Flex was already open source.. They are just pushing the responsibility of maintaining it to the community. Now if they were open sourcing the Flash Player, I would commend them for that as it could ease the pain a little of those stuck relying on this legacy technology.

no mod points.... psuedo-modding parent +1 - insightful

It blows my mind when people running OS X don't use Time Machine.

My hard drive died a few weeks ago, and it was so easy to restore from Time Machine. I was right back where I left off when the drive died. In my case I bought a 2TB 7200 RPM Hitachi Deskstar. I had heard that those tend to fail, but the price was right, and I have enough confidence in Time Machine and the off-site backups I make every few weeks (rotate external drives which have a complete backup of my entire system) that I can take that risk.

you are being taken advantage of.

If you compare that money against the total government expenditures, I'd guess percentage-wise they're spending far less on gadgets from their budget than the average consumer. Maybe we should be congratulating them.

Of course, there may be buried beneath all the other expenditures many gadgets that don't show up as itemized and measurable.

I think the better question is, "Can anyone think of an example where someone has been hacked in such a way whereby the hacker does so to make the hackee look like a sexual cad?" I can't think of a single instance where the hack has been to that end. Probably is one, can't think of it. Nope, nothing comes up. Idiots. More idiotic when they start down the implausible denial path. Didn't sound plausible day one. And Weiner looks more ridiculous now than he would have. Now he's a cheater and a liar. Bad at both.

And, yeah, IT community, hackers specifically, are an easy scapegoat. Sucks that people would buy the story/claim of hackery. Blows that the media lets it slide. It's a head shot the IT community doesn't need.

You mean like an iMac (and countless other computers throughout the history of desktop computing)? I personally don't like the concept and wish it had died in the 80s, but the iMac is popular enough and PC vendors are trying to bring it back, too.

I had a similar experience with my TV buying. I bought a 58" Panasonic plasma TV in 2009 which works great, but it will never get Netflix support (they claim this is because the TV lacks some hardware for DRM), whereas the 2010 model did get a firmware update to give it Netflix support.

Have you run Windows 2000 recently? That shit is blazing fast compared to XP and later Windows. Windows 2000 was also faster than Windows 98 in my experience. I consider it the best Windows ever (not saying much, I know). If they had tacked on the remote desktop feature XP has (maybe you can have this with terminal services?) it would have been perfect and we would have never needed another Windows version (it runs great in a VM).

Huh? I think the opposite is true, and I think the general trend is towards laptops and mobile devices where there is no assembly and very little upgrading. I think more people are using computers these days, leading to more people assembling their own computers and doing their own upgrades, but I think percentage-wise this is less so.

I already run a different operating system, but have to use Windows in a VM for some software. My Windows 7 VM is much slower than my XP VM. Forget XP, I wish Windows 2000 was still supported for what I use Windows for (.Net development). Windows 2000 in a VM is blazing fast and doesn't need as much RAM.

Did these people switch from Windows to OS X? OS X happens to have a usable UNIX userland, which is good, but what makes it great is the combination of being a UNIX and the excellent GUI, commercial software availability and support, and no hassle with wifi / power management / multi-monitor support.

I'm a long time UNIX user (started using various proprietary UNIXes a few years before Linux existed) and a software developer. Of course I use the command line (BTW homebrew being my package manager of choice). I also use Microsoft Office, iTunes, commercial music apps (like Logic, GarageBand), commercial video editing software (Final Cut). I switched from Linux as my host OS (running Windows in VMWare), to OS X as my host OS (and needing a Windows VM a lot less; I don't use Windows at home at all anymore). OS X hits a sweet spot where it meets all of my needs, one of which happens to be a proper UNIX userland, even though Linux is better for that. It's the sum of the parts which is what makes OS X and Mac hardware nice.

intelligence enhancement, and may hold improtant clues...

Like, speling?

An ironic twist I think... I know many people whose DSLR pictures totally suck because the camera is beyond their ability to master even simple photographs. Also, ironically, anyone who would want useful information from digital pictures can readily shoot quality pictures with non-DSLR digital cameras. Is this for real?

yes, that would be sub-bullet one of many under "etc."... :-)