I think you're missing the point - it's why do people put up with queueing when you just get an alternative product, or even just order online. Why waste your time queuing? If the store is too small or has too few staff to serve the customers, either come back another time or shop somewhere else. I don't want to waste my time queueing, so I'll either pick the right time or not bother.

If that's all Vesper does, it's competition will be the 800lb gorilla of cloud note taking - Evernote, which works and syncs on all platforms and is arguably the incumbent in that space. Most people looking for a note app will find Evernote first, although OneNote is catching up now that it's cross platform (and pretty good on iOS). If your needs are more simple, the built in notes app will probably do.

That's the mainframe model. You pay for the CPU you use - measured in MIPs if I recall correctly. The machine might be capable of x MIPs but you can't use them all because you haven't paid for them. It's like buying a quad core machine but only being able to use one core unless you pay to unlock the others.

Application CPU bound? Pay more to be able to access the CPU power in the hardware you already own. And then be prepared to pay all the software vendors more because you're now running it on a more powerful machine...

So it's nothing new, it's been the standard operating model in that world forever.

My car has inbuilt sat nav and I still have to adjust the time manually twice a year. It knows exactly where I am, but can't relate that to a timezone, let alone sync time to the GPS signal. Or the digital radio. Or my phone when that's connected via bluetooth. It's weird that it seems to have multiple data sources that could potentially keep the time accurate but doesn't use any of them.

Try Scotland - the Galloway Forest Park is known for it's dark skies. On the other hand, getting a cloudless night in Scotland might be more of a challenge...

The gmail app now supports Exchange accounts, and I'm assuming that's via ActiveSync?

In any case, this news is confusing because there's been an Outlook app for Android for a long time. It's awful, but it does exist for outlook.com accounts - I assume the new one is different, but the name is confusing.

Wordpress has a lot going for it, but you do need more than just css and html to get the most out of it. You're going to have a hard time getting themes right without some php knowledge. Newer third party themes do a good job of presenting lots of options for customisation, and that might be enough for many sites. If you're developing for a customer, though, eventually they'll want a tweak to a theme that can only be done by changing the PHP (ideally do this in a child theme).

It is possible to get unofficial hacked versions of OS X to run in a VM, but there's no legal way which is a real shame. For my needs, OS X is the best combination of unix and the ability to run commercial software.

That said, whenever I really think about it I realise Windows would be pretty much as good - especially with Cygwin or something on top. If my Mac died tomorrow I'm really not sure whether I'd get a replacement or go back to Windows.

This.

Rather than running other systems on Mac hardware, I want to run OS X on other hardware. But I can't, not officially.

I'd rather have a mini tower with room for at least two, preferably three, drives (an SSD for the OS + apps and a big data drive or two), built in card reader and maybe built in optical drive. Oh, and a decent number of USB ports.

Instead, to run OS X I have to have a bunch of cables hanging out of the back to peripherals, some of which need their own power supply. It's almost enough to push me back to Windows (not Linux, I mostly use Photoshop and no, the Gimp is not a substitute).

I have a very weird combination. I went partially deaf in one hear, losing all the high frequency range, when I was 30. Can hear low notes, but not much in the higher range and have constant high pitched tinnitus in that ear... BUT, with my good ear, I can still hear the tones from the thing in my garden that's designed to scare off cats and that people aren't supposed to be able to hear at all.

It's been fine on my 5. I don't think I've had a crash in Chrome yet and it seems just as quick as Kitkat was. Do you have any background apps that might not be totally compatible? All of my apps seem to work, but I have heard that some are flaky Lollipop (probably down to the switch from Dalvik to Art).

I was hoping to like the new lock screen notifications, but there's not enough flexibility in how they work. I'd like to see per app settings that hide them from the lock screen but not the notification bar. The options seem to be all or nothing, so I went back to the lock screen notification app I was using under Kitkat anyway.

Does anyone know if it aims to encrypt all your files quickly or over a time period to increase the chance of poisoning backups?

If the former, one mitigation might be to check file types on the backup? Assuming you do a backup to a different architecture, such as Linux, check file types - is a jpeg really a jpeg? Can it read plain text files? As soon as it finds one it can't, flag it up for investigation. Perhaps have a number of canary files, pull those first each time and compare them to known good copies stored in a non-shared filesystem on the backup machine, halting the backup if the file has changed in any way. It'd be a pain to set up, but once scripted it would all be automatic.

Question for cryptography gurus - does having a known good file or files increase the feasibility of decrpyting? I.e A file is encrypted. You have an unencrypted copy of it on read only media. Does that increase the chance of finding the keys used to encrypt A, and thus enable you decrypt other files for which you don't have good copies? Probably not, but thought I'd ask. Apologies if it's a stupid question before I get the piss ripped out of me ;)

Exactly, it's the norm in the UK. I started out just over 20 years ago, and only senior managers had offices then. Now even they're out in the open plan office in many places.

Classrooms are also open plan, so it was no different to what I was used to from education. Every environment in which I've been expected to work has been like that, from my first day of school right up until now.

I see the plus side, which is that even though I'm working on my thing I can pick up on conversations around me - and often make a contribution that would not happen if we were all hidden away in cubicles or offices.

That makes sense to me. The warning is saying "this site claims to be secure but the certificate doesn't check out in some way, be careful", whereas http makes no claims to be secure and hence no warning is given.

There is no need for SSL everywhere and punishing sites without it by ranking them lower is just plain wrong. Why on earth would a brochure style site for a business need SSL? Why does Wikipedia need SSL (for readers, not for editing)? Why do blogs need SSL for readers? Why does the BBC News website need SSL?

There are a vast number of sites that have no need for SSL and it's simply unnecessary overhead.