I like to break stuff. Why? It means I get to find things out about what I’ve broken and it means I get to repair what I have broken. And operating systems are no exception.

iPod Linux lock-out broken. Just a day after it was reported that Apple’s latest iPod had a checksum that prevented it from working with anything other than iTunes, the offending piece of code has been broken. Blog ipodminusitunes was among the first to report this.

So, I’ve been shopping for a new laptop for a few months. I’ve got an old Thinkpad T23 that is showing it’s age — both in terms of performance and functionality. It has developed a number of minor quirks over the years, as most well-loved laptops do. Numlock is flaky, the PCMCIA port is flaky, everything is just broken enough to be annoying — but not broken enough to fix.

Tony Mobily published an article in Free Software Magazine discussing software installation, specifically end-user software installation, on Linux, which he calls broken. I agree that the system is flawed, but it is not broken. The most important thing is that we not reinvent everything around the fragmented models that OS X and Windows use.
What about Windows and OS X?

There were several things I was really looking forward to in Vista that are simply missing in action or broken. These are features I'd really hope would improve my productivity and make life a little easier.

BROKEN LINKS in Linux file systems are not just annoying — they can also be a security risk. In a previous post, I discussed the potential dangers of unowned files and in this post I will talk about those annoying, resource consuming broken links usually considered simple file system “lint”.

The International Organization for Standardization's OpenDocument Format standard is broken and needs to be mended, according to an expert who claims to have carried out tests on the format.

The Vista experience is broken. It's long past time to fix it.

In TLWIR 53, I will present some ideas on how to fix the broken U.S. patent system.