Possibly. One of the new features in Leopard is digitally signed apps though, and Apple is setting up some kind of infrastructure so you can verify the signatures. It would seem likely they'll use the same system on the iPhone.
I'm just going to point out that Windows has had digitally-signed apps since (at least) Windows 98, and that nearly every system library and executable in Windows XP and Windows Vista is signed. Vista even checks the signature before you see the UAC dialog, and the dialog for signed apps looks completely different (and has different keyboard shortcuts).
Windows Mobile also has signed apps.
Of course, I'm sure that some Mac fan is going to point out how this is another Apple innovation.
Saying not being able to deal with this sort of thing is a problem with ISO is like saying not being able to deal with a passerby kicking the board over and running off with the pieces is a problem with chess.
We're not talking about a couple of people playing Chess, we're talking about a major international standards body.
To use your analogy, it's like not being able to deal with a passerby kicking the board over and running off with the pieces in a major Chess tournament. You can bet that the match organizers take steps to prevent that.
Why is this newsworthy? Vista has a memory leak in the shell, and they offer a patch on request and will fix it in SP1.
Anyone try using Firefox lately? Sitting here, doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, with 3 tabs open, it's at 69MB right now. I have seen it hit 300MB before, and the longer you have it open, the worse it gets.
Memory leaks happen. They're called bugs. Bugs eventually get fixed.
No, this has nothing to do with a bug in Vista. This has to do with the Slashdot editors throwing more red meat to the dogs. Just like the broadband stories that pop up every few weeks (how many times do we need to be told that the US isn't #1 in broadband?), and just about every other Vista story.
You may notice something though - what hasn't been popping up. There are fewer vulnerabilities for Vista: Secunia reports just 15 vulnerabilities ever, compared with 24 for XP in 2007 and 45 for XP in 2006.
People are complaining that Vista requires too much memory and doesn't have 100% hardware support. Well, 2GB of DDR2 now runs about $60, and pretty much any new hardware sold today is Vista-compatible (not to mention lots of older hardware, including everything in my 3 Vista PCs, all of which predate Vista).
People won't care that Vista has higher hardware requirements. They will care that it's more secure and more robust. Ask anyone who has overclocked their GPU too much:
XP: Blue sceeen
Linux: X dies (along with your session), sometimes kernel panic
Mac OS X: Happy graphical kernel panic
Vista: Display goes black for a couple of seconds, GPU restarts with default settings, desktop reappears
It may not seem like a big thing, but display drivers are very complex and they shouldn't be able to bring down the computer.
UMTS/HSDPA can easily hit 700kbps, as can CDMA2000 1x EV-DO. EDGE hits 180kbps on a good day. On a REALLY good day.
The "error" argument is bullshit. All digital cellular technologies have extensive error correction.
Streaming media (Verizon/Sprint/AT&T all have services), downloads, and pretty much everything else benefits from more bandwidth. There is absolutely ZERO way that your browser is going to get slower because you have a faster network link, unless your browser is a piece of crap. Your browser may not get much faster if it's CPU constrained (pages don't load any faster on my 770 using the 15Mbps campus network instead of 1.5Mbps DSL), but it's certainly not going to trip the browser up or any garbage like that.
As for battery life, yes, UMTS/HSDPA takes more power. You also spend less time downloading, because it's faster.
T-Mobile doesn't have UMTS/HSDPA in the US right now, so I use EDGE every day - on my phone or on my laptop. EDGE is slow and has horrible latency. There's simply no other way to slice it.
So you can brute force a victory on a game with 10^60 possible endings? Okay, then I'll invent a game with a much bigger space to search and a bigger decision tree. Then what?
Go for it. The article isn't about beating "UbuntuDupe's hypothetical game", it's about beating Go. There are lots of things that humans are better than computers at. None of that has any relevance to the article.
You've found a way to weed out fruitless branches, so it collapses into a problem that requires only 10^12 flops to solve? And this method isn't in use yet? Submit it to a journal, and add it to the corpus of Go algorithms.
No, the author is implying that algorithmic advances combined with more computing power will allow computers to beat humans at Go in the near future. Just because your Core 2 Duo box isn't competitive at Go doesn't mean that a hypothetical computer with, say, 500 FPGAs (we're talking about the FPGAs of 2017, not 2007) can't be.
So what's the breakthrough here?
There isn't one. Like most engineering progress, it happens incrementally.
Re:Progress in Computer Go
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 1
I'm a reasonably strong Go player myself (4. dan) and I've studied computational complexity - my gut feeling is that computers will not beat humans at Go in my lifetime even if Moore's law continues to apply.
You must be pretty old, because we haven't even begun to see what computer science can do.
Every time, they tell us that we're stuck because our current paradigm has run out of steam. And every time we come up with something new.
11 years ago, computers couldn't beat grandmasters at Chess. Now significantly cheaper computers are so strong that no one even bothers playing them. That advancement has come mostly from algorithm development, not from brute force.
We're not going to beat Go with burte force. That doesn't mean that we're not going to beat it with better algorithms. I don't think it's going to be 10 years, but I also don't think that it's going to be 40.
I bought a Nokia N770 Internet Tablet because it was a nifty little "open" Linux machine. It couldn't do much, but it was open, so the promise of an amazing device was there. Unfortunately, it was abandoned by Nokia as soon as the N800 came out, even though the devices are similar. No more OS updates, application development has largely dried up, and the developer community has moved on.
I suggest you look at the OS2007 Hacker Edition firmware. It's the next best thing to official support (considering that it is both sponsored by and sanctioned by Nokia).
When will people get a fucking clue that the MP4 files that iTunes sells are not an Apple proprietary format? It's the codec developed to replace MP3. It was developed by the same freaking people who developed MP3. You know you can buy songs without DRM from iTunes? Thirty cent price jump for 256 kpbs MP4 (theoretically superior quality to 256 kbps MP3) with no DRM for individual tracks. No price jump if you buy the whole album. And reportedly Amazon's terms of service don't allow re-downloading of transfer of ownership.
AAC is indeed a decently standardized format, but it's not as widespread as MP3. I don't know of a single device that plays AAC that doesn't also play MP3. The converse can not be said.
My car handles MP3 or WMA files on a CD, but not AAC. So does my DVD player. Lots of older players (like my Zen V) and even some newer players don't support AAC.
At 192kbps, I can't tell the difference between AAC, MP3, WMA, or Vorbis. Heck, I have a hard time telling that it's not the original uncompressed recording. So, tell me why AAC offers any advantage at all to me over MP3?
I've heard Coke VPs from back in the day admit that that's how it worked out
Then you've heard wrong. Coke Clasic has NOTHING to do with the switch to HFCS, for the simple fact that most Coke bottlers switched to HFCS long before New Coke was ever introduced. They did it just as you would imagine that they would - 10% per year.
No, he was referring to the Express Visual Studio, which is still an entire IDE. The actual command-line compiler is much, much smaller (analogous to GCC).
And VC++ Express isn't 1.7GB, it's like 100MB. It's all of the documentation and code samples that take up the space.
The 60 million people who use Vista on a daily basis got tired of defending their OS.
At a recent LUG meeting, one of our new members noticed that I dual-boot Vista and Ubuntu on my laptop. He started to comment on it, and instead of launching into my usual rant about how Vista is trashed unfairly, I simply said, "I don't need to defend my choices to you. Discussion over.".
I run Vista on ALL of my personal machines, from a 2.66GHz P4 to my dual-core Athlon 64 desktop. Many of the people I know use Vista as well. We are looking at deploying it at my workplace starting early next year.
I guess I just don't care anymore. Don't use Vista if you don't want to. But, please, stop fucking talking about how much you hate it. We don't want to debate you, and we don't want to defend our choice any longer. We just want to use our damn system.
If you don't like AT&T don't get an iPhone. Nobody is forcing you to buy one and you're definately not entitled to own one just because it exists.
No one is forcing you to buy any phone from any carrier. If Apple wants me to sign up with AT&T, they should make me sign a contract to that effect. This cat and mouse game is stupid. EVERY GSM phone has been unlocked. The iPhone is no exception.
Personally, I'm not willing to put up with Apple's bullshit. I won't buy their iPods (which only sync with iTunes - wait until the next release where they're sure to break Linux support again), and I won't buy the iPhone. Right now I have a T-Mobile Dash / HTC Excalibur (unlockd, running HTC firmware). When the neo1973 comes out, I might switch to that.
Problem #1 with arresting someone for wearing a "suspicious" breadboard: Terrorists wouldn't do that.
Seriously, are we honestly so stupid to believe that terrorists are going to go walking around with wires all over their clothes? They're going to put the fucking bomb UNDER their clothes. It's not going to tick, it's not going to beep, and there's not going to be an obvious bright LED countdown clock.
This isn't 24, it's real life.
There's nothing wrong with questioning the kid or examining the device - that's just common sense. But there is exactly zero reason to arrest the kid once it's clear that it's nothing but a blinking T-Shirt. It's not a "hoax device", it's a blinking T-shirt.
This is getting old. In Vista, the UAC elevation process checks the file signature. Since the OOo installer for Windows elevates, it should be signed. So should the actual application binaries, but the installer is particularly problematic.
A code-signing certificate is around $100 per year. This is peanuts for the OOo Foundation.
Mozilla signs their Windows binaries. So do Adobe, Corel, Apple, NVIDIA, ATI, Sun, Microsoft, and thousands of small software companies.
No, it's not. One of the best things about the vendor-customer relationship is that it is essentially amoral. It's not the job of the seller to decide whether or not I'm "worthy" of purchasing their product.
This kind of bullshit would never fly with adults. What if the store asked for a letter from your manager that you're performing well at work? What if the food store asked for a doctor's note so that you could prove you're healthy enough to eat butter?
Isn't it cool that the people defending corporatism aren't as smart as those who can see that humans are more important than money?
Don't be so fucking righteous. This isn't about "humans vs. money". This is about the belief that it's not the place for a store to decide who is and is not an acceptable customer. Stores can't turn away customers based on race, religion, sexual orientation, handicap, or a wide variety of other categories. Why should we let them turn away people based on their grades?
Good post. FYI, the solution to the problem you're talking about (wanting to migrate to digital but still provide analog) is analog digital simulcasting. Comcast does it in the Denver/Boulder area (as a result, they can use the cheaper Motorola 3412/3416 DVRs which don't have analog tuners/encoders).
The problem, of course, is bandwidth. Even on a modern 1GHz HFC system, it's tough to cram a substantial lineup of both analog and digital channels on the same wire, let alone internet and phone service.
Comcast's solution is to drop the less-watched analog channels. Scrambled channels (HBO & Cinemax) are gone, as are some of the expanded basic channels. It's down to around 30-40 analog channels now, mostly locals and a few others (CNN/Fox News/MSNBC, TNT, TBS, Discovery, TLC, Cartoon Network, Food Network, and a few more).
Cable companies really do want to go all-digital. Yes, it's a massive cost, but they need to do it to compete with Verizon and the satellite providers. Each 6MHz channel can be used for one of the following:
One SD analog channel
Two HD digital channels
Six SD digital channels
40Mbps of bandwidth for internet or phone
Having 60 analog channels wastes nearly half the bandwidth of the network. 2.4Gbps is a lot of bandwidth, any way you slice it. Cable companies would rather use it wisely.
In the Denver/Boulder area, Comcast has full analog-digital simulcasting enabled. The Motorola 3416 DVRs they give out don't have analog tuners, so all channels are encoded digitally.
What are you talking about, you can buy yourself a copy of Tiger through The Apple Store./Mikael
He's saying there are no Tiger discs for Intel Macs. If you had bothered to read his post, you would understand that. And if you had bothered to read the system requirements on the page you linked, you would see that you have proved his point.
Let me repeat: There are no commercial Mac OS X releases for Intel machines.
I suspect that this is intentional. I wanted to run Mac OS X on my notebook, but I didn't want to pirate it. Unfortunately, Apple won't let me purchase Mac OS X for Intel machines. The only way to get it is to buy a new Mac.
And before someone brings up the EULA clause about only running Mac OS X on an Apple-branded computer, it is my opinion that that clause is unenforceable.
Neither 98 nor XP were significantly different at 1 year old compared to 3 years old, but the perception of them changed massively in that time.
It's not the OS that changed, it's the ecosystem.
Common complaints with Vista:
Hardware requirements too high (particularly memory)
UAC dialogs ("cancel/allow") pop up too often
Crappy performance for games (primarily with NVIDIA's cards because they have crappy drivers)
Hardware incompatibilities
Name one of those things that won't be fixed as the ecosystem develops. NVIDIA's drivers are finally getting decent, and they will eventually approach the level of performance that their XP counterparts have (ATI's already have). UAC dialogs are largely caused by shoddy programming ("let's write to \Windows\System32") and are already much less common on software released after Vista (VMWare, etc.). Hardware incompatibility is quickly becoming a non-issue: most stuff works already, and new hardware has full Vista support.
As for performance, Vista sure as hell doesn't feel slow on my Athlon 64 X2 5000+ system with 2GB of memory. Guess what, though? That's not a high end system anymore. My system is at the low end of "midrange". Even the cheapest POS eMachines PCs ship with dual-core AMD/Intel processors and at least 1GB of memory.
Despite all of the delays, it's as if Vista were released as a surprise to the industry. Everyone had become accustomed to XP. Now everyone is going to have to get used to Vista.
There were those who complained about how bad XP was compared to 98. Sometimes I wonder if those people actually used the same Windows 98 I did.
So now that hackers know there exists a backdoor to the windows update which will let them update a stealth patch to anything they want in the system because it runs with admin rights, this isn't a big deal to you?
Since the updates are signed (and have been for years), no, I'm not particularly worried.
It sounds to me like there is a security problem in allowing any program to write to the iTunes database and have that code executed by the iPod or iPhone. If Microsoft Windows were to let just any program write into the system folder... oh, wait, they do that --- but we laugh at their utter lack of security as a result.
You can't write to C:\windows or C:\windows\system32 in Vista without elevating. Even on XP, overwriting any system file results in Windows File Protection restoring that file from the cache (or, if the cache is also overwritten, prompting the user for the CD). The files are signed, and the kernel verifies the file signatures.
Now, what this has to do at all with the iTunes database is beyond me. iTunes is actually rather poorly designed - disconnecting while the database is being written can corrupt the DB, which prevents the iPod from doing anything at all.
MTP devices, on the other hand, like the Zen/Sansa/iRiver devices, don't allow direct access to the player's FS, and they can be safely disconnected at any time.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just going to point out that Windows has had digitally-signed apps since (at least) Windows 98, and that nearly every system library and executable in Windows XP and Windows Vista is signed. Vista even checks the signature before you see the UAC dialog, and the dialog for signed apps looks completely different (and has different keyboard shortcuts).
Windows Mobile also has signed apps.
Of course, I'm sure that some Mac fan is going to point out how this is another Apple innovation.
We're not talking about a couple of people playing Chess, we're talking about a major international standards body.
To use your analogy, it's like not being able to deal with a passerby kicking the board over and running off with the pieces in a major Chess tournament. You can bet that the match organizers take steps to prevent that.
Funny, that's what I keep saying about Vista, but the Mac users seem to be convinced that Mac OS runs fine with 512M.
FYI, Vista runs just peachy on my 2.5-year-old Pentium-M 1.73GHz notebook with 1.25GB of memory.
Anyone try using Firefox lately? Sitting here, doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, with 3 tabs open, it's at 69MB right now. I have seen it hit 300MB before, and the longer you have it open, the worse it gets.
Memory leaks happen. They're called bugs. Bugs eventually get fixed.
No, this has nothing to do with a bug in Vista. This has to do with the Slashdot editors throwing more red meat to the dogs. Just like the broadband stories that pop up every few weeks (how many times do we need to be told that the US isn't #1 in broadband?), and just about every other Vista story.
You may notice something though - what hasn't been popping up. There are fewer vulnerabilities for Vista: Secunia reports just 15 vulnerabilities ever, compared with 24 for XP in 2007 and 45 for XP in 2006.
People are complaining that Vista requires too much memory and doesn't have 100% hardware support. Well, 2GB of DDR2 now runs about $60, and pretty much any new hardware sold today is Vista-compatible (not to mention lots of older hardware, including everything in my 3 Vista PCs, all of which predate Vista).
People won't care that Vista has higher hardware requirements. They will care that it's more secure and more robust. Ask anyone who has overclocked their GPU too much:
It may not seem like a big thing, but display drivers are very complex and they shouldn't be able to bring down the computer.
UMTS/HSDPA can easily hit 700kbps, as can CDMA2000 1x EV-DO. EDGE hits 180kbps on a good day. On a REALLY good day.
The "error" argument is bullshit. All digital cellular technologies have extensive error correction.
Streaming media (Verizon/Sprint/AT&T all have services), downloads, and pretty much everything else benefits from more bandwidth. There is absolutely ZERO way that your browser is going to get slower because you have a faster network link, unless your browser is a piece of crap. Your browser may not get much faster if it's CPU constrained (pages don't load any faster on my 770 using the 15Mbps campus network instead of 1.5Mbps DSL), but it's certainly not going to trip the browser up or any garbage like that.
As for battery life, yes, UMTS/HSDPA takes more power. You also spend less time downloading, because it's faster.
T-Mobile doesn't have UMTS/HSDPA in the US right now, so I use EDGE every day - on my phone or on my laptop. EDGE is slow and has horrible latency. There's simply no other way to slice it.
Go for it. The article isn't about beating "UbuntuDupe's hypothetical game", it's about beating Go. There are lots of things that humans are better than computers at. None of that has any relevance to the article.
You've found a way to weed out fruitless branches, so it collapses into a problem that requires only 10^12 flops to solve? And this method isn't in use yet? Submit it to a journal, and add it to the corpus of Go algorithms.
No, the author is implying that algorithmic advances combined with more computing power will allow computers to beat humans at Go in the near future. Just because your Core 2 Duo box isn't competitive at Go doesn't mean that a hypothetical computer with, say, 500 FPGAs (we're talking about the FPGAs of 2017, not 2007) can't be.
There isn't one. Like most engineering progress, it happens incrementally.
You must be pretty old, because we haven't even begun to see what computer science can do.
Every time, they tell us that we're stuck because our current paradigm has run out of steam. And every time we come up with something new.
11 years ago, computers couldn't beat grandmasters at Chess. Now significantly cheaper computers are so strong that no one even bothers playing them. That advancement has come mostly from algorithm development, not from brute force.
We're not going to beat Go with burte force. That doesn't mean that we're not going to beat it with better algorithms. I don't think it's going to be 10 years, but I also don't think that it's going to be 40.
I suggest you look at the OS2007 Hacker Edition firmware. It's the next best thing to official support (considering that it is both sponsored by and sanctioned by Nokia).
AAC is indeed a decently standardized format, but it's not as widespread as MP3. I don't know of a single device that plays AAC that doesn't also play MP3. The converse can not be said.
My car handles MP3 or WMA files on a CD, but not AAC. So does my DVD player. Lots of older players (like my Zen V) and even some newer players don't support AAC.
At 192kbps, I can't tell the difference between AAC, MP3, WMA, or Vorbis. Heck, I have a hard time telling that it's not the original uncompressed recording. So, tell me why AAC offers any advantage at all to me over MP3?
Then you've heard wrong. Coke Clasic has NOTHING to do with the switch to HFCS, for the simple fact that most Coke bottlers switched to HFCS long before New Coke was ever introduced. They did it just as you would imagine that they would - 10% per year.
Zero. They'd develop their own DRM platform. Which is exactly what Apple did with iTunes.
No, he was referring to the Express Visual Studio, which is still an entire IDE. The actual command-line compiler is much, much smaller (analogous to GCC).
And VC++ Express isn't 1.7GB, it's like 100MB. It's all of the documentation and code samples that take up the space.
The 60 million people who use Vista on a daily basis got tired of defending their OS.
At a recent LUG meeting, one of our new members noticed that I dual-boot Vista and Ubuntu on my laptop. He started to comment on it, and instead of launching into my usual rant about how Vista is trashed unfairly, I simply said, "I don't need to defend my choices to you. Discussion over.".
I run Vista on ALL of my personal machines, from a 2.66GHz P4 to my dual-core Athlon 64 desktop. Many of the people I know use Vista as well. We are looking at deploying it at my workplace starting early next year.
I guess I just don't care anymore. Don't use Vista if you don't want to. But, please, stop fucking talking about how much you hate it. We don't want to debate you, and we don't want to defend our choice any longer. We just want to use our damn system.
One word: family.
No one is forcing you to buy any phone from any carrier. If Apple wants me to sign up with AT&T, they should make me sign a contract to that effect. This cat and mouse game is stupid. EVERY GSM phone has been unlocked. The iPhone is no exception.
Personally, I'm not willing to put up with Apple's bullshit. I won't buy their iPods (which only sync with iTunes - wait until the next release where they're sure to break Linux support again), and I won't buy the iPhone. Right now I have a T-Mobile Dash / HTC Excalibur (unlockd, running HTC firmware). When the neo1973 comes out, I might switch to that.
Problem #1 with arresting someone for wearing a "suspicious" breadboard: Terrorists wouldn't do that.
Seriously, are we honestly so stupid to believe that terrorists are going to go walking around with wires all over their clothes? They're going to put the fucking bomb UNDER their clothes. It's not going to tick, it's not going to beep, and there's not going to be an obvious bright LED countdown clock.
This isn't 24, it's real life.
There's nothing wrong with questioning the kid or examining the device - that's just common sense. But there is exactly zero reason to arrest the kid once it's clear that it's nothing but a blinking T-Shirt. It's not a "hoax device", it's a blinking T-shirt.
This is getting old. In Vista, the UAC elevation process checks the file signature. Since the OOo installer for Windows elevates, it should be signed. So should the actual application binaries, but the installer is particularly problematic.
A code-signing certificate is around $100 per year. This is peanuts for the OOo Foundation.
Mozilla signs their Windows binaries. So do Adobe, Corel, Apple, NVIDIA, ATI, Sun, Microsoft, and thousands of small software companies.
No, it's not. One of the best things about the vendor-customer relationship is that it is essentially amoral. It's not the job of the seller to decide whether or not I'm "worthy" of purchasing their product.
This kind of bullshit would never fly with adults. What if the store asked for a letter from your manager that you're performing well at work? What if the food store asked for a doctor's note so that you could prove you're healthy enough to eat butter?
Don't be so fucking righteous. This isn't about "humans vs. money". This is about the belief that it's not the place for a store to decide who is and is not an acceptable customer. Stores can't turn away customers based on race, religion, sexual orientation, handicap, or a wide variety of other categories. Why should we let them turn away people based on their grades?
The problem, of course, is bandwidth. Even on a modern 1GHz HFC system, it's tough to cram a substantial lineup of both analog and digital channels on the same wire, let alone internet and phone service.
Comcast's solution is to drop the less-watched analog channels. Scrambled channels (HBO & Cinemax) are gone, as are some of the expanded basic channels. It's down to around 30-40 analog channels now, mostly locals and a few others (CNN/Fox News/MSNBC, TNT, TBS, Discovery, TLC, Cartoon Network, Food Network, and a few more).
Cable companies really do want to go all-digital. Yes, it's a massive cost, but they need to do it to compete with Verizon and the satellite providers. Each 6MHz channel can be used for one of the following:
Having 60 analog channels wastes nearly half the bandwidth of the network. 2.4Gbps is a lot of bandwidth, any way you slice it. Cable companies would rather use it wisely.
In the Denver/Boulder area, Comcast has full analog-digital simulcasting enabled. The Motorola 3416 DVRs they give out don't have analog tuners, so all channels are encoded digitally.
He's saying there are no Tiger discs for Intel Macs. If you had bothered to read his post, you would understand that. And if you had bothered to read the system requirements on the page you linked, you would see that you have proved his point.
Let me repeat: There are no commercial Mac OS X releases for Intel machines.
I suspect that this is intentional. I wanted to run Mac OS X on my notebook, but I didn't want to pirate it. Unfortunately, Apple won't let me purchase Mac OS X for Intel machines. The only way to get it is to buy a new Mac.
And before someone brings up the EULA clause about only running Mac OS X on an Apple-branded computer, it is my opinion that that clause is unenforceable.
It's not the OS that changed, it's the ecosystem.
Common complaints with Vista:
Name one of those things that won't be fixed as the ecosystem develops. NVIDIA's drivers are finally getting decent, and they will eventually approach the level of performance that their XP counterparts have (ATI's already have). UAC dialogs are largely caused by shoddy programming ("let's write to \Windows\System32") and are already much less common on software released after Vista (VMWare, etc.). Hardware incompatibility is quickly becoming a non-issue: most stuff works already, and new hardware has full Vista support.
As for performance, Vista sure as hell doesn't feel slow on my Athlon 64 X2 5000+ system with 2GB of memory. Guess what, though? That's not a high end system anymore. My system is at the low end of "midrange". Even the cheapest POS eMachines PCs ship with dual-core AMD/Intel processors and at least 1GB of memory.
Despite all of the delays, it's as if Vista were released as a surprise to the industry. Everyone had become accustomed to XP. Now everyone is going to have to get used to Vista.
There were those who complained about how bad XP was compared to 98. Sometimes I wonder if those people actually used the same Windows 98 I did.
Since the updates are signed (and have been for years), no, I'm not particularly worried.
The problem is that the things you are complaining about have little to do with modern medicine.
The consensus is that breastfeeding is good, and circumcision isn't beneficial.
Medicine screws up, sometimes, but you're damn glad it's there when you need it.
You can't write to C:\windows or C:\windows\system32 in Vista without elevating. Even on XP, overwriting any system file results in Windows File Protection restoring that file from the cache (or, if the cache is also overwritten, prompting the user for the CD). The files are signed, and the kernel verifies the file signatures.
Now, what this has to do at all with the iTunes database is beyond me. iTunes is actually rather poorly designed - disconnecting while the database is being written can corrupt the DB, which prevents the iPod from doing anything at all.
MTP devices, on the other hand, like the Zen/Sansa/iRiver devices, don't allow direct access to the player's FS, and they can be safely disconnected at any time.