Because you didn't look? I've never wanted this functionality, but it's been in my last two Nokia smartphones and in my current HTC one (Desire). I seem to recall a lot of people complaining when the iPhone was launched that it didn't include an FM Radio, which was a standard feature in most other smartphones. I'd imagine manufacturers are phasing it out now, because there's very little demand for it.

It is your problem if everyone else is using the authoritative definition and you are using your own made-up one.

You can put these things on a timer: load the machine before you go in and have it start a few hours later.

You can't expect to have a conversation if you insist on giving words different meanings to those understood by everyone around you. Or, you put it another way: aardvark aubergine eats legal ostriches.

The grandparent asked for an example of someone holding both opinions. You replied by saying that, on a site with over two million registered users, both opinions are expressed, and hand-waved that they were expressed by the same person. Please show an example of two posts by a user expressing both views.

It's not much more valuable. The line between code and data is often quite blurry. For example, a lot of browser exploits have been due to vulnerabilities in libpng or libjpeg, where a malformed image caused some part of the input image to be treated as code. Even if you signed the entire binary, all of its libraries, and all of its config files, you aren't guaranteeing that the code is bug free. It protects you against a specific kind of adversary: one trying to persuade you to install a trojan by pretending to be someone else. This is a pretty rare form of attack. Most trojans don't pretend to be someone else, they pretend to be someone useful or fun. For example, things like screensavers and little phone games, not copies of Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop.

If you want to be protected against trojans, then you want to run each application with the minimum privilege that it needs. This is mostly a UI problem: you must define a set of restrictions that can confine applications at the required granularity yet still be comprehensible to a typical user. For a case study in how not to do it, see Android, which fails on both counts.

If you want to be protected against non-malicious, but exploitable software, then you also need compartmentalisation, so that a compromise, for example, in libpng, does not give you the privilege of the entire application (for example, access to all of your documents if it's in an office suite, or access to your Internet banking if it's in a web browser). This is the focus of Robert's current research (I should add a disclaimer here that I am part of the same project), because current architectures don't scale well to the required level of compartmentalisation. If you use the Chrome (and Capsicum) model of one-process-per-sandbox, then you quickly find performance limited by the number of TLB entries. On a recent Intel chip, this is somewhere in the 128-256 entry range, and if you need one process per sandbox with at least one code and one data page mapped at a time then you very quickly find that you're spending all of your time in TLB misses (this is why Chrome weakens its sanboxing if you have more than about 20 tabs open). Fixing this requires some architectural changes: it's not enough to just add TLB entries (aliasing effects hurt you), and even if you could they are constantly-powered TCAMs and so power efficiency means that you want the TLB to be as small as possible.

Alpha Centauri could take several minutes for the AI players to take their turns on a 550MHz P3. And this game was released in February 1999, several months before the 550MHz P3 was launched at a price of $700. On the other hand, back then I was paying per minute for Internet, so I probably wouldn't have wanted to offload then game engine to a big server farm somewhere...

90% of auto-starting flash is adverts. For the few things that are actually useful content, it isn't much extra effort to click. I was amazed at how much my browsing experience improved when I installed a click-to-play plugin for Flash.

For this use-case, periodic snapshots of the volume in question work well. A simple cron job will let you rotate ZFS snapshots and clean up old ones so you can have hourly ones for a day, daily ones for a week, weekly ones for 3 months, and monthly ones for a year (or whatever) and can restore accidentally deleted files without having to go to any external media. Backups on external media are for when something very bad happens to your system.

Not really. The BD writer in my NAS cost me £63, over a year ago. 25GB disks cost about £1, 50GB ones are still close to £5. So, somewhere between £5 and £10 for 100GB, depending on how willing I am to use the lower-capacity disks. And these prices are likely to follow the same sort of curve that CD-RW and DVD-RWs did. LTO-1 tapes are about £13 for 100GB, so more expensive per GB than even 50GB BD-REs. The cheapest LTO drive I can find with a quick search is £1000. That's LTO-4 (LTO-1 drives are probably available second hand, but comparing only new with new), so to compare tapes I suppose we should use LTO-4 ones. They cost around £20 for 800GB, so per GB they're a lot cheaper than BD-RE. To back up 2TB, I'd need a drive and three tapes, so that's about £1060. With a BD-RE, I'd need a drive and 40 disks. That's £460. For a home user, the optical disks are a lot cheaper, and you also get random access, which makes restoring easier.

Once you get up to datacentre scales, things are different. The price per GB for tape is a lot lower and so it makes more sense. If you're backing up even 1TB/week, the cost of media for the optical drives quickly overshadows the lower up-front cost. The faster write speed for tape is also useful.

On the other hand, if you're just dumping data and never reusing the external media (so you can go back to backups from a long time ago), the media costs start to swing the other way. BD-Rs are very cheap. 50p/each for 25GB disks (CD-R and DVD-R went down to 10p/each so BD will probably keep falling), so you're looking at a similar cost per TB to LTO.

If you don't think that's impressive, then you clearly never ran COREL Draw.

OSMAnd~, at least on the device where I've tried it, has no download limits and can show offline wikipedia entries. The unlimited downloads thing was what made me donate.

If you have F-Droid installed, then they have OSMAnd~, which is OSMAnd compiled by them from the upstream sources. I never bought OSMAnd+, but I sent them a donation once I discovered OSMAnd~ (of more than the cost of OSMAnd+, even before Google takes their cut). It's incredibly useful.

That depends a lot on where in the UK you are. When I was living in Swansea, I was spending about £6K/year on housing (initially renting a 2-bedroom flat, then owning a 2-bedroom house which pushed my cost of living down even more), food, and bills. £15K would have been enough to live quite comfortably. I spent under £10K most years, including buying new laptops, eating out, and so on, and all of the rest of my income went into savings. I'm now in Cambridge, and £15K here would, after tax might just about about cover expenses if I lived in a bedsit, but I'd probably have to live in a shared house, and even then I'd be struggling. In London, it would be impossible.

£15K seems very low for a software engineer though. Even in places with low living costs, I don't think I've seen below £22K, and £30K is a better ballpark for a starting salary.

I was quite shocked to see that on my last trip to the US. The UK is pretty backwards in this respect, and even we effectively abolished signatures some years ago. How many store clerks are actually qualified to validate a signature? Now, if you accept a card payment without it going through the chip-and-pin terminal then you are liable for any fraud. Big supermarkets still allow it sometimes on the basis that it's better to lose £50 on fraudulent card transaction than it is to alienate a customer and lose whatever their profit margin is on £50/week for however many years that person can hold a grudge. I actually had to show my passport when buying chocolate on my last trip (like American beer, American chocolate from smaller producers is often very nice, but for some reason most of the population eats tile grout instead). No idea why they thought this was a good idea - I doubt that the guys behind the counter were qualified to check an EU passport for forgery either...

I don't think I've ever seen that. The purchaser has to count the cash, then the merchant has to, then they (or their till) has to calculate change, then they have to get the change. Meanwhile, someone paying with a card just pops it in, enters their PIN, and waits for the receipt to be printed. Or, for low-value transactions (under £15 in the UK, not sure about elsewhere), just waves the card over the machine and does the contactless payment thing.

They do. The amount of cash kept on the premises is factored into the cost of insurance. The cost of transporting it to the bank also increases when there is more cash, as does the cost of storing it, and banks often charge transaction fees when dealing with large amounts of cash. These costs are all passed on to the customers, including the ones who pay with credit cards, but apparently it's fine for card-payers to subsidise cash-payers, but not the other way around.