Yeah, that's what superfetch is supposed to be sucking up all that memory for. But you must be using some tweak I don't know about if it loads anything that fast (and this is with 4 gigs of RAM I'm talking about here). I can't tell that FF or anything loads faster than 10 seconds.

Face it, the real reason that Windows 7 is leaner than Vista is that Vista was a market flop because it tried to do all sorts of things that Windows users were simply not ready for. There is nothing seriously wrong with Vista, and Windows 7 is mostly an optimized version 2 of Vista.

That is the MS company line about Vista, and that is part of their problem: denial. I've used XP for years and have had to use Vista at work. Your claim that there's nothing wrong with Vista and it did things the public wasn't ready for is laughably ridiculous. Let's just start with that first one -- exactly what does it do that the public wasn't ready for? The sidebar? That's probably the most popular feature about Vista, but other similar applications came out and were even more sophisticated before Vista got to RC1. The visual previews of items on the taskbar? The transparency? Or maybe you mean the security of UAC, which is not only annoying as hell but has been proven to be not all that secure?

Nothing wrong with Vista? Oh, nothing, as long as you don't mind nearly an entire GIG of your memory basically disappearing while Vista eats it up and returns nothing for it. I have literally seen this situation: two computers side by side, both with fresh installs of Windows, one with XP and the other Vista. Nothing extra installed, nothing customized. The XP machine was using roughly 450 megs of RAM idling, and the Vista machine was using over 900 megs of RAM idling! Just out of curiousity, I took the XP machine home and tried this little experiment. I installed a Vista look-alike app bundle, which included the sidebar, taskbar previews, flip 3d, transparency, etc.; all the bells and whistles. Memory usage while idling shot up to 738 megs. Yes, that's quite a lot, but the Vista machine at work -- with nothing extra added on to it -- still used over 150 megs more Ram idling. I'm not alone either. Study after study comparing the two showed the same results -- even after the installation of SP1 on Vista.

Seriously, I can't help but wonder; how did this get modded to +5? We all know better than this. I'm tempted to go back to moderating and meta-moderating when I see stuff like this. Seems more to me like you pulled that out of your ass, not the author of the article.

I'd love to see a MMO or RPG-esque zombie game come out. Instead of worrying about the next thing to jump out at you around the corner (though you'd have to worry about that too) you would have to worry about things like having enough food and supplies to outlast the zombie hordes, or having to fight off other people from taking over your shelter. You could work with a team of other survivors to find a safe haven (i.e. clear this area of zombies and defend it).

In those movies this is the mistake the protagonists make, thinking they can keep the plague outside their defended area indefinitely as long as they have supplies. But the disease is so virulent that a victim is assured of becoming a zombie and spreading it with just one bite, so there is no way to keep it out in the long term. No matter what you do the Red Death will slip into the castle eventually.

I'm afraid that too many fans of zombie movies would recognize that scenario (and obviously Poe fans). If they tried to market a game based on that it would be shot down as cliche. Not everyone, but enough that it might not sell good enough to suit the company. I say "might not" because even if did sell just fine, the fact that it was criticized could scare the company enough to scrap before they got far into developing it.

Only if you some how ascribe a ridiculous value to human life. We're animals; there's 6 billion of us. Life is cheap, and beer isn't free.

That is a statement one would expect from a psychopath. If you really believe that -- not just trolling -- then you need to see a psychiatrist. Seriously. If you see human life as so valueless then you will eventually kill someone, if you haven't already.

Still seem to have? Just parroting? Dude, I'm using the latest version of FF right now. I have 5 tabs open but only one is active. I'm not downloading anything. It's not really even doing much of anything. It's almost idle. Yet FF is using 154, 320 K of memory.

This exactly why the original poster's suggestion would never work as a Mythbuster's episode: with nothing to blow up, there is no episode.

Everyone tells me that I DON'T stagger or have bloodshot eyes when I'm drunk, but I do slur my speech. I also slur my speech when I haven't slept in over 24 hours. So if I don't smell of liquor and I'm slurring my speech, am I drunk? If you're a cop and you automatically answered yes, then you're exactly the sort of cop the original poster was talking about.

I used to recommend NOD32 but not anymore, given these tactics. Tried it and confirmed it for myself that they were doing this. I use Avast on my Windows box, and although it uses more resources than NOD32, it's not nearly so much more as to be a deal-breaker. And the actual level of protection seems to be about the same -- mind you, I make these observations after trying both on various computers over a period of three years.

That's actually not a bad idea. If they had to deal with a large number of profiles all proclaiming to be gay they'd have to rethink that policy.

Problem is, they shouldn't be allowed to discriminate like that in the first damn place. I am straight myself, but this is the 21st century already. Almost everybody would be on her side if this happened because she mentioned that her boyfriend was black. When the hell is it going to recognized as a basic human right to be with anyone you want as long as that person is a consenting adult? It's way past time to get rid of this Bible-thumping, repressed Victorian crap.

I've never understood the US (and increasingly UK) regulators' belief that violence is good and sex is bad.

It's kind of interesting to note that some of the most violent games targeted at young people -- 99% of them male -- are military-style games that this "violence=ok, sex=bad" government apparently has no problem with. There are people out there who think that military action games help to mentally prepare young people for actual military action in years to come. After all, they'd be less likely to panic in such situations, since they'd have some idea about what they need to do to protect themselves. These people must all be paranoid, of course.

I have far more sympathy for the continental European tendency to view sex as good and violence as bad (even if -- or perhaps because -- it does lead to the French tendency when confronted with a war to say "f*** it...").

You pot-smoking hippy, you. Seriously. If you dare utter an anti-war sentiment in the US these days, you're going to be called a pot-smoking hippy by somebody. I'm not sure when or how, but that has become a bad thing nowadays.

"Do magic purple dragons do loop-DE-loops in the upper atmosphere?" No evidence for that either!

You obviously haven't had any good LSD.

Not to mention the paid ones who pretend they aren't.

It would've been better to leave the statue up. It would have served to scare away giant cockroaches and other crawling insects.

Get real, everyone knows there are no women on slashdot.

Lock-in has worked pretty well for several companies (e.g., Apple). I'm afraid you need to give a specific example, as their examples of practicing lock-in (PlaysForSure, etc.) aren't so glaringly notorious as that.