One thing to try to appease Google Play is to change the app, so it's a set of instructions/downloads as follows:

* If Unknown Sources isn't ticked on, the first screen tells the user to go to Setttings/Security and tick on Unknown Sources (maybe that screen could be loaded by the app to make it even easier?).

* Next, the app downloads the apk from the CM site and installs it.

* Ask the user to uncheck Unknown Sources if they had to check it on in the first step.

* Run the downloaded app (exiting the original app at the same time if possible).

Would *this* violate any terms of service of Google Play (written down or otherwise)?

Replace "FF" with "Google Chrome" and you'll see that Google beat Mozilla to the punch :-) Remember that Chrome is on version 29 (5 ahead of Firefox) and now uses more RAM than Firefox! You've also conveniently forgotten the Firefox ESR release (Chrome has *nothing* like it, so is a complete disaster for corporate use). Also, the performance gap has been gradually closing between Chrome and Firefox in the last year or so. For the first time in a couple of years, Firefox recent actually beat Chrome in Tom's Hardware Browser Grand Prix.

The lack of extensions on Android Chrome is utterly appalling, which is why Firefox on Android basically destroys Android Chrome. Now if Mozilla could fix the dodgy graphics issue with Firefox on the Nexus 10 (pages often half-rendering and needing a screen rotation to render them properly!), then I wouldn't have to double-rotate my tablet so often :-)

> although to be fair your Linux distro should be less than two years old.

Er, who said that had to be the case? "Your Linux distro should be supported" would be a more accurate statement to make surely? Some of us actually don't want to have to update our desktops every 6 months to a new release (which often requires a cold install) and prefer longer support than a year or so. If Windows users can have lengthy support for their desktops, why can't Linux users too?

I use CentOS 6 at home and work, which is actually supported all the way through to November 2020 and yet Google Chrome 28 or later *does not work* out of the box with it. I've managed to work around this with some Fedora 15 libraries - see http://chrome.richardlloyd.org.uk/ - but I really shouldn't have to. Sorry, with Firefox and Opera both working fine on CentOS 6, Google really have no excuse for their recent drop of support for any distro more than 2 years old.

OK, I haven't RTFA'ed, but the summary here makes no mention of the price of e-books, which is hugely relevant considering that an e-book cartel has been caught price-fixing! My classic example of e-book overpricing was the e-book version of hugely-selling Steve Job biography, which turned out to be more expensive than the hardback. How can any bookseller justify that situation - it *surely* costs more to ship a hardback (this price diff was on Amazon) than an e-book?

I did eventually buy an e-reader once the Nook Simple Touch hit 29 pounds here in the UK and it's quite hackable (runs an old Android that you can root/install apps on), but I ended up putting Droidfish on it and playing chess (it's really a rather good dedicated chess handheld :-) ) and using my Nexus 7 for document reading.

Good luck on finding some of those sports covered fully live on the BBC. Only half the F1 races in a season are shown live on the BBC any more (the half they don't show, they have highlights of qualifying and the race hours later). "Soccer" matches (aka Premier League) aren't shown live at all on the BBC - they have highlights shown in the evening (MOTD/MOTD 2 shows). There's only limited rugby on the BBC as well.

The BBC are weak on most sports, though they do cover world championships for swimming, athletics (Diamond League too) and skiing (though Ski Sunday is an appalling effort now - more apres-ski than actual racing). Sadly, in the UK, it's Sky who dominate most sports coverage (and charge a *lot* for it), though BT have muscled in with football and rugby recently.

Considering this is an optional app that you have to download (rather than being baked into an Android release), what does it offer that loads of similar free apps on the Google Play store have offered for years now (OK, apart from the fact that it's an app from Google of course)?

I'd have been more impressed if this had come with the Android 4.3 release to be honest and might actually be one of the very few pre-installed Android apps that could be justify being uninstallable.

I'm in the UK and I can pretty well guarantee that virtually all non-IT people in the UK have never heard of "National Sysadmin Day" (or "Secretaries Day" for that matter). Is there any country other than the US that's heard of it amongst non-IT people? I'm raising all this because the article doesn't mention which countries honour it, so by default that means more than just the US to me. Please don't use "National" in an article title if it means just the US.

You'd be surprised how many CMS's store many absolute URLs (with base URL being the same) rather than relative ones in their DB - it's not just Wordpress! There's a useful generic search and replace tool that I've used successfully a fair number of times (not just on Wordpress) to replace URLs when moving a site from dev to staging to live. Just remember to delete it immediately after use (the more paranoid amongst you would put the PHP script in an .htaccess protected area or at the very least put it in your Web tree with a random filename).

There is absolutely no excuse for sloppy CMS coding that puts absolute URLs everywhere when relative ones would work just as well. A DB for a CMS should have its top-level URL present *once* in some config table, not thousands of times. Just dump out a populated Wordpress DB and grep its SQL for the top level URL if you don't believe me.

They've fixed a few annoyances in Anaconda in F19 Alpha including actually offering MATE as a desktop option (F18 never showed it in Anaconda - you had to know to groupinstall it later on). Still no package version numbers or install time remaining when the packages are being installed though - both blatantly obvious requirements!

The Anaconda interface is still LUDICROUSLY SHOUTY (yes, much of it is fully capitalised and even adds bolding on top of that!) and the custom disk partitioning still needs further work. It has a nasty mixture of size units (yes, it's possible to see K, MB and GB all on the same screen) and the option - if it exists - to "use all remaining space on device" when creating a new partition (which you're surely almost always going to need?) didn't jump out at me.

I'm using tvheadend for a backend (on a beefy desktop PC with TV cards, SSD and TBs of storage) and an Acer Revo 3710 (a "little atom based box") with XBMC on Ubuntu 12.04. No problems with hardware acceleration (uses Nvidia ION 2) once I installed the proprietary nvidia-current driver or sending 5.1 audio to my 5.1 setup (obviously use the Sound section in Ubuntu's system settings to test the audio before doing the same in XBMC's audio settings). It should be noted that everything is connected HDMI (Revo -> receiver-> plasma TV) and I was worried HDMI audio might not work, but it seems to be fine.

My only beef with XBMC on my setup is that it can hang at "exit points" periodically (either stopping a video/live TV stream from playing or trying to exit XBMC completely).

It should be noted here that I don't watch movies on Youtube - it's about the last place I'd think of looking! I tend to watch local or LAN-networked files from a DVD or Blu Ray rip - any streamed video is useless IMHO (it buffers unless your connection is perfect and can't picture search FF/REW or even position jump at decent speeds),

Google Doodles like this do rub me up the wrong way. For a start, the person concerned is often an obscure one (or at least obscure outside the US - the US-centric doodles end up on Google UK, where they probably don't belong). OK, Adams isn't obscure because of Hitchhikers', but an awful lot of Doodle people are.

Secondly, if they're going to choose to celebrate someone's life, do it on a rounded number of years either since their death or birth. Not "161st birthday of <insert_obscure_Hungarian_physicist_here>". In this case, why wasn't the 60th year since Adams' birth celebrated last year, rather than the 61st this year?

And, finally, I must take massive umbrage with the Google tooltip that says "Douglas Adams' 61st birthday". I'm sorry, but once someone dies, they can no longer have birthdays after their death. It should be "61st anniversary of his birth", but I guess that's too long and not so catchy. I now call them "deathdays" when Google does this :-)

Now get off my lawn!

Sorry, I have no sympathy for someone who was responsible for GNOME 3. As for whingeing about incompatibility of distros, just stick with one for bleeding sake! In my case, it's CentOS 6 (though Fedora 18 with MATE looks OK, it's just that Anaconda is so wretched on it) - 10 years of updates (more than Mac OS X), GNOME 2 (the best thing to come out of GNOME), System V initscripts (not the pain that is systemd) and the glory of GRUB 1 (10 times easier to manage than GRUB 2).

It's a rock solid setup that I think is the best "professional" Linux desktop out there today, which is why I use it both at home and work. Yes, I dual boot with Windows, but only to play games of course. Steam on Linux might knock that on the head once they get 1,000+ games rather than 100 or so they have now.

I use Firefox Beta on Android myself, but I do throw in some useful add-ons of course. Now it has click-to-play, Flashblock is less important (yes, I sideload Flash for the sites that need it), but I do install Adblock Plus to keep myself sane. Another obviously useful add-on on an Android tablet is Phony - set it to be "desktop Firefox" and you get the full desktop versions of all sites rather than some half-baked mobile version.

Whilst Firefox isn't any better or worse than Chrome on the desktop, I do think it provides a better browsing experience than Chrome in Android, particularly on a tablet. And, yes, Firefox Sync is handy (but Chrome has something similar anyway). Also note that Safe Browsing that alerts about malware is now standard on Android Firefox - I'm not sure, but I believe no other Android browser has that as standard.

It may be slightly off-topic, but I wonder if some of the red light camera tickets are because traffic lights are set in "dumb" mode a lot of the time? Where I live, for many years the lights wouldn't react to traffic at all and be put on set intervals, which is infuriating because you sit at a red light and there is no change at all, despite no perpendicular traffic for 20-30 seconds. I bet a few drivers get fed up and (safely) jump the red light because of this!

In my home town, they experimented with a smarter program for a while and it was a great success - lights would change to red either when they hit a fixed time on green *or* when there had been a few (maybe 5) seconds since the last vehicle had crossed the sensors (with probably a minimum green time of something like 10 seconds). It was so successful, the idiots in charge of them switched it back to a fixed time on green now and you are waiting - I kid you not - up to a minute on red (especially if someone presses the pedestrian button), with up to half of that minute spent with little or no traffic crossing your path.

Because you have servers you installed 5.X on a few years back and are still in service. Hence, 5.9 is most welcome for those and a lot easier and less risky than trying any sort of upgrade to 6.X. In fact, Red Hat/CentOS specifically warn *against* trying any sort of warm upgrade between major OS releases because of the high likelihood of borkage.

Probably the best way to upgrade to 6.X is to get new boxes, set them up like the old 5.X boxes (import any data from the old boxes obviously) but with 6.X instead of 5.X and test it like crazy until you're happy it can take over the old 5.X box. You might well have to do this as a "big bang" upgrade of your dev, staging and live environments in turn (i.e. all completed in a fairly short period - but long enough to be certain things are working in 6.X) if active development is taking place on the old 5.X setup.

Once 6.X is all bedded in and working, the old 5.X boxes can either be retired or if they're still in warranty, re-purposed for another project using 6.X (i.e. you'd wipe them and put 6.X on them), though be warned that they will fall out of warranty much faster, so I wouldn't recommend anything critical on the re-purposed boxes.