Every time Google messes with Gmail, the interface gets worse. The Gmail product management needs to be flogged every time they try to be too clever. By now they're owed at least a dozen floggings.

I hope "VGA" is a bad hint at what this screen will be. Pi's have HDMI output, so surely the screen will support that, if not HDMI/VGA/NTSC/PAL. Adafruit's 7 inch LCD screens are 800x640 or more, so hopefully he's not referring to 640x480 resolution.

Hopefully what they release is at least 720p.

They won't learn, because while most people think MS is a software company, they are actually a marketing company.

The issue was that because people weren't getting headhunted the companies didn't need to compete as heavily on wages. If I recall correctly, when one of the deals fell through, Google compensated with a substantial payrise, which was used to justify the scale of the loss.

I recall reading that when Emirates started putting in mobile phone facilities, the staff on the plane reported that they didn't hear anyone using them, whereas the logs showed lots of calls being made. The engine noise was such that the phone calls are essentially unnoticable.

The hijacking that you were thinking of (Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961) had survivors. According to that article, a significant number of the dead were those who didn't wait until leaving the plane before inflating their lifejackets, and as a result were trapped inside the plane when it flooded. 125 out of 175 died, with only 60 to 80 still in their seats.

It's also not done in Australia either. The process here is that everyone puts their university/course preferences into a website. Then, at the end of the year after exams are marked (identical across the state), students are ranked and the system goes down the list and assigns people to university places. No wishy-washy essays or personality assessments, you get a number based on your marks and that determines what you get.

Very interesting—thanks for the insight. I've kind of steered off-topic a bit, but it seems to me that how people behave in dance classes is interesting as a model because the approaches happen again and again and again, while the anxiety is for me quite similar in nature, and because what the girls have told me about their experiences sounds quite similar to my feelings trying to make approaches in spite of shy quiet geek boy tendencies.

Interesting, I didn't expect the difference in local culture to be anywhere near that much. Perhaps we Australians are just oddballs. I can understand beginners being a bit squeamish about it, since it takes a while for it to become more sexually neutral; especially with Tango, since my understanding is that it isn't terribly forgiving of those with any real sense of personal space. Here though there is a tendency for women to lead more than you describe, as Australian men in general aren't terribly interested in dancing and so occasionally the imbalance can be truly catastrophic.

I think there's more to it than that, though. Perhaps the reasons that you state cause the inhibitions that you mention, however it is not a rational "I must not do so because people will think this of me..." etc. etc., in my opinion, or at least if so it is more deeply ingrained, since the same phenomenon occurs in other areas. My anecdotal evidence: I dance as a hobby, and of all of the groups with which I have taken lessons, it has been invariant that essentially all beginning women, and even the majority of experienced ones, will never ask for a dance, and will quite happily (or not) sit on the sidelines all night waiting for someone to come to them.

When a friend of mine visited a club of a different style, she found herself in this situation again; no longer being able to offer years of experience, she suddenly had to start asking for herself, and to put it mildly found the experience freakishly traumatic. Another confided that in well over a year she had been able to bring herself to ask a dance of someone perhaps ten times. All this in a context where refusal without reason is viewed about as fondly as spitting in someone's face.

That's not to say that I (Australian male) don't find it difficult at times, and in the early days I felt the same utter terror that they did, but I knew perfectly well that I had to bite the bullet and do it anyway, because no-one was going to come to me. This is not the same as making romantic advances, but I find it interesting because to me the anxiety of rejection is similar, and the behaviour of the two sexes is similar, despite the fact that rational factors other than fear of rejection are not present—on the contrary, being preemptive is greatly endearing. It makes me wonder whether there really is a difference, or whether we're just stuck in this situation because for men there is no alternative to making the first move, and without that pressure most women lack any reason to put themselves through it.

Actually our central IT buys core i7 with 1GB ram and HDDs. What we do (after the fact is) adding an SSD and 4GB ram for my departement. Also we have been heavily pushing for 1GB ethernet to all offices.

After that we started buying clients with slower cpus but with SSD, more ram and combined with the faster network the overall performance is much better for an office user. And the average price per client is now usd 400 instead of usd 1200. Our researchers get faster computers where needed.

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I am working for a company with 6000+ desktops. I do not understand why our client engineering is rolling out faster hardware every year. 95% of all office workers need MS office, a browser and email. Most of the home users just need a browser these days. Those core i7 are just idling around heating office space.

I have now started rolling out 200 dollar desktop hardware (zotac). Which could really become a problem for microsoft. The windows licence price tag looks really expensive with these hardware prices.

Office problems are solved, we do not need faster hardware. And microsoft is manly making money from, *drumbeat*, office workers.

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Good questions indeed. Apple has rolled out a "Safari Update" on Sept 29th, but there seems to be more to it, however, apple is very secretive about the security updates. Something I really dislike about them:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT...

Because MS hates standards. Their first vowel for exploitable software is 'i'. If you think that doesn't hold up, prepend Microsoft or Windows.

Has Netcraft unconfirmed the death?