The basic office-type products for Linux still kind of suck. I've been using them since the StarOffice/SunOffice days, and now use LibreOffice. They've improved a lot, but they're still flakier than they should be, a decade after initial release. Nobody wants to fix the hard-to-fix, boring bugs which damage usability.

Oracle buying the remnants of Sun didn't help.

Before "Jaws", there wasn't much of a market for shark meat. Then demand picked up. Now, the shark population has dropped so much that sharks are facing extinction.

Will this be fixed on the next Patch Tuesday? I haven't been using the Windows macines much lately, but one is powered up, idle, and accepting updates. Will it fix itself?

As usual, we have to go through two levels of blogs to get to the actual ICANN document. Which document you may find incomprehensible even if you know how DNS works.

This is in theory true, but there are proposed proof-of-work algorithms for which specialized hardware doesn't have a huge edge over general-purpose CPUs. Such algorithms require more memory than the existing hashes, and are designed to be highly sequential, so they don't parallelize easily. At least one altcoin claims to have such an algorithm.

Any algorithm that requires a significant amount of 64-bit floating point computation and lots of memory, like a big matrix inversion, would be reasonably ASIC-proof, simply because that's a task CPUs are designed to do fast. An ASIC that could invert big matrices would need superscalar FPUs, which makes it as complex and expensive as a CPU with comparable performance.

So far, nobody seems to have devised a "minable" algorithm based on matrix inversion, but that's a place to look for one.

What I'm proposing is to hold up the final 250 OK until the message has been passed on, then report the result of the forwarding as an SMTP status. If immediate forwarding is not possible, return a 421 Service Not Available, so the sender will retry. If the forwarding returns an error status, return that error status. No need for local message storage or bounce messages.

I've heard Dolby's positional audio, being driven from a game, in the Dolby Labs screening room in San Francisco. It sounds great. You can hear people sneaking up behind you in the game. You can hear someone walking around you. There's a real sense of presence.

That's in a room built, at a cost of millions, as a demo for Dolby's audio technology. The room is on a separate foundation from the rest of the building, with an inner set of vibration isolated walls. The room acoustics are very good; you don't need a microphone when giving a talk there. The walls and ceiling conceal speakers everywhere, and the room with the amps and processors looks like a small server farm.

You're not going to get that in Joe Sixpack's living room. You might get close to it in some high end home theater installations, the ones that look like small movie theaters and are used for no other purpose. It's a niche market.

One of my back-burner ideas is speeding up email forwarding. Most email forwarders (sendmail, etc.) accept emails, put them in a queue, and then later spool them out to the destination. This adds a minute or so of latency. It's done this way for historical reasons. In the early days, the destination mail agent might be down, or the mail transfer might be over some polled protocol like UUCP.

That's dead. Today, if the destination mail agent exists, it's probably up and immediately reachable via a fast connection. So a modern mail fowarder should accept the incoming email via SMTP, and then, while holding the incoming connection open, send the email on to the destination mail agent. Any problems are immediately reported to the sender via SMTP status code.

This not only speeds things up a bit, it eliminates "bounce messages" generated between mail agents. Problem reports come back immediately, as SMTP errors. There's a series of open TCP connections from sender to the receiver's IMAP server. From the IMAP server to the final destination, today you usually have some kind of push notification. So you get the effect of instant messaging, using existing email protocols.

This also eliminates "joe jobs", where impersonation generates vast numbers of bounce messages. The spammer just gets lots of SMTP errors, which never bother anybody else.

Agreed. Anyone know what kind of exploit this is?

Didn't look at the source of a Youtube page, did you? Look for "http://s.ytimg.com/yts/swfbin/player-vflZsDuOu/watch_as3.swf". Videos can also play with "HTML5 video", but there's Flash code there to be executed.

Presumably this attack is via a Flash vulnerability. So why is there no mention of Adobe in the article? Why isn't Adobe being held responsible? Why are there still vulnerabilities in Flash? Who audits that code? Well?

It's good to see this discussion becoming mainstream. Back in 2009, Alan Cox wrote in the Atlantic, "One sometimes wonders, in this era of Market religion, where the skeptics and freethinkers have gone". There's been an assumption in recent decades, since the USSR went down, that capitalism is the only possible system of economic organization. That's starting, cautiously, to be questioned.

In the Great Depression of the 1930s, all sorts of "isms" were proposed. Communism, socialism, technocracy, and others now forgotten had substantial followings. WWII ended those discussions, and the postwar boom made them irrelevant. Now, few people even know that alternatives to capitalism are possible.

The "strong safety net" countries (the Scandinavian countries, some EU countries, and Japan) have done reasonably well. The production side is mostly capitalist, but taxes are higher and the consumption side is partly socialist. This works if international competition is limited to stop the "race to the bottom" in wages. The current Doha round in the WTO is stalled because many countries now want more protectionism.

Flying cars work just fine. They're called quadcopters. They're just not for people. Like space travel. The future belongs to robots.

It's just a battery factory. It's unlikely it will employ that many people. Tesla says 6500, but that's probably exaggerated, including the construction phase. The battery factory for the Chevy Volt has only 100 people. It's a big, highly automated plant.

This is a naive article. For a better analysis, see "How Asia Works", which is a comparison of the coastal Asian countries, how they developed, and why. Development requires several phases. One is raising agricultural productivity. There's the heavy-handed approach, which comes in the communist form of collective arms and the capitalist form of big plantations. Then there's the light approach, which involves lots of little services like tractor rental and agricultural agents. (The heavy-handed approach works well only for flat land. Hill operations require too many local decisions.) There's thus a visible relationship between what a country looks like and its Gini coefficient.

The second phase of development is about industrialization. Where investment goes really matters. Market forces do not direct investment towards overall economic growth, but toward short-term profit. The successful "Asian tigers" all had very directed investment controls, and how well countries did relative to each other depends on how well investment was directed.

The book has lots of country-by-country comparisons, both statistical and on the ground. It's worth a read.