The press release had essentially no information. The fact that they were using a accelerator X-RAY source clearly says that they were working with a diamond anvil cell. It would not be surprising if the pressures involved were in the Megabar levels. You would want to know what the transition temperature is for deuterated silane, as this would tell us if phonon modes were involved - classical superconductivity is phonon-mediated, while the cuprate high temperature superconductors involve very short range electronic excitations as exchange vectors.
Potentially interesting from the physics point of view. From the engineering point of view, I would view it as providing hints concerning other, more reasonable, molecular media.
While such Wolf-Rayet doubles, or the LBV in Eta Carniae are definitely pre-supernovae, it is unlikely that they are likely gamma ray burst sources. GRB's have a very strong preference for low metallicity environments, almost certainly because higher metal levels cause them to loose too much mass angular momentum. In this region of the galaxy, the metal levels is too high to have a high unlikelihood of GRB's. Also note that for the GRB to propagate into space, the star must first have blown off its envelope, or the GRB is absorbed in the stellar atmosphere and simply adds to the explosion energy (this is probably quite common).
It appears to me that the critical thing to realize about the market in the developed world is that manufacturers are looking for reasons (marketable feature sets) that can be used to sell newer hardware to users who already have older hardware (in this case, new pc's to users of older pc's). Thus they exert strong pressure upon the OS and SW makers to add more and more features to justify the "upgrades". The software vendors do this as well, as otherwise their sale of a application package a decade ago would block their sale now.
As long as a large fraction of the consumers are willing to continue the feature race, there is good money to be had. I saw one study some time ago that concluded that for each 1$ Microsoft received, ~ $18 went into the the rest of the industry. This is of course true of all the other areas of the consumer economy, which is focused upon creating and satisfying "wants" in a never-ending cycle.
I don't want to get into a discussion of what people need vs. what they want. It does appear that the functionality to any given user increases very slowly with the total feature set of a product. Of course, different users will use different features.
If you are willing to work with text mode displays, you could and can do very well with very minimal systems. I did very well with a 12 MHz 286 running DOS 6.1 with Word Perfect 5.1 and QuattroPro 18 years ago. 25 years ago I used Emacs and Scribe / nroff for writing documents on Unix systems. My cousin just had her Win 3.1 system die (also a 286 system). She had been using Word Perfect to write scientific papers.
From a practical point of view, normal users needs for routine writing, spread sheet usage, and the like in a convenient GUI were satisfied with Office 97 on Win 98, and its equivalents. Win 98 systems were more than adequate for ripping of music and can handle moderate still image manipulation. I still have my Win 98 box (1.7 GHz P4, 80 GByte drive, although I upgraded it from 256 MBytes to 768 MBytes when I upgraded it to XP). Unfortunately, the Win 9X series were designed for a much less hostile environment than we now face. 9X systems should not be connected to the internet.
Win2K was developed for the enterprise and did well. It had more security, configurability, and manageability than the 9X series.
For consumers, XP followed the 9X series, and eventually offered far more security. The hardware that came of age in the XP environment is far more capable, and XP systems are easily capable of ripping and transcoding large video files and can easily handle speech recognition, and simultaneous demanding applications. Unfortunately, XP continued the 9X tradition of typically running the user as administrator and application writers made this assumption, making it very hard to run XP as a normal user.
From my point of view as a security geek, Vista is a security enhanced XP with enough kernel security enhancements to break a number of bad security practices of XP - with ensuing application breakage. You can run Vista a normal user and a lot of work went into hardening the system. We have seen ~ a 50% reduction in MSRC issues.
From a point of view of "needs", we get into a different discussion. What are you doing and in what environment? If you are producing text documents in a stand-alone system, you can get by with very limited HW. If you are working always connected to the web or a server, you can get by with a thin client. If you are in the mixed mode, the question comes down to what are you trying to do, and what support do you have available to do it. Most customer tasks are not that demanding and hence do not require that much HW. If I can go on-line to get functionality support that is beyond my box, I don't have to buy as much capability in my local device. We will see some interesting transitions in the next decade.
I run Windows at home because the apps I use were written for Windows (for example, OmniPage OCR) and I could get drivers for my dev
As I see it, the driving force for the migration in hardware requirements is the hardware vendors. They are looking for reasons, typically "new features" that can be used to sell new machines to people who already have machines. This has significantly constrained Microsoft, as their primary customer is these hardware vendors (I think that the fraction of users buying systems is in the low single digit percentage). The hardware vendors would not make any money if MS simply released or sold an update package that allowed an earlier release to do some rich new feature set. My own opinion is the there would be more money for Microsoft pursuing the user, but that Microsoft is trapped by the hardware vendors.
Personally, I would like to see Windows Server 2008 available as a desktop OS and at a desktop OS price. It is reliable, runs well on moderate hardware, and has been subjected to a lot of security hardening. I believe that is far more secure than XP.
As things move to services and people come to rely upon their personal devices (phones, etc) as thinner clients, we will see a significant change. The home PC's are likely to become more servers, and some of that functionality will migrate into the internet cloud.
We have a divergence in the interests of the users and the customers. The customers for PC's are largely HP, Dell, etc. Dell, HP, et al, want reasons to get users to buy new PC's, rather than just upgrade their existing SW. If people bought subscriptions to the SW, the business model would change. That said, I expect the movement to software as a service should have some interesting impacts, and not only on Microsoft.
Just an observation. Microsoft sells very few copies of Windows to users. It sells primarily to vendors such as Dell, HP,... These vendors are trying to sell new "improved", "new features" systems to people who already have adequate machines. There is insignificant demand targeting minimal platforms. Microsoft has a light version of XP which will run on 64 MB and take ~ 1 GByte of disc, but it was carefully crippled and not offered to the general community (Windows for Legacy PC's is a XP variant with a browser, messenger, media, and a term serve client). The hardware vendor community clearly would not have been happy with Microsoft shipping a minimal set that would run on W98 HW when they needed to sell new HW.
Thus, MS has left the minimal market to others, such as the BSD's.
I know the Program Manager who was responsible for UAC and discussed it extensively with him when it was being developed.
Application developers have been writing applications assuming that users had administrative privileges. To secure the system, we need to move to an administrator : user paradigm, where apps are run with user privileges only. Since this would break everything, deflection directories and registry hives were written to intercept unauthorized writes to privileged system and registry locations and the UAC prompt was added so that users would be notified when something was being installed. Once you install your apps, you should not be seeing UAC popups.
I ran as administrator when I installed all my applications. Then I took myself out of the administrator's group and added myself into the users group. I use the machine administrator account to install stuff, but run as a normal user.
I am going to have to rebuild my new machine at home: a HP system with a 2.4 GHz Core 2 + 2 GBytes of RAM. It is not as responsive or reliable as it should be (I do have experience with the behavior of the base OS). It is clearly the crapware. I uninstalled most of it at the beginning, but clearly didn't get it all.
I used some of my internal tools and found that the crapware that shipped with the PC introduced a significant number of security vulnerabilities into the system.
They are my working desktops. I keep my old notebook, the D610, for taking to conferences (defcon, black hat, and the like). I have it well scrubbed before I go. While properly configured bitlocker would prevent loss of corporate data, I would still be out a machine. Thus, I take my old machine on trips and make sure there is nothing sensitive on it. My primary system has a full development system on it and a variety of internal security tools, some of which are rather weaponized.
The difference is cost. The OS X releases are minor releases, released every year to 18 months. Microsoft supports a product for 7 years or more before it goes into extended support. This is more than a factor of 2 longer than Apple provides support for their products.
As for home usage, I run Vista at home, where I have my kids run as normal users, not administrators. With them running as admin on XP, the situation was totally hopeless.
I run server 2K8 on my work notebook. It is very robust and performs well. Personally, I prefer server over Vista, but then again, I am an old paranoid who doesn't value slickness.
I had an iBook before I joined Microsoft. It burned motherboard every 9 months. To maintain security support of the OS, I had to buy a new version of OS X every other release (My system came with OS X 10.1). Not only is MS cheaper to buy, it is far cheaper to maintain for many years. That said, Apple does make elegant consumer products.
Server 2008 is highly componetized. I run Server 2008 in the following configuration:
Standard server 2008
+wireless feature
+search indexer from the file server role
I have run this configuration on a Dell D610 and D620 notebook with the notebooks locked into maximum battery life mode (I get 6+ hours with the DVD-tray second battery).
2K8 also allows you to install server core, which gives you only a command line interface. It is intended for headless servers and is not particularly useful as a workstation OS. Note that I do not run the desktop experience pack, so I don't have messenger, the media player, etc.
I have been running Server 2K8 since Vista Beta 1, and it has always been reliable.
I would judge the responsiveness on the GX620 to be a bit slower than when running XP, but not so significant as to impact my productivity. The other machines I have at work run Server 2K8, which I prefer. I do not run the desktop experience pack, so none of the neat GUI is available.
We are seeing about half of the MSRC issues, and a number of them have lower criticality. In addition, I know what was done in the way of service hardening, the addition of ASLR (which complements the NX work done in XP SP2), the enhancements in exception handling, and the massive fuzzing of parsers for Vista. Unlike XP, it is quite feasible to run Vista as a normal user. I run my kids as normal users on the home systems - they do not have install privledges.
My perspective is more of an enterprise one. Many enterprises adopt alternating releases. I would expect the organizations running W2K to move to Vista and 2K8. The case if more demanding for the move from XP to Vista. It can be made, but it is less compelling.
It does work well on 2 GBytes. I run an index server on 1 GByte running Vista Business, and have no problems with it. The cheap USB stick in my pocket has 8 GBytes.
OS X is definitely not more secure than Vista. Standard Linux consumer distros are not either.
The thing to remember about the PC market is that it is driven by the hardware vendors who are looking to sell a "new, improved, with neat features" PC to somebody who already has a PC. Given the low cost of memory and storage, there is little incentive to try to minimize size. Vista is big, but so to are the major consumer distros. This is actually reasonable. Even if the value to the consumer scales as ln(feature_count), a reasonable value proposition can still exist.
You don't find many still using vi or emacs with tex or nroff formatting.
As my handle notes, I work at MS. I worked on Vista security during its development and was frequently at ship room concerning security issues. My focus is not on neat consumer feature and great graphics. I have found that Vista runs well on old hardware that is not really adequate for the new visuals. -- I turn off the Aero interface (which saves a lot of RAM as well), running "Windows Classic" for my UI. I then go to system advanced properties and optimize for performance. The resulting system works quite well. I have an old XP box (Dell GX620, ~ 3 GHz processor with 1 GByte of RAM) that I am running Vista business on. I added a 330 GByte drive and use it as an index server for ~ 150 GBytes of source code that I search. Except when it is syncing its files with the master, when ~ 40 command line processes run synchronization simultaneously, it is reasonably responsive.
I have found that Windows server 2008 runs very well on a ~ 3 year old Dell 610 notebook, even when the system is locked into maximum battery life (and minimum performance) mode. It has a ~ 2GHz processor and 2 GBytes of RAM.
Playing graphics games costs CPU and GPU processing power. From my point of view, the reason to upgrade to Vista is its significantly higher security than XP, let alone the earlier OS's. Search is also very nice and quite useful.
It is a server OS, a very nice one. It has been optimized for throughput, not responsiveness, but despite that, it makes a very robust client without a lot of bloat.
As for search indexing, it is a minor feature under the file server role, where it is clearly intended to support indexed access to large data stores. I use the search indexer on an old XP system I loaded Vista on to to conduct text searches against > 150 GBytes of source code.
I have found server 2K8 to be stable and reliable. I have been running a beta version on my notebook since Vista Beta 1. It runs well, uses modest resources (it even runs well on a Dell Dimension 610 notebook running in maximum battery life mode with the index server running). Unless you install the desktop experience package, you do not get the media player.
When you install server, you are given the choice of server core or standard server. Assuming you choose standard server, it installs server with a basic core of functionality. Then in server manager you add only those roles and features that you want for your system. For my notebook, I added the wireless feature and the search indexer, which is under the file server role.
I am doubtful. The driving force for the extreme feature richness of Vista is almost certainly the hardware vendor's search for new features that will let them sell hardware to customers who already have adequate computers. Those customers who are happy with basic functionality will be happy with their Win 2K and XP boxes. For many people, the Win 98 boxes would remain adequate for browsing, light duty editing, and the like. Providing simple functionality only requires on sale, typically one that was made years ago. The hardware vendors need new feature that gobble RAM, CPU, and disc to sell their hardware. It seems to me that Microsoft is more the follower than the leader here.
Actually, look at Server 2008. When you install, you get the choice of standard GUI or server core. Server core is for headless servers and does not come with a GUI or the windows explorer - you get a command line. If you install the standard server configuration, you server with no roles or features enabled. No media player, no sidebar, et. This is what I run on my notebook. I added the wireless feature and the search indexer from the file server role. It runs well on low power on my notebook and ran well when I was using what is now a 3 year old notebook.
Consumers seem to like all the bells and whistles. To make sure that the consumers have lots, all the PC vendors ship their systems with gigs and gigs of various stuff. I would pay extra to get a clean system and clean install discs without all the extra *hit!
I will make no comment about the cross OS comparisons. There are interesting issues of measurement and methodology there and depending upon your biases, you can get a wide variety of conclusions.
I work in Windows security and was heavily involved with Vista security. That said, it is somewhat reasonable to compare the number of issues by criticality for OS's after release. The reason I said somewhat reasonable is the the attack community has gotten a lot more competent over the past 5 years. That said, even with the significant increase in attack capabilities, the number and severity of vulnerabilities found in Vista in the first year after its release is significantly lower than found in XP for the same period. And the Vista shipment numbers are very significant, enough so that it is well worth attacking.
Basically, the European union seems to be trying to defend the manufacturer of various products / features over the consumer. When forced to, Microsoft shipped a version of Windows with no media player. Nobody bought it (This was no surprise to anybody). It is trivial to install other media players or browsers on Windows. Indeed, you can also set your prefered search engine in IE to Google, Yahoo, etc. Opera makes a nice browser. It is efficient and capable, but Opera has failed at marketing. Even in the highly anti-Microsoft community in the EU, they still have insignificant market share. This is not Microsoft's fault.
The argument that Microsoft's inclusion of functionality with Windows discourages third parties from making such functionality implies a far different view of OS and applications that is present in the market. Should Apple be banned from shipping their browser? What about their included applications? What about KDE or Gnome? They are add-ons above the basic OS functionality. What about OS utilities for disc management, security tools, etc.?
Microsoft ships an OS with a rich set of functionality, dealing with the demands of the hardware manufacturers for functionality that will motivate users to purchase new systems. This does not preclude third parties from selling or distributing their own versions of this functionality and associated enhancements on the merits of that functionality. Firefox has sucessfully done so.
It seems unlikely. I would expect a move to advertising support first. If all you want is basic functionality, there is no reason whatsoever to be buying and upgrading machines to higher and higher capabilities. The old ones will do very well, thank you. My cousin is about to buy a PC. Her Win 3.1 system finally bit the dust - hardware failure. Customers with very basic usage are not of interest to manufacturers - there is no particular profit potential there. I just replaced the monitor I bought when I bought my Win 95 box, more than 10 years ago.
It appears to me that Microsoft's continually growing HW requirements are driven by the HW vendors, who are looking to get people to replace their old systems with new, more capable systems. If Microsoft (or Ubuntu, or whoever) simply shipped a SW update / version that didn't justify the new HW, the HW vendor (who is the primary customer of the OS supplier) would not be happy.
There are some nice bells and whistles with Vista. Other than search, I do not really use them. My functionality needs were satisfied with XP. I run Vista because of its superior security, not for the bells and whistles. I already have a large SW library that I run on Windows (or in emulators), including some DOS codes that I run in DosBox (> 20 years old specialized codes). I do not gain anything by switching to *nix and I would loose a lot due to my support problems with my family members who are familiar with Windows.
My snake oil sensors are going off. To be blunt, I don't believe. Theoretical Carnot cycle limits on efficiency due to temperature differences (such as human body to air) are very low. This is what limited the ocean thermal energy systems, as the efficiencies were low and the amounts of matter you had to move past your heat exchanger were very large. The 60% number came from a high concentrator temperature. The reason we don't get such efficiencies with our power plants is material imitations, similar limitations will limit other approaches as well.
We are going to have sizable energy losses going through the membranes and be very susceptible to cracking, pitting, and holes. Note that high temperature hydrogen is a rather chemically active environment.
Current thermoelectric elements are not yet efficient enough to compete with closed cycle refrigeration systems. Why should I believe that he has a system that can get ~ 50% more efficiency than we can in highly optimized power plants? Note, reasonable increases in efficiency will be very valuable and are worth funding, but the spinmeister publicity is counter productive.
Incidentally, I did my Ph.D in solid state thermodynamics some 25 years ago.
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Potentially interesting from the physics point of view. From the engineering point of view, I would view it as providing hints concerning other, more reasonable, molecular media.
While such Wolf-Rayet doubles, or the LBV in Eta Carniae are definitely pre-supernovae, it is unlikely that they are likely gamma ray burst sources. GRB's have a very strong preference for low metallicity environments, almost certainly because higher metal levels cause them to loose too much mass angular momentum. In this region of the galaxy, the metal levels is too high to have a high unlikelihood of GRB's. Also note that for the GRB to propagate into space, the star must first have blown off its envelope, or the GRB is absorbed in the stellar atmosphere and simply adds to the explosion energy (this is probably quite common).
As long as a large fraction of the consumers are willing to continue the feature race, there is good money to be had. I saw one study some time ago that concluded that for each 1$ Microsoft received, ~ $18 went into the the rest of the industry. This is of course true of all the other areas of the consumer economy, which is focused upon creating and satisfying "wants" in a never-ending cycle.
I don't want to get into a discussion of what people need vs. what they want. It does appear that the functionality to any given user increases very slowly with the total feature set of a product. Of course, different users will use different features.
If you are willing to work with text mode displays, you could and can do very well with very minimal systems. I did very well with a 12 MHz 286 running DOS 6.1 with Word Perfect 5.1 and QuattroPro 18 years ago. 25 years ago I used Emacs and Scribe / nroff for writing documents on Unix systems. My cousin just had her Win 3.1 system die (also a 286 system). She had been using Word Perfect to write scientific papers.
From a practical point of view, normal users needs for routine writing, spread sheet usage, and the like in a convenient GUI were satisfied with Office 97 on Win 98, and its equivalents. Win 98 systems were more than adequate for ripping of music and can handle moderate still image manipulation. I still have my Win 98 box (1.7 GHz P4, 80 GByte drive, although I upgraded it from 256 MBytes to 768 MBytes when I upgraded it to XP). Unfortunately, the Win 9X series were designed for a much less hostile environment than we now face. 9X systems should not be connected to the internet.
Win2K was developed for the enterprise and did well. It had more security, configurability, and manageability than the 9X series.
For consumers, XP followed the 9X series, and eventually offered far more security. The hardware that came of age in the XP environment is far more capable, and XP systems are easily capable of ripping and transcoding large video files and can easily handle speech recognition, and simultaneous demanding applications. Unfortunately, XP continued the 9X tradition of typically running the user as administrator and application writers made this assumption, making it very hard to run XP as a normal user.
From my point of view as a security geek, Vista is a security enhanced XP with enough kernel security enhancements to break a number of bad security practices of XP - with ensuing application breakage. You can run Vista a normal user and a lot of work went into hardening the system. We have seen ~ a 50% reduction in MSRC issues.
From a point of view of "needs", we get into a different discussion. What are you doing and in what environment? If you are producing text documents in a stand-alone system, you can get by with very limited HW. If you are working always connected to the web or a server, you can get by with a thin client. If you are in the mixed mode, the question comes down to what are you trying to do, and what support do you have available to do it. Most customer tasks are not that demanding and hence do not require that much HW. If I can go on-line to get functionality support that is beyond my box, I don't have to buy as much capability in my local device. We will see some interesting transitions in the next decade.
I run Windows at home because the apps I use were written for Windows (for example, OmniPage OCR) and I could get drivers for my dev
Personally, I would like to see Windows Server 2008 available as a desktop OS and at a desktop OS price. It is reliable, runs well on moderate hardware, and has been subjected to a lot of security hardening. I believe that is far more secure than XP.
As things move to services and people come to rely upon their personal devices (phones, etc) as thinner clients, we will see a significant change. The home PC's are likely to become more servers, and some of that functionality will migrate into the internet cloud.
We have a divergence in the interests of the users and the customers. The customers for PC's are largely HP, Dell, etc. Dell, HP, et al, want reasons to get users to buy new PC's, rather than just upgrade their existing SW. If people bought subscriptions to the SW, the business model would change. That said, I expect the movement to software as a service should have some interesting impacts, and not only on Microsoft.
Thus, MS has left the minimal market to others, such as the BSD's.
Application developers have been writing applications assuming that users had administrative privileges. To secure the system, we need to move to an administrator : user paradigm, where apps are run with user privileges only. Since this would break everything, deflection directories and registry hives were written to intercept unauthorized writes to privileged system and registry locations and the UAC prompt was added so that users would be notified when something was being installed. Once you install your apps, you should not be seeing UAC popups.
I ran as administrator when I installed all my applications. Then I took myself out of the administrator's group and added myself into the users group. I use the machine administrator account to install stuff, but run as a normal user.
I used some of my internal tools and found that the crapware that shipped with the PC introduced a significant number of security vulnerabilities into the system.
As for home usage, I run Vista at home, where I have my kids run as normal users, not administrators. With them running as admin on XP, the situation was totally hopeless.
I run server 2K8 on my work notebook. It is very robust and performs well. Personally, I prefer server over Vista, but then again, I am an old paranoid who doesn't value slickness.
I had an iBook before I joined Microsoft. It burned motherboard every 9 months. To maintain security support of the OS, I had to buy a new version of OS X every other release (My system came with OS X 10.1). Not only is MS cheaper to buy, it is far cheaper to maintain for many years. That said, Apple does make elegant consumer products.
SBS has a lot more stuff running that default standard server.
Standard server 2008
+wireless feature
+search indexer from the file server role
I have run this configuration on a Dell D610 and D620 notebook with the notebooks locked into maximum battery life mode (I get 6+ hours with the DVD-tray second battery).
2K8 also allows you to install server core, which gives you only a command line interface. It is intended for headless servers and is not particularly useful as a workstation OS. Note that I do not run the desktop experience pack, so I don't have messenger, the media player, etc.
I have been running Server 2K8 since Vista Beta 1, and it has always been reliable.
We are seeing about half of the MSRC issues, and a number of them have lower criticality. In addition, I know what was done in the way of service hardening, the addition of ASLR (which complements the NX work done in XP SP2), the enhancements in exception handling, and the massive fuzzing of parsers for Vista. Unlike XP, it is quite feasible to run Vista as a normal user. I run my kids as normal users on the home systems - they do not have install privledges.
My perspective is more of an enterprise one. Many enterprises adopt alternating releases. I would expect the organizations running W2K to move to Vista and 2K8. The case if more demanding for the move from XP to Vista. It can be made, but it is less compelling.
It does work well on 2 GBytes. I run an index server on 1 GByte running Vista Business, and have no problems with it. The cheap USB stick in my pocket has 8 GBytes.
The thing to remember about the PC market is that it is driven by the hardware vendors who are looking to sell a "new, improved, with neat features" PC to somebody who already has a PC. Given the low cost of memory and storage, there is little incentive to try to minimize size. Vista is big, but so to are the major consumer distros. This is actually reasonable. Even if the value to the consumer scales as ln(feature_count), a reasonable value proposition can still exist.
You don't find many still using vi or emacs with tex or nroff formatting.
I have found that Windows server 2008 runs very well on a ~ 3 year old Dell 610 notebook, even when the system is locked into maximum battery life (and minimum performance) mode. It has a ~ 2GHz processor and 2 GBytes of RAM.
Playing graphics games costs CPU and GPU processing power. From my point of view, the reason to upgrade to Vista is its significantly higher security than XP, let alone the earlier OS's. Search is also very nice and quite useful.
As for search indexing, it is a minor feature under the file server role, where it is clearly intended to support indexed access to large data stores. I use the search indexer on an old XP system I loaded Vista on to to conduct text searches against > 150 GBytes of source code.
When you install server, you are given the choice of server core or standard server. Assuming you choose standard server, it installs server with a basic core of functionality. Then in server manager you add only those roles and features that you want for your system. For my notebook, I added the wireless feature and the search indexer, which is under the file server role.
I am doubtful. The driving force for the extreme feature richness of Vista is almost certainly the hardware vendor's search for new features that will let them sell hardware to customers who already have adequate computers. Those customers who are happy with basic functionality will be happy with their Win 2K and XP boxes. For many people, the Win 98 boxes would remain adequate for browsing, light duty editing, and the like. Providing simple functionality only requires on sale, typically one that was made years ago. The hardware vendors need new feature that gobble RAM, CPU, and disc to sell their hardware. It seems to me that Microsoft is more the follower than the leader here.
Consumers seem to like all the bells and whistles. To make sure that the consumers have lots, all the PC vendors ship their systems with gigs and gigs of various stuff. I would pay extra to get a clean system and clean install discs without all the extra *hit!
I work in Windows security and was heavily involved with Vista security. That said, it is somewhat reasonable to compare the number of issues by criticality for OS's after release. The reason I said somewhat reasonable is the the attack community has gotten a lot more competent over the past 5 years. That said, even with the significant increase in attack capabilities, the number and severity of vulnerabilities found in Vista in the first year after its release is significantly lower than found in XP for the same period. And the Vista shipment numbers are very significant, enough so that it is well worth attacking.
The argument that Microsoft's inclusion of functionality with Windows discourages third parties from making such functionality implies a far different view of OS and applications that is present in the market. Should Apple be banned from shipping their browser? What about their included applications? What about KDE or Gnome? They are add-ons above the basic OS functionality. What about OS utilities for disc management, security tools, etc.?
Microsoft ships an OS with a rich set of functionality, dealing with the demands of the hardware manufacturers for functionality that will motivate users to purchase new systems. This does not preclude third parties from selling or distributing their own versions of this functionality and associated enhancements on the merits of that functionality. Firefox has sucessfully done so.
It appears to me that Microsoft's continually growing HW requirements are driven by the HW vendors, who are looking to get people to replace their old systems with new, more capable systems. If Microsoft (or Ubuntu, or whoever) simply shipped a SW update / version that didn't justify the new HW, the HW vendor (who is the primary customer of the OS supplier) would not be happy.
There are some nice bells and whistles with Vista. Other than search, I do not really use them. My functionality needs were satisfied with XP. I run Vista because of its superior security, not for the bells and whistles. I already have a large SW library that I run on Windows (or in emulators), including some DOS codes that I run in DosBox (> 20 years old specialized codes). I do not gain anything by switching to *nix and I would loose a lot due to my support problems with my family members who are familiar with Windows.
My snake oil sensors are going off. To be blunt, I don't believe. Theoretical Carnot cycle limits on efficiency due to temperature differences (such as human body to air) are very low. This is what limited the ocean thermal energy systems, as the efficiencies were low and the amounts of matter you had to move past your heat exchanger were very large. The 60% number came from a high concentrator temperature. The reason we don't get such efficiencies with our power plants is material imitations, similar limitations will limit other approaches as well. We are going to have sizable energy losses going through the membranes and be very susceptible to cracking, pitting, and holes. Note that high temperature hydrogen is a rather chemically active environment. Current thermoelectric elements are not yet efficient enough to compete with closed cycle refrigeration systems. Why should I believe that he has a system that can get ~ 50% more efficiency than we can in highly optimized power plants? Note, reasonable increases in efficiency will be very valuable and are worth funding, but the spinmeister publicity is counter productive. Incidentally, I did my Ph.D in solid state thermodynamics some 25 years ago.