Actually, Win8 helps on systems like yours a lot. For example, the multi-monitor support is vastly improved, with things like the taskbar spanning multiple monitors and showing the windows open on each monitor on that monitor's taskbar. I really don't get why people keep talking about the Metro experience on a desktop; it's neither required, nor important. There's plenty of non-Metro features, some of which are long-overdue improvements to the desktop. Almost nobody ever seems to talk about that, though...
You may be unaware of this, but Powershell supports remote operation, and can be used to completley administer a machine (recent versions of Windows Server ship without the graphics subsystem, relying on Powershell for full administration). People do what you derisively suggest that somebody "try" all the time.
Parent has it right, but there's even more to it than that. For one thing, it's bloody obvious that WOA / Windows RT has a full Win32 API; what the hell do you (the GP) think that Explorer and IE10 and cmd.exe and Task Manager and Office RT (or whatever it's called) and all those other hundreds of Win32 binary programs that ship on it are running against? In fact, I'm quite sure there's nothing that actually stops Windows Store apps from using it, except A) they run with extremely restricted permissions, so many of the APIs won't do any good B) much like the way that Apple rejects apps that call restricted APIs on iOS, the Windows Store app approval process will check the APIs that an app uses.
Also, aside from the UI, Office these days is pretty much identical between the Windows and OS X versions. That implies that not only is it free of "decades-old windows specific bloat" (as the GGGP claimed) but that much of it isn't even dependent on Win32 (the UI obviously is).
Well, gaming consoles run JavaScript (in their browsers, or at least the Xbox will at some point), and most of them (PS3 being the exception) don't run Java. Smartphones run Javascript, while even Android doesn't really run Java (there are a few niche platforms that do, though). Every single PC has at least one, and probably quite a few, javascript engines (Windows ships with at least two: the one in IE and Windows Script Host). Neither Windows nor OS X ships with Java anymore. Aside from Windows-NT-based ones (again, Android doesn't count), I don't know of a single tablet that can run Java. They all support Javascript, though. Many dumbphones can run (a subset of) Java, but these days many of them can run Javascript too. Nearly all of the larget Personal Media Players of recent years can run Javascript; I don't know of any that run Java.
In absolute numbers, I don't know what the balance is. However, in terms of the way that customers interact with their devices, Javascript is a lot more widely used than Java.
Believe it or not, IE actually has an excellent anti-tracking mechanism built in (existed since v8, better by far in v9 though). It's called InPrivate Browsing on IE8, and Tracking Protection on IE9+. By default, once you enable it, it tracks what resources have crossed a certain threshold for number of requests across third-party sites. In other words, every time you go to foo.com and it contains an image tag for http://bar.com/transparentpixel.gif, IE increments a counter for that image. Once the counter reaches a certain threshold (defaults to 10, but configurable) the browser stops respecting any requests for that URL. This also works for things like scripts and such. Essentially, it's heuristic-based anti-tracking.
There are obvious limitations to this approach. For one thing, you can still be tracked up until the threshold is reached. For another, since it's URL-based, you can fool the heuristic by making different sites request different URLs (although I believe it ignores the querystring and fragment, so you would have to assign different paths). You may want to allow ads on certain sites, but this system also makes a pretty effective ad blocker. Finally and most importantly, there are legit third-party resources used by many sites (think about the big JS libraries, or PayPal donation buttons, or certain SSO widgets). Fortunately, there are counters to all of this.
1. Set a lower threshold. Mine is set to three, and that works fine. 2. Although it requires manually (or programmatically) editing the blocklist, the filter supports wildcards just fine. 3. You can turn off the feature on a site-by-site basis (it's actually controllable right from the nav bar, just a couple clicks to toggle). 4. The filter UI also supports whitelisting specific URLs (or wildcards, though again that requires manual editing).
As of IE9, the filter also supports subscribing to "Tracking Protection lists" which contain blacklist and whitelist definitions. These supplement the heuristic (or personally customized) filter list, but don't override it; a locally-specified behavior always takes priority over one from a subscribed list. EasyList, the most popular choice for AdBlock Plus, offers both a pure tracking-protection list for IE9, and a full ad-blocking list.
I can't tell if you're a troll or just spouting off about things you don't understand in the least, but...
It's a hell of a lot easier to find a vulnerable machine behind NAT than it is to find one across a search space 40 bits wide (which is wider than the entire IPv4 search space, and less than a cube root of the search space of IPv6 as a protocol).
NAT is not a security measure. You can (and should) still have a firewall with IPv6; your firewall box just won't also have to perform NAT. That's fine, though; a NAT has a maximum search space of 24 bits (10.0.0.0/8) while IPv6 has enough addresses to assign one to every atom in the solar system, and no, that's no an exaggeration, guess, or line of BS.
I'm guessing you're either not in STEM, or are really, really bad at it... because you're completely failing the analytical thinking that's such a vital part of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Of course, that puts you in the same boat as the extremely vast majority of those 23 million.
With bachelors degrees in things like like "art history" or psychology (the latter being one where you basically can't get any job in the field unless you have a higher degree) or even journalism or political science(which are badly oversaturated), plus a huge load of student debt (because they went to expensive and fancy institutions for degrees they couldn't afford, instead of cheap local schools where a 4-year degree might cost under 10K), those people probably aren't too good at math or critical thinking either. What they *should* be doing (and should have done, but it's a bit late for that) is either getting a skill set that will be interesting to employers - even if that means going to some "crappy" trade school or taking classes online or something - while working toward a plan to improve their financial situation as soon as possible. Maybe that means taking night classes while working at a sandwich shop. Maybe that means taking classes for 9 hours a day, and accept the mounting debt because there's somewhere you'll be 4 months when your program is done (and I mean somewhere that you'll actually be working, not just somewhere that you might now be able to get a job).
Pay at Microsoft is tied to level, flat out. A SDE2 is going to be at least level 61, a Senior at least level 63. A fresh college hire will be level 59, and probably making $80k-$90k, although it's been some years since I interviewed there.
Due to the way pay is tied to level (with some range on it), a new level 61 might just possibly earn less than a great level 60, but they'll definitley earn more than a level 59 and less than a level 63. A SDE2 who has held that title for at least two years is probably level 62, and making substantially more than a 24-year-old level 60... even if the level 60 is an American kid from an affluent background, and the level 62 is a Chinese guy whose family would have trouble buying plane tickets to visit him.
Since this seems to get mentioned a lot of/. recently...
Google intentionally installed a tool that would submit browsing and search info to Microsoft explicitly for the purposes of improving Bing. They then deliberately poisoned their own search results and sent the poisoned results to Microsoft, Since that was the only data point MS had for the nonsense search query, yeah, it was the only response they could offer to that query.
An much closer equivalent to what you propose would be to have Google mess with their map data like you suggest, then use the feedback mechanism in iOS 6 Maps to sumehow automatically submit that poisoned data. Of course, since iOS 6 Maps doesn't have any way to say "I'm navigating to Hahayousuckistan now" and have it follow you along the nonexistant route, that's not really possible.
Apple may resort to scraping Google's maps for another data source (though part of their problem seems to be having too many sources, rather than too few) but I doubt it. Even Google never actually claimed Bing was doing that, they just gave a wink to the screaming moron fanboy legion who did it for them.
To be fair, until recently it was almost unheard-of for a mobile device to ever get updates more than two years after its release, and it's still relatively uncommon. The iPhone 3GS and the first-generation Windows phones are getting that, and it's possible there's some Android phones that will receive such updates officially (though I somewhat doubt it), but it's not really the common state of affairs.
With that said, it is a somewhat odd decision on Apple's part, especially since the iPad has both better specs and a display resolution that is still supported in another iOS product.
I mean why didn't Apple just use Google Maps data but build their own skin over it? Apple claimed yesterday they dropped Google Maps because Google didn't want to provide voice navigation, but Google is also simply a repository of a rich dataset of map data you can license sans UI.
First of all, that's exactly what Apple has *always* done. The old iOS maps app was written by Apple, and merely used data licensed from Google.
Second, the terms under which Apple was licensing the map data did not permit turn-by-turn voice navigation. That's a pretty common thing to leave out of such licensing deals, apparently; there's an entire industry built around that particular use of map data.
Third, you might then ask why Apple didn't renegotiate with Google when they wanted to add this feature. Well, here's the thing: they tried. The problem was that Google wanted a bit more presence in the app in return. In particular, they either wanted Google branding in the app, or they wanted it to integrate their FourSquare competitor, whatever the hell it's called.
It also prevents you from playing if somebody else is using your account, or if your Steam client can't authenticate (although if creds are stored locally, offline mode will work for up to a month). It prevents you from returning or reselling the game or even gifting the game (once you've installed it, it's tied to your account forever). Games require that the Steam client be running, which imposes a non-trivial RAM and CPU overhead (not huge, but enough to notice on my slightly aging gaming box).
DRM done right is the lack of DRM, or perhaps at worst a subscription service where you explicitly don't own anything and instead pay (a reasonable rate) for ongoing access.
Mostly true, but Steam is also a storefront wrapping a DRM system. Some Steam games can run apparently without Steam running and signed in (none of the ones I've tried, though), but many can't. To be fair, that's sometimes because they use Steam for in-game features (multiplayer matchmaking and such) but often it's just for the DRM. There are almost no free (as in cost, much less freedom) games on Steam, so it's not much like a typical Linux package management repo in that way either.
As DRM schemes go, Steam isn't that bad; it can run in an offline mode for up to a month or so without connecting to Valve's servers, and it quite handily avoids the whole "You have used up your limit of X activations" BS. It brings a host of other problems, though, like the inability for two people to play two completely different games at the same time if they were purchased on the same account. It also has the usual "you don't really own it" BS of DRMed media, such as the complete inability to resell any game.
Considering that the atmospheric pressure on Mars is a lot closer to 100 milibars (1/10 of an "atmosphere") than to that of 10 [Earth] atmospheres, I think the GP's point stands. True, under certain conditions CO2 has a liquid state, but the liquid nitrogen is a far more likely explanation.
Did you miss the part about "x86" or are you referring to the not-really-out-yet x86 smartphones? If you only need to run software that's available for Linux on ARM, then yes, that would work. But if you need something that's only available for x86, even Wine won't save you.
So, it includes the main thing that a TPM is used for (key storage)? Or is it only ephemeral and loses data during a power-cycle?
Hardware-accelerated crypto and hardware RNG are both very useful features that have only recently become common on commidity CPUs. I'm somewhat impressed that they bothered to put it in a tablet-oriented chip, but I can see the logic (no pun intended).
Substantially lower memory usage (especially due to things like page combining a.k.a. deduplication). Client Hyper-V (a huge improvement over any previous consumer-grade virtualization on Windows). New task manager. Very fast startup (my 1.2GHz C2D tablet boots it as fast as my 2.8GHz C2D gaming box boots Win7). Greatly improved multi-monitor support (taskbar spanning, taskbar icons shown on their respective monitor, wallpaper spanning, etc.). Antivirus out of the box (optional of course, but there by default). Settings and bookmarks follow you between PCs (if you use Windows Live login). Better power management (intended for tablets, but useful on laptops too). Unified location for app updates (I don't care for Metro-style apps that much, but the Marketplace/Store/whatever is something Windows has kind of needed for a while).
Eh, give me Perforce over Subversion (I've used both; the latter is simple but lacks some things) much less anything older like CVS or RCS. Git and Mercurial are probably better still (although the only place I've used Git, it was wastefully overkill and I'd have preferred something much simpler).
If the servers that you have handy are Windows, but you want to use *nix, there are a few options available.
First of all, there's virtualization. It's free (there are many free virtual machine programs available for a Windows host, and they should all support Linux guests). It does require some of the server's hardware (RAM and storage) though, and *somebody* will need to administrate it (which it sounds like your current IT doesn't really want to deal with).
Second, there's the option of simply hosting your own Linux box, either internrally or externally. A 10-year-old piece of junk PC that has a working CPU (of no particular speed), network card (10 Mbps would do, 100 would be overkill), RAM (128MB would suffice), and storage (20 GB would be enough for years) should cost almost nothing; odds are you could find one for free (I have a couple laptops which exceed those specs that get no real use anymore but still work). Put a copy of Damn Small Linux (or your favorite other ultra-lightweight distro) on there, hook it up to the network, and put your git/hg/svn/whatever repo on there.
Third, there's the option of Cygwin on one of your Windows boxes. It works well enough, is reasonably easy to install, costs nothing, and will allow you to host a version control repository of your choice easily. So long as the service starts automatically and the requite firewall port is open, there should be basically no additional IT overhead; it's not as though VC software for two developers is going to have an even trivial effect on a modern machine's performance.
Fourth, there's the option of Interix, the official POSIX subsystem for Windows. This requires that your servers be either some edition of Windows Server (probable), XP Pro, Vista or Win7 either Enterprise or Ultimate, or Win8 Enterprise. Enable the "Subsystem for UNIX Applications" in the Windows Features control panel, install the Interix utilities (and SDK, if you desire) from Microsoft, install the package manager for http://suacommunity.com/ and use the pre-compiled cvs, svn, or git binaries (you could probably get Mercurial too; I've never tried). Again, you'd need to make sure that the server daemon was running (it should automatically run at startup) and accessible through the firewall, but after that you could pretty much just pretend it was some odd relative of BSD (which is where msot of the included tools are sourced from). As with Cygwin, it would have minimal if any effect on maintenance (Microsoft occasionally pushes SUA/Interx updates over Windows Update, just like any other update), but it gets better performance and more accurately portrays a POSIX system than Cygwin can.
As awesome as SETI is, and as much as I like SETI@Home (started using it during the 90s, I forget exactly when), I think Folding@Home has a better per-CPU-cycle impact on the human race. Protein folding is a big deal for medical research, and it's very hard to automate efficiently. F@H is a somewhat brute-force approach, but it gets results.
Oh, and for the record, this is rural Washington, not Seattle. Most of the state outside of King County (which contains the majority of the state population) votes Republican. Admittedly, I don't know what way this particular town (with its 4-digit population) votes.
There was a patch for three of the (~20) vulnerabilities that were reported. When Oracle neglected to patch the rest in a timely manner, another 3 of the vulns were chained together to make a full applet-sandbox-bypass exploit. That was in the wild for several days before Oracle finally released an out-of-band patch to fix it... and even then, they haven't yet patched all the other reported issues.
Oracle knew about the vulns, and may even have had an internal patch, bu they did not publish it before a working (on the current released patch level) exploit was published.
One of the reasons why sensitive data should *never* be sent over HTTP using using GET, even over encrypted connections. Although in theory GET is no less secure than POST, in practice URLs (and therefore GET parameters) are commonly logged, while HTTP request bodies (and therefore POST parameters) almost never are.
It's not even just distributed computing. Some commodity hardware, like AMD GPUs, can compute current (fast) hashes at a ludicrous speed (billions per second, and no, that's not a typo, although memory throughput tends to limit the effective rate to hundreds of millions). Dedicated hardware, either custom-fabricated or using FPGAs, can improve on even that order of magnitude... and that's today's tech. As you say, hardware just keeps getting faster and faster, plus of course there's the distributed ("cloud") aspect.
For an example of what dedicated hardware can do, there's now a commercial service that can brute-force any DES (56 bits, 7*10^16 possible values; 10 bits is just over 3 orders of magnitude) keys in a day or so (under two days for worst-case). Of course, as the summary points out, 3DES is considered inadequate these days, and that's 7*10^16 as hard to crack as basic DES (112 bits, 5*10^33).
Now, even the shortest sha-2 digest is four times the length of a DES key, which means about 3*10^67 possible values. Even assuming a very fast SHA2 implementation (compute a hash in less than 1/70 the time it takes to do a block of DES), computing every possible SHA-224 value would take about 10*63 years. Suppose you got a *really* big cluster/cloud/botnet/whatever, like a billion machines. Then, with modern state-of-the-art hardware, it would take 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10^54) years (give or take a bit). Heat death of the universe indeed! But wait, what about Moore's Law? Well, after the first twenty years, you could knock three orders of magnitude off that. Still too long. After three hundred years, you can take 45 orders of magnitude off; at that point it'll only take a billion years using a billion machines! The solar system might even still exist in something resembling its current form by the time you finished, then!
So, if Moore's Law (as it relates to computing in general, not strictly as stated) continues for three times as long as it has so far, somewhere around the start of the 25th century CE "you" (or rather, your great-great-great-great-great... grandchildren) should be able to brute-force the shortest digest of SHA2 in a year or so with reasonably-priced hardware. That's well within "the length of the universe" (most likely) but still quite impractical.
People just do not comprehend exponential values; they're too big for our brains to really understand. Computers are really, really fast (relative to the numbers we commonly use), with prefixes meaning "billion" or even "trillion" thrown around these days. Great... but a trillion is 10^12. A trillion operations per second (1 TFLOPS) sounds fast today, but breaking modern crypto (say, AES) via brute-force requires so many operations that if every single atom on the Earth were a 1TF computer, you still wouldn't manage it once before the Earth was swallowed by the expanding sun. Crazy, huh?
BTW, apologies if I misplaced a few orders of magnitude here or there; it could happen. My point remains, though.
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Actually, Win8 helps on systems like yours a lot. For example, the multi-monitor support is vastly improved, with things like the taskbar spanning multiple monitors and showing the windows open on each monitor on that monitor's taskbar. I really don't get why people keep talking about the Metro experience on a desktop; it's neither required, nor important. There's plenty of non-Metro features, some of which are long-overdue improvements to the desktop. Almost nobody ever seems to talk about that, though...
You may be unaware of this, but Powershell supports remote operation, and can be used to completley administer a machine (recent versions of Windows Server ship without the graphics subsystem, relying on Powershell for full administration). People do what you derisively suggest that somebody "try" all the time.
Parent has it right, but there's even more to it than that. For one thing, it's bloody obvious that WOA / Windows RT has a full Win32 API; what the hell do you (the GP) think that Explorer and IE10 and cmd.exe and Task Manager and Office RT (or whatever it's called) and all those other hundreds of Win32 binary programs that ship on it are running against? In fact, I'm quite sure there's nothing that actually stops Windows Store apps from using it, except
A) they run with extremely restricted permissions, so many of the APIs won't do any good
B) much like the way that Apple rejects apps that call restricted APIs on iOS, the Windows Store app approval process will check the APIs that an app uses.
Also, aside from the UI, Office these days is pretty much identical between the Windows and OS X versions. That implies that not only is it free of "decades-old windows specific bloat" (as the GGGP claimed) but that much of it isn't even dependent on Win32 (the UI obviously is).
Well, gaming consoles run JavaScript (in their browsers, or at least the Xbox will at some point), and most of them (PS3 being the exception) don't run Java.
Smartphones run Javascript, while even Android doesn't really run Java (there are a few niche platforms that do, though).
Every single PC has at least one, and probably quite a few, javascript engines (Windows ships with at least two: the one in IE and Windows Script Host). Neither Windows nor OS X ships with Java anymore.
Aside from Windows-NT-based ones (again, Android doesn't count), I don't know of a single tablet that can run Java. They all support Javascript, though.
Many dumbphones can run (a subset of) Java, but these days many of them can run Javascript too.
Nearly all of the larget Personal Media Players of recent years can run Javascript; I don't know of any that run Java.
In absolute numbers, I don't know what the balance is. However, in terms of the way that customers interact with their devices, Javascript is a lot more widely used than Java.
Believe it or not, IE actually has an excellent anti-tracking mechanism built in (existed since v8, better by far in v9 though). It's called InPrivate Browsing on IE8, and Tracking Protection on IE9+. By default, once you enable it, it tracks what resources have crossed a certain threshold for number of requests across third-party sites. In other words, every time you go to foo.com and it contains an image tag for http://bar.com/transparentpixel.gif, IE increments a counter for that image. Once the counter reaches a certain threshold (defaults to 10, but configurable) the browser stops respecting any requests for that URL. This also works for things like scripts and such. Essentially, it's heuristic-based anti-tracking.
There are obvious limitations to this approach. For one thing, you can still be tracked up until the threshold is reached. For another, since it's URL-based, you can fool the heuristic by making different sites request different URLs (although I believe it ignores the querystring and fragment, so you would have to assign different paths). You may want to allow ads on certain sites, but this system also makes a pretty effective ad blocker. Finally and most importantly, there are legit third-party resources used by many sites (think about the big JS libraries, or PayPal donation buttons, or certain SSO widgets). Fortunately, there are counters to all of this.
1. Set a lower threshold. Mine is set to three, and that works fine.
2. Although it requires manually (or programmatically) editing the blocklist, the filter supports wildcards just fine.
3. You can turn off the feature on a site-by-site basis (it's actually controllable right from the nav bar, just a couple clicks to toggle).
4. The filter UI also supports whitelisting specific URLs (or wildcards, though again that requires manual editing).
As of IE9, the filter also supports subscribing to "Tracking Protection lists" which contain blacklist and whitelist definitions. These supplement the heuristic (or personally customized) filter list, but don't override it; a locally-specified behavior always takes priority over one from a subscribed list. EasyList, the most popular choice for AdBlock Plus, offers both a pure tracking-protection list for IE9, and a full ad-blocking list.
I can't tell if you're a troll or just spouting off about things you don't understand in the least, but...
It's a hell of a lot easier to find a vulnerable machine behind NAT than it is to find one across a search space 40 bits wide (which is wider than the entire IPv4 search space, and less than a cube root of the search space of IPv6 as a protocol).
NAT is not a security measure. You can (and should) still have a firewall with IPv6; your firewall box just won't also have to perform NAT. That's fine, though; a NAT has a maximum search space of 24 bits (10.0.0.0/8) while IPv6 has enough addresses to assign one to every atom in the solar system, and no, that's no an exaggeration, guess, or line of BS.
Well, MS headquarters are in Washington state, which doesn't have an income tax. There certainly are taxes on businesses, though.
I'm guessing you're either not in STEM, or are really, really bad at it... because you're completely failing the analytical thinking that's such a vital part of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Of course, that puts you in the same boat as the extremely vast majority of those 23 million.
With bachelors degrees in things like like "art history" or psychology (the latter being one where you basically can't get any job in the field unless you have a higher degree) or even journalism or political science(which are badly oversaturated), plus a huge load of student debt (because they went to expensive and fancy institutions for degrees they couldn't afford, instead of cheap local schools where a 4-year degree might cost under 10K), those people probably aren't too good at math or critical thinking either. What they *should* be doing (and should have done, but it's a bit late for that) is either getting a skill set that will be interesting to employers - even if that means going to some "crappy" trade school or taking classes online or something - while working toward a plan to improve their financial situation as soon as possible. Maybe that means taking night classes while working at a sandwich shop. Maybe that means taking classes for 9 hours a day, and accept the mounting debt because there's somewhere you'll be 4 months when your program is done (and I mean somewhere that you'll actually be working, not just somewhere that you might now be able to get a job).
Pay at Microsoft is tied to level, flat out. A SDE2 is going to be at least level 61, a Senior at least level 63. A fresh college hire will be level 59, and probably making $80k-$90k, although it's been some years since I interviewed there.
Due to the way pay is tied to level (with some range on it), a new level 61 might just possibly earn less than a great level 60, but they'll definitley earn more than a level 59 and less than a level 63. A SDE2 who has held that title for at least two years is probably level 62, and making substantially more than a 24-year-old level 60... even if the level 60 is an American kid from an affluent background, and the level 62 is a Chinese guy whose family would have trouble buying plane tickets to visit him.
Since this seems to get mentioned a lot of /. recently...
Google intentionally installed a tool that would submit browsing and search info to Microsoft explicitly for the purposes of improving Bing. They then deliberately poisoned their own search results and sent the poisoned results to Microsoft, Since that was the only data point MS had for the nonsense search query, yeah, it was the only response they could offer to that query.
An much closer equivalent to what you propose would be to have Google mess with their map data like you suggest, then use the feedback mechanism in iOS 6 Maps to sumehow automatically submit that poisoned data. Of course, since iOS 6 Maps doesn't have any way to say "I'm navigating to Hahayousuckistan now" and have it follow you along the nonexistant route, that's not really possible.
Apple may resort to scraping Google's maps for another data source (though part of their problem seems to be having too many sources, rather than too few) but I doubt it. Even Google never actually claimed Bing was doing that, they just gave a wink to the screaming moron fanboy legion who did it for them.
To be fair, until recently it was almost unheard-of for a mobile device to ever get updates more than two years after its release, and it's still relatively uncommon. The iPhone 3GS and the first-generation Windows phones are getting that, and it's possible there's some Android phones that will receive such updates officially (though I somewhat doubt it), but it's not really the common state of affairs.
With that said, it is a somewhat odd decision on Apple's part, especially since the iPad has both better specs and a display resolution that is still supported in another iOS product.
I mean why didn't Apple just use Google Maps data but build their own skin over it? Apple claimed yesterday they dropped Google Maps because Google didn't want to provide voice navigation, but Google is also simply a repository of a rich dataset of map data you can license sans UI.
First of all, that's exactly what Apple has *always* done. The old iOS maps app was written by Apple, and merely used data licensed from Google.
Second, the terms under which Apple was licensing the map data did not permit turn-by-turn voice navigation. That's a pretty common thing to leave out of such licensing deals, apparently; there's an entire industry built around that particular use of map data.
Third, you might then ask why Apple didn't renegotiate with Google when they wanted to add this feature. Well, here's the thing: they tried. The problem was that Google wanted a bit more presence in the app in return. In particular, they either wanted Google branding in the app, or they wanted it to integrate their FourSquare competitor, whatever the hell it's called.
Apple said no. I don't know what terms they offered Google instead, but apparently they were unwilling to meet Google's terms. Incidentally, this was all covered on Slashdot within the last 24 hours: http://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/09/27/1737202/why-apple-replaced-ios-maps
It also prevents you from playing if somebody else is using your account, or if your Steam client can't authenticate (although if creds are stored locally, offline mode will work for up to a month). It prevents you from returning or reselling the game or even gifting the game (once you've installed it, it's tied to your account forever). Games require that the Steam client be running, which imposes a non-trivial RAM and CPU overhead (not huge, but enough to notice on my slightly aging gaming box).
DRM done right is the lack of DRM, or perhaps at worst a subscription service where you explicitly don't own anything and instead pay (a reasonable rate) for ongoing access.
Mostly true, but Steam is also a storefront wrapping a DRM system. Some Steam games can run apparently without Steam running and signed in (none of the ones I've tried, though), but many can't. To be fair, that's sometimes because they use Steam for in-game features (multiplayer matchmaking and such) but often it's just for the DRM. There are almost no free (as in cost, much less freedom) games on Steam, so it's not much like a typical Linux package management repo in that way either.
As DRM schemes go, Steam isn't that bad; it can run in an offline mode for up to a month or so without connecting to Valve's servers, and it quite handily avoids the whole "You have used up your limit of X activations" BS. It brings a host of other problems, though, like the inability for two people to play two completely different games at the same time if they were purchased on the same account. It also has the usual "you don't really own it" BS of DRMed media, such as the complete inability to resell any game.
Considering that the atmospheric pressure on Mars is a lot closer to 100 milibars (1/10 of an "atmosphere") than to that of 10 [Earth] atmospheres, I think the GP's point stands. True, under certain conditions CO2 has a liquid state, but the liquid nitrogen is a far more likely explanation.
Did you miss the part about "x86" or are you referring to the not-really-out-yet x86 smartphones? If you only need to run software that's available for Linux on ARM, then yes, that would work. But if you need something that's only available for x86, even Wine won't save you.
So, it includes the main thing that a TPM is used for (key storage)? Or is it only ephemeral and loses data during a power-cycle?
Hardware-accelerated crypto and hardware RNG are both very useful features that have only recently become common on commidity CPUs. I'm somewhat impressed that they bothered to put it in a tablet-oriented chip, but I can see the logic (no pun intended).
Substantially lower memory usage (especially due to things like page combining a.k.a. deduplication).
Client Hyper-V (a huge improvement over any previous consumer-grade virtualization on Windows).
New task manager.
Very fast startup (my 1.2GHz C2D tablet boots it as fast as my 2.8GHz C2D gaming box boots Win7).
Greatly improved multi-monitor support (taskbar spanning, taskbar icons shown on their respective monitor, wallpaper spanning, etc.).
Antivirus out of the box (optional of course, but there by default).
Settings and bookmarks follow you between PCs (if you use Windows Live login).
Better power management (intended for tablets, but useful on laptops too).
Unified location for app updates (I don't care for Metro-style apps that much, but the Marketplace/Store/whatever is something Windows has kind of needed for a while).
Eh, give me Perforce over Subversion (I've used both; the latter is simple but lacks some things) much less anything older like CVS or RCS. Git and Mercurial are probably better still (although the only place I've used Git, it was wastefully overkill and I'd have preferred something much simpler).
If the servers that you have handy are Windows, but you want to use *nix, there are a few options available.
First of all, there's virtualization. It's free (there are many free virtual machine programs available for a Windows host, and they should all support Linux guests). It does require some of the server's hardware (RAM and storage) though, and *somebody* will need to administrate it (which it sounds like your current IT doesn't really want to deal with).
Second, there's the option of simply hosting your own Linux box, either internrally or externally. A 10-year-old piece of junk PC that has a working CPU (of no particular speed), network card (10 Mbps would do, 100 would be overkill), RAM (128MB would suffice), and storage (20 GB would be enough for years) should cost almost nothing; odds are you could find one for free (I have a couple laptops which exceed those specs that get no real use anymore but still work). Put a copy of Damn Small Linux (or your favorite other ultra-lightweight distro) on there, hook it up to the network, and put your git/hg/svn/whatever repo on there.
Third, there's the option of Cygwin on one of your Windows boxes. It works well enough, is reasonably easy to install, costs nothing, and will allow you to host a version control repository of your choice easily. So long as the service starts automatically and the requite firewall port is open, there should be basically no additional IT overhead; it's not as though VC software for two developers is going to have an even trivial effect on a modern machine's performance.
Fourth, there's the option of Interix, the official POSIX subsystem for Windows. This requires that your servers be either some edition of Windows Server (probable), XP Pro, Vista or Win7 either Enterprise or Ultimate, or Win8 Enterprise. Enable the "Subsystem for UNIX Applications" in the Windows Features control panel, install the Interix utilities (and SDK, if you desire) from Microsoft, install the package manager for http://suacommunity.com/ and use the pre-compiled cvs, svn, or git binaries (you could probably get Mercurial too; I've never tried). Again, you'd need to make sure that the server daemon was running (it should automatically run at startup) and accessible through the firewall, but after that you could pretty much just pretend it was some odd relative of BSD (which is where msot of the included tools are sourced from). As with Cygwin, it would have minimal if any effect on maintenance (Microsoft occasionally pushes SUA/Interx updates over Windows Update, just like any other update), but it gets better performance and more accurately portrays a POSIX system than Cygwin can.
Not sure if serious...
As awesome as SETI is, and as much as I like SETI@Home (started using it during the 90s, I forget exactly when), I think Folding@Home has a better per-CPU-cycle impact on the human race. Protein folding is a big deal for medical research, and it's very hard to automate efficiently. F@H is a somewhat brute-force approach, but it gets results.
Alaska, the parasitic state that consumes far more federal tax money per capita than any other state in the union? Sure, that makes sense! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge (and especially the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge#Road_to_Nowhere where Alaska went ahead and burned 25M to absolutely no purpose except avoiding returning it to the nation as a whole).
Oh, and for the record, this is rural Washington, not Seattle. Most of the state outside of King County (which contains the majority of the state population) votes Republican. Admittedly, I don't know what way this particular town (with its 4-digit population) votes.
Um, no. Not even slightly.
There was a patch for three of the (~20) vulnerabilities that were reported. When Oracle neglected to patch the rest in a timely manner, another 3 of the vulns were chained together to make a full applet-sandbox-bypass exploit. That was in the wild for several days before Oracle finally released an out-of-band patch to fix it... and even then, they haven't yet patched all the other reported issues.
Oracle knew about the vulns, and may even have had an internal patch, bu they did not publish it before a working (on the current released patch level) exploit was published.
One of the reasons why sensitive data should *never* be sent over HTTP using using GET, even over encrypted connections. Although in theory GET is no less secure than POST, in practice URLs (and therefore GET parameters) are commonly logged, while HTTP request bodies (and therefore POST parameters) almost never are.
It's not even just distributed computing. Some commodity hardware, like AMD GPUs, can compute current (fast) hashes at a ludicrous speed (billions per second, and no, that's not a typo, although memory throughput tends to limit the effective rate to hundreds of millions). Dedicated hardware, either custom-fabricated or using FPGAs, can improve on even that order of magnitude... and that's today's tech. As you say, hardware just keeps getting faster and faster, plus of course there's the distributed ("cloud") aspect.
For an example of what dedicated hardware can do, there's now a commercial service that can brute-force any DES (56 bits, 7*10^16 possible values; 10 bits is just over 3 orders of magnitude) keys in a day or so (under two days for worst-case). Of course, as the summary points out, 3DES is considered inadequate these days, and that's 7*10^16 as hard to crack as basic DES (112 bits, 5*10^33).
Now, even the shortest sha-2 digest is four times the length of a DES key, which means about 3*10^67 possible values. Even assuming a very fast SHA2 implementation (compute a hash in less than 1/70 the time it takes to do a block of DES), computing every possible SHA-224 value would take about 10*63 years. Suppose you got a *really* big cluster/cloud/botnet/whatever, like a billion machines. Then, with modern state-of-the-art hardware, it would take 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10^54) years (give or take a bit). Heat death of the universe indeed! But wait, what about Moore's Law? Well, after the first twenty years, you could knock three orders of magnitude off that. Still too long. After three hundred years, you can take 45 orders of magnitude off; at that point it'll only take a billion years using a billion machines! The solar system might even still exist in something resembling its current form by the time you finished, then!
So, if Moore's Law (as it relates to computing in general, not strictly as stated) continues for three times as long as it has so far, somewhere around the start of the 25th century CE "you" (or rather, your great-great-great-great-great... grandchildren) should be able to brute-force the shortest digest of SHA2 in a year or so with reasonably-priced hardware. That's well within "the length of the universe" (most likely) but still quite impractical.
People just do not comprehend exponential values; they're too big for our brains to really understand. Computers are really, really fast (relative to the numbers we commonly use), with prefixes meaning "billion" or even "trillion" thrown around these days. Great... but a trillion is 10^12. A trillion operations per second (1 TFLOPS) sounds fast today, but breaking modern crypto (say, AES) via brute-force requires so many operations that if every single atom on the Earth were a 1TF computer, you still wouldn't manage it once before the Earth was swallowed by the expanding sun. Crazy, huh?
BTW, apologies if I misplaced a few orders of magnitude here or there; it could happen. My point remains, though.