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Hmmmm ... I just read a blog post (Ars??) that upto 1% of Macs could be infected.

What percentage of Window machines did Conficker infect? 30% 50%? I seem to remember it was a huge percentage.


Estimates vary... here's one:

"It's estimated that at its peak Conficker infected more than 11 million PCs globally."

-- http://www.sophos.com/en-us/security-news-trends/reports/sec...

Numbers in the range 15-25 million were also tossed around. It's hard to estimate.

Steve Ballmer expected the Windows installed base to cross the 1 billion mark in mid-2008: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-expect-windows...

Conficker peaked around January 2009 I believe. At 10 million that would be 1% of 1 billion.


This, a thousand times this.


+5


That touches on my main point. I think relatively speaking it has outlived its usefulness, but twice a year its very disruptive to my family's daily schedule for a few days. My kids are too young to understand it and just know that their day is off somehow.


FWIW: I use XCode for all Objective-C development, TextMate for almost everything else, and BBEdit to open large files (IMO the single biggest area of weakness for TextMate). I've tried other editors, but 3 covers everything I need.


I tried to use Texmate like that for a while but ultimately, not having a sensible undo and the kind of sucky non-regex incremental search blew it for me.


cash for clunkers got a statistically signification number of poor milage cars off the road, that also helped with our nations oil consumption.


But caused a significantly greater demand for energy to make new cars.

If it was worth it to trade your guzzler for a new car people would do it on their own without incentives. But a new car uses more energy than it saves for many many years. It's only worth it when the old car dies.


I have a hard time believing this. Let's take an environmentally attractive car, like the TDi Jetta. How many barrel-of-oil equivalents would you estimate it takes to produce a car like this, in mass quantity?


About 200 to 300 barrel of oil. Or about 20 - depending on who you ask.

Basically how far down and across the manufacturing chain do you count the energy. Most places use the second number since it's direct energy for that car. I prefer the first since it also includes things like overhead for the sales team, the engineering, building the manufacturing plant and everything else it takes to actually make a car.


Whoa. For reference, 300 barrels of at today's prices is over $24k.


Well, ok, but you need to consider that Apple is actually winning most of the cases where it has accused Samsung of copying it. It has gotten injunctions. This is clearly a case of a company (Samsung) not thinking though the consequences of its actions. Although lots of companies copy stuff all the time, Samsung has done a really thorough job of copying the iPad this time around.


Please note that there are two other credit rating agencies, Moody’s and Fitch, and both of them have stated that they have no current plans to downgrade US debt from AAA, although one of them did place a negative outlook on the US. So, generally as long as one of the three agencies has a AAA rating the debt is usually fine for most investment / trust purposes.


But now S&P has provided the others 'cover' for downgrading.

Since part of the reasoning of S&P was that US politicians were willing to play chicken with events of default, I don't see that this is an easy hole for the US to dig out of. The fact that politicians in the US were openly discussing 'how bad would a default really be' sums up why the AAA rating was no longer deserved.

IMHO, 80% likely that the other agencies will follow within a couple of weeks.


Yes, but this talk was uploaded to youtube 8 months ago.


Actually, what Tim Cook said at the Apple's Financial Conference last quarter was that it runs "a little ahead of break even". Therefore, it is reasonable to say it runs at break even.

Even if you are cynical and assume a certain amount of money is moved from one department to another, he can't say something on the record like that, if it isn't basically the truth (these numbers are audited and are subject to Sarbanes–Oxley. So, even assuming a small amount of shifting money around between departments and his fudge factor "a little", I think you could at most say single digits, for example: 5% if you want (or whatever small % you choose), it is still close enough for normal conversation to say its break even.


these numbers are audited and are subject to Sarbanes–Oxley

AFAIK only if they're large enough to make a dent in overall AAPL financial picture.


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