I haven't seen MS distributing rootkits with its hardware products. So definitely less hostile.

But remember kids when Sony opens their bootloaders for Android it is the Ericsson part. But when Sony BMG does something stupid it is the whole company that is at fault.

But yeah trying to strip consumer rights to the bare minimum, wanting to have a system that is 24/24 connected and knowing that you are part of PRISM (but I forgot its OK because it only invades the privacy of us non-Americans/Untermenschen) isn't really the signs of a company that is hostile. The whole f*cking box was original planted as one big ROOTkit.

I swore to never buy anything from Sont again since the rootkit fiasco, and have kept to that.

So you don't have any products with for example a camera sensor ?

We already have switched to the use of OSM/Mapbox/Cloudmade for mapping services and seeing you can't use the results of the Google Directions API on for example to plot on a OSM map, we are also in the process of looking for an alternative for a routing api.

It's not even the case of getting a free ride, because we absolutely don't mind to pay for the service but nowadays Google is really all about restrictions. The only thing that speaks in their advantage is that the limitations are very clear, not like the Bing REST services TOS that is plain lawyer speak.

There is also no transparency in Google offerings. Alternative providers are very upfront in what you can get for the money, Google commercial offerings is behind a big wall of mist.

and all it means is that your app adjusts parametrically, so you don't have to customize it for every possible screen pixel dimension.

Yeah with android it just some parameters that you need to adjust and everything works fine. You really don't have any real world experience with Android haven't you ?

I develop Android Apps as a part of my job (I don't even do the iOS ports) and there doesn't go a day by without being faced with some problems. Fragmentation, low quality dev tools, bugs , ... it all adds up. Android is the Windows of the mobile world in my book. Yes it has the biggest marketshare, but it doesn't tell a lot of the quality of the platform as a whole.

The notion that developers/companies would rather prefer to be apple fanatics instead of making money is ridiculous. The problem is that for some apps Android has an extremely low ROI. I sometimes see really cool stuff being developed on the other side where the client doesn't want to invest in an Android version.

raising questions over American influence on the British agencies

I find it strange that this is a question that still need to be asked. Maybe that is because I'm living in Europe, but for years I have the feeling the American influence on Great Britain is big in everything. So big that I personally see the British politicians as some kind of American trojan horse within Europe.

Some europeans even joke that it isn't a country anymore, but the 51st state of the US. Really in all honesty, this article doesn't surprise me one bit.

(Former L&H developer speaking here)

Nuance bought the speech technology from Lernout & Hauspie when the latter went bankrupt after a fraud scandal. I don't have the feeling that they developed the technology a lot further it seems that it still is the "same" as a couple of years ago.

Doesn't surprise me as they bought the software, not the talent behind the development.

For years games was a big argument to have windows installed on a machine. But the arrival of the 360 made it for me so easy to dump windows for linux on my desktop and buy a macbook pro for on the go.

The majority of the people in Belgium speaks Flemish (which is related to Dutch) and dialects. The french and germans are a smaller language group. The dialect that I locally speak (West Flemish) is even more related to the languages from Northern France then the Netherlands.

But what bothers me the most with Belgian mistaken identity is that a lot of American companies or websites serves everything in French when it detects I'm from Belgium. It is like if the rest of the world would detect that you are from the States and serve everything in Spanish because there is a big Hispanic community.

It took Microsoft years to get it in their head that most people here speaks Flemish. For years everything on Xbox live (that had a french localization) was served in French.

It is funny how there are many definitions of Sony . When they opened the bootloader for Android the Slashdot crowd reasoning was "it was the Ericsson part" (even if the Ericsson was dropped) that is the reason they play nicely. But the Sony - BMG rootkit scandal was Sony doing, even if you can seed the same doubt. I think when they opened up their smartwatch (http://developer.sonymobile.com/services/open-smartwatch-project/smartwatch-hacker-guide/) is also Ericsson doing I presume ? Companies can change you know especially if they did some wrong in the past, the world isn't always black & white.

That being said, I don't know if you are aware that a lot of the older people (that made the PS3 decisions) with regarding the SCEE are out of the picture. The PS4 wasn't even developed in Japan or by a Japanese, hell it will even be released earlier in the US and Europe. If you follow the news a bit you will see Sony has a massive attitude change regarding the PS4. You just need to look how they are handling Indie's these days. You must read the humbling interviews with a guy like Cerny, what a chance in comparison with the arrogant Sony.

With regarding the OS a lot of people seem to forgot that Sony also supported linux through the PS2 lifetime (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_2) and they never took it back. So it may be that the removal of the OtherOS for piracy reasons was more valid then the so called hatred for Linux suddenly. There are strong opinions about linux, but does opinions never involve the fact of the possibility of that method being abused as an easy way to pirate. Or what should be the real reason that they removed OtherOS support anyway ? Because they hate linus or RMS ?

You are right there should be other mod options like "living in the past" that I would gladly reward you with.

This opinion piece holds up Belgium as an example other European countries are trying to emulate, but Internet service there is incredibly expensive and has tiny monthly bandwidth caps, worse even than Australia. Almost any European country is doing better.

I must be living in a parallel Belgium it seems. I have 60Mbit/s down with no bandwidth cap (FUP) for 55 euro. That also includes cable/decoder + telephone with free calls within Belgium and free calls to mobile/European countries for certain hours. If I would bump that to 24/24 then it will set you back another 5 euro. My mobile internet costs me 15 euro and that includes 2Gb of traffic.

The cheapest internet on cable (which is available everywhere) will set you back for 25 euro and that includes 30Mbit/s and a limit of 100Gb. VDSL2 that is available in most places : 35Mbit/s including unlimited bandwidth and that for the price of 35 euro.

It is what you call incredible expensive and tiny bandwidth...

Not everyone lives in a country where shrinkwrap licenses are a legal contract. I think this is the case in most European countries. That being said the backslash would be bigger then the removal of a feature that the majority of the users wouldnt care about. As a linux box it also sucked a lot...

Microsoft did say that if a disc was used with a second account, that owner would be given the option to pay a fee and install the game from the disc, which would then mean that the new account would also own the game and could play it without the disc.

and simcity like "features"

Xbox One will give game developers the ability to create games that use Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service, which means that they might be able to offload certain computing tasks to the cloud rather than process them on the Xbox One hardware itself. This would necessitate the game requiring a connection.

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/05/xbox-one-analysis/

No. The FOSS community simply realizes that most of the so-called Photoshop users here are just degenerate pirates.

Even photoshop elements that they give away with every camera or scanner is miles better then The Gimp regarding usability. You don't need to pirate to get products that are better then The Gimp. Hell even Paint.Net is a lot better.

Real professionals will probably just bite the bullet. They are already paying for the product anyways.

I'm convinced that using a "free" product like The Gimp is more expensive (if you keep in mind that time is also money) then paying 10$ per month for Photoshop.

I think they have the same trouble as here in Belgium. A lot of local islamic extremist are recruting young people on the street to fight in syria. I think it are those kind of people that are the targets of these kind of surveillance.

From the authers blog

Earlier this year however, I discovered that a well-known company had taken the code - disappeared underground with it for several months, improved upon it, utilized the capability in their advertisements and demos and in the end posted the code utilizing their own source control system, detached from any state of that of the upstream project's. Even to the extent some posters around the web thought libhybris was done by that company itself.

That kind of behavior ruined the initial reason I open sourced libhybris in the first place and I was shocked to the point that I contemplated to by default not open source my hobby projects any more. It's not cool for companies to do things like this, no matter your commercial reasons. It ruins it for all of us who want to strengthen the open source ecosystem. We could have really used your improvements and patches earlier on instead of struggling with some of these issues.

http://mer-project.blogspot.fi/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-android-gpu-drivers.html

Canonical being Canonical

The original version was vastly more superior then what kinect is offering. There was a lot less lag and overlapping bones weren't any problem. Microsoft removed hw stuff and countered that with software, but the end result was a system that was usuable but a step back from the original design. I wouldn't call that innovation.