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That is totally unrelated now. Symantec sold the SSL certificate business:

Symantec Selling SSL Security Business to DigiCert for $950M

And since it isn't obvious from the article, I'll point out that FY18 for Symantec started in April 2017, so Q3FY18 ended at the end of calendar year 2017.

If you go to their web site, it already has been updated to say the SSL certificate service is being provided by DigiCert (in the fine print at the bottom) and that DigiCert is licensing the Symantec brand name for this particular service.

Whee, my ISP went down literally in the middle of my writing this comment, but I saved it to notepad ahead of submission because I am used to them (Digital Path) failing miserably. They're not even going to send someone out to look at it for several days. What country is this? I thought I lived in California, not Afghanistan.

Anyway, back to topic.

Trademark, not copyright.

Yes, of course, trademark. That was a foolish error, of which I am of course as capable as anyone. The point, however, stands.

I suspect that ship has sailed.

So why the ongoing bullshit claims about inventing the phrase? There's a new attempt to falsely claim its creation every year or so. Is it just about self-aggrandizement? You people feeling insecure?

Note also that there are trademark categories, one does not register the word for all possible uses.

While that is completely true, we're clearly talking about the same thing here.

It also seems to me quite silly for you to rail about this because SCO, the organization that inanely tried to sink the ship of Linux, used the term once, not meaning the same thing, back when they were still called Caldera and were releasing the source for DR-DOS.

It only sounds silly to people who don't know what I'm (before your last comment, I would have said "we're") talking about. For one thing, the company was not SCO at the time of the press release; it was Caldera. In addition, I know more than a handful of people who worked for the actual, original hot-tub-and-fizzbeer SCO way back in the way back, before Caldera was even founded by Ransom Love. At the time, SCO was just as much a champion of open standards as any other Unix vendor. I'm sure you have passionate feelings about The SCO Group, but that has little to nothing to do with the SCO of the day and you seem to be confused about the details. Finally, the fact that they used the term before you, but not meaning the same thing you mean, is precisely the point I've raised. Thanks for really hammering it home, though.

Perhaps you should bother Intel about previous uses of their corporate name as a short form of "intelligence". Or Tesla, named after a scientist who might not even have approved of them.

Intel and Tesla aren't bothering ME with their silly names. Intel isn't trying to redefine the term "intel" as used in the intelligence community. Tesla isn't trying to claim that Tesla invented their car. But the OSI is trying to claim that it invented the phrase "Open Source" as pertains to software, and that it gets to determine (at least partially on that basis) what is and what is not "Open Source Software" which was a phrase provably already in use years before recent claims to the contrary which — if true — would have strengthened the OSI's position in this regard. Since the claims are false, they do the opposite. Continually claiming to have been involved in the invention of a phrase which predates your claim by years makes you a liar. Why do you and your pals over there want so very much to be liars? Don't you think that's going to hurt your credibility in the long term? These facts aren't going to just go away. I found them out with google, and by doing a little old-fashioned reporting. Anyone else can do the same, though I've saved them the trouble. When the inevitable trademark claim (whatever you say about it, since you're not trustworthy anyway, should be ignored) goes to court, no leg work will have to be done, because I've done it already. I've identified all the key witnesses and the most relevant evidence to disprove such a claim. So why not just stop wasting your time telling lies?

You said, "Absolutely no one would consider Slashdot a sound source of business advice about technology. No one."

The 12 Slashdot stories to which I linked are summaries that link to many stories at other web sites about Apple not managing correctly. When there are many stories like that, the entire reputation of Apple is lowered.

You also said, "Meanwhile Apple has built $260+ billion in cash on its books."

I don't say I know all the answers. However, it appears to me that Apple has done extraordinarily well for 3 main reasons:

1) The world has realized that mobile phones are extremely helpful in making our lives more efficient.

2) The only big competitors use the Google Android operating system. Those competitors prevent updates to fix vulnerabilities. One story about that: Op-ed: It's time for Google to take responsibility for Android's security updates (May 15, 2017)

In the past at least, anyone who buys an Android phone is, knowingly or not, buying a phone that is not secure, or will eventually be found not to be secure when vulnerabilies are discovered.

Also, Google has arranged that Google Play apps automatically update themselves. That means the app providers can make changes that allow more control, or do other possibly destructive changes, without the mobile phone user being able to know why a phone is operating differently, or even know that it is operating differently.

One of the stories: Fake WhatApp Update for Android Dodges Google Play Vetting Process (Nov. 6, 2017)

3) Steve Jobs built Apple's present world popularity. Steve Jobs was extremely abusive in some ways, but good at making sure that Apple didn't release products with problems. Now that advantage has disappeared, apparently, judging from the 12 Slashdot stories to which I linked.

When you disagree, don't call people "idiots", as you did 2 times. Stay logical. If you know better, show us how you know better.

Recent Bluetooth vulnerability.

APIs are not copyright able. See Google vs. Oracle.

Wow, you completely misunderstood that case. APIs most definitely are copyrightable, as per the appellate court. The best you can hope to attain is a fair use defense, which Google tentatively won (though it may or may not be overturned, like I know). Reasonable summary here, a lot of situations are probably fair use, including interoperability.

After what microsoft did to visual basic, I would never trust them with an enterprise/mission critical application I intended to use long term.

http://www.eweek.com/developme...

  I worked in a shop which had large VB applications and they were told "convert or die". As if they could just print money and whip up a bunch of programmers to convert the applications. (It looks like microsoft eventually relented a bit but they didn't want to and I still don't trust them.)

Car manufacturers support their cars for 10 years after they stop making them.

Decades old COBOL still works and runs every day at many companies.

Remember when Twitter shut down access to 3rd party access?
http://www.digitaltrends.com/m...
https://www.independent.co.uk/...
http://www.idownloadblog.com/2...
http://news.softpedia.com/news...
http://www.eweek.com/developme...

So I gotta ask, is this really news? Or just reporting?

Last year, the University of Northern New Jersey was announced as a sting operation, about this time of year.

Want something older?

Here, from 2009

I'm sure you could find more in ICE's reports(that article mentions one in 2008), so I don't know what s.petry is thinking. This isn't new at all, after all, the Obama administration deported something around 2 million people. The Bush and Clinton Administrations managed a bit less, but not that much.

They weren't all people faking marriages.

Really?

About 1 1/2 years ago, AMD was on its way out in the server market because the Opterons were not competitive enough anymore: http://www.eweek.com/servers/amd-aims-to-reinvigorate-x86-server-business.html
Now they are going to give it another try with Zen, and I think it is a promising try. But then again, Zen is not more power hungry than comparable Xeons. Maybe less so.

If you care about your transactional data, it can't be beat by any other on-premises RDBMS

I *somewhat* agree with you, but not everyone reaches that point. You can use the other solutions for less cost, and they will cover most everyones needs.

One thing that nobody on here has touched on though are the REALLY big systems like Teradata. Although I've never had the pleasure of working with it, I'm willing to bet that it can smoke Oracle.....of course I'm sure you'll pay a pretty hefty sum to do so. If you have THAT much data to crunch though, cost should be less of a deciding factor. Look at how much data Wal-Mart crunches through it, it's pretty mind-boggling. Have you ever used it? If so I'd love to hear about it, as I have yet to find anybody that has actually had to support it.

DB/2 on z/OS can beat it to, but of course you're tied to IBM's hardware stack for that, with A LOT more cost. I read somewhere once that Larry Ellison said that DB/2 on Z/OS is "the only other database system I respect". He definitely had this to say:

"IBM DB2 is good on mainframes, the best in the world. Oracle is good on everything else-x86 and all others. It's too bad DB2 can't run on modern machines. Can't scale either-the most [instances] you can have of DB2 is one."
http://www.eweek.com/database/...

I know that he's incorrect the "modern machines" part, and it's meant as a swipe against IBM, but it does mean something when Oracle used to run on z/OS until they pulled support for it back in 2009.

Well, they were putting visitors to Linux Journal or the Tails distribution website on a watch list.
http://www.eweek.com/security/...
No interrogations. Yet.

Bearing in mind how often we receive VLC updates, what is your opinion of Google's decision to "carve in stone" the StageFright media libraries into the /system read-only mount point on Android?

Stagefright patch breakdowns were of surprising number and duration: "...over the course of the last year of Android updates, Google has issued patches for 115 media server-related CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) flaws. Of those, 49 were found directly in libstagefright, with 35 in libmedia and 31 in libraries on which libstagefright depends."

A related question: if Google had approached you with the intention of burning the VLC player into the equivalent of ROM, would you have asked them to choose another player?

"Red Hat and Microsoft have agreed to a limited patent arrangement in connection with the commercial partnership for the benefit of mutual customers." link

How could Red Hat be that stupid, signing the patent agreement means validating Microsoft claims that Linux violates their patents and now Red Hat is giving Microsoft a seat at an Open Source conference. Just how stupid do you have to be to not see this.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.co...
http://thestack.com/zyxeltech-...
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.c...
http://www.itworld.com/article...
http://www.eweek.com/security/...
http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...
https://threatpost.com/exploit...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
http://www.zdnet.com/linkedin-...
http://www.bing.com/search?q=r...

APK

P.S.=> See subject & now more specific attacks on DNS by malware's next... apk

the tor project should shy away from Firefox (ESR)?

https://it.slashdot.org/story/...

http://www.eweek.com/security/...

"Working closely with the community over many months, Red Hat engineers have been heavily involved in the process of analyzing and developing Samba patches for Badlock-associated issues," Josh Bressers, security strategist at Red Hat sad.

http://www.eweek.com/security/...
http://www.itworld.com/article...
http://www.itworld.com/article...
http://www.itworld.com/article...
http://www.majorgeeks.com/news...
http://www.majorgeeks.com/news...
http://www.net-security.org/se...
http://www.networkworld.com/co...
http://www.networkworld.com/ne...
http://www.networkworld.com/ne...
http://www.networkworld.com/ne...
http://www.networkworld.com/ne...
http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...

APK

P.S.=> So much for your faith in routers alone stupid (225 in total, 15 posts with 15 items each)... apk

http://www.eweek.com/article2/...
http://www.eweek.com/article2/...
http://www.eweek.com/article2/...
http://www.eweek.com/security/...
http://www.itworld.com/article...
http://www.itworld.com/article...
http://www.itworld.com/article...
http://www.majorgeeks.com/news...
http://www.majorgeeks.com/news...
http://www.net-security.org/se...
http://www.networkworld.com/co...
http://www.networkworld.com/ne...
http://www.networkworld.com/ne..." ADD_DATE="1314658631" LAST_VISITED="0">Cisco routers caused major outage in Japan report - Network World
http://www.networkworld.com/ne...
http://www.networkworld.com/ne...

APK

P.S.=> So much for your faith in routers alone stupid (225 in total, 15 posts with 15 items each)... apk

http://www.eweek.com/article2/...
http://www.eweek.com/article2/...
http://www.eweek.com/article2/...
http://www.eweek.com/security/...
http://www.itworld.com/article...
http://www.itworld.com/article...
http://www.itworld.com/article...
http://www.majorgeeks.com/news...
http://www.majorgeeks.com/news...
http://www.net-security.org/se...
http://www.networkworld.com/co...
http://www.networkworld.com/ne...
http://www.networkworld.com/ne..." ADD_DATE="1314658631" LAST_VISITED="0">Cisco routers caused major outage in Japan report - Network World
http://www.networkworld.com/ne...
http://www.networkworld.com/ne...

APK

P.S.=> So much for your faith in routers alone stupid (225 in total, 15 posts with 15 items each)... apk

http://www.eweek.com/article2/...
http://www.eweek.com/article2/...
http://www.eweek.com/article2/...
http://www.eweek.com/security/...
http://www.itworld.com/article...
http://www.itworld.com/article...
http://www.itworld.com/article...
http://www.majorgeeks.com/news...
http://www.majorgeeks.com/news...
http://www.net-security.org/se...
http://www.networkworld.com/co...
http://www.networkworld.com/ne...
http://www.networkworld.com/ne..." ADD_DATE="1314658631" LAST_VISITED="0">Cisco routers caused major outage in Japan report - Network World
http://www.networkworld.com/ne...
http://www.networkworld.com/ne...

APK

P.S.=> So much for your faith in routers alone stupid (225 in total, 15 posts with 15 items each)... apk

http://www.eweek.com/article2/...
http://www.eweek.com/article2/...
http://www.eweek.com/article2/...
http://www.eweek.com/security/...
http://www.itworld.com/article...
http://www.itworld.com/article...
http://www.itworld.com/article...
http://www.majorgeeks.com/news...
http://www.majorgeeks.com/news...
http://www.net-security.org/se...
http://www.networkworld.com/co...
http://www.networkworld.com/ne...
http://www.networkworld.com/ne..." ADD_DATE="1314658631" LAST_VISITED="0">Cisco routers caused major outage in Japan report - Network World
http://www.networkworld.com/ne...
http://www.networkworld.com/ne...

APK

P.S.=> So much for your faith in routers alone stupid (225 in total, 15 posts with 15 items each)... apk

Yes, there is.. and you don't have to "buy" it... Its called Linux.. Of course, having said that, I wonder how long it will be before the "government" decides that anybody who is not doing their internet business with an "approved" operating system, namely Windows or Mac, will be marked as a "terrorist".. I hope I'm dead and buried by then, but the way the world is going, I wonder (I'm 65 y/o now)....

How long? They already do.

The design that Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works is working on continually produces its own Tritium.

"Tritium fuel is continually bred within the reactor wall and fed back into the reactor along with deuterium gas to sustain the reactions."

One of the reasons browser vendors can get away with getting rid of as many plugins as possible is because they are adding features to the browsers themselves. WebEx is actually a good example.

Cisco is one of the companies working on WebRTC at W3C and IETF.

So WebEx will support it if it doesn't already I'm sure:
http://www.eweek.com/networkin...

Mozilla and Google support WebRTC and Microsoft is working on supporting it.

About WebRTC:
- is peer2peer like Skype used to be and can do NAT hole punching if I'm not mistaken
- automatically uses a relay as a fallback if peers can't connect directly
- traffic is encrypted so the server or network can't see or change the content
- supports video/voice calling
- support for one of the most used codecs from traditional voice like analog and VoIP so sound doesn't need to be converted.
- has the best audio codec ever created for these type of applications: Opus. Which is an IETF standard created for WebRTC by Skype (before it was acquired by Microsoft) and Xiph.org developers
- screen/desktop sharing
- application sharing
- the standard says: browsers most support both the H.264 and VP8 video codec
- data channels (useful for example for building games)

If you're on the radar...

Linux Lands on NSA Watch List

EVERYONE is on the radar these days. But they can only cost-effectively get to a subset of "everyone".

When the Heartbleed vulnerability was found, there was spotted another OpenSSL security vulnerability which had not been fixed for 4 years and it even had a public CVE record in place.

> What are you talking about?

I'm talking about Facebook and Google, two of the companies explicitly listed in the article. You did RTFA right? Or are you one of those tards who manufactures the least charitable interpretation of what someone says and goes to town on them with a strawman?

> Apple are positioning themselves to use privacy as a selling point.

Since you brought it up, I disagree. They are like google, they absolutely want to track the crap out of people, they just want to keep that data for themselves and sell access to their customers rather than sell the data about their customers. It is the modern version of "renting" a mailing list. Sure, Apple has business lines that generate income from hardware sales, but that's not stopping them from wanting moar.

Fair enough, I certainly deal with the ghastly little things more on the inside than as a user. I assumed that 'RSA dongle' implied that the grandparent poster was using the same, didn't actually check to see what the companies mentioned issued to customers. They are usuriously priced; but that didn't seem implausible for a brokerage account that might easily have actual money in it.

That said, aren't all non-connected tokens(like the Symantec one you link to) going to have the same fundamental limitation that you need to know enough to clone the token in order to authenticate the token? In the case of the Symantec offering, it appears that the model is "Company B needs to pass every auth request to Company A for processing". It's Symantec: Neutral Trusted Party, rather than Bank A vs. Bank B; but same basic system.

The nice thing about smartcards (and USB dongles or contactless systems that implement equivalent functions) is that, while they do need a communication channel, they can perform a proof of identity(via public/private keypair) without ever needing to expose their private key, and without the remote host needing to know anything except the public key. The extra channel is a huge pain in the ass, compared to the time-based ones(which really are a cute trick, even if RSA are awful to deal with), especially if users expect to log in on something where you can't just install a card reader; but something with access to keypair auth is fundamentally better suited to multi-institution verification.

I really wish that we'd just bitten the bullet 10 years ago and actually rolled out a CAC-style keypair/smartcard system, with accompanying hardware and software ecosystem) in a big way. Trying to add it on after the fact is pretty hopeless; but if baked in it's a pretty cheap interface, and more capable than the disconnected tokens by a fair margin. Ah well.

A report has been released detailing an issue that the reporter is naming "Grinch". This report incorrectly classifies expected behavior as a security issue.

... to the masses of sarcastic "I though Open Source was more secure!" crowd: in an Open Source forum, when vulnerabilities are found, they are patched. Since it's a public forum, the vulnerabilities are disclosed, and patches / updates made available. The poor, sorry state of the first cut gets rapidly and openly improved.

With closed source, the vulnerabilities merely stay hidden and undisclosed, and you have no ability to know about it, or fix it yourself. the poor, sorry state of the first cut never improves. Yes, there are some cultures that take security seriously. You have no way of knowing.

This, right here, is what "more secure" looks like: public notification of the vulnerabilities and patches to distribute.

Except when they are not fixed.

There are various serious bugs lingering on bug trackers, which have been known for a long time, but no one takes the responsibility to fix them.

For example, in addition to Heartbleed, OpenSSL had another bug which had been unfixed for 4 years and even had a CVE record in place.

But I bet you'd see some interesting differences if you compare the time between when an open-source vulnerability is reported and when it is fixed to the same interval for a commercial, closed source alternative, you'd see that known vulnerabilities exist for a much shorter time in a well-supported open source product.

Take a look at bug trackers of OSS projects sometimes. They are full of known bugs which have been waiting for fix for months or years. Around the time when Heartbleed was discovered, there was another bug reported 4 years ago and no one had taken the responsibility to fix it. It even had a CVE record.

The deal under which Mozilla makes about $300 million a year putting Google as the default browser in Firefox is ending in November of this year. This deal provides the vast majority of Mozilla's funding. Does Google need to renew it? The situation has changed from 4 years ago - Chrome is the default on Android, People are installing it on their laptops to have the same browser as their phones, etc.

So maybe Mozilla can see the writing on the wall and doesn't care to "offend" Google any more. Making the Firefox phone OS, and now competing with Google Chromecast ... and on tablets, desktops, and TVs. Because there aren't already others competing for the bottom 0.01% of users in any of those spaces (hello, Canonical).

Because really, if Google doesn't renew the deal, or renews it a a much lower price, there's going to be a lot of pain and suffering at Mozilla. And if Mozilla signs with Microsoft instead, how quickly do you think people would put their default search back to Google? Microsoft knows that, so they're not going to be willing to pay big bucks either for a browser that has lost half it's market share and that most FF users will quickly switch back to Google for their default search engine.

Yea, definitely a media thing. No one actually working on the Linux kernel has ever said they care about the desktop

Not only that, but Nerval's Lobster is the screen name of Nick Kolakowski, a Dice / Slashdot employee who churns out content for just about anyone who pays

Warning: Visiting some of these terrorist-oriented sites may put you on some lists.

OpenSSL Gets Patch for 4-Year-Old Flaw

That one had a public CVE sitting for 4 years while nobody took the responsibility to fix it.

The point is that if a flaw exists, when found, it can be quickly fixed in open source.

In theory it can be fixed quickly, but even in the recent OpenSSL quality assurance effort, there was fixed a 4 year old publicly reported bug. So it's not guaranteed that anyone fixes the bugs quickly, even if they are already found and described accurately.

It's just like the "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" law: the bugs can be found if enough professional people are rigorously going through the code. But there is no guarantee that every open source project (even mission critical projects) have enough of eyeballs in practice.

In other news, there was also a 4-year-old flaw in OpenSSL. In the same way this bug was publicly reported (CVE-2010-5298) for years, without no one taking the responsibility to fix it.

Here's a detailed report of the bug by OpenBSD developer Ted Unangst. It was finally fixed in the recent quality assurance effort conducted by the OpenBSD guys.

In other news, OpenSSL gets a 4-year-old flaw patched. The catch here is that the bug was not only 4 years in the codebase, but it was publicly reported (CVE-2010-5298) for 4 years, without no one taking the responsibility to fix it.

OpenBSD developer Ted Unangst made a detailed report of the bug. It's not as severe as Heartbleed, but still allows remote attackers to inject data across sessions or cause a denial of service (use-after-free and parsing error) via an SSL connection in a multithreaded environment.

In other news, OpenSSL gets a 4-year-old flaw patched. The catch here is that the bug was not only 4 years in the codebase, but it was publicly reported (CVE-2010-5298) for 4 years, without no one taking the responsibility to fix it.

OpenBSD developer Ted Unangst made a detailed report of the bug. It's not as severe as Heartbleed, but still allows remote attackers to inject data across sessions or cause a denial of service (use-after-free and parsing error) via an SSL connection in a multithreaded environment.

Yes, changing it to say "alpha" would be putting it nicely. It WAS beta quality until they hired bing developers to pretty it up. Now it doesn't work on my mac, pc or android phone.

The problem is, comply with WHAT? Have you ever read the various "standard compliance requirements"?

Yes I have. I've read the entire HIPAA and HITECH acts, including the data transfer standards. It takes weeks just to get through the non-standards documents. Luckily I'm paid to do it.

They're usually worded in a way that leaves holes big enough to move planets through. You'll find a lot of talk about "reasonable" and "adequate" security without any kind of definition whatsoever what these words would mean.

That's not entirely false. There are many references to clarifications that will be provided by the Secretary of HHS (who tends to pass the buck to NIST these days) and also implicit references to industry best practices and explicitly to the "reasonable man" legal standard (which seems to be what you're referring to).

You will NEVER EVER find something that they could be pinned with, like "leave no default passwords" or "no guest accounts" or even "stateful firewall with [[list of features]]". Never. No chance.

Wrong. The only people who can't be "pinned" are the government regulators themselves - the compliance standards, as officially and legally clarified by the Secretary, explicitly reference things like FIPS 140-2 which have exact requirements. Failure to comply with those is punishable. The weasel-wording you've pointed out serves to protect and empower the regulators who are outside of the congressional legislative process, it does nothing to protect non-compliant hospitals, for example.

Of course it's a consultant's dream because no matter what you sell, you're complying. And it's of course no problem for the customer in question to be compliant to rules like that.

It's a consultant's dream alright, for two reasons - one, it's a gold mine because the rules constantly change as the Secretary makes "statements", and two, because people like you are spreading inaccurate information about liability. I can't tell you how many times I've heard fools say that "nobody will prosecute us for this..." setting themselves up for a board-mandated takeover of the IT department by consultants.

I might suggest the same. You are pointing to the work of an advisory board, and that is their only power. They are advisors, not "deciders." You should also note that the decision was split.

Advisory Board Report Won't Alter NSA Operations Despite Hype

The PCLOB (or Pee-Klob as it's pronounced in official Washington, D.C.) is an advisory commission that has no actual power. What this means is that while it can offer advice to the president, that's all it can do. The president doesn't have to pay any attention to that advice. In some cases, such a commission can be used by the president as a reason to take action, but that's not what's happening here.

Yeah, because no FLOSS projects people can come to rely on are ever abandoned.

Open source absolutely has a lot of advantages over proprietary software, but let's not pretend that it's not subject to most of the same software engineering concerns. A five-year-old source dump isn't a whole lot of use when it relies on a long-deprecated version of a library (also open source) that's not backward compatible, and so on.

Yes, with FLOSS, you have the option to become/commission a new maintainer for an entire toolchain, but if you're being practical rather than idealistic, you'd spend so much time and money doing so, you'd never have the opportunity to use it. And gods help you if a second of your beloved applications was abandoned.

Since the start had big problems, but the reasons are the worrysome ones, sometimes for misconfigured network devices, forgetting to update a SSL certificate, dealing with leap years, and even over DNS (this one was last month, and took down other MS services).

Unfortunately it became a legend for all of the wrong reasons. Billions of dollars have been sunk into it over the years and many lawsuits have been filed over it demise by vendors desperate to get out of it or force another vendor to stay in it.

http://www.eweek.com/servers/hp-to-seek-4-billion-in-damages-from-oracle-over-itanium/
http://news.cnet.com/Allies-pledge-10-billion-to-boost-Itanium/2100-1006_3-6031773.html
http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2013/09/hudson_intel_plant_closing_wil.html

Unfortunately sales never came close to the billions of dollars that have been sunk into it, and it has been that way for years:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/28/itanium_04_sales/
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/02/hpearnings/
http://www.zdnet.com/photos/charts-mining-itanium/21115

I'm sure someone has a comparison of how much money has been invested compared to how much money has been made in sales. I might be mistaken, but from what I've been reading from the beginning Itanium has never come close to breaking even for hardware or software sales. Certainly companies like HP and Oracle spent millions of dollars on their lawsuit trying to get out Itanium.

Itanium has always been nothing more than a desperate multi-billion dollar effort to break free from the chains of x86.

It's not the first time it happens on Windows but similar issues have also affected Linux and most likely OSX too.

You may have your business, and decide to use Libre Office. Great for you and your 2 employees.

I'm quite sure H&R Block has far, far more than 2 employees, and they get along just fine with OpenOffice.

Replying to myself.... found this recent link talking about the possible launch of the product in December. Bad news for MS I guess:
http://www.eweek.com/pc-hardware/slideshows/dell-moves-forward-with-project-ophelia-cloud-device.html/

Windows tablets also DO NOT run native windows programs.

True for Windows RT tablets. Not true for Windows Pro tablets.
http://www.eweek.com/mobile/slideshows/surface-pro-vs.-surface-rt-10-reasons-to-buy-the-windows-8-pro-tablet/