you call a method in another class and get the params wrong you might only be told when gradle reports an error. In Eclipse it would have told you instantly which means turnaround is so much faster. I also prefer the Java editor in Eclipse, because it knows more about your project as a whole, the code completion and hints are more immediate and useful. I'm also used to the keybindings but AS has some Eclipse keybindings so that doesn't matter too much.

Android Studio does have some excellent code analysis tools. It has Android lint integrated into the build and there are a pile of things it can search for in addition to that and in many cases will offer automatic solutions. It also has nicely integrated view and fragment editors which work better than the ones in Eclipse.

AS is a terrible CPU hog. I've noticed it eating anywhere between 5-30% of the CPU depending on what panes are open. This is a serious problem on a laptop because the fan starts whirring and the battery life suffers. The command prompt pane is the worst of all and I only assume it's killing the CPU by continuously polling. Source code integration is also inferior to Eclipse - EGit is a wonderfully mature plugin these days with some complex and useful functionality - the support for Git in AS seems quite perfunctory by comparison although it covers the basics.

So to summarise pros for AS:

1. End to end builds for Android apps
2. More integration for Android tools
3. Excellent code analysis
4. External build system making it easier to do custom tasks and automated builds.

And the cons:

1. Gradle really sucks for iterative development and slows things down. It's also a massive learning curve.
2. AS is a CPU hog
3. Source control integration is weaker
4. If you have a mixed development environment (e.g. client and server side components) or multiple targets then an Android-centric IDE might not be so good as Eclipse.

Well that's genius logic. Your link demonstrates the need for an even higher standard for background checks and a zero tolerance for drivers with convictions that could be a threat to the public. In this instance it would suggest that the decision should not have been entrusted to the council in the first place - they should be responsible for the paperwork but the police should ensure the driver is of good character and their say should be final.

It also does NOT suggest that we should loosen or do away background checks altogether so that any psychopath, even those with previous convictions, can lure women into their vehicles.

I'd add that if you were to search for high number of court cases involving unlicensed cab drivers (i.e. those illegally operating taxis), that it demonstrates why checks are so necessary in the first place. Not just on the driver, but also the state of the vehicle they are driving in to ensure it is roadworthy and insured.

Further, I'd note that there is no reason that Uber cannot operate within the law. They can require their drivers hold a taxi licence and be in good standing. They just choose not to because interferes with their profits.

I was watching an episode of the BBC drama series "Colditz" the other day. One of the POWs attempted to bribe a German guard who needed a lot of money (his girlfriend needed an abortion). Rather than take the bribe he reported it and the chief security officer rewarded him with 2 weeks leave and a posting to somewhere closer to his family. Smart when you think about it - you want to encourage people to report events that could compromise security, not make them fear that they'll be punished.

The TV series is fascinating viewing especially from a security perspective since its informed by real events and contains many parallels for modern day security practices.

Maybe they did it to justify the West dumping all the broken electronics onto a barge and sailing it to India where it becomes somebody else's problem.

Google's problem is they're so big that they'll completely screw over their own projects if they don't align with the corporate roadmap. Look at the likes of iGoogle and Google Reader. Both products were popular but I'm sure some genius in Mountain View decided to shitcan them because they "competed" with Google+.

Now I can't say for sure how many people did move to G+. What I can absolutely say is that I'm not one of them. I used to use iGoogle and now I use My Yahoo. So instead of enjoying whatever metrics they used to gather from me and ads they now get nothing. Google+ is what it is and occasionally I look at it, but presently Google offer nothing which could be called a homepage and so I take my eyeballs elsewhere.

I have no idea what InBox is but the way it's being talked up would make me incredibly fearful of what could befall GMail. GMail is popular because it is online email with a nice GUI - nothing more, nothing less. It they replace it with some bullshit "stream", or a "network", or "social experience", or some glorified "wall", then they can fuck the hell straight off. Put that shit over in G+ where it belongs and don't even think of integrating or replacing GMail with it.

The high DPI manifest entry and APIs only turned up with Windows 8. It's hardly surprising that legacy applications don't support it or make declarations in their manifest to that effect. Even applications which are in active development might be using legacy APIs or DLLs that make it a non-trivial problem to solve.

It's not confined to Windows either, Linux and OS X suffer from similar problems.

Yes you can. You just lift the tablet out of the stand and walk off with it. The stand itself does a little heft to it because it has to counteract the high centre of gravity of the tablet. Microsoft's solution is kickstand which significantly increases the footprint the thing needs to stand on. Oh and no keyboard for you unless you fork out a small fortune to buy it as an accessory.

I doubt that holding a 12" tablet to take notes is an ideal use though I concede it doesn't have an active stylus. You could of course just buy a "dumb" stylus for a dollar and install one note all the same. Or use the keyboard. The one you get included with it.

Who said it was exactly the same?

I find it annoying too. Windows (and OS X and Linux) has long been used with low dpi screens so software can look really awful with a high DPI. All the menus, buttons, and toolbars are teeny tiny. So there is now a high DPI aware flag that software is supposed to use to declare it's conformance with new APIs.

Problem is some software proclaims itself high DPI aware but still doesn't look right - Google Chrome in particular has fiddly little buttons. If software doesn't say it's aware then by default Windows will scale the window but then you get a somewhat blurry upscaled window. It's possible to change the scaling and to disable it entirely from shortcut properties but it's clear that desktop operating systems still have some way to go to get things right.