Military computers and warfare hardware running virus-prone software (from you-know-whom no doubt) is like a weight lifting champion with multiple sclerosis: most of the time he looks mighty and even wins competitions, but don't be surprised if he collapses and crushes his neck with the barbell at an awkward moment.

In short: it's not reliable, don't do it.

They've even added region coding to round out the new protection bundle.

Gee great, like this wasn't already a needless PITA with DVDs - needless because de-zoning happens anyway, so in the end it's just there to piss off people who aren't tech savvy.

I find it very tasteless and absolutely revolting that you continue to post on a low-id Slashdot account that you purchased on ebay, to pose as the long-time Slashdot user that you are not.

It's an article on an air guitar, why wouldn't they use an air verb? I think it's perfectly fitting.

You got that right!

other gamers out there with zero interest in grinding for gear

That's what scripting is for.

Easy: if you see the blocks clearly, you glasses are on your nose. See? that's the power of Tetris.

I wonder if playing Minesweeper is effective against boss-inflicted stress.

I don't know where the poster works, but in most workplaces, boss-inflicted stress is caused by playing Minesweeper on the job. But then I suppose getting a pink slip is one sure way of never being stressed out by the boss ever again...

No wait, thats called puking

It's "that'S".

lets not be too trendy, this is News for Nerds after all.

It's "let'S".

You gotta love the Internet, only here can you find the analphabets correcting the illiterates...

He's a catalyst. He's not arguably good at anything that's directly useful to development, sales or marketing, but he fires employees and customers up. You could say he's the soul of his company.

My boss is like that: he doesn't know much about the products we make and how they're made, nor is he particularly good at promoting or selling them, but he could convince you to put on suntan lotion in the middle of a blizzard storm.

When many people believe that the continued success of a large company depends on one individual, his health becomes news.

That's because in Apple's case, it's more than a belief. Apple's success does depend on Steve Jobs, strangely enough. Remember John Sculley?

"stop the Tumors."

There, fixed that for ya...

overgrown PDAs that still don't have enough pixels to do anything useful with.

It's painfully obvious that you're talking out of your arse and you don't have a netbook.

For what it's worth, I use SolidWorks 2008 on my EeePC 901 professionally. Sure the screen isn't as nice as a big desktop thing, but it's perfectly usable.

Microsoft has one very big problem: they totally missed the low-power PC revolution. They have sunk insane amounts of money into their new OS that, as tradition has it, is slower and demands better hardware than the previous one, and released it when (1) XP had just started to mature enough for people to consider it good enough and (2) when the best selling PCs can't run it.

What they should do now is split OS lines, i.e. support XP for small PCs, and Vista for big machines, instead of trying to kill off XP. But they'll never do that, they're much too stubborn.

As for growing XP registry and general mess on the system, that's easy:

- Disable automatic Windows update. Yes, get a decent AV, a decent non-Microsoft browser, a decent non-Microsoft firewall, behave rationally when you browse the web and you'll be just fine. Each new update of Windows seem to be worse than the previous one anyway; one could almost believe they're trying to make XP worse than Vista for some reason I can't fathom. [/sarcasm]

- Disable prefetching for anything but boot programs. You'll recover many MANY megabytes of disk space, and you'll boot a ton faster.

- Run things like ccleaner regularly

- If you're really short of disk space, consider nLite

(This post made on a EeePC 901 w/ XP)

Several years ago, my mother got herself a computer. I lived abroad, so she did that all by herself. When I came back, I fell into the trap of doing computer maintenance for family, and finally I got tired and told my mom I'd install Mandrake on her machine. She said okay as long as it worked like Windows. Sure I said, you'll see...

So I went buy a mandrake CD, installed it, gave a small course on how to do things on the machine, and told her how she didn't have to worry about viruses and spyware anymore, etc... The first thing she said to me was : "but my CD with the program to remove red eyes from photos doesn't work on it. And neither does my cliparts utility, and the fun online postcard programs my friends sent me by email." and I thought, shit, I didn't think about that. So I tried to get her to use Gimp and other open-source utilities, but it wasn't "the same", it wasn't "her programs".

So eventually I told her, look, it's either Linux with no worries, or Windows with all your toys, but you worry about security and backups yourself. She chose Windows, never once called me for support anymore, and that was it.

My mom is 70 and now owns 3 computers, including an EeePC that she keeps in her purse all the time. So the moral of that story is, unless your "senior citizens" (also called old persons in non-politically-correct circles incidentally) is mentally deficient or just not interested enough, don't take them for idiots and tell them that, yes, computers are a pain, and you've never had one, and yeah it'll be a tough learning curve, but you're perfectly able to do it. And don't let them use their age as an excuse for laziness.