Interesting fact: it isn't just the light that makes them scurry away adn hide. They can smell us, and find us quite disgusting (presumably an evolved survival reaction: avoid mammals as they'll either eat you or just stomp on you).

The supply deal between Samsung and Apple is already due to end (in 2014) IIRC, so Samsung are in a position to lose at most that. Chip manufacture is an expensive business, there are a fair few players in the mobile device market right now and Samsung don't have infinite production capacity - presumably they think they can make the same money (or more) using that finite resource to service other clients (including other parts of themselves), and do so without helping a competitor, they may even already have new contracts lined up ready.

My assumption is that Samsung could do better now. The contract must have room for price variance nor room for Samsung to walk away, but clauses that would allow Apple to walk away. If I'm right then what Samsung have done is simply demand Apply pay the going rate, which is higher right now than when their deal was first negotiated. They couldn't lose: either Apple agree and give Samsung what they want, or Apple walk away and Samsung get the same from others (or via equivalent saving by being able to make use of the manufacturing resource directly themselves).

I think that inconveniencing a competitor in another market probably didn't even come into it, other than inspiring a few humorous/ironic/what-ever notes on internal memos. This seems to be to be basic cost/benefit and "what the market will bare" stuff. If anything inconveniencing Apple would have made them think twice rather than make them more eager to cause disruption: being seen to deliberately inconvenience a partner, no matter what the provocation, can look bad and make other potential partners think twice about dealing with you.

I've gone a quick check of my memory, and it looks like QuickBasic and its descendants had those directives, which will be where I'll remember it from.

GPP was imprecise but almost correct. Unless I'm misremembering and assigning properties of other BASIC variants (I used a few variants way back then) to MS's that it didn't have, or course.

IIRC all unqualified variable names defaulted to integer type, adding the $ told the interpreter that a string type is required instead. But there existed directives to alter this behaviour, so for instance strings were the default. Something like "DEFSTR S-R" would make variables starting with S, T or R default to string (unless specifically set to something else by a trailing type indicator) from that point on.

I'm only one data-point, but a lot of people I know directly or indirectly seem to have switched away from MS's IM. It usually starts with using Facebook's IM for contacts that are on there then slowly logging into MSN/Live/what-ever less and less often until they don't bother at all (and reverting to mobile phone text messages for communicating with people who are not on facebook).

My phone will last two days between charges if it has to and I don't use it much other than it being on and idle. I can easily run the battery down in a few hours or talking or worse using to tether my netbook to the Internet - being able to put it on charge when I go to bed is not really useful when it is nearly drained due to long voice calls at two in the afternoon when I'm not near a convenient USB port. That doesn't happen often, but it does happen often enough and no doubt there are a great many people out there with more exciting lives than mine who find many more occasions when they are not near a convenient charging point.

I have a couple or portable battery chargers that help a lot for this though, so it isn't a completely unsolved problem even without spare batteries. Not very efficient of course, charging a battery via USB then using that battery to charge another battery later...

Of course a lot of people are more concerned about what will happen when the battery ages to the point of not holding enough charge at all any more. Personally I'm not so worried about that these days as improvements in battery technology make it far more likely that I'll have a replaced the phone before that becomes a major issue.

There are a couple of people/groups out there who are trying to take the highest quality versions and mix out all the changes. "Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition" is said to be the best by far at the moment - available on most moderately disreputable trackers.

Unless it varies by territory of course - I'm in the UK, perhaps the states will get it on the 3rd while we will need to wait 10 more days for the honour of paying through the nose[1] for one. [1] The equivalent of $383 at current rates for the 8Gb model through a mix of our tax regime and the manufacturer's desire to fleece us like everyone else does. Only 60% of the cost of a sim-free 8Gb iPhone 4 though, when my current smartphone fails (as it is threatening to do) or annoys me enough to warrant a short sharp visit to concrete-land I'll have to search out some comparative reviews.

The horses mouth suggests your assumption is correct: https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_4_8gb

There is a rather useful search engine run by a company you may heard off, that helpfully directed me to the official specs when I made an appropriate enquiry: https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_4_8gb

The dimensions are listed there, to the precision of 0.1mm (no word on the accuracy though).

There will no doubt be people out their willing to pay a pretty penny for those, hobbyists wanting to extend the life of some cherished old kit for instance. The problem for auction style selling (assuming you are thinking eBay) tends to be listing your items for sale when more than one of those people is passing by. The lot is either worth a fair bit or next to nothing. As you presumably have no use for them yourself, I'd go for it now and not have them lying around cluttering the place.

I'd have not chucked them unless they were _really_ old, or you only had a few.

I had a small pile of various DIMMs (and SIMMs though I doubt the buyer was really interested in them!) when I last cleared out all my old junk. Single auction on eBay for the whole lot (individually they aren't worth enough for the hassle of listing and dealing with idiots, but together they made a lot worth bothering with) and let someone else deal with finding uses for them (or splitting into smaller lots and reselling).

You'd be surprised how much you might make. Memory of older standards is often useful in printers (sometimes relatively new devices) and such which don't need the high falutin super sonic speeds of newer standards, not just for people looking to extend the life of very old kit on the cheap. And 4Gb DRR3 modules as mentioned here are definitely still worth something, especially in that sort of number. What my company tends to do when getting rid of old stuff like this is drop the money made into the social fund - the furniture sold on after our move to shiny new offices recently has paid for an upgraded Christmas dinner for us all this year!

Or like the guy above says: donate and someone else will deal with finding a use for them. Either way there is far less chance that it'll all just become toxic land-fill. From a company's PoV donating may provide a tax break.

Real world testing conditions.

I've not been on shared hosting for some time, but things always used to be this way. It is a combination of using default Apache/PHP/other configuration (as provided by the off-the-shelf hosting control panels), default file+directory permissions, and users not being educated to change the permissions on sensitive files (or better: being educated enough to know tweaking those perms is not enough so they should demand a more secure setup from their host).

If I'm reading between the lines well enough, I suspect the problem is that /home/ is globally readable (which is pretty much standard) which allows you to see what users exist as they all have a directory under /home/. If this is the case then the fix they applied was likely to simply change the read permission flag on /home so that you can not list the contents, which isn't really a fix at all: if you know a username either because of foreknowledge or by finding a list of users from elsewhere (/etc/passwd for instance, which usually globally readable) then you can just list /home/ and blocking reading of /home won't change that. Turning off global execute permission on /home would stop you, but because of the way many shared hosts are configured that would also break Apache. Yoiu can test this if you report the issue and it gets fixed the same way: remember one of the usernames you can find now and after the fix see if you can still read /home//public_html or similar.

If you host runs Apache as a single user then there is no way around this. You can mitigate it somewhat with carefully setting permissions on your own files and some obfuscation of file/directory names, but that isn't really a proper answer to the problem.

Apache can be configured to run scripts (via suexec, phpsuexec, and so forth) as a the owner of the script which allows you to lock down configuration files and others that contain sensitive information so other uses can't read them (only set them to -rw------- and only you can read them, and that includes scripts if Apache runs them as you) - but most hosts don't do this (or they didn't last time I was working in that arena) as it is more hassle to setup and/or because it requires more resources. And by "more hassle to setup" I simply mean that it means more than just the out-of-the-box configuration: the "leading" standard control panel back than was cPanel (it may still be, I've not kept an eye on the market recently) and seeing posts like http://www.linuxgo.net/howto-enable-suphpphpsuexec-on-a-cpanel-server/ indicates that it still does not offer an easy (from the point-and-click PoV most cheap hosts need as they are rarely Linux/Apache/other experts) route to using the more secure arrangement. Most hosts will consider the extra admin time of setting up the more secure options to not be worth keeping (or gaining) your custom - 99%+ of their target market don't care (or don't know any better) and spending time to satisfy the other 1% or less is not worth it to them.

tl;dr: You will probably find this is the standard setup on a great many shared hosts, possibly most, maybe even nearly all. To ensure you are getting a new host that does things more securely when you move, you need to ask some pre-sales questions that are fairly technical (in the sense that sales may not be able to help, unless the company is small enough that the sales and tech support teams are the same people).

I would suggest instead using a VPS provider or self-hosting, that way there are no other direct users of the machine (be it real or virtual) to worry about, but unfortunately both of those options put more administrative load (and cost, unless you are paying far too much for shared hosting) on yourself and can be a minefield of its own (as with shared hosting avoid the cheapest options and ask searching questions when signing up - FYI of the providers I used before I had my stuff on dedicated machines here and externally, Linode were the outfit I'd most readily recommend (by a fair margin) though they we a bit more expensive than the others I used).

Still tl;dr: Shared hosting is generally not secure. There is little you can do about it other than move to using a different type of hosting service.

So, the sort of people this article about?