In fareness to the manufacturers: that contract you are stuck with is not with them nor was it arranged by them. Though you are right, lack of updates for rather expensive devices after small amount of time is something that puts me off Android based devices at the moment.

Actually, most of the hate is the other way around: people berating MS for forcing mobile optimised elements on the desktop.

If they had limited carrying capacity then it'll have come down to known/unknown factors. They'd have some knowledge of how to identify iDevoce versions (as they are likely to be retail units) and know the back-o-lorry market value for the iPads with some degree of accuracy so they'd know what they were walking away with. The surface units they'd know less about in those regards: it is possible that they are pre-production units or otherwise easily identifed as from there rather than the retail channel, which would make them harder to shift even if there were a good price for them generally on the nicked market right now.

By "some time" I'm meaning days or weeks, not many months or more.

Slap everything commented that doesn't need to persist with a "CLEANUP" tag and scan for them pre-release or at then end of a run of sprints (and/or as you approach a release, where-ever it fits in your flow) as part of your other housekeeping tasks. Give the job to a junior so he/she might learn from the changes (have a more experienced dev to hand in case of questions, and to try make sure the wrong things are not learnt from less "clean" work).

Each open source project will their own preferences and rules which are fine by me, but equally are not my problem currently (if I were to have something to contribute I'd would of course try to fit into the project's preferred coding standards (or just release my changes as-is and if anyone else wants to clean them up and claim the credit they can go right ahead, if not then fair enough too)).

Commenting just code is fine for temporary testing/debugging/rewriting.

Leaving code in a commented state is a comment ("this is how something used to be done here"), but not a terribly helpful one. If you find yourself doing this, as well as commenting the code add a true comment stating why and what code replaces its function (the bit above, the bit below, something elsewhere, nothing (it is truly deprecated)?) and why.

Once some time has passed, unless the change is significant and there is a chance someone will come along and "unchange" it not knowing the history, such comments along with the commented code should be removed as it is all in source control anyway - but keeping it in your face (and the faces of other people working on the code) in the short term can sometimes be quite helpful especially in the case of code several people are actively looking at as one of them may quickly spot a flaw (which may otherwise go unnoticed for a while longer) that makes your new more clean/fast/bugless code far less perfect than you first thought.

The amount of jiggery pokery they'd done to the internals was quite obvious and caused one of Vista's greatest problems. A lot of the internals had changed including several alterations that meant needing new drivers for existing devices which a lot of manufacturers didn't bother producing (why would Epson, to give an example I presonally experienced, spend time writing drivers for their old devices, time they'd see no money back from, when they might instead get some sales of a new devices when peopel discovered Vista didn't like the old ones?), and often the Vista drivers (both for new devices and where they were created to support old ones) were much less tested than the existing XP ones so early adoptors exsperienced a lot of bugs.

Probably at some point, once the relevant evidence is collected and researched. There have been a couple of cases against high profile individuals in recent years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholicism_in_Belgium#Pedophile_priests_scandal) but collating the right evidence to make a solid case against a large organisation is rather more difficult.

Altering a video convincingly is much harder than an indivdual frame, though still possible.

In this instance a there will be other evidence to back up the video: the sequencing of the lights will follow certain patterns for instance, so changing the colour of lights in the video is likely to create a sequence that simply isn't possible. In most cases where video or photographic evidence is accpeted, it is used in conjunction with other evidence rather than trusted on its face value alone because of how many ways such things can be tampered with.

Also in instances like this it is unlikely to come to court. The insurance company certainly won't fight like that, and the driver will hopefully have either the good sense to not waste the time and money or not have the time/money to throw at such a case anyway. It it really was the insurer calling then it would have been simply to check that they were safe to reject a claim, if not then it will be someone acting on behalf of the driver testing the water to see if there is enough evidence to make a claim (or further appeal) pointless.

The quote is "open-source information" - the lack of capitalisation is significant here: no link to the OSI is intended to be implied.

Open-source information is a fairly common term in some circles, it refers to information that can be obtained or derived from sources that are open to (legitimate) public access. In other words accessing that information does not in itself constitute a break of any law or other rule.

Of course the way he used the information once he had obtained it is another matter.

They can't in this instance. "open-source information" is a phrase that has been used by people intelligence services, academia, and other organisations since long before the OSI existed in any form. Even if they could afford the team of lawyers Microsoft use to defend their sole use of the word "windows" in certain contexts, I doubt this would be one of the contexts where they would win.

Could be encryption export restrictions (yes, I knwo the devices were made in China in the first place and are available everywhere else anyway so the restriction has no real effect, but that are still legal restrictions).

There may be other trade limiting legislation that is relevant.

She could be bypassing import/export taxes and other such.

Getting less iPhone specific: she may have been intending to use the phones to pay for other illegal products/services, high priced items are sometimes used as part of attempts to launder money associated with drug and people transportation.



Nothing that really warrants a tasering, though if she was getting overly argumentative they could claim (however disengenuously) that they reacted in fear that she might become violent and put other members of the public in danger.

There are two thigs that make it costing more than Windows unsurprising.

Firstly the cost of Windows to manufacturers like Dell is much much much lower per unit than the likes of you or I would pay personally, and they get a kick-back for every bit of crapware they install on it for you which could easily make the Windows+crap solution zero cost. The crapware is not available for Linux, so they lose that couple of $/unit.

Secondly, if they have done as much work as "the result of a skunkworks project to optimise the open-source OS to run on Dell projects, to create better laptops for developers" might imlpy, then that sort of work to any decent quality level costs a fair amount in experienced man-time. Most chipset/device manufacturers produce their own Windows drivers that are (eventually, usually after a few revisions) fast and stable, but produce very little or nothing at all for other OSs such as Linux. This means that anything not yet fully supported and optimsed by the mainstream kernel woudl need work from Dell's team - and it may not be easy work as often public documentation for such things is sparce or otherwise lacking (or simply not available: they may have had to pay for access to some information).

This isn't about creaming money of us silly Linux people - it is about not doing work for nothing (which is fine for individuals and small groups who are making use of what would otherwise be spare time, but very difficult to get passed your shareholders when you are a publicly listed company).

As Windows gradually loses market share due to the number of devices (I'm including everything here, not just desktops and laptops where Windows is still very much king) running other options (Android, iOS, Linux, ...) the device support situation will hopefully change to the point where (at very least) good documentation is publicly available for most things.

Excellent, my evil island cloaking device is functioning perfectly. They'll never know my nefarious plans until they are too late to do anything about them!

But they also can't stop their customers making the GPL covered code available elsewhere once they have access to it, so releasing to their customers is effectively releasing to the world.

Unfortunately most of the general public think that because nothing really went wrong there was not a problem in the first place, and that it was all hyped up by the media. Some of this is the simple truth that it was over-hyped by the media who over-hype everything so people are growing desensitised, some of it is people not bothering to research their opinions or properly engage their critical thinking abilities.

Nope. Not just your browser. Your browser, your OS & some of its support libraries that many other apps may use.