Typing bugs just don't really happen.

Utter rubbish - in any dynamically typed language you will have many such bugs. I used to code a lot of Perl, and lately I've been forced to use Groovy. There is little chance of refactoring anything, combined with endless cycles of compile, test, fix dynamic language related bug. It's pissing me off so much that quitting my current job and going back to working with Java.

Yes, the UK does have the principle of "contempt of court", and I'd say this is pretty much an example of it as it goes against the spirit and arguably the wording of the court judgement. I just wonder how the court would decide which Apple employees are going to prison for this (and yes, contempt of court invariably means jail time even if it's only overnight).

Simple unlock patterns are inherently flawed, anyway. Your password is finger-painted on the screen. Even direction is easy enough to determine.

Particularly if you sweat as much as Jimmy Savile in a primary school playground.

Amazon is doing something shady and it'll get worked out in court now that it's know[n].

Oh yeah, just like Vodafone and the billions of pounds they avoided paying in tax. In the UK the politicians let big firms get away with crap like this and the Facebook tax dodge in the mistaken belief that it brings jobs to the country. All it does is line the pockets of a few at the cost of a huge amount of tax revenue taht could be used to finance real investment.

I wonder how they manage to support all these different hardware.

One way is automated cross-compiling to ensure that the source at least builds for as many architectures as possible. Think of it as a large scale continuous integration environment.

These guys were targeting primarily older users.

Yup, they targeted my elderly neighbour and a number of her friends, but I've never heard of them targetting younger people. This suggests to me that they have access to data on people so they can pick the best targets. The only commonality we could find amongst the victims we knew was that they had called British Telecom's broadband support lines in India ...

At my current company we have a huge number of cold callers, mostly of the automated variety. There's always a pause as the auto-dialer software waits for a human voice rather than a fax, which is when you should randomly press buttons on your touchtone phone. This either fools the software into thinking it's called a fax line, and removing you from its call list, or transfers you to a human. In the latter case, it's now fun time. My two favourite games (shamelessly nicked from someone else) are:

1. Answer every question or prompt with one word, usually "yes", but extra points for something else

2. Pretend you are a law enforcement officer at a crime scene, and question the telemarketer as to their relationship with "the deceased", ascertain their location and then pretend a unit is on its way to question them

Chips aren't exactly designed to "run Linux" or any other OS.

To be pedantic, most processors are designed to run an OS, in that they have features that are specifically required for the way operating systems are implemented. Support for things like privilege levels for example.

Until the fix the TX number issue ( the infamous rollover ) then they are pretty much out of the running in DB's that have VERY high insert levels since the vacuum process cannot hope to keep up with tables that have 100's of millions of rows.

Infamous to whom? A vacuum updates the frozen TID, which is a trivial operation and allows a subsequent TID to safely wrap around. And I'm struggling to think of any common use cases where the volume of inserts is so high that they can't afford a vacuum every two billion transactions - even high-frequency trading doesn't operate at those levels, and if it did I suspect TID wraparounds would not be your most pressing concern.

Play ethnicky jazz
To parade your snazz
That you download from the Pirate Bay
Braggin' that you know
How to skip out on a charge
Where the Swedish law's got no say

Nah, you're not from the UK - no one here refers to themselves as British.

I actually paid for CND back in the day to get a Motif license...

I bought a CD-ROM of Motif 2.0 from RedHat way back in 1996 - I think it was the only thing they sold that didn't come with source code. When I recently moved house I found the CD-ROM, along with another disc containing a compilation of XView stuff that Ian Darwin used to sell.

Sun seemed to think no one cared about color depth until '97 or so. They did sell a few systems with 24-bit color, but they were expensive as hell.

Yup. most Sun systems like my SparcStation 5 shipped with 8 bit framebuffers that caused the screen to flash horribly if you switched between the windows of applications that were using different palettes. I eventually upgraded to a 24 bit LX framebuffer, which set me back an eye watering £575 in 1998.

I guess you've looked at the XView libraries on a 64 bit PC. XView was created by Sun as a way of easing the transition from SunView (their proprietary windowing system) to the X Window System, and the code was later open sourced. 64 bit versions of the libraries wont run on amd64 / x86_64, despite being included in places like the Debian repositories. This is due to an assumption in the XView code about the size of data types - an assumption that doesn't hold for the 64 bit Intel world (details here). You may be able to get a 32 bit copy of the libraries running in compatability on a 64 bit version of Linux.

I seem to recall that DCE was open sourced a few years back. Not sure how relevant it would be today, since there are plenty of excellent open source alternatives out there now.