Really old machines may have floppies only, not CD drives, particularly laptops. Generally a USB stick is a better option for such machines - even a machine with an old BIOS can use a boot floppy to boot from a USB stick.

Opa is a really interesting design but it's AGPL, so it can't be used for any closed-source apps, even if hosted on a server. Maybe they will dual-license it in future, but right now it's only for open source work.

Installing the latest Firefox on Ubuntu is as easy as adding a small string to the list of software sources in a GUI tool... then it will automatically get new versions. Details here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/6339/how-do-i-install-the-latest-stable-version-of-firefox/6348#6348

This really isn't hard and doesn't involve the scary command line (unless you want it to).

It really isn't any harder than on a Mac or Windows - the only issue is knowing about PPAs as a way of installing software.

LastPass (cloud service with browser plugins) supports Yubikey, a low-cost token for two-factor authentication - so someone would have to both install a keylogger on my system and physically steal the Yubikey token to get the LastPass passwords. http://www.yubico.com/

This makes it actually more secure to always use LastPass even if you remember the site password, because the LastPass login is Yubikey protected while the site password isn't (and the way LastPass sends the password to the site doesn't involve the keyboard.)

As with KeePass or 1Password, which are non-cloud services that would be used with Dropbox etc, you must still be very careful with security of the client system - non-keylogger trojans that attack the LastPass plugin or the KeePass/1Password client software could still steal passwords while the password database is open.

Everyone on Windows should be running the free Secunia PSI, which scans all third party and Microsoft apps every week for vulnerability, providing a link to easily update them, and even auto updates some of the most common ones. If everyone did this, drive-by download attacks would be virtually a thing of the past.

Sadly, Mac and Linux don't have this for any apps not handled by the standard MacOS updater or the Linux distro's package repository, but at least with Linux you can limit your use of non-repository apps to those with excellent auto-updating (Firefox, and Chrome as long as your distro doesn't go out of date making Chrome refuse to update!)

Unfortunately for those who like cross-platform languages, OCaml is well behind F# in a couple of areas:

1. Toolchain - getting a simple OCaml program to compile is horribly complex involving various separate tools such as omake, ocamlbuild, ocamlfind, etc - there is no one way to do things and it's really hard even for someone used to building open source packages in many languages (I've built KDE in the past which uses CMake but did work OK)

2. Integration with other languages - see this tutorial for the various issues to be covered: http://www.linux-nantes.org/~fmonnier/OCaml/ocaml-wrapping-c.php - and this for the build sequence: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2807021/compiling-c-lib-and-ocaml-exe-using-it-all-using-ocamlfind/2809086#2809086

I think OCaml is a very impressive implementation and language, and is one of the few languages which can compile to real machine code with performance competitive with C, yet at the same time provide the productivity of a much higher level language such as Python, Ruby, etc. For heavy computation on limited hardware where the right third party libraries exist, it can really work well. But the OCaml community needs to make it easier to get started....

Mod parent up...

Microsoft has a history of pressuring OEMs not to support alternative OSs, such as requiring a Windows fee on every desktop shipped, even if it didn't use Windows (and other less obvious pressure). It would be quite easy for them to exert some almost-deniable pressure to stop OEMs from shipping motherboards that have the option to disable secure boot. Then the (small) threat of Linux on the desktop would completely disappear - more seriously, a route for new people to learn to use and develop on Linux would disappear, which is important for the whole Linux ecosystem.

This is one of the biggest threats to Linux overall in many years - a world where most PC users simply can't boot Linux is a great way to cripple the uptake of Linux on servers as well as desktops and other devices.

Since I recently set up BitLocker on a Windows 7 laptop (requires Ultimate or Enterprise which are not cheap) - if you have a TPM chip it's convenient to use in the default setup with keys held in the TPM, but if the laptop is stolen it doesn't stop anyone booting it and trying passwords, though it does stop them booting from CD/USB drive to read the disk, or putting the disk in another PC.

TrueCrypt and commercial Windows tools such as PointSec which require a separate disk decryption password every time you boot, which I think is more secure.

There are many dialects and most are mutually unintelligible, but the writing system is standard. In China, most people seem to speak Mandarin Chinese (putonghua) in addition to any local dialects.

The two convicted were not stating an opinion - they were saying "let's get together to have a riot" and at least one gave a particular location (behind McDonalds) where the rioters should assemble. Of course they claim it was all a joke.

"To infringe a patent, one has to infringe on all claims."

Wrong - you only need to be covered by one claim in a patent to infringe the whole patent. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_infringement#Elements_of_patent_infringement (2nd paragraph).

"Only 19% of Internet web servers are running Windows but they are the source of essentially all malware."

Absolute rubbish - JavaScript and iframe infections (often used to serve drive-by downloads of malware) affect all web servers, and often only require a stolen FTP password to work, or a PHP app with a security hole. The majority of web servers are still Linux, and that's where the the majority of web app served malware is.

This is often not Linux's fault - if the user has an FTP password saved on their Windows FTP client and that gets stolen, for example. If it's a web app vulnerability it's sometimes OS independent, but in some cases Linux features like /proc/environ are used as part of the exploit.

The ethernet jack and high speed is nothing to do with the NAT. This sounds like a new apartment building with Fibre To The Building (FTTB), hence the high symmetric bandwidth of 50 Mbps.

This can be done at layer 2 providing an Ethernet demarcation point as the service to the end user (you), or it can be done at Layer 3 (IP) without NAT, or Layer 3 with NAT.

Unfortunately your ISP doesn't have enough IPv4 space left to do layer 3 without NAT, and since it's an ISP it needs to provide layer 3 somewhere. However there are plenty of FTTB/FTTH deployments that don't impose NAT at the provider side.

Yes, and in fact this is closer than all geostationary satellites (communications, TV, etc) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit - which are at 22,000 miles from surface of the Earth, vs. this asteroid's 8,000 miles.

I used to use SpiderOak for backups on Linux, but gave up when it failed in two different cases to backup all the files I'd asked it to, and to restore them. It was also incredibly memory heavy so it ran badly on a 1GB RAM PC.

It might have improved but I always found the user interface highly cryptic.

In the UK, a product generally has to work for 6 years (with exceptions for some things that just wear out), so they could probably be sued there - quite easy to do in the small claims court.