Here 47 days before this announcement they were removing it on Sony Fools Day.

Please be assured that SCE is committed to continue the support for previously sold models that have the "Install Other OS" feature and that this feature will not be disabled in future firmware releases.

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me

Have they added an option to let you get into your board firmware without having to first agree to their EULA? Thanks to their Win8 compliance specs if you don't want to agree to it your only choice in practice is to remove the boot drive to get into the firmware menu (voiding the warranty on your new laptop).

The summary includes one of the major differences, the kernel. Wheezy (and sid as of now) has 3.2, this aptosid release has 3.9. The aptosid kernel stays very close to vanilla mainline with the latest stable/important/security patches and suitably tuned for most desktop users.

Another major difference is the installer (and it's live system) which brings a coherent set of packages to start with and some initial configuration which helps make it more suitable for use as a sid system such as disabling the installation of recommended packages by default. The initial aptosid system is a clean sid system, such as you can get from debootstrapping, without the pain of bootstrapping or the baggage accumulated by starting from a stable system and upgrading it to sid.

As a result of not being tied to the Debian kernel and debian-installer it can also often adopt features ahead of Debian itself without breaking compatibility with sid. Examples have included ath5k support for a fully Free wifi experience, insserv support for parrallel starting of initscripts and support for installing on EFI systems. Of course it doesn't support everything d-i does nor all the architectures of the Debian kernel.

The aptosid manual is great and covers an awful lot of material from setting things up to maintaining your system, guiding you to keep a supportable system in the unstable environment. It's available in 14 languages at the moment.

The artwork of course is also aptosid's own, changing with each release. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and of course you can pick other art from the Debian packages or your own images for wallpapers ... though I never bother.

Finally there is a community which wants to support those running sid and a "fix.main" section of the aptosid repo which often includes some "hot-fixes" for issues which have cropped up in sid, helping to protect it's users, sometimes briefly just waiting for the next debian mirror push and sometimes for issues which end up staying in sid for a long time.

This is not true of aptosid. The update procedure is simply to stop X, run "apt-get dist-upgrade" and make sure what it wants to do seems sane before accepting it.

This is absolutely true and for similar reasons to why Debian has recommended using apt-get to perform the dist-upgrades between their stable releases. With sid you want to dist-upgrade and the predictable and consistent nature of apt-get is far better suited for this then aptitude which can often be too smart for it's own good.

Acer C7 Chromebook £199 from amazon.co.uk (for a sterling comparison as you said £229). This has a Sandy Bridge Celeron so it's a cut back Core processor but it would be the one I'd be most interested in seeing benchmarked like-for-like with this $250 Arm Chromebook.

Presuming you meant scrape (cause we know they aren't scrapping it) the more interesting question to me is: what is to stop facebook and/or google (maybe others) from picking a side and providing an interface to their chosen candidates campaign? If one side had a direct link to mine whatever they wanted what influence would that have on the result of the election?

I'm not sure where your second quote comes from? Yes, shim (or the LF thing) needs to be signed by Microsoft, but the idea here of both these options is that one person/group gets the first-stage bootloader signed (i.e. shim) and then others can use it as a blob which can then be told by a physically present user to trust other items which are not signed by Microsoft. The "here" link in my first post provides a good chunk of extra info.

Linux Foundation approach to Secure Boot
James Bottomley just published a description of the Linux Foundation's Secure Boot plan, which is pretty much as I outlined in the second point here - it's a bootloader that will boot untrusted images as long as a physically present end-user hits a key on every boot, and if a user switches their machine to setup mode it'll enrol the hash of the bootloader in order to avoid prompting again. In other words, it's less useful than shim. Just use shim instead.

Further UEFI bootloader work
A couple of people have asked whether we're planning on implementing the Linux Foundation approach of simply asking the user whether they want to boot an unsigned file. We've considered it, but at the moment are leaning towards "no" - it's simply too easy to use to trick naive users into running untrusted code. Users are trained to click through pretty much any security prompt that they see, and if an attacker replaces a legitimate bootloader with one that asks them to press "y" to make their computer work, they'll press "y". If that bootloader then launches a trojaned Windows bootloader that launches a trojaned Windows kernel, that's kind of a problem. This could be somewhat mitigated by limiting this feature to removable media, and we're seriously considering that, but there are still some risks associated. We might just end up writing the code but disabling it at build time, and then anyone who wants to distribute with that policy can do so at their own risk.

So a tablet with a hdmi port and usb is a PC? Even when it's not connected to the monitor and keyboard/mouse?

The main problem with the present crop of tablets for doing this is the software it is running, which is probably driven by the obsession with capacitive multi-touch. There's also the problem of Apple requiring you to cludge around with third party adapters to get usb or hdmi (and I've no idea if they handle a mouse) and Google's Nexus is even more useless in terms of ports. There are still plenty of tablets though with usb-host and hdmi.

If just any mobile gpu manufacturer would provide decent Free drivers so people could get hacking we really could see the year of Linux on the ?Desktop? (or at least a year of it before one or more of Apple/MS/Google adopt the best concepts and claim they invented it). I suppose it's possible MS might already be aiming for this sort of usage with their forthcoming Windows tablets but until they are actually released (in volume) who knows.

Nigel Farage

UKIP

May as well quote the Pope "abortion is bad m'kay".

You say you want a "small" card which isn't expensive, just outputs to dvi/hdmi/vga/whatever and you don't care about features? Have you ever tried one of the cheapest AMD cards? They fit your requirements using Free drivers that work as expected (e.g. xrandr to toy with displays) and AMD have been releasing the documentation you are requesting for a few generations of chips. Yes, the authors of the radeon and radeonhd "drivers" decided to quit writing their own firmware for the cards and instead depend upon the AMD firmware for a wide range of features, but that was a pragmatic decision as can be seen by how much the radeonhd guys managed without using the binary firmware (including adding features such as hdmi audio before those using the non-free firmware).

.bingo.
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.so .if .an .art .fan .gifts .me .digital .video .camera .and .sexy .pro .star .rental .to .suck .off .and .stroke .my .wang, .im .hosting .one .diy .bj .porn .movie .free .at .cheap .pub .site. .ooo

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Is this saner than docking by connecting a video cable (i.e. hdmi) for an external monitor and usb cable to storage, input devices and even networking? The only potential problem I see then is charging via the same usb port which I admit might be tricky at best with current phones. Plenty of tablets have multiple usb ports and/or dedicated charging ports though but I'd imagine a tablet (I'd fancy 7" @ 720p or higher myself) would be far more usable on it's own for the sort of apps you would run docked. A real (desktop) browser or office suite on a phone is impractical for all but the most trivial uses on 4.x" resistive screen let alone the capacitive screens which appear to have taken over.

As others have mentioned, the 12.5% isn't even the best rate around. Moving to Ireland is more generally about the Double Irish whereby you form two companies in Ireland, one based in a true tax haven like the Caymans. Ireland then lets the company in the tax haven not pay Irish taxes, so it sells "IP" to the other company at whatever price they want (no transfer pricing rules), so while one company banks all the revenue, it pays just about everything over to the shell "IP" company where it is basically all untaxed profit. In practice this means the company chooses it's real tax rate in Ireland by deciding how much of it's revenues it doesn't ship out to the tax haven.

You seem to have access to a website you could already publish it on no?

Failing that for whatever reason you could put it in a wiki on branchable? No I'm not affiliated to them in any way but they were the first "good" answer which jumped to my mind.

More obscure but perhaps extra appropriate for the topic at hand, you could publish it on a "hidden service" on tor?