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It wouldn't wonder me if this would be part of the Vista propaganda machine
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,128715/article.h tml
and yet let's be honest and give an answer.

1) Yes, GNU-Linux has problems with proprietary drivers/software, of course.
2) Yes, it is at times frustrating to have to wade through 1000 different solutions in order to solve a problem.
3) But the desktop level of GNU-Linux appz (especially thank to Ubuntu and its Debian underrocking) has increased dramatically.
4) My own aunt -no kidding- uses now Ubuntu happily ... and she told me -real words- "the computer runs better now, what have you done?"

So if she manage it, the AUthor of the (troll?) article should be well advised to try again (for the next ten years if needs be, some people need longer formation periods).

the Zip disc had some success in its day, but never became "standard"

At least the Zip drive earned fame if not fortune by being included into PC-Worlds 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time.

From the article:

Click-click-click. That was the sound of data dying on thousands of Iomega Zip drives. Though Iomega sold tens of millions of Zip and Jaz drives that worked flawlessly, thousands of the drives died mysteriously, issuing a clicking noise as the drive head became misaligned and clipped the edge of the removable media, rendering any data on that disc permanently inaccessible.

Iomega largely ignored the problem until angry customers filed a class action suit in 1998, which the company settled three years later by offering rebates on future products. And the Zip disk, once the floppy's heir apparent, has largely been eclipsed by thumb drives and cheaper, faster, more capacious rewritable CDs and DVDs.

Not that an unlucky owner of an Iomega product would have ever used such a rebate...

>The US is still stuck around 7-10mbit for the majority of us

No its not. Your average broadband connection floats around 600-700 kbps. There isnt enough last-mile bandwidth for these schemes and big telcos have very little incentive to roll out huge and expensive infrastructure upgrades, especially when regulators keep giving them sweetheart deals.

>Are you saying that business will be unable to cope with giving the customer what they want to pay for?

Yes. First off, the demand for iptv will evaborate because no one has ever see one. And theres tons of competition that its in demand like cable and satelite.

>'Nobody will be able to play these 'nextgen' video games because the processing power isn't there.'

Thats a lousy analogy. CPU manufacturers are constalty producing fast chips, see moore's law. Telecom companies are not constantly producing faster last-mile solutions.

>The market will be there to provide what we want as soon as we have a use for it. You can count on it.

I've been waiting for a
100mbps connection to my home for a decade. Lets not be too naive here. Businesses would love to get off the t1 system. etc.

/me thanks heaven (and Mark Shuttleworth) for Ubuntu.
You know, this attack has been around for a LONG time, but in an even deadlier form called the Evil Twins attack. Basically, an Evil Twins attack involves the attacker creating an access point (NOT an ad-hoc network) out of one network card, and using a second to relay that traffic to the real AP. They set their rogue AP's SSID to the same string as the target network, making client computers completely unaware that they are on a rogue network, and likely to connect to the rogue AP, even if they have their computers set to only connect to "trusted" networks. For the more anal clients that check the MAC address of the AP, that can be spoofed too.
More info on the Evil Twins attack: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,120054-page,1/ar ticle.html
This is why it's always in your best interests to tunnel ALL your traffic to a remote, known-secure connection whenever you are on any kind of wireless network.

All the Certificate Authorities are a bunch of extortionists anyway.

As far as IE is concerned: Even PC World recommends against IE and all they do is promote Microsoft garbage.

PC World commented on the issue in 2005
Also Bruce Schneier wrote about it back then.

I guess it takes a while for the US government and Microsoft, et al to take action on the news.

I'm advising my customers to break the law? What law is broken when the law itself breaks its own law? Quick recap: The DMCA explicitly permits fair use, but the same DMCA explicitly prohibits the exercise of fair use. I'd be advising my customers to break the law just as well by advising them to buy a product which denies them their rights under the law and just live with it, as the HDCP system within Windows Vista seems designed to do.

In spite of MPAA victories such as the banning of 321 Studios' DVD X Copy, victories for the consumer such as the legalization of DeCSS (and the overdue vindication of DVD Jon) and the existence of libdvdcss going unchallenged set a precedent which will create similar victories against HDCP-style DRM.

Those victories won't come until the laws allowing lock-in or lock-out (depending on your perspective) are challenged. What else will get the law changed for the better but a slew of teed-off consumers wronged by Microsoft caving in to the immoral and possibly illegal demands of the music and movie industries?

Besides, they're not going to turn to me for help until they buy an HD disk that already broke their Windows boxen, or until their boxen break without the aid of actual protected content.

Electoral problems should be scrutinized and fixed based on their severity and merits, not how well they play into some "what if the other guy had won?" scenario.

I agree 100%. As I have said many times, I wouldn't be all that interested in having Kerry as President, though I don't like Bush either. But if we're going to have an election between two worthless shills I'd still insist on having an honest election between them.

Further, we should be (and, thankfully, some of us are) looking at the recent midterms as well. Cases like the guy that got no votes (even though he voted for himself), the close House race where 18000 votes went missing, and so on need to be investigated. Further, we should be paying a lot more attention to things like Rahm Emanuel's involvement in the timing of the Foley scandal, which constitute election rigging of a different sort.

And finally, we need to keep clear that this isn't a partisan issue. I am a registered Republican, but I want nothing to do with cheaters on "my side." This is actually a pretty common reaction at the grass roots level -- for instance, left leaning sites are as annoyed at Rahm as the right leaning sites.

Even in hyper-partisan times, the red team and the blue team (again, almost exclusively at the grass roots) have common ground in wanting a fair system.

--MarkusQ

http://www.broadcastpapers.com/whitepapers/Content %20Technology-05-2006-046-048.pdf

The Thompson system for watermarking video and there's also a Fraunhofer Institute system:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,124676-page,1/ar ticle.html

These are all good ideas IMHO. As long as

1. The watermark isn't easy to remove
2. There is uncertainty as to whether the mark is removed
3. It isn't used to apply DRM

1 is obvious, 2 is there because the pirate has to be uncertain if their copy still has the idea, and 3. because the advantages of the system over DRM are lost if they use it for DRM!

Imagine you can freely buy and use the media you use however you like, but if it shows up on p2p, the ID can be pulled and traced back to you.

Since the DRM doesn't work, (not a single piece of media has successfully been locked up by DRM yet, a 100% failure rate). And since the DRM is already so restrictive that it puts off genuine sales, and is causing competition problems as inter operation is non existent. Then watermarking scheme will take over.

This one, I'm not so keen on, since the watermark is too easy to remove compared to the more mathematical approaches. The key point of any watermark approach is the mark must be difficult to remove and there must be uncertainty that the mark has been successfully removed.

My 2 cents.

I'd rather we skip the monetary fines that are becoming meaningless and go for revocation of patents.

I don't think that punishment will be acceptable to Mr. Gates. And when you are as rich and powerful as Mr. Gates and you break the law, you get asked whether the punishment is acceptable to you AND to please monitor your own behavior.

It's true. Here. Amazing. Simply amazing.

It is fast, stable and uses about 1/3rd of the memory FF does.

"no one's (OK, almost no one) is going to sell you a pre-ripped MP3 - ready to share via limewire"

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,124676-page,1/ar ticle.html

"The digital media watermark used in the Fraunhofer system also contains a "hash value," which creates a link between the content provider and registered purchaser. "The hash value is like a fingerprint; it contains unique information about the user," Kip says.

So they can make MP3's that embed a purchaser ID in a way difficult to remove, and as long as they don't given any tools to test if the mark as been successfully removed, the pirate has no way of knowing if they've successfully remove the ID that identifies them as the buyer.

The MP3 isn't put on limewire because it traces back to the buyer. Yet it's a regular MP3, plays on anything and free from the negatives that the DRM solution has.

Most (but not all) color laser printers put several copies of a pattern of small yellow dots onto every page they print. The pattern is a fingerprint which identifies the printer model and serial number. The alleged justification for this "feature" is for finding counterfeiters. In practice, it makes any printout from such a printer (and sufficiently high resolution copies of the printout) traceable back to a unique printer. AFAIK, it does not apply to monochrome laser printers, and probably not to inkjets - or not yet, anyway.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,118664-page,1/ar ticle.html

Its on the way in the form of total HD http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,128494-pg,1/arti cle.html

Indeed. It's pedantry. And a rather cowardly refusal to accept responsibility for their actions. If I had a blocking list, then I'd say with pride that I block spam, and some list maintainers do this.

You mean like Joe Jared, or maybe the NANAE Nine?

Lawyers are the only creatures on the planet with less scruples than spammers. Prudence does not necessarily equal cowardice.

You're obviously too young to remember when IBM was *the* dominant IT company. Everything they produced turned up in datacenters at some point, and I worked for management that was "Big Blue, through and through".

IBM made these machines called "Mainframes", as well as "Midrange" and "Mini" computers. These were the 360s, the 390s etc on the high end, the 400s on the midrange, and the RISC/6000 and such on the mini set. They even produced microcomputers, which today we call PCs. IBM compatible got that name for a reason - it meant that a "clone" was 100% compatible with IBM or Tandy microcomputers. This was important, because "no-one got fired for buying IBM". A common saying back in the 70s and 80s.

IBM took it in the shorts, faced huge fines, and changed into a pretty cool company. MS is now in that same position that IBM was when the clones came... the difference is that IBM was (at the time) ignorant of how big an opportunity they were missing. They saw microcomputers as nothing more than enhanced terminals and small business machines. Toys, really. Anybody that mattered used mainframes or AS/400s. Their big rival was Digital Electronic Corp (DEC), and so they never assumed that Microsoft was leading the charge against the computer room based machines.

Well, here we are, 30 years later, and MS shot several bullets into IBMs head. Now, IBM isn't even the right choice very often, unlike MS. MS however, is also facing a sharp decline, as Apple, Sun, Redhat and legions of others are waiting to dethrone them.

This year - I spec'd and configured millions in new hardware - moving our flagship systems to Linux. Not a penny of that money went with MS, and even Sun lost out. Our end users and IT are even buying themselves Apple machines, running OSX. Even our lowliest end users are deciding that they don't want to use Windows anymore, and they are taking it upon themselves to move (since IT hasn't forced them to toe the line).

That's what the line means, and that's why it is being applied ironically to Microsoft.

Here's some links if you're interested
http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/archives/000345.h tml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_System/2
http://www.zisman.ca/Articles/2006/Biv876.html
http://e-pix.com/CPUWARS/cpuwars.html

-WS

Well not only it's news to me, it's also news to these guys that apparently work over there:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,128265-page,4-c, industrynews/article.html (go to #8).

Also, I'm somewhat reluctant to treat PS3 as "Innovative".. well, maybe except the Massive Crab Damage...

http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,128176 /printable.html

Ridiculous that the article is stretched across 8 pages.

http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,128295 /printable.html

Click on the "print" link and it shows the article on one page without ads.

You may be surprised, but I completely agree with you here. They may have had fewer throwing incidents if people didn't think there was a strap to keep them from losing complete control of the remote.

Ack, I just posted with this point before I read this comment. I would have put it under here if I had read it here first.

A better other-product analogy to use here rather than footballs and knives would be a railing on a staircase that appeared to be attached but really was not. In this case the appearance of security was there, but not the reality.

Not a bad attempt at an analogy. However, I think this analogy would be best stated like this...

"An attached railing worked for those who grab it with one hand and walked down some stairs, but broke when a 180 pound man tried to sit on it or slid down it."

In this case, railings where designed for people to hold with their hands and even put some body weight on it. Some thick railings (banisters) are capable of holding the weight of an adult to slide down. If one railing would support your weight to slide down, it does not mean all railings can. Even if a railing can support your weight, it does not mean you should slide down one, because it is dangerous to do so; you can fall off and bump your head.

Even so, people and kids will use railings and bannister's to slide down. Some kids will even stupidly try to do it (like myself as a kid) on a railing that cannot support their weight. They will break the railing and maybe even damage something else such as the wall, furniture or themselves. Is it the railing manufacturers fault the kid used the railing in such a way? Or, lets put it this way... How much fault is a railing manufacturer responsible for should they design a product that can be used inappropriately?

Of course, they could have designed the railing to be 'un-slidable', or make it stronger with supports. Yet, I cannot see a vast majority of parents blaming the railing company for the accident, but rather the child's actions. I can see the children turning to their invisible monsters and lair to their parents stating that it was someone else who broke it, to deflect blame.

This would be my case in point, from my previous post. Also, it's been stated that the broken TV phenomenon is over-hyped, and lets run some numbers...

On Nov. 28th, PC World reported that some 600,000 Wii's where sold, with Nintendo estimates to hit 4 million by the end of the year. It's also been reported that the sales numbers are off as much as 20% (less) for that 4 million mark. So, we'll just use the 600,00 Wii number. We'll also use an average of 2 Wii remotes sold per console (everyone will have one, while others can have up to 4). That's 1.2 million remotes out there. Wiihaveaproblem.com is stating that there has been a total number of Wii remote damages of about 40 destroyed objects (including TV's, laptops, PDA's, Walls, Wii's, and more) and they only list 29 broken straps (I guess the other causes of damage where people not even using the strap), but we'll just use 40 as a conservative estimate.

That's an incident rate of 0.0025%. Hardly what I call a problem and should clearly show that these incidences are the exception, rather than the normal and that the cause for these accidents are not the fault of the system, but the user of that system due to the fact that if it was a system design flaw, there would be significantly higher rates. Now, Wiihaveaproblem.com would hardly justify as an accurate site, but even if it is off, it would have to be off by 400 times that amount to reach 1%. Also, the sales number of remotes and systems continues to climb at the same ti

Actually I think the bigger problem is that Microsoft and Verisign in the past have allowed a completely valid, high-grade signing certificate with Microsoft's own corporate identity to be issued to crackers (see http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,45284-page,1/art icle.html or the more authoritative http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin /MS01-017.mspx for details). Note that a class-3 code-signing certificate was one of the more secure grades Verisign issues, it's not their standard e-mail-address-only ones. So how long until the bad guys start getting their own EV-SSL certificates and make the whole scheme not merely useless but advantageous to the phishers?

They can't "improve their techniques," because there was no version of this feature in XP.

SuperFetch builds on the prefetch capability in Windows XP, which preloads frequently used apps into memory to speed up launch times. Microsoft says SuperFetch not only knows which applications you use most frequently, but which ones you're most likely to use on different days of the week and at different times of day.

News thats old. Stuff thats stale.

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/2 0/2257252

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,117318-page,1/ar ticle.html
http://www.physorg.com/news2734.html

Sounds very similar and very old

Thursday, December 02, 2004 05:00 PM http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,118815-page,1/ar ticle.html
01 February, 2005 7:00 a.m http://www.livescience.com/technology/050201_skin_ printing.html
Wednesday, 19th January 2005 http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/s/143/ 143230_tailormade_skin_from_ink_printer.html

Come on get with it, i have already built my clone army using disposable printers thought it was common knowledge.

"The typical access time for a Flash based SSD is about 35 - 100 micro-seconds, whereas that of a rotating disk is around 5,000 - 10,000 micro-seconds. That makes a Flash-based SSD approximately 100 times faster than a rotating disk. " http://www.storagesearch.com/bitmicro-art3.html

"The SSD found files more than twice as fast, and accelerated boot-up. Its cumulative speed advantage over the other two drives was an impressive 25 percent" http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,126833/article.h tml

Solid state drives (flash drives) are not slower. If they were, hard drive manufacturers would not be using flash to make hybrid drives.

I have heard that in the Soviet Union, every photocopier was serially numbered and registered.

You mean, unlike several brands of laser printers?

again?

The fact that Microsoft isn't an innovator is known for a long time. Their "commitment to innovation" is just PR, and people know it since the 90's.

See, for instance:

MS: Innovator or Integrator? - June 10, 2000
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,36902,00 .html

Saluting 25 Years of Microsoft 'Innovation' - June 14, 2000
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,17180-page,1-c,o fficesuites/article.html

BTW, I know of many companies whose slogan includes "paradigm shift", "a new way of ...", "innovation comes first" or anything else along the same lines. As always, they offer the very same things as everyone else.

What's to stop them from shoving the format down your throat? In other words, as long as they piggyback the format on existing technology it will be hard to reject it. When only TVs made are HD and your TV dies what do you do? When only DVD players made are DVD/HD-DVD and yours dies what do you do?

Why are the electronic voting machine companies generally so dead-set against emitting verifiable and auditable paper records?

I would argue that it's common knowledge
that Firefox
doesn't have
anything like
50% of
the browser market,
with most estimates
coming in
at less than
25%.

"It uses more power. Big deal. I'd wager that there is not a single person on the planet that will not buy a PS3 because of power consumption. Not one."

The higher an electronic device's power consumption, the more heat generated, since heat is a byproduct of using all that power. The more heat a device generates, the more likely it might... OVERHEAT. You know, like the article mentioned? That is one reason why this being discussed, and one that has the potential to affect PS3 owners, no matter how rich...

Another reason this is likely being discussed is that overheating Xbox power supplies have been known to cause fires, as have more than Sony laptop batteries. I'd also wager that a PS3 owner, no matter how rich, would like to be sure their console won't catch fire.

Yet another reason that this is being discussed is that after the rootkit scandal, the fire-hazard laptop batteries, if the PS3 is also plagued with hardware problems, it is a big nail in the coffin of Sony's reputation as creator of super-dependable products. Sony needs the PS3 to go off without a hitch to make people forget about their recent problems. This is why any percieved issue is being exampled under a microscope.

"Except that Microsoft probably didn't blame the CD company for allowing a virus to be put on the CDs... "

Actually, in http://pcworld.com/article/id,101930-page,1/articl e.html MS specifically blamed the company that they hired to translate their software into Korean for injecting the virus into the document that MS then distributed on the CD. So you're technically right that in that case MS didn't blame the CD duplication company, but they certainly passed the buck to a vendor.

That being said, when reporting the details of how something like this happened, there's nothing wrong with documenting that a vendor introduced the virus, if that's what actually happened.

Good news... There are several reports that Firefox 2 uses less memory than IE 7. Only a small percentage of users ever had problems with memory usage to begin with.

From what's been announced, the disk duplication step of manufacturing was fine. Ironically, it sounds like the virus got onto the iPods as a post-manufacturing quality check where the manufacturer connected a few iPods to PC's to check them, and some of those iPods got infected from an infected PC. But this apparently affected a very small number if iPods.

To keep this in perspective, in 1995, the first Word macro virus -- now called Concept -- was massively distributed by Microsoft on a CD-ROM called Microsoft Windows 95 Software Compatibility Test. The shipment went to hundreds of companies in August 1995. And MS has distributed viruses on CD's to huge numbers of their customers numerous times. (http://www.soci.niu.edu/~crypt/other/onestop.htm, http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/wazzu.shtml, http://pcworld.com/article/id,101930-page,1/articl e.html) So while I am sure that MS' quality control has gotten better, I think that MS isn't in much of a position to play "holier than thou" on the issue of distributing viruses in their products.

Here is little hard drive history http://pcworld.com/article/id,127105/article.html

Circuit Boards:
Integrated Circuit Recycling from Finished Product Printed Circuit Boards
PCs Don't Die--They Become Road Fill
What to do with your printed circuit boards?
USNavy: PRINTED CIRCUIT BOARD RECYCLING
Printed Circuit Board Recycling Equipment

CRT Glass:
Cascade's CRT Glass-to-Glass Recycling Program
EPA: Glass-to-Glass Recycling
WRAP identifies four potential markets for television glass (26.01.04)
Cathode ray tube glass recycling: an example of clean technology, mostly in Italian usage in ceramic tiles.

"YouTube .. a company which appears to be a giant liability .. it won't suprise me if the recording industries take a more hostile approach to YouTube"

Just hours before Google announced a $1.6 billion acquisition of YouTube on Monday, both companies separately revealed agreements with major music labels for offering music videos on their respective sites.

was Re:I think it is interesting...

When Spamhaus bothers to defend themselves, the spammers tend to get stomped on badly once the judge realizes what the case is about.

Unfortunately, that's not the case. Spamhaus was sued by spammers previously in 2003. Spamhaus won. The court did not punish the spammers in any way. Even when you win a lawsuit, you're still out legal costs, which can be unbelievable, especially if discovery is involved.

I was sued by a spammer last year, and just arguing jurisdiction alone (I won) cost me tens of thousands of dollars. The judge did *nothing* to the spammer who wasted its time and my money.

This is the spammer tactic. They have no chance of winning on the merits; instead, they hope to bankrupt the anti-spam movement. Spamming pays well, and spam-fighting is a mostly volunteer effort. The spammers can afford to bring one frivolous lawsuit after another against us and the courts let them do it. Eventually the spammers will wear us down and then destroy email they way they destroyed usenet.

When Spamhaus bothers to defend themselves, the spammers tend to get stomped on badly once the judge realizes what the case is about.

Unfortunately, that's not the case. Spamhaus was sued by spammers previously in 2003. Spamhaus won. The court did not punish the spammers in any way. Even when you win a lawsuit, you're still out legal costs, which can be unbelievable, especially if discovery is involved.

I was sued by a spammer last year, and just arguing jurisdiction alone (I won) cost me tens of thousands of dollars. The judge did *nothing* to the spammer who wasted its time and my money.

This is the spammer tactic. They have no chance of winning on the merits; instead, they hope to bankrupt the anti-spam movement. Spamming pays well, and spam-fighting is a mostly volunteer effort. The spammers can afford to bring one frivolous lawsuit after another against us and the courts let them do it. Eventually the spammers will wear us down and then destroy email they way they destroyed usenet.

AOL recently aced PC World's list of the top 25 worst tech products of all time. .

I don't think they were all bad. They did send me all those nifty coasters, frisbees, and BB targets.

This is not a "twin screen" laptop your title-inventing fact-bending fact-manglers!

This is an "aux" display which is part of the native Vista featureset, and FAR from being the first laptop manifactures with this facility.

There you go

And those that said it can't work with your laptop off: that's the whole point. Or you think I'm gonna spin my laptop all the time to see both displays?

Yes, the aux display has standalone electronics, it wastes very little power, and it can sync with Vista and work with the laptop off. Only when you need to access the HDD (like, listen to mp3-s) the laptop powers up when you use the aux display.

What kinda geeks are you, waiting for my sorry ass to explain all of this to you!

Not entirely.. I'd heard the same thing, so I tried copying a few new US bills and a 10 euro bill on my new HP Photosmart. They scanned fine, printed fine, and straight color-copied perfectly. I even put the printouts under a black light and filtered red/yellow/green lights to look for unusual patterns or spots, but I found nothing out of the ordinary (although it's possible I missed something of course). The copies were very convincing, nonetheless you'd have to be pretty stupid to try to pass off one of those as an actual bill. The surface of the printed image is obviously completely smooth, unlike a real bill, so it doesn't seem like much of a counterfeiting risk. Someone could probably get away with it once or twice by hiding one of the copies in a stack of bills, but if they made it a habit, they'd definately get caught pretty quickly.

Undoubtedly it varies by manufacturer, but it doesn't seem like HP has jumped on the anti-idiot-counterfeiting bandwagon.. yet.

Actually, we can never validate one way or the other if these elections are valid because you can't do recounts in Diebold elections.

All I meant with my post was that polls show Republicans should get trounced this November.

If they don't, and if exit polls are wrong for the 3RD election in a row, then our election system is officially rigged and we have no easy way to stop it.

Anyone familiar with the story of flight 93 knows that cell phones work at the cruising altitude of commericial jet aircraft.

Nova 1 featured some simple, off-the-shelf technology. This included GSM text messaging as well as radio for communications and an ordinary 5 megapixel camera.

You started this whole thread with the erroneous and uncited "less than 10%" figure, so why am I on the hook for citing sources?

You want sources? here are sources. Oh, and this.

When the source code is available to everyone, that also means that it's easier for the enemy to find security holes to exploit.

Actually, it means open source is reviewed by many more people, open to correction and critical review. He biggest danger of Windows becoming open source would be that reviewers will spew out vulnerabilities by the dozens per day.

If nothing else you can make sure there is not an covert NSA key in the thing. For that mater, there isn't even one from Microsoft in FOSS.

In fact, if everyone deployed a major version of Linux there support costs, including security costs would plumet. Microsoft fuels the security business by providing an insecure product, run insecurely but people who fundimentally don't care about security.

If you can manage to keep tight control over who has access to the source code...

Hate to tell you, Microsoft has had source code stolen and compromized. Some other threads offer details. And given Microsoft's track record on security, I wouldn't doubt Vista source is out there already.

But the real truth is in the money. http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,117487-page,1/ar ticle.html

You can get the panasonic oxyride batteries now, hasn't been that long since they were invented.

As to battery tech in general, I can remember when all you could get were carbon zinc batteries (drycells) and that was it., now you can get NiMH, NiCad, LiIon,and the oxyrides. Tech advances...maybe not as fast as you'd like, but it advances. Heck, I own some solar PV stuff, that is pure sci fi action from when I was a kid, along with just personal computers in general.

Use the Force, Luke!