I might not particularly love the way MS handled it (say, compared to Mac OS)
Not sure I can agree with you on this one. I can still play some DOS-based games games on Vista, never mind running older programs and, in many cases, even drivers (Vista will quite happily run most XP drivers if you load them using Compatibility mode).
Periodic application crashes sound annoying as hell - I've not faced any on my personal system, but my father has when trying to use a really outdated and rather kludgey piece of navigation software (that installed a bunch of drivers for no reason I could discern). Apple doesn't want that flavor of annoying, so they just say "it can't be done" and block out most oudated Mac software. Unfortunately, this means that some people I know are tied to using 10.2 or 10.3 on PPC because their older Mac OS software and even early OS X software will not run on Tiger or Leopard, let alone on x86.
By comparison, I regularly play StarCraft (now just over 10 years old) on Vista using my original install disc. Backward compatibility FTW.
The ability to easily encrypt flashdrives and other removable media (using BitLocker) is a pretty nice one if you have any kind of sensitive data you need moved/stored. BitLocker in Vista doesn't support encryption of removable devices, and certainly doesn't support decrypting them on other computers than the one that encrypted them in the first place. It required some significant changes to add this feature (yes, I worked on this).
Question: do you run XP/2000/whatever with full Admin privileges? If/when you use Linux, do you log in as root?
If you answered yes to the second of those... I don't know what to say. If you answered yes to the first and no to the second, well, why do you? Running with full permissions on the most commonly targeted OS doesn't sound too smart to me. Of course, running as a non-Admin on XP/2000 can be a REAL bitch (yes, I've done it).
Enter UAC. From the standpoint of somebody who used to run XP as a limited user, UAC is a real blessing. I can live with a couple prompts a week if it means I can A) run everything else with limited permissions B) elevate those things that need it without using the PoS that is Runas
In Win7, they even changed the default behavior of UAC so it elevates MS-signed binaries by default. Personally I'm not sure I like this default, but it certainly results in fewer prompts.
Just wondering: how well does "monitor any machine remotely" work when the student just reformats the hard drive and puts their own OS on it? I mean, you're talking about complete physical access, here.
That was my first thought too; if you're "giving" the students the laptops, there's nothing to stop them from reinstalling the OS, or installing a completely new one. Hell, they could probably even leave the (restricted) OS X image completely intact, and just reboot into Windows (or Linux, for the more adventurous) for completely unlimited access. Unless you lock the boot sector or something similar, there's not a lot that can be done to work around this.
First, that's federal level. Applying that to a state-funded instiution is sketchy at best. Second, it's not a "law" at all - it's merely a restriction placed upon a tool provided to the students. They aren't prevented from finding anything they want, they just aren't allowed to do so on the machines you prioveded them. See the diference?
First off, "supports open source" is not the same thing as "sells only hardware with free/open-source drivers" although it would be nice if that were the case. However, for a quick example of HP's support of F/OSS, consider the high-end hardware that kernel.org runs on - donated by HP.
Additionally, while not ALL of HP's systems are 100% F/OSS compatible, they have for a couple years now sold at least a few laptops (look in their business lines; their home machines all come with Windows) with Linux pre-installed and supported. It sounds like they're moving to do the same with desktops now, for which I applaud them.
On a side note, ATI probably has the best video capabilities from a complete open-source driver these days, since they've been opening all their specs. I realize Intel Integrated has F/OSS drivers, but no driver could make the chips themselves not suck.
Microsoft says they'll turn it on starting year 2010 (via an update of course), and then good luck trying to play all your burned CDs and DVDs that lack DRM.
[Citation Needed]
Seriously, what you say is *marginally* less unreasonable than that absurd article Gutmann published a few years ago, which was demonstrably untrue on the pre-release Vista systems available then. Of course, he didn't cite any sources either. I realize there's plenty of/. group-think that "supports" your claim, but it just doesn't make sense - it would cost Microsoft too much, for far too little gain - to be even seriously considered without a reliable source to back it up.
I presume you're referring to the article in which he described Vista as something like "quite possibly the longest suicide note in history"? I read it back in 06 shortly after it was initially published, I didn't know Gutmann's work terribly well before reading that, but he came highly recommended.
However, that article cost him about 98% credibility with me. Some of it - even some of the really bad stuff - might in fact be true. However, there were trivially verfiable claims he made which were blatantly untrue (an example being that ATI, nVidia, and other graphics companies were going to need to switch away from unified drivers, and provide a different driver for each card model - which by the time the article went public was an obvious falsehood since you could download and install the beta Vista drivers for any card in a given family and they would work fine).
If the man can't be bothered to do even that minimal an amount of research (it also didn't help that he refused to disclose any of his sources) then he has no business publishing in anything but tabloids, nor does he have any place in academic circles. I am a student, not a professor, but if I had written such tripe and submitted it to anybody who knew what I was talking about, I'd have been laughed out of the department.
Incidentally, the article has been edited at leas three times since its initial publication. While I have no objection to revising, it is usually done prior to publication, not afterwards. Furthermore, while some of the more blatantly false claims are missing from the latest version, Gutmann neither addresses nor explicitly retracts those statements. It is although he wishes to remove the original statements entirely, though nothing controversial on the Internet ever vanishes so thoroughly as that.
I was just about to suggest Allegiance myself. It's a fun game with fairly realistic physics (for a game), lots of 0-Gee dogfighting, and a substantial strategic element if you want to play as the team commander (alternatively, you can just how in a fighter or the turret of a capital ship, and blow stuff up).
The learning curve is a little steep but there's some great tutorials and even human-guided training, and the community in general is very accepting of newbies so long as they make the effort to learn (a characteristic that, to me at least, distinguishes newbie from n00b). That said, the community IS small, and it is rare to find more than one game in progress (though a given game can have dozens or even over 100 players).
It isn't a classic MMO without the persistent world (there's a sort of metaverse thing that some people participate in, I think - I just play it to fly around and shoot stuff) but it's well worth trying - especially since it's free and pretty much guaranteed that your system can run it.
Sorry, I just found this ridiculous. You don't trust XUL after one quickly-patched vulnerability, so you use a browser that is one of only a few pieces of software to have successfully been used for 0-day exploits, in the wild, against OS X?
You, sir (or madam), have a VERY twisted view on security.
JavaScript-wise, it will still be pretty bad. I'll be surprised if they break 30 on Acid3, though there's hope (nightly builds showed some small improvement there during my summer internship). They've fixed a few of the more outrageous issues, and support more of the standard DOM, but JS compliance doesn't seem to be a big priority. Performance in beta2 is already much better, especially on things like string processing, but without a JIT-to-native compiler, it will never reach the speed of something like Chrome.
HTML- and CSS-wise, it's already quite compliant. IE8 beta 1 passed Acid2 (have you been paying any attention at all? This is old news). Also, IE8 has some features (Web Slices, Accelerators) that no other browser has at all, and others (tab grouping/coloring) that are only available in other browsers through extensions.
I believe this is also possible (in XP and 2000) by right-clicking on a program or shortcut and selecting "Run As..." and making sure the "Prevent this program from making harmful changes to my computer" (or something similar, I don't use XP anymore) is checked.
On Vista, all processes run as not-really-Administrator by default, though that does lead to UAC-related complaints.
Erm... WTF? Power users are typically the ones who know better than to install random toolbars, unnecessary "browser integration" programs, and media players like QuickTime or Flash (or will use the add-on manager to disable those plugins until absolutely needed).
Even with IE7 having a built-in search box, I still see an awfully large number of people with AT LEAST two toolbars, at least one of which will be search-related and at least one of which they never use at all.
Nope, never, not at all. Where in the world did you get an idea like that? Windows Defender is anti-spyware/anti-adware. It looks for programs trying to change your browser's home page, or install toolbars. It checks for programs known to log keystrokes or web sites you visit. It has lists of bad programs, add-ons, and so forth.
Anti-virus may do some of the same kinds of things (search for malicious trojan executables) but its main target is (strangely enough) computer *viruses* which are programs that compromise, imitate, or replace legitimate software. To do this, AV software needs to scan inside executables and libraries, looking for malicious behavior.
Granted, there are a few things that are similar about them, and Defender can help you catch some kinds of software classically described as viruses (usually by detecting applications that try to run at startup and asking if you trust them) but it is not and has never claimed to be anti-virus software anymore than Spybot: Search and Destroy or AdAware.
You seem to be confused about what exactly most of the work on Vista amounted to (and one of the main reasons for its delays). Vista was built with a ground-up re-examination of their code for security. Changes the blocked out insecure stuff broke a lot of programs that were using legacy APIs in an insecure way. They then provided a collection of compatibility shims for legacy programs (which will allow most legit programs to run, if you put forth the effort to try). Some virtualization is also used for security, though a number of apps require real access.
Out of curiosity, how do you suggest your "sandboxes" work? The very idea behind sandboxing apps is that they don't have the ability to do anything they might want to, and must live with that. This is usually fine for apps that were designed with these limitations in mind (see Java, but also the number of Java programs that need some native code as well, and the much larger number that simply can't run in the stricter sandbox of an applet) but the nature of the compatibility problems with Vista is that these programs WERE NOT designed to limit themselves to safe operations. You'd need to provide those apps a full playground (virtual OS) rather than just a sandbox, and then isolate them from the main OS... which means isolated from the rest of the running software, isolated from the hardware and even from the standard HAL... at this point you might as well run a copy of Windows XP or even ME in Virtual PC. Good luck gaming on that, or using a software firewall (to protect the host system), or any of a long list of other things.
Stuff that is run by a user (i.e. non-Administrator) CANNOT modify system files, unless those files' permissions were previously edited by an admin. You seem to be confusing the idiocy of people logging in with Admin accounts for everyday work for some kind of hole in the OS (although admittedly MS screwed up when they made the default accounts members of Administrators)
Modification of system files that results in failing the cryptographic signature check (i.e. any change at all that doesn't come from MS) also causes newer versions of Windows to complain bitterly and attempt to restore the modified file. This is part of the whole "Trusted Computing" thing. An admin (or software running as one) can work around it, of course, but it's not trivial - those files are owned by SYSTEM, not Administrators, and while malware can certainly go through the steps required to modify the file permissions (assuming said has Admin-level privileges) it does prevent casual or accidental damage.
I don't even know what you're talking about when it comes to "separation between privilege levels" since Windows actually has a much more powerful and fine-grained permissions system than the old POSIX standard still used by most Unix-like OSes (though SELinux and AppArmor aim to fix this on Linux). Windows' permissions system works quite well, behaving as it is supposed to. Unfortunately for ignorant users, said permissions system is supposed to allow Administrators to take over and subsequently do anything they desire with any part of the system. You'll find logging in as root gives the exact same kind of behavior. For that matter, Vista's UAC actually limits Administrators to the standard User permissions unless expressly authorized for Admin rights (makes a pretty mess of their user security tokens, but appears to work correctly).
Additionally, the bit about "their FUBAR'd implementation" is pure bullshit. First, most programs on any OS can't be installed as a standard user (since "installed" typically means getting put in Program Files or/bin - many, on or off Windows, can be installed to a user's folder just fine without Admin privileges). Most, however, can be RUN as a standard user without any problems, whether it's from Microsoft or some ISV or a little thing you hacked together yourself. If you meant running the installer with Admin privileges from a User account, that's actually quite possible (if more annoying than it should be) on Windows prior to Vista via "Run As..." and dead easy on Vista using UAC. If you want to claim that Vista makes UAC prompts appear too often, I ask you to try two things: count the number of times you use su/sudo (or the graphical equivalent) on a Linux box, and try doing the types of things that require UAC on Vista *without* root permissions.
Microsoft's past screw-ups on security are worthy as a historical note, but aren't even vaguely representative of the current state of Microsoft software. You're living between 5 and 15 years in the past. If Windows were as insecure as you suggest, all Windows machines ever connected directly to the Internet would be compromised now. Remarkably enough, that's not true - and it's not even entirely due to the firewall.
Actually, many sailing yachts use small wind generators to charge their batteries (generators are heavy, noisy,smelly, and need fuel, and many yachts don't have space suitable for sufficient numbers of photovoltaics). While the power produced would be quite low for the standards of a US home (many yachts are fine on a kilowatt-hour/day or less), there's no particular reason they couldn't be built a little larger, a little heavier, and used to produce AC power for homes. A more efficient generator would be a big help.
Just thought I'd comment on this quickly: have you tried Vista's System Restore feature? It's so much bette than XPs they arguably should have renamed it. Not only can you easily undo a botched update, but you can do it from either the boot menu or the install disk (as well as within the OS) making it possible to revert problems that rendered the system totally unbootable (this hasn't ever happened to me, but I've had a couple things that came close going back to beta2).
The feature works well, too; in every case I've had to use it the problem not only got fixed, but it only took 10-15 minutes including reboot and showed no issues or side effects when it came up again. On XP I didn't even bother, but with Vista it's well-worth trying a System Restore.
While you make a couple good points, I'd like to point out that OS X *still* doesn't have native write support for NTFS. In this day of massive dual-booting, that's just silly. Considering how long Linux has had safe and stable NTFS R/W support, it's ridiculous. But the real kicker is that you *can* get NTFS write support on OS X (though FUSE) but for some reason Apple neither includes this nor makes it particularly easy. Honestly, it's easier to get full ext2 (ext3 but without journaling, safe otherwise) on Windows than NTFS write on a Mac.
While I'm not quite sure where Nokia acquired it, the N800 and N810 (and possibly other PDAs/phones) have Adobe Flash. These are ARM devices running a Debian-based Linux distro, and ship with Adobe Flash 9 as of a few months ago (last I checked was before Flash 10 was available). It's not a "lite" version, either - it can play games, watch movies, and handle purely Flash-based sites like Pandora. The limited RAM and CPU (400MHz IIRC) makes them decidedly sub-optimal for heavy Flash use, but they certainly can do it (to the point where installing AdBlock Plus is a necessity for sane browsing).
I'm sure Adobe would be willing to provide Flash to other device manufacturers, and quite possibly other OSes (Windows Mobile or mobile OS X - Android should be easy since it's based on Linux). The more market penetration Flash has, the better for them.
Interesting. Question: was that before or after he knew he wouldn't live to finish it? I mean, in a way I like having the story not end on a "and everybody dies" and leave some things still happening (and there's whole areas, like Seandar, and the lands across the Waste, that have never been visited) but on the other hand, a certain degree of closure is good. The white and black towers both need a serious internal re-organization. The Seanchan issue is hardly resolved. I could understand if not ALL Min's visions come true in the series (Aviendha having 4 kids with Rand?) but some of them...
I suppose I'd call SupCom2 the grandchild, not the great-grandchild, but yes. please do let it be so. Also, please let it not require hardware in excess of what, say, StarCraft 2 will need (although TA had its taxing moments as well - I remember thinking that the 256MB needed to play the Four Corners map was completely unreasonable). SupCom will only barely run on one of my computers (though it's fine, if not any where near maxed out, on another).
My feelings exactly. Take the world that WoT is most often compared to, LotR. There are certainly lots of parallels - Middle Earth is huge, there are lots of different nations with their own history, traditions, culture, and appearance, and the author crafted each with an incredible attention to detail. However, reading through the books (never mind watching the movies) in LotR doesn't give NEARLY as much a feel of the setting as WoT does. In WoT I can imagine the parts of the cities, the look of the farms, and the speech of the people - even for specific settings that were never visited. Without reading a lot of the LotR background, I've found this not nearly as easy to do. It's just not as immersive.
There's a lot more to this comparison, but I think I'll stop here.
A massive portion of the books is in descriptions of places, people, and events - stuff like that is incredibly wordy and uses up a lot of pages, but is where the old "picture is worth a thousand words" line is most true. Take Egwene and Perrin meeting up with the Tinkers and traveling with them in The Eye of the World; there's a lot of book there, but it could be adequately described in well under 5 minutes of film. This is also true of the dream sequences, fight scenes, and so forth.
Dialog is the opposite, consuming tons of movie time with what would need only a single page of text. I think they could trim out a lot of the talking while maintaining the sense of wonder and excitement of the books, but on the other hand I've read them enough that the characters are well-developed for me. Somebody new to the series might find the characters to not get much background and development in my vision of the movie(s).
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I might not particularly love the way MS handled it (say, compared to Mac OS)
Not sure I can agree with you on this one. I can still play some DOS-based games games on Vista, never mind running older programs and, in many cases, even drivers (Vista will quite happily run most XP drivers if you load them using Compatibility mode).
Periodic application crashes sound annoying as hell - I've not faced any on my personal system, but my father has when trying to use a really outdated and rather kludgey piece of navigation software (that installed a bunch of drivers for no reason I could discern). Apple doesn't want that flavor of annoying, so they just say "it can't be done" and block out most oudated Mac software. Unfortunately, this means that some people I know are tied to using 10.2 or 10.3 on PPC because their older Mac OS software and even early OS X software will not run on Tiger or Leopard, let alone on x86.
By comparison, I regularly play StarCraft (now just over 10 years old) on Vista using my original install disc. Backward compatibility FTW.
The ability to easily encrypt flashdrives and other removable media (using BitLocker) is a pretty nice one if you have any kind of sensitive data you need moved/stored. BitLocker in Vista doesn't support encryption of removable devices, and certainly doesn't support decrypting them on other computers than the one that encrypted them in the first place. It required some significant changes to add this feature (yes, I worked on this).
Question: do you run XP/2000/whatever with full Admin privileges? If/when you use Linux, do you log in as root?
If you answered yes to the second of those... I don't know what to say. If you answered yes to the first and no to the second, well, why do you? Running with full permissions on the most commonly targeted OS doesn't sound too smart to me. Of course, running as a non-Admin on XP/2000 can be a REAL bitch (yes, I've done it).
Enter UAC. From the standpoint of somebody who used to run XP as a limited user, UAC is a real blessing. I can live with a couple prompts a week if it means I can
A) run everything else with limited permissions
B) elevate those things that need it without using the PoS that is Runas
In Win7, they even changed the default behavior of UAC so it elevates MS-signed binaries by default. Personally I'm not sure I like this default, but it certainly results in fewer prompts.
Just wondering: how well does "monitor any machine remotely" work when the student just reformats the hard drive and puts their own OS on it? I mean, you're talking about complete physical access, here.
That was my first thought too; if you're "giving" the students the laptops, there's nothing to stop them from reinstalling the OS, or installing a completely new one. Hell, they could probably even leave the (restricted) OS X image completely intact, and just reboot into Windows (or Linux, for the more adventurous) for completely unlimited access. Unless you lock the boot sector or something similar, there's not a lot that can be done to work around this.
First, that's federal level. Applying that to a state-funded instiution is sketchy at best. Second, it's not a "law" at all - it's merely a restriction placed upon a tool provided to the students. They aren't prevented from finding anything they want, they just aren't allowed to do so on the machines you prioveded them. See the diference?
First off, "supports open source" is not the same thing as "sells only hardware with free/open-source drivers" although it would be nice if that were the case. However, for a quick example of HP's support of F/OSS, consider the high-end hardware that kernel.org runs on - donated by HP.
Additionally, while not ALL of HP's systems are 100% F/OSS compatible, they have for a couple years now sold at least a few laptops (look in their business lines; their home machines all come with Windows) with Linux pre-installed and supported. It sounds like they're moving to do the same with desktops now, for which I applaud them.
On a side note, ATI probably has the best video capabilities from a complete open-source driver these days, since they've been opening all their specs. I realize Intel Integrated has F/OSS drivers, but no driver could make the chips themselves not suck.
[Citation Needed]
Seriously, what you say is *marginally* less unreasonable than that absurd article Gutmann published a few years ago, which was demonstrably untrue on the pre-release Vista systems available then. Of course, he didn't cite any sources either. I realize there's plenty of /. group-think that "supports" your claim, but it just doesn't make sense - it would cost Microsoft too much, for far too little gain - to be even seriously considered without a reliable source to back it up.
I presume you're referring to the article in which he described Vista as something like "quite possibly the longest suicide note in history"? I read it back in 06 shortly after it was initially published, I didn't know Gutmann's work terribly well before reading that, but he came highly recommended.
However, that article cost him about 98% credibility with me. Some of it - even some of the really bad stuff - might in fact be true. However, there were trivially verfiable claims he made which were blatantly untrue (an example being that ATI, nVidia, and other graphics companies were going to need to switch away from unified drivers, and provide a different driver for each card model - which by the time the article went public was an obvious falsehood since you could download and install the beta Vista drivers for any card in a given family and they would work fine).
If the man can't be bothered to do even that minimal an amount of research (it also didn't help that he refused to disclose any of his sources) then he has no business publishing in anything but tabloids, nor does he have any place in academic circles. I am a student, not a professor, but if I had written such tripe and submitted it to anybody who knew what I was talking about, I'd have been laughed out of the department.
Incidentally, the article has been edited at leas three times since its initial publication. While I have no objection to revising, it is usually done prior to publication, not afterwards. Furthermore, while some of the more blatantly false claims are missing from the latest version, Gutmann neither addresses nor explicitly retracts those statements. It is although he wishes to remove the original statements entirely, though nothing controversial on the Internet ever vanishes so thoroughly as that.
I was just about to suggest Allegiance myself. It's a fun game with fairly realistic physics (for a game), lots of 0-Gee dogfighting, and a substantial strategic element if you want to play as the team commander (alternatively, you can just how in a fighter or the turret of a capital ship, and blow stuff up).
The learning curve is a little steep but there's some great tutorials and even human-guided training, and the community in general is very accepting of newbies so long as they make the effort to learn (a characteristic that, to me at least, distinguishes newbie from n00b). That said, the community IS small, and it is rare to find more than one game in progress (though a given game can have dozens or even over 100 players).
It isn't a classic MMO without the persistent world (there's a sort of metaverse thing that some people participate in, I think - I just play it to fly around and shoot stuff) but it's well worth trying - especially since it's free and pretty much guaranteed that your system can run it.
Sorry, I just found this ridiculous. You don't trust XUL after one quickly-patched vulnerability, so you use a browser that is one of only a few pieces of software to have successfully been used for 0-day exploits, in the wild, against OS X?
You, sir (or madam), have a VERY twisted view on security.
JavaScript-wise, it will still be pretty bad. I'll be surprised if they break 30 on Acid3, though there's hope (nightly builds showed some small improvement there during my summer internship). They've fixed a few of the more outrageous issues, and support more of the standard DOM, but JS compliance doesn't seem to be a big priority. Performance in beta2 is already much better, especially on things like string processing, but without a JIT-to-native compiler, it will never reach the speed of something like Chrome.
HTML- and CSS-wise, it's already quite compliant. IE8 beta 1 passed Acid2 (have you been paying any attention at all? This is old news). Also, IE8 has some features (Web Slices, Accelerators) that no other browser has at all, and others (tab grouping/coloring) that are only available in other browsers through extensions.
I believe this is also possible (in XP and 2000) by right-clicking on a program or shortcut and selecting "Run As..." and making sure the "Prevent this program from making harmful changes to my computer" (or something similar, I don't use XP anymore) is checked.
On Vista, all processes run as not-really-Administrator by default, though that does lead to UAC-related complaints.
Erm... WTF? Power users are typically the ones who know better than to install random toolbars, unnecessary "browser integration" programs, and media players like QuickTime or Flash (or will use the add-on manager to disable those plugins until absolutely needed).
Even with IE7 having a built-in search box, I still see an awfully large number of people with AT LEAST two toolbars, at least one of which will be search-related and at least one of which they never use at all.
Nope, never, not at all. Where in the world did you get an idea like that? Windows Defender is anti-spyware/anti-adware. It looks for programs trying to change your browser's home page, or install toolbars. It checks for programs known to log keystrokes or web sites you visit. It has lists of bad programs, add-ons, and so forth.
Anti-virus may do some of the same kinds of things (search for malicious trojan executables) but its main target is (strangely enough) computer *viruses* which are programs that compromise, imitate, or replace legitimate software. To do this, AV software needs to scan inside executables and libraries, looking for malicious behavior.
Granted, there are a few things that are similar about them, and Defender can help you catch some kinds of software classically described as viruses (usually by detecting applications that try to run at startup and asking if you trust them) but it is not and has never claimed to be anti-virus software anymore than Spybot: Search and Destroy or AdAware.
You seem to be confused about what exactly most of the work on Vista amounted to (and one of the main reasons for its delays). Vista was built with a ground-up re-examination of their code for security. Changes the blocked out insecure stuff broke a lot of programs that were using legacy APIs in an insecure way. They then provided a collection of compatibility shims for legacy programs (which will allow most legit programs to run, if you put forth the effort to try). Some virtualization is also used for security, though a number of apps require real access.
Out of curiosity, how do you suggest your "sandboxes" work? The very idea behind sandboxing apps is that they don't have the ability to do anything they might want to, and must live with that. This is usually fine for apps that were designed with these limitations in mind (see Java, but also the number of Java programs that need some native code as well, and the much larger number that simply can't run in the stricter sandbox of an applet) but the nature of the compatibility problems with Vista is that these programs WERE NOT designed to limit themselves to safe operations. You'd need to provide those apps a full playground (virtual OS) rather than just a sandbox, and then isolate them from the main OS... which means isolated from the rest of the running software, isolated from the hardware and even from the standard HAL... at this point you might as well run a copy of Windows XP or even ME in Virtual PC. Good luck gaming on that, or using a software firewall (to protect the host system), or any of a long list of other things.
So many things wrong here...
Stuff that is run by a user (i.e. non-Administrator) CANNOT modify system files, unless those files' permissions were previously edited by an admin. You seem to be confusing the idiocy of people logging in with Admin accounts for everyday work for some kind of hole in the OS (although admittedly MS screwed up when they made the default accounts members of Administrators)
Modification of system files that results in failing the cryptographic signature check (i.e. any change at all that doesn't come from MS) also causes newer versions of Windows to complain bitterly and attempt to restore the modified file. This is part of the whole "Trusted Computing" thing. An admin (or software running as one) can work around it, of course, but it's not trivial - those files are owned by SYSTEM, not Administrators, and while malware can certainly go through the steps required to modify the file permissions (assuming said has Admin-level privileges) it does prevent casual or accidental damage.
I don't even know what you're talking about when it comes to "separation between privilege levels" since Windows actually has a much more powerful and fine-grained permissions system than the old POSIX standard still used by most Unix-like OSes (though SELinux and AppArmor aim to fix this on Linux). Windows' permissions system works quite well, behaving as it is supposed to. Unfortunately for ignorant users, said permissions system is supposed to allow Administrators to take over and subsequently do anything they desire with any part of the system. You'll find logging in as root gives the exact same kind of behavior. For that matter, Vista's UAC actually limits Administrators to the standard User permissions unless expressly authorized for Admin rights (makes a pretty mess of their user security tokens, but appears to work correctly).
Additionally, the bit about "their FUBAR'd implementation" is pure bullshit. First, most programs on any OS can't be installed as a standard user (since "installed" typically means getting put in Program Files or /bin - many, on or off Windows, can be installed to a user's folder just fine without Admin privileges). Most, however, can be RUN as a standard user without any problems, whether it's from Microsoft or some ISV or a little thing you hacked together yourself. If you meant running the installer with Admin privileges from a User account, that's actually quite possible (if more annoying than it should be) on Windows prior to Vista via "Run As..." and dead easy on Vista using UAC. If you want to claim that Vista makes UAC prompts appear too often, I ask you to try two things: count the number of times you use su/sudo (or the graphical equivalent) on a Linux box, and try doing the types of things that require UAC on Vista *without* root permissions.
Microsoft's past screw-ups on security are worthy as a historical note, but aren't even vaguely representative of the current state of Microsoft software. You're living between 5 and 15 years in the past. If Windows were as insecure as you suggest, all Windows machines ever connected directly to the Internet would be compromised now. Remarkably enough, that's not true - and it's not even entirely due to the firewall.
Actually, many sailing yachts use small wind generators to charge their batteries (generators are heavy, noisy,smelly, and need fuel, and many yachts don't have space suitable for sufficient numbers of photovoltaics). While the power produced would be quite low for the standards of a US home (many yachts are fine on a kilowatt-hour/day or less), there's no particular reason they couldn't be built a little larger, a little heavier, and used to produce AC power for homes. A more efficient generator would be a big help.
Just thought I'd comment on this quickly: have you tried Vista's System Restore feature? It's so much bette than XPs they arguably should have renamed it. Not only can you easily undo a botched update, but you can do it from either the boot menu or the install disk (as well as within the OS) making it possible to revert problems that rendered the system totally unbootable (this hasn't ever happened to me, but I've had a couple things that came close going back to beta2).
The feature works well, too; in every case I've had to use it the problem not only got fixed, but it only took 10-15 minutes including reboot and showed no issues or side effects when it came up again. On XP I didn't even bother, but with Vista it's well-worth trying a System Restore.
While you make a couple good points, I'd like to point out that OS X *still* doesn't have native write support for NTFS. In this day of massive dual-booting, that's just silly. Considering how long Linux has had safe and stable NTFS R/W support, it's ridiculous. But the real kicker is that you *can* get NTFS write support on OS X (though FUSE) but for some reason Apple neither includes this nor makes it particularly easy. Honestly, it's easier to get full ext2 (ext3 but without journaling, safe otherwise) on Windows than NTFS write on a Mac.
While I'm not quite sure where Nokia acquired it, the N800 and N810 (and possibly other PDAs/phones) have Adobe Flash. These are ARM devices running a Debian-based Linux distro, and ship with Adobe Flash 9 as of a few months ago (last I checked was before Flash 10 was available). It's not a "lite" version, either - it can play games, watch movies, and handle purely Flash-based sites like Pandora. The limited RAM and CPU (400MHz IIRC) makes them decidedly sub-optimal for heavy Flash use, but they certainly can do it (to the point where installing AdBlock Plus is a necessity for sane browsing).
I'm sure Adobe would be willing to provide Flash to other device manufacturers, and quite possibly other OSes (Windows Mobile or mobile OS X - Android should be easy since it's based on Linux). The more market penetration Flash has, the better for them.
Interesting. Question: was that before or after he knew he wouldn't live to finish it? I mean, in a way I like having the story not end on a "and everybody dies" and leave some things still happening (and there's whole areas, like Seandar, and the lands across the Waste, that have never been visited) but on the other hand, a certain degree of closure is good. The white and black towers both need a serious internal re-organization. The Seanchan issue is hardly resolved. I could understand if not ALL Min's visions come true in the series (Aviendha having 4 kids with Rand?) but some of them...
I suppose I'd call SupCom2 the grandchild, not the great-grandchild, but yes. please do let it be so. Also, please let it not require hardware in excess of what, say, StarCraft 2 will need (although TA had its taxing moments as well - I remember thinking that the 256MB needed to play the Four Corners map was completely unreasonable). SupCom will only barely run on one of my computers (though it's fine, if not any where near maxed out, on another).
My feelings exactly. Take the world that WoT is most often compared to, LotR. There are certainly lots of parallels - Middle Earth is huge, there are lots of different nations with their own history, traditions, culture, and appearance, and the author crafted each with an incredible attention to detail. However, reading through the books (never mind watching the movies) in LotR doesn't give NEARLY as much a feel of the setting as WoT does. In WoT I can imagine the parts of the cities, the look of the farms, and the speech of the people - even for specific settings that were never visited. Without reading a lot of the LotR background, I've found this not nearly as easy to do. It's just not as immersive.
There's a lot more to this comparison, but I think I'll stop here.
A massive portion of the books is in descriptions of places, people, and events - stuff like that is incredibly wordy and uses up a lot of pages, but is where the old "picture is worth a thousand words" line is most true. Take Egwene and Perrin meeting up with the Tinkers and traveling with them in The Eye of the World; there's a lot of book there, but it could be adequately described in well under 5 minutes of film. This is also true of the dream sequences, fight scenes, and so forth.
Dialog is the opposite, consuming tons of movie time with what would need only a single page of text. I think they could trim out a lot of the talking while maintaining the sense of wonder and excitement of the books, but on the other hand I've read them enough that the characters are well-developed for me. Somebody new to the series might find the characters to not get much background and development in my vision of the movie(s).