Wayland & Weston are coming along pretty well and we are seeing increased adoption in both GTK+/QT toolkits and in desktops with upcoming versions of KDE.

One area where the developers need to go out and evangelize is on the front of EGL for proprietary drivers. Yes it's great that Intel's open source drivers (and to a lesser extend the open-source AMD & Nvidia drivers) have EGL support, but both AMD & Nvidia need to be convinced that EGL is important to their upcoming proprietary drivers too.

The irony here is that Mir, which is is seen as a huge competitor to Wayland, could end up helping Wayland enourmously since Canonical doesn't seem to be afraid to pick up a phone and call people at AMD/Nvidia to talk about updating the drivers.

Chromebooks most certainly are self-serving products for Google. Just because they aren't selling on the same scale as Android doesn't make them charity devices.

To really use a Chromebook do you need to have a Google account? Yeah?

Will you be bombarded with ads? Sure?

Are the two complaints I just listed above huge bones of contention for Windows 8 & 8.1 (substituting Microsoft's online services for Google's)? YES.

So just because the Google version is "free" does that make it insanely great while a Windows machine is full of spyware? Not necessarily. A Chromebook running real Linux is nice, but a better-specced Windows notebook that also runs real Linux can be quite a bit nicer.

So basically the NSA has been granted the same level of access as every low-grade Taiwanese device manufacturer, the Mozilla foundation that wrote the firefox browser I'm using, and probably multiple front companies associated with the PLA. Check.

Still doesn't prove or even suggest there's a backdoor, and as far as I know, even the big-bad NSA would have to send traffic over a network to control my PC remotely. How come nobody has ever seen that traffic? In order for the traffic to be completely invisible, the NSA would by definition also have to have backdoors in Linux that prevent Linux based security monitors from seeing their traffic.

So basically we have two big choices:
1. The NSA has backdoors in everything (Windows and Linux) and the exact same security researchers who find holes in software on a daily basis are too stupid to see what would undoubtedly have to be highly complex rootkit software right in front of their noses. Basically, you think that Bruce Schneier isn't all that bright.
OR:
2. When the NSA wants to do dirty work it uses the exact same exploits that crackers use every day, albeit with probably a greater degree of sophistication since they have a big budget. Since there are security holes in Windows, Linux, OS X, iOS, etc. etc., the NSA can certainly do nasty things, but they don't do it via magic, they do it exactly the same way that everyone else does it.

As I posted above... why does the NSA need Stuxnet to attack Windows computers in Iran when they have magical access to every Windows machine in existence already?

P.S. --> At no point in my post did I ever say that I trusted the NSA, I just pointed out facts that an open-source project is not magically invulnerable to security breaches simply because people can read the source code. If the Windows source was so uber-secret, how would you even know that it is approximately 50 million lines?

As a followup to my other response, if this magical backdoor into every Windows system on the planet is so great, then why was there a need for Stuxnet to ever come into existence?

The NSA should have built-in access to every Iranian Windows computer without the need for highly complex malware package!

So the NSA put in a magical untraceable backdoor that has never been found by the likes of Bruce Scheier or others in his field, but the NSA was also so stupid that they named the file "NSA_secret_evil_backdoor.dll" or something like that... yeah whatever.

Despite what you think, lots of people, including security researches, have access to the Windows source code too.

What you are saying is that:
1. Without source code, people find security holes in Windows all the time... you do agree with that statement right?
2. With source code, only the good guys find all the security bugs and fix them so fast that they never become an issue. Oh, and all existing Linux deployments, including the embedded Linux installs in your home router/cell phone/toaster/etc. get up to the minute security fixes applied too (yeah right, and I really don't care if you personally hack your devices with daily upstream kernel commits because there are millions upon millions of devices that aren't running that way).
3. Before you start accusing other people of spewing FUD, I never said that Windows is some paragon of security. You obviously see things in a very simplistic black and white world where Windows == All Bad and !Windows == All Good. Sorry sunshine, life is a lot more complex than that.

Last year or early this year there was a fix for a Linux kernel bug that could provide root privilege escalation. Here's the kicker though: The bug had been fixed years earlier but had been reintroduced into the kernel and nobody caught it for a very long time. For some reason, OpenSuse's kernel patches still included the bug fix, so OpenSuse couldn't be exploited, but mainline didn't reintroduce the fix for a long time.

Given the complexity of the kernel as just one example of a large open-source project, I don't really buy the "all bugs are shallow" argument from days of past. That argument was making a presumption that people *wanted* to fix the bugs, and as we all know there are large groups of people who don't want the bugs fixed. That's not to say that there is a magical NSA backdoor in Linux (and no, there isn't a magical NSA backdoor in Windows either, get over it conspiracy fanboys). That is to say that simply not running Windows isn't enough to give you real security and yes, your Linux box can be attacked by a skilled and determined adversary.

The second reason was adventure? So basically this guy was just like Bradley Manning who was self-avowedly in it for the thrill and the power trip.

This is basically the Icelandic Bradley Manning except 1. Nobody will die due to his leaks and 2. the exact same people who say there's some sort of duty to leak information from abusive and secretive organizations will vilify him for leaking information from an abusive and secretive organization (oh wait, Wikileaks is our new God-substitute and is above good and evil, sorry I forgot).

AMD Fanboy: This Post should be deleted because it doesn't agree with my pro-AMD RDF.

Can we please have another article about how Haswell is such a failure instead? Oh, and can you please not do any benchmarks between Haswell and any AMD products whatsoever except for a couple of IGP benchmarks that we will pretend represent the only types of systems gamers care about? K-thanks!

Did you bother to read that graph? Try looking at the bottom where it says "Wattage At the Wall"

You must be an enormous Intel fanboy to think that they have invented technology that allows every single component in the whole computer outside of the CPU to consume zero power in highly-overclocked systems....

That's like saying if Intel increases it's IGP performance by a factor of 10 then AMD will have to worry... of course it would, but the whole problem with that statement is the pesky word "if"

My 4770K is overclocked to 4.6GHz without that much tuning right now, and I guarantee it beats these new parts even in the perfectly multithreaded synthetic benchmarks that are best-case scenarios for AMD. It does that without being a space heater, and if the rumors about prices are true, the 4770K is an outright bargain to boot.

You sed: "The part I find interesting, is that if they can beat the haswell with this part then they probably have an IPC advantage over intel again. Remember the top end haswell turbo boosts to 4.9Ghz."

Please re-read everything you just said very very carefully. Especially the parts about how a design with a known IPC will magically get huge IPC boosts by only increasing the core clock and power draw (hint: it won't). Please also remember that Haswell only has a 4.9GHz boost speed for incredibly small values of "4" (it's 3.9GHz, not 4.9GHz).

The message is: You got the Megahertz myth wrong! The only myth is that Megahertz isn't important!

Oh, and all that performance-per-watt stuff? You might want to walk that back. Oh and, pull those Youtube videos where you accuse Nvidia users of being fake-pot farmers because their cards pull so much power. Sure it was funny at the time, but we'd rather not have to live that one down now.

Yeah! After waiting 4 months after Bulldozer launched to get that $189 price, and now waiting another 8 months after Piledriver launched to get the current $180 price, you got almost-as-good-at-Intel-in-a-couple-of-synthetic-benchmarks performance for the low low price of $369 in 2013!!!!

Those blubbering morons who bought the 2600K in 2011 for $350 are stuck with outdated crap that will finally be eclipsed when steamroller launches next year*! What a ripoff!

* Assuming that they spent extra for the K-series part and never bothered to overclock it for some strange reason that is...