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It has been patently obvious for years now that Dvorak is intentionally caustic to generate banner ad impressions on his web column. DON'T FEED THE TROLLS.

In fact it will only get worse as technology coverage is handed to newer, less-qualified observers who simply cannot use a Microsoft Windows computer.

As opposed to the current "qualified" observers who cannot be bothered to use anything besides a Windows computer? Maybe like you, John, who admitted that you didn't understand Creative Commons, and therefore it must be worthless. Or saying that large hard drive storage only serves as a replacement for the VCR. Or that the PC has become bland, boring, useless? Maybe it has, if your nose is stuck up the ass of Microsoft.

If it's anything different from the current "Microsoft can do no wrong" mainstream press, I'm all for it. The real question should be can PC Magazine survive?

In fact it will only get worse as technology coverage is handed to newer, less-qualified observers who simply cannot use a Microsoft Windows computer.

As opposed to the current "qualified" observers who cannot be bothered to use anything besides a Windows computer? Maybe like you, John, who admitted that you didn't understand Creative Commons, and therefore it must be worthless. Or saying that large hard drive storage only serves as a replacement for the VCR. Or that the PC has become bland, boring, useless? Maybe it has, if your nose is stuck up the ass of Microsoft.

If it's anything different from the current "Microsoft can do no wrong" mainstream press, I'm all for it. The real question should be can PC Magazine survive?

In fact it will only get worse as technology coverage is handed to newer, less-qualified observers who simply cannot use a Microsoft Windows computer.

As opposed to the current "qualified" observers who cannot be bothered to use anything besides a Windows computer? Maybe like you, John, who admitted that you didn't understand Creative Commons, and therefore it must be worthless. Or saying that large hard drive storage only serves as a replacement for the VCR. Or that the PC has become bland, boring, useless? Maybe it has, if your nose is stuck up the ass of Microsoft.

If it's anything different from the current "Microsoft can do no wrong" mainstream press, I'm all for it. The real question should be can PC Magazine survive?

You'll find all of the pictures here

are here

He has actually gone out and complained in a column about the System Idle Process taking up 98% of cpu on his Windows machine and making the box thrash.

I know I should have known better, but I couldnt believe this at first, so I had to go look. This guy is clearly not qualified to discuss anything more complicated than a sundial. Here is his exact quote http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1304348,00.as p

When I hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, I see that the System Idle Process is hogging all the resources and chewing up 95 percent of the processor's cycles. Doing what? Doing nothing?

> The man is an idiot who doesn't check his facts.
> He has actually gone out and complained in a column
> about the System Idle Process taking up 98% of cpu
> on his Windows machine and making the box thrash.

Perhaps you should start checking your facts. Here's what Dvorak actually wrote:

"When I hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, I see that the System Idle Process is hogging all the resources and chewing up 95 percent of the processor's cycles. Doing what? Doing nothing? Once in a while, after you've clicked all over the screen trying to get the system to do something other than idle, all your clicks suddenly ignite and the screen goes crazy with activity. This is not right."

As you can see, he complained about 95% -- not 98% -- of cpu.

He has actually gone out and complained in a column about the System Idle Process taking up 98% of cpu on his Windows machine and making the box thrash.


This is the said article.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1304348,00.as p

Just check it out for yourself at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1870342,00.as p Gotta find a system with 512 KB RAM and DOS 3.1 somewhere...

Link to the printer friendly version...
http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=16197 7,00.asp

(no karma whoring, either)

Without Ads

Ubuntu isn't the most user-friendly Linux, because its still a work in progress. For years publications like PC Magazine and PC World have been giving that honor to Xandros (and Linspire at times). And I think they're right. It's also closely Debian-derrived and usable with the "Debian universe", and the Deluxe version lets you run a list of supported Windows apps via Crossover Office (a nice cushion-- I run DVD Shrink with it). You can get nice Linux-native stuff like Skype preconfigured with it. Hardware detection has always been its strength and I'd say today its definately in the top 3 in this respect. The Xandros File Manager is very Explorer-like and stable, with some bennies like CD-ripping and DVD burning.

Xandros Open Circulation edition is available via Bittorrent.

As powerful GUI environments go, Xandros was the first to autoconfigure USB devices, the first to logon to Windows Domains (and even create them!), the first with VPN and encrypted home folders, the first with anything approaching a usable printer setup, and many other boring-yet-crucial features that wouldn't give the average Slashdot Linux enthusiast much of a thrill.

If you want an almost more-Windows-than-Windows environment, get the new SUSE v10 and install it with KDE. The Control Center dialogs are less elegant than Xandros, and even Windows XP, in that they have GOBS of powerful options dialogs. But they are still dialogs and "friendly" to a non-Unixy power-user. IMO it is a little weak on hardware detection and there's no APT. Their target is Windows power users and admins, so the slickness doesn't mean they'll knock off the rough edges to the extent Xandros does.

Linspire itself is rather unorthodox: It defaults to root auto-logins (bad) and its package-naming will present more difficulties when you want to grab stuff from Debian. You also have to pay for access to much of the software repository, so its no coincidence that they've marginalized its compatability with Debian's.

K/Ubuntu is very nice. What it can do, it does well after a couple iterations. And system configuration is at least elegant and approachable. But even by their own admission it needs about another year.

You do realize that was, like, eight years ago, right? And then they fixed it ("months"? Good lord!). Are there hiccups? I'm sure there are. But in practice, very few people moan about incompatibility issues.

It was November/December of 1997, so yes about 8 years ago. And I was working at a Fortune 500 company who's Executive VP (pre-CIO days) insisted on immediately upgrading half the company to Office 97 to "standardize". That was 3,000+ desktops on one version and 3,000+ on the older version. It was a damn nightmare for almost a year and that experience stuck with me. :-)

It also stuck with Microsoft, because the Office 97, 2000, XP and 2003 formats are the same and didn't change. Yes, they introduced XML capabilities in 2003 but the default format was the 97/2000/XP one.

Now they're going to change again, this time to XML, and are making the same promises they did in 1997.

Since they are changing, now is the perfect time to try and force an open document solution. Better now than before getting locked into the next cycle.

But in practice, very few people moan about incompatibility issues.

Look harder. Google is your friend.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1631430,00.as p
http://office-watch.com/office/archtemplate.asp?v9 -n05 (Scroll down to #4, about half-way.)

"...neurobiologist seeking data from the Viking probes sent by the United States to Mars in the mid-1970s was told by the US space agency that software to read the 25-year-old computer tapes no longer existed, and "the programmers who knew it had died," according to the scientist."
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=3902& Cr=unesco&Cr1=

And to top it off, Office 2003 has no less that six(!) different versions, of which only the top-end 2 can create XML formats. http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/04/23/deviant.html

People don't care about philosophy until it happens to them. Most are apathetic with the attitude "yeah, but what are the odds of that happening to me?" That attitude can NOT be let to rule the day.

Hell, my dad still has the disks he wrote his first book on. TRS-80 Model III, 5 1/4" floppies. And no earthly idea how to get the data off them, much less what format it is in.

Some manufacturing equipment is still controlled by software on OS/9000-based machines. Yes, they can read and write DOS-format floppies now. Of course, the driver for that is $2,500 per node-locked machine...

Sorry for the rant, but this is an important subject I've been burned by before.

  -Charles

You might like to know that John Dvorak wrote yesterday about the Microsoft Protection Racket

Forget the sheets - think about the fact you're reusing the blankets from the previous parties (and the previous parties' leftovers).

Speaking of the drives, Best Buy just finished having a sale of Memorex 2G sticks (retail $199) for $159 at the cash register, then another $30 for the rebate. Granted, you're looking at $10+ in taxes at each level, but it's still a heck of a discount. Not much more than some of the stores' retail prices for 1G, although I don't think anyone is going to pay the upper end of a 1G price scale. Those things were nearly impossible to find using the StoreFinder Inventory. I didn't want to order one and was going to my doctor's office in Chicago a couple of days after they sold out here in Indy, so I placed a pickup order there.

Then, I happened to be picking up some laptops for our DARPA team from a repair shop, and when I went back to my car, there was a Best Buy sack (this was on the far side of the BB parking lot) which was on the passenger side of my car, so I opened it up. There was a 2G stick in it. Unopened. So I figured I'd do the nice nerd thing and track down the new owner. If they paid via credit card or cheque, it shouldn't have been a problem to track them down. Unfortunately, they paid in ca$h???? So I sat there for another hour, sitting & reading, sans A/C as it was fixed, then stopped working and I hadn't had time to take it back to be re-repaired. I don't tolerate heat very well, but I felt it was the decent thing to do. After an hour, I wasn't sure what to do, so I ended up putting it onto my lanyard, feeling badly for not having another way to find the owner.

BTW, it's said you can't (or shouldn't) format NTFS, but both of mine seem to be working fine. I had the handle (which holds it on the lanyard) break off and had to finagle a fix, but also contacted Memorex. They told me to file it as a warranty issue to get a replacement cap. (???)

One of my friends, who has a 512M stick, asked me what I was going to do with 4G of stick memory and I asked him what he did with 512M. He said he rarely comes close to capacity. I thought about marking one of them with tiny lettering: ICE (In Case of Emergency), sort of like the fad with cell phones, but a text file with the important info, in addition to the usual phone numbers (a list, and who they are - more options than a cell phone) as I usually have them around my neck; e.g. I'm allergic to morphine; my pain receptors have been exposed weekly exclusively to methadone for nearly ten years, so other pain meds may not work correctly; what other meds I'm taking; why all of this is so; etc.

Here's an article from PC Magazine detailing how to stock up on what you can carry around, bootable, as well as what utilities you can tote about worrying about (on the Windows side) things which have to have components in specific directories, entries in the registry, etc.

With developments like these I am begining to think that Dvorak may be on to something in his latest PCMag.com article.

http://pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1862166,00.asp

It certainly seems that the record companies are deliberately trying to sink online music sales...

The RIAA is afraid of Apple. They know in today's world, music labels aren't as necessary. And iTMS may be making them useless. Why should a major act re-sign with a label when they can go straight through iTMS? Dvorak has a great article on it.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1862166,00.as p

I believe that both John Dvorak and I agree with you on this. There are probably a lot of reasons, control at or near the top of the list, why the record companies don't like the success of the iTunes Music Store. They are just trying to find a reason to pull the plug and be able (with a semi-straight face) say that it was Apple's fault. They will say, we wanted to let you have some songs for less money, but Apple kept that from you. Sure, give us $0.29 songs for the ones that nobody really downloads anyhow to justify charging us $1.79 or $1.99 or more for the 'popular' songs. In the end, it gets them more money and returns more control to the record companies.

For Dvoraks comments: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1862166,00.as p

CNet and PCMagazine already call it for Y!Mail (not the beta, the current one) because of its security, antispam, and global language support:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1830114,00.as p
http://reviews.cnet.com/Yahoo_Mail/4505-9236_7-309 80704-2.html?tag=top

I read people writing about Yahoo! playing 'catchup' - that is so ridiculous.

Google has maginally better web search, made a great marketing move with 1GB webmail, and has done an absolutely unparalleled job at serving the needs of both sides of the advertising market.

The weirdest part of the Google phenomenon is when everyone started hyping how superior Google was for web search back in the day when Yahoo! was *using* Google for *their* websearch! This really illustrates how much difference fresh branding in the post .dom-apocalyse makes.

However, side-by side comparisons show that Yahoo! has competitive and frequently better products (Messenger vs. Google Talk, Y!Mail vs GMail, Y! Toolbar vs. Google Toolbar, Y! Desktop Search vs Google Desktop Search) and most of them have been around a lot longer.

If there is one place Y! got its ass soundly kicked where it hurts its with AdWords and Web Search.

But certainly not all that is Google is god and some of their products are just plain lame (Google Talk). And dont talk to me about judging betas either because Google has a habit of just calling everything a beta forever to avoid scrutiny and invite interest, which is really, really lame.

How's this a troll? This is entirely correct

The shuffle is also better in the following ways:

- Better sound quality (considering it has the best of any other popular player out there) Shuffle sound quality

- Shuffle is smaller in length, width, depth and of course volume.

- It actually has the nice shuffle feature. How can you "compete with the shuffle" and not have shuffle?

- And shuffle was here almost a year ago.

This article analyses and explains why the shuffle sounds the best of all major mp3 players: Shuffles Secret

I liked this article on the marketing campaign.

Also, Dell is really starting to suck. I have a feeling that to buy this is to buy pain.

And finally, Shuffle's got a secret.

By the way, appearance aside, IBM Thinkpads in the last few years have used titanium alloys for lids (but painted the appropriate IBM deep black).

Recent models include the T and X series, such as the T42p, T30, and the X30.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,544117,00.asp
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/17/review_ibm _thinkpad_t42p/

So titanium is not really a "new," verbatim. But certainly the color is.

PC Mag actually did that in their review of the ROKR. Check out the pictures here.

PCMag.com's scanner reviews are relatively brief (compared to Tom's Hardware), but they still review more scanners than most sites and is a good starting point for first-time scanner buyers.

PCMag.com's scanner roundups group together their scanner reviews by category and give nice introductions that describe what features to look for in each category. Their most recent roundups are:

• Low-Cost Document Scanners (07/27/05)
• Business Card Scanners Keep Down the Clutter (06/03/05)
• FlatBed Scanners for Scrapbookin' Mommas (05/05/05)
• Scanning for Business (04/20/05)
• Digital Note Takers (12/08/04)
• Super Scanners (11/18/04)

PCMag.com's scanner reviews are relatively brief (compared to Tom's Hardware), but they still review more scanners than most sites and is a good starting point for first-time scanner buyers.

PCMag.com's scanner roundups group together their scanner reviews by category and give nice introductions that describe what features to look for in each category. Their most recent roundups are:

• Low-Cost Document Scanners (07/27/05)
• Business Card Scanners Keep Down the Clutter (06/03/05)
• FlatBed Scanners for Scrapbookin' Mommas (05/05/05)
• Scanning for Business (04/20/05)
• Digital Note Takers (12/08/04)
• Super Scanners (11/18/04)

PCMag.com's scanner reviews are relatively brief (compared to Tom's Hardware), but they still review more scanners than most sites and is a good starting point for first-time scanner buyers.

PCMag.com's scanner roundups group together their scanner reviews by category and give nice introductions that describe what features to look for in each category. Their most recent roundups are:

• Low-Cost Document Scanners (07/27/05)
• Business Card Scanners Keep Down the Clutter (06/03/05)
• FlatBed Scanners for Scrapbookin' Mommas (05/05/05)
• Scanning for Business (04/20/05)
• Digital Note Takers (12/08/04)
• Super Scanners (11/18/04)

PCMag.com's scanner reviews are relatively brief (compared to Tom's Hardware), but they still review more scanners than most sites and is a good starting point for first-time scanner buyers.

PCMag.com's scanner roundups group together their scanner reviews by category and give nice introductions that describe what features to look for in each category. Their most recent roundups are:

• Low-Cost Document Scanners (07/27/05)
• Business Card Scanners Keep Down the Clutter (06/03/05)
• FlatBed Scanners for Scrapbookin' Mommas (05/05/05)
• Scanning for Business (04/20/05)
• Digital Note Takers (12/08/04)
• Super Scanners (11/18/04)

PCMag.com's scanner reviews are relatively brief (compared to Tom's Hardware), but they still review more scanners than most sites and is a good starting point for first-time scanner buyers.

PCMag.com's scanner roundups group together their scanner reviews by category and give nice introductions that describe what features to look for in each category. Their most recent roundups are:

• Low-Cost Document Scanners (07/27/05)
• Business Card Scanners Keep Down the Clutter (06/03/05)
• FlatBed Scanners for Scrapbookin' Mommas (05/05/05)
• Scanning for Business (04/20/05)
• Digital Note Takers (12/08/04)
• Super Scanners (11/18/04)

PCMag.com's scanner reviews are relatively brief (compared to Tom's Hardware), but they still review more scanners than most sites and is a good starting point for first-time scanner buyers.

PCMag.com's scanner roundups group together their scanner reviews by category and give nice introductions that describe what features to look for in each category. Their most recent roundups are:

• Low-Cost Document Scanners (07/27/05)
• Business Card Scanners Keep Down the Clutter (06/03/05)
• FlatBed Scanners for Scrapbookin' Mommas (05/05/05)
• Scanning for Business (04/20/05)
• Digital Note Takers (12/08/04)
• Super Scanners (11/18/04)

PCMag.com's scanner reviews are relatively brief (compared to Tom's Hardware), but they still review more scanners than most sites and is a good starting point for first-time scanner buyers.

PCMag.com's scanner roundups group together their scanner reviews by category and give nice introductions that describe what features to look for in each category. Their most recent roundups are:

• Low-Cost Document Scanners (07/27/05)
• Business Card Scanners Keep Down the Clutter (06/03/05)
• FlatBed Scanners for Scrapbookin' Mommas (05/05/05)
• Scanning for Business (04/20/05)
• Digital Note Takers (12/08/04)
• Super Scanners (11/18/04)

Google Feeling Lucky: comparison audio ipod shuffle mini quality

Which immediately leads to http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1778968,00.as p

According to these articles, the shuffle's sound quality is due to superior amp circuitry (push-pull vs capacitor-coupled). That's not to discount the possibility that the HDD in other models contributes noise, but I haven't seen or observed any proof of the HDD noise.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1778968,00.as p
http://home.comcast.net./~machrone/playertest/play ertest.htm

i don't think it has to do with the hard drive, but using different audio components. not sure if the nano inhereted them from the shuffle though.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1778968,00.as p

No, you're just overlooking the latest iPod Mega. Its been around for years, not only plays DVD's, but burns them as well; sit your ass in a hotspot and you can download music and video right from the player!

I assume by many you mean more than three, but less than the 87% of people who chose the iPod despite the availability of other models.

I think that this article is full of mistakes that are done by purpose (i dont know, maybe!!) or are due to the misunderstanding of those guys about many computing ideas and principles. I really think that such articles that claim to be informative should not be allowed to be on internet as it is simply saying wrong things. My big concern about their tests is that they are not fair and they never tend yo be fair to the apple side and osx. For example i believe that everyone who pretend to make precise testing should realize that if they got results that differ so much and are so unexplained, well the best thing is to try different testing methods and tools. So tools may work well for a given platform, others may not work well. So any tempt to highlight any os design flaw should be done after testing many different benchmarking tools. They don't do that, instead they try to find some reasons that are completely meaningless in the sense that they are saying things that are technically wrong. Trying to find such whatever threading problems in osx in order to hurt the platform is not really fair...... So to begin with, let me comment on the Apache results. Well they use Apachebench to test osx, and they get rather low request per second with osx. Well ok, but why don't they try something else to test Apache performance, in that case they could figure out that the problem is either the os or the benchmarking tool (they recognize themself that apple did tell them that thre is a bug in ApacheServer, while running it on osx, maybe? i did not test it). Try to run WebBench on osx and linux ppc or x86, and have a look to the results. Well WebBench is a largely accepted benchmarking tool for test Apache performance, so it make sense to use it too. pcmag.com have tested a Xserve G5, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1630329,00.as p, and their result show something like almost 8000 request per second for 60 clients for a static configuration test. Ohhhh!!!! What's going on here? What we have here is something completely different, a completely different image compared to their results. What does this tell us? Well two different bench tools can produce very different outputs. But moreover everything that follows in their article simply collapse because nothing tell us that the tools that they use for MySQL testing are not having a problem too. Moreover WebBench involve as weel many threads creation, so their theory about this threading problem of osx collpase too. We simply dont get any global image of osx performance in server applications with their limited set of bench tools. Did they never think that the problem of those results could come from the benchmarking tools or the app itself that may have performance problems while running on osx. Here is the comment of pcmag.com "Performance-wise, the dual-processor Xserve G5 compares well with Linux-based x86 servers. This is not surprising, considering that Mac OS 10.x is based on FreeBSD UNIX. Using the included Apache server, we ran the Xserve G5 through our standard WebBench tests. It did quite well on the static WebBench test, outperforming a competitor's dual processor x86-64 server running Apache server on SuSe Linux-64." Something rather different to their general statement, isn't it? So now about MySQL. So first they mention fsync(). Let me correct. What are they talking about is wrong?, fsync() behaves the same as it does on all unixes: it writes the data from the host to the drive. However this is not good enough because drives will buffer the data and potentially write it in a different order than the app did. To deal with this, MacOS X provides an fcntl() called F_FULLFSYNC which does what fsync does and in addition asks the drive to flush all buffered data to disk. This is the only way for an app to be able to make any guarantees about things like transactions which is why InnoDB in MySQL uses it! And i think that because its an os feature it works whenever you use MyISAM o

Nevermind, I guess I wasn't geek enough. :)

I found it.

http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542,t=AB I&i=37329,00.asp

Slashdot: The more you know!!

Should have included this in my post.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1813919,00.as p

12-city dark fiber network

They leased the dark fiber, they didn't buy it, but from where I am sitting that is fairly similiar. The fiber was used to replace their OC-3 connections from data-center to data-center, apparently at a great cost reduction.

This is almost assuredly what Google is attempting.

Mod parent down. The fine article about the test specifically states that only one of the solutions that tested 6/6 provided a large number of false positives, and flagged the infected files as such simply by deciding that all packed executables are suspect. The other, is actually commended for having a low false positives rate.

If you want more information on the NSA requesting a secure PDA Phone, you can point your browser to http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1850744,00.as p . They have an html page that is easy to read.

You don't have to take my word for it.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1843330,00.as p

Just read one of many articles about how our government is increasingly doing a disservice to the public in the name of corporate interest. Then compare our broadband prices with Sweden. Don't insult me with 8th grade shit because I didn't include a bibliography on a slashdot post, asshole.

rhY

As long as corporations dictate our governmental policy to dis-benefit the populace, you can see this trend continuing for sure. I don't always agree with Dvorak (maybe 25%, or slightly more, but disagree with his details and examples), but he's DEAD ON on this one. Check out the new PC world article he wrote about Philly's municipal broadband shut down.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1843330,00.as p
Our entire government should have been up against the wall and shot about 20 years ago. The fact it hasn't happened yet proves the negative effects of current medicine on the human mind. rhY

Ian Davis' "TheDraw" was awesome for us SysOps. Clearly the best ANSI editor of its time... I can still vividly remember anticipating every release he did for it - and I went as far to write a TSR program, Kolor!, to display ANSI block combinations to achieve more colors.

TradeWars was a must have 'door' game, and very addictive... staying up so extra late so that I could eagerly make my next move 24 hours later. (Okay, that's not really a utility, but when I think BBS, TradeWars comes to mind)

AVA (Automated Verification Algorithm) was a great tool for SysOp's to use; it'd call back a new user to ensure their phone number was valid.

Other tools would include a hammer to pound the TRS-80 Model I back into shape so that System/80 would run... and when a SysOp's cooling mod meant that all covers/plates were removed from the CPU and external 5 1/4" floppy drives so that the BBS could run 24/7.

First, for this to mean anything at all, they need to get participation from the companies with the biggest patent portfolios. This includes companies such as Microsoft. It's not going to happen. Without their participation it's meaningless.

Second, even if they do get every single Fortune 500 company to join in the fun it won't help because there will always be small companies that make a play for some cash with a patent attack. We all know about a small I'm-not-dead-yet company coming from nowhere with a lame copyright suit. There are also some tiny companies with no products that come out with pure-play patent shakedown business models. Are these guys going to join in the pool? That's where the real threat is.

No, the real answer is this:

• Sourcecode can't infringe on patents. Only distributed products can possibly infringe on a patent. Therefore those who are involved only in sourcecode (ODSL) don't need to worry about patents. That's a question for distributors like RedHat, etc, who do have the resources to fight patent fights or license the patents.
• Software patents don't exist in Europe. Why worry about a problem that doesn't exist?
• We would be better served by a League of Patent Justice to defend the Earth than by some kind of pool. This League of Justice would do things like fight against frivolous patent shakedown claims, and also put out bounties on finding prior art. There almost always is prior art for all these claims.

----------------
mobile search - try it on your phone

Dvorak: The idea of a personal Internet connection over power lines is preposterous. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,896590,00.asp /

I don't agree or disagree with Dvorak's column. I personally think Apple sees its long-term revenue in hardware. Regardless of whether Dvorak is guessing correctly here, phase one of his prophecy has now come to pass. Now, over the next few months, we'll see if Apple responds the way Dvorak predicts, and see whether his prophecy comes true. I personally doubt it, but we'll see.

...will jump on the vmware bandwagon. With Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server (especially Mac OS X Server in the context of what I'm about to discuss) supporting x86, it would be trivially easy to have Mac OS X Server run in a supported fashion in a vmware environment on any variety of hardware. Stay with me for a moment: similar to the impact of soon being able to get an Apple desktop or, especially, laptop system that runs Mac OS X plus any x86 OS, including Windows, in a sure-to-exist virtual machine/vmware-like environment at near-native speed of the underlying hardware, having Mac OS X Server run on vmware in a server environment - somewhat the reverse - would be a huge coup for Apple in the datacenter.

Yes, yes, we all know that Apple, at least at the outset, will not "allow" Mac OS X to run on non-Apple hardware. Aside from some semi-insane but actually interesting prognostications from John Dvorak (and TPM panic aside), Apple is primarily talking about the desktop/consumer marketplace when it says this. There is little to nothing to stop Apple from partnering with an enterprise x86 vendor (or a partner such as vmware) to provide a vehicle via which to run Mac OS X Server on hardware other than Apple's 1U, single-power-supply Xserve.

Mac OS X will only run exclusively on Apple hardware as long as its good for Apple. As soon as it becomes desirable to allow Mac OS X (or Mac OS X Server) to run on possible non-Apple hardware configurations, you had better believe they'll do it. That's probably part-and-parcel to this whole x86 transition strategy. Further, consider that individual market segments may be appropriate for this first, such as enterprise datacenter and server markets. Consider also that while Mac OS X is $129 ($69 government and education), Mac OS X Server is $499/$999 ($249/$499 government and education), meaning that Mac OS X Server has a price point much more in line with allowing Mac OS X Server to run sans Apple hardware and still be a profit center. And as it matures, Mac OS X Server is an increasingly powerful, very attractive UNIX server platform, with major commercial vendor support and the best of the open source world wrapped up into one product.

I see Mac OS X Server on (something like) vmware on non-Apple x86 enterprise server hardware in Apple's future.