Remember that this very stock exchange moving to a purely Microsoft/.NET based solution was widely touted in Microsoft's so-called 'Get the "Facts"' campaign. Microsoft was involved (with Accenture) in the implementation of the project, not just in selling some Windows licenses. So this screwup should really be a PR disaster for them. If Microsoft themselves cannot even get a .NET project to work in places where their Linux-using competitors have no trouble at all (Chi-X is also Linux-based), then that sure looks like a platform in trouble to me.

Remember that the entire thing crashed down for an entire trading day, something that you can imagine didn't go over well, and together with the high latencies and other numerous problems, was the reason they dumped it for Linux.

If I purchase the phone outright, wouldn't this be willful destruction of property on Motorola's part? Does a company have the right to destroy a purchased product - after the sale - if the consumer doesn't use it in a prescribed manner?

To my knowledge (IANAL etc.) many countries have laws against this, though I don't know about the USA specifically. Generally the line is crossed at the point when there are built-in additional features that serve no purpose other than to cause the product to "break" intentionally, in circumstances that are not advertised and obviously not intended by the user. The latter might be the case for e.g. self-destructing USB sticks and the like (in which case it would be an advertised and obviously intentional feature).

In other words, it's fine to build (shoddy) products that are "designed to have a limited life-time", to put it the corporate speak way, but intentionally adding "self-destruct" components is not - in particular if the customer could not reasonably have known about it (e.g., when that property was not advertised anywhere).

For once, we're hearing about an authentically clever, afaik new physical design which solves a real problem and is actually sanely applicable to be patented. I wasn't expecting that when I clicked on this story. Gotta hand it to Microsoft for this one.

Whenever reading something like this, I cannot help wondering which company they bought the solution from.

It's certainly a clever design, and even if they bought it elsewhere that was a very good decision. Which, if technology blogs are anything to go by, are increasingly rare within Microsoft's management layers.

Adult here, with a well paid job. I live in a city, and I have never felt like I needed to own a car. In fact, do not even have a drivers license.

Also, you don't live in the USA, I'd guess?

I see your badger badger badger mushroom, and up you one rathergood.com

Of course, such sites and similar could just be produced as a movie (using HTML5) but (1) that would probably take quite a bit more bandwidth, and (2) I'm not sure it would be easier to produce, because using Flash you can indeed easily do simple animations, duplicate and scale objects, do worse-than-Southpark style animations etc. I'm sure there is software to do this for movies, but it might be more involved/complex than some rainy sunday afternoon Flash hackery.

Btw. I detest Flash, but well...after a couple of beers such websites can make me suspend my hatred for a while.

Well, the worst that could happen is that visiting the site will feel like watching paint dry.

You can't easily upgrade an OS out from under itself.

Uhm, what? Linux distributions do this all the time.

(However, they are not usually installed in firmware, I'll admit).

3 of 4 engines started up once they got out of the ash cloud.

Don't forget that these engines sustained $50-60M worth of damage in the process though. That ain't pretty.

Don't you hate it when people refuse to accept the premise of a technical question and write long monologues why the submitter is working with false assumptions even though they don't know what exactly they are dealing with?

In fact no, I hate it more when people do not state their actual purpose, especially in cases where what they are asking combined with the fact that they *need* to ask, cannot prevent one from wondering whether they really understand what they're doing, or whether they are addressing the right problem from the right angle (which, in this case, appears extremely unlikely).

The problem with this topic is *exactly* that we don't know what we're dealing with, and the first thing any decent engineer would do is to try and figure that out (in fact, you started out to do just that). Surely the stated goal doesn't stop at writing bits in exact locations just for the sake of it, right?

In fact, if I asked this to a 100 engineers, I'd really expect that at least 99 of them will immediately ask "why the fuck would you want to do that!?". And the one who doesn't probably works at a harddisk manufacturer.

Their names look very Dutch to me (I'm Dutch myself), so I'm guessing the Netherlands (or perhaps Belgium).

You're probably right that "encouraging people to rob a specific person's house is actionable in every first world country". However, that's clearly not their stated intention - to the contrary, in fact.

In the Netherlands, if someone would start a lawsuit about this (could happen, sure), I'm guessing chances are pretty good that the judge will buy the argument of the website authors, especially since burglars can already trivially find the exact same information if they have two half-working brain cells, and their stated purpose is to actually make people aware of this obvious problem. In addition, whoever starts the lawsuit would probably first have to prove actual damages (e.g. being robbed), and that this was caused by this website, and even then there's the obvious counterpoint that they put this information online themselves in the first place, and it might have been trivially found without that website. The apparent intention (of the website authors) matters as well, probably more so than in the USA (this is just a feeling, I may be wrong).

So, it's hard to prove that a robbery was "caused" or "encouraged" by this website, even then it involved your own stupidity in putting that information publicly on the internet in the first place, therefore the chances of winning (as the person who got robbed) seem not that great. In addition to that, mostly everyone here has insurance covering their household effects, meaning they'd get (most of) the money back from an insurance company anyway, so why bother with the lawsuit.

Finally, if you lose, you typically have to pay the legal costs of the defending side - so starting the lawsuit is not without financial risk in the first place.

Much of this is probably also true in the USA, but the legal costs involved would be higher, and I somehow have a feeling, also the chances of losing. (IANAL, so I may be wrong about that.)

Doubt it, since they obviously don't live in the USA. Good for them, then :)

What? They suggest these cables were created by manufacturers who thought "...you need all sorts of special hardware to create the USB connection you need to make." So a simple A to A style USB cable qualifies as "all sorts of special hardware?" And somebody thought that they were necessary because of the faster speeds involved? Huh? And then having set that up as the reason they exist (which seems a little shaky to me), they then go on to state that the approach is "completely incorrect." Interesting ... and very clearly explained! Thank you!

Explanations like these are what you get when people *know* they have to stay politically correct, when it's obvious that what they really want to say is "some hardware vendors are tremendous retards who barely comprehend the product they're trying to manufacture themselves, nevermind about reading or implementing any pesky *standards* correctly".

The other type (who make their own A-to-proprietary connectors) probably understand the standards just fine but purposely ignore them to make a quick buck. I'm looking at you, Apple :/

Which means no hulu.com, espn360.com or fancast.com. Somehow Mr. Jobs is touting this as a feature.

Anything that improves the chances of Flash disappearing from the web *IS* a feature.

Apple obviously thinks about this the same way, although likely for different reasons than I do.

They care because they don't control Flash, for technical as well as political reasons; technical: they cannot make it 64 bit, they cannot fix crashes caused by Flash as they can with pretty much everything else in OS X, etc. Political: they don't like someone else to have control and receive licensing fees over something that central to the user experience).

I care because Flash is the only "real" remaining proprietary extension that is pretty much required to experience the "web" currently, if at least you care about A/V on the internet (Youtube etc.). Pretty much everything else can be used without paying royalties to anyone just to use the technology.

This poll could really use the option "all of the above".

Worse, a change from 6% to 5% "real mail", if that is indeed the case, isn't a "very minor change", it's a 20% difference!