I get your point (that a kernel module, being low-level, gives you greater access), but I think a malicious browser extension is worse.

* It's a lot less likely that a user will install a malicious kernel module, as compared to a browser plugin.
* It's a lot easier for someone with bad intentions, a few hours, and a little coding experience to write a browser plugin, than it is for them to write a kernel module.
* It's much easier to distribute a plugin, and the install base is much greater.
* The signal/noise ratio of data you would want to steal is much more attractive for a browser plugin, than it would be inside the kernel.

I completely "get it" that the entertainment companies need to protect their copyrighted material. That's their product, and it's how they make money; fair enough that they don't want people exploiting it.

But here's an example of them going too far: The other day I was watching clips from The West Wing on Youtube. I'm not sure how exactly I got there, but regardless, it was one of my favorite shows back in the day, even though the West Wing franchise never got a dime from me either through product purchases or ads. But after seeing a couple of clips, I was reminded of how much I liked the show, and started to consider purchasing the DVD set -- until I clicked on a clip that had no sound. Then I saw that great "this video contains audio not approved by..." on the top of the screen.

Needless to say, that killed the viewing experience right there. I think when the entertainment companies revisit the sheer dollars and cents, they might see that it's beneficial to leave a lot of this copyrighted material up there -- it might generate a few sales.

I think the consumer trend is pretty clear with respect to SSDs (enterprise-level I think is still uncertain). Consumers like the speed and the battery savings (laptops being incredibly popular now) that SSDs provide, but of course there is no way you are going to get the sheer quantity of storage space that you can get with hard disks.

Consequently, a lot of companies are marketing "home storage servers." I've seen Lenovo, Acer, Asus, etc... all come out with small 4 or 5 bay boxes, usually running Windows Home Server, all aimed at the mid-range consumer market. It makes complete sense to put the platters in a box, where you can keep network-accessible massive storage, and to put the fast, low-power SSD into your client machine.

The problem arises when you need to access what's on that home NAS while you're out on the road. While I think many people have the upload bandwidth for streaming music, I don't think that exists for video (at least, not in the United States, or at least not where I live). So sites like hulu, etc.. will remain popular in that regard for the time being.

I've seen, and have been able to reproduce reliably, hard disks losing their internal cache data, claiming to have written it to platter when in fact it was not. And I am /not/ talking about battery-backed RAID cache, OS write cache, or anything of that nature; I am speaking specifically of the internal hard disk cache.

When we figured out what was going on, needless to say we were all a bit shaken. But the lesson is learned: your storage needs to have a battery backup system.

This past week I had two very interesting customer service experiences -- interesting because of just how different they were.

I spent probably 5 to 7 hours on the phone with HP technical support last week, trying to get them to assist me with a problem we were having with a pair of ProLiant servers. I was shuffled around to multiple departments (and, judging by the various accents, I would say I was probably shuffled to multiple continents as well), each one telling me that the next guy was the right guy to talk to about our issue (which of course he wasn't). This was for a fairly simple question about the functionality of one of their server administration tools, that no one seemed equipped to answer.

Conversely, we also had a hard disk in a ProLiant server go bad. With the serial and part numbers in hand, I was able to get a replacement shipped within 10 minutes.

The two completely different experiences I had suggests to me that when companies get large, they get very good at handling the common support problems, like bad hard disks. They develop procedures that save both the company and the customer lots of time, and are relatively painless. But what's lost is the ability to handle the out-of-the-ordinary service needs that customers have; the company is just too big, and the support guy (let's be frank, in some call center in India*) just doesn't have the resources or the knowledge to handle the problem. This leads to a frustrating experience -- whereas in a small company, these things tend to be handled quickly, because the support guy can escalate easily.

*HP doesn't even try to hide that their support is outsourced to India. If you log-on to their professional support, you can tell right away by the names.

Because as a child, didn't you want to be an astronaut?

OK, so you didn't actually become one. But didn't it help to spark your interest in science and technology?

Are you using a beta version? There was a bug like that a while back, but it's been fixed for a while now. I have no problems with 5.0.375.70

I would imagine that until now, Foxconn's bean-counters had done the math and figured out that it was cheaper to simply build a factory in China and use cheap labor to make their products. But now that their labor is causing PR problems, demanding raises, and killing themselves for insurance payouts, the bean-counters redid the math and figured out hey, if we keep this up, it would be cheaper just to move to Taiwan and have robots do most of the work. So that's what makes sense, and that's what they'll do.

I'm not talking to the ethics of the matter, just the fundamentals of the situation, which is that whichever course of action is best for profits is the one that will be taken. Just because labor wants more, and maybe even deserves more, doesn't mean that when they ask for more they won't be thrown out on their asses.

I hate to ask the obvious question, but the article doesn't address it -- could this be intentional, or is it accidental?

I would imagine that some shady overboss would be willing to pay a relatively sizable amount of money (especially considering that the amount of money you'd have to pay someone in a Chinese factory to do this would not be very high) for the opportunity to infect potentially tens of thousands of computers.