Or whoever established a foothold on a computer and is looking to expand their territory. Let's say they got something running from a drive-by infection. They can now proceed to access social media, buy stuff with the owner's money using amazon 1-click and so forth. Maybe even find the owner's actual comments on Pornhub in order to make the extortion mails more believable. Industrial espionage. Basically, these vulnerabilities can result in monetary gain for the attacker so it'll attract some proper talent.

"Severe" is possibly overstating it, but we should't downplay this too much either.

Imagine a bucket hanging from a string that will snap once the bucket is full. You hang it from a branch, so that it will be filled by rain water.

Then, before it is full, you cut the string using a scissor.

This is perfectly analogous to what happened in Spain.

Nope. Facebook has proven this. People say offensive shit from their facebook profiles.

You want the 11" MacBook Air. My 2010 model is still humming along fine, vastly outperforming all netbooks while taking up almost the same physical space. However, the Asus Transformer series would probably also meet your requirements - for less money. It's a 10" Android tablet with detachable keyboard/trackpad.

Not exclusively. (And in this case not at all since the Intel driver is open)

Bug-reporting is extremely important if you actually want to provide a high-quality product. Bug-reports can be seen along two axes.

1. 
    
2. Whether your product is understandable to the user. If people consistently make mistakes , you've got a design issue somewhere. The usage of the product is obviously not sufficiently clear, or the documentation is not sufficient etc etc etc.
3. Whether your product has bugs. In this case, getting a clear description of how you can reproduce the bug is key. These "submit error" pop-ups are popular for a reason - they can submit log files and stack traces, core dumps etc etc.

And some bugs are just plain hard to fix. They may also be a manifestation of a design issue, and those are rarely trivial to fix. I hope Ubuntu gets this sorted soon.

Anyone can become a programmer at some level. Simple programming is like coming up with a recipe for a meal - you have some ingredients and combine these to create a hopefully desirable outcome. It's skill, but it can be learned. I mean, I was able to move the turtle using LOGO when I was .. 10? 11?

It does however take both experience and raw intelligence to become a really good programmer. Fully understanding trade-offs takes experience. If you go all-out on even small scripts, you'll waste time. If you just hack away at large projects without design and methodology, your lack of a coherent design will bite you in the gonads. Learning how to communicate effectively with end-users and non-technical team members is also something that takes practice and a certain mind-set. I've seen many, many bad solutions chosen by bright people. I've done some myself, also recently. And I'll make some more mistakes in the future. Why? Because communication is hard. Also for the other party.

x64 is misleading. The x86_64 still uses the underlying architecture and instruction set of the original Intel 8086.. Changing the name to x64 would imply the instruction set is different from that of x86 - and while the instruction set has been extended it still (as far as I know) still support the instructions designed in the 70s.

I personally find x86_64 the most descriptive designation for a 64-bit x86-processor.

I bet Steve Ballmer made it himself!

You guys are losing the plot.

Hell yeah. Buy games from companies who care about their customers. The more money the nice companies make, the more incentive for the giants to mend their ways - otherwise they might one day become extinct as the nice companies will make so much money that they will out-compete the giants.

Windows market share is about 80%. Linux market share is about 1.5%. Politics is not the reason behind the lack of games for Linux - market analysis is.

If we want games for Linux, then we gotta systematically buy all good games that are ported to Linux. Otherwise, there will be no business case to port games to Linux.

After upgrading to Lion, my 2008 iMac suddenly started dropping the wifi connection periodically, while my 2010 MacBook Air is rock stable. Anyhow, that's my experience. Anyhow, we'll need a bigger sample in order to determine if Macs really have more wifi-issues than Windows computers. Statistics matters.

Nokia was doomed several years ago. They ridiculed Apple while they failed to streamline Symbian app development, while they failed to research and develop touch-screen mobiles, while they failed to build a proper app store that was easy to use, while they failed to build.

Making a deal with Microsoft was just an act of desperation. They were already bleeding profusely from the consequences of all their dumb-ass decisions made around 2005-2007 when mobile internet was beginning to take off. The Ovi store could have been launched in 2005-2006 with over-the-air app downloads. Had Nokia remained on the leading edge and focused on making their products better from a consumer-point-of-view, then Apple would have had a much harder job in invading the mobile phone market.

But Nokia was not focused. Apple and Google had them for lunch.

Amen.

And: Excellent developers require excellent leadership to perform well! Without excellent leadership (that understand what system development is, how to separate the wheat from the chaff and how to organize system development), the effort of developers will go to waste.

The magic happens only when excellent developers are managed well.

Jobs wasn't a very nice person. Not only do I understand peoples' dislike of the guy, I share it.

Oh please. Of course, I've never met Steve Jobs, but still: Sure he was a very demanding boss and unscrupulous strategist, but that would not automatically make him a bad person in all aspects of life (unless you consider moneymaking and bossing all there is to life)