Who cares? Save yourself the money and install it yourself. The XPS models seem very Linux friendly. I'm happy with my 9550. Install was smooth, everything works out of the box.

Or, pick up a *nix friendly laptop from one of the *nix friendly vendors out there?

The GP likes to reinvent every wheel that exists before touching the code for the actual app. Some people call that real coding. It isn't very productive though.

Hehe you missed a fairly thick joke there :)

No one is denying that another vulnerability was found. Vulnerabilities will be found in any software.

Yeah, that one piece of malware is a real pain.

Yes, malware for OSX and iOS does exist. It is very possible. But the problem seems to be about the same size as malware for Linux at this stage. By that I mean there is very little of anecdotal evidence of widespread, active malware in the wild targeting OSX, iOS and Linux. The same can't be said for Windows.

So far I've never been hit on OSX, iOS or Linux. I've had plenty of Windows machines go down in flames though. I still have friends of family for which this is a fairly regular occurrence. Even myself, I had a fully patched Windows VM just for testing websites in IE. No antivirus installed. Visited some legitimate news and html/css sites... Boom. Malware installed.

I wish I had mod points to give go you.

First up... Thank you for Rake, Jim. It is a great tool and I can only imagine how many tasks a day are fired off with Rake. Not to mention that you were an active member of the programming world, and a great person by all reports. You will be missed by many.

Many of you may not have heard of Jim Weirich, but that isn't the point. Through the fog of your low IQ and ignorance, you may have gleaned that someone who contributed a widely used feature for a programming language that has an active and thriving community. They appreciate his contribution greatly, and from what I have heard in the past Jim was also once of the nice guys.

The total lack of respect in the comments at the loss of someones life saddens me. Trolls have no shame of course, so I'll do something useful today instead of feeling bad about Anonymous Cowards.

The quality of the comments at Slashdot has dropped so low that they actually detract from the story, way worse than just adding nothing. I've been coming to Slashdot less and less over time because of this. Slashdot used to be *gasp!* ... a place where actual nerds (You know? Those people that care about Tech?) came to have intelligent, humorous and often vigorous discussion and debate.

I can't believe I'm suggesting this as someone that values freedom of speech, but is it time for Anonymous Coward to go? Should slashdot require a user to login before commenting? Let's face it... Anonymous Coward adds as much to a meaningful discussion as someone who drives past a coffee shop and yells out, "Look at me!". I would finally be happy to see the last of Mr Coward. You can still say whatever you want, but put your id to it.

This isn't even a thorough article. Slashdot has jumped the shark so bad since the last time I was here.

240ms from Singapore, apparently in orbit.

Magical and exclusive? Do you mean like when Windows PCs started to ship with FireWire ports?

You're 100% correct that a reasonable amount of effort is needed to test a patch that is going to be deployed to users and enterprise systems.

But here we have a known exploit, and Oracle with their huge pool of resources cannot manage to release patch for it before Feb 2013? You can believe that they don't have the resources to test the patch in a shorter time frame or even create a better one? I seriously doubt that it takes Oracle months to regression test a single patch.

The bottom line is that Oracle are the owners of Java, and they can't patch it in a timely fashion.

Companies and people running Java applications are OK with this?

I was once a huge fan of Java and in all seriousness, this is one of the exact reasons that I don't touch Java anymore. I don't even look at MS stuff either for similar reasons.

You know how BSD advocacy folks like to tell you they "don't like politics"? It's kind of like the story in the Onion about that guy who keeps telling people he doesn't own a television and how much more fulfilling his life is, even when no one asked. BSD advocacy folks are _just as political_ as the GPL crowd. The reason to use GCC isn't performance, it's the only free compiler that supports a multitude of target architectures. And that's very very useful. Dropping utility over licensing kind of smacks of the thing GNU is accused of when BSD advocacy folks get all snooty about technical superiority.

I hope all cars sound like they used to on The Jetsons.

You can roll back to an earlier version without too much trouble. OK, harder than it should be, but it wasn't what I would call hard.

I didn't run into any "conflicts".

I wrote about it here http://scottbarr.blogspot.com/2010/07/rolling-back-iphone-ios4-to-iphone-ios3.html