Seriously, the 8088/80286 and their addressing space limitations set back the DOS-based world by years, until Intel finally accepted that people wanted to use individual chunks of memory larger than 64K, and that they wanted to run their old real-mode DOS programs, too.

Intel wasn't the problem. The 386 was released in 1985.

Win 3.0 was absolutely awful. It crashed and needed a reboot about twice an hour.

Rubbish.

It was soon replaced with the improved 3.1.

It was two years between Windows 3.0 and 3.1.

One major reason for the split was that IBM insisted on programming OS/2 in assembler - over Gates' objections - locking them onto the 386 platform.
At least that is the way I remember it.

I think you are remembering IBM's insistence that OS/2 ran on their shiny new "AT", with it's 286 processor when the 386 was already out on the market.

It was already working on the next version of OS/2, but split from IBM's path and re-branded the new product as Windows NT. IBM then started their own separate development path and produced OS/2 2.0.

Minor correction. Microsoft - Dave Cutler's team - were working on the OS that was going to replace OS/2 (OS/2 "New Technology") that was then turned into Windows NT 3.1 and successors after the (surprising) Windows 3.0 success.

IBM took the "old" OS/2 code (that both they and Microsoft had worked on) and tarted it up into OS/2 2.x and successors.

Windows NT and OS/2 have no common ancestor. They are completely different OSes from bottom to top.

That explains why in the mid '80s to mid 90's IBM was busy in a joint venture with Microsoft first and alone afterwards... to produce a PC system with networking, multi-tasking and file permissions and even 32 bits (OS/2).

OS/2 (at least in that timeframe) was not multiuser. Neither was it 32-bit (IBM insisted it run on their brand-spanking new AT with its 16-bit 286 CPU).

And the Microsoft/IBM "divorce" was around 1990.

With that said I don't agree with GP. I don't think IBM had that much strategy.

Losing data goes with the territory if you're going to use RAID 0.

In particular, RAID 0 combines disks with no redundancy. It's JUST about capacity and speed, striping the data across several drives on several controllers, so it comes at you faster when you read it and gets shoved out faster when you write it. RAID 0 doesn't even have a parity disk to allow you to recover from failure of one drive or loss of one sector.

That means the failure rate is WORSE than that of an individual disk. If any of the combined disks fails, the total array fails.

(Of course it's still worse if a software bug injects additional failures. B-b But don't assume, because "there's a RAID 0 corruption bug", that there is ANY problem with the similarly-named, but utterly distinct, higher-level RAID configurations which are directed toward reliability, rather than ONLY raw speed and capacity.)

Every non-aboriginal inhabitant of Australia is an immigrant.

Complete bullshit, as it seems you well understand:

Even the aboriginals are fairly recent arrivals if your perspective is wide enough.

I don't understand the racist hate.

No racist hate here, simply someone who thinks immigration should be controlled and targeted in the best interests of the country.

However, successive Australian Governments for a decade or more have been running record immigration rates - mostly under the guise of "skilled immigration" and associated hangers-on - with the twin primary objectives of suppressing wages and maintaining the property bubble. Simultaneously, they have been demonising the weakest and most helpless fleeing for their lives, who account for a rounding error in our immigrant intake.

Unsurprisingly, this systemic view of people as cogs in the machine to be used and discarded on demand has led to a similar culture amongst employers, most recently exposed by the exploitation and abuse of short-term holiday visa holders (usually "backpackers") by the farming industry.

As usual, the Greens have the right idea. Knock down the skilled immigrant intake substantially and increase the humanitarian intake. The footsoldiers of economic immigration can go somewhere else, we should only be importing the best and brightest through our skilled immigration plans, maximising the national interest, and using the rest of our "quota" to help as many people threatened by starvation, torture and death as possible.

When even the dodgy headline unemployment rates are running at 5%+ (real unemployment into the teens), the idea we need to be importing even more people to fight for fewer jobs is just flat out insulting - but the political right seem to believe they've reached the endgame and they're not even trying for a facade of propriety or governance in the national interest any more.

It happens I could use remote USB port functionality.

(Right now I want to run, on my laptop, a device that requires a Windows driver and Windows-only software. I have remote access to a Windows platform with the software and driver installed. If I could export a laptop USB port to the Windows machine, it would solve my problem.)

So NetUSB is vulnerable. Is there an open source replacement for it? (Doesn't need to be interworking if there are both a Linux port server and a Windows client-pseudodriver available.)

I skimmed the start of the paper. If I have this right:

  - Essentially all the currently-deployed web servers and modern browsers have the new, much better, encryption.
  - Many current web servers and modern browsers support talking to legacy counterparts that only have the older, "export-grade", crypto, which this attack breaks handily.
  - Such a server/browser pair can be convinced, by a man-in-the-middle who can modify traffic (or perhaps an eavesdropper-in-the-middle who can also inject forged packets) to agree to use the broken crypto - each being fooled into thinking the broken legacy method is the best that's available.
  - When this happens, the browser doesn't mention it - and indicates the connection is secure.

Then they go on to comment that the characteristics of the NSA programs leaked by Snowden look like the NSA already had the paper's crack, or an equivalent, and have been using it regularly for years.

But, with a browser and a web server capable of better encryption technologies, forcing them down to export-grade LEAKS INFORMATION TO THEM that they're being monitored.

So IMHO, rather than JUST disabling the weak crypto, a nice browser feature would be the option for it to pretend it is unpatched and fooled, but put up a BIG, OBVIOUS, indication (like a watermark overlay) that the attack is happening (or it connected to an ancient, vulnerable, server):
  - If only a handful of web sites trip the alarm, either they're using obsolete servers that need upgrading, or their traffic is being monitored by NSA or other spooks.
  - If essentially ALL web sites trip the alarm, the browser user is being monitored by the NSA or other spooks.

The "tap detector" of fictional spy adventures becomes real, at least against this attack.

With this feature, a user under surveillance - by his country's spooks or internal security apparatus, other countries' spooks, identity thieves, corporate espionage operations, or what-have-you, could know he's being monitored, keep quiet about it, lie low for a while and/or find other channels for communication, appear to be squeaky-clean, and waste the tapper's time and resources for months.

Meanwhile, the NSA, or any other spy operation with this capability, would risk exposure to the surveilled time it uses it. A "silent alarm" when this capability is used could do more to rein in improper general surveillance than any amount of legislation and court decisions.

With open source browsers it should be possible to write a plugin to do this. So we need not wait for the browser maintainers to "fix the problem", and government interference with browser providers will fail. This can be done by ANYBODY with the tech savvy to build such a plugin. (Then, if they distribute it, we get into another spy-vs-spy game of "is this plugin really that function, or a sucker trap that does tapping while it purports to detect tapping?" Oops! The source is open...)

Some people use these terms in the moral and ethical, rather than legal, context.

Kevin '07 was eager to open the immigration floodgates and let anyone in who wanted to buy property. He'd drunk deeply of the neoliberal koolaid.

That's hardly an achievement. Abbot is making Kevin Rudd look good.

We had a chance to be great, but we elected John Howard and it's been all down hill since then.

Thankfully I have multiple citizenships, but NZ or the UK aren't much better. At least the latter gives me an avenue into the EU and Switzerland, though.

The inadequately-configurable trackpads, in positions where they detect the palm resting on the laptop (or brushing them) and randomly jump the cursor or highlight whole paragraphs so the next keystroke replaces them, are no help, either.

What do you mean by inadequately configurable? There's usually an option to disable while typing somewhere.

It's there. It's on. Didn't help. Don't know if it's that Ubuntu 14.04 doesn't support it properly on these two machines or if it doesn't do the job I want done.

What I'm looking for is NOT there: A threshold level for touch sensitivity. If you're going to put a BIG touchpad on a laptop's palm rest, you need to either put it where the palms won't brush it, or you need to make it possible to turn down the sensitivity so that a feather-light brushing of the pad doesn't register as a mouse motion or button click.

Two different manufacturers (Lenovo and Toshiba) have used exactly the same layout, and exactly the same hair trigger, non-adjustable, touchpad sensitivity. (Also exactly the same sort of wafer-thin flat tile keys, which is how we got into this digression.)

The problem I have with current keyboards is not just the short travel and lack of clickyness, but the tiny height of the keys.

Instead of the tall keys with space between them for fingernail clearance, there are these thin squares maybe an eighth of an inch above a solid surface. If I don't keep all my fingernails cut short, when they go past the side of the key they hit the panel and the key doesn't "strike". Letters get dropped. (So I get to pick between typing well and playing the guitar. I pity those who must keyboard for a living but want long nails to maintain their social life.) The short travel means there's little margin for finger variation, so some letters, where my fingers don't depress the keys as far, normally, don't strike, while others, where I support the weight of my hands, do strike when they shouldn't, or strike multiply.

After over a year I haven't been able to adjust. You may have noticed that my spelling has gone to hell as a result: I have to do a lot more correction and sometimes miss fixing things up.

(The inadequately-configurable trackpads, in positions where they detect the palm resting on the laptop (or brushing them) and randomly jump the cursor or highlight whole paragraphs so the next keystroke replaces them, are no help, either.)

On the other hand, when the nails do hit the key, they quickly wear through the top level of black plastic, exposing the backlit transparent light below it. I replaced a laptop about a year ago and after about six months about a half-dozen heavily-used keys had their pretty letters obscured by the giant glow of the scoured away region.

I had been running on older thinkpads and toshibas, with classic keyboard-shaped keys, or at least the little fingertip cup and substantial fingernail clearance. Switching (in a two-dead-laptops-in-two-weeks emergency) to a lenovo z710, then to a company-supplied toshiba s75, both with the stupid "I'm so thin", square, low-travel, no-finger-cup keys has been a disaster.