Wow wow... hold on fellow. You now are doing exactly what you object to in others, making an unrealistic caricature of groups of users. You do realize there are more Android phones sold every day then there iPhone's right? I don't know in which groups you hang of course, but with my friends, the "in" crowd is definitely not the iPhone user. But all of this is completely irrelevant because we should judge the products, not their users.

I'm sure there are some delusional Fandroids out there that think Google is God, but I'm pretty sure there are just as many delusional iFans and a significant portion of delusional Open Source / MS supporters (sorry I couldn't come up with anything clever to name those fans).

But please remember that's just the vocal minority on internet fora, most of the market just thinks: "Hey, this company has done pretty well. I'm not so sure about their privacy stuff that I sometimes read about, but their products are pretty nice.". There's no "Evil Google (TM)" or "Holy Google (TM)" for most people, and that's a good thing.

Well now, this is getting up to the level of tinfoil hats mixed with an extremely selective world view. I'm sure there are Google employees on this and other sites, just as there are Microsoft employees here (probably even more), Apple employees here (probably less) and you know Slashdot has enough Open Source evangelists, even if it's a little less than it used to be. Besides, what is exactly the problem with Google (or any other company) trying to please the crowds? I'm a privacy advocate, so it stings me to say, that as far as delivering (decent) quality services to end-users for little-to-nothing (and unfortunately that's what people want - privacy be damned), I can't really think of any other company than Google that has done so well in the past years.

An unfortunate truth is that not all business models flourish through open-source. And not only open-source projects give the best end product, especially when it comes to user experience (which now is more important than ever). What Google has done better than any other (evil or not) is introduce and actively develop a legion of services and solutions (some better than others) that are free / freemium to use. Google's core business - Search - will never be opened because it would destroy their business. That Google isn't really quick on opening newest Android builds (whether for security or monetary concerns) is definitely unfortunate, and I'm sure there are many points to be made against other missteps, but the simple truth is that they are no more evil than MS or Apple or [fill in large corp]. I'm sure I don't have to list to you any of their missteps to prove that point. (Though to be fair Apple's recent patent trolling is really starting to bother me, especially because they violate so many of these so-called patents themselves, but that's a different story for another day.)

People get hung up on Google's openness, either in a too positive or too negative way. Judging by your signature, I'd say you are in the latter department. Chill, relax. The world is not coming to an end because of these companies. Your and my government (and the people that vote for them) are way ahead of them.

I think GP meant Apple... the US company.

Well that's the point isn't it? All these companies (Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, etc) own such a ridiculous amount of patents, according to the MAD principle they've stayed off each other's backs for years... until recently when Apple (& Microsoft) started suing everyone. If every patent they were granted was in fact valid, they could completely block each other from ever bringing out new products and completely destroy each other.

Indeed, it seems this system is starting to show everyone why it doesn't work.

Well the cold-war stand-off that seemed to happen (most of the time) in the past decade or two seemed to work "somewhat", a company like HTC was able to rise to power only at the merits of others not suing them over patents until they got a couple themselves (though not enough apparently in some cases).

With other words: Patents (in their current form) are anti-competitive and anti-innovative... and it seems that deep misunderstanding by many judges worldwide of the technical sector and how it works, doesn't help much either.

And to comment on the form factor: There were rounded square tablets before the iPad, there were rounded square phones before the iPhone (LG Prada?)... maybe the Galaxy S 1 is a bit more like the iPhone than the iPhone is like the Prada... but it's all definitely a blurred line. I've heard non-techie's say the Galaxy S is like the iPhone, but only in the sense a McDonald's burger is like a Burger King burger... never were they unable to tell which is which.

This must hands down be the weirdest reply I've ever read on Slashdot... and I've read quite a few strange ones...

Ehm, I think they actually said: "President Obama is dead" (note the "president" part). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMP7Ys57ha4
Though it seems like an honest mistake... then again, they are Fox News, so...

Actually, I take that back... go through the comments on the Fox site. The ridiculous amounts of negative feedback on the review more than makes up for the review itself. This should be posted in Idle though, like the joke that it is.

How did this even get through the Firehose? Guess there are a lot more Apple fanboys on Slashdot then I thought... Even an Engadget review would've been more in-depth and useful than this one... and that's saying something...

It goes beyond that... it's also about recognition.

When I see "blablabla.com" I'm pretty sure that's a website. When toplevel domains are fully customizable and some companies will presumably start using http://microsoft/ or http://apple/ ... recognition will be gone, which is very annoying and slightly confusing. Most annoying for me personally (and many others I gather) will be I can no longer use the top bar for both searching and entering a webaddress. If I enter one word right now, it searches for it and if I enter a word+".com" (or similar) it goes to the web page. How will it be able to know once we go "keyword"-ing our TLDs? (Without either having a current list of ALL TLD's (which can become a huge list) or looking it up online (which introduces lag, especially on mobiles)?

But it was bound to happen I guess... ICANN wasn't going to ignore this huge amount of money that they can make from this just because it might make sense.

You must be Dutch...

I think you should re-read Duradin's comment... and check again for sarcasm. Good points otherwise though.

From TFA:

So yeah, but no, Google never claimed the flash plugin was inside the Chrome sandbox, it's still a work in progress apparently. Of course that doesn't negate the fact that flash is bundled with Chrome and therefor all Chrome users are vulnerable. Still, most users would've installed Flash anyway, this way Google has at least some control over the security issues (though obviously not enough).

Flash is not going away for awhile, especially as long as people keep using outdated browsers en masse and HTML5's implementation isn't (at least somewhat) unified crossbrowser... so with other words it's going take a looooooooong time before Flash is a distant memory. Your best bet is that Google finds a way to *really* sandbox Flash in, so this can't happen anymore. We'll see if they're able to.

Yes, and it should link to the original source of the story, not this crappy write-up on some unknown blog.

Original: [link]

Exactly.

Look, I'm a big advocate for more privacy and believe we are currently giving away way too much private information and are tracked way too much, but this is something that should be addressed in browsers, not websites. Hell, make legislation that makes it mandatory to have a dedicated cookie-information page with a new tag that links to it if you must (so the browser can link to it, for instance with the infamous yellow bar), but the practical effect of legislation like this is that business is moving elsewhere (outside the EU).

Any website that gives the end user a scary "I'm tracking you!" pop up will most definitely be less popular than its US/Asian/etc sibling that doesn't. More importantly, it's not what the end user wants (in most cases) as it deducts from the user experience. If you want to tackle this legitimate concern, do so from within the browser, so there is no advantage to anyone (and also solves the issue with how to warn for 3rd party cookies, plus saves a million man hours to make current websites compliant). I really don't understand why the (sometimes somewhat IT competent) EU decided to implement this in the way they did, as it will only hurt their business.

Almost makes me wish the EU had someone in charge that calls the internet a "series of tubes"... Almost.