Whereas with a PC, Android or iOS system you have plenty of RAM, storage and graphics capability so you can be pretty sloppy in your code and get away with it.

Man, I don't have fond memories of memory/resource management in the old PC and C64 day. Not having to deal 64k blocks for expanded memory is a good thing.

In this day and age, multi-threaded programming is more important than managing memory IMHO. I've done my share of sloppy code, mostly because I had more important things to deal with. Sometimes a nested loop does the job quickly and you can move on to other parts. I have yet gotten a bonus,programming style points and won accolades from my peers by coding beautifully or super-efficiently. It's usually scorn and jealousy. 80% of the code I've worked on, no other soul looks at.

I say use what you have at hand and get the job done. If you got 2 Megs of RAM, use them. If you save the a Meg, you're not going to have some sort of cyber consciousness thank you for using less electricity or cycles. Hell, you may have limited your application by not using all the resources available to you.

If you have the luxury of time, enhance it and make it more bug-free.

While many good people lost their job in Nortel, there was a LOT of deadwood at Nortel. Kanata has never been the same since.

We had one upgrade with Nortel telecom equipment, where I had one engineer and five (or six) project managers. You need one or sometimes even two good project managers, but never FIVE, especially when the engineer is doing all the heavy lifting (figuratively and literally). So by charging us $300/hr, we knew we were subsidizing several crappy layers of ineffeciency.

A-L may in a similar boat. There are probably people who did not keep fresh or add very little value, because they were brought in when a VP went on an empire-building spree.

Good point.

Apple is setting a terrible precedent. I think I know their motivation (e.g. money, Chinese market, etc).

Let's say Saudi Arabia makes looking at dirty pictures illegal (not just immoral). Are they scrapping browsers?

No, the government needs to ensure that while using their network infrastructure the "dangerous" services and applications are blocked. Don't impose your morality and legality on citizens of other countries.

Apple is weak. They considered the cost/benefit analysis, and figured that the few hundred people who get irate about this won't matter. Chinese citizen will not stop buying an iPhone even with this app gone; they buy it for the "cool" factor not because it allows civil disobedience. Most Chinese are terrified of getting in the sights of their government. Those who have an iPhone will gladly use in the government-approved manner.

I once experienced an DoS MitM LTE XSS attack that lasted 42 hours and had a steady stream of 105TB/ms using NetBIOS Saturation over AppleTalk techniques that spread over a redundant cluster of MBR using HPFS. Of course the victim wishes to remain in the shadows as sharing the company's identity would either harm their reputation or allow you to verify the plausibility of the incident.

I really liked the series, but them dropping the ball on Episode 3 and forfeiting on their promise to release, really soured the experience for me.

I will certainly not buy when it comes out, whatever they call it. Actually, I haven't bought anything off Steam and certainly from Valve for that reason (I always associated both together, since the only reason I installed Steam was for HL2).

"Brand" and "Knock-off" should be carefully used in the same sentence.

For 10 seconds I thought that Apple was branching off and selling some new cola that tastes like Coke(tm).

Agreed, that to me seems a respectful way of treating your employees. People have families and commitments, the least you can do is give them notice as far ahead as possible. And some generous severance.

If you want to know more what each party is discussing with their national governments, can't think of a better place than hacking Belgian telecom.

This is why they did it.

Agreed. Chances are there are a bunch of PMPs and ITIL processes in place. Could be internal politics.

Coding a few minutes is a one thing. Testing it, getting someone to approve to move something to prod, and herding people to actually do work is a bunch of other things. Legal and PR may get involved too.

In some corps I worked, the finger-pointing usually takes days and involves a bunch of crappy meetings. It can be days before someone engages InfoSec or the developers to confirm a problem.

Two weeks is not terrible; better than most large corporations.

That's not too bad all things considering. Maybe they have a proper structured development shop (not too structured, since it obviously doesn't include code reviews or vuln scanning)? Maybe they had maintenance windows which they are contractually bound to (and more expensive to make an exception then to do deal with a flaw)? Maybe once they were made aware of the problem they were scanning the database system for odd entries or suspicious activity? Maybe they needed to get an independent audtor to review so they can appease their various stakeholders?

Hopefully they learned from this, and will at least run an automated vulnerability tool against the app for future releases.

Excellent question. Here's what I would do.

Treat a desktop like a desktop. Perhaps share elements of the Windows OS between platform (.NET framework, kernel, DirectX, etc) but the UI must be diffirent. In case of a hybrid device; let the user pick the experience he/she wants.

Continue the Home Server concept; partner with a company (D-Link) to create a stand-alone box. Don't screw this up. If you want a media box, do it properly. Get some content; pick a movie studio or two to back you up. Get an American TV channel. GET LIVE SPORTS, especially SOCCER!

Realize that you lost the smartphone market. Work towards creating a presence on the incumbents. Price the competition out of the water. Do a proper Office version.

Lower the OS price. Create three versions tops; Lite, Regular and Corporate.

They want an app store. Okay, that's fine. Create a "certified by Microsoft" program that provides some perks and allow people to buy stuff online. Fully-tested software (a proper QA process), no malware/spyware, backups, more generous licensing,

XBoXOne - give a free online experience. Support the indie community more. Don't release 20 variants of the console.

Forget doing a hardware media player like the zune. Do something that allows you to play music on existing smartphones. An app that allows you to stream the music from your media box (as mentioned above).

Pick another commercial product area. Perhaps education? Perhaps extend messaging.

Look at more reasonable pricing for CALs in the corporate market. Give better volume discounts.

Thanks; that's good info.

So the underlying convenience is at fault.

How about the fact that Chrome can import passwords stored in Safari to begin with?

So Safari has some security issues as well. Where is the "master key" to export passwords?

I guess the underlying message is that if you leave a computer unattended the information is accessible to anyone. E-mail, passwords, documents, MP3s, etc.

This is a convenience feature and 99% rather have the convenience of a cached web passwords on their personal computer then worrying about something walking by.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms724832(v=vs.85).aspx