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I was expecting someone to come up with the fact that Olympic official website of NBC (which runs in free economy) will force you to run Windows or OS X (if Silverlight 2 isn't late!) if you want to see the videos. Instead it is the cold war all over again along with needless defence of their country by their citizens.

Lets say you are a happy Ubuntu user but somehow interested in Olympic content. As Icaza (future author of future clone) already started whining, the only way to watch videos from official site will be install windows. As nobody will pay for Windows, they will pirate it, an american product! Guess who is the king of Windows piracy? China! That is the real red conspiracy my friend! ;)

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,143232-page,1/article.html

Your point about MS Vista is valid, but the perceptions about XP might be based on two quirks. One is that problems fade over time. After about 2½ - 3 years it seems that most people forget the bad things and remember only a rosy picture. I'll get back to that. The other quirk is that people quickly get used to a lower level of performance and adjust their expectations and behavior accordingly. Spam and lost e-mail are the best example, but XP is a lot less flexible in many ways than 2000 was.

Getting back to rosy memories. SP2 was released far behind schedule and long after the initial hype. XP SP2 broke hundreds of applications, many had followed MS dogma about DCOM and other non-standard, mS-annointed methods of developing applications. As far as the whole operating system goes, XP SP2 brought down around 15% of XP machines to the point where the systems had to be rebuilt from scratch. Many reviewers likened the service pack to a trial of pain more like a full operating systems upgrade than a service pack.

Don't even start about the DRM, licensing and interoperability problems that SP2 added.

What's really tragic, is that despite the egregious problems of XP and, later, XP SP2, it seems like a rose garden compared to MS Vista. The good part about Google's emphasis on WINE rather than native Linux, Solaris, or BSD applications would be that it facilitates those who can hold out a bit longer in XP to be able to upgrade to a modern system, hopping off MS Windows completely, and avoiding the twin Tar Babies of MS Office 2007 and MS Vista.

When Mossberg asked if we needed to fix copyright policy, McCain gave a tentative yes: "I think we probably do," to applause from the audience. "But it's got to be carefully thought through--most members of Congress do not understand the complexity of these issues." However, when Mossbrg said that many people think that U.S. patent law is allowing companies to patent existing ideas, and asked McCain if this was a problem on his radar screen, McCain gave such a firm "No!" that it prompted audience laughter.

"I want to focus on the big things," he said.

Stop Tax Shelter Patents by prohibiting the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office from issuing patents for "inventions designed to minimize, avoid, defer, or otherwise affect liability for Federal, State, local, or foreign tax"

Yup. Pr0n started coming out last March on Blu-Ray.

If' they're dropping cooling components due to lower heat output, I wonder if that means this picture is for real.

plus, there was just an article on digg where real was considered badware: http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/006421.html

this is about speculation about the possibility of a service pack being released by Microsoft.this is about speculation about the possibility of a service pack being released by Microsoft.

for an OS no one is using. Microsoft promissed to release SP1 some time first quarter of 2008, so there's no real news here. SP1 itself only of interest to those poor deluded people who think SP1 is going to make a difference in Vista performance. You can feel the cognitive dissidence radiating from people like this but they are few and far between. The rest of the world has written Vista off.

Why am I even reading these comments? Microsoft story comments are mega-Gauss troll magnets.

Here are a few Firefox flaws. The list was made quickly; it is not extensive. Hundreds of articles have been written about Firefox problems; the articles mentioned here are just some I found during a quick search. The overall impression I get is that Firefox development is very badly managed.

CPU hogging: I've typed every comment in this thread under the same conditions: Firefox is taking 30-40% of the CPU. This has been reported many, many times, by many, many people. Leaving Firefox open for days, as when doing extended research, especially when the computer has been put into hibernation, causes Firefox to hog the CPU. Firefox actually corrupts Windows XP so that it is necessary to reboot the computer, not just Firefox.

The CPU hogging bug affects the most heavy users of Firefox.

Here is one of the many stories about Firefox CPU hogging, the February 08, 2007 PCWorld staff blog: Help! Firefox is Sucking the Life From My Processor!. Quote: "... Windows Task Manager shows that Firefox is bogarting 90 percent or more of my processing power. The problem happens pretty consistently on three different Windows machines I use."

Abuse by the developers of those who report bugs: Apparently developers have refused to start numerous windows and tabs so that they could see the CPU bug for themselves. That's been the response to the CPU hogging bug reports I've seen.

Firefox developers seem to be involved in work avoidance schemes. They don't seem to want to work on bugs that require extended troubleshooting.

Firefox cannot be made portable. Bad choices have been made in how Firefox handles its files. Running a portable version of Firefox is impossible if a version started from a hard drive is running.

Firefox will not allow multiple instances. If something goes wrong with one Firefox window and tabs, it affects all the windows and tabs that are running.

Firefox session restore is not reliable. If there happen to be delays in restoring a tab, possibly because other tabs were loading, Firefox throws away the URL, rather than simply displaying it in the tab with a blank window.

Firefox hogs memory. See the ComputerWorld article, Hands on: A look at Firefox's memory issues. Quote: "It's clear to me that there are pandemic memory problems in Firefox, and also that Mozilla has not responded adequately to them." Since that article was published, Firefox developers have fixed numerous memory management bugs, while continuing to deny that any exist.

Firefox advertises extensions, then blames them for problems. A common topic of articles about Firefox is some variation of "How to make Firefox work the way it should".

Often Firefox developers blame Firefox extensions advertised on the Mozilla web site.

From the PC World Article linked to from the article linked to in the summary:

"Mattel values its intellectual property and actively protects its brands and trademarks."

If they don't defend their trademark everytime they see it being used outside of a licensing deal, they can lose it. You may not like it, but that's the way it is. You want it changed, change the law. I'd also like to point out that trademark law, at its best, actually protects consumers from shoddy ripoffs of the product they thought they were buying.

EMC just announced this this morning. They are going to start haveing soldi state drives in there DMX-4 storage arrays. "EMC plans to offer flash drives in 73 GB and 146 GB capacities for the Symmetrix DMX-4 platform beginning later in Q1 2008". http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/141323/emc_readies_solidstate_drives_to_replace_disk_storage.html

MC-10. My first PC. Borrowed a book from a friend with a bunch of BASIC games and quickly learned how to modify the games to be more entertaining. Wrote my own crude etch-a-sketch program from scratch. Wow, the memories...

1983? I was 10...

My 11 year old son is whipping me silly. Play video games? nah, he'd rather modify the subsurfaces controlling the wire frames of his latest character he has created in blender. (or something like that - I honestly have very little idea of what he's doing, but it looks cool!)

It's there, it's number 4. And having written code on most of these, it wasn't too bad once you got used to it.

10. Commodore 64 (1982)
The Commodore 64 sits on a mile-high pedestal in the adolescent memories of millions of people, but its keyboard design--shared by Commodore's earlier VIC-20--was incredibly clumsy. One glance at it reveals three major flaws. It was visually confusing, with too many symbols printed on each key. The computer's anti-ergonomic 2-inch height made it extremely hard on the wrists of untrained typists. And the keyboard's layout leaves much to be desired, with numerous examples of poor key placement. For example, the Home/Clear key sat directly to the left of Delete (Backspace), resulting in users' making repeated accidental hits and sending the cursor back up to the top of the screen. In addition, the layout was peppered with an unusually large number of nonstandard keys such as Run/Stop and Restore. Luckily, most C64 owners remained oblivious to these problems: More often than not, they used the C64 for playing games with joysticks, saving the heavy computing work for dad's IBM PC.

9. Timex Sinclair 2068 (1983)
In the process of "improving" the wildly successful Sinclair ZX Spectrum for the United States market, Timex ruined the line with a bastardized version known as the Timex Sinclair 2068. But the 2068 shared one significant feature with its progenitor that it should have left behind: an atrocious keyboard. It's no exaggeration to say that using the 2068's keyboard without training was like trying to type while drunk and blindfolded. Some of the keys controlled as many as six different functions. Just to rub it all in, the unit had no Backspace key, a fault of many other early home computers. Did the designers assume that typists would never make mistakes? I bet the masterminds behind the 2068's keyboard backspaced over this part of their design history long ago.

8. Commodore PET 2001-32-N (1978)
Critics hailed the revised, full-stroke keyboard of the updated Commodore PET (model 2001-32-N) as a huge improvement over Commodore's first PET keyboard. But Commodore still got a few layout points terribly wrong. For one thing, the design repeated the old "Run/Stop key placed directly to the left of the Return key" trick. For another, it went with the ever-popular "lack of Backspace" maneuver; to perform something resembling a Backspace, you had to hold Shift and the left/right cursor key above the numeric keypad. And since the creators of this keyboard included a numeric keypad in the design, they cleverly omitted numbers from the primary keyboard area altogether--if you pressed keys that would conjure up numbers on any other remotely semistandard QWERTY keyboard, you'd get symbols instead. And hey, has anyone seen the period key? Oh, it's over there on the numeric keypad.

7. Texas Instruments TI-99/4 (1979)
With the release of the TI-99/4 in 1979, integrated-circuit pioneer TI took its first shaky steps into the home computer market with a $1150 package that included a special monitor and a calculator-like Chiclet keyboard. Like the original Apple II, the 99/4 did not support lowercase letters. Because of this limitation, the Shift key served as a function modifier, with the functions typically marked on a plastic overlay. The most frustrating of these key combinations was Shift-Q, which would quit a program or reset the computer, much to the chagrin of users who lost a day's work while erroneously trying to capitalize the letter Q. The 99/4's layout problems extended beyond the Q conundrum: The Enter key sat where a Right Shift key would normally reside on a standard layout. Also, the keyboard had a space key instead of a spacebar, and it was located in an odd position. The design had no dedicated Backspace key,

10. Commodore 64 (1982)
The Commodore 64 sits on a mile-high pedestal in the adolescent memories of millions of people, but its keyboard design--shared by Commodore's earlier VIC-20--was incredibly clumsy. One glance at it reveals three major flaws. It was visually confusing, with too many symbols printed on each key. The computer's anti-ergonomic 2-inch height made it extremely hard on the wrists of untrained typists. And the keyboard's layout leaves much to be desired, with numerous examples of poor key placement. For example, the Home/Clear key sat directly to the left of Delete (Backspace), resulting in users' making repeated accidental hits and sending the cursor back up to the top of the screen. In addition, the layout was peppered with an unusually large number of nonstandard keys such as Run/Stop and Restore. Luckily, most C64 owners remained oblivious to these problems: More often than not, they used the C64 for playing games with joysticks, saving the heavy computing work for dad's IBM PC.

9. Timex Sinclair 2068 (1983)
In the process of "improving" the wildly successful Sinclair ZX Spectrum for the United States market, Timex ruined the line with a bastardized version known as the Timex Sinclair 2068. But the 2068 shared one significant feature with its progenitor that it should have left behind: an atrocious keyboard. It's no exaggeration to say that using the 2068's keyboard without training was like trying to type while drunk and blindfolded. Some of the keys controlled as many as six different functions. Just to rub it all in, the unit had no Backspace key, a fault of many other early home computers. Did the designers assume that typists would never make mistakes? I bet the masterminds behind the 2068's keyboard backspaced over this part of their design history long ago.

8. Commodore PET 2001-32-N (1978)
Critics hailed the revised, full-stroke keyboard of the updated Commodore PET (model 2001-32-N) as a huge improvement over Commodore's first PET keyboard. But Commodore still got a few layout points terribly wrong. For one thing, the design repeated the old "Run/Stop key placed directly to the left of the Return key" trick. For another, it went with the ever-popular "lack of Backspace" maneuver; to perform something resembling a Backspace, you had to hold Shift and the left/right cursor key above the numeric keypad. And since the creators of this keyboard included a numeric keypad in the design, they cleverly omitted numbers from the primary keyboard area altogether--if you pressed keys that would conjure up numbers on any other remotely semistandard QWERTY keyboard, you'd get symbols instead. And hey, has anyone seen the period key? Oh, it's over there on the numeric keypad.

7. Texas Instruments TI-99/4 (1979)
With the release of the TI-99/4 in 1979, integrated-circuit pioneer TI took its first shaky steps into the home computer market with a $1150 package that included a special monitor and a calculator-like Chiclet keyboard. Like the original Apple II, the 99/4 did not support lowercase letters. Because of this limitation, the Shift key served as a function modifier, with the functions typically marked on a plastic overlay. The most frustrating of these key combinations was Shift-Q, which would quit a program or reset the computer, much to the chagrin of users who lost a day's work while erroneously trying to capitalize the letter Q. The 99/4's layout problems extended beyond the Q conundrum: The Enter key sat where a Right Shift key would normally reside on a standard layout. Also, the keyboard had a space key instead of a spacebar, and it was located in an odd position. The design had no dedicated Backspace key,

10. Commodore 64 (1982)
The Commodore 64 sits on a mile-high pedestal in the adolescent memories of millions of people, but its keyboard design--shared by Commodore's earlier VIC-20--was incredibly clumsy. One glance at it reveals three major flaws. It was visually confusing, with too many symbols printed on each key. The computer's anti-ergonomic 2-inch height made it extremely hard on the wrists of untrained typists. And the keyboard's layout leaves much to be desired, with numerous examples of poor key placement. For example, the Home/Clear key sat directly to the left of Delete (Backspace), resulting in users' making repeated accidental hits and sending the cursor back up to the top of the screen. In addition, the layout was peppered with an unusually large number of nonstandard keys such as Run/Stop and Restore. Luckily, most C64 owners remained oblivious to these problems: More often than not, they used the C64 for playing games with joysticks, saving the heavy computing work for dad's IBM PC.

9. Timex Sinclair 2068 (1983)
In the process of "improving" the wildly successful Sinclair ZX Spectrum for the United States market, Timex ruined the line with a bastardized version known as the Timex Sinclair 2068. But the 2068 shared one significant feature with its progenitor that it should have left behind: an atrocious keyboard. It's no exaggeration to say that using the 2068's keyboard without training was like trying to type while drunk and blindfolded. Some of the keys controlled as many as six different functions. Just to rub it all in, the unit had no Backspace key, a fault of many other early home computers. Did the designers assume that typists would never make mistakes? I bet the masterminds behind the 2068's keyboard backspaced over this part of their design history long ago.

8. Commodore PET 2001-32-N (1978)
Critics hailed the revised, full-stroke keyboard of the updated Commodore PET (model 2001-32-N) as a huge improvement over Commodore's first PET keyboard. But Commodore still got a few layout points terribly wrong. For one thing, the design repeated the old "Run/Stop key placed directly to the left of the Return key" trick. For another, it went with the ever-popular "lack of Backspace" maneuver; to perform something resembling a Backspace, you had to hold Shift and the left/right cursor key above the numeric keypad. And since the creators of this keyboard included a numeric keypad in the design, they cleverly omitted numbers from the primary keyboard area altogether--if you pressed keys that would conjure up numbers on any other remotely semistandard QWERTY keyboard, you'd get symbols instead. And hey, has anyone seen the period key? Oh, it's over there on the numeric keypad.

7. Texas Instruments TI-99/4 (1979)
With the release of the TI-99/4 in 1979, integrated-circuit pioneer TI took its first shaky steps into the home computer market with a $1150 package that included a special monitor and a calculator-like Chiclet keyboard. Like the original Apple II, the 99/4 did not support lowercase letters. Because of this limitation, the Shift key served as a function modifier, with the functions typically marked on a plastic overlay. The most frustrating of these key combinations was Shift-Q, which would quit a program or reset the computer, much to the chagrin of users who lost a day's work while erroneously trying to capitalize the letter Q. The 99/4's layout problems extended beyond the Q conundrum: The Enter key sat where a Right Shift key would normally reside on a standard layout. Also, the keyboard had a space key instead of a spacebar, and it was located in an odd position. The design had no dedicated Backspace key,

10. Commodore 64 (1982)
The Commodore 64 sits on a mile-high pedestal in the adolescent memories of millions of people, but its keyboard design--shared by Commodore's earlier VIC-20--was incredibly clumsy. One glance at it reveals three major flaws. It was visually confusing, with too many symbols printed on each key. The computer's anti-ergonomic 2-inch height made it extremely hard on the wrists of untrained typists. And the keyboard's layout leaves much to be desired, with numerous examples of poor key placement. For example, the Home/Clear key sat directly to the left of Delete (Backspace), resulting in users' making repeated accidental hits and sending the cursor back up to the top of the screen. In addition, the layout was peppered with an unusually large number of nonstandard keys such as Run/Stop and Restore. Luckily, most C64 owners remained oblivious to these problems: More often than not, they used the C64 for playing games with joysticks, saving the heavy computing work for dad's IBM PC.

9. Timex Sinclair 2068 (1983)
In the process of "improving" the wildly successful Sinclair ZX Spectrum for the United States market, Timex ruined the line with a bastardized version known as the Timex Sinclair 2068. But the 2068 shared one significant feature with its progenitor that it should have left behind: an atrocious keyboard. It's no exaggeration to say that using the 2068's keyboard without training was like trying to type while drunk and blindfolded. Some of the keys controlled as many as six different functions. Just to rub it all in, the unit had no Backspace key, a fault of many other early home computers. Did the designers assume that typists would never make mistakes? I bet the masterminds behind the 2068's keyboard backspaced over this part of their design history long ago.

8. Commodore PET 2001-32-N (1978)
Critics hailed the revised, full-stroke keyboard of the updated Commodore PET (model 2001-32-N) as a huge improvement over Commodore's first PET keyboard. But Commodore still got a few layout points terribly wrong. For one thing, the design repeated the old "Run/Stop key placed directly to the left of the Return key" trick. For another, it went with the ever-popular "lack of Backspace" maneuver; to perform something resembling a Backspace, you had to hold Shift and the left/right cursor key above the numeric keypad. And since the creators of this keyboard included a numeric keypad in the design, they cleverly omitted numbers from the primary keyboard area altogether--if you pressed keys that would conjure up numbers on any other remotely semistandard QWERTY keyboard, you'd get symbols instead. And hey, has anyone seen the period key? Oh, it's over there on the numeric keypad.

7. Texas Instruments TI-99/4 (1979)
With the release of the TI-99/4 in 1979, integrated-circuit pioneer TI took its first shaky steps into the home computer market with a $1150 package that included a special monitor and a calculator-like Chiclet keyboard. Like the original Apple II, the 99/4 did not support lowercase letters. Because of this limitation, the Shift key served as a function modifier, with the functions typically marked on a plastic overlay. The most frustrating of these key combinations was Shift-Q, which would quit a program or reset the computer, much to the chagrin of users who lost a day's work while erroneously trying to capitalize the letter Q. The 99/4's layout problems extended beyond the Q conundrum: The Enter key sat where a Right Shift key would normally reside on a standard layout. Also, the keyboard had a space key instead of a spacebar, and it was located in an odd position. The design had no dedicated Backspace key,

Your reaction to fast motion on DLP is really interesting - it's the first I've heard of it. We have a 61" DLP at thome, and have not noticed any illness during fast movies like any of the Bourne series of flicks.

Maybe you have what I jokingly call "Sniper Eyes," which my kids have, when they focus rapidly on my moving head during TF2 sniper war sessions on 2Fort (insert booming UT voice here: HEADSHOT!)

I did some googling, and it might not be the fact that it's a DLP screen. See here , where the writer claims even LCDs can cause them.

There are at least eight different "versions" of Windows Server 2008:, depending on what features are crippled:

1. Windows Server 2008 Standard, $999 (with five Client Access Licenses, or CALs);
2. Standard without Hyper-V, $971 (with five CALs);
3. Enterprise, $3,999 (with 25 CALs);
4. Enterprise without Hyper-V, $3,971 (with 25 CALs);
5. Datacenter, $2,999 (per processor);
6. Datacenter without Hyper-V, $2,971 (per processor);
7. Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-based Systems, $2,999 (per processor); and
8. Windows Web Server 2008, $469.

This change only affects the crippling level on #8.

The word scam is not on the page you linked to.

Since the OLPC is a scam, and none will really ever end up released... isn't an injunction preventing them from shipping the OLPC to Nigeria kind of useless?

BTW, I'm sure the irony of the OLPC scammers being sued, by a scammer, in Nigeria (!!!) is lost on nobody. If it were any more divorced from reality, it would tear a hole in the space-time continuum.

The fastest is at 6x though there are no 6x media right now.
These days most of new desktop BD drive products are 4x at $500.

LG GGW-H20L Blu-ray Drive/HD DVD Reader
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140332/article.html

>The GGW-H20L is the first Blu-ray Disc burner to support 6X speed for writing to BD-R.
>That's up from 4X on the GGW-H10N, and up from 2X on the early Blu-ray Disc burners
> from Plextor, Sony, and Pioneer. In the PC World Test Center's evaluation, the
> drive's performance reflected its boosted specs even on slower speed-rated media.
>(According to media manufacturers, 4X media first ships at the end of 2007;
> 6X media won't come until the first quarter of 2008.)

And it is nearly as ominous as another recent Apple patent application. "Trusted Computing" is back? You'd better believe it.

Considering all media outlets in the USA are owned by one of three mega-conglomerates, I must have failed to see when the US acquired a "free press". With all the sound and fury over the "liberal media" which fails to take conservatives and their hardcore corruption and plundering of America to task, I must have missed when the press became "free".

BTW, the OLPC is a flop. The device is buggy, it can't carry non-Latin character sets, which I guess is irrelevant since the keyboard is too small even for a child's fingers. And, the boobs in charge can't even get any devices produced, much less sold. The device went from $100 to $200 to it's current price of $400 for two (one being purchased by a future disappointed customer in America, the other "donated"... allegedly).

There was recently a big article on teh OLPC which lays bare the entire failure. Not surprisingly, it didnt get any play on Slashdot, since they are tied to the OLPC failure.

Then there is also the Washington Post's piece which likewise exposes that mean old reality.

Reality just seems to be biased against both conservatives and FOSSies. Not surprising, since they have the same selfish and unrealistic mindset.

I looked at PC World's printer reviews. For example, their review of the Brother HL-2070N says the consumables cost (toner + replacement drum) per page works out to about 3.4 cents, which is on par with some of the inkjets.

Their top-rated laser was 2.2 cents per page though, so my conclusion was that these things vary, and that the ranges overlap.

Of course, that's one organization's test, so real-world might be a bit different.

What printer are you using that gets 1c/page prints?

Here's their Top 100 Products of 2007 list. Funny you mention Google, because Google Apps Premier is their #1. http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,131935/article.html One oddity - the tagline on this article says its from May 2007, so it covers less than half of the year. For example, Apple OSX 10.4 is #9 on the list, and that was released in 2006. Man, I'm confused.

This list is just bizarre, what are their top 10 products of 07?

I read the PC World laptop page that proclaims the MacBook Pro was the fastest "power laptop" they tested. There is one big caveat: it was only during a very short period of time and only faster than the next machine by a little. If you look at the "Top 10 Power Laptops" page today, it's obvious that the MacBook Pro is nowhere near the fastest machine. The fastest Vista machine on the list is the Eurocom D900C, which has a Core 2 Quad Q6700 and a 512 MB GeForce 7950GT versus the MacBookPro's Core 2 Duo T7700 and a GeForce 8600M.

The full list is here:
http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,140583/printable.html

And both iPhone and Leopard are on the list (just for Apple fanboys that came here to gloat on Vista's #1 ranking :p).

The list is pretty weak, really. And strange too. Putting Office 2k7 on the list because it has a new interface? WTF?

... to complete its humiliation, Slashdot has managed to confuse PC Magazine, which has nothing to do with the article, with PC World which is where the article actually appears: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140583-page,5-c,techindustrytrends/article.html

... to complete its humiliation, Slashdot has managed to confuse PC Magazine, which has nothing to do with the article, with PC World which is where the article actually appears: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140583-page,5-c,techindustrytrends/article.html

This was under discussion (again) just the other day... http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/15/1944206

Here is the full PC World Magazine's list http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,140583/printable.html#

*The 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007*
#1. No Wow, No How: Windows Vista
#2. What Is It Good For: The High-Def Format War
#3. The Anti-Social Network: Facebook Beacon
#4. In a Sorry State: Yahoo
#5. The Great, The Bad, The Ugly: Apple iPhone
#6. Un-Neutral: The Broadband Industry
#7. Cannot be Completed as Dialed: Voice Over IP
#8. Needs To Change Its Spots: Apple "Leopard" OS 10.5
#9. Sorry, We Already Gave: Office 2007
#10. Is Anyone Listening?: Wireless Carriers
#11. Singing an Old Familiar Zune: Microsoft Zune
#12. Just Another Oxymoron: Internet Security
#13. Web 2 Woe: Social Networks
#14. Screwed up to the Max: Municipal WiMax
#15. Box Unpopuli: Amazon Unbox

Microsoft plans to buy $150 million in struggling Apple Computer stock...

Going from XP to Vista is hard. Going the other way is a huge pain in the ass. No, you can't dual boot. Information does not move smoothly. This is by design, so they can force people along and create the illusion that moving to free software is even more difficult.

Orange promises to sell unlocked iPhones in France, as per black letter law. Unlocked Orange iPhones come with all sorts of restrictions - provided that you remain on their network. In other words, they want the power users to go chew up somebody else's bandwidth.

I wonder, though. How unlocked is unlocked? Will I be able to use this in the US? (I'm glad I kept all my surplus Euros from my trip to Germany in '05. Yay for currency speculation! Thanks, Bernanke, and thanks Ali Greenspan for setting this shittrain in motion!)

however, it was only when you examined the small print on any advertisements for computers that you discovered this fact...

case in point, PCWorld staff would say when questioned about a basic vista capable computer that it was good for booting the OS...

here's what they were saying back in 2006...

"A system that will run Windows Vista may not be capable of using all of its features," he points out. For example, a machine branded "Windows Vista Capable" that is a high-end Media Center PC with superior graphics capabilities will be ready for even the most feature-intensive versions of Vista, Wilcox explains. But if it's a low-cost PC and it has a "Capable" sticker on it, "it will probably run the features of Home Basic but not anything else," he warns.

I don't see why people think that the PS3 is expensive. Think of how much you would pay for each feature of the system separately.

PS3:
- Blu Ray player: $250++ (on the low end)
- Games: $100++ (PS2 is like $100ish, and the ps3 has much much much better graphics + potential awesomeness due to blu ray capacity)
- Internet Gameplay: $50 (Its 50 a year for XBL, for the PS3 its "free" (in the cost of the games and system))

Congrats, now your at $400. Now think of all the other things you can do with it.

- Upscale DVD's
- Play PS1 + PS2 games upscaled (if you have the right one =/)
- Browse the web (and thus "mod" games.
- "Hack the matrix"
- Home (the "Second Life"-like game/thing)
- and More! (firmware updates)

And yes, it even runs Linux!

Seriously though, for all the things you get, I think the PS3 is by far the best value per dollar of the three next gen consoles.

I agree with some points. can I have all my Technical books on it? how about all the automotive books I have?

Give me my college textbooks on it as well and I'll pay $700.00 for the thing.

But I know for a fact that all the books I want will never EVER be available on a ebook reader device. college professors are almost completely paranoid and will not allow their holy tomes to be published that way. and the technical books I read dont have 30,000,000 readers so they also will never hit ebook readers.

Therefore, I am stuck once again ignoring the next round of ebooks. It seems that every 4-5 years they trot this stuff out once again and we all watch it fail. They never learn it's the lack of books and DRM that turns everyone off. at least this time I dont throw it in the pile of older ebook readers I still have. anyone want a Sony bookman from the early 90's? How about the Franklin ebookman from the early 2000's?

Both sucked massively because of..... DRM. at least the ebookman had hacks out there to get text files and rtf file into their stupid special format.. problem was most times when you picked it up it was dead. in the off state it will still eat batteries.

How about some official real documentation?

That's for starters. Then there's the insignificant issue of playing your own content back in its native resolution.

You can continue to look for ways that Vista betters XP in ways other than these - there's plenty of statements out there about it, some are even from blogs!

Don't be an apologist. Vista blows so hard I don't know a single person that prefers it over XP, and only know 1 that still runs it, but only because the process of putting XP on his Vista laptop runs into issues with the OEM not providing XP drivers. Not only that, but Linux and Macs are now being actively considered at my workplace, and I'm sure mine's not the only one considering what we're now reading in places like cio.com.

With microsft posting double digit increases in Q4 revenue from client(vista) and business(office) divisions compared to last year, I guess microsoft failed at failing.

Yeah, it certainly is kinda cool. Read here for a little more info: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,139810-page,1/article.html.
Wonder if it can be hacked to use the EVDO Internet connection for something a little more useful.... free of charge of course.

Despite frequent attempts (often by Bob Metcalfe) to proclaim The Death Of The Internet, somehow the damn thing just keeps on surviving and expanding:

  * ARPANet Co-Founder Predicts An Internet Crisis October 25th 2007
  * Death of the Internet greatly exaggerated August 25 2004
  * The Death Of The Internet November 4 2002
  * Predicting the Death of the Internet May 18 2001
  * Internet still collapsing, Metcalfe says July 7 1997

I'd like to suggest a new anti-Internet-death-meme: the Internet is a giant collection of cockroaches. You can step on as many as you want with your HD video torrents, it just keeps on multiplying and scurrying around anyway.

Wal-Mart has been experimenting with Linux PCs for a long, long time. Here are just a few examples:

2002 Walmart sells Lindows PCs:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/general-10/wal-mart-ships-linux-pcs-23619/

2003 Microtel computers with SUSE Linux:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,111557-page,1/article.html

2004 Linspire computers on sale at Wal-Mart for $498.00

http://www.news.com/Wal-Mart-debuts-498-Linux-laptop/2100-1044_3-5498006.html

May of 2007, Dell computers on sale at Wal-Mart:

http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/15701

Wal-Mart is not stupid. They know that as the price of PCs falls, their sales volume rises. They have a vested interested in commoditizing PCs. With Microsoft, Wal-Mart gets a limited mark-up. With Linux PCs made by small vendors, Wal-Mart gets to call the shots. Wal-Mart has dollars signs in their eyes, and those dollars signs are dancing with Tux.