I'm curious. Did you actually read the article? The product he was trying to install was a desktop antivirus. It doesn't come on a boot disk, and it's not intended for cleaning heavily infected systems.

Obviously, most products that are actually intended for cleaning heavily-infected systems are self-booting. I'm sure Symantec can license some sort of command-line version of Windows in a way that's cost effective, or use a different NTFS implementation. It's just not what this product is intended for.

Not sure what planet you live on where resellers have a 50% profit margin. Places like Newegg have a margin that's somewhere in the single digits. If they sell a drive for $50, they are probably paying $45 or so for it. Also, a lot of cheap drives are clearance items -- the manufacturer is discontinuing the drive model, and they are selling excess inventory below cost.

Um, we are talking about used/surplus drives. They cost way more from the manufacturer.

I think you need to read up on how operating systems work. The whole idea of a protected-mode operating system is that programs are not allowed to access the hardware directly. As long as this is the case, an antivirus program cannot be guaranteed to run on a corrupted OS installation. In any case, the primary purpose of an antivirus is to prevent infection, rather than repair it.

You can't make a hard drive for $25. Cost does not depend on capacity, and you can't just do a process shrink and make everything cheaper. Even if you could get a hard drive for $25, it's still too expensive for a $100 console. The PS1 had a bill of materials that added up to maybe $15 towards the end of its life. When you can just integrate everything on one chip and use a $3.00 CDROM reader, things are cheap. When you need hard drives, BD readers, and fancy silicon, things are much more expensive.

Well, he didn't really succeed at it. I think he folded up shop after a couple of years.

Also, I don't understand your attitude. For the most part, owning your own business is harder, less rewarding, and less productive than working for an established company. Unless you are an exceptional businessman, starting a company is difficult, risky, and a ton of work. If you have some new technology you are commercializing, at least there is a chance that someone will buy the company down the road. Otherwise, you are pretty much stuck fighting for a scrap of market share in what is probably an oversaturated market.

As far as freedom goes, you are much better off working for somebody. If you run a company, you will pretty much be putting in 16-hour days 7 days a week with no vacation time, ever. Sure, you could go on vacation, if you don't mind the company collapsing in the meantime.

Anyway, I would suggest you actually talk to some business owners before you decide that it's something you like. Chances are, you won't like it.

Huh? The SNES was not powerful. It had the worst processor of its generation, very little RAM, and not much else. It did have a pretty nice graphics chip that supported a lot of colors, but that was its only advantage. The Genesis was a much more powerful console, but it had a slightly crappier graphics chip, which meant that the best games on the SNES looked better. On average, though, there are very few third-party SNES games worth playing. Nintendo's real advantage with that console was a superb development team.

Well, that's all nice when you have crappy competition like the N64, which was pretty much a complete bitch to program for. Unfortunately for Sony, Microsoft is extremely well positioned to compete with the PS3. They have excellent dev tools, a lot of experience with game APIs, and an understanding of what it takes to actually write games. Sony is fundamentally a hardware company that has no understanding of software development. The problem is, hardware is now a commodity. That is what bit them in the ass with music players, and it will bite them in the ass with consoles, too.

The PS3 will never be $100. Just like the Xbox was never $100, just like the 360 will never be $100. That's not possible when you need to have a hard drive, a Blu-ray drive, a fairly advanced processor that you don't manufacture, and expensive high-speed RAM. The only console that is cheap enough for this is the Wii -- it could already be sold for $100 if Nintendo wanted to do that.

Besides, the PS3 is seriously lagging behind the 360 as far as games go. For the most part, the 360 has better games, better graphics, and better online play. Of course, some people buy both, simply because the 360 is a good console and the PS3 is a good Blu-ray player.

Well, apart from having a great UI, great features, iTunes, the app store, and so on... I guess this just reflects different priorities. I don't give a flying fuck how many megapixels the camera has, but the user interface is incredibly important. I suppose Japanese consumers see it as the opposite, which might explain why pretty much every Japanese product has tons of useless features and an incredibly poor UI. The fact remains, it's a lot harder to make something that is pretty, well-made, and has a good UI than it is to just cram it with useless features. That's really what Apple, Bose, Bang & Olufsen, and similar companies are good at.

I guess the best analogy is a Swiss watch. A Swiss watch costs at least 100 times more than a cheap digital sports watch, has lower accuracy, is more fragile, and doesn't really have any features. Yet, I'm pretty sure most people would choose a Rolex over a Timex, even if they were the same price.

Um.... is it really that hard to run WinXP inside Virtualbox or something? I mean come on. Linux is a non-entity as far as desktop computing goes. It's also rather difficult to develop stuff for, given that there is no standard version of anything, multiple incompatible libraries and kernel versions and desktop environments and so on. For Apple, there is absolutely no business case for developing it, given that it would cost a few million bucks, and maybe a thousand people would use it (while bitching about closed-source binaries and DRM).

The fact is, the desktop Linux demographic is very small and pretty much impossible to please. Just look at how much shit Nvidia gets, despite having full-featured and easy-to-use Linux drivers.

I'm sure there is plenty of corruption and all that. That's the case in every developing country. That was the case in the US when the US was at the same stage of development. What I'm saying is, you are probably not going to make things better by acting externally. Change has to come from within. Right now, China has hundreds of millions of young, healthy, eager workers who are willing to work long hours for low pay to try to build a life for themselves. That's why you have these types of working conditions. By trying to help the workers, you'll just be making them unemployed. If they could find a better job, they probably would have found it.

OK, so go to System->Preferences->Appearance, click Fonts, then Details. Make sure you have subpixel turned on with hinting set to full. Also make sure the subpixel order is right. You can check that using one of the LCD test websites, like this one. It definitely looks just as good as XP with Cleartext for me.

You are retarded. The reason prices are higher in the US is because US workers get paid about 100x more. The only way prices are going to come down is if you pay them less or employ fewer of them. Employing fewer workers means you need more robots, which are generally very expensive. The only things that can be profitably made in the US are those for which manufacturing is completely automated, such as alkaline batteries, bullets, chemicals, and so on. What exactly does innovation have to do with any of this?

I think one of the reasons everything shifted to China is because the quality of most of that MADE IN USA stuff was pathetic. When it comes to consumer products, US manufacturers have always been good at one thing -- cost reducing the hell out of everything. Making the stuff in China kept the quality level the same, it just reduced the prices by a factor of 10.