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?

So let me get this straight: nasty criminals taking advantage of the security holes stopped them making and marketing glorious new products with glorious new security problems? Perhaps if security wasn't so bad to start with that would have been less of a problem. (yes, I know Windows security is pretty good these days, but it wan't then which is both my point and, essentially, his too)

Crap. Volume is not the only value of import here at all. Volume isn't insignificant, but the overall problem is more proportional to volume * ease-of-attack. If it were just volume then Apache would have been in the news for security problems more than IIS rather than the other way around.

That is why the LTS releases exist.

Until a short while ago my netbook ran 10.04 and could have done a while longer (but I replaced the spinning metal will an SSD and reinstalled rather than transferring the system to the new drive so upgrading at that point made sense). It might be slightly different on a main PC/laptop that you do more on than my netbook's workload, but I didn't find 10.04 to be too out-of-date for anything much (Firefrox, but there was an easy PPA for faster updates to that, and IIRC installing Chrom{e|ium} was a manual job too) so there was no need to go for 10.10, 11.04 or 11.10as 10.04 was still supported for security updates and critical bugs. I doubt I'll upgrade gain until after 14.04 is out.

If it were just a simple pissing match then it would just be them vs Google not them+government vs Google.

They've already lost the pissing match. In fact they didn't even have it because the knew they would lose: they could tell Google "pay or stop indexing us" and Google would say "fairy enough" and stop indexing them.

What this is, is the spoilt kid who isn't used to not winning running home and getting Daddy involved.

The question isn't so much as if their business model is good. The question is if their business model is legal or ethical. After all, robbing someone's house is a great business model in terms of making money.

Fairy nuf. But their business model WRT news is identical to the business model of the people that are moaning about is: take freely available information, and make money by collating it and making it available in a way that people find useful.

What Google do to on the "collating the information" front is a bit different, but the core model is the same. The editorialising that papers and such do is part of their collating effort but is something that Google do not need to do directly: they provide that service by also having a search engine that can check other resources in easy reach (they don't need to add a map of the middle east in a story about territorial arguments in order to give me more context within which to understand the information as I can just look it up if I need it, which I can necessarily do while reading a paper on the train). The "making available" part is different too, but again just because of the different medium.

Despite those differences the base model is the same: take, collate, make available, profit. They are complaining about someone else using their business model but somehow making it work better.

You are not wrong that editorial content can be considered new material, or at least a new derived work, but if they don't want indexing sites to index that material all they have to do is use facilities already available to stop indexing sites indexing that material. You don't need new legislation to stop Google indexing your content if you don't want them too, and if you do want them to index your content (because people might not find it otherwise) you can't demand that Google pay you for providing free links to it any more than I can demand the local telephone directory pays me for including my name/address/number.

And some are just plain green with envy that Google's business model is more-or-less working and theirs hasn't really done so for a while now. This isn't about creator's rights, this is playground-like cries of "not fair!".

Since the first news papers media outlets have taken freely available information then charged for it and wrapped adverts around it in order to pay for the distribution of that information (and making a profit too). Now someone else is playing their game and playing it better than them they are crying foul. Google's adverts are no more wrong then their adverts, issue prices or subscription costs: in both cases someone is profiting from the act of making information easier to access for those who pay (which to my mind is fair enough in both cases).

Are you suggesting that they do all that work indexing the content and giving you easy access to it for free? They aren't a charity you know.

Are you saying that news papers should not carry adverts either? Or charge for each issue more than cost price for manufacture and distribution? After all, all they've done is collate a bunch of information and by the same argument that doesn't give them the right to expect to profit from it.

With words like "appropriate" you talk like they are pulling a FunnyJunk and taking all the content, deliberately removing attribution & all other links to the original. Google present the headline and perhaps the first sentence or so, along with where they go the news from and a full link to the originating site.

Even if it doesn't break the Internet, it is completely unnecessary and will just add complication and therefore cost. If the news outlets don't want Google to use their content in the manner that Google uses content then they should just ask to be de-listed, or use the facility that already exists in robots.txt to tell Google not to index the content that they wish to keep for themselves. Problem solved. The thing is, this is not what they want: they want to be in Google's index but on their terms, terms that would help them perpetuate their out-of-date business model.