A single example: the "make xconfig" tool for the Linux kernel requires a specific variant of the QT toolkit to build, and the correct variant is QT3 for 2.6.32.x, while it is QT4 for the current dev branch. If the build environment points to the wrong QT version, the build will fail with cryptic messages, which means that you would need to sandbox your kernel compilation to compile both on the same machine. Of cource, most of the people in this situation uses the "make menuconfig" option, that uses libcurses in a terminal emulator instead.

I don't know whether this is a problem with the kernel's developpers or a general QT3/4 problem, but this is for sure a bad situation, and I expect that other projects have had the same kind of issues (forward & backward incompatibilities on the source level) with QT.

The "concatenated SMS" protocol, which removes this limit in exchange for a higher message count, existed before twitter started to be relevant: It is defined in GSM/3GPP release R99, which was already widely deployed even in low-cost devices in 2006, when twitter was created.

The newest Renesas application chips are based on ARM, with a SH4 core only as a coprocessor, so this particular monster will probably never exist.

Do you realize that the chip on the other end of a SATA link - typically the controller in the SSD you're using right now - has a lot of chances to be an ARM chip ? It is the case for common SSD disk controllers (Marvell or Sandforce).

And even if it is not common in today's products, there are a lot of recent high-level ARM SoCs that offer SATA - not least because its low pin count makes it easier to route on the board in the end than a parallel bus. For example, TI's OMAP5, Freescale i.MX53 or CSR's Prima 2 have SATA support.

Given that UTC dates from 1961, and that the leap second concept comes from this, it rather means that a lot of coders are dealing with time without being careful, rather than a fault from the astronomers, who mostly use TAI (without the leap seconds) anyway.

Leap years, daylight saving time, local calendars, all those are also complex issues that need to be taken into account when writing software that needs to correctly handle time. And this is before taking into account the issues brought by the hardware, as clock drift, RTC limitations and integer wraparound, that need to be addressed by the OS developers.

All this means that when it comes to time, most developers should leave it to the OS and language libraries. And those implementing these libraries should take their work seriously, because time is a complex matter, as Y2K and the current issue remind us.

Apple is not as popular in other countries as it is in the US. It is very popular, but it is not reaching the levels seen in the US, where the iPod was practically the single MP3 player sold in significant numbers in the country.

As a result, the international composition of the Slashdot readership will probably tilt the view towards other players, especially if you're comparing with your surroundings.

It does not. One of my previous employers tried to play this card with the MPEG-LA for digital TV decoders, and in the end they had to settle and pay for the MPEG2 patents. But Apple lawyers may be more skilled and success where others have failed.

If you're doing memory transfers to the world outside the CPU (DMA, alternate bus masters, peripherals, etc), you need to have the whole data flushed out of the cache, or the contents of the cache invalidated to avoid reading stale data. In many of those cases, the data must pass through the memory bus, and you cannot avoid cache misses. Hence the importance of low-latency memory access.

From the PDF, the implementation mistake is to give the attacker feedback on whether the tried key is correct after the first half of authentication (phase M4), and then after the complete authentication (phase M6). Since the PIN is only 8 digits, and the last one is a checksum, the problem is reduced to guessing 1 number in 10000, and then 1 in 1000.

The document states that there are few possible mitigations for the problem. However, it skips the obvious one: do not notify authentication success/failure until the response to the M6 message. This would restore the 1 in 10,000,000 guessing complexity of the PIN code, without changing the protocol. It should even be a new issue tested by the compliance suite the vendors need to pass to get the WPS certification.

This is the idea behiind Ribbon Hero, a game designed to learn to use the ribbon interface of Microsoft Office.

Cursive is not easily legible, and clearly the wrong choice in a world where you are not going to write long texts with a quill. Like other antiquated handwriting scripts, it is obsolete and should be reserved to specific cases.

Just teach the kids to spell correctly, and write legibly with block letters. If they want to learn calligraphy, let them learn it during art lessons, instead of basic school training.

A comparatively small country will always be able to set lower taxes for enterprises than their larger neighbors. This is because it only needs to attract a small percentage of the larger countries taxable income to offset the loss due to the lower tax rate, whereas the big country only lowers its income when it does this. Fiscal competition in an open market is a fraud against the people of larger countries, preventing them to set the tax rates of the companies that do business there.