...but the way Oracle runs it, probably getting to be most-hated and most-abandoned too. At some point most-abandoned will cross with most popular and it won't be most popular anymore.

I will let them know.

The rest of us are stuck with Java 1.4.2, 6, and 7 due to poorly written apps using RMI to go to c:\program files(x85)\...to check version numbers and using == instead of = to run.

Or we left long ago to Ror.

Bee powered meshnet when?

ZigBees?

I'm not worried. I've already set up a honey pot to trap them.

...falls from the sky for free all the time.

There are many places in the US (typically in the West) where unless you own the water rights to the land you are on, you do not own the water that falls onto that land. So rainwater is only free for certain values of free.

If you ever want to give up Taco Bell, get a good smell of 'Ol' Roy' brand canned beef dog food, then goto a Taco Bell and inhale. You will recognize the smell.

Not this nonsense again.

Unlike Taco Bell, Ol' Roy brand canned beef dog food contains actual beef.

... by which mankind has swindled itself are religion and bottled water.

Demand a fair market price, if Nestle moves on let them.

"Next to nothing" is a fair market price for water. I pay about $1 per HCF (hundred cubic feet) at the retail level, for water pumped to my house. That is about a 30th of a cent, or $0.0003 per liter. This is in drought threatened California. In most other areas, water is even cheaper.

The prices listed in TFA are reasonable, and only sound otherwise to people that have no idea just how cheap water is. Any government is going to get way way way more from jobs and property taxes that they could ever expect to get by charging a few extra pennies per HCF for the water.

You're splitting hairs. Intrinsic rights don't exist; all rights are entitlements.

Thus, anything can become a right; it is up to society to decide which are beneficial to civilization and which are detrimental.

Terms like 'natural rights' are simply rhetorical devices indicating rights which are so fundamental to civil society that denying them would threaten the whole enterprise.

Clean water absolutely deserves to be a right anywhere sufficient infrastructure exists to provide it affordably. It's inarguable that potable water benefits civilization far more than it costs, unless you want to return to an era when cholera, typhoid, and dysentery were leading causes of death.

Well, it sounds like the only reasonable thing to do would be to provide the National Cybersecurity Centre with much more funding!!

Don't forget abolishing any privacy or encryption.

Rather than obsessing about buying the right security products, Levy argued, organisations should instead focus on managing risk: understanding the data they hold, the value it has, and how much damage it could do if it was lost, for instance.

He has a good point. When an all out attack does happen you won't be able to stop it. So before it does, make sure your backups work, make sure your restores work, put fences up to stop the spread of an attack, etc, etc.

In other words, assume the attack will succeed. Then what will you do?

It's hard to believe the internet would hyperbolize something just for fun.

Maciej Ceglowski, a Polish-American web developer,

...better known as the owner of Pinboard (which recently bought Delicious!), and is somewhat well-known on Twitter for his snarky, witty commentary. He's not just some random guy with a blog.

Everyday I come to this site, and everyday I think we'll talk about some exciting tech news. But all that's here is news about some dude recording video tapes in his basement and people being mad about beta software not working.

It's almost as if the editors aren't actually nerds.

collection keeps that sweet nostalgia content safe from degradation of the magnetic tape, which starts to go downhill within 10 to 25 years. He's capturing them in HD using a 1080p upscaler, at a full 50fps frame rate by converting to HDMI before grabbing -- a higher frame rate than many standard commercial digitizing devices that capture at 30fps -- so that no frames are missed.

Why?

VHS only has about 333x480 (NTSC) or 335x576 (PAL) resolution in luminosity, much lower color resolution. There is no point capturing it at higher resolution - you're just wasting storage space with duplicated or made-up pixels.

The framerate thing I can sorta understand - both NTSC and PAL were interlaced. So for example, the actual resolution of NTSC VHS was 333x240 @ 60 fps interlaced, which when deinterlaced (the alternate lines of video interpolated) created 333x480 frames @ 60 fps. While modern computer video formats do support interlacing, I've noticed annoying artifacts when they're converted badly (you'll see horizontal lines during quick panning or quick horizontal movement). So I can understand.capturing at 333x480 @ 60 fps when it only contains 333x240 @ 60 fps of information.

Maybe if he had access to the original Betacam tapes I could understand capturing in HD. Those had 720x480 or 720x576 resolution with 10-bit 4:2:2 chroma compression. But if your source media is plain VHS...

Why only 99%? If the software is FOSS, then the protection should be 100%, no less.

"FOSS-ware" would mean "(Free/Open Source Software)-ware"

The accepted terms are "free software," "free (as in speech) software," "software libre," and if you really insist, "F/OSS" or "FOSS" as expanded above. Also valid but with slightly different definitions: "GPL-compatible" (tighter definition), "open source" (looser definition, allows prohibiting modification or even sharing), and "copyleft" (looser still).

If I were to coin a new term for something meeting RMS's Free Software Definition, I'd consider "freedomware"

The problem was that systemd was railroaded so fast through most of the major distros -- almost as if it were an insideous update to a proprietary OS, with the questionable acceptance by the Debian technical committee being the worst outcome, as it affected so many derivative distros.

This is untrue. Yes, many distros decided to adopt it in a short timeframe, but Red Hat had been testing systemd for years before that, and it's not like this was the first time that someone has either tried to replace sysvinit or someone has tried to introduce process tracking to the kernel. The pain points were known for decades, and as someone who has written a (short) book on the shell, anyone who prefers Bash as a scripting language has brain damage.

Debian's technical committee was split between systemd and upstart, with OpenRC being a distant third, and only one person who favored sysvinit. Since it is hopefully not in dispute that upstart was the worse option there, we can consider the decision to have been the best outcome. Note also that this was merely a decision about the default init system: sysvinit is still supported. The reason why sysvinit was not popular, however, was that the init scripts are comparatively more difficult to maintain, and generally slower. If Devuan has decided to shoulder the maintenance burden, I'm sure I wish them the best of luck with that.

The anti-systemd crowd here are morons, severally and collectively. No, systemd is not perfect, but there's a reason why people have been trying to replace sysvinit for the past three decades. Even OpenRC is almost entirely written in C. Either learn why, or quit complaining.

It's a telephone.

No it is not a telephone. It's a handheld computer that happens to be able to make calls. HUGE difference.

Qi charging

That's cute. I remember when I got my first phone with wireless Qi charging (Nexus 4) five years ago

I don't know why there's this narrative that the Apple market is 'saturated'. They're still growing, just more slowly.

But even if that were the case, Apple is well known for allowing its own products to cannibalize sales of its other products. There's going to be a lot of demand for the X, and so that's suppressing iPhone 8 sales. Hardly a revelation.

There are plenty of people on long update cycles now; the most common one is 'when my phone breaks'. Assuming you're actually fairly careful with your phone, you'll get iOS updates for phones as old as the iPhone 5S, which was released in 2013. iOS 11 runs well on my iPhone 6, and I plan my upgrades to be on a 4 year cycle, because that's where I think the value is. A huge number of people bought the iPhone 6, and so how many of them really feel like they need an upgrade is a bit of an open question.

There's this story that Apple fans aren't just loyal, we're fanatical to the point of nonsense, and we buy things for no reason, all the time, and that's not true. We spend our money where we think it's warranted, and we like Apple products because they're well engineered and built to last if you put in a little effort. We don't buy things that are new for the sake of buying new things. I understand this narrative is important for some people because it makes them feel like the only reason that Apple is successful is because they're good at marketing and its customers don't understand what they're doing, but I'm afraid you're just going to have to accept that there are plenty of good reasons to buy Apple's stuff on its own merits.

The iPhone 8 looks like a great phone. If this were my upgrade year, I might consider one—though I would probably also go for the X, since that feels like it has longer legs for the future. I'm sure a lot of other people are making this decision and that's probably the one Apple was expecting. Relax.

"I can't think of a single compelling reason to upgrade [to iPhone 8, or iPhone 8 Plus] from an iPhone 7 [which was launched last year]," wrote Nilay Patel of The Verge.

Apple work on the assumption that people upgrade every other year driven, in part, by the standard 2 year contracts that network operators tend to have.

The fact that last years phone isn't a big enough improvement over this years has been consistent for well over 10 years now. Admitidally skipping the S moniker has confused things - but Apple's target for the iPhone 8 are the people currently using an iPhone 6S (or earlier). In which case, the move from those devices to the 8 is a big jump.

I'm surprised that this well-worn strategy still takes reviewers (and posters on internet forums) by surprise.

That's how Netflix took down Blockbuster. They kept their huge profits secret till they went public. By that time it was too late for Blockbuster video rental store (Yes, they really did have a store that rented movies.)

Now, everyone tries to brag in order to get money. It's self defeating. If you are truly a disruptive technology, you should be working your ass to keep that secret. Claim you expect to get 20% of the market, not 80%.

People love the idea of disruption when it rapes and pillages monopolistic industries that deserve to be disrupted. Yellow Cabs, yes. Corner convenience stores, not so much.

instant gratification in a brick and mortar store does not include the fact that they don't carry my size in clothes or enough of a selection of the items that I am looking for. For example, I cannot get the programming books that I am looking for in a Barnes and Noble. They cannot keep up with the changes in the industry.

Verizon's technology is decent

Verizon's MARKETING of their technology is good. Their technology is awful. They're the only network I consistently have to ask everyone to repeat themselves three times or more if they call me. It's like listening to someone speaking through a garden hose that someone else is jumping on over and over again.

They've learned the secret to getting people to say they have a really good network is:

1. Marketing, marketing, marketing.
2. Maximize coverage, at the expense of everything else.
3. Focus on call drops and other unlikely events that tend to get used as objective metrics.

Do those three, and you can get away with anything, to the point your network is virtually unusable in practice. Why? Because if the objective metrics say it's good, people will rarely even realize the more difficult to measure but more critical attributes of a phone service are infinitely better with all the others. Even Sprint.

While Uber is abusive and socially dubious corporation,

Yes.

what came before is even worse.

WTF? No. The world isn't America. This is London.

London has had regulated minicabs (i.e. what Uber is) since about forever. If you didn't want to fork out for a black cab, you could use any one of the minicab firms. This ranged from the local dodgy one man band, to a local company with a reputation and a collection of taxis to a bigger company like Addison-Lee who had an app and GPS tracking for ages already.

Uber hasn't failed at that. Drivers need to have badges, and they need to get licensed car plates for the car from TfL. Otherwise you can't operate as a driver.

I think you are assuming that Uber's actions in other countries have also been the case in the UK. But they haven't.

Nice to see you didn't read my post and just substituted it with whatever you thought.

1. It is the responsibility of the hiring PHV company to ensure all drivers comply with relevant licensing laws. PHV companies are not to hire drivers who do not comply with these regulations. Although this isn't the problem, TFL has been letting uber get away with not doing this for years.
2. PHV companies must co-operate with police and investigators when a complaint has been made. PHV companies must also have an internal process for dealing with complaints. Uber has failed both of these duties as several complaints have been made to police and Uber did not follow them up. That is why TFL has taken the step not to renew their licenses.

The article is terribly biased, but I've been following the issue for some time and this is not unexpected. Uber can skirt regulations, especially in London which is very business friendly, but when the rozzers got involved they should have taken it seriously.

So basically you've just backed up what I said.

Well, no. You said, "they haven't been responding to criminal activity in their vehicles." That's clearly not true. The fact that their response was different than you would prefer is a different issue, one that I'm quite happy to discuss (and in fact did, but you ignored that part).

TFL would have told them to report it to the police

There's no "would have" here. Uber indeed did report the alleged incidents to TfL, and TfL indeed did NOT tell Uber to report them to the police. Again, I covered this in my first post.

And once again, more importantly, if there was really CRIMINAL activity against a passenger, why didn't THE PASSENGER call the police instead of just (wait for it) filling out a feedback form in an app? Really?

In addition to being implausible, the system you're is proposing is way too easy to hack. For example, a passenger gets pissed off at the Uber driver for whatever reason and wants to get even. Actually going to the police themselves would put them at risk of charges for filing a false police report, but in your system they could simply make a report to Uber and Uber would then be obligated to contact the police based solely on the word of the passenger (who now is shielded from liability since they didn't make the report to the police). The existing checks and balances in the system are there for a reason, and a system like yours would badly break them.

If people felt unsafe using Uber, Uber would lose riders, and if Uber drivers were unsafe, they wouldn't get insurance. Given Uber's constant tracking of both drivers and passengers, you're probably safer in an Uber ride than in a taxi.

No, Uber bans are simply about money and power, using "public safety" as a smokescreen: the London city government wants to force people to send money in the direction of their political cronies: taxi operators, unions, public transit monopolies, because they know full well that Uber can hurt all those government-imposed monopolies badly.

One of the stories I heard was his contract with IBM allowed him to set the prices of the other OSes.
Which brings us to the real smart/lucky thing Gates did, signed a very good contract that let MS keep control of DOS and perhaps the above.
This was possible for several reasons, coming from a family of lawyers, and IBM, due to the antitrust actions on them, being eager to look like they weren't a monopoly.

Gates DID get a lucky break - there's no question about it. However that "break" was to be born into a well-off and well-connected family.

And, honestly... if you can pull that off, it's almost certainly the best way to "become" rich yourself.

Microsoft didn't have an operating system. They had to get it from someone else. IBM basically went to talk with Microsoft because Gates' mother, who used to be a bank manager, did benefit work on weekends with people connected with IBM's management. And Bill Gates' father, one of top lawyers in the area, helped craft their (highly favorable) contract with IBM.

One of the characteristics of being middle-class is having leisure time. No matter how much money you're making, working 14hours/day, 7 days/week is not middle class, upper or lower.

Microsoft was selling customized microcomputer BASICs to Fortune 500 clients in the mid seventies. MBASIC was the first product for the micro to reach a million dollars in sales. By 1980, Microsoft was offering a full suite of programming languages for CP/M and was moving into operating systems before being approached by IBM. The notion that Microsoft was am insignificant or invisible player in the industry before the IBM PC is just plain nonsense.

What Gates offered IBM was a serviceable and perhaps more importantly a uniquely affordable 16 Bit CP/M clone + MBASIC, etc., in time for the scheduled launch of the IBM PC. I doubt that the IBM PC team gave a damn how Gates sourced or developed the package so long as it was ready on time.

It already does: http://www.techrepublic.com/ar...

But more importantly, smart AI-powered systems reduce the need for custom code. We will not have Terminator-style humanoid robots replacing programmers in their cubicles. We will just need fewer programmers.

Sex slave programmed to feel joy only when servicing his/her master in 3, 2, 1...

Why are all of the "AI"s so specialized?
One can play piano, another can drive a car, another can do speech to texr, another can identify faces, etc.

Is this really Intelligence? Is "Artificial" just a synonym for "fake"?

It plays a piano, should've given it an accordion, then it would be Baby Weird AI