Apple's just as sleazy as lots of other companies who are out there fighting patent wars, but I do agree that in this case Apple is attempting to monopolize the market against what it sees as a serious threat. If it weren't for them actually having bullshit patents to wave around, the government would likely be chewing their asses up for their behavior.

I mean come on, they're suing over the act of making phone numbers and URLs in text messages clickable. This is in no way an original idea from Apple, they just got the patent on it first, since apparently nobody else thought this was worth patenting to begin with. I've even written code which does the exact same kinds of things, just because it's stupid to not add such a convenience for users. So why does performing this task inside a text message make it patent-worthy?

Just flush the entire patent library out already. Obviously 99% of them were passed by people with absolutely no understanding of technology or common sense. I could write some long detailed explanation of a particular way to submit a Slashdot comment, and I bet I'd get the patent for that too.

Meanwhile, it's always funny to see Apple fanboys out in full force claiming Apple is just protecting their company, even though if the opposite had happened and Microsoft or Samsung had forced the iPhone to stop being sold, it would be civil war.

I don't hate new GUIs, particularly for mobile devices where it's still a relatively new area and companies are still learning how to do it best. But for desktops, where work actually gets done, I just see no reason to take away something that's worked perfectly for years. Microsoft nailed it with the start button/task bar/system tray interface. We've used it for over 15 years now, and it's been cloned countless times for its shear functionality. But for some reason, many Linux distros/software, particularly Ubuntu, thinks that cloning OSX is the way to go. You know, OSX, the operating system which literally hasn't changed its GUI in 30 years aside from adding a dock bar to it. A GUI which was designed to handle individual applications at a time due to hardware limitations. And a dock bar which, I might add, is one of the most uninformative task management devices ever created. It's fine for grandma to see if she has her email client open, but not for someone who wants to see how many web browsers, directories, or terminals they may have open, and displaying where or what those windows are currently doing.

Don't get me wrong, I'm cool with Microsoft trying something new, in an effort to bridge the desktop and the mobile device. But I want the ability to disable it on my desktop machine. Right now you can't without breaking shit. But this is Microsoft, and they're pretty well known for configurability and backwards compatibility, so I have a feeling nobody is going to be forced to use it on the final product.

When you buy a cheap product, you don't usually expect a lot of life out of it. But maybe that's all you could afford at the time, and not everyone wants to throw credit cards at everything beyond their means.

The point which people should be seeing is that it's possible to create cheap Android products to begin with. There's no such thing as a cheap iPhone. So when your iPhone breaks, it's a lot bigger deal than some fifty or hundred dollar clunker that lasted you a year or so.

You can certainly get quality Android products, some of which will be better quality than an iPhone, but that's beside the point of this article.

This just in: everybody disagrees with how the Linux directory hierarchy should be implemented.

That's because there is no truly good way to do it. You either try to split stuff up in some semblance of organization which makes it harder to locate things, or you throw it all in together which also makes it harder to locate things. It's like sorting music; maybe you have an instrumental of an album. Does it go in the same folder with the normal album? Does it go in an instrumentals folder for that particular artist or genre? Does it go into a separate instrumentals folder with all the other instrumental albums? There is no answer because everybody prefers a different layout. Hell, people can't really even agree on a single naming scheme for individual MP3s to begin with. Artist first? Song first? Album first? Include the year?

Unfortunately you can't use a bulk renamer on the Linux filesystem. The only alternative I can think of is to just create like an environment variable system or some other method of letting users choose where stuff will be stored by default. All future software installations would then abide by those rules.

But this is Linux we're talking about, so there aint gonna be consensus over doing it that way either.

This is such a ridiculous conspiracy that only Microsoft haters could have roused up so much in people. Microsoft doesn't have the control over PC manufacturers as people seem to think based on all of this nonsense. And manufacturers aren't idiots; they know that they sell plenty of hardware to corporations, networking/hosting companies, research labs, etc, and they know that those clients need machines which can run alternative operating systems without all of this implied dicking around.

What I think it boils down to to some degree is jealousy that Microsoft has taken security so seriously, and even doing some things that Linux is not, so they can't use that same old FUD/rhetoric about their operating system being the most secure or keep implying that Microsoft doesn't take security seriously. Because let's face it, this has been a big part of the pro-Linux fanboy campaign for years. What have they really got left now? Just the old "Micro$haft is for fags." I guess.

Don't get me wrong though, there's nothing wrong with honest Linux advocacy; I've used the operating system for countless things for over 10 years now, and still on a daily basis. For my particular server management/networking/development tasks, it's the best choice for those jobs, and I'd recommend it any day of the week. But, it's not as the main OS on my primary home PC. Nor do I really want it as such. We're not talking about Windows 95 here, even though that seems to be the last thing a lot of the hater camp has any experience with. Win7 is probably the best operating system that I've ever used, and I know a lot of people who agree. Windows 8 has the potential to be even better. So if they think they can better secure countless peoples' machines with a new technology, preventing them from infections which affects the internet for ALL of us, then for crying out loud let them do it without trying to get in a bunch of childish jabs to take their spotlight away.

Knowing Slashdot, a "how much is Microsoft paying you" sort of response to a comment like mine won't come as any surprise at all. But I don't need money to see right through this incredulous conspiracy scenario.

What difference does it make whether the attacks are detectable? DDoS for example is detectable, but that doesn't make it any less potent of a weapon. As someone who has dealt with blocking Chinese break-in attempts for years, and at one point blacklisted IP blocks from the entire region, I can tell you that China is a scourge on the internet at best, and a damaging force against major targets at worst. There's more than enough evidence of that.

While I'm all for an open-source Linux-based OS on handheld devices, the fact remains that it's not exactly the most battery and CPU-efficient operating system. When you start putting virtual machines and high-level languages on these devices to run cross-architecture applications, you only further diminish the device's capabilities. This has become commonplace now, focusing on ease of development over efficiency, and it's really rather disappointing considering the raw power available in these kinds of devices.

What needs to happen for phones, handhelds, and tablets is what happened with PCs: a single open architecture which allows anyone to develop software that will run on any other manufacturer's device. And the obvious choice is basing it around ARM. Then you develop the operating system to run solely and efficiently on that platform. At that point, applications can be developed in native code, and interface with the hardware through an API, which can then use drivers to deal with different types of hardware in the device (from display to wifi and whatever else).

Unless that ever happens, we're just going to continue to stifle the potential of devices, wasting so much battery power in the process, with companies focusing on throwing more hardware specs at it rather than fixing the core issue. Putting Ubuntu on handhelds doesn't fix any of this. In fact, considering how it's already layer after layer of code even on the desktop edition, it's only going to make the problem worse.

There is absolutely no excuse for a 500+mhz device to ever run sluggishly when attempting the same basic tasks that still run fine on aging desktop computers.

You do realize that since I've had nearly every pro-pot textbook answer shouted at me, usually angrily and disrespectfully, that I don't actually waste my time reading most of the responses again, right? I just skim them, looking for the key words which everyone uses, and then the insults. If there are no insults, I might go back over it and look for actual information I might have not heard, since they at least showed some respect.

Guys like you, however, make it much easier to go through them, because I have no idea what you even said.

If I were going to troll you, I would have posted in all lower-case, called you names, and made unfounded assumptions about your character.

Nice job.

p.s. I'm quite liberal.

Sorry, but if you think making pot legal will stop organized drug crime in any way, you're mistaken. They'll continue to rake in money for pills, cocaine, opiates, underage girls, etc. They would likely even become more violent to protect those remaining assets after losing their pot income.

And if you think a pot tax is going to raise significant revenue, you're also mistaken. Especially when the market for illegal pot exists, with no taxes, and everyone who smokes it already knows where to get it that way. The criminal pot element will always exist. It even still exists with alcohol and cigarettes. People try to skirt taxes on everything all the time, buying across state borders or making their own.

The irony is that the same people who yell for pot taxation would be much of the same hypocrites still buying it on street corners to save a buck.

Like I said, heard it before.