IANA EE, automotive or HVAC engineer either, however I do have a heat pump that heats and cools my home. Heat pumps work great for stationary applications, but you need a relatively large evaporator coil to generate any significant amount of heat. Compare a regular residential A/C unit to the equivalent tonnage heat pump and you'll see that the unit is almost twice the size. Automotive A/C condenser coils already take up all of the surface area they can get in the front of the vehicle's radiator. Also keep in mind that heat air-to-air pumps also require defrost cycles to clear the evaporator coil of frost accumulation, this requires an auxiliary heating method as well, unless you don't mind ice cold air being blasted at you during each defrost cycle. Place the evap coil on the front of a moving vehicle with precipitation constantly blasted at it and these defrost cycles will be even more frequent.

In theory, a heatpump would be great, but you need to solve a few problems with the conventional heat pump application first to make it practical. I really think it would just be easier to have propane catalyst heat that used those canisters that camping applications use. VW used to offer something similar for their air-cooled vehicles that burned gasoline called the ebersparcher

These AWD gas powered "sports cars" have lined up to accept your challenge...

Supercars in the snow - Audi R8, Bentley Continental GT Speed, Porsche 911, Jaguar XKR-S

Audi Quattro plows its own lane in snow

Audi R8 commercial - Good Day For A Drive In The Snow

...of course, somebody could just make an AWD EV with a fossil-fuel burning auxiliary heater to even the playing field a bit.

Just out of curiosity (and because I'm too lazy to google it, AND you're an EV builder), how exactly does the heat in an EV like a Tesla or Fisker work? I know it at least has to be supplemented by some type of resistive electric heating element, but is there also a method for circulating waste heat from the batteries and motor(s) to the cabin area to provide heat as well? Does this waste heat provide a usable amount of heat for say a Northern US winter climate?

I'm just wondering, because I know resistive electric heat has to suck a lot of amps. Depending on whether you just bundle up and tough it out with no resistive heat, vs cranking the heat like you would in an ICE-powered vehicle probably has a very considerable effect on range.

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.