And you've hit one of the biggest problems with this system on Android. Unless you're in one of the countries which supports Google Wallet your ability to use this system will depend on which company made which deal with which financial institution and offered the fruits on which model.

Open platforms are like standards, there are so many to chose from, all similar yet incompatible and none of them really do what you want.

NFC yes, mobile payments, no. The only reliable solution I have found at the moment is customers of Commonwealth Bank and Mastercard (not OR, you can't use it with another mastercard) can make NFC payments from the phone. Google Wallet is not available (not supported anyway, if you have root you can side load it). And while Samsung claims they made a deal with VISA back when the Galaxy S4 came out, I've so far failed to get any solution working on my phone without rooting and sideloading apps.

This may not work out so bad for Apple. Remember how we have had 3G video calling since the late 90s yet when Facetime came out on the iPhone people collectively said "OMG AMAZING MUST HAVE!" Don't underestimate the stupidity of the collective.

You misspelt nowhere, but yeah everywhere/nowhere the keys are right next to each other.

Here's a fun fact. Google wallet actually works as you describe it. It emulates a card. It also works on pretty much any NFC terminal. It's just a shame that it is actually supported in VERY FEW COUNTRIES. Yep, despite looking like a generic VISA card Google Wallet is geo-locked and won't even appear in the Play Store in many parts of the world. Hence companies have gone and done their own thing. Hence my comment about fragmentation.

You can talk it all up as much as you want, but until it works without having to root the phone and side-load the application my original comment still stands, this is a good marketing move by Apple, and Google and the Android eco-system are so fragmented that they are effectively being bypassed by banks who are getting sick of this mobile shit (as mentioned in another comment some banks here offer NFC stickers people can glue to their phones to get around the solution that really doesn't at all work "everywhere").

Oh google? You mean mean the Google Wallet that isn't available in large parts of the world? They need to deploy terminals? That's a fail right there. Is this the same Google that partners with companies like Samsung who make the most popular Android handset and yet by default install a completely different payment system on their handset?

And you say fragmentation is nonsense... what next? The sky isn't blue because you once saw a nice red sunset?

It seems like the last 3 people who posted against me all used examples of the UK. Normally we have to tell Americans that there is this thing called the rest of the world, but I don't normally expect it from the UK.

I am jealous, but the reality is a large portion of the world has contactless payment systems, yet a very small portion of the world has something compatible with a phone.

You know I heard a computer fault once killed someone. We should ban these computer things. Wait what? Oh we weren't playing the "Use the most extremely bad example and extrapolate it to mean everything is bad game?"

No I don't mean the Windows Registry. That should be called out for the load of garbage that it is. But if you want to dig through windows internals there are plenty of examples of one stop common configuration stops that make me want to go out and stab all people faithful to the UNIX philosophy. Group Policy, a complete one stop shop to account policies, administrable locally and remotely as part of a domain would be a great example. Actually if you pick pretty much every other windows component other than the registry you'll find one underlying system taking care of everything and most importantly presenting it to the user in a seamless and easily configurable way. I.e. the system management console, a complete one stop shop to configuring pretty much every piece of hardware in the system, as opposed to messing with modules, /dev, /sys, and the many different tools to manage the above.

You regularly use NFC for payments? You must be some kind of wizard. Or maybe just be one of the few people blessed to have the right phone and the right bank in the right location with the right local support and the right platform installed.

That is exactly how the market works at the moment. The market is so fragmented that several local banks are offering NFC stickers that you can link to credit cards and stick on the inside of phone cases because they can't get bloody phones to work. Samsung provide a glimmer of hope by announcing some kind of deal with VISA, but that one one generation ago, yet here I still am with my VISA credit card and my Samsung NFC enabled phone without the ability to make payments.

So you master magician, enjoy your NFC payments, I for one will continue to critisize the fact that I am now on my 3rd NFC enabled phone and still can't make payments because %MOBILE_MANUFACTURER% hasn't made some exclusive deal with %BANK%.

A favourite of mine is S-Beam which makes it easy to setup a file transfer with one click. No need to go enable bluetooth, dig through settings, pair, join, then transfer the file. Just tap two Samsung Galaxy phones back to back while the image / video / file is open and tap the screen. It sets up a wifi connection (I think, though it may be bluetooth I can't remember) between the devices and sends the file across.

The mobile payment market is completely fragmented. Apple is by far not the first company to announce a payment scheme, however it is the first that has managed to make some concrete deals with several companies and it's the first that actually has a chance at taking off.

Apple has locked it down? So what? How is that any different from the last several years where competitors have had NFC and payment support? Why is the upcoming year suddenly going to backfire them right at a time where service providers will likely be questioning whether it's a good idea to promote a system which can't be used on Apple's much advertised phone?

I'm no fan of Apple, but you can't argue that they aren't strategically clever bastards.

Why? Justify that statement without using any reference to the UNIX way or it being the way things have always been designed.

IMHO a coordinated set of functions that are used in a common way should be combined. Why is it that to parse a log file I need to run grep, and sed, and all these other utilities in a continuous pipe? For that matter why should the tail command be able to open a file, is that against the unix way because everything should be grepped into it?

I'm getting sick of using 1000 different utilities to do one task or manage one system. Hate me, down mod me, argue with me, but I for one am a big fan of big software with multiple functions approach. If that one program does it well why wouldn't you let it manage multiple coherent tasks like getting a computer from nothing to at least a login prompt?

I appreciate calling out the "journalists" on their inability to explain a summary, but there's almost a systemd article on here every week, it's one of the biggest hot topics in the Linux world at the moment, and frankly I'm amazed that there's anyone who reads Slashdot doesn't already know absolutely everything about it.

But PID1 is not the lowest level. And restarting everything except SystemD is not really any different than doing a cold boot.

Why not implement a watchdog in the kernel that can restart the system if it crashes. You're arguing that this important job should be done by some high order process instead of some higher order process, why not the bottom?

The last time I saw a system where X died and didn't melt down everything with it was back in the early 2000s. My current experience is that with a lot of desktop Linux distributions is if X dies your system likely:
a) has already panic'd
b) is about to panic
c) has hard locked and makes you pray for a SysRq key.
d) is so broken that an attempt to restart X results in you wishing you'd just hit the reset button to begin with.

I haven't seen X gracefully die in a long time now. That said I don't see it die often but that's not really the heart of the debate.

Thanks for clarifying. I was under the impression that you couldn't use the windows store at all without an account.

It does look like that's the direction they are heading though, but if as you say you can perform some downloads without an MS account it's ok then.

This is a very ironic statement given that people with Windows 8 (now out of support and thus no more security updates via Windows Update) could not upgrade to Windows 8.1 without a Microsoft account to access the store. You may not need one to run it, but for many poor folk out there they couldn't even get it without one.