What color is the sky in your world?

Where I work, if you see a programmer at 8:00 AM, it's because he's been there all night.

Where I work, if you see a programmer in the office at 8am, he's been there all night.

Indeed. I solved it in 2-3 minutes, spent 15 minutes refactoring it, then just put it back the way it was.

There is some truth to this, but my feeling is that as long as Microsoft's own desktop software is Windows only*, that will be enough to keep the business desktop on Windows. But on top of that, you can count on ISVs producing RT versions of their software, but many still don't have much incentive to port them to anything else. Businesses want to standardize the desktop, even if it causes them some pain. That standard will continue to be Windows, because it is currently the standard, if for no other reason.

* Office, Outlook, Visual Studio, IE, and many others that most people never heard of but are common in business. The Mac version of Office lacks features used in business environments.

Maybe you're like me.

I've been using C for so long that I think I've lost objectivity. C is the first language I learned (other than line numbered basic.) In my mind, C is the language all other languages are judged against.

But if there's any truth to this (when did the TIOBE index become the official word?) it makes me wonder if it's not C itself that is making a comeback, but good old fashioned procedural style programming.

All these fancy new languages with their polymorphism, encapsulation, templates and functional features have lost their sparkle. Programmers are rediscovering that there isn't anything you can't do (even runtime polymorphism) with just functions, structs, arrays and pointers. It can be easier to understand, and although it may be more typing, it has the virtue that you know exactly what the compiler is going to do with it.

I'm not in favor of forced sterilization, but at least the person would have other reasons to go on living.

But I must be missing something here, because shouldn't the question be:

Is it worth it to cure addiction if you utterly destroy everything that makes life worth living?

How could any rational person think this is a good idea?

They can. (Haven't they done so already?)

The question is will you continue to be able to get hardware that doesn't have those restrictions, at a reasonable price?

I think you will.

Personally, I think the whole issue has been overblown, but...

The fact that they are doing the right thing now doesn't matter to those who are worried that they could change their minds at any time. Asking for a public commitment to continue to do what they are doing and plan on doing has value for those people. Nothing douche-y about that at all.

You feeling alright? :)

You're right. There's no reason why Linux can't work perfectly with (and benefit from) secure boot.

There's also no reason why doing so should require less frequent kernel releases. It doesn't require anything from Torvalds. Whoever builds your kernel just needs to sign it, and the end user just needs a way to say whether or not they trust that signer (e.g. a way to add Canonical's keys to your firmware.)
(Compiling the kernel from sources would require support from the entire toolchain, but that's another issue. That would require something from the kernel maintainers: they would have to sign the 'official' sources. But it would take much more than that...)

You have the right idea, but you're mistaken about the details.

A rootkit doesn't install a modified version of ps, it modifies the system calls that ps uses. That way the rootkit is able to hide its processes from any program that enumerates processes. (There's much more to it of course.)

That also makes it easier to defend against. There's no need to prevent the user from running whatever userland code they want. All you need to do is ensure that the kernel you are running is the one you THINK you're running (as you put it.) Once you've verified the kernel, then you can trust the kernel to verify userland software (if desired).

In fact, you don't have have to protect the entire kernel, just a small portion of it that is responsible for loading and verifying the rest.

That's exactly what Secure Boot does, and it is an idea that is long overdue.

The ONLY issue is who controls the keys.

While I admire your extreme cynicism, you haven't been paying attention to hardware trends. General purpose computers will be expensive relative to the special purpose ones, which is to say they will be dirt cheap (and obscenely powerful by today's standards) .

Until they make it illegal, someone will always be willing to manufacture general-purpose-do-what-you-want machines.

Those numbers aren't that hard to get, and they are pretty good estimates, not "guesses".

But you don't even need to know the manufacture price or markup to know Apple is making a fucking blizzard of cash on these devices.

Here are the first two paragraphs from Apple's own press release regarding their most recent quarterly results. Pretty much speaks for itself:

CUPERTINO, California—October 25, 2012—Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2012 fourth quarter ended September 29, 2012. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $36.0 billion and quarterly net profit of $8.2 billion, or $8.67 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $28.3 billion and net profit of $6.6 billion, or $7.05 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 40.0 percent compared to 40.3 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 60 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

The Company sold 26.9 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 58 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 14.0 million iPads during the quarter, a 26 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 4.9 million Macs during the quarter, a 1 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 5.3 million iPods, a 19 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter.

Negative. The Mac and *nix versions of IE were completely separate code bases, developed by completely separate teams.

Negative Kelvin does have meaning. I've read that article 6 times and I still don't know what it means, but apparently it means something.