The guy who launched GNOME as a counter to KDE is complaining about "the fragmentation of Linux as a platform"? Tthe guy who made the decision replace GNUstep (which was the GNU project's official toolkit/framework in 1996) in favor of GTK â" he's fled to the Mac? He's got the chutzpah to say, "Linux just never managed to cross the desktop chasm"â"without admitting that his decisions are a major cause of that failure?

Good damn riddance.

It's not that people reject change. It's that Windows 8 on phones/tablets/netbooks is the equivalent of cramming a lobotomized MVS onto the original 8088-based IBM PC, while Windows 8 on PCs is like making a port of COMMAND.COM the shell on MVS.

remember when /. was edited by people with a brain?

Let me guess, you've just temporarily misplaced the password for your three-digit UID?

Blatant collusion in price-fixing is illegal, and screaming "But Amazon!" doesn't change that.

And, oh, my, Senator Schumer of New York says things that support New York-based publishers in a dispute with Washington-based Amazon? Next up, we'll ask congressmen from West Virginia what they think about nuclear power as an alternative to coal; it'll be just as reliable.

Nope. A weakness is not the same thing as a vulnerability. Weaknesses are things that already have gone wrong and are already accounted for in market share; vulnerabilities are things that haven't gone wrong yet. Weaknesses don't kill market-dominating platforms; vulnerabilities do. Fragmentation and lack of updates are not new things that are going to suddenly appear and kill Android.

On the other hand, the next iPhone's hardware sucking hard, the next version of iOS sucking hard, carriers getting pissed at Apple and ending subsidies/ads/support, or Apple screwing up the App Store, those are all things that have not yet hurt Apple market share, but could. That doesn't mean they will; Apple doesn't have to screw up. But they can, and if they do, it's an opportunity for rivals (assuming Android's weaknesses keep it from just eating that share of the market anyway).

iOS is vulnerable, because Apple can screw up. Apple can screw up the hardware, the OS, the App Store, or carrier relations, and cripple it as a result. And somebody else can become #2.

Android, on the other hand, is set. If a handset manufacturer screws up, it'll just get eaten by one of the others. If Google screws up the OS, it'll get forked from the source to the previous version. Google Play turns bad, there's Amazon's Appstore, and plenty more less well-known alternatives. There isn't any one controlling entity to screw up carrier relations, either.

Why would he? Chromebooks exist, you can install Linux on them.

Click on the gear icon in the upper right, look down to "Adjust Sources", then adjust how often you see results from that source down to "Never".

I suspect it's an attempt to replicate the Wall Street Journal model. The Wall Street Journal business/finance reporting, especially focused on the New York exchanges, is not generally replicated among mass-market newspapers. And it constitutes genuinely valuable work-related information to certain people who also have employer-provided expense accounts, these people go ahead and subscribe, and the subscriptions are paid by their employer as a business expense.

The Washington Post at least had (I don't know if they currently still do) a reputation for doing detailed nuts-and-bolts political/policy reporting on the US Federal Government in depth that nobody else matched. That is similarly genuinely valuable work-related information to certain people who also have employer-provided expense accounts, who will (presumably) then go ahead and subscribe, the subscriptions are paid by their employer as a business expense.

The Buffet-owned papers are, according to the article, going to go with "local, local, local stuff." Which is to say, the theory is the subscription will be worth it for the stuff that you can't get from a general-interest international paper. I'm more suspicious of this model; it doesn't have the advantage of the expense accounts. But it does at least try to sell something other than AP wire reports.

Um, no. The vending machine industry (under the name Dollar Coin Alliance) doesn't want to keep the dollar bill; they're the primary lobby for getting rid of it. To quote them, "Jammed $1 bills in vending machines cost the industry hundreds of millions in annual repair costs and lost sales."

Hmm? This is not nearly as bad as Jon Katz's shit was.

What was Microsoft thinking? Thinking had nothing to do with it; they had no choice.

See, Windows 98 SE was followed by Windows Me, which sucked more.
Windows Me was followed by Windows XP, which sucked less.
Windows XP was followed by Windows Vista, which sucked more.
Windows Vista was followed by Windows 7, which sucked less.

Windows 7 accordingly had to be followed by a "sucked more" release.

You're linking hack propagandist Florian Mueller? Are you trying to discredit yourself?

Only if Google continues to have operations in the EU. Moving Google's European operations entirely to, say, Switzerland, would be annoying but not impossible.

Given how Google handled the French-language press in Belgium, and that they've already said they'd stop indexing French news sites if required to pay, I think it's fairly obvious that they will make a stand.

Indeed, the current major complaint from the French government is that saying they'll de-index rather than pay is "threaten[ing] a democratically elected government."