[citation needed]? Demanded by an Anonymous Coward? Methinks not, but if you really, really need to bone up on the subject, there's an entire field dedicated to the subject. It's called "Economics." And should you really, really need access to the data, go look at all the studies by Econometricians. Those are the people that develop the statistical and mathematical models and how to test them against reality. I know. I 'R' one. I took my degree in econometrics, statistics, and computer science. Triple-Threat. [That's after being bored by working a dozen years as a professional engineer. Another kind of Applied Mathematician.]
How's that for a reply to your plaintive "Appeal to Authority." Dipshit. Next time, use your own name to cast aspersions.
Apple certainly created a mess for the rest of the digital world by providing huge incentives to learning all about jail-breaking, torrents, and media conversion despite serious roadblocks. I wouldn't know word one of what to do with iOS stuff, they find it out on their own. Nice to see CBS and Time-Warner following in the hallowed footsteps of Steve Jobs.k
Here, any download has to make it past two different suites on my workstation before it even gets across to the tablets. I have more tools, just only two that can scan Android.
Apparently neither can anyone else. When I started down the software engineering trail I was taught by some people (mostly men but some seriously intense women too) who happened to take programming extremely seriously. Zero defect was the gold standard. Hell, the only standard. If you couldn't do that, you really needed to be in another line of work. Lives were on the line and if you fucked up, someone, may a lot of someones, will die. Now we have EULA's that swear up and down that using any given product in such an environment, you are breaking the agreement. I've worked in nuclear, military, & medicine sooo.. Nice out there you deep pockets you. Sorry, failure wasn't an option in my line of work. Seriously. Aside from the fact that software engineering was something I did in my downtime, my life, the lives of people I knew, and untold other lives depended on zero defects. And if I fucked up, blaming it on Microsoft, Intel, IBM, or any other company wasn't an option.
Again, my life literally was in my own hands. As in "life in prison." No one has ever found a security hole or a defect yet in 20+ years and I didn't write small, single function applications. Blaming MS for not writing good code is really blaming a whole system that turns out barely usable code with the only safety being that if you fuck up, it's your fault using it whatever in some EULA excluded environment. And as for you, betcha you've got exclusions on the use of your code as well.
Physician - Heal thyself. Or better yet, he who is without sin, throw the first stone. This is my stone./rant - for now.
While running VMs is more flexible, is there too much overhead in the tradeoff? Especially with a million servers and all.
Which does need some consideration. Supposedly, in a perfect virtualized environment you'd see about 2-3% knocked off, in a headless configuration (no preferred guest OS VM installed on top of the host) and with perfect loading. However it's an imperfect world and no matter how you automagically mix and match loads, assuming it's allowed for those guests (think HIPAA, etc.), you're going to see more inefficiency. How much? No one seems to be releasing real numbers that I know of. It's quite literally a billion dollar question for the host providers and perhaps a trillion dollar question for the world.
With what we know now about Microsoft's cooperation with the NSA, exactly how unprecedented was the number of 0-day vulnerabilities and certificates used to subvert the OS?
Actually "Stupid distractions like television, facebook, and sport..." hits the nail on the head. Thinking is really hard work and hard work is something most people seem to want to avoid whether mental or physical. Yep, there are those out there that like exercising, again mental or physical, but we few are considered extremely odd.
Actually most of the people that I know and support, i.e. not into consoles/PC-Gaming-Rig-From-Hell (should that be a new acronym?), do just fine with the games on their tablets/phones/etc under Android and iOS. I have yet another self-designed rig from hell here except it has nothing to do with gaming. I do complex analysis/simulations so the "gaming video-cards" are a bit of a super-computer here.
Just a random thought but since MS has introduced the concept of a portable work environment (Windows-To-Go, but only for Enterprise Software Assurance customers), I can definitely foresee just such a critter but that plugs into home entertainment systems, tablet-like devices, and so forth. I just wonder why no one has brought such a beast to market. Of if they already have, why haven't I seen some blurbage around it?
I would sure love to have some of the drugs your smoking! Seriously, people always make the mistake of assuming that it is Windows that is keeping the Microsoft money pit going. Sadly, for the alternatives, it's Office itself that is the key to Microsoft dominance. Not a single alternative out there for MS Office has 100% compatibility with Office, all the moving parts of Office, not just the document formats (which nobody gets right to date). Since Office only runs on Windows, MS gets to sell a lot of copies of Windows. Workers, for now, have to keep a copy installed on their home computers so they can get work done outside office hours, if you have the luxury of having real office hours, which means that a lot more copies of Office get sold along with all those copies of Windows.
Yes, there are ways to get around the no Office on anything but Windows (or Mac for a niggling few percentage points) but for the typical, must be appliance-like (or automobile-like) in terms of usage, Linux hasn't been there yet. [Yes, I know Crossover Office and Wine but they ain't appliance-like.] However, there's a huge camel's nose under the Microsoft tent in the shape of tablets and other light-weight devices. The form-factors aren't great but they are easier to cart around when you have office-crap fall into your lap out of the office. Microsoft knows this, or they seem to occasionally act (ir)rationally around this. The solutions are "the cloud" to get you that MS Office-like experience (Office 365) and/or VDI.
Unfortunately for MS, they don't seem to have a clue on either the marketing or the pricing. Those two solutions pretty much only work for larger firms, not your smaller businesses let alone a mom-and-pop. [Have you ever seriously priced Cloud Backup? Including infrastructure costs? Heart Attack!] Equally unfortunate is that there are no cheaper alternatives in sight that actually cross the Office-clone on Android, iOS, whatever divide. VDI licensing costs are just simply absurd, let alone the licensing restrictions per device on top of all the other costs.
I'm not the only one thinking damn hard about this mess. What the fuck do we recommend to SOHO's, SMB's, hell even SME's around BYOD and making all the pieces work together without breaking the bank either in capital or hell, just recurring operating costs? Microsoft has essentially written off an everyone except the few firms that buy in huge bulk (via Software Assurance). Everyone else gets to talk to we VAR's and get to deliver the financial bad new. Thanks for nothing Microsoft.
I'm going to see about getting one of these combination devices. I can already do Android on any of my Windows boxen so that ain't new. And Windows 8 is the first desktop that I haven't immediately done a rip-&-replace desktop crap to something more reasonable, but I've been doing that for decades (Amigan here;-). What I don't appreciate is throwing shekels Microsoft's way when they are the source of the problem, not the source of a (hell any!) solution./rant My sincerest apologies.
Or just take a few high-end 'video cards', a ton of fast RAM, and a bunch of SSD's in a RAID 0 configuration. Then the issue becomes bus saturation. I don't have to wait for time on the super-computer;-).
Actually, the world needs Singapore vastly more than Singapore needs the world. I've been there a half-dozen times so far and it is a bit oppressive if misbehaving is part of your makeup. Amazingly polite, amazingly modern, and amazingly clean. I'm a libertarian and opposed by principle to such laws but the people of Singapore get to decide that question. You can't stop a few million people in such a small area from successfully revolting. They sure as Hell don't have to let anyone or anything in, or most importantly through, if that's they have a problem with it, whatever it is. We nearly had one of our people executed (caught smuggling heroin in the frame of his bicycle). Fortunately for him, we were able to pay a fine and hand him over to US justice. He thought he was smarter than they were. Wrong guess, minus five. I hope his time in federal prison was far more enjoyable that a bullet to the head. And I can understand the Singapore side on this.
In terms of political-economic power, Singapore absolutely controls the major trading route from the Indian Ocean to the Asian-Pacific rim. Yes, you can go around it but you'll be in even more pirate infested waters, dealing with the odd reef and oceanic sandbars, etc. You'll also forgo refueling in Singapore if needed. And protection. We don't break out the.50 cal. machine guns for entertainment (although it's a trip to actually practice with one) as soon as we hit the Celebes Sea. So, when push comes to shove, even the US Navy is going to think twice about playing in the littoral waters should Singapore express dissatisfaction with some kind of embargo. Frankly, targeting anything there, even with brilliant weapons, is going to be Hell.
So, what are you going to do to Singapore? Squawk, that's about your only option. And I don't think you get much support (actually lot's of opposition) from the major trading partners dependent (Japan, China) on the flow of trade there. Historically, the US likes freedom of the seas (Mission #1 of the US Navy) far more than other nice-to-haves. I can't see that changing. Sorry.
Sadly PCI-DSS is an example of security theater. VISA/Mastercard set up the standard to protect themselves, not the 'stakeholders': credit card users, processing firms, banks.... They've held that up as the Standard by which all things are measured and when their practices are questioned they blame everyone else but themselves.
There have been firms who have suffered breaches directly after audits demonstrating compliance that have been fined for non-compliance. Why? Because they were breached so they can't have been in compliance. Nice example of ex-post facto there. Then there have been firms undergoing and audit that have been breached and therefor fined, even when the breach was discovered after the audit was completed and compliance was assured. Pure and simple, if you are breached, you must not be in compliance.
If I were the only one dealing with security saying this, it might be personal. I'm not. It's just one of those meaningless standards that exist solely to provide butt-cover. As for government doing the job, I used to ensure compliance with all the various safety regulations (military, environmental, OSHA,... that list is almost endless) and I literally lost count. Counting is something I do real good. That and an eidetic memory. It was simply impossible to comply with them all, not from the standpoint of time and money; it was impossible as they often contradicted themselves. If you fed them all to an expert system it would have a seizure. Me? I used to laugh out loud, a lot, and everyone thought I was weird for laughing at the regs.
The only way to get things right is to vote with our wallets but that's damn hard to do when dealing with a duopoly. And impossible when you're dealing with government. Corps have much bigger wallets than ours. They ought to since any costs they incur come out of our wallet.
Not everyone has a cellphone, nor wants/needs one. OTOH, I tend to use passwords (passphrases where possible) from Hell except where id10ts creates policies that are ummm... not to put too fine a point on it, idiotic. Like my banks and credit agencies, the government (multiple agencies no less all with fucked up policies), &c. ad nauseum. You want good policies? Get people who actually know the realities of security, people, and especially security theater.
Meantime, I'll keep my passwords in encrypted passwordsafe files, available via multiple pathways, and even on multiple tablets which are also thoroughly, and I do mean thoroughly, encrypted. Synching everyone is about my only complaint left.
Hey if you want more funds for your kind of research and/or development, this is what gets some bucks shaken out of the money tree. Since most everybody out there is either unequipped to properly evaluate risks, Stossel did a nice piece on this, it usually works. Bugs (insect, bacteria, viral, or even surveillance), terrorism, ecological disasters, cyber this or that, whatever. Film at 11! Or worse, yet another FUD piece on/.
Unfortunately nothing gets done because all the experts jump in stating their opinions of what is "good enough." And "good enough" for constant use is what any sane engineer (albeit sane and engineer is a bit of an oxymoron) should/would attempt. If the solution isn't used by the users, what's the frigging point. This is the dividing line between "business requirements" and user-requirements which are rarely the same IMNSHO.
So all you academic/theoretical security types get together and come up with something just "good enough" that it would pass the (grand-)mother test. Please!
Actually, I tend to do the reverse, and I don't mean making Mac look like a PC. I mean making an Amiga, IBM-PC compatible, Mac, or anything else that doesn't run quickly away soon enough, look like a NeXT. Where did you *think* OS/X got its look, hmmm? The only thing I'm missing here is my damned tear-off menus. Give me a few. Otherwise, my Windows 8/Server 2012 (on my workstation) is like a big-ass dock with all kinds of goodness hiding around the hot-spots (also lifted wholesale from the NeXT).
Trivia question. Do you happen to know who ran NeXT?
.
Set up and tear down takes some time and consumes (somewhat) valuable resources. This observation about electronic devices is as old as electronics, not just computers even unto the original (re-)wired computers. From that viewpoint, even the roomful of ladies using calculators in parallel had a significant waste, at that time, involved. Now it's setup and tear-down of virtual machines on massively parallel hardware. My, how things have changed. NOT!
The first thing I do after getting a distro running here is take apart the kernel, modify it to strip everything non-relevant to that machine's purpose(s), recompile, link, substitute, and go. Someone else pointed out the sheer (bloated) size of the kernel that attempts far too much, IMNSHO. VM's receive exactly the same treatment whenever a new purpose is identified and they go into my golden master collection. Turning off services, reducing the amount of code, removing as much of the driver base, all this to create not only a reduced memory footprint, but also a reduced demand on the server by all tiers, and a much reduced attack surface. And BTW, I do exactly the same to any version of Windows that I'm playing with at that time. 'Sides, it's always fun to torture the little beasties in my chamber of horrors here.
These things come in waves. Generalized yields to a flood of purpose built [Sofware | Hardware], which yields to a new, sweeping generalized. Lather, wash, rinse, repeat, ad nauseum. So unless you've already plopped down in front of the 'puter with this page up, move along. Nothing new here.
No idea why anyone (any reasonable moderator) would mod this down for a BestBuy link, but I was over on NewEgg and found some nice tablets, dual-core A9, at least as much memory as an iPad, 5 point touch, etc., and at or less than the $100 price-point I'm looking for here. Definitely nice enough for a roommate who would have to ten dollar it to death when I get it for him if I don't make it an outright gift.
Prices are coming down nicely, so this is a good question to ask.
I consider it a pretty great question as well as one of the recurring options people ask me about is "what if a buy [whatever < $100 tablet]?" What can I do with it rather than spend the big bucks?
I'm really interested in the answers here and I'll be checking in later to get them all. Not for myself, my Great Googley, CM'ed, rooted Nexus 7 suits me fine, thank ye.
Slashdot Mirror
[citation needed]? Demanded by an Anonymous Coward? Methinks not, but if you really, really need to bone up on the subject, there's an entire field dedicated to the subject. It's called "Economics." And should you really, really need access to the data, go look at all the studies by Econometricians. Those are the people that develop the statistical and mathematical models and how to test them against reality. I know. I 'R' one. I took my degree in econometrics, statistics, and computer science. Triple-Threat. [That's after being bored by working a dozen years as a professional engineer. Another kind of Applied Mathematician.]
How's that for a reply to your plaintive "Appeal to Authority." Dipshit. Next time, use your own name to cast aspersions.
Apple certainly created a mess for the rest of the digital world by providing huge incentives to learning all about jail-breaking, torrents, and media conversion despite serious roadblocks. I wouldn't know word one of what to do with iOS stuff, they find it out on their own. Nice to see CBS and Time-Warner following in the hallowed footsteps of Steve Jobs.k
Actually, I use separate browsers entirely. Kinda hard to detect something that's happened in an entirely different program. [Usually]
Here, any download has to make it past two different suites on my workstation before it even gets across to the tablets. I have more tools, just only two that can scan Android.
Apparently neither can anyone else. When I started down the software engineering trail I was taught by some people (mostly men but some seriously intense women too) who happened to take programming extremely seriously. Zero defect was the gold standard. Hell, the only standard. If you couldn't do that, you really needed to be in another line of work. Lives were on the line and if you fucked up, someone, may a lot of someones, will die. Now we have EULA's that swear up and down that using any given product in such an environment, you are breaking the agreement. I've worked in nuclear, military, & medicine sooo.. Nice out there you deep pockets you. Sorry, failure wasn't an option in my line of work. Seriously. Aside from the fact that software engineering was something I did in my downtime, my life, the lives of people I knew, and untold other lives depended on zero defects. And if I fucked up, blaming it on Microsoft, Intel, IBM, or any other company wasn't an option.
/rant - for now.
Again, my life literally was in my own hands. As in "life in prison." No one has ever found a security hole or a defect yet in 20+ years and I didn't write small, single function applications. Blaming MS for not writing good code is really blaming a whole system that turns out barely usable code with the only safety being that if you fuck up, it's your fault using it whatever in some EULA excluded environment. And as for you, betcha you've got exclusions on the use of your code as well.
Physician - Heal thyself. Or better yet, he who is without sin, throw the first stone. This is my stone.
While running VMs is more flexible, is there too much overhead in the tradeoff? Especially with a million servers and all.
Which does need some consideration. Supposedly, in a perfect virtualized environment you'd see about 2-3% knocked off, in a headless configuration (no preferred guest OS VM installed on top of the host) and with perfect loading. However it's an imperfect world and no matter how you automagically mix and match loads, assuming it's allowed for those guests (think HIPAA, etc.), you're going to see more inefficiency. How much? No one seems to be releasing real numbers that I know of. It's quite literally a billion dollar question for the host providers and perhaps a trillion dollar question for the world.
With what we know now about Microsoft's cooperation with the NSA, exactly how unprecedented was the number of 0-day vulnerabilities and certificates used to subvert the OS?
Actually "Stupid distractions like television, facebook, and sport..." hits the nail on the head. Thinking is really hard work and hard work is something most people seem to want to avoid whether mental or physical. Yep, there are those out there that like exercising, again mental or physical, but we few are considered extremely odd.
Actually most of the people that I know and support, i.e. not into consoles/PC-Gaming-Rig-From-Hell (should that be a new acronym?), do just fine with the games on their tablets/phones/etc under Android and iOS. I have yet another self-designed rig from hell here except it has nothing to do with gaming. I do complex analysis/simulations so the "gaming video-cards" are a bit of a super-computer here.
Just a random thought but since MS has introduced the concept of a portable work environment (Windows-To-Go, but only for Enterprise Software Assurance customers), I can definitely foresee just such a critter but that plugs into home entertainment systems, tablet-like devices, and so forth. I just wonder why no one has brought such a beast to market. Of if they already have, why haven't I seen some blurbage around it?
I would sure love to have some of the drugs your smoking! Seriously, people always make the mistake of assuming that it is Windows that is keeping the Microsoft money pit going. Sadly, for the alternatives, it's Office itself that is the key to Microsoft dominance. Not a single alternative out there for MS Office has 100% compatibility with Office, all the moving parts of Office, not just the document formats (which nobody gets right to date). Since Office only runs on Windows, MS gets to sell a lot of copies of Windows. Workers, for now, have to keep a copy installed on their home computers so they can get work done outside office hours, if you have the luxury of having real office hours, which means that a lot more copies of Office get sold along with all those copies of Windows.
;-). What I don't appreciate is throwing shekels Microsoft's way when they are the source of the problem, not the source of a (hell any!) solution. /rant My sincerest apologies.
Yes, there are ways to get around the no Office on anything but Windows (or Mac for a niggling few percentage points) but for the typical, must be appliance-like (or automobile-like) in terms of usage, Linux hasn't been there yet. [Yes, I know Crossover Office and Wine but they ain't appliance-like.] However, there's a huge camel's nose under the Microsoft tent in the shape of tablets and other light-weight devices. The form-factors aren't great but they are easier to cart around when you have office-crap fall into your lap out of the office. Microsoft knows this, or they seem to occasionally act (ir)rationally around this. The solutions are "the cloud" to get you that MS Office-like experience (Office 365) and/or VDI.
Unfortunately for MS, they don't seem to have a clue on either the marketing or the pricing. Those two solutions pretty much only work for larger firms, not your smaller businesses let alone a mom-and-pop. [Have you ever seriously priced Cloud Backup? Including infrastructure costs? Heart Attack!] Equally unfortunate is that there are no cheaper alternatives in sight that actually cross the Office-clone on Android, iOS, whatever divide. VDI licensing costs are just simply absurd, let alone the licensing restrictions per device on top of all the other costs.
I'm not the only one thinking damn hard about this mess. What the fuck do we recommend to SOHO's, SMB's, hell even SME's around BYOD and making all the pieces work together without breaking the bank either in capital or hell, just recurring operating costs? Microsoft has essentially written off an everyone except the few firms that buy in huge bulk (via Software Assurance). Everyone else gets to talk to we VAR's and get to deliver the financial bad new. Thanks for nothing Microsoft.
I'm going to see about getting one of these combination devices. I can already do Android on any of my Windows boxen so that ain't new. And Windows 8 is the first desktop that I haven't immediately done a rip-&-replace desktop crap to something more reasonable, but I've been doing that for decades (Amigan here
Or just take a few high-end 'video cards', a ton of fast RAM, and a bunch of SSD's in a RAID 0 configuration. Then the issue becomes bus saturation. I don't have to wait for time on the super-computer ;-).
Thank ye for that pointer. Far more revealing were the comments to the article.
Actually, the world needs Singapore vastly more than Singapore needs the world. I've been there a half-dozen times so far and it is a bit oppressive if misbehaving is part of your makeup. Amazingly polite, amazingly modern, and amazingly clean. I'm a libertarian and opposed by principle to such laws but the people of Singapore get to decide that question. You can't stop a few million people in such a small area from successfully revolting. They sure as Hell don't have to let anyone or anything in, or most importantly through, if that's they have a problem with it, whatever it is. We nearly had one of our people executed (caught smuggling heroin in the frame of his bicycle). Fortunately for him, we were able to pay a fine and hand him over to US justice. He thought he was smarter than they were. Wrong guess, minus five. I hope his time in federal prison was far more enjoyable that a bullet to the head. And I can understand the Singapore side on this.
.50 cal. machine guns for entertainment (although it's a trip to actually practice with one) as soon as we hit the Celebes Sea. So, when push comes to shove, even the US Navy is going to think twice about playing in the littoral waters should Singapore express dissatisfaction with some kind of embargo. Frankly, targeting anything there, even with brilliant weapons, is going to be Hell.
In terms of political-economic power, Singapore absolutely controls the major trading route from the Indian Ocean to the Asian-Pacific rim. Yes, you can go around it but you'll be in even more pirate infested waters, dealing with the odd reef and oceanic sandbars, etc. You'll also forgo refueling in Singapore if needed. And protection. We don't break out the
So, what are you going to do to Singapore? Squawk, that's about your only option. And I don't think you get much support (actually lot's of opposition) from the major trading partners dependent (Japan, China) on the flow of trade there. Historically, the US likes freedom of the seas (Mission #1 of the US Navy) far more than other nice-to-haves. I can't see that changing. Sorry.
Direct hit!!! As a policy I never give AC's +mods. In your case, I'd give it all five positives!
There have been firms who have suffered breaches directly after audits demonstrating compliance that have been fined for non-compliance. Why? Because they were breached so they can't have been in compliance. Nice example of ex-post facto there. Then there have been firms undergoing and audit that have been breached and therefor fined, even when the breach was discovered after the audit was completed and compliance was assured. Pure and simple, if you are breached, you must not be in compliance.
If I were the only one dealing with security saying this, it might be personal. I'm not. It's just one of those meaningless standards that exist solely to provide butt-cover. As for government doing the job, I used to ensure compliance with all the various safety regulations (military, environmental, OSHA,... that list is almost endless) and I literally lost count. Counting is something I do real good. That and an eidetic memory. It was simply impossible to comply with them all, not from the standpoint of time and money; it was impossible as they often contradicted themselves. If you fed them all to an expert system it would have a seizure. Me? I used to laugh out loud, a lot, and everyone thought I was weird for laughing at the regs.
The only way to get things right is to vote with our wallets but that's damn hard to do when dealing with a duopoly. And impossible when you're dealing with government. Corps have much bigger wallets than ours. They ought to since any costs they incur come out of our wallet.
Meantime, I'll keep my passwords in encrypted passwordsafe files, available via multiple pathways, and even on multiple tablets which are also thoroughly, and I do mean thoroughly, encrypted. Synching everyone is about my only complaint left.
And yes, I define paranoia.
Hey if you want more funds for your kind of research and/or development, this is what gets some bucks shaken out of the money tree. Since most everybody out there is either unequipped to properly evaluate risks, Stossel did a nice piece on this, it usually works. Bugs (insect, bacteria, viral, or even surveillance), terrorism, ecological disasters, cyber this or that, whatever. Film at 11! Or worse, yet another FUD piece on /.
Unfortunately nothing gets done because all the experts jump in stating their opinions of what is "good enough." And "good enough" for constant use is what any sane engineer (albeit sane and engineer is a bit of an oxymoron) should/would attempt. If the solution isn't used by the users, what's the frigging point. This is the dividing line between "business requirements" and user-requirements which are rarely the same IMNSHO. So all you academic/theoretical security types get together and come up with something just "good enough" that it would pass the (grand-)mother test. Please!
Actually, I tend to do the reverse, and I don't mean making Mac look like a PC. I mean making an Amiga, IBM-PC compatible, Mac, or anything else that doesn't run quickly away soon enough, look like a NeXT. Where did you *think* OS/X got its look, hmmm? The only thing I'm missing here is my damned tear-off menus. Give me a few. Otherwise, my Windows 8/Server 2012 (on my workstation) is like a big-ass dock with all kinds of goodness hiding around the hot-spots (also lifted wholesale from the NeXT).
Trivia question. Do you happen to know who ran NeXT? .
Set up and tear down takes some time and consumes (somewhat) valuable resources. This observation about electronic devices is as old as electronics, not just computers even unto the original (re-)wired computers. From that viewpoint, even the roomful of ladies using calculators in parallel had a significant waste, at that time, involved. Now it's setup and tear-down of virtual machines on massively parallel hardware. My, how things have changed. NOT!
The first thing I do after getting a distro running here is take apart the kernel, modify it to strip everything non-relevant to that machine's purpose(s), recompile, link, substitute, and go. Someone else pointed out the sheer (bloated) size of the kernel that attempts far too much, IMNSHO. VM's receive exactly the same treatment whenever a new purpose is identified and they go into my golden master collection. Turning off services, reducing the amount of code, removing as much of the driver base, all this to create not only a reduced memory footprint, but also a reduced demand on the server by all tiers, and a much reduced attack surface. And BTW, I do exactly the same to any version of Windows that I'm playing with at that time. 'Sides, it's always fun to torture the little beasties in my chamber of horrors here.
These things come in waves. Generalized yields to a flood of purpose built [Sofware | Hardware], which yields to a new, sweeping generalized. Lather, wash, rinse, repeat, ad nauseum. So unless you've already plopped down in front of the 'puter with this page up, move along. Nothing new here.
Sadly, more than a few "security" tools here require Java or .NET.
That's a given, but thank ye kindly for the links as the screen protectors would be very high on my list of modifications.
No idea why anyone (any reasonable moderator) would mod this down for a BestBuy link, but I was over on NewEgg and found some nice tablets, dual-core A9, at least as much memory as an iPad, 5 point touch, etc., and at or less than the $100 price-point I'm looking for here. Definitely nice enough for a roommate who would have to ten dollar it to death when I get it for him if I don't make it an outright gift.
Prices are coming down nicely, so this is a good question to ask.
Toddler proof is damned good to know, even if I'll never use that info. Thank you.
I consider it a pretty great question as well as one of the recurring options people ask me about is "what if a buy [whatever < $100 tablet]?" What can I do with it rather than spend the big bucks?
I'm really interested in the answers here and I'll be checking in later to get them all. Not for myself, my Great Googley, CM'ed, rooted Nexus 7 suits me fine, thank ye.