Last I checked, solar panels were pretty affordable, but installation was a substantial part of the cost of a useful setup. While making cheaper cells is good, I think making more effecient cells (less area required, thus lower installation cost) could be even better. That, and cheaper storage.

The good news is that all these are being done, and the cost of a working installation with battery storage is now low enough that if I had a house, I would get a solar installation. Unfortunately, I can't afford a house.

I love "* Two people have reported live 386 systems".

And that was in 2003, almost 10 years ago now.

Congratulations to the Samba team on this major accomplishment! Great work, everyone!

I don't know if that's a real problem. There are a lot of ways you can help a project. Contributing code. Using it and filing bug reports and feature requests. Even just talking about it can be helpful.

As for donations, I think there have been cases where getting more money into the project has hurt rather than helped (sorry, I don't have links and don't remember the specifics). At the very least, that means it's not clear that donating money is the best way to help a project. Of course, some things cost money, so please don't take that as dismissing donations altogether. I'm just saying that donations aren't the only way and aren't necessarily the best way to help a project.

I don't see why Yelp should chose sides. If Dietz feels that he has been harmed by false claims, suing for defamation seems a sensible thing to do. Let the court look at the case and determine who is telling the truth. This seems to me like the system working as intended.

The thing is, Apple went through hard times and managed to turn things around. People were predicting they would go out of business for years, then came iTunes, OS X, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, all of which have been resounding successes, propelling Apple to previously unthinkable heights.

Nokia actually has a similar story. It's an old company, and they have been in many businesses that they have since abandoned for more profitable ones. The question is: Will they be able to do it again?

As far as I know, Apple did well under Jobs, then declined after Jobs was gone, brought back Jobs, and became successful again. Nokia apparently tried the "change the leader" approach, and the new leader certainly made large changes to the company. So far, it doesn't seem to be working out very well. Maybe it needs more time, or maybe it needs a different strategy.

What about extra hardware? Instead of checking for everything that might have been done and running the risk of missing something, it may be more cost-effective to destroy the machine and move on.

To support your point with an anecdote, I ended up paying an ISP for a year for a service they didn't deliver (specifically, a DSL signal to my modem).

I called the helpdesk. Several times. Finally, they did a test. Took a couple of seconds. "The signal is not getting through." Yes, that's what I've been telling you for the past couple of days.

Then they told me they would send a technician. They had already sent one before, but, apparently, that one hadn't done his job. I agreed on a date and a time of day, took half a day off from work, and waited until it was clear the technician wasn't going to show up. No call, either.

Fed up, I called them and told them I was through with them and wanted to cancel the subscription. They told me I needed to tell them in writing. I argued with them for a while (because this was not stated elsewhere), but eventually did send them a letter. No response. Meanwhile, they kept deducting money from my bank account.

At some point, I decided to call my bank and tell them that the ISP was no longer authorized to deduct money from my account. They told me that they couldn't do that, but I could reverse the automatic transactions if I called them within 4 days of the transaction happening. Normally, that's 20 days, but in this case there was a special deal.

I reversed one of the payments. That got the ISP's attention. They send a collector after me. I told the collector what had happened, and that I wasn't willing to pay for a service that wasn't being delivered. They told me that they had heard similar stories from other customers of the ISP's, and told me that they would pass on the message, but suggested that I pay the outstanding amount as a sign of good faith. Figuring I could always do the same trick next month if it didn't work, I did that.

Eventually, I got a response. The ISP said that they had credited one month of the subscription fee to make up for one month of service not delivered. I know for a fact that it was at least two months that it didn't work. After that, my connection with a different ISP came online and I hadn't looked at the broken one anymore.

Figuring this wasn't going anywhere, I decided to talk to a lawyer. Turns out there is free legal help available. They advised me to, first of all, file a complaint with the comission that handles these things. If that didn't work, we could go to court, and we would win, but there would be (heavily discounted) fees and hassle.

The way this comission works is that some cases are free, and some require a small fee. Mine, fortunately, was in the free category. So I filed the complaint and submitted all the paperwork. A few weeks later, I got a response, asking me to pay the required fee. Wait, what? Earlier you told me that there was no fee! Since the year of my contract was always up, I decided this had cost me enough of my time, and just stopped putting energy into it.

And this is how Telfort in the Netherlands got a year's worth of subscription fees, without living up to their side of the agreement. Never again will they get a cent from me.

Thanks. I wish I could mod you up.

You even went as far as pointing out that education could help. If more people knew what the real effects of certain laws and policies were, perhaps we would get better ones.

So, it's actually not a PC. It's a circuit board with some chips and connectors. I think that has always been abundantly clear.

Look at it a different way: If you want to use this as if it were a PC, you are going to have to add some stuff to it. Same, in a way, with PCs still requiring a monitor and keyboard in addition to just the box where most of the magic happens. On the other hand, if you don't want all that, you don't have to pay for it. The Raspberry Pi is a component, and you can use it to build something that resembles a PC, but also, say, use it as a controller for a robot. Or both at the same time.

And yes, compared to a modern PC, the Raspberry Pi is slow. Again, I think this has always been abundantly clear. It's not like the Raspberry Pi foundation went around advertising their product as "$35 gets you a box that does everything your PC does as fast as your PC does". That's not what the Raspberry Pi is for. We already have PCs for that. The cool thing about the Raspberry Pi is that it is cheap, cheap enough that you can tinker with it, give a couple to some kids and let them tinker with them, and see what comes out. If a few boards go to waste, it's not a huge cost. The Raspberry Pi is exciting exactly _because_ it isn't a PC.

Also, Chrome OS. I'm getting a Chromebook for this reason. I'm perfectly capable of keeping a system humming (I've been using and adminning GNU/Linux systems since 1997 or so), but I just can't be bothered if I don't have to. Chrome OS comes with a web browser and an SSH client. That's really all I need on my laptop. They're updated automatically. I trust Google to not muck that up.

To top it off, Chromebooks are cheap. I paid about $400 for mine, but you can buy one for $199 retail. If you buy bulk, I'm sure you can get a better price, better features, or both.

I can understand why the school district didn't go with Chromebooks at the time (they probably weren't out yet, and even if they had been, would have been unproven technology), but they seem an option worth evaluating now.

True, but I also wonder why governments don't do anything about it. Back when I built software for the government, I was employed by a company that would agree up front on the features and cost, and then deliver the promised features and receive the promised payment. Our customers loved us, because this was apparently better than the experience they were used to. Makes me wonder why they didn't go for the same terms in their other contracts.

I mean, I understand and know full well that you can't always accurately estimate everything ahead of time. Sometimes, development ends up costing more than you estimated. Happened to us, too. That just means you make less profit, or maybe even lose money on the project. I understand why companies would try to pass the higher cost on to the customer, but I don't see why the customer would let them do that. Maybe the first time, if backing out and starting over costs more than paying extra, but after that, wouldn't you look for a more trustworthy supplier?

Long story short, I think governments at least share the blame for over-budget projects. Over-time is a bit more subtle, as there isn't always possible to deliver on time. But it's always possible to charge no more than the agreed-upon price.

While not disputing your premises, I don't see that this means Dell is too late. Maybe they are trying to enter a niche in which Apple has been very successful. The last couple of companies I've applied for jobs at all had all or nearly all developers using Apple laptops. I now work for one, and I have an Apple laptop. But if I could have chosen a laptop with Ubuntu instead, supported by the IT folks, I would have. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Well, I don't know. It is true that MySQL has improved by leaps and bounds over the years. However, every time they get rid of a batch of gotchas, there are new ones. I remember being elated to work on a project with MySQL 5 because I felt it had finally grown up to be a real database, only to find that there were concurrent insert issues that caused a huge chuck of my updates to time out and/or be aborted (I don't remember which).

The problem isn't so much the specific issues as the philosophy that gives rise to them. MySQL was clearly developed as a quick and dirty vaguely RDBMS-like SQL database. Remember when MySQL didn't support transactions? It wasn't originally developed with data integrity in mind. That's why I and a lot of other people don't like it. It's hard to turn a system like that into something you can trust with your data.

By contrast, PostgreSQL was already a mature, ACID-compliant system when MySQL started gaining mindshare. It has problems, too, but not being an actual ACID-compliant RDBMS isn't one of them.