More like CV Dazzle

A burkha will get you "profiled". Weird hair and makeup is a fasion statement.

Wasn't that the Nexus 4? As I understand it, they left a heat spreader out between the CPU and the chassis (and there are hacks to replace it with graphite tape out there online).

Phablets will have a longer battery life too because of the larger battery ; while the screen (and therefore it's battery consumption) increases with the area of the phone, the CPU, radio, etc, have fixed power consumption.

OK, so if you have a phablet, you may use it more... but that's the point, more *useful* battery life.

So you're saying that tax is unfair because rich people find loopholes to avoid paying it, and ways to have public money dropped into their hands, and you think the solution to this is to cut taxes?

Wow.

The tax-avoidance behaviour of the rich demonstrates very clearly the reason we need government, and public works, which is that corporations and more particularly corporate officers engage in behaviour that benefits themselves, at the expense of absolutely anyone else. Because the effect of money is to grant power, and the effect of power is to give you a greater ability to change the world according to your design, the natural outcome of this is.. well, the feudal system.

I agree that the squeezed middle and the poverty classes are suffering unfairly, but ithe reason for that is not that they are paying too much tax. The reason is the increasingly unchecked power of those who *don't* pay their taxes.

I say bring an ounce of honesty to it all. Since money is clearly a way to buy power, make it explicit. And *very* expensive. Deficit solved....

I agree that Unity had a teething period... but I spend most of my time using applications and terminals, not the window manager.

I actually like things like the HUD menu, where you can tap alt and type something and find a menu item buried deep in the tree with a few keystrokes. And the movement of the close button makes sense at the top left, if that's where your "open an app" tool is - it's usually the next thing you'll do. Windows puts it as far away as you can get, and OSX is barely better.

Especially if you learn a few key shortcuts, it's entirely usable. And shouldn't represent more than a fraction of 1% of your time using an OS anyway.

You need tools that futz with low-level stuff and insert hooks into the process, like procexp.

Having to use tools that do things that you'd ordinarily associate with rootkits isn't really a good answer.

And svchost.exe can host the DLLs for multiple services at once... you can't kill the process without killing all of them. A terrible design, compensating for the heavyweight nature of Windows processes.

It's true, but in the office suite space, the only programs that properly support open formats are currently OSS.

The standard version of MOO-XML isn't implemented by MS Office (it still only supports the "transitional" version).

MS Office does it's best to break ODF documents when possible as far as I can tell. It destroyed all the formulas in ODS sheets last time I tried editing one in Excel.

The 99% believe that there is no kind of talent or ability that makes one person's labour literally worth 10,000 times that of another.

Those kind of wages (I refuse to say "earnings") usually require either the direction of vast amounts of other peoples labour (and therefore represent a salami slicing scam where the productivity of that labour is being directed up the corporate pyramid), or intangible and imaginary "wealth" which in effect is just a massive confidence trick.

The 1% are bilking the rest of us. They live high on the hog by using their power to manipulate the system to deliver the fruits of our labours into their pockets. That's what the 99% actually believe.

Scamming some noob because they don't understand computers is morally no different, but a drop in the bucket in comparison.

XP was 5.1

Windows 2000 was Windows 5 (and very stable, and really, really fast on modern hardware). Inevitably it was DRM that put paid to my attempt to keep using Windows 2000 until it was impractical... some of the games I wanted to play were depending on cryptographic components that didn't ship in Win2k.

So I "upgraded" to Vista.

I didn't have quite the same urge to hold onto that one as long as possible....

MS do OEM and retail disks, distinct from vendor-specific OEM images.

The OEM release is intended to go on one machine ONLY and the license is bound to that system. Upgrading it will typically provoke different levels of incredulity from the activiation server.

The retail release is allowed to be on one machine CONCURRENTLY and you can move it between machines, and upgrade to your hearts content, although you may still get hassled into phoning a robot and beeping a bit at it.

The rules about selling the OEM disk are supposed to mean that it only goes to the manufacture of a new computer, but I've seen vendors bend the rules as far as they can go and sell the OEM disk to anyone that buys a new hard drive.

MS do have a program for this, it's called the Microsoft Signature Experience - it's a selected range of hardware sold without crapware on it.

Alas, it only covers a tiny selection of hardware.

For desktops, I always buy parts and install Windows myself. For laptops, if it comes with a standard Windows medium, I'll bleach it clean and reinstall from scratch.

Laptops which make you burn your own recovery disks with the crapware on them are taking the piss.

The problem with homeschooling is that it's usually used not as a means to educate your kids better, it's most often used because you have a particular worldview you want them to be exposed to, to the exclusion of all others.

Hipsters aren't fat, either.

They can't afford to eat enough to get fat on the artisanal delights, that are in any case, mostly purchased for their ornamental value on the plate next to their ethically conscious coffee.

I consider doing this even here in the UK sometimes.

My office shelled out, I estimate, around €30,000 for WinRAR licenses. Looking at the report justifying it's purchase, it's clear that 7-zip beats it out in basically every category of functionality that they assessed it on... but no-one sells 7-zip so you have no-one to point the finger at if it fails.

A small company selling support for F/OSS packages could really clean up (and probably not have to do very much real work), just by tendering prices a little under the "market leader" for F/OSS programs that occupy a commodity niche.

Depends on the people, depends on what they want.

You could invert that sentence and swap "Mac" for "Linux" for many audiences ; particularly creative types that have specialist apps that only run on one platform.

For simple uses... there's no problem. Linux has browsers, email clients, and LibreOffice. For business purposes, anything written in Java or one of the other virtual runtimes should be easy to port to Linux, or run right out of the box.

For complex uses... it depends on the niche. Certainly for software development, Linux wins for basically everything except native and .NET Windows apps. For other uses, I will grant you, the professional-grade applications are not available (even if they run in Wine). But I'm not an artist. I'm a developer.

Gaming is one of the things that keeps Windows on my hard drive, but Valve are trying their darndest to make this irrelevant. I'm watching with interest, but Windows won't be going away just yet....

But that's it. All my real work is done on Linux. Windows has been relegated to the status of a toy for me. I find it frustrating and clumsy to work with - even more so once the IT department has shackled the vast suite of corporate malware they deem necessary to the chain around it's neck. The software I produce is a mixture of server processes and client tools that run on both Windows and Linux. I even *gasp* pay for software to run on Linux.

I agree there is a vast technical debt built up apps written on platform-specific toolkits, but they become obsolete eventually and there's no excuse for porting them to another platform-locked toolkit any more.