QLED is a con, but for entirely different reasons than you state. Samsung where extremely light on details when they introduced their QLED televisions, but questioning by AV sites revealed that these are not electroluminescent quantum dot displays, but are in fact LCD displays with a quantum dot backlight. It's a lot like Samsung's so called LED displays, that are again just LCD displays with an LED backlight. There's no denying that these quantum dot LCDs are a significant improvement over standard LCD, but they still possess many of the drawbacks of LCD, and to market them as quantum dot displays is misleading.

Companies are working on true electroluminescent quantum dot displays, with BOE being the first to demonstrate prototypes. There are some pictures here, and another article here. There's a video somewhere but I can't find it right now. Digitimes reported that Samsung have prototype electroluminescent quantum dot displays that they have not yet shown publicly, and other Chinese manufacturers besides BOE are working on the technology.

It still looks like its a good few years before we'll see commercial electroluminescent quantum dot displays, and micro-LED displays may have taken off by then. I'm still waiting for a decent computer monitor. It is insane that nearly 20 years later you still can't get a monitor that comes close to the Sony GPD-FW900.

I hadn't heard about Snapcraft until now, but taking a look at the site it sounds like it will fix some major problems and make Linux a more viable platform.

I'm just moving to Linux and have been doing a bit of development. A major drawback I've found is the trouble releasing your software, since it requires multiple builds and different packages for different distributions. The trouble distributing software has been a significant factor in putting me off Linux, but it sounds like Snapcraft will make things much easier by allowing you to do just one build and bundle all the dependencies.

Another thing I've found annoying about Linux is that the software in the repositories is often extremely old and there's no way to upgrade to the latests version. It sounds like Snapcraft will solve this problem as well with auto-updates. I just hope there's a way to keep a specific version if you don't want to upgrade.

These were actually my two biggest issues with Linux, and I'm very enthused to hear there's a solution. It sounds like Snapcraft will make things easier for both developers and users.

This is going to give a powerful voice to people who can afford to pay for it. With more newspapers and websites adding a paywall, the market will be left open for wealthy people to buy newspapers, operate them at a loss, and use them as their personal mouthpiece. Wealthy individuals already have significant influence on our society, and their influence will only grow when theirs is the only opinion we can read for free.

This is a worrying situation.

I'd much rather have a programmer design the user interface than a UX designer. With a programmer you usually get a logical, well constructed interface that follows standards and offers easy access the software's functionality. Meanwhile, most UX designers turn up and say, "let's recreate the interface with flat design, remove all the colours, hide all the options, remove all customisation, spread the buttons all over the place, and after we've finished let's redesign the whole thing again next year."

I've used Windows and commercial applications all my life, but in recent years I've found myself using free open source software far more, and Windows 10 has me moving to Linux. This isn't for idealogical reasons, but with free software the developer generally creates the user interface, so you get something that's usable. Commercial software tends to bring in UX designers who have a nasty habit of taking good software and rendering it totally worthless.

Making an absolute claim like this is always a great way to make yourself look stupid. I remember at university chips were currently being fabricated using a 24micron process and a lecturer claimed it would be impossible to go below 8microns (I may be getting the numbers wrong here) because it was below the physical wavelength of light. Nearly two decades later, here we are at 10nm with further process shrinkages planned.

You could have claimed it was mathematically impossible to reduce the fabrication process further due to the wavelength of light, but that doesn't mean there aren't ways around problems. To claim something is impossible simply because you don't know the solution is a great way to make yourself look stupid in the future.

This is a moral dilemma, and there are strong arguments both ways, but I lean towards feeding them for a number of reasons for this. Firstly, human activity is having a very negative impact on bird populations, and populations are declining rapidly. It seems morally correct to compensate for the damage by help the animals, and feeding them to maintain their population is one way of doing that.

Feeding does seem to have a beneficial effect. For example if we look at tits, a family of birds that are very adept at eating from feeders, we see their population is stable. While if we look at sparrows, which will absolutely never eat from feeders and will only ever feed from the ground, we see their population is in decline, and numbers are headed towards dangerously low levels. As human populations continue to expand, it appears as though feeding of birds is the only thing that's going to save them.

The second reason I lean towards feeding is that during the winter 50% of small birds die due to a combination of starving and freezing to death, which is an extremely unpleasant way to go. If I were starving and freezing, I know I would like somebody to give me food, and I'm certain the birds would have the same attitude. Feeding birds avoids a lot of suffering. Yes, it does interfere with nature, but humans are already interfering on a massive scale. We may as well engage in some positive interference to counter our huge negative impact.

Wikipedia defines a crash as when a computer program "stops functioning properly and exits". A crash is generally a non-recoverable state. Are you sure you don't mean the site was overloaded?

More interesting is the website "intermittently crashed". I think we'll need Mr Hawking to explain the mechanics behind a program that is both crashed and not crashed. It must be that quantum physics stuff.

No, that's not the way open source software works. The Blink rendering engine is released under the BSD license, and placing instructions for uninstalling the software next to the download link is not a requirement of that licence. Vivaldi is required to fulfil the terms of the licences under which Chromium is released, no more and no less.

Besides, Google isn't even using the Chromium licence to manipulate Vivaldi. They're claiming that Vivaldi isn't meeting the terms of Google AdWords, and is using that to force Vivaldi to jump through hoops.

Google has been abusing its monopoly position with alarming regularity recently, and clearly intervention is necessary. Unfortunately, any intervention will likely be in the form of a fine, which helps nobody. In situations like this the only real solution is to split Google into multiple companies, each of which gets a copy of the search engine code and full data set. The companies can then compete against each other from the same initial starting point. When presented with real competition their ability to be evil is significantly limited.

Winamp was required to play mp3 files on Windows in the late 90s because Windows Media player did not support the codec. This allowed Winamp to grow as a successful product, up until Microsoft started bundling Windows Media Player 7 with Windows. Since WMP7 had support for mp3, most people just used that, simply because that's what mp3 files opened in when they double clicked on them. This lead to a rapid decline in Winamp users, and thus through the illegal practice of bundling Microsoft was able to abuse its Windows monopoly to kill off another competitor.

Bundling is an illegal practice for trust companies, and it always amazes me that they were able to get away with this with no investigation at all. It's not the only time Microsoft has used its bundling of Windows Media Player to its advantage. With WMP9 Microsoft added the VC-1 codec as a competitor to h.264. VC-1 was supposed to offer lower royalty payments to h.264, while offering similar performance, but once all patents were assessed the royalty payments turned out to be the same as h.264, so VC-1 offered no advantage at all to the incumbent codec. However, Microsoft used its Windows monopoly and bundled WMP application to push VC-1, and they were so successful they managed to get VC-1 included in with the Blu-ray and HD-DVD standards. Some early Blu-rays from Warner used VC-1, but the quality was noticeably inferior to h.264, and thus it is rarely, if ever, used for Blu-rays now. However, thanks to its monopoly abuse anyone who buys a Blu-ray player is paying money to Microsoft because all Blu-ray players have to support VC-1.

The lack of "improvement" is what keeps Thunderbird good. Could you imagine if it had been "improved" in the same way that Firefox has. The user interface would be a train wreck, it would have all sorts of wonderful plugins like Pocket, they'd be planning on breaking all extensions by the end of the year and every new release would remove features.

No, I'm very happy that Mozilla have left Thunderbird well alone. Sure, there are a few bugs that could be fixed, but compared to the alternative of Mozilla continuing developing, I'd rather keep the bugs.