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I hit submit before finding the article, but VMWare was talking about clients for Linux, iPhone (uh, why?), and OS X back in September of 2008. 5 months later and nothing to show for it. http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/151194/vmwares_virtualcenter_coming_to_linux_iphone.html

Obama is doing almost nothing about this bill, although I don't think he would veto it.

President-elect Barack Obama's transition team sent a second letter to Capitol Hill today to re-enforce the push to postpone the Feb. 17 date of the nation's digital transition.
-Washington Post

Michael Copps, a Democrat appointed acting chairman last week by U.S. President Barack Obama, ripped into digital-television transition efforts under his predecessor, Republican Kevin Martin.
-PCWorld

Or just google it yourself.

More of my taxpayer dollars wasted on useless legislation when there are far more important things to worry about.

A particularly clever virus or trojan could even go forth and re-write the BIOS to disable the "security freeze" function you speak of.

A particularly clever virus could encrypt your data secretly, anyway. In fact, it's already been done.

Well-written encryption at the firmware level is a good thing. Unfortunately, I don't agree with a design that doesn't let you perform a low-level format of the drive if you forget the password. My guess, though, is that the eBay comment is not accurate. It probably comes from the fact that people have sold drives containing sensitive information on eBay in the past--with this type of encryption, that will no longer be a problem.

Aside from the fallout pun, why is this being modded funny? Informative, yes. But someone losing their job in this economy (and I gathered he was laid off, not fired) is not particularly humorous to me.

the answer is presumably because they consider piracy to be wrong, but don't want shell out money for the full version.

Presumably, but if that's the case it's not terribly smart.

Sort of like how IE8's clickjacking fix requires the author of the web page to do something in order to not behave like IE7 (i.e. in order to not get fooled). This is also similar to the way ActiveX controls work... (by default anyway): The only barrier to running (besides changing the default settings, which lusers never do) is whether the author of a control has marked it as safe. Or like how Congress thinks it can outlaw something and it'll "just work" (a law is a piece of paper; criminals have no difficulty ignoring pieces of paper)

No, 1TB drives hit the market about 2 years ago. In early 2007:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/128400/hitachi_introduces_1terabyte_hard_drive.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hard_disk_drives#1980s_to_present_day

But... Comcast's traffic shaping policies do not apply unless you've used over 75% of the upstream or downstream for 15 minutes straight, and even then only when the whole cable node is congested....

You can not be serious...or perhaps you are not reading all the posts and complaints from customers who have and are experiencing problems with throttling, the crafting of RST packets to cut off communication between your PC and another. Like almost everyone, I have seen my upstream and downstream traffic throttled within the first 30 secs to (consistently) less than 1 minute of beginning to connect and read, connect and download, connect and view, attempt to upload...etc.... to very low Kbps rates of usually around 20 or 30 Kbps, consistently less than 200 Kbps on cable and that does suck. (And this happens without using any P2P or BitTorrent software...just browsing the web...reading articles, viewing still images, it is a wonder videos will even play at all when you think about it.) Of course they do choke out and stop occasionally as well.

I wish that I got 25% of the bandwidth that I am paying for. You made me laugh with your 75% figure. I wish... Also after 15 minutes...that too I wish I would get, but do not. My speed drops in less than 20 seconds. I am so sick and tired of sites (not blaming the sites in most cases) with images loading slow and slowing me down when I am looking for information on the net. I too would take a non-throttled slower service over the currently throttled fake promises of Telcos, Cable and DSL providers. Granted my experience is strictly with cable and it does suck, big time, for everyone at this time, with no good future in sight any time soon.

Heck I wish I got a consistent 2 MB down and 600 Kbps up (instead of 30 Kbps, much less than 200 Kbps, thus they are not providing me high speed internet even with the older FCC definition of 200 Kbps which only recently got updated to 768K, which is still a joke). I know it can NOT happen without government intervention as happened in Japan back before 2000. I seriously doubt that it will ever happen until some competitor enters the market offering fiber from their location to my home, period, end of discussion. (Note: FIOS and other current American ISP / Telco Fiber initiatives will not give Americans what other countries have had since 2000, read on... that joke is on all US consumers, sad really.)

government intervention is credited for 100MB/100MB in Japan

1GB / 1GB (for less than $55 per month)

Until we have a new competitor enter (very profitable, yet unlikely) the market or government intervention and regulation (much more likely to happen sooner thanks to the current administration), the current group of ISP and bandwidth providers will continue to ignore consumers, stick their collective noses up at our elected officials, showing their arses I might add. Obviously they would not be able to take billions (more than $200 billion) of our money via set asides, increased taxes and incentives if they did not pay off more than a few politicians.

While I challenge the Obama Administration to fix this, sadly too many current politicians (both Democrats and Republicans) are in the telco's pockets today. Heck they canno

"Quit rocking our boat, or we'll take our toys and go home."

At least he's not throwing things this time.

Who would not hate Bush PCs?

Is this some legalism, as in nutrition labeling, in which rounding is allowed? Can they round the power consumption to the nearest watt, and call anything drawing less than 0.5 watts "zero watts?"

I realize that geek.com does say "absolutely no power," but the farthest I can trace that statement is to pcworld, not to Siemens.

Revisionist history. It wasn't Slashdot that made people think Vista was slower than XP.

it was Infoworld:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/03/17/12TC-vista-versus-xp_6.html

and Fox news:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,314141,00.html

and PC World:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/129410/vista_ui_is_a_step_back_for_microsoft.html

and MICROSOFT when they told the gaming industry Vista was 10 to 15 percent slower (or virtually identical in your world)

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/027/1003027/vista-gaming-will-be-10-to-15-per-cent-slower-than-xp

(links from searching vista slower) Go on, now you can talk about how that was before the service pack, or pre-release, or whatever, but that is when reputations are built. Windows 7 is getting praise because the FIRST IMPRESSION is that it doesn't suck. Vista's first impression was that it generally was slower and used more memory. It isn't all about different caching strategies or Vista wouldn't be almost unusable on netbooks (and if that weren't the case Microsoft wouldn't have agreed to keep selling XP to netbook vendors). So give it a fucking rest and go troll some people who are stupid enough to believe you.

I bet you twelve internets that within two years these things will be selling like hot cakes.

Only if a big corporation named after a fruit gets in on the action.

Still true after all these years.

Granted it's been a few years since the article was written. The internet is much more useful, and the technology has gone a long way towards making them cheaper and better, but unless a company like Apple shoves this into the mainstream it's not going to get much farther than its predecessors.

This is a device to fill a very specific niche. One that most people currently have covered with their everyday computer.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/20/1624253

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/21/1543234

It was also on Wired: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/02/encryption-stil.html

Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/21/cold-boot-disk-encryption-attack-is-shockingly-effective/

Schneier's blog: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/02/cold_boot_attac.html

Information week: http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206801184

The Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/21/cold_boot_utilities/

Cnet: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10003167-83.html

PC World http://www.pcworld.com/video/id,762-page,1-bid,0/video.html

Boing Boing http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/19/cold-boot-encryption.html

It was even on reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS163325+27-Feb-2008+PRN20080227

It's not an obscure thing, you are just ignorant of major technology news. Perhaps the summary should define "CPU" and "linux" for you as well, just in case you don't what they are either.

See http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/155242/inside_tsubame_the_nvidia_gpu_supercomputer.html, for example.

Oh like citigroup buying a spanish highway construction company with 7bn euros in bailout money from our taxes?

http://www.thestreet.com/story/10450514/1/citi-to-buy-spanish-highway-operator.html?puc=_tscrss

Here's the day they got our bailout check. Note the dates:

http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSN2636427520081126

Yeap we paid for it. Be pissed, very pissed.

I can't believe regulators aren't all over them for this. What are we paying them for? What good is all this bailout money doing if they are just using it to buy foriegn companies instead of saving the jobs of the people that effing paid for the bailout? Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. That bailout money did NOT come from Europe.

Here's the layoff announcement of the US employees:
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/154130/citigroup_layoff_could_decimate_it_jobs.html

grrr

-Viz

That may be so, but I'd take the review here with a grain of salt.

Preston Gralla is pretty much the epitome of a breathless Windows fanboi. Try reading some of his articles about Vista...

To anyone who has been sitting on the fence over whether to upgrade to Microsoft's new operating system, I'll say it loud and clear: It's time to make the jump. There are plenty of reasons to leave Windows XP and install Vista.

Windows Vista: 15 Reasons to Switch

The conventional wisdom, that Mac's OS X is superior to Windows Vista, is flat-out wrong. In fact, despite much belief to the contrary, Vista is a superior operating system.

Five reasons why Vista beats Mac OS X

...and his blog here is full of pro MS/anti [any competitor] drivel.

Please read what they said before complaining about it.

They ARE fixing UAC, and they ARE slimming down Vista. I quote from the article.

Among the new features in Windows 7 are an updated interface, including a redesigned task bar; tools to make home networking simpler; and a reworking of the User Account Control feature, which annoyed many Vista users with its constant prompts. It also aims to give better performance than Vista and supports a touch-screen interface, though few PCs are likely to use that feature at first.

The minimum recommended hardware for the beta includes a 1-GHz processor, 1GB of system memory, 16GB of available disk space and support for DX9 graphics with 128MB of memory (to enable the Aero theme), Microsoft said.

(emphasis mine)

My mistake about this - it wasn't this article that had the "lean" part... it was this one:

At the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has announced a free public beta of the new OS, which reportedly will be less of a resource hog than Vista and may even run well on netbooks. The Windows 7 public beta is reportedly "feature complete" and will expire on Aug. 1, 2009.

Microsoft says Windows 7 is a leaner, stripped-down OS that will require as little as 1GB of memory. Then again, it's fair to be skeptical here. Vista has the same memory requirement but runs sluggishly on systems with 1GB of RAM.

(emphasis mine)

Sorry you can't author bluray, those five people with bluray players must be really bummed.

According to "PC World" in September Blu-ray's market share was 8% while "traditional" DVDs had the other 92%.

Falcon

I would hardly consider it a business laptop, and a road warrior's laptop in particular:

1. No matte screen option, only glossy
2. No built-in Ethernet, only clumsy optional USB-to-Ethernet adapter
3. One USB port (immediately taken by (2), necessitating carrying a USB hub)
4. 2GB RAM limit
5. 2.5 hr real-world battery life, without ability to replace in the field

It may be a cool fashion-statement device, but business-oriented travel laptop it is not.

PCWorld.com has a brief write-up detailing methods to ensure the unlock works. Additionally, they link to a chart on the yellowsn0w website which lists "supported" carriers. This answers my previous question/post.

I agree with enjoying tutorials that include video and so forth.

But the implementation didn't fail because animated characters are retarded. The implementation was retarded because Clippy, Bob and the Pathetic Fucking Search Puppy(*) just launched by themselves as an annoyance, not in response to a request for help. Further, as another poster suggested, the so-called help guessed very poorly what it was that was being worked on. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1078567&cid=26299781

Given that it's completely retarded and evil to have software work that way, it's actually internally self-consistent that these components are displayed in the most retarded fashion possible.

If they had done "a proper, professional, and serious implentation" as you suggest, then this dung would have never infected our minds.

I find the very same can be said of the company's commercials and several of their products (Access, anyone? That now-missing member of the Office Suite?)

The avatars were born in Bob, noted as the 7th worst product of all time, an open joke as the MS campus, and unfortunately not the dumbest idea ever at Microsoft. Links, in their respective order:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
http://www.pcworld.com/article/125772-3/the_25_worst_tech_products_of_all_time.html
http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/04/clippy_update_now_with_organiz.php
http://blog.tomevslin.com/2007/05/microsoft_memor.html
(yeah, I know how to inline the refs in html, but I prefer to let people clearly see where they're linking to)

(* Pathetic Fucking Search Puppy - Ask for it by name!)

Link

"Early this morning we were alerted by our customers that there was a widespread issue affecting our 2006 model Zune 30GB devices (a large number of which are still actively being used). The technical team jumped on the problem immediately and isolated the issue: a bug in the internal clock driver related to the way the device handles a leap year.

"That being the case, the issue should be resolved over the next 24 hours as the time change moves to January 1, 2009. We expect the internal clock on the Zune 30GB devices will automatically reset tomorrow (noon, GMT). By tomorrow you should allow the battery to fully run out of power before the unit can restart successfully then simply ensure that your device is recharged, then turn it back on.

Bonus: No leap-second problem to deal with today.

Here you go!

...100MB up and a 100 MB down...

Whoa! Those are some steep caps dude! Maybe you skiped something, like per second?

[/UnitNazi]

Caps, NO CAPS! (... watched Independence Day again) No compromise is acceptable here!

If the companies in question had built out their infrastructures with the additional taxes and fees legislatures allotted them (Why have U.S. customers paid an estimated $200 billion in higher services rates and tax breaks for fiber-optic networks they never received?) for that specific purpose, we would not be having this exchange today, nor would there be a need for the farce that are bandwidth caps or per message charges on text messaging and the other BS we are told by companies in order to gouge us for more money. They do us no favors and provide even poorer service!

If I had been referring to caps I would agree with you...rather I want the bandwidth I have paid for (ie. no throttling). My bandwidth should allow for 100 Mbps / 100 Mbps synchronous communications via fiber (doubt any other media will allow for it) as they have had in Japan since pre 2000 thanks to Japanese government intervention. We should have had this in 1996, however are (US) legislative leaders have let us down yet again. Both Republicans and Democrats are guilty (Even pre-Clinton, as far back as 1991, the Bell companies made very promising statements about their commitment to fiber-optic networks.) of sabatoging our children's futures.

Now in Japan, since they wisely built out their fiber infrastructure years ago, are starting to offer 1GB / 1GB (for less than $55 per month) synchronous bandwidth to customers homes.

Here in America, we have been sold (and continue to be sold) down the river by are leaders, politicians, our ISPs, the telcos and others. (United States could add $500 billion annually to its GDP)

• Overall, using a 20-year analysis of major revenues and expenses, we found that once deregulation laws went through, the Bells became a cash machine. - why didn't they spend some of this money updating their infrastructure?
• Phone companies were once regulated....Profits were ... 11-13% ⦠Under alternative regulation (i.e., deregulation),...Profits â¦jumped to 30%, more than double the original. ⦠also received massive tax write-offs on the promise they would build fiber-optic networks...
• The phone companies argued for deregulation in part because they said it would allow them to use the extra profits to construct new services, including fiber-optic lines. In fact, however, such capital expenditures dropped from 24% of Bellsâ(TM) total expenses in the early 1980s to just 14% of expenses in 2004. ...high speed networks could have been built.
• The primary difference today between the United States and other countries is that instead of diverting funds away from upgrade commitments, ⦠other countries made sure the money went into ground wiring and other upgrades. The U.S. lacked the regulatory will for enforcing the agreements, and ⦠(were not) held accountable.
• About all fiber deployments over the last few years by telcos...

Just to make sure that you know, MS is currently being sued for reducing its "Vista Ready" requirements so that hardware which wasn't capable (mostly Intel graphics chips) was labeled as being so.

The great thing about this fiasco is that I was able to convince several people who had been un-willing to move to Firefox or Opera to now do so.

Mozilla has issued eight patches for its Firefox Web browser, three of which fix problems classified as critical.

Man, you really showed them.

802.11N is not finished yet. Stop buying draft N hardware. You're ruining the standard.

I might have agreed with this (or rather, with criticism of manufacturers releasing "Draft N" hardware) 18 months back. However, 802.11n has been awaiting final release for ages, and it supposedly *still* isn't due until the end of next year. That's a ridiculous length of time.

According to the date on this article, the first "draft N" routers were already out more than 2.5 years ago. Slap another year on that and you're talking up to 3.5 years wait for someone who wanted an official 802.11n device instead of enjoying the benefits of Pre-N/Draft-N in the meantime.

I couldn't in good conscience criticise someone for not waiting another bloody year, even if it's not 100% clear if all the current routers will definitely support the final 802.11n standard.

I really don't see the light at the end of the tunnel with Windows 7, either.

Agreed. I mean, Windows 7 will be a better OS, higher performing than Windows Vista. I don't doubt this, because this has been a goal for Microsoft this time. "Don't do much to Vista, but we need to make it faster and earn a better reputation with it, and in the process, stop using the tainted Vista brand name". I think that's the idea.

But... This won't solve any issues Vista had with legacy applications -- it's still a major OS revision away from XP, because Vista was. Even worse, one of the more recent publicized builds of Windows 7 had a surprising amount of compatibility issues, for being a minor OS revision. (Windows 7 is internally really Windows 6.1 as for the kernel and shell) Oh sure, the popular apps having problems will be fixed probably by Microsoft cooperating with the companies and coming up with workarounds, but what about the rest?

What about latency and reliability? I'm happy with 3.6 Mbit/s, or even lower, if I get a reliable connection with low latency. Rock solid 512 kbit/s with 20 ms latency would be preferable to anything available in the mobile market right now.

I will be happy when I get 100 MB / 100 MB bi-directional access to the internet for around $50 per month. Heck the Japanese have had this level since 2003 and now in 2008 they are migrating up to 1GB / 1Gb for less than $55.00 per month. How far behind do we have to fall anyway?

As for

Who cares about bandwidth?

I do!

I still want the same speed upstream as I am getting downstream. Enough excuses already time to honor your promises to the United States government and U.S. consumers. (Note: While some of the telcos that promised no longer exist, I would suggest that the homes and area that they serviced does still exist. The business that acquired their area, should also acquire responsibility to build out that area per the promises that the telco that was bought made. I would suggest that they bought both the assets and the liabilities. I believe this liability, a public trust if you will, should be passed on as it is attached to our tax dollars, fees-still-being-charged every month and government funding and therefore should not be ignored because the business was purchased and/or acquired....my .02 cents)

As of 2008, no US customers have the 45 Mbps bidirectional service to our homes and you guys promised to have 86 million customers receiving 45 Mbps by 2006. And certainly not for the expected cost of .50 cents per 1 Mbps of bi-directional bandwidth.

And do NOT state that you are providing high speed access to consumers based on the FCC definition of high speed internet, 200Kbps - try to run videos at that speed, high speed my behind....

Also about bandwidth, I want to be able to consume the total amount of bandwidth that I am (and have been) actually paying for. It's not my fault that the telcos and internet providers have taken money from consumers and the U.S. government (estimated at over $200 billion since early 1990s in the form of tax breaks; increases service fees and outright government funding) and used it for buying up companies rather than building out their infrastructures. ( Funny how similar the telcos reaction to receiving money was to the current financial companies and banks that received the buy in / bail out money by the government recently).

I am concerned that the wireless providers will play the same sleight of hand with or without the FCC for wireless internet that they have been playing with hard wired access. Surprised they are not asking for tax breaks, money or a bail out as well!

Now for a question to those of you who say reduce the latency and than work on speed, because I honestly do NOT know the answer. Here is the question:

If you had 100MB / 100MB (bi-directional) at how high a latency (how slow could it get) until you were as slow as what the average American high speed internet user gets today? (Assume an average bandwidth of 8.8 Mbps downstream (I do not get that either, but it is the average listed in the articl

I'll pay for education. I don't want to pay for the No Child Gets Ahead program bullshit, where half the money is pissed away on a minority of kids who'd be better served in vocational or other alternative education, instead of dragging everyone else down.

People don't trust the educational system because teachers have been hamstrung by lawsuits, the administration is a political bullshit quagmire (seriously... talk to any teacher you know about the administration of their school), and you can't get intelligent, capable people to teach because males are suspected of being closet child molesters simply for being men, and anyone who is on the fence about teaching goes into private enterprise because the personal risk is much lower, and the pay is the same if not better.

Oh, and further news in that case: http://blogs.pcworld.com/tipsandtweaks/archives/003741.html

I'll pay for education. I don't want to pay for the No Child Gets Ahead program bullshit, where half the money is pissed away on a minority of kids who'd be better served in vocational or other alternative education, instead of dragging everyone else down.

People don't trust the educational system because teachers have been hamstrung by lawsuits, the administration is a political bullshit quagmire (seriously... talk to any teacher you know about the administration of their school), and you can't get intelligent, capable people to teach because males are suspected of being closet child molesters simply for being men, and anyone who is on the fence about teaching goes into private enterprise because the personal risk is much lower, and the pay is the same if not better.

Oh, and further news in that case: http://blogs.pcworld.com/tipsandtweaks/archives/003741.html

I wouldn't say nobody is doing anything.. Just because Apple doesn't get the treatment MS has gotten, doesn't mean nobody cares or does anything. ;) The Ombudsman of Norway has since sometime 2006 been in a legal battle against Apple for locking music on iTunes to their iPod's, demanding that it either only sell music playable on other players or open up iTunes to be able to export music to a format playable by other players (eg. DRM-free MP3). The latest development is that the case has going to be brought up for Markedsrådet (eng: The marketing council, a court for marketing related cases), which basically has the authority to set requirements for what Apple may sell/market in Norway. This may just lead to Apple stopping all sales of non-iTunes Plus music in Norway, solving the problem but leaving us with only a subset of the available music on iTunes..

Though a Mac is not an alternative for me, as so much of my software is not available on Mac and I'm not about to buy it all again anyway.

Um, why would you have to buy it again? I'm pretty sure it will run just fine on a Mac.

A much fairer comparison would be to install a fresh bloatware-free install of XP Pro in bootcamp on the Macbook Pro. You might be surprised at the results.

Done by PC World in 2007 with Vista. They labeled the macbook pro "The fastest Windows Vista notebook we've tested this year". Maybe YOU would be surprised if you'd tried.

Here's why!

Microsoft Signs MSN Toolbar Deal With Sun

Google caught wind of a Microsoft/Sun deal.

Ballmer's probably just peeved that he won't get to be Secretary of State now. Muahahahahaha.

Do note, this is the US market only, and only in July/August of this year. It was 17.6% in June. It worse world-wide, 4.6% in March. Of course, these are sales, not installed base, which make Apple look better (you can find installed base numbers, also called market share, out there; basically halve the numbers).

Just FYI, they very recently claimed this:

Microsoft: Moving to Windows 7 Easy for Device Makers

How much does bandwidth actually cost for a major ISP? ... Imagine if the cable companies capped how much TV you could watch per month.

Less than $5.00 per month their cost, for what we would pay $50 or more for per month for. IMO $50 per month for 100MB / 100MB or .5 per Gig is too much. If only never-to-be-throttled 100MB / 100MB would be offered to us...

Of course 100 MB / 100 MB is not yet available to us here in the USA. But it is coming, and when it does watch out...

In Japan they have had, thanks to forced government de-regulation, 100MB / 100MB since 2000 for around $25 per month.

I liked this quote from the above link:

"Obviously, without the competition, we would not have done all this at this pace," said Hideki Ohmichi, NTT's senior manager for public relations.

I heard another Japanese telecom executive state that it cost them less than $5.00 to provide services to customers on a PBS show. You will not hear American executives telling American consumers that it costs them less than $5.00 per month. The American telecom executives on the show / panel had pained expressions on their faces. I am sure they are counting on their customers remaining oblivious to how much we are getting hurt by charging more for less; throttling services based on type of services; putting caps on services; etc....

If it costs less than $5.00 per month for a fiber link, than why is anyone, anywhere else in the world paying more for less. And once you learn of these facts, it really does make you mad when shills for the US cable and DSL companies come out complaining the opposite is true. I am sick of the lies and many innocent people jumping on the band wagon only because they are in the dark and do not know any better, WAKE UP please for all of our sakes.

Eventually there will be a company in your area offering uncapped, fiber-last-mile connection to your home, apartment, community and you will be able to thank your ISP for years of abuse by churning.

The more they piss off customers, the less sympathy any of us should have for them. I know I do not feel sorry for any of them. And marketing campaigns to buy American and get screwed will not work on me and many others either.

Now in Japan they are upgrading from 100MB / 100MB to 1GB / 1GB because their infrastructure, Fiber, will allow them to make this change simply by changing out the router on each end. Or if you already have a fiber router, just changing out the firmware in it. The expected cost for 1GB / 1Gb is expected to be less than $55.00 per month. Forum posts discussing the new technology; UK Inquirer article. I wish we had this available in the USA.

USA consumers should have had this back in 2000, perhaps as early as 1998 in some larger cities, definitely by 2003. Here it is 2008 and we still can't get service anywhere near 100MB / 100MB. Pathetic and definitely NOT FORGIVABLE! How many of you reading this understand that the telcos promised higher speeds and collected money for those promises that they reneged on?

We, the USA High Speed Internet consumer, have been getting screwed for years. Our only chance will be if government steps in as they did in Japan and forces the hands of the major telcos, cable companies and related telecommunications companies. Normally I am NOT for government regulation however, as Japan has proved and the US telcos have shown by their lack of keeping promises they made, in thi

Intel has been hit with antitrust charges in several countries. I assumed a Slashdot reader would be familiar.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070726-eu-slaps-intel-with-formal-antitrust-charges.html

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Weblets/0,,7832_12670_13242,00.html

http://www.pcworld.com/article/142443/intel_and_antitrust_a_brief_history.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_v._Intel

"This is because the Korea Fair Trade Commission has issued a fine of US$25.4 million against Intel."

Several vendors have come forward to corroborate AMD's story, and issue statements against Intel for these cases.

I could keep going, but that should suffice.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/114176/philips_shows_networked_tv_home_theater.html is what I saw.
I wouldn't want that on wireless though. I stream video on wireless and works ok, but slows down everything else if I'm not careful.

I am afraid that you still not see my point: there is nothing you can do with a registry that you cannot do with a filesystem and config files. A registry just adds complexity.

And I have seen multiple ways of storing data in the registry, so there is no convention that is followed, just like there is no convention that is followed on conf files.

It indeed is standardized; very badly. It only add complexity and solves nothing of the problems caused by conf files.
Easily accessible it is not; I would not try to tell my mother to start regedit32. And from a programmer pov: take a look at the Preferences API in Java. That API is simple, straightforward, and allows for multiple implementations.
All in one place: that is actually a very bad thing. Look at all the troubles the registry has caused, and for so many people, just because the registry is in one place. Single point of failure + Microsoft == headaches. Sometimes you need to change things in your registry for a certain application, but Microsoft warns that any changes to the registry can make the whole OS unstable. In no other modern operating system you are confronted with these complexities. Changing a conf file for an application on a *nix machine will not cause the whole OS to become unstable.
Also look at all the crapware that is able to hide in the registry; all possible because there is no rights management; either you can write in the registry, or you cannot. Application A can always read/write settings for application B. That is very, very bad design.

Again: lookup articles about it: the registry is a p.o.s.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000939.html
http://www.pcworld.com/article/149951/how_to_clean_your_windows_registry_and_speed_up_your_pc.html
I recon that for every registry-fan you can find at least 10 foes. Go to any programmer convention and ask around. I did.

If you really think that the registry is the answer, you did not understand the question.

any harm caused ... is far outweighed by the act's "notice-and-takedown" provision and the safe harbor that this provides to intermediary ISPs

Revenue:

Comcast
AT&T
Verizon

These billion-dollar companies are charging us exorbitant rates for service and still don't have enough balls to stand up to the other bullies on the block (ex. MPAA & RIAA)?

any harm caused ... is far outweighed by the act's "notice-and-takedown" provision and the safe harbor that this provides to intermediary ISPs

Revenue:

Comcast
AT&T
Verizon

These billion-dollar companies are charging us exorbitant rates for service and still don't have enough balls to stand up to the other bullies on the block (ex. MPAA & RIAA)?

This review, from 2007, is of a Dell XPS M1210 laptop (12.1 in screen), which I've owned for over a year.

http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/product/29878/review/xps_m1210.html

On one hand the hardware is old and could probably use a revamp... on the other hand we did miss a few major bullets.

After all, NASA could have decided to run Windows ME with an Nvidia graphics card with an IBM Deskstar 75GXP

On one hand the hardware is old and could probably use a revamp... on the other hand we did miss a few major bullets.

After all, NASA could have decided to run Windows ME with an Nvidia graphics card with an IBM Deskstar 75GXP

I hate to rant about windows firewall, i really do, so i'll let pcworld do it http://www.pcworld.com/article/39841/firewalls_plug_holes_revealed_by_security_test.html

i'll give you hint windows firewall in a leak test scored a 0 out of 6-7000 points. don't recall the exact total score, but windows SP2 firewall is not 'enough firewall for the average user' even the vista sp1 firewall has questionable merit being turned on.

Actually there are add-ons available to bring the old file menu style back in addition to the ribbon. I know there are some free ones around because I downloaded one months ago, but heres a link to one that has a trial/buy. http://www.pcworld.com/article/130635/office_2007_addon_adds_back_classic_menus.html

From an article in PC world I recently read. it is the last 'trick' on the first page.

SpoofCard

How illegal can it be?