Funny. That doesn't seem to have stopped the Hackintosh community from installing El Capitan on their Hacks.

Yes, people have found ways around it like they do for every version. However almost all of the solutions involve some combination of patching the installation to remove the checks and/or software solutions that use UEFI modules to intercept and spoof the results of various hardware checks to trick the OS.

The points is, you cannot simply take a current OS X install drive and get it to boot directly on non Apple hardware without using such tricks and modifications due to the checks done during the boot process.

Apple actually already has some degree of hardware verification built into OS X and it will refuse to boot in some cases if it thinks the hardware isn't genuine.

In fact, a major bug in this verification system prevented some builds of OS X 10.11 from booting via Netboot on certain Mac Minis causing the system to freeze in the middle of booting. Fortunately a later build fixed the issue but the problem persisted for several months before they finally fixed it.

As I understand it, OS X primarily checks for a particular string reported by the SMC in Apple hardware. If the string is missing or incorrect the boot process is halted. But I suspect their are probably additional checks in the current versions of OS X which is probably what caused the Netboot problems on some hardware configurations.

Are they actually sold by Amazon or are you simply seeing listing on the Amazon Marketplace? Most of the time when I see stuff like that on Amazon, the items are listed and sold by a marketplace seller - not Amazon directly.

Almost anyone can setup an Amazon Marketplace account and list almost anything they want for sale (much like eBay's Buy It Now option). Marketplace sellers can put up new listings at almost any time.

If Amazon receives enough complaints for a particular marketplace seller (selling counterfeit goods for example) they have been known to disable the seller's account and pull all of their items from sale. The problem is, new sellers often pop up faster than they can be removed.

No, there is still a difference. By default in Windows even with extensions off blah.torrent.exe will be listed as an "Application" type while blah.torrent will be listed as something else (by default "Torrent File" but could be different if an installed Torrent client customized the file type description).

The problem is people blinding clicking on things without looking at what the OS is trying to tell them.

That is due to the way TPM chips are designed and the exact same problem occurs when changing/ or re-installing any OS while the TPM is provisioned and in use. Indeed by coupling the TPM to the installed OS, it makes it much less likely someone would be able to boot off of some form of external media and convince the TPM to provide it's keys.

That is why most BIOS or UEFI interfaces on machines that are equipped with a TPM contain an option to clear/reset the TPM chip and suggest doing so immediately prior to installing or re-installing an OS.

I say most, but I have yet to encounter any machine that has a TPM chip that doesn't have a reset option somewhere. There was one motherboard that I encountered that required the TPM to be reset by moving a jumper on the motherboard which was a bit more of a pain. Pretty much every other machine I have worked on has had the reset option in the BIOS or UEFI interface.

The Microsoft Surface machines are a little different in that WMI can interact with UEFI directly and reset the TPM for you as long as the TPM is currently unlocked. If it is in a locked state, you still have to reboot into the UEFI interface and reset it manually.

Apple is more to blame than Microsoft for that particular limitation. iOS apps are not allowed to run in the background for more than around 10 minutes or so unless they are explicitly approved by Apple to do so. The iOS client lacks that approval and the OS kills it when it runs for longer than it's allotted time.

Apple is generally quite slow to grant approval for background apps and the review process for that is separate from the App Store review process. As a result, it is entirely possible for an iOS app to be available for download in the App Store for months before being granted the background app permission by Apple.

This isn't really a bug and more of a case of failing to use the INDEX() function in the formula.

When a cell is moved in Excel, there is a feature that attempts to rewrite formulas in any cells that reference the moved cell so that they point to the new location.

When it works, this can be quite handy and in my experience does the right thing most of the time. However, there are certain situations where it doesn't always do what you want.

The proper way to ensure a forumla always references a particularity cell/location is to use the INDEX() function. This function is specifically designed for specifying cell references that should not be automatically updated.

Are you sure you are running an actual RTM/release build and not a Insider or preview build? I have never seen such a survey prompt on any of my systems running the RTM release but I have seen it on my test system running an Insider build.

Surveys in the Insider builds make perfect sense and are to be expected given that those builds are designed to gather feedback from users to be incorporated in future updates and are not supposed to be used on primary or production systems.

The Windows 10 ISO is over 6 GB. Thank you for proving that the lynch mob was right!

No it's not. I have the 64-bit Windows 10 build 1511 ISO that has Home and Pro versions and it is slightly less than 3.6 GB.

Even the Enterprise version ISO is only slightly larger at 3.7 GB. Only the ISOs that include both 32-bit and 64-bit versions are larger than that and that is just because that version effectively is two separate install images in a single ISO (the 32-bit and 64-bit installers don't share files).

And once I discovered that output is refomatted depending on destination it was the nail in the coffin.

In Powershell the output is always formatted in the last step of an operation because it is an object-oriented shell and everything is technically an object or array of objects.

Once you understand that everything is an object, the behavior of Powershell makes a lot of sense and you can use the object-oriented nature to do things that would be fairly difficult to do.

If you really want to work with plain text in Powershell, just pipe the output to Out-String which will give you the same text-output that is printed to the console in most cases or ConvertTo-Csv | Out-File for CSV output.

That $100 gets you more than just being able to list apps in iTunes though. Among other things, it gives you 2 support incidents which you can use to get Apple to look at your code and tell you why something isn't working properly and how to fix it.

Also, If the problem was caused by a bug in iOS then the support incident is credited back to your account. As far as I am aware, there is no way to submit a support incident without an active developer account.

You also get access to the Apple developer forums which can be quite helpful and limited access to the Apple bug database for reporting and tracking bugs in iOS (production and beta releases.)

It sounds like the LTE device wasn't configured properly and was setup as an unmetered connection. If a network connection is marked at "metered" updates (including Windows 10) are not downloaded automatically, and if the user manually tries to download updates they receive warnings about possible data charges.

Microsoft doesn't usually reference security vulnerabilites by CVE numbers but use their own tracking system. They usually publish knowledge base articles for security updates that detail what vulnerabilities are fixed. A recent example can be found at KB3135173

Indeed security updates obtained via WSUS almost always have the KB article number included in the title and updates downloaded manually via Windows Update usually have the KB number listed somewhere in the description as well.

No, NAT devices are extremely common and most users have their traffic pass through at least one before it reaches the Internet. As a result, a single IP address could belong to hundreds or thousands of users and most definitely cannot be used to positively identify a single user unless you can prove that the traffic didn't pass through any NAT layers.

Why would it not boot?

Because many distributions have trouble booting via UEFI and more and more systems are shipping without legacy/MBR boot support and can only boot via UEFI.

UEFI brings some nice improvements but motherboard manufactures typically only test with Windows and good UEFI support hasn't been a high priority until very recently for many Linux distributions.