That... actually makes no sense at all. Everything they can do if you refuse to pay the monthly $50 phone bill - turn off your service, ding your credit rating, send it to a collections agency, whatever - they can also do if you refuse to keep paying the $20 loan installments. If you don't need the service anymore and yet want to keep the phone, so you choose to keep sending the $20 payments but not the $50 payments, what are they going to do - turn off the service you aren't using anyhow? Boy, that'll totally show them!
There are methods for handling debt collection. That applies whether it's a $480 loan or a $48000 loan. The difference is whether it's worth the cost to repossess the item, and not much more. There are lots of companies that offer loans in the hundreds of dollars, with payments in the tens per month. The difference is, most of those aren't 0% interest loans. T-Mobile's is, because the value they lose in investment opportunity (interest they could have made if you paid that $480 up front) and inflation ($480 now is worth more than $480 accumulated at the end of two years) is worth less than the extra business they get on their actual business: selling cellular service.
Except... it is actually possible to do what you say. You can suspend your number (technically distinct from canceling mostly in that the number remains parked, which they will charge a nominal fee for) and continue paying the phone installments. When you want service again, just tell them to re-enable it.
That said, this doesn't allow for switching your number to another carrier (temporarily or permanently) and staying on the installment plan. Given that it's a zero-interest loan, that doesn't hugely surprise me, but I do now agree that it's not as well advertised as it should be.
Except, the phone financing plan (literally, it's just a zero-interest loan on a phone) is *completely separate* from the service plan. You can, if you want, cancel the service plan and keep paying off the loan. You can also pay off the loan early, or buy the whole phone up front, or bring your own phone. There's no early termination fee on the phone service; you just have to pay off the loan you took on the device. The $20 for the phone and the $whatever (typically 50, under their new M2M plan they're pushing) are typically sent on a single bill, but as separate line items. There's no "new 2-year activation required" when you get a phone under this agreement either, although you *might* need to be an active subscriber the get the financing in the first place. If that's not the case, I could see the AG's point, but otherwise I really don't; the service plan is contract-free, and the option of getting a phone on a payment contract is separate from it. Only in the US would people assume that because you signed up for phone service at the same time you took out a loan on a phone, the loan contract has anything to do with the phone service plan...
The car analogy is exactly correct, especially because the car does not, in fact, "stop working" just because you stop paying the T-Mobile monthly service bill; buy a PAYG SIM and put it in, or switch to AT&T, or switch to one of the GSM resellers in the US, or move overseas, or even just go SIM-free and use it as a WiFi PDA that can also call 911 in an emergency. The freedom to do that is what makes it contract-free... and it's important to note that, unlike AT&T and some of the other companies, T-Mobile is happy to SIM-unlock your phone for you.
Oh, by all means, complain away. However, anything you "purchased" that comes with DRM, that should have been the exact moment you had all the required "evidence" you speak of. It doesn't matter if it was formerly easily-broken DRM unless you went through the effort to break it and make your own un-DRMed copy at that time; if they go beef up the DRM I don't really see how you can blame them for not warning you.
Stop supporting the purchase of DRMed goods. Breakable DRM is still DRM, it's just DRM that the company hasn't yet bothered to fix. They'll get around to that in due time. You're a fool to expect otherwise, and a fool to support them in the first place.
Oddly enough, that's actually not quite true. They were the first major digital download retailer to offer DRM-free MP3s from major labels. They still do it, in fact, although since everybody does it now that's less of an incentive to use them than it used to be. There was a period of a year or two where every song I purchased came by way of Amazon, though.
Unfortunately, aside from their moderately enlightened views on music, nearly everything else is DRMed to hell. There are apparently DRM-free Kindle ebooks on their store, but only in situations where the author explicitly requested no DRM (for example, if they're using a CC license).
Aha, thanks for the clarification. I know a few assembly languages, including x86, but had never really read up on the x64 extensions. Doubling the register count *and* doubling the width is definitely a huge improvement, as is being able to do relative jumps with large offsets.
How does 32-bit Linux handle video cards with a gig or more of VRAM? Honest curiosity; the last time I ran 32-bit Linux I think my video card had only 256MB. On Windows, I think it would just fail to load the video driver, although I haven't checked (been a long time since I ran 32-bit Windows on raw hardware too).
I believe Win8 x86 may have finally removed the NTVDM (NT Virtual DOS Machine) required for running 16-bit apps. It's never been present in x64 versions of Windows - it's not possible to switch the CPU back into 16-bit mode after switching it up to 64-bit mode without first resetting it - but it's so incredibly legacy on win8, not to mention being a potential security liability, that I wouldn't be surprised if it was removed. (I'm assuming, of course, that you're running a 32-bit Windows 8 version.)
If you desperately need 16-bit support on a Win8 machine, your best bets are DOSBox (which emulates a 286 or 386 on machines where that mode isn't directly available) or virtualization (my Win8 x64 machine happily runs WFW3.11 on DOS 6.22 - a 16-bit OS - in a Client Hyper-V VM; please don't ask why). I think you need a 64-bit version of Win8 in order to use Client Hyper-V, but there are many options for 32-bit Windows hosts.
Yeah, I love it when people pretend that backward compatibility on the *nix side of computing is any better than it is on Windows. Open source software is easier to update, of course, but you have a much better chance of getting a 15-year-old Win32 program written for Win95 (for context, the original StarCraft is 15 years old) to run, unmodified, on Windows 8 than you do of getting the same thing to happen on pretty much any *nix platform for an equivalent version gap
In the old days, "nobody" used computers. They were too hard to use, too expensive to hire anybody who knew how to use them, and their usefulness was too limited for the value they provided. Your typical 3-20 person medical/dental/whatever office wouldn't even have had a computer!. That office (which will include at least one receptionist who *might* have a liberal arts degree and be making $30k/year, but who will probably be one of the heaviest users of this software in terms of time) would certainly not hire a software developer to create and maintain and update their in-house software, nor will anybody there for other work have the necessary skills. Paying a tenth of that developer's annual salary for such a program and its support package gets you a $10k piece of code you drop onto your $1k commodity PCs around the office, plus support calls when stuff doesn't work right, all as a one-time expense. It's not as customized to your particular needs, but it's also a lot better than the kind of crap that even $20k of developer time would result in, plus you get ongoing support, all for half the cost!
Your poor people are running $10k niche office programs on those machines they use for job hunting and paying bills? I think you missed the point of the article.
Good luck getting them running on Linux, too. It's not like the Wine devs are going to going to be able to pick up a copy of the program for testing, nor are they going to likely to care that much (in the aggregate) about the relative handful of users of such software. If you're lucky and the program isn't doing anything too crazy, it might just work on Wine with no hackery, but if it was that easy it would probably work on Win7 just as easily too. Of course, it might not be supported on either platform... if it's unsupported on Win7, you can be damn sure it won't be supported on Wine!
"XP Mode" is just a mildly customized Windows XP Pro image running in a Windows Virtual PC virtual machine, plus some cleverness with Remote Desktop Protocol stuff to get the windows from the VM to appear on the host desktop. There's nothing important about it that can't be done on Win8 using Client Hyper-V, it just doesn't configure itself for you.
However, bear in mind that it's still an XP image. It needs XP security patches just like any other XP install. When those are no longer available, it will be as insecure as every other XP machine.
What I want to know is how the hell people manage to write XP software that is flat-out incompatible with newer versions. Sometimes it takes a bit of mucking about with compatibility mode flags and running the program as Admin, but in general I've been able to get every 32-bit XP program to run fine under 64-bit Vista or newer. The only major exception is anything which requires a (32-bit) driver.
I've seen Firefox run into the 2GB user-mode address space / process limit many times... Chrome and (recent) IE don't have this problem due to per-tab processes, but Firefox definitely hits it when you use as many tabs as I do.
Most programs still don't need to work with numbers larger than 4 billion on a regular basis, so native 32-bit ints are just as fast as native 64-bit ones. Most programs still don't need to map more than 2GB (not 4GB; in fact not even quite 2GB) at once, so there's no pressing need for 64-bit pointers.
Software does take advantage of the fact that you can fit twice as many 32-bit values into the standard x86 registers if the registers are 64 bits wide, in the same way that you can stuff two 16-bit ints into EAX on a 32-bit system if you want to. However, the performance gains from doing so end up in conflict with the reduced cache coherency of larger binaries (bigger instructions) and possibly larger (less well-packed) data, resulting in more frequent cache misses. That's why the perf gains are typically very modest, although it really depends on the application.
Where 64-bit does become really valuable is working with very, very large amounts of sequential data (want to allocate a 10GB array? Can't do that on x86, no way no how). That's hardly a typical requirement right now (although I wrote a program a few weeks ago that needed to do it). However, it's getting closer. Additionally, while clever memory mapping can allow a 32-bit process to access over 4GB of RAM (just not all at the same time), there is a (small) performance impact associated with the need to be constantly re-mapping that memory.
The other area where 64-bit really helps is with security, specifically exploit mitigation. High-entropy ASLR in recent versions of Windows and some other OSes randomly places 64-bit aware executables and their various data regions across their entire 64-bit address space. This not only makes it completely impossible to correctly guess the address of any given bit of code in memory, it also makes spraying (heap spray, JIT spray, etc.) attacks completely infeasible; to cover even a tenth of a percent of the address space, you'd need to spray 16 million gigabytes of data. That's not only quite impractical at modern CPU speeds (even on a blazingly fast CPU and done in parallel, it would take a week or more), it also is far more memory (physical or virtual) than any modern computer will be able to allocate.
Naw man, when my gaming PC (850W PSU) is in sleep mode (1W draw), the power supply just dissipates those other 849W by MAGIC! I mean, the fans aren't running, and there's no fucking way the PSU fan alone could move that much heat before it melted something anyhow.
Anyhow, the only reason to put the PC in Sleep mode is to enable the "magic" of the PSU and lose the fan noise, it's not like it actually saves any power while that 850W PSU is still connected!
Actually, even at the efficiencies (typically around 25%) of the typical laser, 100W of power will make a very powerful beam. A 5W (emitted) laser will quite happily cut wood or flesh. A 25W laser should be capable of cutting a great many materials.
Even if it did, and even if we assume you meant megabytes (MB) not milibits (mb) per second, 1.6GB/s is hardly anywhere near the 30GB/s that goombah99 claimed. I call BS.
My understanding is that it's common in the UK for the court to award legal costs to the winner of the civil case, even if it's the defendent. In this particular case, the defendant has legal advice already, but they're working under an arrangement where they will not charge if the case is lost... and I suspect that if the case is won, the money for her defence will end up coming out of the plaintiff's wallet.
Contrary to what Hollywood may have led you to believe, things on fire do not normally explode. They normally just produce a lot of smoke and burn down. Seriously, go watch the video... it's a big fire, but it's just burning steadily and in a not-even-remotely explosive way... until from one frame to the next it flashes so bright it washes out nearly the entire light sensor of the camera.
Yes, obviously the fire is related to the explosion, thank you Captain Obvious. The question is, what about the situation even had the potential for such an incredible explosion? Because that shit is not normal for a fire. What part of "not precisely known" are you having trouble understanding? Also, as Phase Shifter pointed out, knowing exactly what blew up and possibly also knowing why is important for proper response to the incident.
Admittedly I kind of doubt this is the case here, but there are actually at least two legitimate reasons I can think of to have antivirus on a server: 1) File servers for shared files (ything that users can upload). Scan everything as it comes in. Identify LAN worms before they spread throughout any other less-secured boxes. Kept up to date and hardened by IT staff, this is a good place to add some really heavy-weight scaninng without it messing up employee workstation performance. Note that this applies to many kinds of file server, such as version control hosts or Sharepoint servers or the like. 2) Email servers. Scan everything going into or out of the company. Catch malicious attachments before they hit the inbox of that idiot VP of Sales who will disable his local AV in an instant if it blocks him from getting an email that claims to come from a hot 19 year old girl who wants to chat online. Possibly even use an SSL-terminating proxy to watch people downloading mail (or other files) from external servers and scan that too (whether you consider this a breach of privacy is between you and the company, but from the company's point of view it's a viable option to secure the system boundaries).
Have mod points, but what the hell: Win8 ships with MSE (well, with a version of Windows Defender that coincidentally has an antivirus capability that strongly resembles MSE) built in. You can of course disable it, but it's protected out of the box.
That said, I think some of the old anti-trust restrictions on MS expired recently; this may be why they went ahead and bundled it with Win8 but didn't do the same for Win7.
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800k ISK? Man, that's pocket change. Go shoot belt rats for a few minutes and you'll make that back easy.
Where's "Europe" anyhow? Can't find it on the map. Sounds like it should be part of Gallente space, though...
(lol, burning karma)
That... actually makes no sense at all. Everything they can do if you refuse to pay the monthly $50 phone bill - turn off your service, ding your credit rating, send it to a collections agency, whatever - they can also do if you refuse to keep paying the $20 loan installments. If you don't need the service anymore and yet want to keep the phone, so you choose to keep sending the $20 payments but not the $50 payments, what are they going to do - turn off the service you aren't using anyhow? Boy, that'll totally show them!
There are methods for handling debt collection. That applies whether it's a $480 loan or a $48000 loan. The difference is whether it's worth the cost to repossess the item, and not much more. There are lots of companies that offer loans in the hundreds of dollars, with payments in the tens per month. The difference is, most of those aren't 0% interest loans. T-Mobile's is, because the value they lose in investment opportunity (interest they could have made if you paid that $480 up front) and inflation ($480 now is worth more than $480 accumulated at the end of two years) is worth less than the extra business they get on their actual business: selling cellular service.
Except... it is actually possible to do what you say. You can suspend your number (technically distinct from canceling mostly in that the number remains parked, which they will charge a nominal fee for) and continue paying the phone installments. When you want service again, just tell them to re-enable it.
That said, this doesn't allow for switching your number to another carrier (temporarily or permanently) and staying on the installment plan. Given that it's a zero-interest loan, that doesn't hugely surprise me, but I do now agree that it's not as well advertised as it should be.
You can suspend service and keep paying for the phone in installments. They do charge a small fee to keep your number parked if doing this, though.
Except, the phone financing plan (literally, it's just a zero-interest loan on a phone) is *completely separate* from the service plan. You can, if you want, cancel the service plan and keep paying off the loan. You can also pay off the loan early, or buy the whole phone up front, or bring your own phone. There's no early termination fee on the phone service; you just have to pay off the loan you took on the device. The $20 for the phone and the $whatever (typically 50, under their new M2M plan they're pushing) are typically sent on a single bill, but as separate line items. There's no "new 2-year activation required" when you get a phone under this agreement either, although you *might* need to be an active subscriber the get the financing in the first place. If that's not the case, I could see the AG's point, but otherwise I really don't; the service plan is contract-free, and the option of getting a phone on a payment contract is separate from it. Only in the US would people assume that because you signed up for phone service at the same time you took out a loan on a phone, the loan contract has anything to do with the phone service plan...
The car analogy is exactly correct, especially because the car does not, in fact, "stop working" just because you stop paying the T-Mobile monthly service bill; buy a PAYG SIM and put it in, or switch to AT&T, or switch to one of the GSM resellers in the US, or move overseas, or even just go SIM-free and use it as a WiFi PDA that can also call 911 in an emergency. The freedom to do that is what makes it contract-free... and it's important to note that, unlike AT&T and some of the other companies, T-Mobile is happy to SIM-unlock your phone for you.
Oh, by all means, complain away. However, anything you "purchased" that comes with DRM, that should have been the exact moment you had all the required "evidence" you speak of. It doesn't matter if it was formerly easily-broken DRM unless you went through the effort to break it and make your own un-DRMed copy at that time; if they go beef up the DRM I don't really see how you can blame them for not warning you.
Stop supporting the purchase of DRMed goods. Breakable DRM is still DRM, it's just DRM that the company hasn't yet bothered to fix. They'll get around to that in due time. You're a fool to expect otherwise, and a fool to support them in the first place.
Oddly enough, that's actually not quite true. They were the first major digital download retailer to offer DRM-free MP3s from major labels. They still do it, in fact, although since everybody does it now that's less of an incentive to use them than it used to be. There was a period of a year or two where every song I purchased came by way of Amazon, though.
Unfortunately, aside from their moderately enlightened views on music, nearly everything else is DRMed to hell. There are apparently DRM-free Kindle ebooks on their store, but only in situations where the author explicitly requested no DRM (for example, if they're using a CC license).
Aha, thanks for the clarification. I know a few assembly languages, including x86, but had never really read up on the x64 extensions. Doubling the register count *and* doubling the width is definitely a huge improvement, as is being able to do relative jumps with large offsets.
How does 32-bit Linux handle video cards with a gig or more of VRAM? Honest curiosity; the last time I ran 32-bit Linux I think my video card had only 256MB. On Windows, I think it would just fail to load the video driver, although I haven't checked (been a long time since I ran 32-bit Windows on raw hardware too).
I believe Win8 x86 may have finally removed the NTVDM (NT Virtual DOS Machine) required for running 16-bit apps. It's never been present in x64 versions of Windows - it's not possible to switch the CPU back into 16-bit mode after switching it up to 64-bit mode without first resetting it - but it's so incredibly legacy on win8, not to mention being a potential security liability, that I wouldn't be surprised if it was removed. (I'm assuming, of course, that you're running a 32-bit Windows 8 version.)
If you desperately need 16-bit support on a Win8 machine, your best bets are DOSBox (which emulates a 286 or 386 on machines where that mode isn't directly available) or virtualization (my Win8 x64 machine happily runs WFW3.11 on DOS 6.22 - a 16-bit OS - in a Client Hyper-V VM; please don't ask why). I think you need a 64-bit version of Win8 in order to use Client Hyper-V, but there are many options for 32-bit Windows hosts.
Horrible things, probably. Good thing PNG is lossless compression...
Yeah, I love it when people pretend that backward compatibility on the *nix side of computing is any better than it is on Windows. Open source software is easier to update, of course, but you have a much better chance of getting a 15-year-old Win32 program written for Win95 (for context, the original StarCraft is 15 years old) to run, unmodified, on Windows 8 than you do of getting the same thing to happen on pretty much any *nix platform for an equivalent version gap
In the old days, "nobody" used computers. They were too hard to use, too expensive to hire anybody who knew how to use them, and their usefulness was too limited for the value they provided. Your typical 3-20 person medical/dental/whatever office wouldn't even have had a computer!. That office (which will include at least one receptionist who *might* have a liberal arts degree and be making $30k/year, but who will probably be one of the heaviest users of this software in terms of time) would certainly not hire a software developer to create and maintain and update their in-house software, nor will anybody there for other work have the necessary skills. Paying a tenth of that developer's annual salary for such a program and its support package gets you a $10k piece of code you drop onto your $1k commodity PCs around the office, plus support calls when stuff doesn't work right, all as a one-time expense. It's not as customized to your particular needs, but it's also a lot better than the kind of crap that even $20k of developer time would result in, plus you get ongoing support, all for half the cost!
Your poor people are running $10k niche office programs on those machines they use for job hunting and paying bills? I think you missed the point of the article.
Good luck getting them running on Linux, too. It's not like the Wine devs are going to going to be able to pick up a copy of the program for testing, nor are they going to likely to care that much (in the aggregate) about the relative handful of users of such software. If you're lucky and the program isn't doing anything too crazy, it might just work on Wine with no hackery, but if it was that easy it would probably work on Win7 just as easily too. Of course, it might not be supported on either platform... if it's unsupported on Win7, you can be damn sure it won't be supported on Wine!
"XP Mode" is just a mildly customized Windows XP Pro image running in a Windows Virtual PC virtual machine, plus some cleverness with Remote Desktop Protocol stuff to get the windows from the VM to appear on the host desktop. There's nothing important about it that can't be done on Win8 using Client Hyper-V, it just doesn't configure itself for you.
However, bear in mind that it's still an XP image. It needs XP security patches just like any other XP install. When those are no longer available, it will be as insecure as every other XP machine.
What I want to know is how the hell people manage to write XP software that is flat-out incompatible with newer versions. Sometimes it takes a bit of mucking about with compatibility mode flags and running the program as Admin, but in general I've been able to get every 32-bit XP program to run fine under 64-bit Vista or newer. The only major exception is anything which requires a (32-bit) driver.
I've seen Firefox run into the 2GB user-mode address space / process limit many times... Chrome and (recent) IE don't have this problem due to per-tab processes, but Firefox definitely hits it when you use as many tabs as I do.
Most programs still don't need to work with numbers larger than 4 billion on a regular basis, so native 32-bit ints are just as fast as native 64-bit ones.
Most programs still don't need to map more than 2GB (not 4GB; in fact not even quite 2GB) at once, so there's no pressing need for 64-bit pointers.
Software does take advantage of the fact that you can fit twice as many 32-bit values into the standard x86 registers if the registers are 64 bits wide, in the same way that you can stuff two 16-bit ints into EAX on a 32-bit system if you want to. However, the performance gains from doing so end up in conflict with the reduced cache coherency of larger binaries (bigger instructions) and possibly larger (less well-packed) data, resulting in more frequent cache misses. That's why the perf gains are typically very modest, although it really depends on the application.
Where 64-bit does become really valuable is working with very, very large amounts of sequential data (want to allocate a 10GB array? Can't do that on x86, no way no how). That's hardly a typical requirement right now (although I wrote a program a few weeks ago that needed to do it). However, it's getting closer. Additionally, while clever memory mapping can allow a 32-bit process to access over 4GB of RAM (just not all at the same time), there is a (small) performance impact associated with the need to be constantly re-mapping that memory.
The other area where 64-bit really helps is with security, specifically exploit mitigation. High-entropy ASLR in recent versions of Windows and some other OSes randomly places 64-bit aware executables and their various data regions across their entire 64-bit address space. This not only makes it completely impossible to correctly guess the address of any given bit of code in memory, it also makes spraying (heap spray, JIT spray, etc.) attacks completely infeasible; to cover even a tenth of a percent of the address space, you'd need to spray 16 million gigabytes of data. That's not only quite impractical at modern CPU speeds (even on a blazingly fast CPU and done in parallel, it would take a week or more), it also is far more memory (physical or virtual) than any modern computer will be able to allocate.
Naw man, when my gaming PC (850W PSU) is in sleep mode (1W draw), the power supply just dissipates those other 849W by MAGIC! I mean, the fans aren't running, and there's no fucking way the PSU fan alone could move that much heat before it melted something anyhow.
Anyhow, the only reason to put the PC in Sleep mode is to enable the "magic" of the PSU and lose the fan noise, it's not like it actually saves any power while that 850W PSU is still connected!
</sarcasm> for those who don't get it...
Actually, even at the efficiencies (typically around 25%) of the typical laser, 100W of power will make a very powerful beam. A 5W (emitted) laser will quite happily cut wood or flesh. A 25W laser should be capable of cutting a great many materials.
Even if it did, and even if we assume you meant megabytes (MB) not milibits (mb) per second, 1.6GB/s is hardly anywhere near the 30GB/s that goombah99 claimed. I call BS.
My understanding is that it's common in the UK for the court to award legal costs to the winner of the civil case, even if it's the defendent. In this particular case, the defendant has legal advice already, but they're working under an arrangement where they will not charge if the case is lost... and I suspect that if the case is won, the money for her defence will end up coming out of the plaintiff's wallet.
http://www.amazon.com/Warp-Speed-1/dp/1416520635
Contrary to what Hollywood may have led you to believe, things on fire do not normally explode. They normally just produce a lot of smoke and burn down. Seriously, go watch the video... it's a big fire, but it's just burning steadily and in a not-even-remotely explosive way... until from one frame to the next it flashes so bright it washes out nearly the entire light sensor of the camera.
Yes, obviously the fire is related to the explosion, thank you Captain Obvious. The question is, what about the situation even had the potential for such an incredible explosion? Because that shit is not normal for a fire. What part of "not precisely known" are you having trouble understanding? Also, as Phase Shifter pointed out, knowing exactly what blew up and possibly also knowing why is important for proper response to the incident.
Admittedly I kind of doubt this is the case here, but there are actually at least two legitimate reasons I can think of to have antivirus on a server:
1) File servers for shared files (ything that users can upload). Scan everything as it comes in. Identify LAN worms before they spread throughout any other less-secured boxes. Kept up to date and hardened by IT staff, this is a good place to add some really heavy-weight scaninng without it messing up employee workstation performance. Note that this applies to many kinds of file server, such as version control hosts or Sharepoint servers or the like.
2) Email servers. Scan everything going into or out of the company. Catch malicious attachments before they hit the inbox of that idiot VP of Sales who will disable his local AV in an instant if it blocks him from getting an email that claims to come from a hot 19 year old girl who wants to chat online. Possibly even use an SSL-terminating proxy to watch people downloading mail (or other files) from external servers and scan that too (whether you consider this a breach of privacy is between you and the company, but from the company's point of view it's a viable option to secure the system boundaries).
Have mod points, but what the hell: Win8 ships with MSE (well, with a version of Windows Defender that coincidentally has an antivirus capability that strongly resembles MSE) built in. You can of course disable it, but it's protected out of the box.
That said, I think some of the old anti-trust restrictions on MS expired recently; this may be why they went ahead and bundled it with Win8 but didn't do the same for Win7.