What's wrong with /proc and /sys for kernel and hardware configuration tasks? It's easy and twekable, you can poke around in it without writing a program first, and it conforms to "everything is a file".

IPC is between processes, not between a process and the kernel.

Which negates what I said -- how? Why didn't they provide the ability to run Linux desktop apps instead?

It indirectly shows the sorry state of Linux desktops as a commercially viable alternative to Windows -- apparently companies perceive that as so much a can of worms that they choose Android over it, which was never meant to be a desktop OS.

That sounds more like a method for finding normal (unintentional) CPU bugs, not backdoors, because the latter would be designed to not alter the regular behavior of the processor.

Which is a different kind of disaster waiting to happen. Lead batteries provide about 40Wh of storage capacity per kg of lead. Germany has 40m households, and their average electricity consumption is 10 kWh per household per day. Which means that if, statistically, every household wanted to be able store one day of electricity consumption (which, arguably, isn't enough if you go 100% wind/solar, but anyway), you'd need 10 million tons of lead -- about one annual world production of lead, roughly as much as is contained in all car batteries worldwide combined.

And private households only consume 1/3rd or so of all the electricity produced in Germany (businesses and industry consume the other two 3rds).

AFAICT from this, the whole thing is a total non-starter. It will never scale up to any significant number of homes. A few percent of the households (mostly rich home owners) may do it, collect Government support and feel good about saving the environment. The overall effects will be inconsequential -- so much so that the whole project wasn't worth starting in the first place.

He did what he did to Nokia because he was a trojan horse there. As CEO of MS, he would be his his true self, not a trojan horse, so there's nothing to suggest that he would do similar things there as he did at Nokia.

Now that's an outlandish and self-serving explanation if I ever heard one. Why are people convicted to prison sentences if they cause deadly car accidents? To disconnect them from their previous life? Why are they allowed to move back to their family after their release then? Prison sentences are always about revenge too. That's just how these things work. The bereaved wouldn't accept anything else. If the whole point of the justice system was to convert criminals into better people, many murderers, especially second-degree murderers, would not be imprisoned at all. There are many murders that happen under special circumstances, where it's highly likely that the offender wouldn't do it again no matter what conviction he receives or doesn't receive. Putting him in prison will, if anything, worsen his prognosis

No. I owned a Palm Pilot. It was a very different device from an iPhone. There was nothing like the app store either. OTOH, all current smartphones, including Android and Windows Phone offerings, aren't very different devices from an iPhone. Even though those devices have developed several unique feature sets and UI paradigms, the basic way the whole package works is fundamentally similar to -- and can be traced back to -- the first iPhone.

That's not a valid line of reasoning. You can disrupt and recreate a market without subsequently dominating it for a long time. The available Android and Windows Phone devices are very competitive offerings. Still, as stated above, they're fundamentally similar to the original iPhone in many ways. As an indication you can just look at the way mobile browsers have developed. Until 2007 they were tiny, clunky apps that nobody used. After 2007, everybody scrambled to make their browser work like the iPhone's. There is a reason why e.g. Opera basically pulled their browser from the market and started laboring internally for one or two years. There is a reason why Microsoft essentially terminated their entire mobile OS line, which had been quite successful previously, and started working on a new one. There was a smartphone market before the initial iPhone, and then there was a very different smartphone market after the initial iPhone. That's what constitutes the market "disruption" and "recreation".

He isn't "revered" for his being a "workplace bully", he is revered because of the change he affected -- which is probably more than almost all the other "workplace bullies" combined. There are millions of workplace bullies, but only one of them pulled off the -- in all likelihood -- greatest commercial comeback of the last 50 years, and initiated several breakthrough products in the process. All those attributes make the "workplace bully" attribute proportionally less relevant.

No. They produced entirely different devices and were (more or less) successful with those. The innovation in the original iPhone wasn't in any of the underlying technologies -- those had all been there before. The innovation of the iPhone was in the overall design, the vertical integration of the touch screen with the new "physical" touch UI and the sensors, the unified co-design of hardware and software and applications and later the app store model and so on. All those things constitute innovations in themselves -- and they have since totally disrupted and recreated the entire smartphone market.

Haha. People here seem to have forgotten that Microsoft practically invented the term "vaporware" all by themselves. They were undisputed masters in that field. The "Cairo project" arguably existed for the sole purpose of shying customers away from NeXTStep, and was buried as soon as the latter was no longer thought to be a threat. And who remembers WinFS? They probably even shipped some developer previews of that before cancelling it.

In contrast to that, Jobs at Macworld 2007 only promised that Apple would deliver a device 6 months later which would work as could reasonably be inferred from the demo. And they did that. So technically Jobs wasn't even "lying" at that demo, the whole thing can essentially be seen as a somewhat more elaborate slide-show presentation which just happened to include a half-working prototype as well.

By the time the iPhone came out, Gates's/Ballmer's efforts to "make things useful" had culminated in something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQquVbbLgtE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=928W9niR0G0

...and face it: Without Apple, some linear enhancement of this would be in our pockets today.

Nuff said.

Drive failure? Sounds more like a RAID1/5 thing. Someone should tell Linus about mdadm.