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At least that's what the people over at ars say

implanted RFID have been known to cause a high incidence of cancer around the implantation area

Known? Implanting "subcutaneous foreign objects" might cause cancer, see the quote below. And the research done on mice indicates it typically happens in one percent or two.

"It's important to emphasize that those studies are not necessarily sufficient to view these implants as known hazards. The data suggest that the devices foster cancer by causing inflammation of the tissues that encapsulate them. There is a large amount of scientific literature linking cancer and inflammation (the National Cancer Institute has some information on the matter). RFID tags turn out not to be the only form of animal tagging that causes cancer through inflammation; standard metallic ear tags can do so as well. That paper also notes that there have been a number of case reports where human prosthetic implants have induced cancers in the surrounding tissues.", taken from Ars Technica

If the only factor in the case was the theft of the laptop, you would be correct. However, there is more involved in this case. IANAL, but it apppears that Best Buy broke a number of laws -- sometype of Fraud for repeatedly lying about the theft of the laptop, more fraud by crediting her credit card and sending her a gift card on the pretense that she had agreed to that as a settlement, plus violating Washington, DC's security breach notification laws by not telling her about the potential data loss. It seems to me to make Best Buy criminally negligent and liable for more that simple damages for the loss of the laptop.

It seems to me that she has very legitimate concerns. She admits that the $54 million dollar claim is a publicity stunt of sorts. It appears to be working. I think that this ars technica article does a better job of describing the case.

Was that what Best Buy did was illegal. From ars technica:

"Campbell's tax returns were on her laptop, and Best Buy apparently violated Washington, DC's security breach notification laws by not telling her about the potential data loss. And the potential for data theft as a result of missing equipment is no laughing matter: the state of Ohio, TSA, IRS, US Department of Transportation, and the Veterans Administration have all lost equipment (often laptops) that have forced them to alert millions of citizens to watch out for identity theft. Campbell says that she still hasn't heard from Best Buy on that particular issue, and has been forced to incur extra costs to monitor all of her accounts for suspicious activity."

On top of that, the victim also notes that she herself thinks 54 mil is too much, but thinks it is necessary to get the media attention to make Best Buy do the right thing.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080212-victim-54-million-best-buy-lawsuit-stupid-but-necessary.html

And in the provided screenshots, I can already spot ways that the "native" OS X theme doesn't cut it. For example, the screenshot which proudly shows off an Aqua-style select control and button next to a search box also shows those controls using the wrong font and with the text incorrectly placed. If they can't get those details right, they might as well not try to do a "native" theme at all.

Eh? That screenshot (and I presume you mean this one http://arstechnica.com/news.media/osxnative.png ) is not of the theme its of the native controls being used in forms. They appear when you use unstyled form controls in html. They are native, not emulated in any way, shape, or form. You do get some control of the font, which may explain why you think the font is wrong - same thing on Safari, Opera.

In other words, if these look odd, its because Apple's native controls are odd.

Ars Technica has more information on the three versions.

The reason I want FF3 is to get whole-page zoom.

http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2007/07/27/firefox-3-gets-full-page-zoom

I use a 110 dots per inch monitor. I hate, hate, hate all web pages that were laid out with WYSIWYG design tools, with fonts set to 7 pixels tall and columns also specified as a certain number of pixels wide.

I don't have eagle eyes and I don't like to sit close to my screen. So I have my personal CSS forcing fonts to a minimum size... which makes some pages ugly, and other pages unreadable (depends on how much the page designer hard-coded with pixel sizes). I'm also using the ImageZoom extension to scale up images... which means the scaled images cover up lots of text on many web pages, and fancy graphical navigation buttons often don't match up with their clickable regions.

And I have a 16:10 ratio monitor... which means that often I will read a web site and there will be a narrow strip of text in the center, and tons of wasted space to either side, again because some web designer hard-coded things with pixel counts.

I used to wish that web designers would make sites that can adapt to unusual screen sizes. Well, the WYSIWYG tools aren't going away, so now I just want to zoom my pages.

steveha

If you've been following the development of Firefox 3, you'd know that there are several major speed, performance and memory usage improvements (e.g this, this).

TFA is only talking about "bells and whistles" (most of which are really useful features and improvements) because it's about what's new in beta 3, not what's new in FF3 as a whole.

If you've been following the development of Firefox 3, you'd know that there are several major speed, performance and memory usage improvements (e.g this, this).

TFA is only talking about "bells and whistles" (most of which are really useful features and improvements) because it's about what's new in beta 3, not what's new in FF3 as a whole.

After the endless iPhone hype and the actual product turning out to be an overpriced and underfeatured commercial dud

Uhhh...I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but by exactly what standard is the iPhone a "dud"? Last I heard, it was beating every forecast sales target and had already captured 20 percent of the smartphone market in less than a year. In fact, if you haven't seen one at your local coffee shop, bar, or train station yet, you probably live in a cabin in the Ozarks.

Didn't I read something around Christmas that Wiis were flying off the shelves with a much lower attachment rate than the 360s or PS3s? If so, then big fscking deal.

No, you imagined that.

Here's what you probably actually read: Wii attach rate soared to 8:1 for December. That's ahead of the 360's 7.76 and PS3's 5.04 during the same period.

I don't completely agree with the observation. Yes, most people don't know about the 'runas' command, and I wouldn't have known either if I hadn't worked on the XP team. But I have been diligently using an unprivileged account on all my XP machines for regular work since 2001. If you right click on an executable, you can select 'Run As' and then choose which user you want to run the binary as. This doesn't work with .msi packages directly, so you need to start a command prompt and start the msi package from there. I still use these techniques without much problem.

But, as one of the replies to parent noted, many applications themselves are broken, and won't run as a non-admin user. One of the biggest offenders is Microsoft's own Windows Media Player. DRM schemes break down if you are not running as an admin user! Many graphics-intensive apps screw up for whatever reasons (I'm not very familiar with DirectX, but that seems to be the culprit there). Further, I know for a fact that most developers in MS stay logged in as admin, so most code doesn't get developed with a Unix-like user credentials model anyway. I don't know if that has changed in MS with Vista being the standard desktop OS there, but I highly doubt it.

One more particular thing MS did horribly wrong with Vista is ask the user for confirmation every time it blinks. It is a well understood by UI experts that such 'confirmations' are read only the first time - after that, saying 'yes' becomes a habit. 'sudo' is definitely a lot more mature (but still somewhat lacking) in that arena since it caches the state for some time.

The fact remains though, that MS tried something radically different and failed miserably with Vista. Probably proves the point that large corporations should stick to manufacturing, selling and incremental updates and leave innovation to smaller startups.

Maybe MS should buy out the Haiku dev team and have them build a new OS that is binary compatible with older MS platforms, but is better than their Windows code base.

Heres and interesting quote over at Ars Technica:

One thing is certain: the choice to have many editions of Vista differentiated sometimes by key features is causing Microsoft quite a bit of trouble. Had Microsoft enabled or disabled features like Aero Glass based on a machine's capabilities rather than the version of the OS in use, this suit would have likely been avoided.

So basically if they had based a machines capabilities at run-time based on it's hardware they wouldn't have been culpable but because it was done through marketing they may have mislead consumers.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080211-samsung-sued-over-defective-first-gen-blu-ray-players.html

If you Google for BD-P1200 Lawsuit, you'll see the profile 1.0 vs 1.1 is not the issue. I'm guessing Samsung released this thing, and now the software patches are eating them alive keeping up with the changing spec (and probably a bad design to begin with). Based on the scant information, I'm guessing Samsung realized at some point they couldn't patch their player to fix all the incompatibilities. Perhaps it was at end of life, so they figured they'd just ignore the complaints.

I don't think this is a "first adopter you have to expect this" situation. It sounds like a bad design. If Samsung had any corporate integrity, they'd replace these players with ones that actually work. I'm not a fan of lawsuits, but Samsung basically said "screw you" to their customers, so it's natural somebody would screw them right back.

Jeremy Reimer is just bad news, literally and figureatively speaking, and is nothing more than a troublemaker online. He caused himself and his website (arstechnica) all kinds of trouble, as well as his fellow arstechnica person in Mr. Jay Little.

Umm, you're Alexander Peter Kowalski aka APK aren't you?

I can see why you hate Reimer though -

http://www.jeremyreimer.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=4128

Too start with it was quite funny, but I actually ended up feeling sorry for you.

You're (in)famous at arstechica too -

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/34709834/m/8510980933?r=3650926043#3650926043

And Jay Little wrote this creepy little article about how much he hates you -

http://www.jaylittle.com/jaylittle/default.aspx?cmd=article&sub=display&id=30

Seriously dude, you're mad and they're evil to torement you. Seek pschiatric help. And stop linking to that windowsitpro thread, it makes you look like a nutter.

The two plaintiffs, anonymously listed as Doe I and Doe II, are female students at Yale Law School and claim that the users of a third-party law school message board have consistently and regularly made such disparaging remarks about their characters that it has cost them not only their emotional wellbeing, but internships and jobs. And despite repeated requests to remove the offensive posts, the site's administrators continually refused to do so.

On what grounds did AutoAdmit.com refuse to remove libelous messages? On what grounds did they later claim to be unable to identify the defendants?

In the complaint as seen by Ars Technica, Doe I and II claim to have lost sleep, fallen behind on schoolwork, suffered strained personal relationships with their families, and were forced to attend therapy as a result of the postings on AutoAdmit. Additionally, Doe I claims to have lost job prospects. She says that at some point, she applied for 16 different on-campus interviews at Yale, which resulted in a mere four callbacks and zero offers. "On information and belief, it is unprecedented for a second-year law student from Yale to participate in so many interviews without obtaining a single summer associate offer," the complaint reads. Her academic qualifications were similar to that of other classmates who had received offers, the complaint says.

I am not a lawyer, nor do I need to be, to see that the plaintiffs can demonstrate real, measurable damages.

The posts occurred on AutoAdmit, a site that describes itself as the world's "most prestigious" college discussion board and claims to help students with law school information, hiring practices at law firms, and more.

Assuming they're any good at anything they do, how is it possible that they both refuse, when requested, to remove content that is so obviously incitement to violence and defamation of character, but also neglect to keep records pertaining to that content? Even if AutoAdmit.com had no "no outing" policy [see the linked article], a marginally competent administrator and a marginally competent lawyer should, between the two of them, have the expertise & intellectual capacity to at least have concluded that responsible hosting of a discussion forum requires that they begin keeping records after a pattern of abusive content is observed from some, if not all, of the 28 pseudonyms used to harass Doe I & Doe II, auto-deleting most as is standard maintenance of servers, but specifically archiving those noticed as illegal, either as libel, incitement, or direct threat of illegal actions. I have no Linux certifications or CS degrees, and I can write the cron jobs for that, easily. It is not rocket science!

It is simply not plausible that at no point did anybody at "[t]he most prestigious college admissions discussion board in the world" notice the pattern of messages that are not protected by the First Amendment, and know that those messages are, from that point forward, evidence of a crime. As "[t]he most prestigious college admissions discussion board in the world," they had a professional responsibility to start logging that information, independent of their declared ["no outing"] site policy. There are really only two [non-e

This should make for some interesting drama over the next year. I wonder what Harvard, which RIAA appears to be avoiding wrt lawsuits, will do about this bit of legislation if it becomes law?

I have comcast, and I've never experienced the traffic shaping.

And honeslty, for your average poweruser like any member of /. is likely to be, comcast's usage policy is still sweetness and light compared to this:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080116-leaked-memo-time-warner-cable-to-trial-hard-bandwidth-caps.html

In what major Western Country can religion impose restrictions on free speech?

Perhaps you've not heard of the Parent's Television Council, and the fact that they generate the vast majority of all obscenity complaints to the FCC.

How about Vista Antipiracy? remember when vista was telling people to register their PCs due to doing this on a semi-hardware level? Didn't end well, did it? If I recall they removed it within days, and the only people they screwed were those who bought legitimate copies.

There are many methods, this one just happens to be as much fail as the other non-methods. I hear ya though, and only hope they never try to do full on-die DRM, but if they did? Hey, we'd know what not to buy, at least.

"In order to clamp down on the practice of tit-for-tat feedback, eBay will begin preventing sellers from leaving negative feedback on buyers."

I was going to summarize this but that one sentence is about as basic as it gets.

The BBC writeup isn't very good. Try Ars Technica's coverage and you'll see that it's a 100 cm^2, rewritable holographic display. Or you can read the scientific paper in Nature.

It really is a holographic display. It uses a mixture of two polymers and quite a few kilovolts to zap things into place, after which you get a nice little display. It takes about half a second to form the image, which then lasts for about 3 hours (compared to it vanishing in about as much time as it took to create the image before). The device is also a lot bigger than previous devices.

I covered all that in my submission, but I guess someone beat me to submitting the story. Oh well, I've got plenty of accepted submissions already, anyhow, and knowing Slashdot, they could use my submission for a dupe, tomorrow :-)

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

BBC's coverage is pretty lame. Slashdot would serve its readers better by linking to coverage at a science blog instead. For instance, Ars Technica's Nobel Intent science journal has a far superior writeup of the announcement.

Ars has better coverage which talks more about the polymers used and how this is actually achieved. It also has a link to the paper published in Nature (although you can only get an abstract if you're like me and don't have a subscription).

I submitted this story, too. So knowing Slashdot, we might see a dupe :-)

Seems to me that based on Ars Technica's torture test, the original iPod Nano would win. That said, mine stopped working after it went through the washer for the third time.

And, frankly, the iPod worked a hell of a lot better when it was working than my GameBoy did.

I'd look into the Nokia N810 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N810) and a 2GB MicroSD Card. It's a few hairs bigger than the Touch, and only has the 2GB built-in (hence the MicroSD card), but it makes up for it with the 800x480 screen, GPS, webcam, and slide-out thumbboard. Also, Maemo (the Linux-based platform that the N810 and it's cousin, the N800, run on) seems to have a somewhat healthy development community, and plenty of ports of desktop Linux apps. Ars has a pretty thorough review here: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/nokia-n810-review.ars

Your parent's are among the lucky. Their 5k village is getting FIOS before the population of nearly 3M in Chicago is getting it. Not to mention half the US who live in the western states. I mention Chicago specifically not only because thats where I live, but also because they have FIOS in Indiana and no information (as of when I last checked, admittedly around 3 months ago) on when FIOS is coming to Chicago.

I only complain because people always say "ohh just switch to X service", but because of the government granted monopolies my current choices are between the 768k DSL from AT&T, or 6Mb cable from Comcast. Here we are stuck between slow and evil. If FIOS came here I would switch ASAP, but the option simply isn't here yet.

Thats one reason why I'm hoping Sprint's Xohm WiMax takes off, which got a good review from Ars Technica in a prerelease tech preview.

Lets take a look at what you are saying.
1. It's wrong because it is legally wrong.
Most people would consider this comment silly. Without getting into it (what a silly old topic), so you're saying that if it was legal (like in the Netherlands and many other countries soon) it would be ok?
If you want me to address this comment further I will.

2. It's wrong because you're being a freeloader and taking unfair advantage of someone else.
This is a part of your argument you could possibly expand on. There's the "freeloader" part which is really just saying you didn't pay for it. The term "freeloader" doesn't actually work when applied to things that don't run out. It works for food, supplies, candy, commodities in general. Physical items. IP is not physical. It can't "run out" (unless, i guess all copies are destroyed) The term "freeloader" suggests that a negative is happening to the non-freeloaders.
"taking an unfair advantage of someone else" would be like if someone stole your book when you weren't around, or recited your lines as if they were their own, discrediting you. The point is that something negative is happening to you. You are losing out in some way.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070212-8813.html
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/11540.cfm
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/6828/Music+download+sales+soar+in+US
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060320-6418.html
(More links if you want them)
And then you express your take on my arguments as "teenager crap."
"they're rich so they won't notice" Could you tell me from where in my comments this was inferred?

"their art sucks so they get what they deserve" I guess this is your take on "If she's not as good as her sales suggest (like many pop stars) than she will (deservedly) make less cash." I don't know, I guess that is similar to what I said. Except you make it sound real vindictive and mean. And then you call it "senseless babble." Why is it babble? How would you have it? You want less talented people to make more money than talented people? (please explain why this is babble)

I feel I have taken the time to articulate my points coherently. I have addressed every issue you have brought up. (Am I missing something?)
I apologize if you were offended by my previous comments. (I can be rude)

I do not feel you have addressed my points.
You seem steadfast in thinking "downloading copyrighted material is wrong." I guessing you are probably surrounded by people with similar opinions?

Lets take a look at what you are saying.
1. It's wrong because it is legally wrong.
Most people would consider this comment silly. Without getting into it (what a silly old topic), so you're saying that if it was legal (like in the Netherlands and many other countries soon) it would be ok?
If you want me to address this comment further I will.

2. It's wrong because you're being a freeloader and taking unfair advantage of someone else.
This is a part of your argument you could possibly expand on. There's the "freeloader" part which is really just saying you didn't pay for it. The term "freeloader" doesn't actually work when applied to things that don't run out. It works for food, supplies, candy, commodities in general. Physical items. IP is not physical. It can't "run out" (unless, i guess all copies are destroyed) The term "freeloader" suggests that a negative is happening to the non-freeloaders.
"taking an unfair advantage of someone else" would be like if someone stole your book when you weren't around, or recited your lines as if they were their own, discrediting you. The point is that something negative is happening to you. You are losing out in some way.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070212-8813.html
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/11540.cfm
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/6828/Music+download+sales+soar+in+US
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060320-6418.html
(More links if you want them)
And then you express your take on my arguments as "teenager crap."
"they're rich so they won't notice" Could you tell me from where in my comments this was inferred?

"their art sucks so they get what they deserve" I guess this is your take on "If she's not as good as her sales suggest (like many pop stars) than she will (deservedly) make less cash." I don't know, I guess that is similar to what I said. Except you make it sound real vindictive and mean. And then you call it "senseless babble." Why is it babble? How would you have it? You want less talented people to make more money than talented people? (please explain why this is babble)

I feel I have taken the time to articulate my points coherently. I have addressed every issue you have brought up. (Am I missing something?)
I apologize if you were offended by my previous comments. (I can be rude)

I do not feel you have addressed my points.
You seem steadfast in thinking "downloading copyrighted material is wrong." I guessing you are probably surrounded by people with similar opinions?

Apple has already implemented HDCP in Leopard: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/aluminum-and-glass-a-review-of-the-new-imac.ars
From the link: "There's also HDCP support built in, so future support for Blu-ray and HD DVD is not out of the question." I had read a more direct reference on Apple's site but I couldn't find that link right now.

Please don't interpret this as an anti-Apple rant though. Rather, as I said in my original post, get pissed at the entire industry, or nobody at all.

Apple never had a choice in the matter, and neither did MS. If you want your system to play HD-DVD or BluRay media once the ICT bit is set, you have to have HDCP support otherwise the playback resolution has to be degraded.

Whether you implement this in software or hardware (firmware) of course, is entirely up to you.

Ars Technica claims that file copies are now 50% faster in SP1.

It should only take 65 and a half years, instead of 131, to copy 168 Mb of pictures now. What a great feature! :-)

As ars said, "Combining two companies that are losing market share doesn't guarantee that the trend will be reversed." Yahoo needs a better game plan, and a way to generate money from their portal. That they can do all on their own.

And this is where Apple may have blundered, at least in the US.

Strange as a national network policy you think it would day something about the government taping in to all traffic and monitoring it. That is a national policy and it does affect everyone. Also said taping might have something to do with network uptake by end users.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060515-6829.html

Looking at the map of High Speed Providers by Zip Code, it would in fact appear that we as a nation are in pretty good shape. Problem is, the pictures people are using to educate our leaders reflect some fictional, non-existent universe. I live in Central Ohio. Looking at that map, it appears that I have PLENTY of choices for broadband coverage. It would also appear that there is no place in my state that isn't covered by at least 4-6 providers. I'd like some of whatever that map-maker was smoking, because it must be some good stuff. As an IT consultant, I can say assuredly that MOST places in the state have, at most, a single provider. Where I live, it's Insight (RoadRunner) or nothing. My parents have another, single, provider. Where I work, I have only one option. I have a client who lives about a 22 miles from me who has no broadband options at all.

I think the fallacy here is that they're probably counting technologies as "broadband" that shouldn't really be considered. ISDN is not broadband. Counting Satellite as broadband is a mistake, too. If you've ever used it, you know what I'm talking about. You can't count the cellular 144k as broadband, because in practice, it's not really faster than dial-up, and you can't count a $1000/month leased line as broadband, because most people aren't going to pay 30% of their income to cover their broadband connection.

We can't delude ourselves with fake numbers and expect to know what's really going on. We're holding on to our past glory not even realizing that we're becoming less and less relevant every day. Sure, we built a nuclear bomb and put a man on the moon, but do you know of anyone in today's workforce that was part of either of those projects? Our highway system, built in the 50's, is great, but there's a heavily travelled bridge down the street from me that's been out for 2 years. The World Trade Center got knocked down over 6 years ago, and there's still a giant smoldering hole in South Manhattan because we can't see past our greed and get our crap together. We have a president that thinks scientific advancement is sinful, and an aging, over-extended military that can't even defeat a bunch of disorganized rebels in two third-world countries.

I hope and pray that we soon get our stuff together. I don't think it's too late yet, but it's getting pretty close.

"Well, Asus alone plans to sell about 50% more Eee PCs (5 million) than Apple sells Macs (3 million) in 2008"

Where did you get the "3 million" figure for Mac sales from? Apple sold 2.32 million of the things in the fourth quarter of 2007 alone, and 7.83 million of them during the entire year, compared to 5.66 million sold in 2006. It would therefore be a notably disastrous year for Apple if their Mac sales suddenly drop to 3 million in 2008.

Ars tecnica has sales figures taken from Apple's quarterly reports here:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080122-last-quarter-brought-highest-revenue-in-apples-history.html

Last, and perhaps most troubling for Dish, the company faces the very real possibility that it will be barred from selling DVRs and forced to disable the functionality on devices already in customers' homes.

I don't know about the third one, but according to Ars, the first two were 2 km apart from each other.

Ars Technica. They aren't pure hardware review, but they do a good job and have much more insightful articles. Really, the difference between a Mac and a PC any more is the operating system and the fit and finish. The only reason to use a Mac is if you need/want OSX. Not a bad reason to use it, but that's the main differentiator between Macs and PC's. That, and design. Macs tend to have a certain spartan, minimalist yet functional design that appeals to a lot of people. It fits with their Ikea furniture ;)

Tom's Hardware has good Charts section, too. It'll let you fairly easily compare different bits of hardware, and get the best bang for your buck with configurations, let you see if it's really worth the extra $300 to get the faster CPU and so on.

Tech Report seems to think it was the WSJ that said it:

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/14047

whereas Ars doesn't name a source;

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080201-microsoft-adds-yahoo-to-shopping-cart.html

Tell you what, Microsoft: You come up with an OS that outperforms XP Pro SP2, has some useful new features, is efficient, compatible, maybe even costs less, and then blow me, and I'll give your new OS a try. How's that sound?

Networking (Pre SP1)
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/juha/2070

Raw CPU Use
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/xp-vs-vista-uk,review-2067-5.html

Gaming Performance (Especially after the Beta Driver Releases in Jan - Check out reviews from June to now - Drivers are faster than XP 99.9% of the time)
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/amd_nvidia_windows_vista_driver_performance_update/page9.asp

Even Early Drivers (Beta Even) put Vista at only a few FPS behind XP, and this is pure RTM code, no optimizations:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/page11.html

DirectX10 REALLY does need Vista
http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2007/2/14/7060
The GPU scheduler and GPU RAM Virtualization are just two major aspects of what DirectX10 expects to be present, and if you run the DX10 libraries on XP, you will never get these features.

Vista is faster than Mac on own Hardware
(Didn't have link in my folder, but do a search, especially with Leopard and Boot Camp. From casual user reviews of Vista loading faster and being snappier than Leopard and Tiger to reviews that take native compiled applications or games for both Intel based codesets, Vista easily out performs OS X in raw application performance and ESPECIALLY gaming like Quake or WoW or other native apps that run under both OSes.)

Beware of Idiot Reviews
-Most Online and 'tech' reviews are conducted by iditors or people that don't have a clue what they are doing.

The main things you will find is that they use a first day installation of Vista, where Superfetch has had no time nor performed any optimizations on the system to increase applications load times, Vista itself has ran no optimization for prefetch, file placement as there is no data to base it on for the applications or games yet, and especially the intelligent SuperFetch optimiations make a massive difference in gaming where you have a tons of textures and levels being queued into the game.

Another signs of a bad test - They turn of Aero, which on modern Video cards is faster than turned off. They also go out of their way to turn of Search Indexing and other performance assisting tools like Superfetch. (In fact with Aero on and WDDM's scheduling handling the GPU in Vista, even a single game will usually run faster 'inside' a Window instead of Full Screen - something that is the opposite of XP or other OS models.

You can find a ton of reviews that fall into these categories.
Here is a recent one for Example:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=797

The majority of the problem with Vista is just like this article mentions 'perceived reality', and also the 'missed advantages' Vista does offer to everyday users as well as gamers.

Gamer example: run several high end games in a Window at the same time, notice you barely lose FPS in any of the Games even though they are running on the screen at the same time, or even in Flip3D (or a 3rd Party Expose' Mimic utility). Not only would this choke XP, since Vista DOES the GPU scheduling and is not application yield based like you find in OpenGL based OS designs, this is something that is nearly impossible to do on anything outside of Vista. And yes there are people that do this, just find almost any MMO player than has more than one account or playes more than one MMO, and they are usually running

Finally some good news! Too bad it's still anonymous. I'd love to know who broke the barrier.

Why is Verizon so against the concept of a 700MHz open network when they've stated that they're going to open up their own network some time this year?

More details can be found here from the previous round of talks: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070308-us-doj-microsoft-dragging-feet-on-documentation.html Or the official DOJ page http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f221700/221759.htm

Yes, WoW does use Bittorrent for it's updates. I'd be rather unhappy if it were to be further restricted.

I was quoted in the Ars Technica article. Here is the text of my FCC comment.

Dear Commissioners,

As a longtime customer of the Comcast Corporation (CMCSA) I feel it is necessary for me to provide you with my views and opinions regarding their use of throttling bandwidth for point to point (P2P) users that access their network.

File sharing is a gray area with regards to the law. It can be used for not only illegal purposes, such as the sharing of copyrighted material like music and movies, but for sharing of information that is perfectly legal such as software updates, free operating system distribution, free movie and movie preview distribution plus free music distribution. I will cite examples of each accordingly.

The most widely publicized use of P2P file sharing is illegal music and movie distribution. As this review for comment does not touch upon the legal issues surrounding the data being shared I shall focus my attentions to those legal methods that are affected.

Blizzard Entertainment, a wholly owned subsidiary of Vivendi Games (Euronext: VIV), uses the Bittorrent P2P file sharing protocol to distribute updates and patches to the players of the very popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft. If their data is interrupted for any reason, even for a short time, then thousands, perhaps even millions, of users will be unable to play their game. This will directly cut into their profit margin.

The Linux operating system is a freely available alternative to both Microsoft Windows and the Apple Mac OS. As the Linux operating system is free they rely solely on donations of both time and money from people across the planet. That money, however, is not unlimited. To reduce the high cost of bandwidth they use the Bittorrent protocol for much of their software distribution. Interrupting their distribution channel would only benefit Microsoft, an already proven monopoly. To help ensure competition I feel that Bittorrent should not be interrupted.

To give but one example of free video entertainment you may want to look at the TV Guide 2007 Online Video Award winner Star Trek New Voyages. They are a very high quality non-profit production that was able to beat out contenders such as the 4400 and Battlestar Galactica. Their preferred method of distribution is bittorrent as they have a very limited bandwidth.

Many movies distribute their previews via bittorrent. This would damage not only their advertising structure but limit the consumer to one method of retrieval.

To see that Bittorrent and the movie industry, music industry and gaming industry are working TOGETHER and that they are seeking to create a strategic partnership please view the following URL for more information:

http://www.bittorrent.com/about/press/bittorrent-inc-launches-the-bittorrent-entertainment-network

Of course now that you know that Bittorrent is a popular, legal, and economically feasible method of content distribution let me explain a little bit of how it works.

Let us say that the makers of Star Trek New Voyages come out with a new episode. They have a few options at their disposal. One of them is to create a simple link to a file and have everyone who is interested in the file download it from one single location. The downside to this is that the single location will be paying a fortune to accommodate the high volumes of traffic.

The other option is Bittorrent. By having people connect to what is referred to as a "tracker" they can find out who else is downloading the same file and start taking pieces from multiple different users. Essentially everyone is

Don't forget to tax every truck driver so we can compensate all those hurt by the smugglers.

According to this Ars Technica article ( http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060505-6761.html ), the $6.1 billion that the MPAA claims is lost to piracy is a highly inflated number. Ok, I'll pause while everyone says "Well, DUH!".... ... done? ... ok, good. Let's proceed.

Apparently, "bootlegging" costs them $2.4 million. This is typically "hard piracy" or a guy on a street corner selling a copied DVD for $5. Let's give the MPAA this figure.

The next portion is $1.4 billion "lost" to illegal copying. Now this isn't someone putting Star Wars up on a P2P network. This is someone taking their Star Wars DVD and making a backup copy of it. Apparently, the MPAA feels that you should pay for backup copies and not doing so is costing them money. This is likely just a load of horse manure, but let's leave it be for now because the next one is what really interests me.

Finally, they claim $2.3 billion in losses to "internet piracy". Since they claim that most of the losses are overseas (say, 40%) and 15% of the US Internet piracy happens on campuses, that's $138 million ($2.3 Billion * 0.4 * 0.15). Now, they also are claiming that each P2P copy downloaded is a lost sale. I disagree with that and think that the real "lost sales" figures are far lower. I'm willing to grant them a compromise, though, and assume that a one in three downloaded copies is a lost sale. This takes the losses figure down to $46 million. Finally, some of those "lost sales" would have been used copies, rentals, or other legal "reduced cost" methods. So let's assume that this takes reduces their revenue by 20% (again, being generous)*. This takes their Internet Piracy loss down to just under $37 million.

So for $37 million lost annually, the MPAA wants severe Federal laws that would deny students a college education if someone else on the campus pirates a movie?

* Ok, I pulled a lot of the numbers out of my behind, but so did the MPAA. At least my numbers are likely to be closer to reality.

Unlikely is not the same as impossible. In fact, this has happened before. From the link:

They certainly could put software through Apple's own QA process, but I doubt they will. Even so, the question was whether an application could cause issues with the cell phone network, and the answer is yes, it can.