The recent Lenovo mess has shown that it's a good idea for users to be able to easily download a stock Windows ISO to reinstall their system free of crapware. Microsoft may just want to make this process easier for people.

Good for them. I'm not a Windows user myself, but it feels good to know that if I ever switch over to Windows, it's now easier to get real stock installation images.

What about Windows 8, though? Are they doing the same for 8 and future versions?

The $99 for the developer account (which is peanuts to Apple) isn't about income. It's about controlling access to the platform.

If developer accounts were free, anyone who wanted to sideload apps would join the program and just do so. The $99/year fee is enough to discourage people from doing this.

I have access to a developer account through work, and have sideloaded iMAME and a few other emulators using it. You can sign any app bundle you want and put it on your phone without having to go through the App Store.

Access to iOS betas does not allow one to receive provisioning profiles, so the reason for the $99 charge is gone.

How is communicating on Facebook different than making phone calls or sending letters to the outside world?

Eggs are bad for you! Eggs are good for you! Meat is bad for you! Meat is good for you! Alcohol is good for you! Alcohol isn't good for you!

I swear, if you listen to and heed all this advice you will go crazy. I think the best thing to do is ignore all this crap, eat *reasonably* (not too much of any one thing, have a balanced diet) and just ENJOY the things you like, regardless of people saying they're good or bad for you, because life is short anyway and we might as well enjoy it while we have it.

I see so many eating bland vegan diets, thinking it's so good for them; I doubt any of them will live longer than typical omnivores.

...as much as I try to build sympathy for these people, I just can't.

I mean, just reading about this not knowing what happened would make me think "Hmm this seems shady". I also don't think I'm an overly paranoid person by nature!

I don't use my real name on the Internet, yet I contribute intelligently to discussions and don't troll.

Be careful with that strategy; you may be throwing out a lot of baby with the bathwater. Not everyone refuses to use their real name online for nefarious purposes.

That company ruins everything it touches.

Look what happened to MySQL, leading to the need to fork to MariaDB.

Look what happened to ZFS; as soon as Oracle got its grubby mitts on it, it closed-sourced all future updates and made it incompatible with the open source version.

Do you use Solaris? If you do, I don't even have to write anything here. Support has gone absolutely to shit since the acquisition.

And now Virtualbox is stagnant and uncared for.

Why is anyone surprised? Oracle bought Sun and ruined everything awesome about the company. It was the absolute worst possible company that could have acquired Sun, and it shows in every way.

Fuck you, Oracle. With a turbo-charged chainsaw, sideways.

....and it's a much better service overall, being available on many platforms, syncing conversations and best of all not owned by Facebook.

They're referring to the recent drama where Social Justice Warriors are pissed at Linus because he said he "didn't care about diversity."

What he meant is that he doesn't care who the code comes from, just that it's good code. Which is the right way to do things.

That was the reliable way to run the DX50, because VLB was unreliable at 50MHz. You were lucky to be able to afford something so kick-ass back then!

I bet you ran DOOM at 60FPS! ;)

The VLB card connector was really long and would sometimes make a poor connection or start to pop out. Hot glue was a common hack to make sure the card stayed in, and it was reversible (just heat the glue and pop it out).

It truly was a dark age. But we all loved it. :)

I remember VIP 486 boards. VESA-LB, ISA and PCI in one motherboard. Very awesome if you had a really expensive VLB video card that you didn't want to part with quite yet, but wanted to upgrade to a system with PCI. :)

This has been the case for years. For ages and ages I've seen home routers with crappy firmware that results in bad connectivity. NAT table entries timing out too soon, inability to handle VPN traffic, crashes, lock-ups, performance slowdowns, the works.

This is why for years I've been running a full blown Linux machine as a router. Plenty of performance and memory, never any issues. It makes me wonder why more router manufacturers don't use Linux or BSD derivatives for their firmware instead of writing garbage in-house.

Are you telling me that PC vendors these days ship systems without a way to recover them from bare metal? That's... insane. Utterly stark raving mad.

Even Macs, which don't ship with install media, can do a bare metal restore downloading the operating system from the Internet. This is common sense shit!

With older (PPC?) based Macs, to update the firmware you had to power off the machine, then turn it on by holding the power button until you got an extra beep or sound. This would physically un-write-protect the firmware EPROM so that it could be updated by open firmware.

In their quest to make everything as "user friendly" as possible, they took out this hardware security feature, allowing the update to just happen without any physical action.

Bad Apple, no donut.