OMFG. You frigging yankees can't even RTFA.

"OMG! ZOMG! gov't taking our freedoms!!! this must stop now!!!!!"

Let me help those of you who are not yet blind with rage, by quoting the RTFA:

It's not targeted on breweries specifically. It is targeted at diary farms. It is about accountability what the cows are fed with. Breweries inserted themselves into the market and, as suppliers, are subject to regulations.

It's much simpler, actually.

1. Samsung released Gear, based on Android. Major complain: miserable battery life.

2. Samsung released Gear 2, based on Tizen to address the major complains, battery life among them.

3. Google warms up to wearables while at the same time upset about Samsung diverging (and not only on werables). They approach Samsung and pressure them to go back to the official Android way of doing things. Thus, potentially, next Gear might be based on the Android again.

Haven't worked for Samsung myself. From what I heard, your experience reflects most of the Samsung. But the Galaxy phones were so successful, that they treat them very differently. From the scarce accounts, as far as I can tell, the whole Galaxy development is vertically integrated to allow them quicker response to the competitive threats. (The problem, I heard, is that Samsung bosses, seeing Galaxy development being very successful, now throw all possible carp onto it, hoping that the business unit would also fix other broken products too.)

I do think it's exaggeration.

If you look at the Android, more innovations comes from the Android OEMs than from the Google. Tablet support, advanced camera features, multitasking, multi-window, fingerprint sensor, wearable, in-vehicle infortainment - all first were done by EOMs. Google? Fancy UI gimmicks and G+ integration everywhere.

It is really hard to imagine how one can compete with Android right now due to market inertia.

But then, if you look at the reasons why Samsung went for Tizen with the current generation of the Gear devices - dramatic improvement in battery life - one can easily see that there is a niche for other OSs too.

And if you look what path Tizen has chosen to tackle the Android domination - native support for Android apps - you can easily see that the whole premise of the RTFA is flawed. Samsung doesn't want to fragment the market: they want to make Tizen compatible with Android to avoid the fragmentation. Developers shouldn't care what OS runs their apps, as long as it provides all the APIs necessary.

That would have had a meaning, if GNOME was chosen based on technical merits.

GNOME became "default" desktop only because at the time it was GNU project and unlike KDE/Qt had F/LOSS license.

Care to elaborate?

I can only recall the libxml2 and it isn't the most popular xml library.

I had hopes for gstreamer too, but it turned out to be a dud, worth only writing helloworld^W Totem class applications. And GNOME has already wrote the Totem...

Rest of GNOME are just vast layers of layers of wrappers for layers of abstractions for wrappers for 3rd party libraries.

Apache Foundation this days is mostly Java(TM)(R) Foundation.

Why would the Apple want to subsidize the Oracle?

Last time I touched the VMware Player, full screen mode wasn't supported. Ditto VirtualBox.

Has that changed?

P.S. Fullscreen works in QEmu and DosBox.

How the compatibility of GOG games with Wine in general?

Time to get myself an GOG account... Even AC is available there!

AC successor? Very much doubt it.

The Civ III/IV/V were indicatory of the direction they want to move the game: simplify, make it connected.

I'd say it is an achievement to have a Civ game play out in matter of hours. Marvel of game design. But that is also what made it shallow. When you start the game, you already know approximately how it is going to end. There are few surprises there.

AC to me was THE immersive game. You could play it short way - but that was boring. Or you could play it long way - and see your and game's limits. There are simply more possibilities in the AC, compared to the Civ. As time progresses, there are much more surprises in the game.

To me also it was the first game of the genre I could play on the highest difficulty level. All the info and numbers were there. Unlike the Civ where you have to guess and count number of the icons on the screen.

I take you don't watch the Colbert Report?

Colbert is openly a total sell-out. But he manages to make it funny for everybody's involved.

Never really liked the "late night" shows.

I had a number of friends who used Wine to run MSO, because their universities demanded papers in WinWord, e-mail in Outlook and IE for the intranet. That was quite some time ago now. All of the stuff worked pretty well, including 3rd party ActiveX plug-ins. But that's because MSO/IE are *the* software many use Wine for.

The catch is that Wine occasionally breaks stuff. For popular apps that might be not a problem - but for some obscure corpoware is. AFAIU regression testing is very minimal and done by volunteers - due to proprietary nature of the software Wine is used to run. The important bit is to stay with the version which works for you. If upgrade is needed, test new version thoroughly in advance.

800K PCs is a lot of stuff.

I wonder if anybody tried to calculate the costs of migrating that to a server farm with XP running in VMs?

If they use old hardware , then the RAM shouldn't be a problem.

If they use mostly the office software, then the CPU performance also shouldn't be a problem.

One can theoretically pack few dozens of those on a single blade.

Last time I checked, the MSO 2003/2007/etc (and old Windows software in general) runs very well under Wine.

Wine has problems with the newer software. But the old one runs fine.