I want my car to sound like K.I.T.T. or better yet, a cylon.

I have a huge mp3 collection that comes from ripped CDs, saved podcasts, eMusic from back when they wre unlimited downloads, etc. I own this music. I was also a member of Yahoo music unlimited until the day they stopped the service. When I had access to Yahoo, if I wanted to hear my music again, I would just DL them from Yahoo and drop them on my Zen and away I go. Listen for a month without a sync. Sync and get another month. No, I did not own it, I was merely renting it but......

I paid $7/month for YMU. It costs me more than $7/month to keep my server running and backed up and available. That same money allows me to listen to the same things over and over, no new music. Yahoo allowed me listen to new tracks every day. If I liked them, they stayed around for another listen. If I removed them and wanted to hear them again months later, I downloaded them again. Can I listen to them now, no, but I can also not watch DVDs I rented months ago. I can also not watch cable shows that I watched months ago. If I want those songs again now, I can rent them from rhapsody. The problem is not with the rental/subscription model, its being sure that someone is available to continue renting them to me. Yes, that is the advantage of owning, and I am sure that some folks had the same argument back in the 80's with movies. They wanted to own them in case they could not rent them when they needed, but video rentals became ubiquitous. Music rental needs to do the same. The problem with the music rental business is that it came about after napster, and no one was willing to pay to rent music that they were downloading for free even though they still happily rented movies. If music rentals had gained traction before napster came along, it might have been a different story. I wish it had. I'd love to give someone $7/month to be able to listen to what I want, when I want to and not have to worry about the server in my basement.

You have obviously never used Vista's handwriting recognition. XP Tablet's was passable only with training. Vista's is in no way confusing and is much, much better out of the box, and if you bother to spend the 1/2 to train it to YOUR handwriting, it is fantastic.

I have used my tablet for drawing, taking notes (its much nicer to pay attention to people in a meeting and just write your notes than to hide your face behind a laptop screen and click while others are talking. They have their place, I personally find that meetings happen to be perfect for tablet PCs

I don't think that word means what you think it means

Hyronalin, at least spell it right. Damned wannabe Trek geeks.

then people would race for "Second post"

You're obviously new here. Slashdot has never bothered to vet articles. Trust me, I've been around a while

I allowed the install of IE8 on 2 of my personal machines yesterday. Both of the still have Firefox as the default browser. Vista and XP. Who is complaining that its switching their default browser? What's the setup?

Its not perfect. Barbara Babcock was recognized as 2 different faces, 00058 and 00061 and in the episode naked time, Majel Barret was recognized as Chapel and a random character, the only difference was hair up or down. Nice to know that a haircut can confuse it. I hope they don't start using something like this for profiling. Its not ready.

I am currently running the beta on several of my home machines. I can assume you, most emphatically, it does NOT suck. Other than the loss of the classic start menu, which I got over, there is nothing about it I would go back to XP for, and that includes speed.

if you had browser security set high, you did have to at least click to allow it. If you got caught in a drive by install, then you had browser security set low, shame on you.

Hardware is cheap and getting cheaper. The systme may not have to last 15 years. Some important questions that need to be answered really:

Are you going to continue using the existing software? If so then you need to worry more about weather ANY Microsoft OS will still be able to run that software in 15 years (you said the existing software was on Win95). If you are going to run that same software, I would not bank on it running on Microsoft's current OS in 2024, which means that you really DO want to install an OS on the box and have it continue to run for 15 years as a replacement box down the road may not be compatible with the legacy OS you are using for the program. If you are writing custom code, then you can make it web based, in which case, the OS is irrelevant as long as there will be continued versions of the database you use and as long as you design with standards in mind, avoiding Flash and other things that will likely not be compatible in 15 years.

Can the software run under WINE or DOSBOX. If so, then you are free of the OS constraint. Can you virtualize? If so, then you might want to choose an exisitng VM solution (perhaps VMWare, or something simialr) install whatever OS you need to run your software on a VM and keep backups of the VM. When the hardware dies, buy something new and cheap, install the current version of the virtualization software, and copy ni the latest version of the VM and you are good. The drawback here is that you are banking on any of the existing virtualization solutions to either still be compatible in 15 years or to provide a migration path. If you go with a VM solution, and the software changes format at some point, providing an upgrade for you VM, you HAVE to do it, none of the "if it ain't broke" argument because if they switch from version 1 to version 2 in 5 years, and from version 2 to version 3 5 years later, they may provide you with an upgrade path from 1 to 2 and one from 2 to 3, but not likely from 1 to 3, and don't bank on that upgrade from 1 to2 still being available when 3 comes out. You don't want to be stuck. VMWare is popular and has provided migration from early version of the format to newer. I think either they, or a compatible F/OSS version will likely be around in 15 years, but I am of course, not a fortune teller.

How much are you willing to lay out? If they use 2 workstations, you could theoretically buy 6 identical $200 systems (minus the keyboard and mouse), expecting each system to last only 5 years. As long as the rest of the hardware is identical, a simple disk image could make deployment easy. As long as you keep backups of the data then migrating from the original hardware to the backup hardware is a simple backup restore and you can be up and running again in a few hours)

its not a valid comparison. If I want the latest trek novel, I want the latest trek novel, and the fact that it will not allow me to do TTS is not going to have me think to myself..."well, since I cen't get that novel, let me get the latest star wars novel, that's an acceptable substitute." They are not equivalent. If I want the latest trek novel, then it is buy it or not, it is not buy it or buy something else, and in that case, I would buy it.

In Soviet Russia, the gostse.cx domain buys you. But its a lie, you don't own it... all your goatse.cx domains are belong to us.... next.

All your memes are belong to us, with Hot grits