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Operating Systems

Submission + - Intel porting Android to x86 for netbooks and slat (liliputing.com)

Submitted by timothy
timothy writes: According to Liliputing, Intel is bringing the sweet eye candy of Android to x86, which — if all goes well — means it will land on (more) netbooks and tablets soon. I'm more excited about ARM-based tablets, for their current advantage in battery life, but the more the merrier, when it comes to breaking up the tight circle of OSes available for any given arbitrary class of computing devices. Given all the OS swings that the OLPC project has gone through, maybe they should be thinking of Android, too.
Portables

Submission + - Are we seeing the death of the PC ?

Submitted by nzNick
nzNick writes: Yesterday we saw a story about how innovation and application development is focusing on portable devices — no secret there, and no real surprise.
Today Intel announced the end of PCI.
The question I have for slashdotters is 'When will we see the end of the PC?'

By this I mean desktop machines, and I include many of the current laptops in this. Google has said the future is Mobile — all the Telcos around the world are promoting data services and trying to get a share of the mobile data pie.
Traffic congestion in all major cities has made many companies attempt to encourage working from home — this has been hampered in the most part by poor bandwidth and a lack of truly mobile devices and applications.

Does the iPad, iPhone, Android and other mobile devices start to expose a future direction of computing?
Will we start to see applications that currently run on PC's moved to the cloud, and being accessed from more and more portable devices.

I am predicting that the sale of PC's will be 50% of current levels in 5 years, and in 10 years PCs will only be used for legacy applications.
I am not talking about specialised machines, I think we will see an explosion of very specific form factor machines such as PVRs, mini 'Home' servers for storage and gaming platforms — but the general purpose PC that is in 90% of homes and offices — I suspect we are seeing the peek of it's existence now — and we are already beginning to see the mobile revolution overtake the PC.

Do you agree?
If so — do you thing my prediction of 5 years having a 50% reduction in current sales, and being all but extinct in 10 years is correct?

What are your thoughts on this topic

Nick
Politics

Submission + - Australia gets its first female Prime Minister (abc.net.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Julia Gillard has been elected unopposed to the Labor leadership, seizing power in a bloodless Parliament House coup after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd decided not to contest this morning's leadership ballot. Ms Gillard will now be sworn in as Australia's first female Prime Minister. Emerging from this morning's meeting, she said she felt "very honoured" and said she would be making a statement shortly. Treasurer Wayne Swan now steps up as Deputy Prime Minister. He was also elected unopposed.
Iphone

Submission + - iPhone 4 antenna problems, multiple reports and vi (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Gizmodo has a story about multiple iPhone 4 owners experiencing partial or total loss of signal when the iPhone 4 is actually held with skin touching the metal band which acts as the antenna for the phone (good luck holding the phone without your skin touching the band). Numerous user-submitted videos are included on the page showing the problem.

http://gizmodo.com/5571171/iphone-4-loses-reception-when-you-hold-it-by-the-antenna-band

Comment It comes down to requirements (Score 1) 426

by nzNick (#32356140) Attached to: For Automated Testing, Better Alternatives To DOS Batch Files?
It depends on your requirements - if you can install other shells such as powershell, perl, java, python .... then pick your poison. If you want to maintain your initial statement of a single file (and here my assumption is that it must run an all windows machines in your network) - DOS works. Why make it pretty ? There is nothing wrong with a simple text menu in DOS - provided it is simple.

Comment US Tax system is a pain (Score 1) 639

by nzNick (#14320429) Attached to: U.S. Ecommerce To Be Broadly Taxed?
I feel sorry for you all with a tax system that is impossible to track.

The obvious solution is to ignore the fact that it is ecommerce and treat the sale as though the person was standing at the shop counter ordering goods - this is the idea behind ecommerce - a virtual shop.
This way the tax that should be applied is the tax of the state where the business is located. The sales channel should not effect the tax rate.

Back to my origional point - having differing state and regional tax rates is nuts. NZ introduced a flat tax (GST) on every item purchased or service rendered - no exceptions- some 15 years back - this is working well. Aus introduced a similar thing a few years back and it seems to be working- even though they added a whole bunch of exceptions that are exempt which increases the complexity of administratioon (AKA COST).

The US needs to bring its tax system in to the 1980's level of thinking (we wont ask you to advance too far:-) )

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