You're an idiot (from Greek: "idios," meaning someone thinking only of yourself). Just because you find it so relaxing to change your clocks on cue like an animal in a circus, doesn't mean I want to do that.

There's nothing magic about the clocks in smartphones and computers. Those things take a lot of human labor to build and maintain, and frequently the humans make mistakes. Which you can't fix because with all that "magic," they leave out the manual controls. Or have you forgotten how iPhones sometimes make people late to meetings, or how Zunes used to die completely, or how every new program that deals with local time acts weird during the time switches, or how your unpatched system would show you the wrong time for about a month ever since this latest time switch?

I hate experiencing anxiety every time I get a new gadget that has a magical networked clock, wondering whether the clock will change correctly, or whether I'll unnecessarily wake early in the autumn or come to work late in the spring. That's on top of the general misery of changing my biological clock, and knowing that all this hassle is scientifically proven to be wrong and counterproductive but still it continues.

I don't mind having more sunlight in the afternoon. I hate changing the clock.

I don't care whether it's DST all year or standard time all year, but I hate switching back and forth. It's responsible for so much loss of life and productivity. I feel that DST switching is a twice yearly reminder that our "betters" in Congress are in charge and easily capable of messing with our lives. Until it's eliminated, I'll continue voting against my local Representative and Senators.

Yours wouldn't be the first software that has become abandonware. Users may appreciate the stability of an unchanging release. If it's distributed under a Libre license, then it can be forked and redistributed, but chances are that kids would rather make their own mistakes than work on your program.

Argh! No! CUPS did not originally come from Apple, and Apple did not own CUPS back in 2000. Apple bought CUPS and its main developer in 2007.

Oops, I meant Samba 4. Starting in MacOS X 10.7 Lion, Apple has used the closed-source SMBX instead of Samba to provide SMB service, and Apple's SMB client is licensed under APSL 2.0, which is not compatible with GPL. Apple's SMB software has also been slower and buggier than Samba.

I think Apple's aversion to GPLv3 is wrongheaded, as is Google's avoidance of GPL in Android other than the kernel. I'm not saying that it's evil, just a mistake.

Wait, what? Where'd all this hostility come from? I've used Macs for 25 years, and I'm using a Mac to type this. I like parts of Apple and MacOS X, but I recognize some of its shortcomings. In my opinion, nothing is perfect.

I didn't say that Apple does not do open source. CUPS, LLVM, Clang, and KHTML (predecessor of WebKit) were not invented at Apple, and Apple complies with the license terms of the original projects. ZeroConf and OpenCL are examples of basic infrastructure that Apple decided would be in their interests if they were widely adopted. Apple has some surprisingly small teams for some projects, and I think of ZeroConf as a Stuart Cheshire project more than a faceless corporate project. Even so, Apple initially did their open-source releases under the Apple Public Source License, which is not compatible with GPL, and the existing OpenCL kernels are all proprietary. Or did you not notice that Mesa had to reimplement OpenCL from scratch?

In contrast, I notice Apple protocols such as AirPlay and AirPrint, the whole Designed for iPhone licensing system, and how Apple is going out of their way to avoid any GPLv3 software such as Samba 3.

I don't see how you got that conclusion from what I wrote. I said that CUPS was not developed at Apple, so its peculiarities are not typical to Apple.

No. If Apple had developed it, it would not have had any command-line interface except for XML files and the "defaults" program, its interfaces would have been proprietary to Apple, and it would have been even more confusingly documented. It would never have become widely adopted across the Unix world, partly because Apple would not have chosen GPLv2. Instead, Lennart Poettering would have been so in awe of it that he would have created his own unstable version of it, which would immediately have been adopted across the Linux distributions to the exclusion of any other printing system, because Lennart is the best programmer and all crashes are everybody else's fault. It would have stabilized when he got bored and started copying another Apple innovation. Like, say, launchd.

CUPS was widely used before Apple bought it. Apple can't turn it into an Apple-like program without causing a user revolt, so it's still very much like how it was before Apple bought it.

I think the keyword there is companies. The main reason for CUPS is support for IPP, a particularly enterprisey protocol. I could tell that it's enterprisey because it's full of XML and I couldn't figure out how it's supposed to work. Once I got printing to work, I didn't bother to look further into it. Printing is just an occasional hassle for me.

Of course, once CUPS got the momentum, then CUPS got more support, more printer drivers, more GUI front-ends, so right now it's just easier to get a working system using CUPS than LPRng. I'm surprised that LPRng is still seeing development as late as 2012, and the web site apparently got tweaked in March this year.

Apple is not the developer of CUPS. Apple bought CUPS back in 2007 and hired its main developer.

CUPS is an example of the sort of hairy mess that open-source developers don't like to deal with, like OpenSSL. It was the inspiration for Eric Raymond (the main guy of the Open Source movement) to scold the OSS community back in 2004. I think Eric Raymond's ire is misplaced; CUPS was uniquely horrible back then. But printing in Unix has always been bad, and CUPS made it much better than before, so everybody standardized on it.

Sure, I'd rather store stuff on my own machines than SpiderOak. A cursory read of how some SpiderOak features work doesn't give me confidence that it's an especially secure option once you start sharing files. But it's still much better than leaving everything in plaintext in Dropbox. I just link to them as an alternate to one of the panel's participants, where the alternate is actually viable already.

If Google and Facebook made the same claims as SpiderOak, then I'd be inclined to trust. There are laws about truth in advertising, and they have a history of following through in the limited areas where they do provide security: SSL for everyone, and certificate pinning in Google's web browser. Privacy also totally wrecks their business model, so I don't expect them to do so.

My problem is that I want to control my data by placing it on systems under my control. Storing everything on Google is fine for Eric Schmidt because Eric Schmidt owns (many shares and a significant amount of control) of Google. Storing everything on Google is not so good for me because I don't.

And that's the real issue. Google and Facebook's entire business model is to violate my privacy. I don't know if Dropbox does anything with your data, but they've definitely chosen convenience over security. I'd rather store my stuff on SpiderOak than Dropbox. As long as my data are available to somebody other than me, then my data are vulnerable to hackers and immoral government officials.

Ah, there it is. Jay Machalani's recommendations on how to fix Windows 8.

And now I've been made aware of another horrifying possibility: To avoid being detected as Windows 95 or 98.

It seemed like they polled some important people, and found that "10" had more positive connotations than "9" for an operating system. Of course, it has those positive connotations because Apple has been branding MacOS X as a great operating system for the last 13 years, especially compared to MacOS 9.

It might work. From my perspective, Windows 10 is just Windows 8 with some more incremental improvements and pretty much every recommendation for integrating Metro and desktop that somebody wrote years ago... I forgot who it was, and it's really hard to search for. But for ordinary business people who have been avoiding Windows 8, Windows 10 is a big change compared to Windows 7, and a dramatic improvement on Windows XP.

Well, my current machine was bought to be nice, regardless of the price. I'm fed up with Windows and average PC build quality, so I got a MacBook. It has everything that I want, except for ECC RAM. No current laptop has ECC RAM. I can't shop for it even if I wanted to.

Also, Intel leaves out ECC as part of their annoying product differentiation strategy.

I think it will take somebody super-rich and super-influential to make ECC happen. Just like nobody had decent iGPUs or high-resolution displays until Apple made it a priority.

Hah! You wish!

I've been upset about the lack of ECC for a long time, now. Chipset makers know how to build it. High-performance computing systems use it. It should be ubiquitous. But no, you still have to pay a big premium for ECC. At this point, RAM is the only part of a typical PC that does not have checksums.

The original justification for leaving out checksums makes no sense, now. A typical 1-bit correct, 2-bit detect per 64-bit ECC has an overhead of 128MB of RAM per 1GB of usable memory. It made sense to leave that out when RAM was $100/MB. These days, computers casually come with 8GB of RAM, or 12GB of RAM, who cares about the difference. We can easily afford to add 1GB to the 8GB to make a less error-prone system.

My data are important to me. I shouldn't need to buy a server to prevent my data from being corrupted.