But when will they upgrade my 4Mbps down / 256Kbps up DSL connection that I pay through the nose per month for? Cuz really, I keep reading about those marvelous link speeds but in the past 10 years, I haven't seen much of that reach the average Joe Blow internet user like me...

That makes plenty of sense until you realize that device drivers that interact with the hardware are far more likely to crash than things like TCP. Hardware often has things like Direct Memory Access(DMA) to and from the device to make access more efficient and when a hardware driver crashes, a misplaced DMA setting on the hardware can scribble over any memory it wants.

I looked at it a while back with an eye towards doing some work on it, but I'm interested in file systems and large storage and Hurd was limited to a max of 4GB per file because all files were memory mapped all the time and Hurd only runs on 32-bit architectures. So, for me, the amount of work before I could do something interesting was pretty steep.

I think the main reason that microkernels don't have great performance is because not much work has been put into them. I worked on Apple's Copland OS back in the mid-90's (the "failed" OS before OS X). Copland was a true microkernel and there were a number of performance optimizations that we'd put in. Had it shipped, we probably would have started making some modifications to the CPUs to support the microkernel better as well.

A big issue for performance is switching between processes. If you have to make multiple process switches for each kernel call that can get slow due to things like reloading the MMU tables, etc. There are a lot of different paths that could be taken. I could imagine a micro kernel, for example, written in Java or similar language running in a VM that enforced fine-grained memory controls, e.g. at the object level. If you used this for memory protection between trusted (e.g. OS level) servers you could avoid the hit of reloading the CPU's page maps. User space separations could be enforced by the CPU for better security.

Not that hard? It's amazing how many of them screw up badly.

In UPS case the damn thing can't even handle my Canadian accent. Nothing so infuriating than to have to read my number, have the IVR repeat it back to me garbled and then have to tell the damn computer it got it wrong and then have to go through the process twice more before being forwarded to a support person to sort it all out. I've even tried changing my pronunciation from "Zed" to "Zee" .. still no dice.

My only thought is that they either don't keep statistics on how often that happens or that the managers who make the decisions never see them.

At least they tried to help. When one of my customers stopped getting push emails on her Blackberry, I was told by Rodgers Mobility support that push email is an unsupported feature and the policy was that she could not report delivery problems to anyone.

All my life I've learned with "pirated" material: throughout school, my teachers copied all kinds of materials regardless of whether or not it was copyrighted - including my primary school teachers hand-copying entire pages of grammar or math books and giving away dittoed copies, photocopies of of all kinds... whatever was necessary to learn. Learning was considered "fair use" when I was young. Nobody in their right mind thought twice before copying something for education purposes.

Then when I started dabbling in computers, I started "pirating" software all by myself. I knew what I was doing was illegal, yet it didn't feel wrong. I learned C with an illegal copy of Turbo C. I learned CAD with an illegal copy of AutoCAD. I learned everything I know with an illegal copy of something.

Sure I shafted Borland, AutoDesk and all the others, but then I bet they made a whole lot of money afterwards, when I and all the others like me hit the job market and started using their products professionally - on seats paid by the companies I worked for to the tune of many thousands more than a single user seat.

I don't know how I would have gotten an education without pirated material. I don't know how kids today get an education if their teachers should fear jail when they use pirated material. What a sorry state society is in...

This is rather interesting I'd say: considering that BG has vowed to give away 95% of his wealth to charities, and already does give away a shitload of money every year, I find it interesting that his net worth should increase rather than decrease.

Me, when I give money to a charity, I find myself poorer afterward. Not him. That seems like a nerdy enough phenomenon to be worth mentioning.

Google is really missing the whole point of Facebook (Facebook tends to miss it too). It's not about whizzy features, it's about interacting with your friends. I don't use Google+ because few of my friends do. I really don't want to have Google+ OR Facebook finding new junk to stuff in front of me. I want to find out what my friends are up to. It's better than emailing stupid jokes around.

I suspect too many Google staffers are never leaving the Googleplex anymore.

That markup also makes the document more comprehensible to users of gui displays.

No, really.

The gui mail client markup is so catastrophically bad that the text mode stuff is much more understandable. People freuqently are impressed by the clarity I produce in mutt using vim as compared to all my outlook-weilding cavemen.

If it stops functioning, it's lifetime is over. Duh. :)

Your lucky then, I've had two friends come back from the doctor in worse condition than they were in the first place after they got medicated. In one case my friend got better when the doctor took him back off the meds but in the other they doubled down on the meds and he ended up not being able to function on how own (or even hold a conversation) and in a group home.

stdio functions often lead to stack overflows. News at ten...
What next? Null pointers are bad, m'kay...?

I probably should have been more clear about that in my original post. Once the boss saw that he wrote more solid code, he got assigned more difficult projects than the rest of the programmers yet he still managed to keep his low bug count.

One of the best programmers I've ever worked with started as an accountant and became a programmer in his 40s first with ASP and then with PHP. What he lacked in advanced knowledge he made in spades up by being careful and methodical. He never tried to show off and when he designed something it was generally right the first time and out of the 20 programmers in our office he had by far the lowest bug count.

Quite frankly, I don't think the webserver was the entry point for Cdorkd.A since as far as I read it was mainly machines with cpanel that were infected. Even if the problem wasn't cpanel Apache doesn't run with the right permissions to change it's own binary. If the entry point is elsewhere, once they are in the machine with root access discovering what web server software being used is trivial.

Rather than worrying about something as trivial as the web server software, I would be much more concerned about why none of the control panels I've come across seem to have any sort of secure design. They run as root without any sort of privilege separation and edit the config files even when daemons are available that have a database back end.