I understand dumping Google maps. However, Google is hardly the only company out there that Apple could partner with to provide a mapping solution for iOS. An in house solution would have been great if it were ready, but it wasn't. You can't tell me that there weren't other mapping companies with quality products that would have offered Apple reasonable term to replace Google maps in iOS.

Dumping Google maps may have been the right decision. Replacing it with their own solution that wasn't ready was an awful solution.

They didn't start from scratch, but their replacement simply isn't of the kind of quality Apple customers have come to expect. Apple has always demanded a bit of a premium price for a premium product. Maps are a critical app on a smartphone. I can understand that continuing to lack turn by turn navigation wasn't a viable choice for Apple. It's something they really should have had before now. However substituting their own solution that simply wasn't ready yet was a foolish choice. They should have either been investing more on a better solution of their own, or provided an alternative from another company until theirs was ready.

You can get a USB 3.0 dock or eSATA cable that will give you the same access speeds for about 15% of the cost unless you are connecting a lot of disks in a RAID. Thunderbolt isn't useless, but since there are very few devices that rally utilize it, and those that do are needed by few people, I'd say that "currently fairly useless" describes it pretty well for the vast majority of users.

Operating systems already do try to block access to OS files. However, administrators still have to be able to modify such files, and some services have to be able to modify such files.

So hackers find bugs in software that allow them to run code with administrator privlidges.

Once they find one, their actions appear ligitimate because the process has the appropriate privledges.

The kind of testing you have to do to write software that is nearly bug free, such as how control software for airplanes is developed is incredibly time and cost prohibitive. You end up spending on the order of $1000 per line of code by the time you are done with the entire development and testing process in such systems. Obviously that isn't practical for consumer operating systems and applications, and even then you only have such security and stability by stripping out any non-essential functionality.

If you want flexibility, extensibility, and variety, you are going to have to accept that you are going to have bugs and vulnerabilities. Good design and development practices can help a lot, but the tradeoff still has to be made.

There are lots of examples of Linux servers getting hacked, but for the purpose of a botnet they want to infect massive numbers of systems. In reality, that means Windows. Mac OS X isn't particularly secure, there's just no good reason to aim at a niche market instead of the market leader.

Linux is more secure, but being relatively more secure is far different from being unexploitable.

Of course since there are so many distributions, with so many different configurations, the number of systems exploitable with a particular flaw are even more limited.

Don't delude yourself to think that because you are running Linux you are safe. You might be more safe, but the biggest factor is you are simply a less likely target.

I was unreasonably harsh in my previous post. Kyle doesn't deserve to get sued. He's been around a long time and has built up a lot of well deserved credibility over they years. It's a shame to see that credibility tarnished by him not holding himself to the same standard he held Newegg. He owes them an appology.

I'm still waiting for their appology to Newegg. They insisted that the original statement about demo processors was some kind of coverup. Apparently HardOCP shouldn't be held accountable for passing on incorrect information from their sources, but it's just fine for HardOCP to bash the hell out of Newegg for doing the same, and to not even appologize to them for it.
The way things stand now, Kyle deserves to get sued for libel. Either he needs to admit he accused Newegg without good cause, or he needs to accept fault for not doing a better job of verifying that D&H was at fault. He can't have it both ways.

Yes they vetted the suplier, and from everything I know they haven't had significant problems with them in the many years they have been doing business with them.

However, sometimes good suppliers go bad.

It is their responsibility to make good on what they promised to sell customers, and from all indications they are doing so. They should then go after the supplier to recoup their costs in taking care of their customers.

Now if customers expect unreasonable compensation for the inconveience of not getting what they ordered, that's part of the entitlement mindset. Overnight shipping of the replacement and return shipping costs for the fake is reasonable. Expecting a refund and the replacement or something along those lines isn't reasonable.

Good customer service is good business, but mistakes happen, and passing these chips on from their distributor is a mistake. If companies have to bear a high burden for mistakes and problems that aren't really forseeable, it become cumbersome and unreasonably expensive to do business. Newegg has low prices because they have low profit margins. To keep prices low they have to keep costs down.

A well run company has lower costs in general, but if you have unreasonable expectations, you should expect to pay for them. If you want good prices, accept reasonable solutions to mistakes.

Actually the cease and desists were sent by a different distributer who was incorrectly named as the culprit and was justifiably upset. The cease and desist letters by D&H were appropriate, and their claims that they were being falsely accused were accurate.

I think Kyle at HardOCP was honestly misinformed, but he didn't exactly handle if well. He accused Newegg of being dishonest and trying to cover things up. He appologizes to D&H but defends himself by saying "We would NEVER "speculate" on something of this nature, as there is NOTHING for us to gain by misinforming our readers." However, he never gave Newegg the same benefit of the doubt he claims he deserves. He adamantly accused Newegg of a cover-up when they originally relayed IPEX's story about demo processors. Newegg had no more to gain by lying than HardOCP did.

Kyle has been around a long time and should know better. He owes Newegg one hell of a public appology, and hopefully after a little more thought he will man up and make that appology.

I'm not aware of any fair use rulings that have ever allowed for the broad publication of a complete copyrighted work.

His justification appears to be that although Microsoft is required to comply with the law, they should publish exactly how they comply so that people are more capably of avoiding the governmental eavesdropping.

Basically he's arguing that while complying on the surface, Microsoft should be helping subvert the law at the same time, which would likely land Microsoft in some pretty serious legal trouble.

The public has a right to know what the law allows the government to do. It doesn't have a right to know the specific implementation.

Such back doors do often result in some security risks, however, believe it or not you don't have a right to do penetration testing on someone else's system, even if you use that system.

Even though the software upgrade is free, it requires time from support personel and some loss of productivity to upgrade. In this economy, money for anything that is not essential is tight.

If it becomes difficult for you and your coworkers to do your job with IE6, then you have a good argument that might bear some weight. If there isn't a compelling business reason, they are likely to continue to put it off until cash flow improves.

Logic breeds skepticism of those that fail to make use of it.

Logic allows you to differentiate fact from conjecture and falshood.

Skepticism of what is logical however just allows people to be easily swayed by conspiracy theories and the like because without logic all you can really manage is either paranoia, or hope you luckily manage to be skeptical of the right things and trust in the right people.

Logic gives you the tools to make sound choices.

Skepticism by itself gives you nothing but doubt and indecision.

You're assuming that Windows gets such information from the BIOS. How does Windows even know what the original capacity is? It appears the BIOS is indicating that the battery is no longer working within specifications. Windows doesn't even know what those specifications are unless that's something it can read from the hardware.

It's nothing new. Windows has long gotten the blame for the consequences of buggy software and device drivers developed by others. They have come a long way toward reducing what mistakes made by others can crash the OS, but any kernel mode device driver can crash Windows, or any other operating system for that matter.

I've unfortunately released some drivers with bugs myself that I've had to fix at the insistance of justifiably irate customers.

What's different about this is they are getting blameed for messages they are passing on that come from the hardware.