Well, if you want Android but you want to get updates straight from the OS manufacturer like you do with the iPhone... then get a Nexus? That's what they're for.

It's the same as the people who complain about the custom skin on their phone and say they just want plain, vanilla Android. Some people don't care about that, but if you're someone who does, then the Nexus range of phones is specifically designed for you.

This springs to mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

Do something everyone hates, then "compromise" with something slightly more attractive so that people think they're getting a good deal.

Reminds me of a phone company that we looked into for a security class at university (I'm Australian). They allowed access to anyone's account balance simply by calling a number and entering their mobile number. The system provided no other means of verifying your identity. They were investigated by the Privacy Commission and were found to he in breach of the Privacy Act. I can't imagine this company cannot also be.

I don't really understand why this is something people want so badly to be honest. Even if I could deny permissions to an app, do I really want to give business to someone who is clearly making a Trojan of some description. If a photo editing app is asking for permissions for things it really shouldn't (okay, I can think of reasons why a photo app would want what you said, but I'm speaking more generally here) then it kind of draws into question whether the app is actually any good or the developer is just trying to data mine everyone or something. Give your business to the app makers that don't require almost every permission to be installed and hopefully the developers will realise people aren't just going to accept anything anymore.

Microsoft has said that Windows 8 will support Flash, it will just be disabled if you view a page in the Metro UI. I can't imagine many people doing that beyond on a tablet like it is intended for.

Wikipedia tells me TLS 1.1 came out in 2006 and 1.2 came out in 2008, yet still there are many sites that don't support them. It doesn't matter if your browser supports it if the people running the servers it's communicating with are too lazy to update, even after 5 years.

Though the table has what I assume is the section detailing the x86_64 machines cut off, the two systems are running two different DEs. And two different versions of X. Also have different amounts of RAM, different sized HDDs, different motherboards, and are using different file systems. Not that those last things will have as much of an effect on the benchmark I don't imagine, but it desperately raises the question why they didn't just dual boot Ubuntu and PC-BSD on the same machine...

Not really sure what you're saying but Syllable is both a custom Linux distro, which is their server edition, and an operating system which was built from AtheOS which has it's own kernel, which is what is their desktop edition. The server edition is basically just there so that you can have a server with all the capabilities of Linux but a UI similar to the desktop OS's. It's been a while since I've used Syllable so things may have changed a bit though.

I think it's important to develop alternatives to Linux and BSD even if they don't have the app support (though some things can just be recompiled).

And I mean, if the developers enjoy working on it then that's up to them any way.

In case anybody doesn't know, the new standard for C that is currently being planned includes multithreading support in the form of a threads.h header.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C1x

I believe the newest GCC includes some support for some of the features of that standard already (which of the features I can't remember).

I agree absolutely. Reminds me of a story on the news a little while ago about how on average women weren't getting paid as much as men. I supposed we were all supposed to be outraged and stop listening by then, because when they went into the actual story it was simply that a large number of women were choosing lower paying jobs. Now, if there was a man and woman both doing the exact same work and the man was being paid more, then yes I would be disgusted, but we can't tell people that they HAVE to do certain jobs simply because it pays more money. It's not like the universities are rejecting female applicants to courses with high paying careers (in fact, I am now at university and most of my friends that are doing the higher paying courses are female). If women don't want to work in IT, then they don't have to work in IT. If women would rather get into a career that they enjoyed, but didn't necessarily pay as much, then that's their choice. And the same thing applies to men.