What is this "attractive woman" device you speak of?

Well, according to Rufus' law. Computers and other IT equipment age 20 years for every human year. So, that would make the internet 800 years old. Now, Methuselah lived for 969 years, so if the internet was a human, it could set records in the near future.

You need to look at the grand scheme of things. Sure, you may get 5-10% of customers using massive amounts of data (over 500Gb) but when 90-95% of your customers are home users and small businesses who don't have their own data centers, and they may only have a 50Mb backup, their lack of use offsets the heavy users.

Imagine if in a 1Pb server, 750Tb of data was used by 10,000 individuals paying $5/mth and the other 250Tb was used by 50 individuals paying $5/mth. I failed at mathematics at school, but I'm sure the 10k will pay the data center costs that would be incurred by the 50.

Before you mod me down as a troll, read what I have to say.

I am completely sick and tired of manufacturers putting MS Office and Norton Antivirus on computers from factory. These programs come pre-loaded with Asus/HP/Compaq/etc computers but only as 30-60 day trials. And since 90% of people that buy brand name computers are idiots (and 11 years in computer retail tells me this), they think they have the whole program. So the antivirus runs in 60 days but they still think they're protected (not that Norton is very effective in any case) or they create documents in Word/Excel only to be unable to open them without paying more money. What makes it worse is that some people actually start using MS Outlook, then get locked out of their emails.

Deceiving customers with trial software should come to an end. And if this is the straw that breaks the camels back, then so be it.

All record company politics aside, we need an open source album format. MP3's to date have been individual song formats. They can have limited graphics embedded into them, but they are limited to a single individual file package. What would be good is:

- An open source audio compression which is completely scalable (maybe ogg for one download option, flac for those who really enjoy their music).
- Different price points for different quality (an ogg album for example would be $10, flac could be $20, flac with all media extras including video could be at $30). Nine Inch Nails did this with Ghosts. There were, IIRC, about 6 different options to acquire the album that ranged from free, to $300. AND IT SOLD WELL!!!! (looking at this RIAA???)
- Embedded album art and liner notes. Maybe even music videos. With the speed and availability of the internet these days, downloading a 200mb album with video's should be an option.
- Easily extractable package. It would be good to add an album to your iTunes/xmms/winamp/wmp playlist and be able to pick out songs for shuffling purposes and such.
- NO DRM!

Someone mentioned .tar files. Something similar would be good, but you have to have native support in media players (iTunes, winamp, wmp, etc).

"Games fail to portray gender and ethnic diversity"? Really?

Alyx Vance - African American/Asian female
Eli Vance - African American male with a physical disability
Father Grigori - A Russian priest
Judith Mossman - A Caucasian female

For those of you not familiar with K's Choice and didn't get the parent comment...

I concur. The AS-3112 power socket connector is easy to connect in the dark. Just keep your finger on the bottom (earth) prong and stay away from the top 2!!!

You forgot ironic. The big brother connotations on this scandal makes the whole story somewhat funny even.

I own a copy of BetaField 2 and have tried to run it on 3 completely different, but entirely compatible PC's with XP and Vista. I have found it's a good game to play if you can fluke getting it running. I had it working for about 10 minutes total. The biggest disappointment is when it didn't work on my gaming PC (AMD Athlon X2 6000, 2Gb Corsair Dominator 1066MHz, 2x 8800GT 512Mb in SLI) using XP or Vista. Maybe MS will release an OS that works with games really well. Then maybe EA will release a game that works well with Windows.

I have been using Win7 in a VM on my Vista laptop and it does run faster than the host OS. That I'm impressed with. I might try and install some games and see what happens. After the debacle that was Vista, MS may well just be on a winner with 7. My fingers are crossed.

I see what you were trying to start there....

This is not a smart move on the part of those companies which want to stick with Windows XP. Here's my take on the situation. Many will disagree, but there are some valid points.

1. Support: Sure, Microsoft has extended support but what about third parties? What about buying new hardware which will have Vista/Windows 7 drivers, but no XP support. It will come soon enough. And you could even stretch it to the point where hardware upgrades will become a nightmare. With 8Gb of RAM becoming common in high end computers NOW, think about where we'll be in 12 months time. Even low end bargain PC's will have 4Gb, which XP won't support properly right now. And don't bother talking about XP-64bit, there is even less support for that then there is 32bit.

2. Training: Windows has evolved over the past decade. The user interface and structure of how things are done has changed too. Consider this. Say you have an employee starting who's job requires some basic skills with MS Windows. If that employee has a relatively new computer and hasn't had experience with XP, you would have to take the time/spend the money on training them to use an old operating system. That's just stupid.

3. Why not?: From all the reports I've read, Windows 7 is going to be the LEAST crappy version of Windows yet. Even hardened anti-microsoft people (me included) are impressed with 7. Vista was a mistake, granted. And there would be no sane business on the planet that would have upgraded to Vista unless they had to. But c'mon people. XP was good, but it's also 8 years old.

My next computer I'm building in the next month or so will have a dual boot Sabayon Linux/Windows 7 setup. I run XP/Vista/Ubuntu on my current PC and at the moment, only XP works ;). That being said, Microsoft seems to have finally done something right on the OS front with 7. What's next? "We're not upgrading to Windows 8, We're sticking with XP"? FFS. Let's just all go back to MSDOS and be done with it.

Goonix anyone?

More importantly, at 2.1 million dollars, will it blend?

Just today, we read on /. that Zango sued Kaspersky and lost, setting a precedent that will no doubt have an effect on malware vendors. I posted a reply which fits perfectly with THIS story in THAT thread!

For those who don't want to click, the gist of it was that Zango gained money via deceit (changing software to gain profits) and was classed as malware. MS are doing the same as Zango!!!!!! Any business obtaining money by deceit is trading ILLEGALLY. Tsk tsk Microsoft. In this climate of spyware/malware becoming a larger target in the public eye, I can't believe this could turn out rosy for Redmond.