Putting a system in/out of stand-by/hibernation is probably another risk factor with SSD drives.

Some points of failure:

SATA SSD Drive - SATA Cable - SATA Controller - Resource Manager - "Operating System" - SATA Driver

In my personal experience, the manufacturer wanted to blame the SATA controller without providing me with any proof.

In summary, SSDs are fast, but they may die fast too. SSDs are most likely not any more or less reliable than mechanical drives, except for purely demonstrational purposes, such as dropping a computer on the floor (unless that caused a drop in power to the drive from other components).

I suggest the author has a talk with Alan C. Kay.

Fingerprinting, it seems. I guess even relaying a MAC (the unique identifier attached to network interface cards) address would infringe on this patent.

It's basically what programmers did back in the day to check whether the processor was supported by their program, or to conditionally execute floating point instructions, if the platform had a floating point unit. The *only* difference here is that the same information is used to form an identifier to check whether the system platform has changed since the last time the program started, and it stores this information somewhere to run a comparison against.

It's kind of reminiscent of the public key system.

Is this a rerun of The Tower of Babel?

Give me address there.

So, if I make a copy of a database with user names and passwords, then set the bits of the database to all zeroes on the server; it's theft? Because I now moved a "painting" from one area of space to another?

The thing is, the original state was reconstructed somewhere else without the permission of the property owner (the one/ones who arranged the original state), and that's what theft is. It's the same as moving a painting (a collection of state) to another region of space, but it's not easy to replicate a painting, so it gets exclusivity as well, but it's still the same concept; one thing appearing somewhere else in space.

The less obvious part is that you always HAVE to destroy (change) some other region of space in order to replicate the state you want a copy of, but you don't have to destroy the state in the source space. Due to the ease at which one can copy state within the realm of digital computers, the default behavior is to leave the state in tact, or you may not even have access to modify the source space.

As with the painting; less energy is required to move the state from one location in space to another, compared to replicating the state. This naturally adds exclusivity to the state, but still, you did not have permission to move the state, and that's what you are doing when you copy; you move state (not in a cut/paste manner) from one region of space to another.

Everything is a collection of state in space.
The property concept comes from the "shell" we perceive to surround a collection of state so that we can tell things apart; an egg is a property, but is it really no different from a file?

When you download a file, an exclusive region of space must be reserved on your end to hold it, which is then synched to match the state of the source space.

It's free, if you disregard the energy required to synch the state or keep it, but someone arranged the state to begin with.

Businesses--or rather small businesses that are more prone to vulnerabilities due to poor maintenance--are largely going over to cloud services which filter outbound and inbound e-mail. The cloud service anti-spam engines gain more data for heuristics which applies to all customers.

IT administrators have probably also become more aware of restricting outbound SMTP traffic at the firewall or client level.

expect a technician to mess up the PC when replacing HW, then get refusal from HP to do anything until you have reinstalled to factory defaults, if you'd even know how to do that.

This move is about the complexity of programming computers. By removing the GUI dependency, you simplify the life of the developer, not to mention the savings you get from not having to design, program, localize, and test a GUI in various builds.--MicroSoft is free to repeat the mistake with Excel, though--localizing function names and keywords.

        That said, you're always going to have a GUI anyway (if you're sane), like forms for user account creation, but then you'd have to roll your own (fragmented), and since you're rolling your own, you are going to make mistakes or miss something at some level, and all of these mistakes are multiplied by the number of scripters, but at least you'd have the freedom to do so.

        Scripts are about removing the concept of applications (to some degree) and focus on services and functionality. This is a good thing, since you can now roll your own user interface. ;)

The purpose of in-code documentation is to bring awareness to the various situations surrounding certain parts of a program. Contracts, parameters, and protocols already have a place in documentation of its own.

        You simply need to realize that the human mind goes through a lot context changes when doing programming--it's not likely that anyone has the same mindset the next time they touch the same logic.

        Documentation in this sense is to write as much or as little required to bring awareness to assumptions, consequences, etc--it's not like writing the philosophy of the API, defining its parameters and protocols. You may have already written that, as it's the reference for both your own code, and for the users of the API, and other programmers.

BACK THE FUCK UP!

It's business, you're not supposed to care, but people won't stop you from feeling guilty.
Nobody cares about you getting stressed or losing sleep over some unsolved problem.
If they can make you feel bad without even trying, then they're not going to stop; it's working to their advantage.

You're there because they don't know the quirks of the "let's just ship it" piece of shit software we have to make work or troubleshoot at times.

Also, if they can't afford to pay what it costs to have an IT person, then why give them the advantage over other businesses by working for a substantially lower pay?

Of course, unless you're living at home with your parents, you can't really be that choosey.
That's also the fundamental flaw that keeps certain shitty businesses alive.