I still think they're using Transmeta's engineers to run x86 code on their GPUs so they can get Windows to run on systems with other ISAs for their CPU. ARM and POWER, anyone? It sounds much cheaper and simpler than doing the insane amount of testing needed to roll out a new chip, and you'd get the added benefit of accellerating your everyday applications without needing to recompile them for CUDA. Plus NVIDIA will have the advantage of being the first ones out there with SSE5. So BAM!

The examiner will almost certainly come back with multiple rejections based on obviousness [....]

You're saying this about the patent system that approved the patents on swinging on a swing and using a laser pointer as a cat toy?

How does this work better than pictures of half-naked girls already on my desktop?

This plan, of course, has been devised by our resident decision-engine, HAL 9000.

You know, I like to think that I'm a nice person, but I'm going to just have to say this; you are an idiot if you think you can compare what's essentially opcode code translation with complex interpretation.

Have you ever found a CPU that was designed to run programs slowly? x86, along with every other ISA, is designed to run general applications as fast as possible. So they designed their CISC-philosophy chip to do instructions that would, if used, make programs run faster. But when they developed the RISC philosophy, and figured out how to implement superscalar design, of course you're going to get more performance out of the RISC core - it's implementing every part of that 5-cycle instruction simultaneously in one or two cycles. Besides, with the plethora of extensions x86 has tacked on to itself, do you really think that those instructions are the most important for running your computer?

However, the web is not machine code. There is no known design for a hardware processor that will 'execute' a web page. And that's because web pages are more like a page description language than anything else. Thinking metaphorically, it's more like source code for some high-level compiled language. Every time you render a web page, you have to wait for it to compile the code. And even after that, you have more complexity with javascript, AJAX applications, server pushes, flash, java, and more. And if you think about it, you'll realize that none of the web technologies were originally designed to do even a quarter of the things we make them do today. Do you really think that we'll be able to do everything that we can do with our relatively behemoth desktop machines on a web browser?

I'm not saying it's impossible to do everything we can do with computers in a fancified web browser. But it's definitely going to take a lot of work, and for it to work, the technologies involved in the internet are going to have to evolve dramatically.

Do I seriously need to look into the past articles to prove how old this news is? Seriously folks; this isn't exactly rocket science here - this is all stuff everyone knows about by now. Hey, do I even need to point to the link to the story about how people actually prefer the sound of MP3 because of the encoding artifacts, much like how people preferred records after CD's came out because of the noise/repressed frequencies?

If the problem with deploying Linux is not having enough trained professionals, why not go with Solaris? OpenSolaris is free, and Sun offers training for it. Don't know if they have russian solaris training, though. Or they could go through multiple other training sources that are available for Linux. No matter how you put it, paying for windows, no matter how low your discount is, doesn't make sense. For chrissakes - if everyone in Russia were running Linux, wouldn't that get rid of the training problems?

The only reason to have two computers and one monitor is if you, like me, have an Amiga. No, UAE is not perfect; the actual thing is. So to speak. The only thing is that the Amiga doesn't use standard PC peripherals, so my real response to this poll should be "two computers, one monitor, a bunch of keyboards and mice, and thousands of floppy diskettes".

I was a little tipsy when I wrote that comment. OK, a lot tipsy. What I was trying to do was compare the transition between gnome 2.x to 3.x and the transition between KDE 3.x to 4.x. KDE 4.x introduced tons of new technology and did it's best to break away from the desktop metaphor. But because it was so unlike KDE3, there was a huge uproar.

Yeah, lots of people will be in an uproar! There are millions of problems with Gnome 3! For starters, it won't be enough like KDE 3, so everyone will think it's broken when there's really no problems with it!

Everyone knows that you can't do anything with a tivo. It may be using open-source software, but the hardware checks the software's checksum, and if it doesn't match, it simply doesn't run the software. If you remember, this is a major reason (if not the only reason) why Richard Stallman got all upset and created GPL v3.

The latest and currently most popular sport: cow charging. Almost any motor vehicle will do. Ram it into the cow, and listen to it's hilarious confused mooooooooo,

Now that Disney is buying Marvel, Disney's marketing department will consume their IP and digest it into other forms. Soon you'll be seeing marvel-themed toys, then marvel-themed sitcoms!

Oh wait, that's how it is already. Except Marvel's media tends to be more serious.

Except that wasn't the end; the end is when you go to the dollar store and buy marvel-branded plastic sandwich baggies. You can't get lower than that.

The anticompetition thing Microsoft is going under is for Windows Media Player - not for DirectShow Filters. Quicktime is like a suite of DirectShow filters for the mac. The player is just a frame around that. WMP is much more then that.

Beyond the obvious method of physical distrobution, one can always download a browser through the wonders of wget.

90% of all computers don't come with Mac OS on them.

Right now, I'm wondering if you have some problems with the understanding of what is real or not. How can you say that Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly? Go to any shopping center, it doesn't matter where, and you can go into all the businesses and ask them if they have any computers without windows on them. The few who won't say 'no' are the people who don't even know what you're talking about. You won't find any public school in the US with student computers running anything but Windows (excepting the precious few schools which have been blessed by Apple), and you'll be hard-pressed to find one running servers running anything else.

And how the hell do you think that Apple is more locked than Microsoft? Last time I checked, there's a FOSS Mac OS X core available, but no FOSS Windows core. With Windows, you'll never be able to access the kernel, short of writing hardware driivers. Apple has contributed to the public, while Microsoft has only accepted payments from us. And don't forget, people still think highly of them because of the discounts they give to public education. While switching to a FOSS solution would save everyone billions combined.