In VirtualBox v4.0, Oracle released the core as an open-source projet and the proprietary extensions as a plug-in. This proprietary extension is free for home use but commercial users must by a licence. The extension is not 100% necessary but does provides some very useful features, such as being able to connect to the "console" of a headless VM. Cool right?

Well, not really. There is at the moment no way to actually buy such a licence from Oracle, so all the people using VirtualBox v4.0 with this extension in a business are technically out of compliance.

VirtualBox is cool, but they really need some leadership from Oracle.

The first Selsius phone was released in November 1997 and the company was acquired by Cisco in November 1998. That's a bit short to create much legacy code. Plus I think lots of the current IP phones they sell actually came from Linksys...

What make you think that all those constraints cannot be taken into account?

Is it just me or did /. disabled the option to hide the ads for people with good Karma?

There's about 300km from London to Amsterdam. However, due to this little thing called the North Sea, the trip on a high-speed train (a real one) takes a bit more than 4 hours (if you get your connection right between the Thalys and the Eurostar in Brussels). Otherwise it takes about 5 hours.

But of course the train will take you from Amsterdam Centraal to London Victoria, not from Schiphol to Hearthrow, Luton, or, God forbid, Gatwick.

So overall, I'm not sure which trip is going to release the largest amount of CO2. Probably the plane one, cause the Eurostar runs mainly on nuclear power...

Why did you leave a position as a "star programmer" to move into network administration? Why restart at the bottom of the ladder?

I just scan everything. And I mean everything.

The Fujitsu S1500M is a great piece of kit, but pretty expensive. But it can scan and OCR big folders in a manner of minutes. And the software does not suck, which is much more than can be said about the software that usually comes with flatbed scanners. I just hope it could remove the staples as well.

All those scans are just dumped in one big folder. Then Spotlight makes it a breeze to find something. Anectodal evidence shows that it works on Windows too.

I still keep the original paper version, in one big paper folder. Once a year I review the content, throw away the outdated files and move the rest to long-term storage.

Now, if a provider offers an electronic delivery option, I usually pick that instead, if the provider is reliable.

If it was such an interesting feature, TV manufacturers could just licence the tech from PrimeSense, the company behind Kinect, and built it straight into TVs...

Or any other spreadsheet program.

Now of course I admit that Excel is probably not as flexible as R. However, unless your job is to produce stunning, tailor-made graphs, a spreadsheet application will deliver results a lot faster.

The NFC industry suffers from two bigs issues.

1. Huge installed base. There's already lots and lots of installed contactless systems : while many are supposed to follow standards, the standards are unfortunately not good enough to make sure that a NFC phone that would work in London would also work in Amsterdam.

2. Unclear business model. NFC involves too many powerful stakeholders : SIM card manufacturers, mobile phone manufacturers, service providers (banks, transportation operators), mobile telcos ... They all want a vut of the action: making them all agree on a clear business model is very difficult.

I hoped that the combined pressure and will of mighy Google and Apple would finally move things forward. Looks like the complexity of NFC defeated another big corp.