I'm happy to give them a break until they assume the authority to make decisions that depend on understanding technology. Once they do that they have the duty to be knowledgeable and competent. Anyone aspiring to such authority should be preparing and educating themselves.

It's not the government. These people have access to all the modern conveniences via their jobs. They have chosen not to learn anything about them which would be O.K. if it wasn't critical to their job performance.

And a couple of other suspicious things here. 1) Shipped doesn't mean sold as you say, but it can include give aways like when you buy a Samsung TV and get one of their pads for free. Yeah, if you gave me a Samsung tablet I'd take it. Then I'd give it to a poor relative or kid down the street. Not worth anything to me. Also, the "Other" category out ships all the other Android OEMs including the top 3 Android OEM's combined. Sorry, but its pretty arbitrary to put a crappy knock off for the 3rd world market with a state of the art iPad or equivalent. Finally, Gartner predicted that the iPhone would be a flop in 2007 and again in 2008. Their fantasies about MS products in the mobile market are pretty imaginative too.

If you are an employee, you don't have to fix bugs or bad walls on your own time. If you're are a subcontractor that may be expected by some. At my company when a contracting company (including a 1099 or individual corp) is on T&M and screws up - terrible design, incompetent programming, etc., we still pay them until we decide to end the relationship. The alternative is fixed price contracting or a form of "piece work", but that puts a big burden on our own incompetent and clueless managers. They'd rather keep paying than be exposed as useless overhead. Building contractors can't get away with that so easily and they have inspectors to assess quality so they can hold their subcontractors accountable for the quality of the work. Software is rarely developed using rigorous engineering methodologies and documentation, especially in business IT.

Lenovo was already in the mobile business. They've been out competing Samsung at the low end of the market. What they needed was better products at the mid to high range. Motorola's newer phones looked good, but the marketing wasn't working. We'll see if Lenovo can do better.

Whooooosh!

The NSA is an intelligence gathering agency; they are not law enforcement. They have no jurisdictional boundaries to their operations. As a U.S. government agency they are supposed to have to observe some niceties insofar as operating in the U.S. and targeting U.S. citizens what with the Constitution and all. Their failure to always do that is where they've gone wrong. And, as you've indicated, they've probably collected so much information that its getting in the way of useful intelligence analysis. Too much can be worse than not enough. The other fun fact is that they and their allied agencies in other countries seemed to get around some restrictions by letting the "foreigners" do the spying on the domestics for them and then exchanging what they collected.

Was it also removed from Windows Server? The government procurement requirement for Posix only applied to server operating systems. Though in all the development I've done in the Federal space using C/C++, we never talked about or considered whether or not something we were calling was part of Posix or not. Of course, I work in the application space so maybe others did. Federal fondness for Java makes Posix moot in the application space now.

Who cares about Posix? It's a checklist item for government procurement but in practical terms means nothing. It's a subset API. Windows NT was Posix compliant.

I think a better solution is that once you've achieved cruising altitude that passenger can petition for a vote of all passengers to have specific annoying passengers literally thrown off the planes. No parachute, just a good heave. As annoying cell phone users are - shouting in their phones, etc. - seat kickers, loud drunks, crying babies and others deserve some sort of retribution too.

There is nothing in the post that provides any indication much less evidence that the money spent on this by APS came from anything that was in violation of the terms of their monopoly and rates. So unless you have special inside information you are not sharing, you've just proved the point that the term "ratepayer money" used in the summation is prejudicial and inflammatory. In the meantime you can share with me a justified outrage about their admitted lying.

Yes, the use of the term "ratepayer money" is prejudicial and inflammatory as well as misleading. That's pretty typical with Slashdot and almost every other source on the internet. However, the primary objection expressed is that APS lied. I, and others, object that APS, Exxon, Koch brothers and others astroturf their positions, i.e. they set up phoney "citizen" organizations and sites to push their views so people will not be aware of their financial interests in the debate's outcome. That's dishonest and does not contribute to honest open discussion and debate or to science. It's O.K. to promote a position that you benefit from - whether its financial or biological (like health), but it's not O.K. to use deceit to hide your motivations. What they are afraid of, I think, is that people will more closely examine their scientific methods and conclusions if they know you have a vested interest in a particular outcome.

Just to be preemptive, advocates on any side of any position can have a vested interest in a particular outcome. We should always be skeptical.

You're right (and sourcing Wikipedia) that it's FreeBSD and NetBSD, not OpenBSD. Other sources I've read have said that there is very little Mach 3 (except the kernel) left and Mac OS X is primarily *BSD these days . And you are right that Apple implemented most of the power savings. None of this changes my gist which is, Mac OS X is a desktop operating system that unlike Windows, manages battery life very well. So it is possible, isn't it?

On the second point about refactoring/re-engineering you've overlooked some facts. One is that Apple has releases like Snow Leopard that are primarily a refactoring of the previous version in order to set the stage for future improvements. They also replace frameworks (Cocoa versus Carbon) instead of layering one on the other (Windows API versus MFC). Microsoft, on the other hand just keeps piling it on and is, by Gates own words, more interested in features than fixing underlying issues. Linux and *BSD also do a good job of keeping things from gunking up by avoiding a lot of tight coupling of features to the OS kernel and each other.

So yes, Windows NT was not only new, it was MS's first full operating system. Windows was until then a GUI environment on a control program/monitor - not a full blown OS. However, NT is big and has gotten bigger thanks to Microsoft continuously adding on new tightly coupled layers, e.g. COM/ActiveX, Windows MFC and above, etc. Remember how MS argued to the EU that they couldn't remove IE from Windows because it was so tightly coupled to the OS? Relative to Apple and the *ix communities, Microsoft has not managed the underlying OS architecture very well and that makes it difficult for it to make non-superficial changes quickly.

Microsoft has a business model that demands it make big bucks selling the OS because it doesn't own the hardware business. They've also been incented to tightly couple applications and features to the OS in order to preserve their market advantages. That has led it to where it is now which is an OS that doesn't manage power use very well and is difficult to change. The bottom line is that Windows performance in terms of power management is due to Microsoft's decisions and is not due to the fact that its a desktop OS.

A little Bill Gates philosophy that helps explain how Windows got this way: http://www.cantrip.org/nobugs.html

Mac OS X is a desktop operating system - OpenBSD. And no, I don't experience any lag as things "wake up". So now what do you say? Windows simply doesn't consider power management as a priority. Why does it keep polling every connected hard drive? It's an antiquated core with features continuously layered on. It needs a rewrite from ground up.