I'd wager a lot of it is school assignments. School courses are rarely kept up to date with the current distros. I can't blame them for not keeping up with the latest Fedoras, but at least they should be running a supported enterprise release (i.e. RHEL6, but encourage them to use CentOS).

I see a lot of the "I am trying to install Fedora 10 but it won't work". Of course it's normally because the package repositories have been archived and the default install can't find them. When asked why they are using such an old version some people come clean and say it's for school, or say it's a "requirement".

Hmm let me think of all the Nexus devices which had an SD card slot (attmpted to do from memory in chronological order).

• Nexus One (HTC, 2010) - yep
• Nexus S (Samsung, 2011) - no
• Galaxy Nexus (Samsung, 2011) - no
• Nexus 7 (Asus, 2012) - no
• Nexus 4 (LG, 2012) - no
• Nexus 10 (Samsung, 2012) - no
• Nexus 7 (Asus, 2013) - no
• Nexus 5 (LG, 2013) - no

Eight devices, only the first had an SD slot, and only the first 3 actually had a removable battery. It's always been my opinion that Google wants folks using their cloud storage. Many apps don't like storing data on the SD card, but for me I'd like to have it for media, not apps.

WebDAV is only one way to access the files. You can download an OwnCloud client which syncs the files locally in the same way Dropbox does.

Apple is a lot more restrictive in permissions in general.

On Android you have to accept a laundry list of permissions when you install the app. You cannot selectively restrict what it can or can't do.

When you install an app on Apple you don't need to accept any permissions. The app by default gets no permissions but must request it when it needs it. For example "AppName is requesting access to your contacts: Allow / Don't Allow".

I'm an Android user (formerly Apple) and I think this is one area Apple has done it right.

It was fixed on the older model. Google released an update quite some time ago which apparently enabled Trim and sped up the device. Mine was god-awful slow, to the point of being barely usable. The update brought it back to life.

That's actually Homer after having attended Krusty's clown college (episode: Homie the Clown).

Not all of the code on your Android device is open source. Google could easily pack whatever they want into the Google Apps on your phone, just the same as Samsung, LG, HTC, etc could if they want. The OS itself is open source, but what you buy is very unlikely completely open (maybe with the exception of the Cyaogenmod devices)

I'm surprised they didn't update it (maybe even give it a modest price drop). With all the negative press Windows 8 has been receiving, Apple could market the Mac Mini as a "drop in" replacement for people who currently have a Windows 8 tower at home.

All the major platforms can create virtual disk images, it's just not one of them is cross platform.

Windows 7 (not sure about previous) lets you create VHD disk images in Disk Management. I assume BitLocker can be enabled on these, more cumbersome than TrueCrypt since you'd need to attach the VHD then mount the BitLocker volume. Not sure how correct this is as I have Windows 7 Home Premium which doesn't do BitLocker.

Alternatively you could GPG encrypt the VHD file, but that would require decrypting it before attaching and would require that it be stored on disk in a decrypted state. TrueCrypt is purely on-the-fly, the data never touches the disk without being encrypted.

Macs support easily creating encrypted disk images through Disk Utility and mounting+unmounting them is painless. Even more so than TrueCrypt.

Linux you can create encrypted loopback files with losetup or cryptsetup. Cryptsetup supports mounting TrueCrypt volumes so there's that.

Not only for Windows, but cross platform. I love Truecrypt because I can keep a volume in my Dropbox and use it on my personal Mac, my work Fedora desktop, and my secondary PC at home running Windows. There are even mobile apps to mount them. Linux has cryptsetup which can mount TC volumes, but as far as I know there aren't any comparable options outside Linux.

Sounds like Bitlocker might be a reasonable option for full disk encryption at least. All our our work laptops which leave the office currently use TC for full disk encryption, might be time to switch.

I'm not sure I see the inconsistency. He's paying to rent the VM, but he's still not trusting it with his data. It's encrypted before sending.

PHP already has case sensitive variable names. $Foo and $foo are always different variables.

Function names, class names, keywords (class, function, extends, if, while, etc) are always case insensitive.

However, constants are sometimes case sensitive, depending on their declaration.

I do a lot of PHP development, but these days it's only sane by the fact that I've been doing it so long I understand many of it's weirdness. Also, using frameworks (Symfony 1 & 2) and finally using a template engine (Twig) helps enormously. Helps in the same way jQuery has saved me from writing vanilla JS and trying to deal with browser quirks.

Except that no, you can't on an iOS device. Those things are locked right down. Jailbreaks don't allow running an alternative OS like on an Android device with an unlocked boot loader.

You're modded funny, but this is exactly what we would get. This is probably 90% of the smartphone games out there.

GP must be referring to the standard DisplayPort connector, not Mini DisplayPort.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Displayport-cable.jpg