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"The fragmentation issue is honestly just marketing nonsense."

Android fragmentation is real. Even the ever-so-popular Angry Birds had "severe performance issues" due to fragmentation and had to create a second Angry Birds game for low-end Android devices.

Droid has no less than 8 different versions, from 1.1 to 2.3, in addition to whatever custom wrapper or branding the manufacture or carrier added, and dozens of different kinds of handsets, all with different cpus, gpus and memory. iOS has at most 2 versions, 3.x and 4.x, (1.x and 2.x is used by less than 3% of iPhones) and at most 4 handsets, iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4.

So if you're developing an iPhone app you only have to test on 4 or 5 devices, iPhone 4 running iOS4, 3GS running 3.x and 4.x, and 3G running 3.x and 4.x, and iPhone running 3.1.3. If you're developing a Droid app you have dozens of devices with different software configurations you must test on or risk angry customers, and every time you want to update or Google pushes out a new version of Droid you again have to do testing on dozens of devices.

I know Android is the most popular smartphone OS but honestly I think it's going to self-implode, customers will eventually get tired of fragmentation issues, with apps not working and frustrated developers, and they'll either give up on smartphones entirely or turn to Blackberry or iOS.

"The fragmentation issue is honestly just marketing nonsense."

Android fragmentation is real. Even the ever-so-popular Angry Birds had "severe performance issues" due to fragmentation and had to create a second Angry Birds game for low-end Android devices.

Droid has no less than 8 different versions, from 1.1 to 2.3, in addition to whatever custom wrapper or branding the manufacture or carrier added, and dozens of different kinds of handsets, all with different cpus, gpus and memory. iOS has at most 2 versions, 3.x and 4.x, (1.x and 2.x is used by less than 3% of iPhones) and at most 4 handsets, iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4.

So if you're developing an iPhone app you only have to test on 4 or 5 devices, iPhone 4 running iOS4, 3GS running 3.x and 4.x, and 3G running 3.x and 4.x, and iPhone running 3.1.3. If you're developing a Droid app you have dozens of devices with different software configurations you must test on or risk angry customers, and every time you want to update or Google pushes out a new version of Droid you again have to do testing on dozens of devices.

I know Android is the most popular smartphone OS but honestly I think it's going to self-implode, customers will eventually get tired of fragmentation issues, with apps not working and frustrated developers, and they'll either give up on smartphones entirely or turn to Blackberry or iOS.

When I use NoScript to disable JS for a website, at least I have control over it.

Yeah, sure you do... Funny thing about NoScript, it allows you to run JS on sites you trust.

This is just more security theater; Consider cross site scripting attacks. I've seen XSS attacks on Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Amazon, and many more "reputable" sites that you may "trust".

NoScript security comes from not running JS. If you run any JS, you are then no longer secure. How do you know the JS you just allowed to run on a "trusted" site doesn't contain malware delivered via XSS? You Don't.

Granted, NoScript does increase your security because you're running less JS code, but it does not make you invulnerable to JS exploits unless you never allow JS to run.

The "control" you think you have can be ripped away from you by one XSS attack; So, what control do you actually have?

No. Just no. I'm a Windows hater too, but no. It's simply not THAT bad. It's really easy to catch something, but simply existing on the web isn't enough.

Existing, no, browsing to, yes. What if you simply browsed to a page with a trojan PDF for example...

That would be enough.

This used to be true. Now Microsoft has been threatening people with patent litigation. If fact, they took the outstanding step of suing Motorola - several times!

Of course this is neither here nor there on the evilness issue. That's a story that has no beginning and no end, its purity no degree.

So Canadian Court says pay money, so you go above them to the US Supreme Court, aka, Court of the World?

The Company and its people are Canadian, but i4i came to the US to sue Microsoft in the US District court of Eastern Texas.

Note, this is one of those cases of true alleged evil.

i4i is not a patent troll. They developed software. They showed Microsoft the software, in the hopes of Microsoft licensing it.

Microsoft reviewed the technology, apparently decided to not license it / not incorporate the technology.

The next version of Word included Microsoft's own copycat implementation of exactly the technology. And came to the market competing against i4i's product instead of properly licensing i4i's product.

IOW, this is not a bunk "obvious method" software patent. This is exactly the type of things patents are designed to prevent.

Wholesale stealing of a significant invention.

And the allegation of willful infringement appeared to be a reasonable allegation for i4i to make.

I normally go against software patents, but only because often the things that are patented are not inventions, or attempts are made to apply the patent to things simpler or more fundamental than the invention.

In this case, however, I would not object to i4i enforcing this patent and that succeeding

You're fucking joking, right?

It's totally different though, I guess. SAP got a trial.

I didn't hand control over to anyone. I can install just about any software I care to on this machine and Steve Jobs is not going to show up with a baseball bat.

It is likely that this will no longer be the case if you continue with the Apple platform. They have already begun to move the Mac toward the same walled-garden, censored model as the iPad. No, jerkwad Jobs won't come over with a baseball bat, he'll just make it difficult-to-impossible for you to install any non-Apple-approved software on your box in the first place.

What the fuck, dude?

In what paranoid world do people do that?

Do what? Would you care to specify what here doesn't adhere to your view of the world?

RIAA has sued families for copyright infringement (and gooned who knows how many) when they even haven't had an internet connection at the time of the alleged infringement.

  http://www.zdnet.com/blog/spyware/riaa-and-dmca-madness/814

Opentracker mixes in random IPs with good ones: http://opentracker.blog.h3q.com/2007/02/12/perfect-deniability/
The same page has the info on how to use a simple html element that will cause the reader of a webpage to announce himself to the tracker.

Do you know how some DDoS attacks are done? Someone with a popular website adds an invisible frame that also loads the page to be attacked once a second using Javascript.

You're incorrect that Foxit reader has not been subject to attacks or flaws. This article from last year, for instance, describes in-the-wild attacks of Foxit. A Google search for "foxit reader buffer overflow" brings up a number of known (though patched by now) exploits.

Foxit reader, like any other piece of software, is bound to have errors. Use it because you like the interface, or use it because it's less likely to be exploited due to its relative unpopularity. Don't delude yourself into thinking it's completely secure. That's the same fallacious argument that some OSX and Linux users make when saying that their operating systems are immune from viruses or worms. They may be more secure when compared to Windows, but there's nothing in their underlying architecture that prevents them from being exploited with enough effort.

I always find it bizarre when I see posts like this one. I think it is disingenuous to imply that that Linux and OSX have similar malware problems to Windows when it has an order of magnitute more; 10,000's of times more . When someone says immume Its just quicker to write than say "Holy Fuck Windows shit loads of Natsties and Linux Meh!"

Just get Foxit and be done with it. It's light weight, doesn't hang browsers while opening large PDFs, has a SIGNIFICANTLY better search interface, and so far hasn't been subject to any major attacks/flaws.

You're incorrect that Foxit reader has not been subject to attacks or flaws. This article from last year, for instance, describes in-the-wild attacks of Foxit. A Google search for "foxit reader buffer overflow" brings up a number of known (though patched by now) exploits.

Foxit reader, like any other piece of software, is bound to have errors. Use it because you like the interface, or use it because it's less likely to be exploited due to its relative unpopularity. Don't delude yourself into thinking it's completely secure. That's the same fallacious argument that some OSX and Linux users make when saying that their operating systems are immune from viruses or worms. They may be more secure when compared to Windows, but there's nothing in their underlying architecture that prevents them from being exploited with enough effort.

Symbian is sitting comfortably on his throne

Symbian may be king in Europe but not so much in North America, which represents a market with far more people-per-language.

Symbian is sitting comfortably on his throne
 

Facebook's new messaging system may not be a Gmail killer

Here's an interesting graphic that surprised me. U.S. Internet traffic to Web-based email clients

#1 Yahoo - 72.8 million

#2 Hotmail - 48.5 million

#3 GMail - 25.1 million

Because DRMed streams are never ripped...

In short, if you're a Microsoft executive, the profitability of your company depends primarily on Office and Windows

Some time ago a person, a little bit like you, finished his Business education in the big city and move home to his small town. He wasn't able to find good work there, but the old movie theater was for sale. Given the price, he promptly bought it and decided to figure out how to make it profitable.

After playing with the numbers for a while he discovered that while the candy store on the first floor was making a significant profit, the movies them selves were making a significant loss. Being almost as smart as you he promptly decided to stop showing movies.

So no, it's not really a "significant portion" of the Microsoft Enterprise portfolio

If you don't know what Enterprise Software is, you really should try to close your mouth. Try figuring it out. You'll see TLAs like ERP, xRM etc. Office, for example, is not Enerprise Software, used by the enterprise though it is.

Go to http://www.microsoft.com/enterprise/ and find out what Microsoft is doing in that space. Try to find out what requirements Enterprise software like ERPs have. Then try to figure out why Microsoft would be using its Managed Software systems to build Enterprise Software.

We have been talking about Java around here, in the space that you so ignorantly list above, could you point to some typical Java solutions? Something above and beyond Eclipse? Something that actually would justify the enormous investment that such a huge part of the business world has done in Java? Where is all the Java software, where is the profit? Compared to most programming languages and systems, Java is gigantic. Enormous. Where is the software? Can you name any of it? Of course you can't. Compared to the investment in Java by the business world, there is no Java software out there that you have ever heard about.

Just for fun, try to do the same exercise as you just did but replace .NET or Java with COBOL. Where is all the COBOL software? Where is the profit? Compared to the enormous investment still being put into COBOL solutions, you have never heard of any software written in COBOL.

Why is it that you have never heard of these things? Because you are ignorant. A petulant child in the world of grown-up software systems and their developers.

Oh, and also take a look at the concept of "mission critical" and see how many of the Microsoft Apps you have heard about that fit that description (you have mentioned two above).

get back to me when Microsoft are actually building something they really care about on .Net

If you really think Microsoft is stupid enough to not care about their enterprise solutions, solutions that give Microsoft more or less unbreakable tie-ins with their customers, you are dumber than I thought, and believe you me, that would be hard.

How easy is it to move from Office to Open Office? Not that difficult, leaning towards easy. How difficult is it to move from a fully integrated solution consisting of Dynamics xRM, Share Point, Exchange and Office? Close to impossible.

If Microsoft stops caring about their enterprise customers, their Office sales will plummet. For every Share Point license Microsoft sells they guarantee years and years of continues Office sales. For every Dynamics CRM installation Microsoft sells they tie their customers to Exchange for years years. For every dollar some of these big enterprise invest in the Office software, they invest thousands of dollars in enterprise solutions, lots of them in-house. Here is a small example involving SAP. This is where Microsoft needs to play, or they will die, they know that.

You view of the world is quite limited. Broaden it.

H.264's patent licensing fees make it a dealbreaker for law-abiding indies, open source advocates and small hardware makers who don't want to pay.

WebM is free.

It's also a good potential "unifying format" for web video codec-wise the same way Flash has been player-wise because we're still in the same codec hell as far as HTML5 video is concerned due to Mozilla foundation's refusal to use H.264.

H.264 licensing fees look reasonable though if products or services are sold at profit. Not sure how it goes though for free software or products that make marginal profits.

It's rumour, take it with as much or as little salt as you think it needs. But a quick google for malware UAC shows:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/windows-7s-default-uac-bypassed-by-8-out-of-10-malware-samples/4825

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/04/windows_uac_flaw/

And IIRC there was a piece of malware that was signed using a genuine, valid certificate that was issued to Realtek. Looks like I do RC:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Signed-Malware-Used-Valid-Realtek-Certificate-147942.shtml

  - this would walk all over the protection offered by ASLR and DEP because it wouldn't need to be injected into another running process.

Having said all that, I never for one minute believed the death of XP would mean the end of malware. It's become a full-blown industry in its own right these days, and a lot of money is involved. Those who do it aren't going to let a bunch of acronyms that make their job a little harder until such time as they've put whatever functionality they need to work around it into a library any more than burglars all gave up and started going straight with the advent of modern locks.

They could have spent the last two years dragging everyone and anyone who was involved with the Bush administration's more questionable policies (wiretapping, suspending habeus corpus, extraordinary rendition, Halliburton, bogus intelligence and so forth) and probably had a PR field day tearing the ethics of their predecessors apart.

First, a correction, the Democrats gained both houses in 2006, not 2008, so they could have started then... and as a member of the right, I WISH THEY WOULD HAVE. Not because the open partisanship would have cost them votes, because I don't think it would have given how reviled the right had become by 2006, but because we need an open an honest government. However, neither party wants that, they both want a closed, powerful government even if it means they take turns owning the keys.

Obama continued the Bush wiretaps, even "accidentally" extending them to domestic only calls and wants to extend it to the internet. Obama hasn't closed Gitmo, he's still practicing extraordinary rendition (which didn't started under GWB), Halliburton is still getting contracts (because they're one of only a handful of companies that does what they do), we still have problems with bad intelligence, etc.

I don't say that out of partisanship, I say it because Obama and Bush are relatively interchangeable in their practice of foreign policy (oh, sure, there are minor differences, but all the major policies are identical).

But oh no. Either they were idiots and thought that, after eight years of dirty pool, the Republican party's powerbrokers would respond well to bipartisanship (you'd think they'd notice how that was going after six months?), or they were hoping to pull some of the same stuff, in which case they pissed away the moral high ground which would have served them pretty well a few days ago.

Again, noting the above, there is one additional reason why they didn't... They were acting like Mark McGwire. Career batting average of .263, but you knew every time he got up to the plate, he was swinging for the fences, looking for that home run, or even better, grand slam. What do I mean?

Democrats have long been in love with socialized medicine... for the political leadership, it's the one thing they're missing in their dependency pie. Again, what do I mean? Every time a Democrat runs for office and is seriously challenged, what do they run on? "My opponent wants to starve your kids, kick your parents out of the nursing home, take away your childcare, etc." A HUGE portion of the Democrat bases votes Democrat on the fear that their precious entitlements would be taken away. By finally getting socialized medicine in place, it would have forced the working stiffs in the middle that traditionally vote Republican to vote for the party that would keep the handouts going.

So, they spent most of the first two years swinging for that grand slam. The bases were loaded - people already hated the Republicans, the Democrats occupied the White House and, most importantly, had large majorities in both houses of Congress. They came up to the plate, pointed to left field, swung and missed. The liberal Republicans weren't going to go along. They came up to the plate again and missed. This time the conservative Democrats weren't going to go along either. Then Ball 1, the Senate passed a bill in the middle of the night before Christmas break. Ball 2, the House would work on passing the Senate bill if they could get some fixes. Ball 3, they promise some meaningless stuff on abortion and to fix the bill's most glaring problems down the road, all while giving the crowd the finger. Democrats are standing at a full count. Finally, a homer down the left line! But wait! Now th

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/ou/a-secure-wireless-lan-hotspot-for-anonymous-users/587
It doesn't even need a password. It could be a blank username and blank password or any username/password combo for that matter. The point is that it will facilitate wire equivalent security on Wi-Fi networks. Of course we'll have to combat gratuitous ARP to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks on the "wire equivalent".

"It also puts the Free Software Foundation in an... interesting position, as this technically is the first salvo from Apache in a license war between GPL and Apache License. "

Where the hell did you get that idea from? SUN released Java as Open Source under the GPL in 2006 and there was no objection, so what makes you think this is about the GPL, rather than about Oracle trying to undo the Openness?

• Microsoft sues TomTom over Linux and other patent claims
• Aiming at Android, Microsoft sues Motorola
• Microsoft sues Salesforce.com for alleged patent infringement

That's before we get to the actions of the major Microsoft shareholders e.g: Microsoft Co-Founder Launches Patent War "

And finally of course ; Microsoft's apparent involvement in many proxy actions.

• Microsoft Proxy Fights Against Google in the United States
• Microsoft Proxy Attack on GNU/Linux Continues With TurboHercules
• Google Accuses Microsoft of Proxy Legal War
• Also suggestions of MS involvement in the SCO lawsuit

Under previous management MS may not have been lawsuit happy. Nowadays they pretty clearly are.

Google could start by protecting customers from Google.

"They aren't restricting the bidding to only Microsoft... third-party contractors could bid on it as long as they were going to use Microsoft's products"

"The new Federal offering will be sold directly by Microsoft, as well as by its Large Account Resellers and federal resellers .. BPOS is a Microsoft-hosted collection .. The Federal version is hosted on "separate, dedicated infrastructure in secured facilities," not in the existing datacenters where Microsoft currently hosts BPOS", link

Because choice is such a burden.

Better to let the corporations decide what you need. Besides, Oracle has done a fine job with open source so far.

I doubt ODF and OOo will have 300 variations. Likely 2, the outdated OOo variation that has Oracle's name on it which hasn't received an update since yesterday will fade into obscurity, and the ODF variation that enjoys a healthy development community.

Because choice is such a burden.

Better to let the corporations decide what you need. Besides, Oracle has done a fine job with open source so far.

I doubt ODF and OOo will have 300 variations. Likely 2, the outdated OOo variation that has Oracle's name on it which hasn't received an update since yesterday will fade into obscurity, and the ODF variation that enjoys a healthy development community.

I guess Mozilla could try to make a donation drive for the five million it'll cost annually to get every Firefox copy cleared with licensing.

Or they could just use the already-licensed codecs baked in to the incredibly well documented, supported, and high-performance video subsystem of most installed operating systems rather than trying to ignore their host system and the user's previously set preferences completely and apply their own standards...

The suit doesn't have to do with OpenJDK. Google didn't use OpenJDK.

They used another implementation, parts of which have been shown to be basically copy/paste/rename jobs.

And they mangled the implementation to half be Java and half not, while still calling it Java all over the place in their developer docs.

Google could have used a fully-compliant implementation of Java. Or it could have licensed J2ME (which was never free--it paid for free Java). But it didn't.

Why is this modded flamebait?

Come on, the code is ripped or its not.

Sorry, but Google flubbed on this particular file. If the particular coder who was responsible for that also worked the same magic on other files, Google's going to be in a world of hurt.

ZDNet code comparo
http://www.binplay.com/2010/10/look-at-copied-oracle-code.html

And yeah, if M$ did the same thing (embrace and "extend") to Python or PERL that Android did to Java, the community would be up in arms.

Now if only Firefox would support playing the most common modern video format, h.264 - nah, there's no demand for that.

Of course there's a demand for that. The question is, where's the money for that?

MPEG LA holds onto h.264 licensing and I doubt they will let it go cheaply. I guess Mozilla could try to make a donation drive for the five million it'll cost annually to get every Firefox copy cleared with licensing.

Have you even looked at the code? The functions are taken line by line.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/oracle-says-google-directly-copied-java-code-heres-the-line-by-line-comparison/41025

Here are the examples Oracle is using:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/oracle-says-google-directly-copied-java-code-heres-the-line-by-line-comparison/41025&usg=AFQjCNF1GNdD5_oXwawU7akdBGHETrf57w

http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://www.scribd.com/doc/40316099/orclgoogcode&usg=AFQjCNFFdZkReVLuVJIS7Xshk1X997VTIA

And a link to the original Sun implementation:

http://www.docjar.com/html/api/sun/security/provider/certpath/PolicyNodeImpl.java.html

We don't know all the facts... but it smells funny.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/oracle-says-google-directly-copied-java-code-heres-the-line-by-line-comparison/41025

Googling "buy fake iPhone" got me this link. Seems to be a pretty good look-alike for only $40.

Gadgets are gadgets. Gadgets may resemble tools but tools are specifically designed for their purpose(s).
Nothing will replace a workstation's keyboard, local storage and large displays for professionals, they may be plugged into a smaller case/form-factor but it will still need a functional environment, applications for tasks and data back-ups. MS is driving hard to sign-up the masses for streaming services in the "cloud" so they can sell dumb(er) products and meter all the utility however they deem fit(fit=profitable). Reality is vapor and finger-pointing is what you get when services and connections are disrupted or storage crashes with no recovery. I'd prefer to put my head in a lion's mouth than to put my data in MS's, or anyone else's, "cloud".

Over the weekend I was configuring my thermostat and sprinkler system for Fall, and wishing I could cheaply and easily use a web browser interface instead of the tiny, arcane LCD screens currently used to do this. These interfaces only have a few buttons and it's pretty hard for me to imagine configuring ad-hoc wifi on them. I think the problems solved by Wi-Fi direct, such as agreeing on a WiFi channel and encryption key, are fairly simple, but if they can make it a push-button operation that actually interoperates on a wide variety of devices, I'll be there.

Your post might have been moderated "Score:5, Interesting", but it's also "-1, Offtopic".

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/mobile-gadgeteer/how-to-loan-ebooks-on-the-nook-with-lendme-service/2250

"The basics of the LendMe service is that you can lend supported books ONE time to ONE person" (where's Janis Joplin when you need her?).

The only reason Amazon got publishers to make this deal is because the publishers already made the deal for the Nook's LendMe service (yay for MFN pricing clauses!). E-books licensed for the Kindle will get the same licensing/pricing that was applied to the Nook; nothing more, nothing less (boo for MFN pricing clauses).

"Honestly, why do all of you perpetuate this bullshit that Bill actually designed or wrote anything?"

Look it up.

Well, take this with a grain of salt, but this would indicate he's done some programming. He's believed to have written a BASIC interpreter

I'm pretty sure he isn't credited with actually writing DOS. He didn't invent as much as he marketed. He's not some uber coder who actually created a lot of things.

He even said as much in 1986:

INTERVIEWER: You obviously have a lot of responsibilities as chief executive officer of Microsoft. Do you still program?

GATES: No, I don’t. I still help design algorithms and basic approaches, and sometimes I look at code. But since I worked on the IBM PC BASIC and the Model 100, I haven’t had a chance to actually create a program myself.

Bill Gates is a business man with a grounding in tech, and has been around while most of it was created so has a lot of perspective. But, I think his actual "hands on" coding is more limited than people think.

He had little to do with Azure, didn't talk much at company meetings, didn't inspire, didn't do anything.

You sure about that? According to Wired , Ozzie had everything to do with Azure, and spent his first two years on the job reorganizing the company to produce a services platform for the Web. He's quite clear about his intentions and the direction he was pushing the company in his original memo to Microsoft senior management, which was sent out under Bill Gates's email address. And longtime Microsoft observer Mary-Jo Foley says:

As I discovered during the course of my Red Dog meetings, Ozzie was anything but uninvolved in Red Dog and Azure. In fact, I heard from team members time and time again, without Ozzie’s oversight and direct intervention, Red Dog and the broader Azure platform wouldn’t have come together as quickly or comprehensively as they did.

Serious flaws? One motherboard in the time of the bad capacitors was codenamed Vesuvius for a reason ;-) Don't forget retro mode that enabled you to relive your past of 100Mhz on Windows XP.

When I ordered my Nexus one I also ordered a protective case and a belt thingy. It came with a neoprene sleve ( http://i.zdnet.com/gallery/378562-540-424.jpg ) and I just looked at that and thought.. "this thing is actually pretty smart" and I've been using it ever since. It keeps dust out of the phone. Keeps it from getting scratched in my pocket, and amazingly has been dropped more than a few times and has survived unscathed. I would just tell anyone after nearly a year of use, get a nice thick neoprene sleeve and save the trouble of all the other stuff.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/report-apple-had-the-most-vulnerabilities-throughout-2005-2010/6801

Apple also combine all their security patches and release a single patch/advisory every few months, so that 6 is in reality at least 10 times that amount of vulnerabilities or more, from memory one of them mid year had about 30 vulnerabilities patched in it.

I think Occam's Razor usually applies to suspects too. And in this case the most obvious suspect, with the most to gain by far, is Israel. There is even some evidence in the code that this is the case, and the Israeli government itself has openly acknowledged that it has extensive cyber-warfare plans.

Now of course, there are any number of ways to dismiss this if you REALLY want to believe that Israel wasn't involved (and it's always possible that they weren't). But you can do that with any case, no matter how clear-cut. I can make the same argument that O.J. Simpson never killed anyone (maybe it was just someone making it LOOK like he did it, there were probably other people with some reason to kill Ron and Nicole too). But is that the logical conclusion or just wishful thinking on my part because I don't want to believe that O.J. did it?

I run Windows 7 on my my new Revo box 64-bit 2core, 4GB, Nvidia, 500GB Hard Drive. Runs so slow. I spent £300 on it because of lies like yours.

Alrighty. I run Windows 7 on my old Dell Inspiron 1520 with 64 bit dual core, 4GB (aftermarket), Nvidia and 120GB Hard Drive. Bought it in Feb 08 with XP on it. This was during the reign of Vista and this was the only laptop Dell still sold with XP on it.

Got hit by a virus (damn AVG Free did not protect me; even though I scanned the suspect file thoroughly before trying to use it. Switched to Avira, we'll see how that does ;D) and had to re-install. I had already tried Win7 during RC and decided it is marginally better than XP, just not better enough to switch unless you're rolling a new OS anyway.. and now I was. So I switched from 32 bit XP to 64 bit 7.

Now it seems to run every bit as fast as XP did, with Aero turned on. It eats more RAM (900MB used at startup instead of 350MB, overhead appears constant after days of uptime) and this is after applying most of Black Viper's recommended service tweaks to both OSen. I find win+tab is handy when you've got a ton of browser windows open (each with tabs; I generally run one window per distinct project) and want to quickly get to one which is visually distinct.

so tuppe, does my counter-example anecdote mean that you're the liar now? Or perhaps we should yeild the predictive power of all of our personal one-off experiences in favor of actual research?

ZDnet's benchmarks maintain that Windows 7 is faster than XP for standard use, although XP remains more capable for devices with limited memory and outdated graphics.

Maximum PC's benchmarks claim that Win7 simply feels faster than XP on the hardware they tested.

Tom's Hardware's netbook benchmarks show that Windows 7 does not beat XP on the netbook but that it is quite responsive, and would probably surpass XP with better driver support.

TechRadar's benchmark includes many plusses and minuses for Windows 7 with a net plus, but clearly states that it provides "better performance than XP can deliver on today's hardware."

I'm not picking up on any benchmarks that have the same trouble you've had, so unfortunately I have no way to confirm you did not just misconfigure your machine.

Seriously, are we going to be calling it spacecraft? What is it going to be next? The Flip based UFO?
pleaaaseee.... gimme a break...

So in other words, no, monopolies don't give up power voluntarily. Competition alone doesn't help your argument much, either...

Firefox gained ground because of the US government pushing Microsoft to reduce the bundling with IE, and a few million dollars in funding from Mozilla Foundation, itself funded by the Bank Of AOL. Chrome is funded by Google, which got its money through the use of patented (!) algorithms.

Vista failed for more than just "lacking competition". Mac OS X was out for five years, with regular updates, before Vista. In fact, one of the biggest reasons Vista failed was because of Apple's advertising and some internal problems, rather than a lack of new features. It seems a big ad budget can override innovation.

Your last sentence is a four-line jumble of clauses. If I read it right, you seem to be saying that little guys get screwed, and without patents the big players can lock them out of the market. Yep. That's why we need patents.

Probably because Microsoft rewrote the NT kernel for Windows 7, to eliminate the kinds of problems this study discovered:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/windows-7-to-scale-to-256-processors/1687

"most conversation within a car don't cause anywhere near this level of distraction"

[citation needed]

Link

Link

Link

Google for more

Sorry, but if you think adding a few GPUs into the mix is going to make a difference, you don't have much idea about cracking encryption.

Unless you figure out a weakness in the algorithm, you are not brute forcing a 128 bit key without either a lot of luck, centuries of time, or a quantum computer.

Here's a quote from an article about encryption.

Ah, but what about the dreaded massively distributed cracking brute force method for attacking something like 128 bit RC5 encryption? There are massive zombie farms of infected computers throughout the world and some may have gotten as big as 1 million infected computers. What if that entire army was unleashed upon the commonly used 128 bit RC5 encryption? Surprisingly, the answer is not much. For the sake of argument, let’s say we unleash 4.3 billion computers for the purpose of distributed cracking. This means that it would be 4.3 billion or 2 to the 32 times faster than a single computer. This means we could simply take 2 to the 128 combinations for 128-bit encryption and divide it by 2 to the 32 which means that 2 to the 96 bits are left. With 96 bits left, it’s still 4.3 billion times stronger than 64 bit encryption. 64 bit encryption happens to be the world record for the biggest RC5 bit key cracked in 2002 which took nearly 5 years to achieve for a massive distributed attack.

Now that we know that the distributed attacks will only shave off a few bits, what about Moore’s law which historically meant that computers roughly doubled in speed every 18 months? That means in 48 years we can shave another 32 bits off the encryption armor which means 5 trillion future computers might get lucky in 5 years to find the key for RC5 128-bit encryption. But with 256-bit AES encryption, that moves the date out another 192 years before computers are predicted to be fast enough to even attempt a massively distributed attack. To give you an idea how big 256 bits is, it’s roughly equal to the number of atoms in the universe!

So you use Novell which would never do anything underhanded for business?