You know what's ironic - I went to read that article and the first thing I looked for was the "Print" view so that I could read it without all the crap around it. So print isn't dead!

To beat a bunch of UNIX engineers? I guess he got in at about 10.30am

The operating system needs to be able to control caching behaviour of areas of memory.

Consider if you map the registers of a device into some memory range, you don't want writes there to be cached, e.g. you write to the memory mapped to the device register that syncs your disk or sends a network packet or something and the underlying device doesn't actually see it until the CPU gets around to flushing the cache some random time later.

Userspace programmers should not (and can not) modify this state. The exploit requires root, and from there it's just handy that Linux lets you access these settings via /proc, rather than having to go to the trouble of writing and loading your own kernel module, etc.

The article says

"Presumably this will include sources such as YouTube, Hulu, Comedy Central, MSNBC, etc."

I'm pretty sure this would be a licensing issue, not at technical issue about streaming formats.

It's one thing to have to sit at your computer, or faff about with a media PC to watch content. But I imagine the networks would be very scared of a simple, cheap, no subscription, plug-in box. I'd be (pleasantly) surprised if they let Roku get to that content.

Once Hulu comes to my Tivo (I hate having a million boxes for different things), I'd reconsider why I even pay for even the cheapest tier cable.

If anyone wonders what the Comcast 250G caps are about, they have nothing to do with bandwidth contention and everything to do with them realising soon they will loose half (more?) of their business when cable TV dies.