... and? Why would we want a window clone?

50% or 50% empty is a misnomer. Let an engineer look at it, and he'll show you an over-engineered bottle!

Having people resign for bad journalism isn't necessarily a bad thing... But why on earth start that at the BBC !!?? Why not start that trend at the Huffington Post? Or Fox News?

In my experience, "messy code" is a good indicator of "messy development". I strongly believe that the structure and appearance of the code is a insight into the developer's brain. And messy code: Usually means trouble ahead.

And yes: IDEs can help with automatically formatting code: It's good since it allows developers to spot obvious mistakes, and it's bad because it allows bad developers to hide structural errors. But probably good overall.

There's more to coding style than simply indentation: The really most important concept is clarity.

If a developer cannot explain (in one sentence) what a given function does, what a given class does or what a application does: be worried. If the developers thinks they know and still cannot explain: Be very worried.

Interesting... This means that the pirates had added subtitles BEFORE Netflix did? Now that's impressive! (and good customer service too!)

The religious zealots have no interest in getting the video blocked or removed: It helps drive people straight into their arms - and as a result we should expect more radicals and fodder for suicide bombings...

There are two problems with this:

• It may cause people to believe in homeopathy, since it will become the "official treatment": It gives undue credibility
• Studies have shown that when people are given expensive placebos (placeboes?), they report a bigger effect than for cheap placebos (even when told it is a placebo!) - I wish I had the link handy...

And imagine the lawsuit, media coverage and political mayhem if a patient was given a government-approved-known-to-be-placebo medicine and then died - it's bound to happen (law of large numbers and whatnot) - even if it is not causally related...

The article gets off to a bad start in the very first sentence:

In the 1930s, U.S. Navy researchers stumbled upon the concept of radar when...

Rubish. The US Navy did not invent radar as it implies. Nicola Tesla descibed the concept in 1917 and others were playing with similar ideas before then. Sorry. Im not going to bother reading the rest. Isnt there an actual paper on the subject we can read instead of this badly-informed junk?

This is classic microsoft.... They have their eyes focused on their competition, examining what the competition is doing, trying to figure out what they're thinking and wondering how to counter (or block) their next move... Although they consider themselves pro-active it is really a very defensive posture...

And while they're looking at the competition, they ignore the customers ... So we should not expect their reaction to consider customers - simply to target (however accurately) the competition...

As a supporter of Free Software and Open Source, we should watch this carefully - we need to understand what to expect from Microsoft - and possibly Apple: Probably lots of patent stuff and other "Intellectual Property" noise. But we should always keep in mind that the most effective countermeasure is to write good software: stay on top of bugs and listen to the users! That way, everybody wins. Microsoft seems to be forgetting that.

please... somebody mod parent "funny".. definitely not insightful...

Shortening to ".sec" is not a good idea - on a QWERTY keyboard the C and X keys are next to each other and grandma cannot be trusted to avoid typos...

Slight correction: <span class="pedant">Mandriva is not an OS. It is a distribution.</span>

The underlying OS is GNU Linux - but different distributions differ very little in this respect - at least as far as the typical desktop user would care about.

Beyond the operating system: yes you are correct: The differences listed do not seem to distinguish Mandriva from a plethora of other distributions

Yep. These guys are coming to the same conclusion. Too bad that the title in slashdot claims it to be "solved" - the new paper does not claim to have it solved - merely to have reached the same conclusion with (what appears to be) a higher confidence level.

Don't be misled by the title in Slashdot... :-)

"Scandinavian Regions" - makes sense. But "Scandinavia"!? NOT A COUNTRY - you must just have invented that one. Or perhaps it is a Bushism? Mind you, only a fraction of the scandinavian regions are north of the artic cicle. It's a bit like claiming that the eclipse was seen in the USA even though it was only visible in parts of Alaska...

What is the connection to Denmark? I cannot find any mention of Denmark or any Danish bank in the study?