Sure, if you try to match size for size, spec for spec as closely as possible, you have a problem.

However, the article notes that if you went with nVidia chips rather than AMD - which may be preferable for some workloads - then you have the GPU bill, and immediately bring it below the cost of the Mac Pro.

And if you don't care to much about the size, changing the case and motherboard will likely bring your costs down further.

That's without taking advantage of what is good about DIY- the ability to make your own trade-offs as to where it is important to spend your money. Which is my biggest gripe about Apple hardware - to get the one or two things you really *must* have, you end up spending an awful lot more than you would for a PC, because you have to take a load of other things you simply don't care about.

Nobody wants a desktop operating system on a mobile device, and nobody wants a mobile operating system on a desktop device.

All this talk of sales, and talk that government could "enforce tax as a percentage of earnings on all companies".

Corporation tax is paid on PROFITS, not sales / earnings. And as for the large amounts made by some of these sales - e.g. Google's supposed £3.2 billion sales. Well, this year they agreed a £1 billion property deal for new headquarters in London - that might impact on profits somewhat...

HMRC has done some questionable things with relation to some companies, and yes, we need to ensure that all companies are paying tax fairly, and playing by the same rules. But there is a shocking amount of "me too" reporting over this issue, that glosses over the facts, presents information in a way that confuses rather than illuminates the issue, and often just gets the sums plain wrong.

I only keep up with Slashdot via the RSS feed.

The stupid decision to ROT13 everything as a joke (which has gone on far too long anyway), makes the RSS feed entirely unusable. It basically makes my decision much easier - I'll unsubscribe from the RSS feed. Which basically means I'll see articles / visit this site way, way less frequently in the future.

Oh, I get the point that we are not entitled to use these products, because we aren't paying for them.

But there are two points, really:

1) Anger is a way of expressing that people do actually care about the services. If they shut them down with nobody saying anything, then they are right. Conversely, if lots of people kick up a fuss, maybe they see that they are wrong (in thinking that people don't use it).

2) And this one is particularly pertinent to things like Google Sync/Exchange ActiveSync. Just because users aren't paying for the services, doesn't mean that they wouldn't. If I had the option to simply upgrade my Google Mail to a paid apps account / simply pay to retain the features that they are cutting from the free account, then maybe I would. I would *certainly* pay for a "Google Apps for Home", which kept Google Reader, EAS (upgraded to work with Outlook 2013), etc.

But they don't offer that option. That I don't pay for these services, isn't my fault in not seeing the value. It is their fault in providing the option.

Even if the publishers were charities (which they aren't) there are still costs that still have to be covered.

Charging authors doesn't mean that it comes out of the authors personal pockets - generally, the money comes from the university, or more likely, from the funding body that paid for the research to take place.

Planes can't carry 20kg per person of extra weight 'for free'. The more weight on board, the more fuel it has to carry / use.

If you aren't paying for baggage separately, then you are paying for it on your ticket, whether you use it or not. I don't really have a problem with baggage fees - it's all part of the cost of travel (like airport transfers - and that can be a MUCH bigger problem in the states, where some airports have very limited public transport options).

But it would make life a lot easier at times if you could pre-book / pay for your baggage at the time you buy the ticket, instead of making you wait until check-in.

The original Syndicate was a 'beautiful' game, that did not contain or need extreme violence. A modern version of Syndicate would not need extreme violence either.

This is not Syndicate. It's not even a modern version, or a 're-imagining'. This is a completely different game, with some vague influence from Syndicate, and the name grotesquely attached to it.

I've not played with LXDE at all, but from a quick look at the screenshots, I would say:

Refugees from KDE -> LXDE
Refugess from Gnome -> XFCE

I'm currently building up a Xubuntu 11.10 VM, as Unity and Gnome have taken away far too much that's useful.

The easiest / best approach would be to have alpha, beta and release candidate channels, offering various levels of recency and robustness.

These are all unversioned, and simply update to the latest set of packages available in the each. Then, every 6 / 12 / 18 / whatever months, make the current state of release candidate a versioned release.

It's actually not that bad in Chrome. If what you've typed looks enough like a url, then it will simply try to resolve and give you an error page if it can't. A search will only be performed for something that doesn't look like a url.

And even if it does do a search, you don't have to start over - the results page will have box that contains query, ie. what you typed into the combi-box. Fix it there, and 'search', and Google will direct you to where you wanted to be.

Firefox is actually worse, because if it doesn't like the url, it will try to 'auto correct' it, by putting www. and/or .com on the domain. So then you've got more work to fix it.

One of the most useful 'innovations' in browsers over the years - aside from tabs - has been the permanent search box, so that we can fire off searches really easily.

Chrome combined this into the URL box as - reasonably - we don't need two separate boxes cluttering up the display.

But now to hide the combi-box takes away the useful feature that we had - the ever-present search box.

Plus, lets not forget that this is a phishers wet dream - you mean we can't see the url of the page we are looking at, just how it looks, and the title in tab? Hide the url, and it becomes a lot more difficult to be sure that the page you are submitting details to is the page that you intended.

Although I'm currently a Chrome user, I will switch away if this change gets forced on me.

Using an online service is not incredibly stupid - it's a managed risk.

Yes, it is possible for someone to hack it and retrieve data - but as long as they are doing it the right way, and you choose a strong master password that is hard to brute force, it's incredibly difficult for anyone to do anything useful with it.

And, on the basis that the online service has been implemented correctly, it's far, far more likely that someone will break in and retrieve usable data from from the myriad of services that you might sign up to.

So whilst there is a risk, it's still the most secure you can be without sacrificing the convenience of being able to access your hard-to-remember passwords for a wide range of services from any machine with internet access.

And for a few of the most key services, you could always take the radical approach of not storing those details in the management service, and, you know, remember them.

Whether they implied they would be back or not, is hardly the point.

People made purchase from them, and then they simply blocked access to the downloads without any client communication. However you look at it, that is extremely bad customer service.

It's reasonable enough for them to do a publicity stunt, but they have a duty to at least email the people that have made purchases and inform them what will be / is happening, or provide a way for them to access their account / downloads.

Pockets full of devices? I can't see why. Two devices would be perfectly reasonable - one for things that demand connectivity (talk, text, net), and one for the other stuff (games, videos, music). Even if the 'other stuff' has occasional connectivity capabilities to download new music, etc.

When people say phones are for talking, it's not a frivolous argument - they need to be available for talking. Which has two implications:

1) What should happen when you have an incoming call? Do you lose your position in game, etc?

2) The battery needs to stand up to the demands.

As it is, 3G devices struggle to get through a day. It's not going to help matters by gaming on them for an hour or two - pushing the cpu, graphics, display to the limit. If your games console runs out of juice, it's generally less of an issue than if you suddenly can't make or receive calls.