Permissions are a very hard problem to solve, but I think the Android way of presenting them all up front at a high level does at least make it easy and most importantly very low time/irritation cost for the user to check them.

Out of interest, how many times do we need some app overreaching on permissions before people will finally accept that the all-or-nothing-big-old-list-of-permissions-with-no-context is actually a really crappy way of doing things that the majority of users blindly ignore because they don't understand what it's trying to tell them?

I'm genuinely curious.

We must be well into double figures by now, so what is it? Triple figures before there is begrudging acceptance that there might be an issue?

Whilst what he did was very clever, at the end of the day he manipulated the scoring so that his profile was placed in front of thousands of womens search results because it had a high match percentage (that normally would never have been seen).

The TL;DR version of this story is that if thousands of women see your profile and, at the same time, are told by a website that you're a high match to them, then you've got a very good chance they'll contact you. Which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

That, to me, is the digital equivalent of (the old advice) that you'll never meet someone unless you get yourself out there.

Before everyone gets their knickers in a twist, read this article by Ed Bott.

In short, this is just a marketing stunt, OEMs are still allowed to keep selling Windows 7 machines for quite a while yet and the number of Win7 machines that HP are selling hasn't actually increased (in fact, it's gone down by 1 - from 4 in August to 3 now).

Now we've sorted that out, I'll let you all get back to the regular programme of bashing Windows 8... :)

PCs have a longer lifespan, they are way overpowered for what most people use them for. I have a five year old 3GHz 64-bit AMD box. It is still quite usable, I upgraded the video card recently, about $150, and it is still quite usable for gaming. I have no compelling reason to replace this five year old PC.

People say this a lot but every time I've come to upgrade my computer (after a long period of time) I've found that the newer CPUs are incompatible with my existing motherboard.

Once I've bought a new motherboard then I find that my existing graphics card and memory won't fit in the slots available because the connectors have changed. Then to top it off, the new graphics card and motherboard I bought need a greater wattage than my existing PSU can supply - so I need a new one of those too.

In fact, I updated my computer recently and the only internal components that I could keep were the hard drive and the DVD rewriter. Everything else had to be replaced.

Well, I'm on Sky and I just clicked on the torrentfreak link and ... lo ... their article appeared.

Looks like it was a short-lived mistake.

Microsoft is changing the name of Skydrive because it infringes the trademark of British broadcaster BSkyB, normally known as Sky.

Before everyone gets up in arms, it's worth pointing out that Sky Television (which is where "Sky" got its name from) was created in 1980 and merged with British Satellite Broadcasting in 1990 to form the company known as British Sky Broadcasting or, more simply, Sky. The company not only does TV but broadband and VoD as well.

In comparison, SkyDrive was developed and launched by Microsoft in 2007 - some 27 years later (or 17 if you only consider after the merger).

I read Slashdot daily on my iPhone using Avantslash.

I think it works great and it's far better than m.slashdot.org - but then I'm biased as I wrote it. Yes, screen-scraping and reformatting is a little hacky, but this script has been required to read Slashdot on your phone for the past 10+ years. At the rate we're going, it'll probably be needed for at least another 5 years.

If you don't believe me then try the demo on your own mobile phone first.

I don't get the hurt. Why is it sad but true? Apple puts the time and resources into doing it right, and it is a sad thing?

A not-so-small subset of the Slashdot crowd don't like the direction that Apple, driven by actually understanding the needs of the average customer, are moving general computing.

They seem to dislike it even more when Apple can charge a premium and millions will more than happily pay it to escape (what they perceive as) the mundane and bizarre decisions fostered on them by decades of techies who never really understood or listened to what the largest segment of the customer base actually wanted - or didn't want to think about.

Their flashlight app was requesting network and GPS privs? There's obviously a fundamental problem with the Android security model, and I'm just going to go ahead and point my finger at people. First off, people assume that just because it's on the Play store, it's safe to install. Obviously not the case. Second, people obviously don't review the privs their apps request and say something like "Why the fuck does a flashlight app need access to my GPS and network?" And third, lazy developers have no incentive not to request every priv in the model.

Not to mention that although for a very basic app (like a flashlight one) it is possible to spot a nefarious permission, once you start looking a much more feature-rich app then it gets very difficult for users to work out the validity of the permission requested.

For example, a mobile banking app wants your location. Is this because:

1. It's sending location data to a server to track you?
2. It's sending it to third party companies for location based advertising?
3. It wants that information so it can tell you where the nearest ATM or bank branch is?

... or would have it been much more beneficial for everyone if Mozilla spent the $45,000 on a developer who could trawl through Bugzilla and fix some of the highly rated Firefox defects?

Every year we hear about how the desktop is dying and every year it doesn't. When will these idiots realize that desktop PCs are a niche that's not going to go away? It might shrink, especially compared to other forms of computing. But reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.

Even Apple, when announcing the iPad, accepted that there would always be a need for a desktop PC:

When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that's what you needed on the farms. Cars became more popular as cities rose, and things like power steering and automatic transmission became popular. PCs are going to be like trucks. They are still going to be around ... they are going to be one out of x people.

The Verge has posted a hands on with Jolla. It's not good news:

Yes, it sounds very reminiscent of the Nokia N9, but in practice it's highly unintuitive and unwieldy to the point where the entire UI paradigm can be considered broken. Screen transitions and in-app animations go from left to right, inviting the user to swipe from right to left to go back, but thatâ(TM)s not how youâ(TM)re supposed to do it. A notification pops down from the top of the screen, but if you try to swipe down to view it, you're liable to unintentionally close your current app, or more annoyingly, lock the entire phone. Then there's the fact that a swipe from the middle of the screen produces a different result than a swipe from the edge. It all adds up to a frustrating learning experience. The user is forced to adapt around the operating system rather than the other way around.

All the effort of adapting to Jolla might be worth it if the device offered some unique advantage over others on the smartphone market, but it doesn't. The only standout quality it has is the goodwill of old Nokia loyalists and those who like to support grassroots projects. Unfortunately, there just isn't a very good smartphone here, and that's what you need if you intend to compete with behemoths like Google, whose Nexus 5 is a startlingly good value at 70 euros less.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/29/5156446/jolla-smartphone-hands-on-preview

I personally dislike Google's all-or-nothing approach to permissions. It gives the user a complete list of things (some of which may be valid and some not) with absolutely no context as to why they need this and then basically tell you that if you want the app then you have to accept the lot.

Coupled with a barely managed market place, you're just asking for someone to slip something malicious into the store and for anyone downloading it to blindly hit "accept".

A better method would be to rationalise some of the permissions (for example, do you really need to spook everyone with "read call state" given that it's used to suspend an app when a call comes in?) and then pop up a request to access the other permissions at the time when they are needed - a la iPhone.

That way I know why my app wants to access my contacts (because I've just pushed the button that says "invite a friend to a game") and also means that if I'm not comfortable with it having access to my call history then I can decline and still have the opportunity to continue using it.