I'm not so sure about this. I enabled the fix as proposed by Phoronix and saw a 15% battery life improvement; I'm now getting almost 5 hours, which is pretty good for this system.But 15% was not "significant" really. So "to regain much of their battery life" seems like an exaggeration in par with the alarmist tone of the articles in Phoronix. Sure, there's a problem, and I certainly appreciate Phoronix's efforts to pinpoint the cause and offer a workaround, but it's certainly not as bad as they've been making it look.

In my experience, the easiest way to get a consistent and stable printing experience is by generating PDF. I have yet to have stability problems if this is done properly. As you're working with Ruby on Rails, using Prawn and Prawnto might be useful. However, if you absolutely positively must NOT use PDF for printing, then this probably won't help you.

" the simplest tools for producing drop-dead gorgeous Websites".

This here is the dangerous part; thinking that the tool makes the designer. Anyone can produce crap with Flash tools, and all it takes is a stroll through the Web to witness first-hand how much damage Flash can do in the wrong hands.

However I agree that the "designer" will have the last word. And, for as long as Flash allows a graphic designer with no knowledge whatsoever of web practices, standards, and a minimum background in actual computing, to build and "just upload" a website, instead of collaborating with someone who knows what he's doing, we'll be doomed to suffer crap like this.

You can whip up a quick GUI with Ruby and WxRuby, and when you're happy with it, create a single executable file with rubyscript2exe. I see two problems: files tend to be large (~10MB) and thus a bit slow to run, but once running they're quite snappy. Ruby is a very easy language and WxRuby is also quite easy to use (not to mention cross-platform but I guess that's not high on your wish list).

From the point of view of a serious organization, I don't think it was such a good choice - a large part of Google's audience are people who just use the computer to work, can barely use it, and any deviation from standard behavior prompts panic and a call to help desk (us!) to ask why the hell did the computer start making noises and playing games by itself, and how we should run there to run an antivirus check and preferably take the computer outside and burn it with a flame thrower lest the nasty virus spread through the network and wreak havoc in the organization.

From the point of view of a geeky videogame addict, I'd say it kicks ass. And people who get too concerned with it should get a life. Or maybe play a game or two :)

I've been bitching about Flash for years now. And no, I don't care about the lack of Flash on my iPhone; actually I consider it a feature.

Work properly? from Microsoft? the company that made "Microsoft Works" an oxymoron? I don't think so.

On the Desktop OS arena, one always has to have SOME degree of MSFT compatibility. On smartphones there's plenty of choice and Microsoft is but a small player. So why even bother? let's keep them relegated to a corner.

Dude, wear your headphones and get one of these.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/clearance/gadgetscomputing/2940/

"all I can I don't suppose you'll find one that bluescreens as easily as windoze. Might as well accept your fate and stop looking. Oh, I also don't recommend Mac OS, for pretty much the same reason.

Um, not really. As anyone who actually lives in a metric country and has had the metric system and its history pounded into his brain for years beginning in elementary school, the french came up with the metric system in the late 18th century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system

Actually it misses the point, since "significanty more dead space between keys" is only a feasible solution if you have a physically larger screen. He's effectively making the keys smaller, thus harder to hit, and the "dead space" is just space where nothing happens = confused users.

Next thing we know, someone will be inventing a "capacitive stylus" touting "higher precision" while using your iPhone. Well yes, but that's SO not the point of a capacitive, finger-friendly touchscreen.

This is enormously amusing. Many posts say that "hey, as a development firm, I can't afford not to support IE6 because I'll lose customers". Then there's those, like your vendor, who play the opposite game and have you on an outdated browser because their app sucks rocks.

Someone needs to stand up to this mess. If we assume that the economy is as sucky as they say it is, then you might give the vendor an ultimatum. Either get your mess working with a decent, modern browser, or we take our business elsewhere. Ask any of those companies who need to hold on to clients even if they run IE6. I bet they'll be happy to replace your current vendor. It's a win-win situation and then your IE6-centric vendor can go work for the IE6-centric customer and they can live the rest of their IE6-centric lives happily together.

Was going to post about how J2ME does exactly what they complain about: "Creating subsets of the core classes in the Java platform was forbidden", well, Sun itself did it and let me tell you, it makes Java's already convoluted API a nightmare to work with, and is ridiculous when programming on a device such as a Blackberry.

RIM had to provide alternatives to some useful Java classes that are just not present in J2ME, turning Blackberry development into an incompatible and horrendous mess, negating all the benefits of using Java in the first place (not that there are many anyway).

over the past 20 years I've been amazed at how the IT world first started scorning command lines (IE the rise of Mac, Windows and GUIs in general) only to come back to them (IE Mac OS X / spotlight / Quicksilver, Windows / launchy, smart address bars, and the increasing amount of people who started using Linux with Ubuntu and are nwo flocking to the command line).

This just proves what i'd known all along: command lines are more efficient, and although the learning curve might be a bit steeper, they just kick ass for things you have to do repeatedly. You of course learn the commands and then whiz by all those people whose motor skills barely allow them to use the mouse, yet they insist in their clickety-clickety ways.

Many operations are easier with a GUI but getting rid of the command line altogether (mac OS 1.x-9.x, I'm looking at you) is/was never a good idea.