Agreed, Linux needs to focus on the end-product. However it should also refrain from trying to differentiate itself for the sake of it. Unity comes across as an crappy attempt to be stylish rather than contribute an easily developed and more usable interface.

I've never found Xfce to consume more memory than Gnome, in fact a quick Google search confirms it uses less than KDE & GNOME and only marginally more than LXDE. In terms of performance Xfce is blisteringly quick, after using GNOME for three years and a stint with KDE, Xfce has been fantastic with it's performance.

Go and actually download Xfce, it's 15MB. Not even in the same league as GNOME's 200MB.

Any /. lawyers on here care to explain just how legal weight a copyright warning holds?

If someone received a warning from their ISP and were able to track the company responsible for identifying you, how much weight would their supposed evidence hold in a court? I don't know about New Zealand, but hasn't the legal strength of an IP address being used to identify someone been successfully challenged in court before. Furthermore should a user be disconnected by their ISP, could a user then go after one of these IP enforcement mobs for slander or loss of productivity as a result of one of these warnings?

It would be interesting to see the validity of these warnings challenged in court.

My father wants to start a new cloud storage company called blackhole.

At least they'd be honest about their business...

It's just our Facebook Immunity System making sure you're safe. Honest!

That was one of the famous stories of Apple's Cupertino campus. An employee once left a note under the windshield wiper of Steve's car that said Park Different.

In an ideal capitalistic market, Verizon would then lose business from the higher pricing, their competition would get a leg-up. The alternative being that they do not pass this cost onto the consumer and remain at a competitive price-point.

In this bullshit version of real-world capitalism, Verizon increases the price and then the competition does as well, simply because they can get away with it. The alternative is that very few people can move carrier because of prohibitive consumer contracts, by the time many of these contracts have expired, consumers simply renew partially out of forgetfulness and partially due to convenience.

The prices asked by console makers for new generation consoles have always been prohibitive to sales, with the exception being the more dedicated players. Though in recent years a lot of the growth in the industry has been from the adoption by the casual gaming markets, which makes the proposition even riskier for console-markers.

Probably the biggest issue stopping newer generations of consoles is the cost, the tens of millions spent on R&D, the then millions more for marketing and manufacturing, historically Microsoft & Sony have also spend big buying exclusive rights for launch-title games. More recently, to launch a new console can cost a company like Microsoft roughly $250 million and often they'll sell those consoles at a loss for the first 6-18 months, which comes on top of that initial investment, an investment they're unlikely to see a return on for two years or more. This is a big part of the reason why there are so few console-makers, the investment needed is impossible for any electronics company to justify.

What we're likely to see more of are generations of consoles which will take bigger leaps in hardware performance, but console generations which'll often last a decade or more. It's been a business model that's made the Playstation 2 (and now the Playstation 3) very profitable investments.

Last time I checked, sales of the Kinect had blown the Playstation Move out of the water and re-invigorated sales in the Xbox 360. In most markets the Xbox 360 outsells the Playstation 3 and it's the first console by a western company to become a serious competitor in the Japanese market.

When did we get the first look?

The Drobo's are a pretty big NAS player, I'm looking at ordering myself a Drobo + 10TB of storage myself, though I thought Drobo also supported RAID 0/1/5/6? Surely they could've done a piece comparing just those features alone.

Can we have a description that isn't plainly biased toward either Apple or Samsung with these patent lawsuit stories?

For a company that's been convicted time & time again for anti-competitive behaviour and bullying it's competition, Samsung seems to get a lot of sympathy from /.'ers.

Taken individually, yes Apple's patent claims are ridiculous, the idea that Apple can patent a black square with rounded edges highlights how much of a joke the patent system currently is. Though if we take all of Apple's patent infringement claims together it does appear Apple have a case, fashion designers have won lawsuits in the past based on greater differentiation & less evidence.

I don't agree that Microsoft hasn't innovated in 20 years. The Xbox had quite a lot that the competition lacked at the time, the Windows Phone has a rather different approach to other handset OSs & the continued development of Windows 7 and Windows 8 is has been rather different to the one Microsoft (And other PC operating systems) have traditionally taken.

In all the examples I've given above, are all projects Steve Ballmer has had very little input in. As a CEO, you couldn't pick someone who was more of an unimaginative, direction-less bureaucrat and it shows from everything Microsoft did from the late 1990's until recently. I don't know what's happened in the last four years but Microsoft have really gained some direction and begun to really innovate.
The problem it seems is Microsoft is now working in the shadow of Apple in terms of the failed Zune and now the Windows Phone, that's not to say they're bad devices, but they're trying to innovate in areas where Apple dominates using a very different approach. To the point where it's given Microsoft a huge disadvantage if they want an innovative/different product to succeed.

Then again, these Microsoft stores appear to do nothing more than to follow Apple. There are advantages to how Apple handle retail, but the way in which MIcrosoft have done is appears to be nothing more than copying the competition.