The constitution requires that there be at least a theoretical term limit, even if the political reality is that it will extended before anything can escape into public domain.

Except that larger sectors also means more efficient ECC, so the same drive will present a higher OS-accessible capacity. Unless you plan to deal mostly in files that are less than 4K, you'll come out ahead.

The ActiveX plugin dates to the days of IE4, long before Firefox, and pretty much contemporaneous with the open-sourcing of Netscape. This was the height of Microsoft's illegal tactics in the browser wars, and there were no mainstream open-source browsers.

Why the government didn't fund the development of compatible open systems, I don't know, but it was certainly many years before there was significant demand.

Yes, the South Korea that wanted strong (128-bit) encryption back when IE was the only browser worth mentioning, but 128-bit encryption couldn't be exported. They implemented their own encryption scheme as an ActiveX pugin, and open source browsers have been really slow about implementing a compatible form of that encryption system.

To me, that sounds like a country that was quite tech savvy, but got screwed by US politics.

I can.

The x86 instruction set patents now serve only to prevent more competition in the desktop CPU market. If you can't get the licenses you need from AMD and Intel, then you can't enter the market. The mutually assured destruction status of the current cross-licensing situation notwithstanding, Intel has been able to use their patents to cause AMD a lot of headaches with the Global Foundries spin-off. And because they are covered by patents, AMD and Intel have been developing their own incompatible virtualization and SSE extensions, which has prevented a lot of software from using them. Those instruction set patents are a barrier to competition and technological progress, and are thus unconstitutional. If the FTC wanted to be bold, they could ask a judge to render all x86 instruction set patents invalid for the duration of the oligopoly.

Yeah. Windows would never have had a larger audience than the Macintosh, which probably would have ended up as the dominant personal computing platform. The lack of a standard x86 platform would have relegated the IBM machines to being low-end business workstations, while all the consumer product lines moved over to 68k. Without the huge back catalog of non-portable DOS software, Windows would have ended up with the same fate as GEOS. Microsoft would have been just another Mac ISV, and the slower initial growth of the personal computing industry and Apple's relatively stronger position in the market would have meant that Jobs probably would have stayed in power at Apple instead of being fired. The technology Jobs oversaw the development of at NeXT would have mostly been created at Apple, and probably a bit earlier; it would have been in mainstream computers a full decade earlier.

If AT&T starts fining or dropping any customers for excessive use of the unlimited plan, that's a pretty easy way out of the contract without the early termination fees. Just drop the terms "breach of contract" and "false advertising" when complaining to customer service and they should realize that it's time to cut their losses and let you go freely. If not, you can take them to small claims court and they will probably end up paying you the early termination fees.

They wouldn't be able to do that in a timely fashion without inviting several breach of contract lawsuits from OEMs that sell AMD PCs.

And given the sizes of Intel and Microsoft, they'd get savagely beat down by antitrust regulators before AMD's lawyers could even mail their threats. (I'm not saying that the Obama administration would be quick or harsh, but Neelie Kroes would be.)

You're on the wrong forum. This is developers.slashdot.org. You don't write the code, so you shouldn't have to worry too much about what language or platform it is. (And if you do, the programmers working for you will probably hate your PHB-style micromanaging.)

To those of us who do write code for a living, this kind of thing is very interesting and relevant. If even Microsoft's hired geniuses don't like Microsoft's tools, then one can infer that there are very few programming geniuses around that would like Microsoft's tools, and so anybody who does like Microsoft's tools is extremely unlikely to be a superstar coder (or else they are so inexperienced that they don't know anything else - either way, they are worth far less than a true superstar coder).

There's also the fact that user interfaces that can't accommodate expert users also tend to cramp intermediate users as well, just in less obvious ways. The fact that the best coders in the business can't stand Microsoft's tools strongly suggests that they are sub-optimal for the run-of-the-mill programmers, too.

In other words, it allows a remote-exploitable user level flaw to be combined with a local privilege escalation into a remote root exploit. That part isn't particularly new. What is new is that such an attack would take quite some time (to download, install, and start the new software), and would be fully logged along the way. A very small hole indeed. It can be closed by using a private repo that excludes packages with known exploits. Or by not allowing users to install packages containing suid executables. Or by requiring the user to type in their password sudo-style before packages get installed. There are probably several other relatively simple ways to mitigate the small risk.

And none of this changes the fact that if security is this big of a problem to you, you shouldn't be using a distro like Fedora in the first place.

This isn't necessarily insecure. Sure, it's not something you'd want enabled on your servers, but for a desktop the only big problems I see are with disk space. (If, on the other hand, this allows the user to install and start a network-accessible service without root privileges, then it's a problem.) For home users, this feature is a definite convenience, and nothing to worry about. For corporate desktops, it's more of a wash: employees can install productivity apps without pestering IT, but now IT has to disable repos that contain counter-productivity apps.

The reason unix has always required root access in order to install software isn't because that's the way things should be, it's because there hasn't been another way to make it secure. Now, if you trust the distro's repos, you can safely let users install those signed packages. This is similar to (but more secure than) Mac OS X's policy of letting users install and uninstall but not modify app bundles.

The Doppler effect can be used by a radar system to determine the relative speed of an object with a single, arbitrarily short pulse. If you want to be pedantic, you can certainly argue that this is still essentially the same thing, but I think most people will accept that a method that can only be explained with quantum mechanics is different enough.

Time Machine has by far the easiest to use interface of any backup solution that is at least as powerful. And because it does file-level deduplication using hardlinks, the backups themselves are standard directory trees, browsable in every way that the rest of the filesystem is. If the block-level deduplication is part of the backup software and not the filesystem, the the archives will be opaque files that usually can only be manipulated by the backup software itself. This means the user has little or no choice between UIs for restoring from the archive, and it usually prevents the archives from being indexed by something like Spotlight.

By adding one small filesystem feature (hardlinks to directories), Apple made it possible to trivially implement a good incremental backup system. (The under-the-hood parts of Time Machine could be implemented in a fairly short shell script run as a cron job.) They then proceeded to put the slickest UI ever around their backup system, but still left it open for other programs. If Apple added block-level deduplication to their filesystem, they wouldn't even have to touch the Time Machine code and it would become the best personal backup software in history.

I use hard links frequently on my NTFS filesystem (albeit created from within cygwin bash). NTFS also supports symbolic links and mount points these days, although Microsoft clearly has no interest in exposing those features to consumers.

What about archived snapshots of my Windows VM? Or for that matter, my entire Time Machine back-end? Block-level deduplication is basically a prerequisite for being able to have Time Machine back up a virtual hard drive image.