First of all, it's worth noting that Service trigger events shipped with Windows 7.... they're just making better use of this capability in Windows 8. (This is a common flaw with Microsoft's development process for Windows.... they include some really smart new APIs but then take another 5 years to start really using them thoroughly in Windows itself.)

But to your main question -- why are services different from other programs? A service is actually a regular program, with one exception -- it hooks into the operating system to receive events telling it to pause, continue or stop its operation.

Why do this? Management. You don't want 20 different programs with 20 different ways of starting & stopping them.

A feature the Windows Service Control Manager offers is the ability to run your service in a single pooled process alongside other services that require roughly the same privileges on the system. You can see this at work in the Windows 7 task manager -- go to the Services tab and sort the list by PID. If you ever wondered what "svchost.exe" is on a Windows system, or why there are several running on your system, each under different user accounts...... there you go.

This isn't a "base engine" issue -- it's a browser UI issue. Each browser needs to offer an API hook to plugins that allow them to say, "hey, call this function when the user has requested their browsing history be deleted!" So, the way you phrased your last question is backwards -- Adobe must work with browser capabilities, not the other way around.

In the case of IE8 and later, this is a one-function COM interface that gets passed a single flags parameter indicating what types of objects should be deleted. Pretty simple stuff..... why it took Adobe more than two years to implement this obvious little capability is beyond me.

I haven't been able to find an equivalent in Firefox 4's NPAPI documentation, but it may exist. If it doesn't now, it will soon -- it's a really obvious feature to have.

Also, for what it's worth, the Flash local storage is global to your user profile, not local to the browser.... so asking Chrome to delete your browser history will mean Flash cookies are deleted in all other browsers.

Weeellllll, that's the stereotype, sure, but the on-the-ground reality paints a different picture.

Surely you've noticed that Firefox 3.6 is up to its 13th point release since January,and #14 is just around the corner. The first Secunia security advisory for this browser was issued within weeks of its initial release, and there now have been 11 in total, covering 85 separate vulnerabilities in Firefox 3.6. Look at SA42517 for an example, which was published two weeks ago. In that one advistory alone, 13 different security bugs are addressed, covering a wide variety of attack vectors like large Javascript arrays and large parameters to document.write(). And when you look at the fixes made in source control to patch these bugs, you sometimes scratch your head and wonder, how the fuck did they miss that when coding it?

But the problem with Firefox is worse than that. On Windows and Mac OS X, users are prompted over and over again to install these point updates. It requires elevation to Administrator privileges, and it requires restarting the browser. I see people routinely ignoring these updates because it'd interrupt what they're doing..... and the web server logs I have access to are a mishmash of Firefox browser versions.

This is a browser with 25% of the worldwide marketshare -- more than any version of Internet Explorer save for version 8.

So.... how about Google Chrome, you say? Their patching setup is far superior (that's why I use it), but it's not like the browser is any better-written. Just this month there have already been eighteen disclosed security vulnerabilities. And that's only slightly worse than average for a month in Chrome land. There are actually a number of Google Chrome bugs which are marked as only affecting the Linux version, too. Look at CVE-2010-4041 for an example of what I mean.

What I'm trying to say here is this -- Internet Explorer's security profile isn't significantly different than the other major vendors. They all have poorly-coded browsers that focused on packing the features in, without taking due consideration to the safety of the code they're writing. If you want to single out Microsoft for criticism, let's talk about the fact that they take so long to get these fixes out, and that reboots are often required to get the patches in place. That's where Firefox and especially Chrome are ahead.

[citation needed]

I recently installed Live Messenger and am fully up to date with Windows Updates, but my Firefox search engine is still Google. It's never changed. Heck, Bing doesn't even show up as a search engine in Firefox!

It's quite clear from the study that Chrome 6 was the most recent full release of the browser when these tests were performed in September. Don't forget that Google Chrome is on a six-week major release schedule. If the argument is that Google has made significant improvements in their defenses against socially-engineered attacks in the last three months, then okay, the study is no longer relevant. But have they done this? I haven't heard anything along those lines.

I can think of one good use for rear-view cameras... dealing with tailgaters! Imagine being able to record some video of some primo dickbag in his BMW X5, angrily following five feet behind you at 50mph because you aren't willing to go significantly above the speed limit for him. The computer's technology can measure how far away the other car is and overlay it on the screen. Then, hit a button on your dashboard, it sends the video (with a capture of his license plate, if he's got one) off to the police and they mail him a ticket. If enough people catch the same person doing it, fuck'im, take his license away and force him to take the bus.

On a more cheerful note, there is another use that Jeremy Clarkson recently suggested on Top Gear -- looking at pretty girls in the car behind you while sitting at a traffic light. Lech-o-matic!

So if I understand your exaggeration correctly, you think Canada, as a country, will suffer "as a whole" because customers who download between 81 and 300 GB a month will be billed $22.50 extra a month?

(That's what TFA says, but the Slashdot summary didn't)

$22.50 is lunch money at Harvey's for a couple of days, or one hour of pay for a halfway-decent engineer. It also buys you 300GB of consumer-grade DSL bandwidth, which is a sustained 21 megabytes of transfer per minute for the whole month. That's 340 kilobytes per second -- two-thirds of what is physically possible on Bell Canada's 5 megabit maximum DSL connections.

How many people do you really think are out there pushing their consumer-grade DSL connections around that hard, and are in the business of R&D and innovation (as opposed to, say, downloading movie torrents), but can't afford to pay for it? And how will their being forced to pay a tiiiiny bit more every month make the country "suffer"? Do you really, honestly believe that people are going to give up pursuing interesting projects in Canada just because their heavily-utilised 5 megabit consumer-grade DSL service got more expensive?

Dude, seriously, get a grip.

Here's a wonderful little piece of trivia about Solar Realms Elite:

The author of SRE, Amit Patel, went on to work at Google, and is one of two people credited with devising their "Don't Be Evil" motto.

Huh? What proprietary format are you talking about? iTunes' standard audio format is MPEG-4 Part 14, aka ISO/IEC 14496-14:2003. It's supported out-of-the-box by Windows 7 (including streaming) and surely by other operating systems as well.

The only practical difference between Apple's implementation and the ISO standard is that Apple prefers the extension .m4a, whereas the standard states that .mp4 is the only valid extension. All this specifity in file extensions really does is help operating systems sort out whether a given file is an audio-only or multimedia file without having to read the contents. The file contents itself is the same.