You need to pay to have an OS signed. That is true. But you can certainly still install an unsigned OS such as linux. So for the intel version, the answer is "absolutely yes, of course you can run linux. It's a PC, not an ipad!" But yes, like most every ARM device I know of, the RT model is locked down and would need to be jailbroken for anything else.

Just assume it'll be in line with ipad pricing and have slightly worse battery life. Then you won't be disappointed. For the pro version, compare it to a small ivy-bridge ultrabook. They tend to be expensive and still have shitty battery life when compared to ARM devices. It really doesn't take a lot of thought to come up with reasonable expectations.

Not trying to start a war here. Just a couple points/corrections.

idevices happily support bluetooth keyboards. There are apps for many printing scenarios which mitigates that somewhat if you can be bothered. A lot of home printers are on your home network rather than solely USB. Beyond that, a lot of routers have a USB port for a shared printer, etc. So support is limited/tricky but it's not "fugetaboutit". A lot of solutions are built up within apple's walls when 1st party support is lacking.

You don't really need a 3rd party data service. I think you can sync/store your stuff with their cloud. So that's 1st party. If your goal is to put it on a usb stick, that doesn't work.. but you could just as easily say the surface can't burn CDs. If all your devices are synced, passing around usb sticks is a nice-to-have rather than a need-to-have.

Enterprise administration is definitely important. But keep in mind RT does not have AD support. So only the surface pro will be targeting the enterprise directly. Companies will still need to think about how their IT policies deal with non-domain joined devices. I'm sure it'll have exchange support though. So I would imagine that it'll support the same activesync standards as high-end cellphones or the ipad already do, eg pin-lock and secure erase/encryption requirements. No idea what else they might have in mind for RT though.

Zune had music subscriptions and some limited social scenarios. It was just a really bad time to get into the market. At least all the work they put into building their own music store is useful. That service lives on. If you have a subscription, it works on windows, windows phone, xbox, and it'll probably be the underlying service for music/movies on win8 devices as well. Who knows if the name will live on or perhaps get replaced by some xbox marketplace (or just marketplace) naming.. but I think getting their feet wet with a music service was absolutely the right thing, even if the hardware sales were a bust.

I guess it keeps the lawyers happy and product secret when you reuse a name you already own. It's a good name.. may as well use it for something popular.

They're blocking their servers from downloading the videos. They aren't removing it from their search results. That's exactly what I'd do in their case. They'll simply feed it URLs, see who connects to download the video, block the IP, and repeat.

This seems like a complete non-story to me. But then, I've never heard of that site before. If it is actually popular, I can see why that alone would make it news-worthy. As a technical person, I'd look for a browser plugin to download the video, then a desktop app to rip the audio. Searching for a website which automates the process wouldn't have even occurred to me. It's funny how being technical can cause you to miss the boat on some trends just because the problem addressed was just never a problem for you in the first place..

It was hiding in plain sight. It was signed with valid certificates which essentially white listed it.

Actually, it sounds like it was an MS-controlled server issuing a cert for a remote desktop scenario which was inadvertently issuing certificates that also had code-signing privileges. No one cracked the signing process or forged anything from scratch. The attackers just found something that hadn't been locked down properly. Of course, it's still a rather huge fuck up. They were essentially handing over the keys. The point is though, it' was a human-error fuck up that allowed this to happen, not a broken security model that needs replacing. Oups.

A correction.. IE uses the windows certificate store. It doesn't hold it's own set of certs. I know firefox used to have its own set of certs. I'm not sure if that's still true. I'm pretty sure chrome also uses the windows certificate store. In most cases, using the windows cert store is the right thing to do. I can understand why mozilla would want to manage some of this themselves. If they need to roll their own cert store for their cross-platform support, it might just be easier to do that than keep up with all the differences between platforms.

But the main idea is that if you trust the windows cert store, when things like this happen, the cert will be invalidated for everything, not just IE, or Safari, or whatever. Companies can also then add their own certs, regect some, etc in a central database. It's annoying for an IT dept when individual apps do their own thing and don't respect the platform's settings.

The people working on features like this very rarely wrote the original code. If someone handed you 50 or 100k lines of assembly code with little/no documentation and needed you to make a few fixes or add a feature, it's pretty easy to miss some of those assumptions. And it's especially true now since virtually no one writes assembly code. New products are written in modern languages like c# or java specifically for these kinds of things. A lot of language features were actually developed to manage problems like trust in an enforceable way. There are going to be issues like this cropping up for years to come but it's certainly a situation which is getting a lot better each generation as more and more components are re-engineered with modern security.

They review flagged videos. Every action is a one-off. This result is expected and not at all surprising. Trying to build an argument around hypocrisy here is just misleading.

I keep earplugs at my desk as well as headphones. I have my own office but conversations bounce around the halls here pretty badly. It's typical for there to be two or three conversations happening within listening distance.. The earplugs block out 100% of that quiet chatter which is awesome for avoiding distractions.

If you're trying to make a case against socialized medicine, keep in mind that most countries do provide financial incentives to do better. Eg they get a bonus for convincing someone to stop smoking. In the US, the medical industry would seem to benefit (make money) from smokers.

Only the more modern GPU support it. And of those, there are still different levels of support. Even if it's supported, you would probably get much better perf on an nvidia card by using cuda for example. So in today's world, you can't just use an onpencl-powered encoder, it depends on what hardware you have.

Not really true. Siri can search. But siri can also do other things. I can't exactly type "remind me to pick up my paycheque when I get to work on friday" into google. Wolframalpha can also answer some pretty interesting queries that google can't touch. I suspect that with future versions, we'll see more and more useful stuff sneak into siri. Maybe partnerships with more companies, eg comcast: "siri, record tonight's episode of dancing with the stars". It's kinda gimmicky right now but if it works really well for your voice, it can be really nice at times, like when you're driving.