Yeah, sometimes you are stuck with some legacy app that you have to run to do a data sync or something. But in such a case under the given scenario, a Virtual Machine would probably do the trick.

I worked for a company that had written add-on software to WordPerfect for medical transcription. I remember 6.0 for DOS coming out and the pain it entailed. Endless mucking about with customers' config.sys and autoexec.bat files to free up every last bit of conventional memory. Yeah, I know, it's unfair to blame WP for DOS's 640k memory model, but there were enough games that made decent use of XMS and EMS memory that WP should have been able to do somewhat of a better job. I also recall changes in the macro platform that added some functionality but changed things just enough to cause headaches with compatibility on the libraries of macros people had spent years building.

I think WP 6 was a defining milestone in the death of the consumer "word processor" and spawning of consumer "document publishers". The various industry magazines at the time were really found of whole page (or more) comparison lists that would simply regurgitate all of the "features" that compared products supported side-by-side. There were very few metrics that would say how usable the applications were, how productive users would be with them, and how much time users would fight with their computers to get the applications to run, and very few reviews about living with an application for an extended amount of time. It was always "what's new" from the companies that were paying for the advertising in the trade rags. It reminds me of how each year we get laundry detergent that makes our whites even whiter than last year's formula. The pointy-haired boss would simply see that "WSIWYG" and "built in grammar checker" and that was the end of the conversation. It didn't (and doesn't) matter how much work you could actually got done with the tools under review.

The article states that the vulnerability is triggered when a library load is added to pkcs11.txt, and it's really not a problem because as long as you are using Google as a search engine (or anything else that would load up PKCS routines before the pkcs11.txt is modified) then you are not going to run into any problems. But if pkcs11.txt does get modified because the user loads on a malicious payload, does pkcs11.txt somehow reset to its original content when Chrome is shutdown? Or is that library line still there in pkcs11.txt when Chrome restarts?

A configuration file located in a user writable directory seems like an odd place to load up a library, especially one that allows the a library to be loaded from the Internet. "Strange Behavior" seems a bit euphemistic here.

Duke Nukem Forever hits stores on June 14, 2011. 2K Games, now the patron saint of lost causes, has agreed to spearhead the shepherding of CSS 3 through the W3C standards process. They have committed to the publishing of CSS 3 as a formal standard by the time Duke Nukem Infinity hits store shelves in 2020.

So assuming that Apple gets this patent, what then? Would only Apple phones allow recording to be disabled, in which case the simple workaround would be to own a non-Apple phone? Or do they expect all other manufacturers to give them royalties? It seems more likely that manufacturers of other phones would market the lack of such a "feature" as a benefit.

The very act of patenting this method defeats the purpose for which it supposedly serves. If I am a theater owner or amusement park operator, why would I bother paying to implement a technology that is only going to work with a subset of phones?

Agreed. They are trying too hard to accommodate the tablet crowd. And while it's nice to be able to type what you want instead of dealing with cascading menus, it's a bummer to have to guess whether I need to type "configuration", "settings" or "appearance" to get what I want.

Unity 3D was a bust for me. Although I had Compiz working fine on Ubuntu 9 and Gnome, compositing was broken horribly on my notebook (partial screen drawing, artifacts left "stuck" after mouse over, and other fun). The notebook is a Dell with an Intel graphics adapter so, while somewhat underpowered, has had open source drivers for a while. Canonical needs to do a better job in looking at the hardware, and enabling/disabling features appropriately. Unity 2D works okay but, to me, ends up being not much more than a different app bar and really stupid scroll bars.

<flamebait class='despair'> The good news is that the United States will be able to find something to do for all the people excreted from its deteriorating education system, once the service jobs have all filled/dried up. We can have cheap labor creating knock-off products based upon Chinese intellectual property. </flamebait>

Reading this post and TFA, the chronology seems to be that Tivo sued first. If this is the case, then Microsoft is doing exactly what they should be doing, bitch-smacking Tivo on behalf of its customer, AT&T. This is how companies expect their vendors to cover their asses. Pay attention Google.

and how come I miss typos until after I hit submit?

How come they can't gill nets?

And why do they live in igloos?