No, but Texas does have Data Centers.

The core bits of chrome are open source (Look at the chromium project, of which i am a user). Chrome itself also has some proprietary bits (updater, crash reporter, flash & pdf support built-in, etc).

"Provided first-response technical services to the Office of the President" blah blah blah. It's all how you talk yourself up.

Bill Gates had fight through Tier 1 support like the rest of us? Maybe I've been too hard on the guy.

popcon is an optional part of Ubuntu installs (There is an option at the end, not sure of the default). Popcon gives a pretty good indication of what packages are installed, but (afaik) not how consistently the OS is used or any information regarding the hardware it is run on. The canonical-census package seems to tackle the latter two.

I'll bet it will be great, until about half-way through, when the sunburned space zombie appears.

The problem is that a lot of these mistakes are not detailed in "Holy" scripts, which obviously is the only source of history. And if they were, they would be viewed as instructions.

The problem with SSL is we are using the same certificates and mechanism for both encryption and authentication. You can't authenticate self-signed certificates without a point of reference. GPG and other platforms use the web of trust, but we don't have that for SSL. There isn't currently a way to say "I only want encryption, not authentication".

Firefox has no way of knowing whether you care about authentication (this *is* ebay) or encryption (nobody is intercepting my password en-route), or both (this *is* paypal and nobody is intercepting my password).

I would imagine the switch to EFI had more to do with it being Intel's forward-looking platform. iirc, Intel helped design some of the earlier "mactel" machines.

If Apple were to use OF on Intel-based machines, they would be on their own. They would be the only users and sole maintainers of that combination. Going the EFI way gives you a functionally-equivalent platform, essentially already completed and done.

Even if OF and EFI were completely equivalent in features, switching made sense.

In the pre-Intel days, Apple used open-firmware. From my somewhat limited interactions with it, it was somewhat similar in purpose (i.e. Not a clunky old bios)

What, you mean you actually have to speak to somebody???

Real hackers order from tty2

I agree from a developer point of view. Being a Gnome/Linux user, I enjoy using a real GTK+ app instead of something coded cross-platform Java (that is, java using swing instead of GTK). Swing doesn't necessarily implement all the standard GTK features that one is used to. But I wouldn't go as far as saying I know what tools others should use. If somebody felt java/swing was a good match for them, then it is no problem of mine. Likewise, if somebody wanted to code in flash for the iphone, and limit themselves to old APIs, or some lowest-common-denominator for cross-platform support, then fine. Their app won't "feel" as great, and probably will not be as popular as its competitors. I think most of the successful apps will still be native. But it is silly to assume that what makes sense for you or me makes sense for everybody.

The real reason is probably closer to preventing simple porting to/from iphone and other non-apple platforms. They may be somewhat concerned about developers not having to buy apple hardware as well, but I haven't really heard that one mentioned as much.

Give him a break, he's from Jersey.

I would be happy to see a real Windows Mobile OS based on Linux and Webkit.

For every copy you download that's 166 copies you won't be buying.