I cannot seem to find it in back posts but this is the 3rd time slash dot has "reported" on the same event.

Granted, this summery "article" is more retarded than the last 2, as this one suggests having a switch to get in developer mode, and also voiding the warranty for flicking said switch. If there is a switch to get into said mode i don't know of any legal system would accept that flicking said switch is terms for voiding of a contract. Also have you heard of a computer manufacturer voiding one's warranty for INSTALLING programs.

But i will say this, excluding this dumb-ass sacrificing our rights to a hardware protection, I do respect Microsoft stance for this, they essentially asked the hackers to take down their tool and in exchange Microsoft is gonna make a system to do what they want without having they Dev keys posted all over the web essentially making piracy a trivial matter for their phone, which in turn will alienate developers who want to sell products. If this method pans out everyone wins, we get home-brew, we get paid content, and they get a market that is still considered profitable.

assuming a non-encrypted laptop and the default password saver it is trivial to get ones saved password from Firefox, Chome, or IE. in Firefox, is as much as saying show me my stored passwords.

+1 don't have anything to add other than you stole my line, haha thanks

One more thing it should also try to answer questions it does not know with jokes, that is the best part of the human contestants.

I assume the parent was talking about jail-breaking on iOS. From what i can gather you can't do all the things you listed on iOS.

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=I8V6AAAAEBAJ

The article is wrong with the dates as you can see in the patent described in the article it was filed in 1999 and granted in 2006 but the article stated it was filed in 2006, and granted recently. This gave the author reason to believe that this has something to do with what apple is doing next which seems unlikely since they have had the idea for over 10 years and have done nothing with it.

Also from the article it sounded much like a Net-boot Linux distribution with a NFS shared holding the file system to be used. Something like my school has set up for student computers. This gave me an impression of patent trolling/prior art as it has been in place since 1997 at least. But it does make some alteration to what i have seen in practice, for one there are 2 places where a user can make changes to the OS, first is a network stored diff file system which tracks the changes from the end users system and settings files. So that a user can make changes to the programs installed and OS files (not that they have good reason to do so) this is then compared with a master OS image, this i would assume allow a user to have the same programs and settings across any computer. There is also a Local Shadow Volume which stores larger files which cannot be stored on the server due to quota restraints, caching of regularly used files and server write queues. Possibly also can be used to a disconnected client although they don't appear to state how much of the master FS is transfered to the client to make it usable if the network is disconnected.

That being said it can be seen as similar to what Google is doing in Chrome OS but chrome only boots from the server to restore the OS and not to boot every time. Also Chrome OS uses the local copy as the primary and the network copy as a backup but apples patent seems to imply the opposite.

Given the age of the patent this article appears to be someone trying to make up news during a slow week more than anything else.

Apologies for the spelling errors, my eyes did not see them in the preview.

It a way it could be seen as such as opposed to sending a lot of money developing a chip with 10x the components in 2 years you could instead break that into a six/seven year cycle with 2x every 2 years, each chip iteration has an cost but it should also have a profit which will fund the next iteration.

It would be better to follow Moores Law from a economic stand point. The Guy in your example does not give the cost it would take to get his 10x chip production ready which is where you example may fail.

I partially agree Microsoft does have a weird problem where they have more than one product to do the same job,

For example
Windows Media Player, The Zune Desktop Software, Windows Media Center on the desktop all for playing content on one's desktop
Play for sure and Zune's DRM for Digital Rights Management on Portable Players
Windows Live Sync, Mesh and Skydrive. All provide overlapping "cloud" storage syncing that should be merged together.
IE 6, IE 7, and IE8.. oh wait that one is a joke

But When it comes to getting Media Center on a TV the experience is less than optimal, you have 2 options

Media Center Extenders(including Xbox 360), I have tried on a few occasions to get my Xbox functional as one of these it works decently, but i kept running into issues because my home network is bad, and I have no control to fix the network. Essentially the issue was that each time I reconnected to my PC running WMC it would see it as a new computer and try to get me to re-register the device, which then in turn had to recreate the local cache of the desktops media library, which took too long to be convenient. Eventually I switched over to using another media streamer that worked with the Xbox that did not have to do registration and caching.

Roll your own Windows Media Center HTPC
Great in theory much better than using the extender.. not for the general population). The only other Media Center software,that i can think of, that can rip live TV is MythBox. Although personally if XBMC had this capability then it would be my preferred option.

As for what this new device sounds like from this article is the second option all in a self contained box, which is great if it retained it PVR functionality and is able to stream from local network computers (it probably will use home groups but that is a small price to pay). What I hope does not happen for this is removal of user addable codec. It is windows CE based so it will be ARM based as well which means some codec will need to be ported but still better than nothing.

If this is done right it should fill a demand that is not being met by their 2 other products which are meant to be working together.

it would also be wise to price it close to the Boxee, Apple TV and other products of the like. I will be willing to pay more only if it has PVR capability which in theory would mean not an additional box but rather just replacing a box, and is also not being done by any other consumer device that attempts to merge the Web with TV.

Partially true, At the beginning there the hardware ps2 emulation, the next wave of consoles then swapped that out for software emulation, Sony then said it was too hard to keep it up to date and removed the software emulation completely.

Not too sure about this next point, but i think they then removed the ability to access the hardware emulation on the oldest models.

But with this it might possible to restore Sony's software ps2 emulator, but more importantly, it is possible for one to make their own and have it run on the ps3 although that won't happen over night, and speed and memory might be an issue.

your comment says little, essentially exchange is your secure server, e-mails are your sensitive data and the iphone is your remote device. You cannot control what the remote device logs into its own memory so its loss will have confidential data that your server cannot protect.

Aside from the remote wipe system how else do you propose one secure the data on remote devices that your vague system allows.

but if you have a time machine you can go back before the story came out and patent it then

Hey it doesn't have to be by race, they could also do it by lets say beards, search everyone with a facial hair covering some part of their lower face. or everyone wearing hats, there are more ways to profile for terrorists than just race.

But also forcing people to use more "weird" characters is just asking them to do something stupid like have the password on the screen in post it note form, where as a passphrase sure you may fail a few times but at least a normal person would be able to remember it in seconds as opposed to "23;w5f9s".

I am also a firm believer of passphrases and have been using them on everything that does not have an upper-bounds on password length.

Funny thing is i can recite their meaning and they are relatively obvious once you hear it once, but the problem is jumping in with no prior knowledge, there is no official I am new documentation one can look at, when i started all i had was a wikibook which is out of date now, which use screen shots from the 2.3.X builds. I imagine it will be more difficult once 2.5 gets out of beta,

That being said jumping into any 3d software is difficult, but does it have to be that way?