Have you actually used an iOS device for any extended period of time, or is this just conjecture based upon accounts of others and ramblings on forums?

I can't speak for the 3GS, but I had an iPhone 4 up until very recently and all of the OS updates, all the way up to 6.0.1 worked just fine for me. I mean, it was incrementally slower past iOS 4, as you would expect with more features (bloat) added for the newer more capable devices, but it wasn't as slow to be annoying or unusable like other devices I've had the displeasure of using. Battery life was always good for the two years I had the 4, I was regularly able to make it 24-48hrs on a charge all the way up to the last day I had it on 6.0.1.

Yeah, I'm not talking about Windows Updates though. We have free tools like WSUS, or SCCM (not free) available that give you fairly good control over the patch management processes. Security updates and patches are generally a good thing, we want those, they have benefit and value. Compared to WGA, which has absolutely NO "Genuine Advantage" to a company that creates system images with installation media from legitimate sources, and doesn't utilize PC's from sketchy OEM's with pre-loaded software. We know our software is "Genuine" and not tampered with because we paid dearly for it, had it shipped to us, or downloaded it directly from Microsoft's sources ourselves and checked the hashes. Anti-piracy measures like KMS only create additional administrative overhead in a business context, especially in a small to medium size business where we get little to no volume purchase discount anyways. Yeah KMS is free, but it's one more logically unnecessary system that we have to manage just to appease MS.

What RMingin was saying, is that this fix will affect the anti-piracy methods, which will affect everyone, but only temporarily annoy the pirates.

TL;DR: Dear MS, it shouldn't be easier to pirate your F'n software, than to purchase and use it legitimately, quit pissing off your paying customers.

I don't see this getting patched or fixed easily. It will be a lot of work. or it'll require doing things that annoy large volume customers.

Since when has MS been averse to doing things that annoy large volumes of paying customers in the name of ineffective attempts at anti-piracy?

Speaking as a sysadmin who's been annoyed and inconvenienced in time-sensitive disaster recovery scenarios, by pointless product activation snafus, probably never.

MacOSX 1.0.0 - 10.3 was slow as hell.

Really? What are you basing this assertion on? 10.2 and 10.3 weren't very refined overall, but they were plenty quick with sufficient RAM and GPU, especially given the fact that the Quartz graphics system that they had developed way back in 2001 was (besides Amiga OS) the first mainstream OS to include graphics compositing capabilities to offload window manager rendering from the CPU to the GPU. Apple was way ahead on that, MS didn't even have Compositing working in Windows until Vista came out in '07.

10.6 was fast enough to run on the colored iMacs taht 10.1 could not, hence these users stayed on MacOS classic.

10.6 was the first OS X release that ditched Universal binary support and went Intel only, so no, it would not run on "colored iMacs" at all since they were PowerPC G3's. Hell, 10.5 wouldn't even install on the newer G4 iMacs without being forced to do so through OpenFirmware hacks or installer modifications. Running 10.5 was painful enough on those, it'd be relegated to novelty status on a G3.

Today WIndows 8 runs on 9 year old Pentium IV with ease.

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Win8 64-bit only? Is there even a such thing as a Pentium 4 capable of executing x64 code? My memory is a bit foggy on the P4's because AMD was trouncing Intel on price/performance back then, so I never had much experience with those space heaters. In any case, you'd have a hell of a hard time finding Win8 drivers for any system built around a P4, or an Athlon for that matter.

What you're saying about newer Mac OS X and other OS releases getting more efficient and faster is correct, but your historic examples are way off. Now get off my lawn!

iOS 6 is ~700MB - 800MB depending on what device you install it on. From what limited info I can gather online, Android "Jelly Bean" is anywhere from ~770MB - 900MB depending on what crap the vendors load on the device along with it. Point being, both of these OS's have been heavily optimized to be mobile. WinRT being many times larger than the average mobile OS, appears to be Windows 8 shoehorned into a mobile device.

I dunno, as far as I can tell, its difficult to make an assertion either way, unless you're an engineer that works for VMware. The Wikipedia page that I linked to says that this is how the bootstrap process still works in ESXi v5, so that's what I was going off of, you'd think a VMware person would come along and correct that article if that weren't the case.

VMware's ESXi documentation doesn't really go into much detail about how the boot process works in ESXi, or how it's different between ESX vs ESXi. In our environment, I can still enable SSH on ESXi 5 hosts, log into them and pretty much have all the commands available in a typical BusyBox environment as well as some proprietary ESX-related commands...

~ # uname -a VMkernel TSTESX01.local 5.0.0 #1 SMP Release build-474610 Aug 26 2011 13:51:17 x86_64 unknown

I've even managed to lock up the busybox shell doing things like forcing an unused datastore to unmount, you would think doing things like this directly upon vmkernel would be a bad idea and have the potential to disrupt VM's running on the host, but there were no ill effects. You can still configure resource limits and reservations for the system in ESXi, which directly relates to the "Tech Support shell". So it appears that the tech support shell runs in its own sandbox or VM to limit its resources. That's what gave me the impression that the bootstrap process still works similar to how it did in ESX, except that the Service Console is now slimmed down, hidden by default and it's use for management tasks in ESXi is now unsupported by VMware.

It only affects windows and mac systems. ESXi is Linux.

ESXi is not Linux in and of itself, it is a Hypervisor. ESXi boots a minimal Linux kernel, which then loads vmkernel (the Hypervisor) along with some other virtualization components. After vmkernel is loaded, it takes direct control of the hardware and partitions the Linux kernel off into the first VM with a custom BusyBox shell (compiled for vmkernel support) as the Service Console. While the vmkernel does utilize a proc filesystem and some modified linux kmods for 3rd party device driver support, it in and of itself is a microkernel and does not nearly contain all of the Linux API's. It has very few ways to communicate with the outside world, one of them being the Service Console itself. But you can literally crash (and reboot) or CPU bound the Service Console up completely and have little to no effect on the other VM's running on that host.

ESX did contain a mostly complete Linux distro that was also cast off into a guest VM after vmkernel loaded. This Service Console was based off of RHEL, but they've abandoned ESX support in the latest versions of their Hypervisor releases and it will eventually be EOL.

Evidently the password leak was via iOS so if you're not logging in with an iPhone or iPad then you're probably not affected.

I've never, ever even installed a LinkedIn app on my iPhone or any other mobile device, nor has my co-worker. Both of our passwords were found on the list with the leading 0's. I agree that their app is shitty because it doesn't encrypt communications, but I'm pretty certain it has nothing to do with the compromised passwords. Also, another co-worker who does use the iOS apps, did not find their password on the list.

Yep, rogue app icons will be tinted rouge so you can identify and avoid them entirely. I shall patent this idea and sue the fsck out of anyone that infringes upon it!

No, $10 is totally reasonable and worth it for me, since it's a tool I use almost daily as a sysadmin. The developer actually provides support too. I've personally exchanged email with him when I was trying to get a proprietary VT100-based warehouse inventory app working on it and he helped me sort it out in a later update. It is one of the few apps I've actually paid for though. I don't mind paying for an app if it's reasonably priced, of good quality and well supported. Something that was NOT the case when I had a BlackBerry, where apps were rarely priced below $30 and totally blew anyways.

If you want SSH for free, you could try that SSH Mobile app I guess. Or, if you don't like the walled garden you can jailbreak and hope you don't come across any rouge free apps. But for me, the handful of admin apps I've purchased have totally paid for themselves by not having to drive back home or into the office to solve issues that required some minor intervention.

Oh, and iSSH will tunnel X11 too.

and IOS, while pleasant enough, is too much of a limiting walled garden for me. I like being able to use VNC over an SSH tunnel, for instance, or get a terminal on my phone.

I'm not arguing that iOS isn't a "walled garden", but there are apps out there that will allow you to tunnel VNC (or even RDP) over SSH. I use iSSH and it's freakin awesome. I've used several other SSH apps, but iSSH so far is the best IMHO.

Unfortunately no one remembered the A-body to F/J/M body fiasco, and how aging Valiants and Darts were outliving their Aspen and Volare cousins, when the two chassis were for the same market.

My grandparents had a Dodge Aspen, what a POS. It seemed like the thing never ran right unless the freakin stars were aligned properly with it being sunny, 75 and 0% humidity. Towards the end of it's short life, it overheated constantly until the crack in the head was so huge that it couldn't hold coolant anymore. One time when we were stranded in a parking lot, I actually said to my Grandpa: "Grandpa, I can't even imagine this stupid car being new and exciting when it came off of the assembly line." I'm pretty objective about vehicles, but Chrysler made a lot of junk back in those days. Chrysler "Ultradrive" transmissions were also notoriously junk.

Even if the science remains as is, we are going to be moving away from a carbon economy simply because new scientists and engineers are going to be educated in the possibility that the carbon economy is not the best solution, and, being scientists and engineers, many of them are going to looking for a better solution. As time goes on, and those vested in the carbon economy become less powerful, than a more balanced picture will emerge.

You do realize that fuels aren't the only things produced from dead dinosaurs, right? How do we feed people when we can't create the fertilizers necessary to support massive crops? Plastics, composite materials and rubber are all created from oil, how do we replace those modern materials that are pretty much made from long carbon chains without living like the damn Flintstones? I'm really interested in hearing the solutions from people who think that modern civilization can survive these changes, but so far I've heard none. At best, all we can do is slow the inevitable, entropy ultimately wins in the end.

Seriously. I'm getting sick of AOL, Earthlink, and MSN just deleting order receipt emails I send out to people when they buy my software. (Gmail and a million others don't have this problem). The best part is when the customer emails to complain, I reply with their order details, then a few days later they forward the same complaint email with "2nd notice" added to the subject line. If I do reach the customer, not once has the deleted order receipt email been in their spam/junk/bulk email folders. ISPs just accept email for delivery and delete it it seems.

I had this same issue with Time Warner a while back, they created a filter that would drop SMTP sessions on any mail with our company's 800 number in it going outbound through their SMTP servers, which several of our reps were using. They also were dropping any inbound mail with our 800 number in it, into their customer's spam folders. Since most ISP mail users don't even use webmail and set up crappy POP access with the mail client (or smartphone) of their choice, they don't even see this spam folder. This was a serious problem since 90% of the company has the 800 number listed in their email sig and all of our order and delivery status notifications have it as well. I went back and forth with their postmaster group and got useless responses like this...

Our services are not meant for business use, if you are a business class customer there are different sets of servers you may use. Oherwise you may upgrade your account. If you are a road runner user and you require sending of your own 800 number or url in your emails, you may use your own mail server for that business purpose or your business' mail server to send the message to bypass our system. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

and this...

Our spam filters used on our mail system is somewhat automated. So the short answer is yes, if it doesn’t like a link or a phone number or a webpage or some of the contents in the message, the message gets filtered. Then the message goes to the junk mail folder of our clients automatically by default. They are not lost or deleted. The customers can only see those messages if they access their mail on WEBMAIL and visit the junk folder. Now, customers can further filter by chosing the option to auto delete all messages in that folder whithout them ever seeing it. If that's the case they may have accidently or intentionally not receive emails that they are expecting. To get around this you can resend the message and remove the culprit, or offending characters. Like spelling out a phone number five five five twelve twelve instead of 555-1212 or tina dot com instead of tina.com. There have been ingenious ways to do this by customers we have seen in the past.

There were around 100 customers in our DB with *.rr.com email addresses at the time, so we just had to tell them to call their Roadrunner support and ask why they couldn't receive email from us. They were also advised to stop using ISP mail accounts and open a free mail account with Gmail or Yahoo.