When a company acquires another company, that acquisition becomes a part of the balance sheet of the acquirer. Essentially, the value of the assets they purchased are recorded as if they are worth what they paid for them.

Much of this value, especially with software companies, is carried in the form of "goodwill" on the balance sheet. This is the excess payment over and above the book value of the acquired company (i.e. the value of its assets). If a company gets bought out for $6.3 billion dollars and had $100M in book value assets recorded on their own balance sheet (computers, chairs, buildings, machinery, etc.), then the acquirer records $6.2B in goodwill on their balance sheet,

If the assets that were acquired generate fewer profits than expected, the company may have to record what's called a "goodwill impairment" - the stuff they bought has been demonstrated to be worth less than $6.2B, so they have to record a paper loss in their annual profit and loss statement, which comes out of the goodwill asset on their balance sheet. In theory, the accountants are supposed to look at the business unit every year to see if there is any impairment of value that would require the reporting of a loss associated with the goodwill impairment of that unit. In practice, these things often seem to just sit around for a few years then get pulled out of a hat when the CFO decides fuck it, we're losing money this year anyway, time to write off all that dumb shit we've been carrying on our books that we bought before the economy went kerplop.

Even worse the a goodwill impairment, the entirety of that goodwill can be written off, creating a paper loss equal to almost the amount they originally spent on the company. Which is apparently what happened here.

It's like Microsoft took $6.2B and lit it on fire. They just didn't realize it had all burned up until now, even though the actual cash was gone several years ago.

It's not likely that the Canonical boot loader will allow chain loading XP. Any signed UEFI boot loader that boots an unsigned operating system will be doing so under threat of their own key being blacklisted.

By the same token, I shouldn't be expected to use non-company resources (ADSL line for remote standby support, personal smartphone reading company mail) for business purposes.

Or we can come to a compromise, and all be adults.

But it got nowhere near the kind of marketing Lumia has had. Not even the N9 had anything close to what Lumia is getting (and it wasn't even sold in most first world countries), yet it made similar sales numbers.

/me raises hand ... I still can't settle on anything that would suit me better than my N900.

Especially if you're the sort of person who likes that kind of thing.

Is this the last teenager still using AOL?

Or, if you lived in a different country, where Apple does not have rights to distribute it

Note that in most other countries (outside North America, and possibly the UK), there is *no* legal way to download TV shows. No TV shows on iTunes. No Netflix, no Hulu, no content available on Amazon.

You would think the production houses would have figured out that the same technology which allows a few people to distribute large content to millions of people around the world for very low costs would allow them to reach their customers directly, without many different 'distribution' companies, license agreements, thousands of lawyers (or the Apple 30% tax), and allow them to both serve the customers better, understand what the customers are prepared to pay for, all allowing them to make more money.

Why don't they just run private trackers and RSS feeds with subscriptions available per-season, in the $1 to $3 per show range?

Or rsnapshot

pageant(from PuTTY) works adequately. But, the combination of an ssh-agent and bash-completion is still difficult to achieve without actually having bash (e.g. from mingw32), and using plink (to run commands remotely once-off) and pscp are less convenient, and you lose out on all the programs that use ssh as a transport.

My name is August West.

Good hello folks! It's wonderful to see we've made it onto Slashdot in-between releases again!

However, our website hardware is nearly toast, and is also co-located a long way away from where I live. It is an ancient VIA based system with a Celeron and 512MB of RAM. It also sports a Maxtor hard drive connected to a Promise Technology PCI IDE card, and LILO boots from a 3.5" floppy drive. Frankly, this wasn't really great hardware even when it was brand new, but it ran our site and mailing lists with excellent uptimes for over a decade in spite of that. It looks like the trouble could be a flaking Tulip based Ethernet card (getting DUP and dropped packets, and RX/TX errors). It was doing OK again after a reboot, but I'm having some trouble reaching it again for some reason.

We're looking for a new place to put the main site. Perhaps it could move to our other server, connie.slackware.com (in which case we need a PHP guru to port it to the latest version). There are other Slackware related servers that might be able to host us as well. To be honest, connie is also getting a little long in the tooth (that's a Pentium III with 256MB of RAM).

RIP bob.slackware.com, and long live Slackware!

if the third party is your own Root CA, then it does make sense. For example, I can issue a new cert on the mail server (for whatever reason), without the users all needing to accept a self-signed cert and cultivate bad security habits.

Maybe you need to think about the 'Trusted 3rd party' a bit more, specifically comparing SSL/PKI with Kerberos. Without a trusted third party, how are you supposed to do the initial authentication you speak of? Do all your users actually check SSL certificate fingerprints every time you point them at a service using 'first party public keys' (SSL certificates are public/private, and the SSL client gets the public key during negotiation)?

And the old cert that someone stole is still valid, if they manage to redirect users to a system they control that has the old cert, your users will think it is the valid one, and the real one is the fake one, and you've just compromised all your users credentials.

I hope you don't store any personal data.

You know there's a difference between using self-signed certs, and an internal CA, right?

(of course, all root CA certs are self-signed, intermediary CA certs are not, but the distinction being, you usually don't use the self-signed cert itself for anything but signing other certs).

Using your own internal CA (which you can either do by getting a commercial CA cert signed by a commercial root CA cert, or by creating your own self-signed CA cert) to authenticate/certify your internal services is good. Using self-signed certs to secure your services usually does nothing to authenticate the service to the end user, if they aren't verifying the cert fingerprints via some other method.

Well, in actual fact, nothing prevents software from allowing the user more control of validation of certificates. For example, nothing is stopping software from storing the fingerprints, and notifying the user when the fingerprint has changed, even for certificates signed by a trusted CA. It would be useful to be able to assign a trust level to an individual CA certificate.

But, you understood that all, right? A self-signed cert has less about it that you can validate automatically than a commercially signed cert. Everything you can validate about the self-signed cert can be validated on a commercial cert.

(In our environment, where we are responsible for 200 servers with about 50 internal users, > 5000 users inside the company, plus customers, we use an internal self-signed CA cert for all internal services such as VPNs, most internal web admin interfaces, and commercial certs for customer-facing interfaces).

Nokia specifically made provision for this, there is 'open mode', you can flash kernels onto the device, they need some patches to disable the security framework if you want to boot Harmattan (and you may lose some functionality that is protected by Aegis), and while you have a non-Nokia kernel running, you will see a nasty warning when you boot the phone.

But, you can easily install (multi-boot) other distributions.

Really, how do you think mer / Nemo and Nitdroid (Android 4.0.3) run on the N9 ? Since Nokia did things right with the N9 (upstreaming as much as possible), the Nitdroid team has almost full functionality available (calls, 3G, USSD, bluetooth, wifi etc.), where on the N900 years of work by the same team and they didn't manage to get calls or 3G working (though I think mer on the N900 does).