Didn't know this. Looks like it is pretty limited though, as ACPI is much more complex than APM.

I think UEFI is the best solution for things like this and many firmware update utilities already uses it for example.

I don't think APM works on most modern machines though. There is the DOS idle utilities which execute the HLT instruction which is not much but is better than nothing.

Well, it is relatively cheap to do things like this during development of a new major version but relatively expensive to do a security update or hotfix, so they need proof there is actually an exploitable bug, though they will often review surrounding code and do additional fixes when developing security updates.

Remember the "Outlook Email Security Update" from mid-2000 with the pop-ups asking to approve programs sending mail or gathering data from your address book and why it was so difficult to disable?

Screenshot of the Visual Effects dialog: http://i.imgur.com/fNQJjxX.png

Yea, read the end of https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/... and weep. And as it happens Google recently fired Vic Gundotra.

I like to mention this: http://arstechnica.com/civis/v...

At MS?

Eventually Norton AV began to take less resources and I think became easier to uninstall, but I am not sure about the detection rate.

ELS is only available for RHEL3 and RHEL4 which would otherwise have only 7 years of support, and it covers only a limited number of packages. Read Red Hat's lifecycle page.

That is a different problem.

Read the fine point, the 3 more years do not include any updates.

I think they had much poorer support though.

Ah, this is exactly one of the reasons why the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco is one of my favorite topics!