But of course, "eegrep" isn't :)

(enhanced enhaced grep)

"western US" should be "eastern US" of course :)

Hmmm, you do realize that outside the western US, Germany, Japan and some other uptight countries, this is actually the "normal" way of life for the largest part of the world? Some call it "quality of life".

This may or may not be true. In France, people drink wine almost like water. Germany and Belgium are known for their beer. Scandinavian countries' weekeend passtimes is drinking any alcohol they can get their hands on, so would you call all of them "drunks"? Again, this labeling thing mostly seems the problem with the uptight and stressed out USians - the rest of the world works just fine as it is.

Yes, with backup copies on the Google, IBM and Dell clouds in case Amazon goes down (I'm not making this up: it happens).

I concur - they have some amazing things done in their research division but they seem to follow the footsteps of the famed Xerox Palo Alto center - they can't seem to build products on top of that research.

I'm very open source biased but MSR is one of the places I wouldn't have any problems working in.

Hmmm... it looks like the conspiracy theorists should review the Pentagon 9/11 crash :)

In short, RIM was a one trick pony and refused to change, just like Nokia. They did it to themselves.

Unfortunately for the peasants and the third-worlders, there are some huge technological prereqisites:

• You need clean water to wash hands and wounds with - the majority of surface water in "black africa" is contaminated - not by Evil Western Chenicals but by feces and germs
• Covering your mouth when caughing is well and good but to have any resemblance of general care and isolation (i.e. hospitals) you need something to cover your mouth *with*, ranging from clean cloth (see previous issue) to gauzes, bandages and sterile equipment
• Animals in Europe were in houses often for very simple reasons: a) they are warm (remember, the "warm Europe" trend basically started with the 20th century) and b) that was the only option to keep them away from thieves

Basically, I agree with you, but want to emphasize that the ideas need infrastructure.

To be pedantic, that's 65535 per (client_ip,port) pair...

Technically, MS *did* use a valid and acceptedly secure hash functions, DES and MD4. The problem is that, because of backwards compatibility across their 20-year product spans, they were not as vigilant in updating the protocols. Even when they *did* upgrade them, they went to MD5 (with NTLMv2) - which was again proced weak - but they continued to use the older protocol which allowed trivial attacks.

Which is why anyone "worth his salt" will laugh if you propose a crypto system which is supposed to last 20 years and is not flexible in its choice of component algorithms.

This is important in so many ways - including recognizing a genuine, but virtual, "cyber" entity as worthy of being named a "world heritage site". I'd think that Slashdot, as one of the pioneering forums would welcome this.

I've often said - when the civilization collapses, we will remember Wikipedia the same as we now remember the Library of Alexandria.

Your ass is grass. We own you.

RIM was a "one-trick-pony" company in a world where people needed the functionalities they now get from "ordinary" smartphones but which the telcos and phone manufacturers refused to provide. If iPhone and Android didn't happend when they did, I would probably own a Blackberry now simply because nothing else did Internet and e-mail decently, but they tried to milk that platform without innovating for far too long. They may or may not be in trouble right now but in 2 years - who would want to buy a new Blackberry?

It's easy to be prophetic after the battle but imagine if RIM made the first Android phones instead of HTC - they would be unstoppable now.

And thus the tenets of Free Software relating to code availability and reusability are served with GPLv3 ... not!

With GPLv3 it's an all-or-nothing situation: either the whole world will use Linux and be strictly copyleft, or it will avoid it and companies will reimplement the parts they need in a way that's more closed than before. That is why GPLv3 is a mistake.

I'm not saying the findings are not true, but to verify them they will have to do the same research in another company where tech expertise is completely absent from managers and cannot be relied on by employees. In other words, it may be that at Google it's taken for granted and as such is not noticeable. (even so, it will probably never enter the top 5 characteristics, it just won't be the last one).