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Exactly how many flavours was Vista coming out with? Six? Seven??

...it happens to be Patch Tuesday. Naturally EI bugs are about as newsworthy as the sun rising in the east but let's see how it went this time.

In 2003, they bought GeCAD , makers of RAV-AntiVirus . So is Microsoft going to release their own anti-virus too?

This is actually the second antivirus company Microsoft has bought. In 2003 they bought GeCAD, makers of RAV-AntiVirus. So it seems that Microsoft is indeed serious about getting into the anti-virus business.

Open source, although a wonderful thing which should be given away at school bake sales, church meetings, and nascar rallies, is not a silver bullet. Case in point - the Firefox browser (which I use and love) has already had several security flaws (e.g. the same JPG flaw as IE) for which exploits have been released. The major reason we don't see more is *not* because it's so much more robust - it's because it still doesn't have the visibility and marketshare of IE, not to mention the raw hatred of ubergeeks around the world. I know, I know - the marketshare is going up, and as a faithful user I'm honestly torn. I'd love for it to be successful, and for Microsoft to have some kind of competition, but for now, Firefox is pretty safe. Give it the marketshare, and watch all those 2600-loving eyes start reappraising their goals.

daniel

Duly noted and thoroughly refuted

Besides the fact that that article is over a year old (practically an eternity in the life of RFID) this merely documents that some parties are building it into the various standards that they're working with. Is the kill feature required by law? No. Is it in all RFID products? No. Is it a done deal? Almost certainly not.

This article, besides being more recent, indicates that the industry is only now beginning to address the privacy issues.

I remain unsatisfied that at this point "All consumer-product RFID tags have self-destruct codes".

But most users don't "choose" EIDE either. To that end, popularity among vendors is tantamount to popularity on the desktop, as in the case with nearly all Macintosh generations; Macs had SCSI through the G3 line, albeit sometimes alongside ATA hosts.

As you rightfully observe, the price point has historically been the prohibitive factor. Generally, SCSI's TCO is higher, and relatively few home computers are SCSI-ready, but it looks like SAS will bring a lower price point and a lower TCO.

An inexpensively bridgable bus type could help diminish the perception of SCSI as a niche market, since any SATA-equipped computer can accomodate SAS with less expense and expertise than was previously necessary to add a SCSI chain to an ATA-based PC.

By eliminating the cable/adapter insanity, not only would SAS make SCSI easier to support and less complex, it also foregoes many of the expenses and availability problems associated with SCSI. Most popular retail chains offer either no SCSI products, or only a handful of products at incredibly exhorbitant prices.

Hopefully these factors will prompt OEMs to crank out higher production volumes, resulting in lower prices and more unit sales for desktops.

Also, remember that many technologies once associated only with servers and high-end workstations have since been realized on the desktop--affordably. SMP will soon be de facto on the desktop, we've had high-capacity removable storage for years, HP already offers competitively-priced 64-bit notebooks, and my $70 mainboard has onboard SATA RAID; so maybe it wouldn't be so weird for SAS to open up SCSI to the masses.

If there already hadn't been people specifically bitten by using a (non-Microsoft) software firewall and installing a brand new Windows security patch - and losing access to the internet.

There was a quite good article on EnterpriseITPlanet about upcoming Samba 3 and they discuss the possibility to run Samba 3-only network. Which is very feasible IMHO because you don't have to manage headaches such as AD. Of course, this works with Linux/Unix fellas only, not you, my dear MCSEs. Samba is way too complex software package for you GUI people to comprehend. ;)