Posts by DrXym

Android surges past iPhone in smartphone sales

Hmm

"i really want to see a graph that shows the average of iphone 4 sales compared to each individual android phones launched within the last 6 months."

It would be an interesting graph but it wouldn't tell you anything you probably can't guess for yourself. i.e. that some android phones like the Desire, Galaxy are more popular than others and that as an aggregate sales of all models are taking off big time. You can't see per model stats (though Google probably know them) but you can monitor % market share of various android versions here (http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-versions.html). Takeup of 2.1 has been huge in the last few months.

"yes, indeed. android users are on the rise. this is mainly because its more widely available compared to iphones. technical or other issues only have little influence these sales. price and availability has got more to do with it."

I suspect you're right, but at the same time android delivers a comparable experience to the iPhone for less money. A lot less money in some cases depending on model and tariffs. People are starting to realise they can have an excellent phone which suits their needs and budget without paying an Apple premium on top. I expect the same will probably happen with tablet devices too when a bunch of cheaper Android / Windows 7 models start appearing with similar functionality to challenge the iPad.

Horseshit

"Apple WANT to be a "niche" company. They've never been interested in corporate sales, or selling to techies, or selling to anyone *other* than those who appreciate good design."

Pure unadulterated horseshit. Apple have been doing everything in their power to increase their market share as evidenced by the near continuous mainstream advertisments for iPhones, iPads etc. They have transformed themselves from a computer manufacturer to a media device & services provider precisely because they are making little headway vs Microsoft. These days they make their money from selling media and the devices you play media on. The more people who own these devices the more media they sell. It is quite obvious that they would like as much market share as they possibly can.

Not really

Android is a Linux kernel with a BSD derived user space and a kernel extension for BSD / proprietary drivers. So it's Linux + BSD. Furthermore, the kernel & userspace are cut to the bone and primarily there to serve a Java derived runtime platform called Dalvik. Most apps run on Dalvik and are OS neutral so in theory Android could dump Linux entirely if it so wished without affecting most apps.

So you wouldn't find busybox there for example, or most of the other standard Unix commands for that matter.

I don't know why Linux is listed separately, but perhaps a bunch of purer Linux implementations have been lumped together separate to Android to be more measureable.

Not surprised Android is pushing ahead

Android is free, customisable and very flexible. Manufacturers can adapt the software and run it on hardware to cover all price points. Providers are free to choose their own pricing, tariffs and plans. For example there are teeny tiny smart phones like the X10 Mini. And models with physical keyboards. And models with large PMP like displays. Others with fancy cameras with flash. Others with lower res features for people on a budget. There are models from Samsung, HTC, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Huawei, ZTE etc. And so on.

Android phones can be had for £100 on pay as you go and there is plenty of choice in the sub £300 range, many which are free on reasonable tariffs. Apple have nothing analogous and it's somewhat puzzling why not. I expect they'll have to launch something soon enough or their market share will continue to erode. At least you can now buy an iPhone SIM free and the number of providers carrying the phone has increased.

iPhone 4 jailbreak banks on browser exploit

A very scary thought

If one site remotely exploits for "good", then the next one can remotely exploit to completely screw your device, install a trojan or whatnot.

On the amusing side, I wonder if Apple stores will suddenly notice a lot of their display models suddenly and mysteriously become jail broken. I hope they have a firewall or a DNS server to redirect requests to the jailbreak sites.

UK.gov sticks to IE 6 cos it's more 'cost effective', innit

Well don't upgrade to IE8

Upgrade to a browser which is not intricately tied to the operating system such as Firefox, Chrome or Opera. Leave shitty old IE6 for the legacy websites and start putting users onto a modern browser. Who knows, after a few years of such enlightened thinking it might actually encourage government and its vendors to start coding applications that run in a browser agnostic fashion.

Google site fools interwebs into China blockage scare

Security warnings in android need improvement

Android has a finegrained security model which requires apps to declare what things they need access to in a manifest. The problem for me is the installation dialog that shows this is confusing and there is no further chance of intervention possible. For example, how do I tell the difference between a good address book which only dials the numbers I ask, and a malicious address book that dials a premium number in Chad at 3am?

My feeling is that Android needs to get tough and implement something like UAC by default. If an app tries to dial a number (or read private data), the OS should intervene and show a popup requesting permission to proceed and any relevant info. Apps that are doing dodgy things will become immediately obvious because of all the popups. If a user really trusts an app the dialogs could be disabled per-app from the "manage applications" settings.

UAC got a lot of stick in Vista but it served its purpose, beating up apps that asked for things they did not necessarily need (e.g. read/write access to the local machine registry). By the time Windows 7 appeared most applications were good citizens. I imagine Android would go through a similar pain process but it would emerge from the other better for it.

.NET for Android prepares to get probed

Mono tools demonstrates the FAIL of mono

Why exactly do I need tools for MS Developer Studio to develop .NET apps for Mono? Either Mono runs .NET correctly or it doesn't. If it does then charging an obscene amount for tools is robbery and if it doesn't, then what the hell is the point of Mono in the first place?

Amazon takes Kindle to the UK

Depends on lots of things

The iPad is a vastly more powerful device than ereaders but then again it costs 4x+ the price. It also doesn't work in direct sunlight, is much heavier, much larger and requires more frequent charging. Book reading should be seen as one string in its bow but certainly not its forte.

Ereaders have their place in the world, but they need to get much cheaper. Nothing about these devices justifies the hitherto stupid prices they have commanded. £100 really should be the maximum these things cost given the raft of netbooks, tablets etc which will be occupying the £150 range soon enough.

Why not wait to see what Sony et al do next?

Kindles are far, far more restrictive devices than other readers. You are tied to Amazon for all your purchases and support for epub and other common formats is poor. Why not wait to see if Sony etc drop their prices in response? Chances are that they will and you benefit from being able to buy books from numerous places.

So out of interest

How do you intend to transfer your existing books over to a Kindle?

The one thing that has plagued ereading devices are all the proprietary formats, DRM and tie-ins to single stores. And Kindle is one of the worst examples. At least Sony devices let you buy books from a variety of places and support a vendor / device agnostic DRM.

Google brews (another) Facebook rival, says report

Oh great, Zynga

Just what Google needs - to turn their social networking app into a cesspit of skinner box games. If Buzz was bad, imagine what Son of Buzz will be like with Zynga or their ilk commanding a prominent role.

Samsung Galaxy S

Sounds like swings and roundabouts

I own a desire and the UI is very nice. It doesn't sound like Samsung have made as much effort. However the media support seems to be a lot stronger - HD recording, divx playback for example. Maybe it's the processor that has more codec support. I expect that you are more likely to get updates and support from HTC than Samsung though neither would be stellar.

Apple sued over hot iPad shutdowns

Where have you been?

There are quite a number of displays which are visible in full sunlight. The most prominent would be e-ink devices, but there are LCDs too. The One Laptop Per Child device has a screen which can flick into a high contrast black & white display for sunlight viewing and the tech has been commercialized by Pixel Qi. I was actually surprised that the iPad didn't feature a Pixel Qi screen especially after being touted as a book reader.

Ereaders would cope better

"So we're talking about strong sunlight - you'd wear a hat right? Or find some shade? The iPad needs similar consideration."

It could still be hot enough in the shade to turn off. I guess the suit's merits rest on whether the device shuts down inside or outside of its published operating range. I imagine it doesn't help the iPad's heat disappation (vs an ereader for example) that it must remain in a high power state burning watts to power the CPU and the display.

UK bans Nintendo DS homebrew code installer

Homebrewers - yeah sure

I agree that homebrewers should get official support, but it is clear that the overwhelming majority of card owners use them to play pirated games. It would be smart for Sony, Nintendo etc. to support homebrew in some official capacity simply to separate the genuine homebrew scene out from the pirates.

Firefox 4 beta 2 preaches tabs-on-top love to fanbois

Can't figure out what app tab is for

As far as I can tell it just removes the title text from the tab. Other than that it appears to be a regular tab. You can still click on bookmarks or enter a url into the address field to navigate somewhere else.

I was expecting something such as a permanently anchored tab that always starts on one page and modifies the home button to return to that page (it doesn't), opens bookmarks in a different tab (it doesn't), and perhaps grays out the url field so you can't change your location (nope).

I'm not sure what its supposed to do but it feels incomplete. Given this is a second beta I would expect all features and functionality to be present if not necessarily bug free by this point.

Yes it starts fast

I don't know why anyone complains about the current startup speed of firefox, but yes the beta starts very fast. As for your memory complaints, if your PC has available memory then Firefox will make use of it. Firefox & Mozilla / Seamonkey have always held stuff in memory for caching purposes which is flushed if the system signals low memory conditions.

Android's UK phone sales quadruple

No they're not

"Many of the core apps people think of as part of Android are closed source"

No they're not. The core apps would be things that make the phone work. Maps is not a core app, marketplace is not a core app etc. Not things you want on a secure phone anyway. As for drivers, any government tender for a secure phone would probably make it a precondition to be able to review the drivers or use open source ones.

Why destroy it?

Much though I strongly dislike iPhones, if I owned one which was out of contract I wouldn't see the point of junking it unless it is decrepit. Get the unlock code from the provider and then give it to someone else to use.

Hmm

"Funny, I thought that, for e moment, the Android platform is much less functional from the user point of view than the iOS. could it be that Iphone 4 has availability issues and others profit of this situation instead?"

Well this user you speak of is wrong. Android phones in general are just as usable and functional as an iPhone. More so if you consider the ability to choose a phone that fits your budget, form factor, feature set, network provider etc. And that android by default is a far better designed OS than iOS in most respects.

The fact that sales have quadrupled would seem to be a huge frigging flashing neon sign to that effect.

I have a desire

If you're out of contract I suggest you just unlock what you have and keep using it until it dies. If you absolutely must upgrade, then I don't understand your laziness to do a little research. Of course the HTC site lists all their models, if you want to know what model your provider sells, visit their site.

As to your questions:

Sense is the HTC user experience over the top of the default android OS. Basically they swap out some of the default components and replace them with their own - animated backgrounds, different dial pad, keyboard, and some of the apps like alarm clock. Android allows for that and it works pretty well although vanilla android would do well to improve the default apps if manufacturers keep replacing them.

The Desire & Incredible would be most analogous to an iPhone in terms of features, screen size etc. The Incredible is a US Verizon exclusive phone, the Desire is available from lots of providers worldwide and also sim free. The Wildfire is a budget phone which is offers most of the same functionality of the Desire but with a lower res screen & slower cpu for about 3/5 the price.

My experience with the Desire has been generally excellent. Screen is a bit crap in direct sunlight but otherwise its a great phone. I bought my phone from Pixmania but you can get them on contract too. It's definitely not a low end phone and anyone switching from an iPhone should find the experience pretty familiar and in many ways a lot better.

Code for android is open source

It's on android.com. If a government so wished they could roll their own build of the phone OS, sticking whatever apps they felt like on top too just like cyanogen does now.

Firefox 4 second beta hits minor delay

What?

Netscape / Mozilla has only ever used multi-process for some crypto and that was to avoid some licencing issues that were later resolved.

Traditionally for plugins they have run in-process with some system traps to try and cope with certain kinds of recoverable exceptions. The reason they plugins run in-process is because its incredibly difficult to run them out of process. For starters, plugins can be scriptable so JS calls have to be marshalled in both directions, accounting for issues like recursion. Then there is the general issue of dealing with unresponsive / dead plugins. How do you know when the plugin is dead / unresponsive as opposed to merely busy? How do you deal with plugins which are firing possibly hundreds of events out via callbacks? How do you deal with WINDOWLESS plugins where the plugin expects to draw directly into the HTML view? How do you feed the plugin with data from a URL while keeping your cache consistent and correct etc.

Mozilla feels it has resolved most of these issues but just ranting away as you did shows you have no understanding of why things are the way they are.

Empires built on free code aren't cheap

Not sure I understand the point of the article

Even free software costs money in hardware & personel to run. It doesn't alter the fact that if its the best tool for the job (as it often is) then companies are saving themselves money and grief.

HTC Wildfire Android smartphone

Resistive vs Capacitive

I don't think I'd like a resistive phone, but they absolutely have their place in tablets. You can write on a resistive screen with a stylus, you can't with a capacitive. The best you can do with a capacitive is buy some wand like device and tap the screen making sure not to actually touch the screen with your hands or you'll confuse the device.

People keep bleating about how the iPad would be great for academic use etc. but it's capacitive screen sinks that idea immediately. The ideal tablet would be one which offers some kind of resistive support (some hybrids offer capacitive too) so that someone can write notes directly onto the screen with a stylus. Better yet if these notes were correctly integrated into the reading software for proper reference.

App store vs marketplace

I agree marketplace is quite poor in some respects (e.g. level of spam, lack of policing, lack of recommendations), but your points are not very valid.

a) Favourite apps - there are usually analogous apps and it's clear that more apps are appearing by the day. e.g. Nook and Kindle just appeared for Android the other day.

b) Install Warnings - apps access certain features so why don't you want to know what features they use. At least you get told up front what features the app is using. Personally I'd like Android to allow me to set a default and a per app policy which allows me to veto certain actions, e.g. dial numbers, access certain websites etc.

c) Micropayments - big deal. Don't use those apps. The great thing about marketplace is apps are completely free to determine their own payment models - free, ad supported, trialware, shareware, subscription etc. If you don't like apps using one model don't use them.

d) sshd, terminal, keyboard etc. Again I don't see the objection here. There are free versions of these apps even if some people choose to charge for them. Furthermore you should be rejoicing that Android lets you add these things. If you don't like the default keyboard you can just replace it with another. That's a mark of a well designed OS.

d) IPv6. Android is capable of it, though I doubt many network providers do.

Your verdict is invalid. Android is a more than capable device and certain devices such as HTC's are extremely pleasant and friendly to use. I think the stock OS still has some rough edges that individual phone manufacturers shouldn't have to be fixing but there are still more than enough reasons to favour a decent Android phone over the iPhone.

iPhone 4G blingmobe: Yours for £13k

Limited

Like most "limited" editions, I suspect it's only "limited" by the number of people stupid and rich enough to fork out for it.

iRiver Story to preface WHSmith entry into e-book biz

Sweet spot for price and features

There will be half a dozen tablets by the end of the year, probably running android, almost certainly capable of reading books as well as other tasks and many of them will be in the £200 range. Some might even be kitted out with a Pixel Qi screen making them nice and readable.

I reckon £99-150 is the absolute limit for an e-ink device. Any more and people will start looking at tablets. Manufacturers of ereaders could also help their sales prospects by not tying themselves to just one book format or store and supporting several popular DRMs to ensure maximum compatibility. Better yet, it would be in the interests of people like iRiver, Sony etc. and online book providers to adopt an industry standard and logo that assures cross compability of titles. Not only would it increase consumer confidence but it would put huge pressure on the likes of Amazon and Apple to conform too.

Blizzard exposes real names on WoW forums

Well "Adam T"

If you don't want to look ever so hypocritical you should start posting with your full name and set an example.

Back in reality people don't want to expose their real names for a raft of reasons which have already been pointed out. No one is stopping you choosing a nickname which also happens to be your real name. But forcing people to use their real name is simply not defensible ESPECIALLY in a fantasy game where the whole point is roleplay.

Why is it important anyone knows their real names

If people are being trolls, dicks or whatnot, the forum already knows who these people are. Ban them. Empower senior forum users with the tools to moderate the forums that allow them to mod trolls into oblivion and / or report them if necessary to Blizzard employees.

Blizzard already ties nicknames to real names so behind the scenes they have the tools to effectively wield the ban hammer, but what possible reason does a FANTASY GAME need to expose real names to other users for?

Anonymity is important especially in a fantasy game. Doing away might save Blizzard some effort but it will have a chilling effect on the whole forum and possibly the game and not just on the trolls.

BBC chief acknowledges DAB flop & internet radio

But the timeline was way too long

DAB turned up in the UK in 1999 and the phasing out of FM is still some vague future event even now. Ofcom (whose job it is to manage this stuff) could have turned the screws a lot faster than that such as by refusing to renew broadcaster's licences unless they went DAB (or DAB+), squeezing the available spectrum, mandating that devices after a particular manufacture date must support DAB+ and so on.

Digital TV has been around as long as DAB, is arguably more complicated than radio yet the analogue switchover is already in full swing. It's pathetic really to see radio so far behind.

DAB sound idea but already superseded

I think digital radio is an excellent idea, but the DAB implementation has the misfortune of choosing a crappy audio codec, radio sets are expensive and bulky (compared to a regular radio), there are regional incompatibilities, and there is not enough incentive for listeners or stations to switch over.

Personally I think the whole handheld / mobile audio & video situation is a bloody mess. Someone like the BBC should be leaning on the government and the EU to mandate a single Europe wide standard and accelerate a timeline for its adoption.

DAB+ might be one answer but since DAB is not forwards compatible with it, maybe they need to consider something else, a single standard that supports video, audio, metadata through handheld devices. For example DVB-H or H2. Whatever they choose I hope they push it with more urgency than they did with DAB otherwise it will suffer the same fate.

Microsoft patches Freetard-by-design bug

What?

People share files with WMP to get them from one device to another such as to an XBox 360 or some other DLNA device. How is that being a "freetard". What does that label even mean anyway?

iPad, Kindle as readable as print... almost

Kindle page turning

e-ink devices might be very readable, but god the page turning is annoying. I would not be surprised if the ugly flashing transition caused that caused brain farts that slowed people down. The iPad probably looks far slicker but doubtless suffers its own issues due to the screen backlight and reflective glare.

Best of the two worlds IMO would be something equipped with a Pixel QI screen which allows a responsive and readable display and some kind of resistive touch sensing over the top. Resistive would be far better for note taking, tactile response etc even if its not as sexy as capacitive.

'The internet's completely over', declares petulant Prince

Crybaby Prince

Prince is such a crybaby. He proclaims he makes most of his money through tours, so why the hell is he complaining about how his album gets distributed. Is it likely that the newspaper is paying him more than a token fee for what is essentially self promotion anyway?

I can't deny he has written some good music but I don't think much of him as a person. I suspect he doesn't like the internet because he can't control it although that doesn't stop him trying. He unleashed his lawyers on b3ta.com, a small humour site who had the gall to be run an image competition about him. The image of a chihuahua straining to shit out the prince logo was worth it alone. I'm sure the image is still out there somewhere...

OpenOffice gets Ubuntu-media friendly

Might have uses

If you're doing a powerpoint presentation you can easily embed media clips which could be use for demos, interludes etc. Enabling the same in Impress would be a benefit.

Microsoft's past - the future to Android's iPhone victory

Fact check

1) You don't have to use Google Marketplace. Companies like Gameloft sell direct. Even if you DO use Marketplace you could use it to release a demo / trialware version for nothing on marketplace and then take users to a pay site to unlock or download the full version. That's just one way and it's not hard to envisage other models. In other words there are many ways to keep all 100% of the money.

2) Apple don't allow you to use any ad platform. Most advertising platforms rely heavily on analytics to deliver relevant adverts and Apple have banned 3rd party analytics. Without analytics the ads aren't as relevant and clickthroughs fall through the floor. They have deliberately banned / crippled the competion so people are forced to use Apple's instead. Their excuses for doing this "to protect privacy" are horseshit, otherwise they ban apps like Facebook, Twitter etc. who use / sell data in all sorts of ways.

3) You pay to enrol in the iPhone Developer Program which is $99 annually. Since you can't distribute apps in any way except the App store, it is effectively a mandatory charge unless you never want to release anything ever. So what about distributing in-house enterprise apps? Well that's only $299 a year.

4) A non sequitur and not a very good one. The marketplace has terms and conditions and people who upload apps must abide by. Compared to the app store these are very liberal. If you are extra paranoid about marketplace, don't use it in the first place. Distribute the apk from your own web site for example where you are not subject to the T&C of marketplace.

As for the kill switch in general I agree it has the potential for abuse and I would like Google to spell out and commit to the occasions it could be used for. I don't believe for a second that Apple has nothing equivalent and their record for declining to list apps and taking them down after the fact demonstrate they have no moral highground.

IBM vs Microsoft should teach a lesson

The issue of wooing developers is not a new one.

Back in the 90s, OS/2 and Windows were battling for developer mindshare. IBM sold its SDK through its Developer Connection program when you could get it for free from Microsoft. IBM used to sell their command line CSet++ for mucho dinero when Microsoft were selling a visual equivalent for a fraction of the cost. Microsoft made development easy with wizards and visual editors, IBM belatedly threw in some C++ foundation classes but not enough. IBM documentation was dry and often unreadable "red books" while Microsoft implemented intellisense, context sensitive help and filled the bookshelves with accesible and cheap documentation. It's almost like IBM purposefully went out of their way to piss on interest in their platform.

What has this got to do with Apple & Google? Well the costs of developing for the iPhone are WAY more expensive than Google. Apple requires enrollment to the developer program costing $99 PER YEAR, vs nothing on Android (except a small 1 off fee if you want to use Marketplace). Apple requires devs use Macs for development. Google lets devs choose their platform and OS. Apple forces devs to use their app store, their ad service, imposes odious approval conditions and takes a cut of the profits. Google has no such restrictions.

Apple would do well to broaden the appeal to developers by cutting the iPhone development loose from the Mac and lowering the fees. There are money fronts to the war of course, but Apple is losing badly on this one. If they don't start making iPhone development more attractive they will lose out the way IBM did to Microsoft.

Apple support-drone scripts leaked

Not saying other phones are perfect

Lots of phones have faults of one kind or another and I'm sure some have issues caused by sensitivity to interference or whatnot. But Apple is implying that every other phone suffers severe signal degration through handling so therefore their severe signal degradation isn't their fault.

Most other phones sensibly pack their antenna inside the case for starters (for good reason) so it's typically not going to matter how you hold it unless your jewellry / watch interfered in some way. So Apple's claim is bollocks.

All phones suffer from the same problem?

Bollocks do they. Most phones sensibly don't put the antenna in a place where handling the device in a normal way causes signal degration. This is a design flaw pure and simple.

Phorm's losses top $100m

Boo hoo

I'm shedding teeny tiny packet inspected tears for Phorm.

Linux game-time refined with latest Wine

Mac ports

It is as much a pain in the ass to native port a game to the Mac as it ever was. So companies use tools like Transgaming Cider to wrap the Windows binary with minimal changes and execute it natively on the Mac. The game is still written to DirectX apis but the graphics / audio API calls are mapped onto the Mac equivalents.

Not every game is done this way but a substantial number are. EA and Ubisoft use cider extensively for example.

Wine has huge gaming potential

Steam has just launched on the Mac and is soon to do so on Linux. I would be hopeful that when it does appear it uses some commercial variant of Wine to provide game emulation. Then Steam can sell native games alongside carefully selected and tested Windows games and the experience is fairly seamless. Lots of Mac games are just Win32 ports running against a commercial Wine based layer called Transgaming Cider.

Games pose some extra challenges but eliminate some others. The Win32 is a rats nest of APIs but games typically don't use many of them. What they do use is DirectX apis so the emulation for that has to be perfect and performance is critical. Linux uses OpenGL and has different input and audio APIs, so DirectX commands must all be translated.

Rancid IE6 'more secure' than Chrome and Opera US bank says

Utterly insane

I can understand why a bank might assign different browsers different tiers of support, e.g a site must work perfectly in IE7 and Firefox and acceptably in Chrome, Safari. So QA tests in the main browsers and does cursory validation in others. But dropping support altogether is sheer bloody laziness and nothing else.

It's incredibly shortsighted in this day and age to even support browsers by name rather than a particular set of capabilities that many browsers may implement. For example, if the site can take advantage of canvas, test for the canvas, don't test if user agent == Firefox. Coding to the capabilities rather than the browser version is a much better strategy for development and for maintenance when inevitably the site needs to be updated for new browsers.

Google vanishes Android apps from citizen phones

Grow up people

A kill switch is a legitimate last line of defence for app stores. Do you think Apple doesn't have this facility? Do you think most other online app stores don't either? Fact is that most stores that phone home have some way to kill apps or "update" them into oblivion.

Even something as humble as a web browser can block Firefox maintain blocklists which let them disable plugins and extensions. It's already been used to disable a Java plugin which had an in the wild exploit. They've don't it before and doubtless they'll do it again.

If you don't want someone remotely killing malicious apps on your phone, then don't get them from the marketplace. You have a choice on android. Get apps direct from the maker, or even from some dodgy pirate site. But don't come crying if your phone starts calling premium rate numbers in Senegal. You've gone outside the system and you forfeit any protections it may have had to prevent this happening.

Jobs tells iPhone users to get a grip

Every Apple product has issues

People seem to think that because it says Apple it means quality. Far from it. Those days have long passed although you wouldn't know it from the price tags.

Yellowing cases, expanding batteries, cracked cases, overheating CPUs, burnt power cables, cracked ear plugs. The list of defects go on and on yet people still fork out for something which is little different and often worse than the "cheaper" brands.

At the end of the day most consumer products come out of Foxconn or a similar factory and people who think Apple products are imbued with some magic "quality" really need to cop on. They might appear slicker but its the same old crap.

Son of Transputer powers new Amiga box

No such thing as a modern Amiga

"what is a modern Amiga for"

Nothing since it doesn't exist. The Amiga spirit with Commodore. The A1200, A600 and A4000 were the last Amiga.s A succession of owners have slapped the Amiga or Commodore brand on a sucession of (vapourware) products but none of them have come to anything.

The brand has no meaning any more. Calling something an Amiga doesn't make it any more so than if Coke went bust and someone decided to use the brand name 15 years on a packet of gravy sauce.

Furthermore, any advantages AmigaOS had were surpassed a long, long time ago. There is no value in any of the brands and its hard to understand why the Amiga's mouldering corpse is desecrated even today.

Firefoxers howl as privacy add-on auto updates with 'bloatware'

So opera implements every extension by default?

Firefox "fanboys" love extensions because they allow the browser to be customized in interesting and useful ways while keeping the core browser clean and stable. Turning a browser into a kitchen sink just increases the number of bugs that everyone is exposed to.

Besides, there are thousands of extensions, with highly specific, orthogonal or complementary functionality that is not critical for browsing. Not everyone wants or needs an integrated JS debugger, or an extension that launches Skype when you click on a phone number, or opts out of ads, or integrates with Twitter, or plays radio etc etc etc. That's what the extension framework is there for to provide for people who need these things.

As for Opera, it contains plenty of things that are not "essential functionality" by any reasonable definition. Things such as voice control, gestures, widgets, sticky notes (wtf?), cloud / web integration etc. If Opera had a proper extensions framework, these things should be the first things to get moved out. Sooner or later Opera will just such a framework and it will be better for it too. In fact, Widgets could be seen as the first step in that direction and I'm sure it won't be the last.

Pretty scummy

If they wanted to promote their tools they could have popped up a 1-shot welcome / advertorial to that effect. Conning people into install things they never wanted is just low. Not just regular people, but those most likely to be riled by an intrusion into their privacy. I'm glad to see the project has almost instantly branched. I hope Mozilla get in on the act and suspend the orinal add on before any more damage can be done.