cdh

Also, details from Facebook itself: http://newsroom.fb.com/News/558/Update-to-Messaging-and-a-Te...

I'm not sure criticisms around cost are as relevant as they used to be. Windows 8 Pro currently sells for $40 on Microsoft's website, and yes, that key can be used to perform a clean install. If you paid $40 to Microsoft every three years when they released a new Windows version, that would work out to $13.33/year.

That isn’t exactly expensive... $13.33/year is basically a rounding error compared to the costs of console gaming.

Has it actually been established that merely linking to copyrighted content is illegal in the United States? I'm not trying to troll, just genuinely curious.

My technical understanding of this could be incorrect, but it seems to me that there is a meaningful difference between a BitTorrent tracker actively coordinating copyright infringing downloads vs. a website like NZBMatrix hosting nothing but static links to another location on the Internet.

If you're talking about MagicISO, I agree, I couldn't live without it. Windows 8's built in functionality is good, but not quite as good.

Here's the trick to get MagicISO to install correctly on Windows 8: http://www.windows7hacker.com/index.php/2012/08/how-to-insta...

Just do that first and it should work fine.

Imagine if someone researched and sold exploits to anyone (“terrorists”, foreign governments, etc.) internationally which allowed illegal access to say, real-world bank vaults, nuclear military technology, or high security prisons. Theoretically, your same logic would be valid, but I'm fairly sure selling that kind of information on any one of those would be illegal. If not, than it should be!

It's an exaggerated example, but it seems to me that sometimes what is in the best interest of everyone as a whole outweighs the desire of some individuals to exploit the weaknesses of others for personal gain.

> MS is not a startup, that can go by with a promising product. It needs massive amounts of sales and with the current strategy Surface is not going to get them.

Out of curiosity, why do you assume the Surface needs to sell in huge volumes? If every single Surface is sold at a profit, and the Surface division is even slightly profitable for Microsoft, I don't see why it matters if they sell 10,000 or 10,000,000 of them.

To me it seems like the genius part of what Microsoft is doing is that Windows RT and/or the Surface don't actually need to succeed in terms of market share. They just need be taken seriously for long enough to drive down prices of Intel's x86 chips, so that Windows tablets have a shot against ARM tablets long-term. As far as I can tell, that seems to be working already. (Intel Atom Z2760)

They also have a massive Enterprise business, most of which will probably upgrade to Windows 8 eventually, buying them quite a bit of time to watch this unfold. Not to mention Xbox, etc. And of course, on top of all that, there is still the chance that Windows RT will somehow be a hit.... which would be even better for Microsoft, because it would end their Intel pricing problems for good.

To me, this seems like a decent plan for a software company that until now has only been losing relevance and market share. It’s a better plan than bleeding out cash selling super cheap hardware to gain market share (Amazon’s Kindle Fire), waiting too long to give up the dying cash cow as the market changes (RIM), focusing only on extremely high quality products while your company dies around you (Nokia), or killing off the consumer version of Office for no apparent reason (which is presumably profitable as-is).

Without going near your comments on Capitalism, I don't think Spotify's situation is as clear-cut as you do. Why would I pay $20, $15, or even $11, when I can get the exact same service from at least a dozen other companies for $10/month or less? (Rhapsody, Zune, Slacker, Rdio, etc.)

If they raise prices at all, they're likely to lose a significant number of subscribers. If they raise prices and somehow keep those subscribers, the record companies may very well just milk them for the difference in increased licensing costs.

They definitely wouldn't turn a blind eye to an OEM distributing them illegally, though. OEMs shipping Android phones pay Google licensing for the Play Store, Gmail app, etc. From what I understand, most Android OEMs also pay Microsoft royalties per handset.

In other words, these are definitely not free to the end user, the cost is just incorporated into the overall price of the phone.

I don't have a Galaxy S3 to test this, but my experience with the Galaxy S and Galaxy S2 is that for normal phone numbers, you need to specifically confirm that you want to dial the number. For the code to factory reset the phone, though, simply typing in the code is sufficient, you don't need to press dial. It might be the same here, so that only that specific USSD code can be triggered without a confirmation from the user.

Who is to say those weren't gargantuan undertakings as well?

The relationship between Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 is closer than that, though. My understanding is that both will make calls to the same WinRT APIs, meaning a significant amount of code (and the XAML defining the UI) can be shared between both platforms. That's a very different relationship than Mac OS has with iOS (where the UI differences are significant) or Android has with Linux (where there is almost nothing in common between X and Android's UI).

I've been using Postbox, and I couldn't be happier with it.

It was definitely not fake; I know a few people who were on the leaked Yahoo Voices list.

Isn't this the perfect use case for Windows 8, though? Your wife would have no trouble finding the Internet Explorer (or even Chrome) tile prominently featured on the Metro UI launch screen.

It's funny, because your "Announce your vote to the world" comment (ostensibly) wouldn't be welcome on Reddit: http://code.reddit.com/wiki/help/reddiquette

(No offense intended, I just thought it was hilarious in the context of this conversation. Maybe you meant it as a joke...)

If they price it very low ($10 to $20), I can imagine this eating into their sales of desktop Office products.

On the other hand, if they price it similarly to existing Office licenses, would many people buy it?

It might just be me, but I wasn't able to get the consoles working in Opera. I had to use Firefox.

(My apologies if I'm mistaken and it does work. I enable cookies & Flash on a site by site basis, and sometimes that causes problems. I turned them both on, though, and it just stays stuck at "Starting encrypted connection to consoles-1.pythonanywhere.com on port 443".)

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the language itself can be used on almost any platform with gcc, not just OS X.

On the other hand, they could easily provide paid service internationally but choose not to.

It's disingenuous enough when the word 'stealing' is re-purposed in discussions about copyright infringement, since it is very doubtful that every copy of a shared file resulted in an actual loss.

In this case, though, it seems easy enough to establish that the BBC has provided no way to compensate them for viewing their content from the United States. You might be "stealing" bandwidth in some sense, but I don't think it's fair to characterize the content as stolen in this case. The third party (VPN/proxy provider) is paid for network access just like you pay an ISP, not for the content itself.

So you can opt out then, since they're not doing enough to address your concerns. They're being upfront about it, though, and putting that choice in your hands.

I've got bad news for you. If you hover your mouse over the drawings, it totally shows who did it.

Just because you've logged out of a site doesn't necessarily mean the cookies have been deleted. Google can still track you just as effectively until you've cleared your cookies. In fact, if they store IP address and useragent information, they could continue tracking you even afterwards.

Now, I don't know that they do that, but they certainly have the technical means to do so.

I don't know where you are seeing that. According to the data you linked to, the highest unadjusted unemployment rate in November 2011 (in any category) is 12.7% for "Less than a high school diploma".

I suggest starting here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=1050

I don't have a 10.1, but I did spend a few hours reading through many of those threads last week before I decided against purchasing one for my wife. (We ended up going with the 7+ model instead.)

For what it's worth, my understanding is that there are workarounds to flash an unsigned kernel, it's just a real pain. Also, I think you would get the message you are seeing even if it were unlocked... my Galaxy S2 gives me the same warning before letting me into download mode.

It's great that you got one that isn't locked, but worth mentioning for others thats Samsung is indeed locking the bootloader on some (many?) of the wifi-only 10.1 devices.

(As far as I know, all of the Galaxy Tab 8.9 and Galaxy Tab 7 Plus devices are sold unlocked, for now.)

Except that the $55k in cash is also taxable income, especially now that he's told the entire world about it.

My employer uses it. I hate it, but then, performance reviews aren't exactly fun stuff to begin with.

RadioShack only asks for your zip code. It pops up and asks when ringing something up. They can just hit escape if you don't want to tell them.

And who paid the carrier? I pay AT&T upwards of $3000/year, and when I upgrade, they still charge me $100-$200 for the phones I want. I'm pretty sure I'm paying them for that.

I love the back button. It takes a little getting used to, but it's definitely one of my favorite features in Android now. I really can't imagine not having it.

If users can easily disable Secure Boot, it won't prevent much piracy at all.