The worst effect of Microsoft in my mind is that they shoved a mediocre OS down the worlds throat and while doing so, managed to convince generations of people that don't know otherwise that Bill gave us the Personal Computer. It makes me crazy every time I hear it, and what always follows is that I get accused of being jealous. Back in the late seventies, I thought there was going to be a new world fueled by the advent of the microprocessor. Bill's questionable marketing tactics slanted the playing field and suppressed the independent software business. There were some glory days, but it didn't take long before the popular wisdom was that you needed millions of dollars to launch a new application in the marketplace. In my mind, Bill represents everything I dislike about the current marketplace. If he sold his soul to the devil for forty or fifty years of fame and power, wake up nick, and go collect already.

I used facebook for a while. I had to unfriend my grand-daughter because her teen chatter offended me, and I didn't want her to offend my other "friends" as well. I started to feel a loss of control when I realized the bizarre things that can happen when you introduce al the people you have ever known to each other. But the real reason I detached from FB was that I started to see the connections growing between them and the rest of the world. Every time I turn around on the Internet, some piece of software is offering to log me into FB as a courtesy. Then I started noticing web sites where you couldn't participate if you were unwilling to provide your FB credentials. There are a lot of news sites like that. When you want to comment on an article, up comes that FB login dialog. In terms of growing risks, the more systems that are closely bound to FB, the bigger the disaster when something goes wrong.

I want it all, and I want it now, and I want it retroactively!!

Given that each paying consumer get an upward/downward mix optimized for web browsing (small upward, large downward). If COMCAST wants to upgrade the paying users to BLAST to make up for the drain on the bandwidth caused by the public users, then maybe that helps, but why would someone want to share what little portion they do get while competing with all the neighbors for bandwidth on the coax during peak hours? This whole scheme makes no sense to me. With many of the neighbors watching streaming video, and many of them doing bit-torrent, I find the average bandwidth left over for the paying users to be sad. To make things worse, I have been a business class user sharing the same cable with the consumers, and can someone explain to me what that works. I have a business class arrangement with COMCAST, but I have no committed information rate, so I am having doubts about why I am paying twice as much a month for my service, just because I want five fixed IP's.

While they did say, "don't update", they also said if you wanted to continue to play multi-player games, you had to. That left us in the position of turning the PS3 into an unimpressive Linux system with way too little ram to do anything important, and no longer having game playing capability as well. They sold it as a game console that could also run Linux, the emphasis being on the work "also". Making it exclusively one or the other, without the ability to switch back and forth as desired. Definitely a scam IMHO. Not another penny for Sony, ever again in this lifetime.

I read the first hundred or so postings in this thread with special awe. I switched eight years ago and have never had a regret. Sure now and then I use Windows for a few minutes if necessary, but between my Apple Mac OS X machines, and several Linux and Android machines I have, I am very happy staying away from Windows. I think the hardest thing for me about this is that when I see high end vendors proudly displaying their new machines, it just makes me sick to see that ugly array of tiles that Microsoft has coerced OEM's into pushing as the contemporary computing platforms. If we thought there were a lot of machines in the landfill before, just imagine how many lousy Windows 8 machines are destined to go there now. What a terrible waste to build a machine with four or more cores, and gigs of ram, and saddle it with what I consider to be a real stinky piece of malware. In my opinion, Windows most valuable feature is it's ability to convince people they need anti-virus software. And that value is of course for the benefit of Symantec, and McAfee...

I thought he was cool at first, but he managed his life poorly and has compromised the standing of wikileaks in my opinion. What he thinks about anything is questionable at this point. It may very well be he was lured into a honey trap, but he allowed that. I am not sure how he will define the rest of his life under the circumstances. I wouldn't call what he has done as, "lee[ping your head down".

I bought several PS3's to do development. I wanted to experiment with the Cell processor. Of course I also wanted them to play blueray movies.I found the games available did not interest me. I waited what seemed like two years for the @home feature to go on line and finally gave up. Eventually Sony declared they were losing money on each console that had to be made up for in game sales. I say too bad for them if they didn't charge enough to pay for the manufacturing of the device. Around the time I decided to focus on yellow dog linux and experience the console's cell processor, they pushed through an update that removed the 2nd OS option forever. It seems to me the price I paid for my original PS3 units was substantial. Sony struggled to keep control of the marketshare in various ways including bait and switch. I am unimpressed and will be boycotting them for the rest of my days.

If deploying rootkits becomes legal, many companies may start doing it, and we will see nested root kits. As if Windows wasn't shaky enough on it's own, what kind of spaghetti code will result when multiple vendors install root kits, and some better than others. Maybe Microsoft will patent rootkit API's to make things easier. Wouldn't this be the opposite of the trusted computing initiative?

Very true. Digital Research Inc was there in spades with a massive suite of languages and operating systems targeting a haf dozen hardware platforms. They had networking. The common back-end languages were very advanced for their time. Concurrent DOS for the low end and FLexOS for the high end protected mode systems. IBM didn't choose DOS because it was better. They chose it because they could buy a CP/M-86 knock off cheaper from Bill Gates who bought it down the street for a song. Then his predatory marketing of DOS, requiring OEM's to bundle only MS-DOS or else... gave him the monopoly lock on the DOS platform. But DR-DOS was very capable, and could have run beneath Windows if Microsoft hadn't locked it out (proven in court). I believe we could have gone the distance quite nicely with Digital Research instead of Microsoft.

As I recall, USB operations under Windows are polled. I would think that syncing over wifi instead would be much more reasonable.

A burger that special must be for something really important, like has cheeseburger for ceiling cat.

I don't live in Michigan, but I have been paying attention to what is going on, and when the governor assigns someone that supersedes local elections and subjects the residents to non-representative governance, that in my mind is an abuse. I don't know who the OFA is. I listen to news broadcasts from around the country. Once these "emergency managers" take over, they are like kings and everyone else like serfs. It is a complete denial of the constitution.

The article quotes unnamed people in the US Govt, and unamed people in India. This is far too vague to suit me. As far as I am concerned, if the process servers can find them and serve them, that is fine with me. If they don't show up, they can be convicted in absentia and will have to avoid those countries in the future. None of the companies are beyond the law, however large they have become. Freedom of speech is an American issue and not guaranteed in other countries, so while IANABCL, I think sovereign countries have rights about what crosses ther borders.

As despicable as some of the decisions from the whitehouse have been, the war on women and the "emergency manager" fraud being perpetrator on the people of Michigan are much worse in my mind. Lets for a moment lets not focus on what is being said, but rather what is being done. All over the country, in places where the Republicans gained majority, bills prohibiting abortion despite roe vs wade are in evidence. I have chosen not to fly any more, not because I am worried about hijackers, but rather because I am worried about the prospects that I might be arrested for struggling against unfair and unjust procedures at the security checkpoints. I no not wish to be groped in a public place, much less pay for the privilege. The profound amount of money and power granted to the TSA after 9-11 makes my mind reel. All that money could be feeding a lot of people. I think we should be looking instead at why are government (house and senate) have become non-functional, and nothing is being done about it.