HTTPS should be truly end to end with no MITM. Any software vendor putting stuff on my computer that bypasses this will not be supported by me financially in the future.

To be perfectly honest, I'm so strongly in favor of encrypting everything that I say, if there's a non-HTTPS site out there that only serves traffic over HTTP, and they want to bundle malware on my system that *only* injects content into regular HTTP (not HTTPS) connections, I'm all for it. Go ahead and punish users and sites that run without TLS enabled. It'll just increase the pressure on webmasters and users to get TLS up and running on absolutely every host.

And with things like StartSSL and soon that Mozilla-funded free CA, there's really no excuse not to have a trusted cert (not a self-signed or snakeoil cert).

Let's encrypt the web. But don't you dare interfere with or modify my HTTPS traffic through any means. That will immediately get your company blacklisted in my book of companies I'm willing to do business with.

They're going to pay off the music cartels to convince them to give Spotify a few more months of life before they cave in or get bought out, of course.

Half a billion dollars will satisfy the RIAA's greed for about 6 months.

Hand-assembled desktop:
Case: Corsair Obsidian 650D
PSU: Corsair Professional Series Gold 1200W
Mobo: ASUS P8Z77-V
CPU: Core i7 3770K
RAM: 32 GiB DDR3-1600 (Komputerbay)
Storage: 3 x 4 TiB HGST 7200rpm 3.5" + 1 x Seagate Barracuda 4 TiB 7200rpm consumer HDDs (in hardware RAID10)
RAID controller: Adaptec 6405E
GPU1: Sapphire Radeon HD7970 (reference design with impeller)
GPU2 (in CrossFireX): XFX Radeon R9 280X (with three large 'standard' fans and clocked at GHz Edition speeds)
Soundcard: Creative SoundBlaster Z

Accessories:
Headphones: Steelseries H Wireless connected via bidirectional Optical (Mini-TOSLink) to the SoundBlaster Z
Display: Panasonic VIERA TC-L32DT30 HDTV (1080p60)
Keyboard: Das Keyboard Model S Professional
Mouse: Steelseries Sensei
Mat: Razer Vespula

The story:

Ordered the HD7970 in February 2012 and stuck it in my old box for a few months.

Ordered the CPU, Mobo, case, PSU, two HDDs (one of them has since died), and RAM in April 2012 and built new box by adding GPU. Handed down my old box to a family member along with my older GPU.

Ordered the Adaptec RAID controller a couple days after getting the box together and realizing I didn't like software RAID.

Ordered the SoundBlaster Z in February 2014 in preparation for the arrival of the Steelseries H Wireless (pre-order) in March 2014.

Ordered two HGST disks in March 2014 and combined them with the existing two Seagate disks to make a RAID10 array.

Ordered the R9 280X in June 2014 after realizing how cheap it was and that I could Crossfire it with my existing card because it's the same chipset.

One of the Seagate disks failed badly in August 2014, but I didn't lose the RAID array because the other three disks were fine. I overnighted a new HGST disk (same make and model as the other two) to replace it. At present, I have one of the original Seagate and three HGST disks still in the RAID array.

The configuration has been static since then.

Presently I estimate that this system has gone through about 75-80% of its service life *with me*. Since I'm a gamer, coder, virtual machine runner, and general all-around resource hog, I'll be looking to upgrade when Skylake mainstream processors land. I'll probably get a Skylake "K" (unlocked) i7. Of course, this system is perfectly serviceable for lighter duty gaming and web browsing, so I expect it will become the upgrade for the same family member who is using my old system today (though with a few retrofits due to some component failure).

The internals of the case are an absolute mess; a tangle of poorly organized cables. The only thing that keeps it even slightly manageable is the modular PSU; I removed (or never plugged in) all the molex connectors I'll never need.

One of the big limitations I've come up against with this system is the limit of the number of PCIe lanes and slots. I'll definitely consider this more heavily when I buy my next system, but I understand that Skylake mainstream is going to be expanding the number of lanes anyway.

Right now, this system can play 2014-and-earlier AAA games at maximum detail (or very near to it; some settings are just so poorly optimized that they're not usable), even on a single GPU. With CrossFireX I just get more consistent framerates (AMD's Frame Pacing feature is a lifesaver).

I'm starting to feel that it is experiencing significant slowdowns, even in CrossFireX, on the latest AAA titles. Dragon Age Inquisition and The Witcher 3 are giving me a lot of trouble. I am not sure if it's due to their poor driver maintenance, bad optimization, or Nvidia-favoring algorithms. I can probably deal with this performance deficit for the remainder of this year, but I will definitely want to upgrade in time for Star Citizen.

Well, Frontier is the 6th largest local exchange carrier and 5th largest DSL provider based on coverage area (citation: Wikipedia). Being that far down on the totem pole, I'm not surprised that they have to differentiate themselves with nice things like competent tech support. The ones that are really terrible are Comcast, TWC, and Verizon.

Point taken, though. They're not all bad. Just the 2-3 of them that the vast majority of the people have access to.

While I have many issues with ISPs that have been covered fairly well by other responses here, one issue that few have talked about is reliability of the service, and the ability to get it fixed when it breaks.

At least around here, it seems almost 1 out of every 2 people has some significant reliability problems with their Internet connectivity, and isn't sure how to fix them. When they call the ISP (whether it's cable, DSL, fiber, LTE, ..) the first thing they ask them is to reboot their modem and/or router and/or computer. When that doesn't fix it, the tech doesn't know what else to do. They often send out a guy to take a look, who'll say that your cable modem is shot, and have you get a replacement. If it's under warranty or owned by the cable company, sometimes that might be free; if you own the equipment and it's out of warranty, you have to put up for a new one.

But 8 times out of 10, replacing your modem / routers does not fix the problem. Nor does going from WiFi to ethernet -- another common "fix". Sure, WiFi has problems, but if your issue is actually with some part of the cable, especially if it's a part that's buried underground, it can be nearly impossible to convince the company that the problem is there, and moreover, to get them to dig it up and replace it.

I'm on a grandfathered unlimited LTE data plan as my primary Internet connection, now. Cellular towers are pretty reliable due to their centralized infrastructure and the number of users it would affect if they were having a problem. I've had a few persistent issues with my LTE connection that lasted for weeks, but each time, it magically went away after very little effort on my part, likely after they received hundreds of calls from other customers about the same problem, and had to send someone up the tower to fix it.

Those with landlines to the premises are in a much more difficult situation. The company is likely to pin the problem on hardware that is owned by you, or wiring that is installed within the walls of your house. They will not be willing to admit that the problem may lie with the line buried underground. Acknowledging that problem would effectively cause them to have to outlay a significant cost to a contractor to dig up and replace the cable, so instead, they treat each individual support call as a new incident, and forget all the history of your problem where you've diligently worked by process of elimination to determine that it must be something in the line.

I remember years ago when we used deduction to determine that our DSL problem must lie with the phone line beyond the premises of our house. We replaced all our devices, hooked up to ethernet instead of WiFi, and even completely replaced all the DSL filters and phone line wiring in our house. The problem persisted. But the tech support guys kept experiencing a case of amnesia; every time we called, despite trying to ask them to refer to previous tickets and things we'd already tried, they just wanted us to reboot our modem, over and over and over and over again, as if that would help. This would happen even if we got the same tech support person on multiple calls.

At work, a lot of people come to me for advice on problems they're having with tech at home. I don't know why they do it; they just do. I get my fair share of laptop problems; Windows won't boot; they have a virus; whatever. But the #1 most frequent problem I get is that their Internet is unreliable and drops out all the time. Occasionally I'll find that replacing their cable modem fixes the problem, but in many more cases, we narrow it down to the landline, or at least to an ONT or something exterior to their dwelling that isn't owned by the resident -- at which point, you're basically at a dead-end.

The willingness to address problems, and to refer to case history to eliminate potential sources of problems, is seemingly absent from nearly all ISP support employees. And you wonder why their ACSI score is low...

Their bottom line will definitely "feel" this, but it'll be in the positive direction. People will continue to visit Disney parks, buy Disney games and watch Disney movies. As far as the vast majority of the US population is concerned, the Disney company can do no wrong, and everything it produces is gold.

It's like the character Truxton Spangler said at the end of the last episode of the AMC series "Rubicon": "Do you really think anyone is going to give a shit?"

People don't care how they treat their workers. That's just not a criterion that people use to determine whether to do business with a company. Unless their U.S. products start having their manuals and product literature written in Indian English, I doubt anyone will notice, or care, that there was a major shift inside Disney.

And to prevent everything from being written in Indian English, they'll just hire one or two fresh-out English majors (USAians) for $35k to translate all the public-facing Indian English documents into American English.

"Reduce the number of private trees" --> Yeah, like the ancient (by mainline standards) kernels in most releases of Android... The sooner GOOG learns how to play nice with the rest of the Linux developers and get their customizations contributed upstream, the better off we'll all be. Though, admittedly, AOSP is doing a pretty decent job of that nowadays. The more egregious sinners are the device manufacturers.

I would imagine that there is a mandatory security policy on those systems, enforced by the kernel, that prevents processes from modifying their code or modifying any other process's code. If not, it sounds like they need another 100kb kernel module to make sure of that. I'm pretty sure SELinux and/or grsecurity can do that. It's usually enforced with certain exceptions for some software programs that need to modify their own code by design. On an embedded, high-risk system, you would just not allow it, period.

We'll be lucky to see the first device running Android "M" on Verizon by Q2 next year.

Nexus 6 launched on November 3, 2014 as the first Lollipop device. Seven months later in May 2015, my Note 4 is updated to 5.0.1.

Or how about Bluetooth audio that actually *works*? https://code.google.com/p/andr...

The thing to keep in mind is that Google doesn't have a one-track mind. They don't have 1 developer who can only perform feature development work on one thing at a time. MIDI support has very likely been a side project brewing for a number of years that finally now is stable enough to release. Meanwhile, they have lots of other people who have little to no clue what that guy was doing with MIDI because they spend a lot of their time looking into problems similar to the ones you've identified. But obviously those people aren't done with their work because the feature isn't in production yet.

I consider it very unlikely that some other highly useful feature would have been worked on instead, had they opted not to add MIDI support. I'm not sure why they chose to feature it so prominently in TFS or to even mention something like that at Google I/O, but my guess is that it was a 20% project for someone who has a passion for MIDI, so it's not like Google could tell them, "stop doing this useful contribution to the Android open source project in your spare time". 20% time at Google is exactly for this type of thing.

I think this has a very practical purpose: by allowing the charging circuit to operate at the same time as power flows out of the host, it will allow something like this:

USB Keyboard = K
USB Mouse = M
Powered USB Hub (connected to wall socket) = H
MHL adapter (USB-C to HDMI with a female USB-C socket for accepting peripherals and power) = P
Smartphone = S

K and M --> H --> P --> S

USB hub provides power to K and M and provides data and charging to S

Not sure if this is how it will actually work, but they definitely needed to do something to enable a use case like this, and it sounds like it might just do it.

Seriously, if you're doing office work, get a typewriter. Just because you have a pimp desktop doesn't mean it should handle everything.

Seriously, if you're doing gaming, get an XBone. Just because you have a pimp desktop doesn't mean it should handle everything.

Seriously, if you're listening to music, get an MP3 player. Just because you have a pimp phone doesn't mean it should handle everything.

Do you see how ridiculous this is?

There are serious benefits and advantages to convergence: using one device for many purposes. Unless there is some reason why the hardware is especially poorly suited to the task, there's no reason *not* to do it. Supporting needless device specialization plays straight into the hands of the consumer electronics companies, who want you to spend $300 on a music player, another $300 on a phone, another $300 on a tablet, another $300 on an eReader, another $300 on a device to visit facebook, another $300 on a device to visit Yahoo, another $300 on a device to play games, etc. etc. etc.

A few exceptions:

e-Ink: acknowledged that it's superior, mainly due to battery life and readability in a wide variety of light conditions, for long-term reading of plain text. However, many people read large amounts of text on LCDs/AMOLEDs with no adverse effects.

External hardware for music production: acknowledged that skilled musicians can usually do a better job using actual instruments (whether MIDI or just a microphone attached to a conventional instrument) at music production. However, these microphones and MIDI sources can, and should, be compatible with general-purpose computing devices, including smartphones.

Physical keyboards: if you're typing something longer than a Tweet, it's so much faster and more comfortable to use a physical keyboard, even if it's just a small one. However, Android's support for bluetooth keyboards is pretty good, so that's not to say you shouldn't support physical keyboards attached to devices that normally lack them.

Actually, the latter two of those aren't really *exceptions* at all. They exactly prove my point. A general purpose computing device plus external accessories can be much more broadly useful in a diverse array of situations compared to a general purpose computing device that only supports phone calls and web browsing.

So then we have the following categories of devices:

(1) General-purpose computing devices. SHOULD have very robust support for external accessories to make it useful in a wide variety of use cases.

(2) Specific computing devices that serve one or two purposes. These are only justifiable if the hardware feature(s) are so essential to the task being performed that it has to be built-into the device, and it doesn't make sense to make it an accessory to a general purpose computing device. For instance, it would be silly to attach an e-Ink external display to a smartphone.

(3) Accessories. These don't have any real "smarts" to themselves, but they connect to a general-purpose computing device that provides some kind of value-added processing or data storage or streaming, etc.

Reducing the utility of general-purpose computing devices and selling more specific computing devices that are unnecessarily specific is an anti-consumer tactic.

Yeah, and Ubuntu 15.04 *could* potentially kill or even cripple Windows on the desktop. /sarc

Really, though? Momentum and app availability form EXTREMELY powerful negative feedback loops for the losers and positive feedback loops for the winners. Microsoft was late to the party and missed the boat, so they're stuck in a negative feedback loop: no developers, no apps, no users; rinse and repeat, goto 1, while(true). Google and Apple are in a positive feedback loop: more and more devs, more and more apps, more and more users. While(true).

What does Windows offer that is so attractive that millions will jump ship, that neither Android nor iOS offers? A better Hotmail UI doesn't count.

Power users either want high-end hardware and complete control of their device, and buy Developer Edition Android phones and root them; or they're hooked so hard on Apple's koolaid that you couldn't pry them off with a crowbar.

Joe Average probably wants something that they can make calls on and occasionally look up restaurant hours in a web browser, or play a game when bored. If they have money and/or want something stylish, they'll get iPhone. If not, they'll get a current or previous-gen Android. Admittedly, these guys are the easiest to capture for Microsoft, but if they've already invested more than $10 in apps on the Play Store or App Store, you're probably not going to be able to recruit them. Unless you require app devs for Windows Store to offer free licenses to people who provably bought the same product on iOS or Android. Wake me up when MS does that.

People living below the poverty line, and/or in developing countries, are flocking to cheap (and I mean seriously cheap, $20 to $50 FULL RETAIL! and often discounted below even that) low-end Android phones with Mediatek SoCs. Many of them don't even meet the minimum system requirements for Windows Phone, but they run fine on Android. Either that, or they sack away 10 paychecks by living frugally and get sucked into the Apple reality distortion field when they buy an iPhone.

Microsoft is in the same bind that desktop GNU/Linux has been in since the release of Windows 95: the momentum is so powerful that it is literally irrelevant what they do; regardless of what moves they make, short of buying Google or Apple outright (which they can't afford to do), they are not going to be able to own a significant share of the smartphone market.

I would say it's poetic justice, but Microsoft still makes a fuckton of money on Windows and Office, so I don't feel bad for them at all.

You missed an important point of the guy you replied to. Debian *did* eventually adopt the 2.0 kernel (and all subsequent versions). Did Debian's adoption of the "devilish" 2.0 kernel cause FreeBSD (or whatever your favorite alternative is) to take off?

How about the adoption of PulseAudio? Maybe I missed the memo and there's some other desktop distro out there that didn't adopt PulseAudio that has millions of users, but last I checked, Ubuntu is still the most popular desktop distro by a wide margin, despite an enormous backlash against PulseAudio. Even the second, third and fourth-place distros -- Fedora, OpenSUSE and Arch, in no particular order -- all ship PulseAudio by default, and have many core desktop packages that explicitly depend on PulseAudio components.

It's the same story over and over again:

1. Red Hat introduces some new technology or disruptive change.

2. A minority of the people actively embrace it; the vast majority accept it somewhat reluctantly and go with the flow; and an even smaller minority vocally proclaim from the top of the mountains that any change that requires them to learn new console commands is simply unacceptable because what they have is working just fine for them, thanks.

3. As the software stabilizes and comes to incorporate exhaustively every possible feature and use case of whatever it is designed to replace or obsolete, the people who were reluctant but open-minded become converts who embrace and actively appreciate the new solution.

4. The aforementioned vocal minority of opponents continue to wail away tirelessly and threaten to move to another platform, while quietly adopting and learning the new platform because whatever they tried to move to wasn't good enough for their needs.

If this were *false*, then the installed base of distros like Debian and RHEL and OpenSUSE would look extremely different in 2015 compared to other UNIXes and other distros. However, the leadership of Debian/RHEL/Ubuntu/(Open)SUSE continues to be evident in all the numbers, so the people who seem to perceive some kind of a groundswell of shifting users are just projecting their own preferences onto a group of people who aren't actually doing the same thing they're doing.

And the "actual" so-called FreeBSD adopters will probably return to GNU/Linux within a year or two, anyway. Bet on it.

The latest wave of BLE / "Bluetooth Smart" devices, everything from headphones to keyboards to fitness bands, are a joke. Not only is the connection reliability *terrible*, but a paper describing a method of attack the protocol has been out for a while now.

My suggestion, and what I currently do, is refuse to buy any product that advertises that it supports or uses Bluetooth Low Energy or Bluetooth Smart or Bluetooth 4.0. Anything similar to that in the marketing literature or tech specs, and I pass it by. Bluetooth 4.0 might be OK, as long as one of the two devices you're connecting only supports Bluetooth 3.0 or earlier. And yes, I'm aware that not all Bluetooth 4.0 devices are using BLE/Smart, but in my testing and experience, anything communicating with the Bluetooth 4.0 protocol is fraught with problems.

I'm getting a lot more use than I expected out of devices and peripherals that are more than 2 years old that support BT 2.1 or BT 3.0. Looks like I'll be hanging on to them for another 1-2 years until they design a revised low energy protocol that isn't an absolute joke. No one's laughing, Bluetooth SIG.

And, yeah... the reliability issues are especially galling.

I have a bunch of different pairs of Bluetooth headphones and devices that transmit bluetooth audio, from "adapters", to smartphones, to desktop computers with a Bluetooth dongle, to laptops with built-in Bluetooth.

I consistently get great sound and no dropouts or clicks or pops, even at distances of 7 - 8 meters (usually further than most bluetooth devices can transmit without starting to drop out), as long as *at least one* of the devices does not support BLE/Bluetooth Smart/4.0. However, if both the headphones and the transmitter support Bluetooth 4.0 and/or Bluetooth LE, I get consistent and horrid clicks and pops and dropouts, regardless of range or wireless interference. To rule out interference, I performed the tests both at home and at work; my home environment has almost no traffic in the 2.4 GHz band, while the wireless environment at work is extremely noisy.

My tests are pretty conclusive. Right now, in my opinion, the best thing you can do is either don't buy Bluetooth 4.0 / BLE devices, or if you do, make sure you're pairing it with a device that forces it into an earlier-spec compatibility mode, like Bluetooth 3.0. You may, in fact, get worse battery life if you do this, but I would gladly trade that for extended range, reliability and sound quality, which is especially important if you are listening to music.