It is interesting that the age of enlightenment was about rational certainities, it is printed in black and white after all, but the information age allows an older style of open view of the world, which can only be a good thing in my humble opinion. However, there are always people doing stupid things and equally stupid people (like me) like to laugh at them.

Until very recently computing has all been utilising the benefits of this year's more powerful and more resource hungry x86 processor. Relatively cheap laptops are more powerful than supercomputers 15 years ago but the user experience is not particularly more responsive because software gets increasingly bloated.

ARM devices are really a different proposition, on the plus side they have no moving parts and a long battery life, however they are a very different architecture to x86, and making the OS perform well requires lots of differences. Linux (and therefore android too) was always built to be a modular system and one thing it does well is support different platforms with many compatible but swappable components at every level. The world's top supercomputers and the £25 Raspberry Pi both happily run Linux.

Windows is very different. It is a set of very tightly integrated libraries, which has its benefits, but they all need to be scaled down to work on ARM, you cannot just swap out some resource hungry component for some open source project because the system is so interdependent. Scaling down software is much harder than scaling it up.

Therefore I am not suprised that Samsung found Windows' ARM version slow and resource hungry. Just because Windows dominated the x86 era, it does not mean it will be suitable for the new and disruptive ARM age.

Because they want you to buy it twice. [I should try the preview button :)

Because you they want you to buy it twice. (Unless your smart like Cory Doctorow who lets you have the ebook free to try before you buy the paper one).

Funny how they want to engage with the public when it is free and does not upset the interests of any multinationals.

In the U-turn post, TFA says: "...Microsoft adopting WebKit [means] there wouldn’t be a strong opposing implementation of HTML5 to keep WebKit honest"

Well who keeps Microsoft honest? It is better for users that they use software that can be independently peer reviewed by the public. The line between a piece of proprietary software and a computer virus is merely an arbitrary choice of what negative side effects you can personally tolerate - both cannot be independently reviewed to see what they are doing. So getting rid of proprietary software for open source software is always a win.

There are plenty of other alternatives to webkit, Mozilla's gecko being the most competitive. Ditching HTML5 would also make writing Javascript a lot easier, since currently a lot of wrapper code is always required to cope with Internet Explorer's non-standard behaviour.

"The light that burns twice as bright, burns half as long. And you have burned so very, very brightly." (Bladerunner)

Stick the last version you have on github (or similar) if you haven't already.

1 million might have signed up, not really found a use for it and moved on.

I personally have not used it yet. I use GNU/Linux so I have complete control over my computer and my data, the cloud undermines that.

The cloud might turn us all into clowns...

Why don't we use the international space station for nuclear fuel reprocessing? The energy generated would power the ISS and new higher powered experiments. The leftover (significantly smaller) waste could be shoved in an old Soyuz and sent out of orbit.

I cannot see how Skype represents that much value. Getting an open source VOIP client has now risen up my TODO list.