Crossovers strike a reasonable balance if you want to minimize exterior dimension but maximize interior volume - but yeah, beyond that I don't see the appeal (and want to downsize to a sedan (not much hope for getting estate / wagon in the US) as soon as our current crossover ages out (since we'd no longer need the carrying capacity by then). I cringe whenever we travel in a group and have to ask for an Uber XL in the US - more often than not you get a big SUV that has an uncomfortable ride and does not even fit that many people ... on rare occasion you get a minivan which is much better. In Europe the Mercedes V class van is quite prevalent and that is much better as people carrier - especially because the second and third rows face each other which is great when traveling a short to medium distance together.

Same here. Especially great if you need to travel internationally -- no need to worry about roaming charges or getting a local SIM card!

I've been bitten by more BitBucket outages than I've seen GitHub disruptions :p

Well, we know the majority of GOP presidential candidates claim to be creationists, so this one is a no-brainer... It'd be hysterically funny if only we're not all sharing the same planet.

The first time you get a name collision and the spy gets his/her real name assigned randomly, expect sparks to fly

I'm going to try using "007" or, in case they insist on words, "Bond, James Bond" next time I'm in that silly place :p

It's not the core instruction set that's the problem with booting alternate OSes .. as long as you stick to the base archtecture you'll be fine. It's the lack of standardization when it comes to boot firmware and device configuration that's the problem. The server ARM initiative at least is standardizing on UEFI and ACPI .. hate them or love them, making ARM hardware more similar to Intel Architecture hardware will likely make it easier to support both.

The reality is probably somewhere in between, so if this is indeed the work of government-sponsored hackers, expect an improved Chinese clone the same way the J-31 looks to be a better performing clone of the F-35.

"all links are backlinks" is what drove me off WordPress. Too many spam links to prune.

Is there a reason for adopting a different license from core PostgreSQL ? Seems like it makes the information flow a one-way street (from SQL into XL but not vice versa). Looks like an interesting project! Throw in EnterpriseDB-level Oracle compatibility and there's a captive market out there

A one-off investment in Codeweavers' Crossover Office (the commercial offering by the company that does the core development of Wine) is much more cost-effective, time and money wise, than spending the effort on Windows. Don't get me wrong, I have Windows on my laptops (you don't get nice laptops without pre-installed OSes where I live), so I'm not objecting to the purchase price. But the Windows update experience is shoddy - I've been bitten with broken updates for .NET that are never registered as being done, and other annoyances like that.

It's a broad alliance that includes many manufacturers - I don't see it as a racket myself. And of course the customer still has to take his/her old computer to a recycling center if they want it recycled - there's no magic involved. The point is that adhering to the standards makes recycling easier, and Apple's recent moves, starting with the battery and now having the non-detachable Retina display on the 15" MBP, are regressive in terms of recycleability.

The financial industry cut a deal and got a partial reform that only fixed the situation for them. No, really, I'm not joking! [arstechnica]

The social login is not new -- they've used it for location verification for a long time, if you suddenly log in from, say, another town within the same day. My pet peeve is that some profile pictures don't contain actual faces, and some tagged pictures are tagged incorrectly -- so sometimes there's no way to correctly ID a person. You are allowed a few misses, but it calls for (a) Facebook to perform facial recognition to make sure the pictures they show at least show recognizable faces, and (b) for us to prune friends list to keep only those contacts whose profile pictures we recognize (either because it's their actual face, or because one knows them well enough to recognize silly non-facial logos)