It appears it's a useful feature because many applications allow commands to be embedded in documents - even ones you might not expect, like vim. From FreeBSD's pkg-message for editors/vim:
SECURITY NOTE: The VIM software has had several remote vulnerabilities discovered within VIM's modeline support. It allowed remote attackers to execute arbitrary code as the user running VIM. All known problems have been fixed, but the FreeBSD Security Team advises that VIM users use 'set nomodeline' in ~/.vimrc to avoid the possibility of trojaned text files.
I'm not sitting at my desk thinking "I wish this browser would just be faster!"
I do when it takes Internet Explorer several seconds to open a blank page. Fortunately other browsers are a lot faster at starting up and creating new tabs.
You don't need to remove RAM to reduce the amount of memory Windows has available - you can configure it via msconfig (Boot -> advanced options) or bcdedit.
NTFS is supposed to be more resistant to fragmentation than FAT, and I'm not sure it actively needs defragmented. However people have become so used to it from previous versions of Windows that it's something Microsoft have to provide - there was even an outcry over the fact that Vista's defrag utility didn't provide a detailed progress dialog to let people see how much improvement was being made.
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As far as I know the BIOS is unfortunately still involved with anything related to power management through ACPI - suspend/resume etc.
It appears it's a useful feature because many applications allow commands to be embedded in documents - even ones you might not expect, like vim. From FreeBSD's pkg-message for editors/vim:
SECURITY NOTE: The VIM software has had several remote vulnerabilities
discovered within VIM's modeline support. It allowed remote attackers to
execute arbitrary code as the user running VIM. All known problems
have been fixed, but the FreeBSD Security Team advises that VIM users
use 'set nomodeline' in ~/.vimrc to avoid the possibility of trojaned
text files.
That's almost exactly what Chrome does except that new users do get the plugin and have to 'uninstall' it if they don't want it.
I'm not sitting at my desk thinking "I wish this browser would just be faster!"
I do when it takes Internet Explorer several seconds to open a blank page. Fortunately other browsers are a lot faster at starting up and creating new tabs.
It's only the SPEs in the PS3 that are specialized: the main CPU, the PPE, is similar to a PowerPC 970.
It was fixed via a FreeBSD Foundation project in 8.0 and merged back to 7.x.
You don't need to remove RAM to reduce the amount of memory Windows has available - you can configure it via msconfig (Boot -> advanced options) or bcdedit.
NTFS is supposed to be more resistant to fragmentation than FAT, and I'm not sure it actively needs defragmented. However people have become so used to it from previous versions of Windows that it's something Microsoft have to provide - there was even an outcry over the fact that Vista's defrag utility didn't provide a detailed progress dialog to let people see how much improvement was being made.
If all you want to do is read documents created in Microsoft Office applications, you can download the free viewer software that Microsoft makes available. For example, the Word 2003 viewer can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?fa milyid=95E24C87-8732-48D5-8689-AB826E7B8FDF&displa ylang=en. A list of available viewers is available at http://www.microsoft.com/office/000/viewers.asp
It looks like Microsoft have changed something since releasing the previous RC1 that means it now works in Workstation without changing the vmx file.
OS X administrators too!