Programming? Yeah right. Probably last thing ever to go voice-activated. Something more plausible would be for example info-desk style application or perhaps GPS navigation system. After all you're supposed to be driving the car if you change your mind about destination etc.

Gaming is dead-on, too. In fact it's surprising it's been used so little. There was ancient c64 game that already could be taught 3 speech commands. Given the modern cpu and memory capabilities it should be all over the place, especially since X360 has microphone as standard issue.

Not all games benefit of course, but RTS would for sure and so should shooters - In multiplayer better teams have coordinated on voice channels for a decade already, no reason why you shouldn't be able to give AI voice commands in single-player too.

The hardware is still overpriced no matter what.

Mind you, if you could put OSX on a no-name intel box, I'd probably had had it running for years. It's like linux done right.

Well my anonymous coward pal, it *is* a piece of cake with XP. Adding insult to injury the sound chip is just a bog-standard AC97 on-board audio, most common chip in the world. "Known good audio cards" for linux is like one of those world shortest books.

Then there's the whole debacle of setting up specific resolutions for display, kind of handy for HTPC use..

Just goes to show if you need anything beyond pre-set Iceweasel/TB/OpenOffice, you're knee deep in gore.

Which is actually what I'm doing. But face it, XP is being phased out whether we like it or not. 3 years down the line the vista installation base has a lion's share of gaming rigs on plain windows tax inertia alone. At work, I recently upgraded W2k to XP for the sole reason of latest PCB design tools puking on W2k as it's not supported or tested against it anymore. Vista's creeping there too as well, unless you're big enough shop to have dedicated IT staff etc.

Mm. No.

I wasted a week'n'half of my vacation last summer trying to set up a HTPC running on mythbuntu. Even after I scaled down the requirements to just getting something to "play" I was not getting anywhere fast. Linux audio is a big steaming turd and even really elementary stuff like getting SPDIF enabled is an adventure where you have to get comfy with mod parameters and the like.

Not to mention there are no system wide codecs all applications know how to use and so on and so forth.

That whole party line of "so easy anyone can do it" degenerates pretty fast into .conf hell if you want to do something "exotic" like use the digital output or multi-channel audio.

Ooo is just terrible compared to Office as well. I use excel a lot for various engineering things and just making simple solve-with-parameters table or a 2d chart to study component values is much more difficult than it needs to be.

Yeah, maybe 3.x release did something about that, but 2.x calc at least was really bad. I don't feel obliged to learn to use user-hostile software for ideological reasons, I just want to get my day-to-day work done.

To sum up my HTPC project, once I gave up on the whole geek-credibility linux idea, I had fully functional media-box running on top of XP within a few hours including reinstall from scratch. With ffdshow and media player classic everything just works and dvbviewer is remarkably straightforward to set up compared to mythtv or vdr.

My only mistake was wasting more than couple of nights on the linux-project. That's the engineering mindset that difficulties are made to be surpassed. But sometimes the tool is just wrong. I also tried plain ubuntu and debian to see if they make any difference but the whole "multimedia" thing doesn't seem to be there.

Get over yourself already.

Used to be web *was* IE and people were reduced to fool web pages with bogus client ID to get working IE web code instead of terrible buggy netscape 4.x code or just simple "get IE" -banner.

2/3rd is still a lot but it was 90% a little while ago and it could be perfectly justified to develop a new site IE only.

With these figures, in 2009 new sites designed have even stronger reason to cater for the "other" demographic.

Too bad there's no credible alternative to vista or vista 2nd release in sight for your average gaming-oriented PC. I wouldn't use linux for general desktop stuff either, too much pain if there's no ideological reason to go there. And the other notable requires joining a cult with the membership fee charged in overpriced hardware.

ATI drivers seem to have problems with suspend-to-ram and hibernate, thought. I have grand total sample of 2 ati cards and 2 nvidia cards - With Nvidia suspend always worked. With ATI there was always problems. In fact I've not been able to make HD3850 card to suspend/resume despite trying every trick in the book up to and including tweaking bios..

The older radeon 9700 worked fine until driver release ZZZ, after that it shazam stopped working. I was using year'n'half old driver just to keep the suspend working.

Suspend is one of these things that you never miss until you see it working 1st hand and then you can't figure out how you survived without..

I could think of some trivial loads suitable for railgun approach (or whatever you want to call it) such as water, oxygen, fuel..

Kids growing up "dirty" and kids growing up "clean" tend to have the same health issues as adults.

Only there are studies that do show difference. One example is a study between kids livin in eastern Finland vs kids living across the border in Russia. Can you guess which group has more allergies as adults? As in 5x more?

I'd give you a link but the national newspaper web page (www.hs.fi) seems to be kaput today. Here's one for a study starting/started just now studying the phenomenom: http://savotta.helsinki.fi/halvi/tiedotus/lehti.nsf/e1e392ad852e72f5c225680000404fa8/94bdf837e42b8b9cc225745700419453?OpenDocument

All in Finnish of course, but that's your problem, not mine! You should find something with "DIABIMMUNE" as the study is multinational.

Windows 7 is not special and it's not worth reporting every tidbit unless there's actually a product or a set-in-stone feature list.

It will most likely end up on 97% of new home computers bought 2010 and later. I'd call that sort of "special". Given what a big hit vista has been on business desktop I'd give it a fair shake that we won't see any major rollout of W7 in offices either. Just why bother? W2k would work fine except quite a few new apps are not tested against it => fail on wrong wrongness in some DLL.

If NT4 had USB support (ever wonder how that was not added in an SP, hmm..) it'd work just fine for getting work done if you can put up with the ugly UI.

I dunno ... is she really hot?

Or more to the point, worth dying for?