You might be a bit out of your depth in understanding the issue.

The information is still a bit sketchy, but from what I gather, the chips in question are widely used to interface Arduino-type boards to your PC to program, debug, get data, etc...

The key thing here is that the counterfeit chips essentially have the same interface, so they can use the same drivers as devices built with the FTDI chips. Inside, however, they aren't using the same "firmware" as the FTDI chips, so the counterfeits have some extra functionality, like programmable PIDs; this is what FTDI exploited. It was NOT accidental, this simply isn't possible. They specifically coded their drivers to re-write the PIDs using functionality unique to the counterfeit chips.

The real problem is that they not only bricked the fake chips, but the entire device using it. This is a pretty bad thing, if your arduino was collecting data, for example, and you plugged it in to save it. The user has no idea his board is running FTDI-compatible chips (which is really what they are - they are no more "counterfeit" and an AMD CPU is somehow a counterfeit Intel CPU).

FTDI is upset because they paid legitimate fees to get the assigned PID for their device, but this is entirely the wrong way to do it. All you do is upset your customer base and break the law; destructive responses go back to the days when a CP/M spreadsheet program incorporated code to delete everything it could touch if it detected a pirated copy - and they paid dearly for that at the time. At least the victim back then WAS a pirate (mostly, unless the pirate was an unscrupulous vendor, which was often the case back in the 80s).

Ugh... when Microsoft throws out the old to make with the new, however stupid and ill-advised it really is, they justifiably get lambasted for it.

When Apple does it, they are "designing for tomorrow"

Um, ok, sure. Whatever. Ignoring good user interface design is still bad.

The year they finally get around to having 10% of the country wired for fiber.

Fund NASA to explore the advantages (and mitigate issues, such as waste heat) of using fusion in space vehicles. Let's get new designs in play now, so we can get the ball rolling fast when these compact generators are practical and real. Ion thrusters, magnetic fields, life support... having hundreds of megawatts of power makes the entire solar system within reach for manned space travel.

It's a purposeful misspelling of the word moron, a habit picked up on another site where it's a meme.

The original reference was from a picture of some idiot holding a sign that says "Get A BRAIN! MORANS" and another sign saying "GO USA" while wearing a Cardinals shirt and star-spangled bandana.

Thanks for "calling me out" though, especially as an AC. One more 'moran' with nothing worthwhile to contribute to the thread, it seems.

I posted the question honestly (Not sure what moran gave me a Troll mod for my question) - I know ChromiumOS is open sourced, I was not sure how available the source was for Chrome OS.

That said, if the issue is not an issue in ChromiumOS, Google has some serious questions to answer.

If so, why can't members of the Linux community write the required code to support EXT2/3/4 properly, since Google's team can't?

Instead of bitching about losing the feature, zero in on the alleged problem, and provide a solution so it can be reinstated.

Problem solved.

HP is a great example... one division responsible for a tool such as Fortify wants full price (or more) for another's use of the tool, though they'd both benefit. Every company I've worked for typically has one group trying to overcharge another, or even outright backstabbing, which is a real shame, because it only hurts the overall company's bottom line.

That's what you get when you put greedy MBAs in charge, worse when they don't reign in the behavior of their underlings, who are simply emulating their bosses.

Maybe you could hire one to do your math?

Somebody owns one of those "Word Of The Day" calendars, apparently.

"to have an effect for good or ill"

An article with exactly one image from India's mission, and a slide show of false color images from NASA that most slashdotters think were from MOM.

I expected at least a few more images hinted at by the summary. It will be interesting if they can capture some of the more controversial spots to provide independent confirmation of what NASA has been telling conspiracy buffs for the past few years.

Why should we be excited by a $30 1TGB drive today? 5 years ago I was paying $50 for 2TB drives.

That's my point. Development has slowed on higher capacity platter drives for a number of reasons... our demand as consumers might have slowed, but the "cloud" continues to grow and demand storage, but cloud providers are willing to spend too much for enterprise-grade storage they need. Technology is certainly a stumbling block, but they've been talking about these advances for many years. The main reason for the delays and jacked up pricing was plain and simple greed. The Thai floods were a godsend to the industry, which saw prices plummet below $0.025/GB - and suddenly, they were able to charge 3 times the price for all the drives they had stockpiled (not unlike the Sumitomo explosion back in '94 that drove RAM prices to 5 times their previous prices overnight - when the epoxy resin Sumitomo made was in plentiful stock supplies and never was short)

So platter drive makers have sat back and reaped profits, instead of staying ahead of the SSD price/performance/capacity changes. By 2020, those lines will have crossed. We now see "Enterprise" class SSDs, so capacities WILL continue to rise, even if most consumers only need a 1TB or 2TB drive on their PC. Server farms running only SSDs will be a thing in the future. They may even end up being more durable than platter drives by 2020, and that will make it an easy choice for cloud providers, even if it comes with a slight price premium.

SSDs have far more room for innovation than platter drive technology. There are lots of promising advances making their way to production. Even better... you don't have to shrink the chips and make them more dense - you just have to make the existing fab cheaper. In 6 years, those chips will cost a fraction of what they do today.

As for monitors, 1080p is the result of convergence between the television and the computer monitor. Like it or not, it has resulted in an unprecedented reduction in price. South Korean sellers have already pushed WQHD (2560x1440) monitors to the edge of mainstream, and we'll see 4K mainstreamed in another two years (once the HDMI update gets widely adopted). Video games have been the driving force for computer technologies, and 1080p was a sweet spot, with the latest generation consoles finally able to support it fully and computers managing with even low-end video cards these days.

I have some relatively ancient OCZ Vertex drives that are still running, 24/7 as OS drives for two of my servers (media and an ESXi box). Meanwhile, I have a large stack of platter drives that gave up the ghost with no warning whatsoever.

Reliability is as much a quality issue with SSDs as they are with platter drives, but there is less tolerance, more failure points with a platter drive, due to mechanical action.

By 2020, SSDs will have greater capacities than 20TB.

We are seeing the buggy whip manufacturers in full denial. 10TB drives should have been out a year ago, and consumer 6TB drives should be selling for under $100. The floods in Thailand gave platter drive makers an excuse to keep the prices (and profits) jacked up artificially while the insurance money replaced aging plants with the latest technology.

With a fraction of the energy usage, densities increasing, and hopefully a reversal in the recent trend towards less durability, SSDs will probably also overtake platter drives in price per terabyte within 5 years.