In response to embrace, extend, extinguish, Google acquire, alter, and abort.

There can be other possibilities. For example, some devices may not support encrypted Wi-Fi. Or I have a friend visiting and I would not want to share the password with him and decide to temporarily disable encryption. Or maybe I am sure my neighbors are far enough away from me. Or maybe I am technically incapable of getting encryption to work properly. Not enabling encryption does not mean I want you to sniff my data, even small pieces of it. Making something possible to be accessed by public is not the same as making something public. Would you be happy if a company systematically analyze all your postcards and get to know address of your friends? If I have backyard with very high concrete walls, I might walk naked in my backyard. People can still sneak with the help of a ladder. It's not only possible but also easy, but common sense tells us it's unlikely someone would spend the time and money doing that. But you sure won't be comfortable if a company builds a lot of 30-ft robots and lets them walk around your neighborhood with cameras around their head. Sure the robot will only stay a few seconds around your house, and you might not happen to be naked when it comes. But would you be OK with that? I am also wondering what would happen when WEP is trivial to break. If Google were to integrate the WEP-cracking code into its streetview cars to make it more powerful, would people think that is OK? Would people assume that everybody in the world including every grandma online should be aware of weakness of WEP and be capable enough to upgrade all devices to use something less sniffable? I am not saying Google is wrong in this case. I am saying sniffing Wi-Fi data in general is wrong, no matter if it is on open or encrypted network. Google chose to remove face pictures of people around strip club. By the same logic, they should also not have collected Wi-Fi data even it is publicly accessible.

When an industrial standard is dominant with implementation from different vendors (think WWW, JPEG, ODF, XMPP and even PDF), there is interoperability and better security through diversity. When a single product dominates (think Flash, Windows), we bring "write once, play everywhere" to malicious code writers.

The mobile web is getting an increasingly larger chunk of the pie. And in the predictable feature, the majority of the mobile web will be not flash-capable (think iPhone OS, the majority of Symbian). So, no, flash is not "write once, play everywhere" any longer.

I work for a research lab in a university and we do a lot of scientific computing and webapp development. Here it is UNIX variants and only UNIX variants. We use Debian Linux on our clusters, Mac OS X or Debian Linux on my Mac Pro or Mac Mini desktops. Knowledge about C/C++ and scripting languages is very important. We are recently interviewing candidates for an opening, and it is very sad to see people who cannot code without IDE and who think building the binary is equivalent to clicking the little button on the toolbar. If education needs to do one thing, then that should be to give students a broader view instead of limiting them to some false impressions. In that sense, UNIX is a much better tool because of its rich history and active development.

From TFA:

Eclipse 3.1 lacks features that MonoDevelop has, including code completion, integrated debugging, refactoring, and unit testing capabilities

Nothing to see here. Move on.

I don't think it is true. After Jail-breaking it, you can run OpenSSh server in the background. It is the the OS-level limitation, but constraint set at a higher level.

for searching through not only the URLs and titles of visited pages, but also the complete text within the page itself - something "Mac OS X Spotlight' has been doing for a while. I turned on the feature on Safari to never delete history, so that I could always find an article I read last month on fossils of mammoth.

Now web developers will need to test two more assuredly incompatible browsers, IE8 standards mode and IE8 compatibility mode!

Dell do not need an existing standard to start selling Linux Desktops. Dell only need to make a decision on what is the default: a default distro, and a default desktop environment. They do not need to support every single distro or desktop environment or editor or browser under the sun, just the default. Anybody having special requirements on distro or desktop environment or anything will pretty much be able to figure out how to customize their own environment. This will also create a huge amount of opportunities for third-party support providers, which is good for business and open source.