Is it possible they are running out of bandwidth due to increase demand of their streaming service?

I had a completely different experience. I upgraded from Parallels 3 to 4 and had zero problems. My VM consists of various flavors of Linux, *BSD, Windows 98, Windows NT, and Windows XP. All worked w/o problems. The only thing I had to do was re-install the video driver for Windows 9x and NT since they defaulted to VGA with 16 colors. Other than that, I was pretty happy with it. I also noticed (perceived) a slight bump in performance. Was it worth the $40 upgrade? Not really. There wasn't really anything wrong with 3.0 for me. Why did I upgrade? I wanted to try controlling parallels from my iPhone although I haven't had the time to try that yet...

I totally agree and never bite the hands that feed you!

It was a lot more stressful taking apart a PowerBook 12". If Apple is going after the enterprise, it make sense to have an easily serviceable system.

Check out GNU autoconf. That's a good example of how a script works on *nix box. And, yes, they are useful!

Unfortunately, there will always be software piracy. Software makers spend a lot protecting their IP. This goes back to copy protection (a total PITA). And, there will always be crackers who break the copy protection. It's an endless cycle. If software is priced properly, I believe people will pay for it regardless of the software being proprietary. Or, just make the switch to open source where you are free to use and modify the software. Cheers.

close enough

Looks a bit clumsy... Better put some Loc-Tite on it. Otherwise, the iPod will vibrate lose after a few shots. ;-)

Not sure what you mean. I wrote a USB Ethernet driver a few years back and I don't recall doing programmed I/O. The chip handles DMA. You set up request blocks and the chip handles the data transfers. You're not using processor cycles to get data in/out of the chip in that respect. You only need to feed buffers to the chip and keep it busy.

The only thing with USB is that there is a significant overhead associated with USB protocol. If I recall, it was something like 30% of the bandwidth. That was USB 1.1 with 11 Mbps. I haven't looked at USB since.

I want one!

One point about RealTek's driver, it looks like a plain Ethernet device from OS X. From what I understand, you need a special program to set the wireless settings. That is, you can't use existing wireless configuration. It also doesn't work as smoothly as Airport, either. What others have done on the MSI Wind is buy a wireless card off eBay that uses the same chipset Apple uses. This way, OS X sees it as an Airport device.

I'm more interested in Apple coming out with a netbook based on the ARM processor that will give me a day's worth of use instead of 4-5 hours on the current netbooks. In addition, I would like to be able to use the device as a tablet so I can jot things down and read PDF documents. Now, that's a netbook! Build it and I will buy.

This is one compelling reason why people should be allowed to make copies of the media they own. I don't want to have to pay for something I already bought.

fwiw, it is not 15 year old software. His previous machine was Windows XP. He is an architect so he runs specialized application to do his work. He reported that even Autocad didn't install. And, yes, he did try to buy a machine with XP on it, but everything comes with Vista now days.