Are they going to stick with naming Windows as a single confusing number? Windows 7 was NT 6.1, not NT 7 (look at the version when you open a command prompt).

Is Windows 8 going to be NT 6.2 or NT 7?

Am I the only one who thought of The Social Network when I read this article. That sounds like the same thing Zuckerberg did to Eduardo.

Is it common in big companies to dilute out the smaller players so that they won't be stuck with them forever?

Am I the only one who imagines infected humanoid robots walking around while constantly poking at their phones?

Heck, what's to stop these androids from crashing into walls if they are constantly staring at their phones.

Chrome has a lot more options than you might think. In your case, to change the profile location:
--user-data-dir=D:\foo\bar\chrome-profile

For temp files it uses your system temporary directory -- chrome won't be the only program using this, so make sure your TEMP is set to a reasonable place -- but regardless, most of its data goes into the user-data-dir.

Also, if you don't like Google Chrome deciding when to update and where to install, you can download the Chromium nightlies, which come in a portable format that you can place wherever -- with the same features.

I wonder how much outcry there would be if these companies reset all the old user account passwords like sourceforge just did.

Hello,

We recently experienced a directed attack on SourceForge infrastructure
(http://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-net-attack/) and so we are
resetting all passwords in the sf.net database -- just in case. We're
e-mailing all sf.net registered account holders to let you know about this
change to your account.

snip...

So, as a proactive measure we've invalidated your SourceForge.net account
password. To access the site again, you'll need to go through the email
recovery process and choose a shiny new password:

https://sourceforge.net/account/registration/recover.php

<rant>
Wait, they can't just use Market to push out new browser updates? Something to do with the browser being integrated into the OS? (Yet all third-party browsers are not--can't google at least provide a second non-integrated but secure browser?)

Are you telling me that one of the *most complicated* applications on the OS which deals with untrusted data from the internet can not be updated? Did the android developers dream that the web browser will not have security bugs?

Then, did they just push out Android 2.3, *knowing that there was a security bug in the past, and likely to be more in the future*, and still provide no way to release updates to the browser?

Google, are you serious? </rant>

. /me updates Firefox with the hope of getting a less buggy version

Customizability is what extensions are for. Be glad that XUL gives you the flexibility to re-implement these features using its fast javascript engine.

Here's the one here that I'm using, and it offers more flexibility than the original status bar.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/status-4-evar/

What will they say to those users who use up 500MB in a week without even touching it?

I can just imagine the customer service call when someone starts using their new Win7 phone for the first time and is already blocked from streaming.

http://www.marginart.com/misc/bofh/13may98.html

"Managers are stack-based," I explain. "Rule one is that they have, at most, a two-item stack limit. Mention a technical term and they'll push it onto their mental stack. Mention another, they push that up there as well. Mention yet another and they stack overload and reboot. That is, they think about what they're going to do after work, how sore their bum is, whether the marketing assistant knows her blouse is almost see-through, and so forth."

Yes, those two lines are physically next to each other on the contract. Look it up on their website if you don't believe me.

I actually thought they changed the contract on me since I remembered reading "nearest" and then saw "up to the next"

I don't know why you all are so confused. The contract is pretty unambiguous to me:

> megabytes sent or received
> using Mobile Web (including
> advertising) will be aggregated each month, rounded up to the next
> megabyte, and billed at
> $1.99/MB.
> Rates are rounded to the nearest whole megabyte. One megabyte is equal
> to 1024 kilobytes.

This would imply a charge of $0 in your case. It would also charge you $2 when rounding up to the whole megabyte.

Using my verizon math skills, I can see that adding these two charges together gives us $2 + 0 = $20.
It would appear that you managed to save a whole 18 cents.

This strategy to stop leaks is brilliant! While we waste our time reading and discussing this document, we won't have time to notice any other leaked documents.

I definitely agree with you. In fact byte streams being a fundamental part of POSIX is one thing I love and make use of every day, for example piping output between programs/sockets. My post was not very clear, but I was trying to say that users developing application protocols should not be using BSD sockets directly any more--people usually write or use libraries for that sort of thing.

As far as new protocols go, you can build basically anything using UDP (and UDP is far less likely to be firewalled than any custom IP-level protocol you make up). I think such a protocol could only ever be practically implemented user-space library anyway

I would be curious what the article thinks is so fundamentally wrong with the sockets paradigm.

I honestly had never heard of SCTP before, and I'm surprised that it is not used more widely since it has been around since 2000. It looks to be more complicated than what I was talking about since it covers more issues (talking to multiple hosts). Do you happen to know of any uses of this protocol in real applications?

BSD Sockets themselves are very flexible, I suppose I was complaining about the read/write semantics in stream sockets. Either way, it is possible to layer protocols even at the application level so it's not a big deal. Sadly I didn't get a chance to read the article before acm.org died.