They don't do well I'm sure. That being said, I'm surprised they don't have samples from Cisco, Checkpoint, or Juniper - the three market leaders. Even if the companies don't provide freebies, they should have bought a few and tested them.

Agreed, Fallout 3 disappointed me greatly. I accidently skipped a lot of story by randomly wandering around and meeting people before I was "supposed" to. The Fallout universe is great, the Fallout 3 writing (heck, the whole game in general) doesn't compare to the original two.

Windows is just as secure if you don't run as Administrator, at least since Windows XP. Unfortunately, due to convenience or bone headed applications (usually both), people run as Administrator waaaaay too often. This is less of an issue with Vista since Microsoft fakes out the apps and writes to a users VirtualStore, but still users run as Administrators because that's the default from Dell & HP.

XP is 8 years old now. USB was fairly new, SATA didn't even exist yet.

Except it's not $100 cheaper. For the Dell's and HP's of the world, it ends up being more expensive. Assuming a Windows license costs them $30-$50, there would be significant overhead in having to support a second set of software, drivers, and technical support. I would venture to guess it would cost a lot more than $50, esepcially for a box that would probably not sell very well at all.

Windows 2003 servers become bastion servers occasionally, where it can be one install supporting 20 users. 1.7% probably overstates it's desktop market share due to this phenomenon.

Why has boot speeds all of a sudden become a "thing"? Both my home Vista (desktop) and Gentoo (laptop) boxes almost never get shut down - when I'm not using them, I put them in standby/sleep mode. They draw almost no power in that mode and return to full usuability in about 3 seconds for Vista and about 15 for Gentoo (waiting for wireless to resume).

Agreed, an educated user is relatively secure on both Linux and a fully patched Vista x64 box. Keep your permissions in order and run as a non-priveleged user, and you should be pretty safe. I personally don't even run anti-virus on either platform - just a waste of performance. Can't comment on Mac OSX since I haven't used it.

Apple does it all the time.

I'm not sure that's even possible. I don't think people that close to the poverty actually pay any taxes.

Being within 15% of poverty indicates an income of about $12,000 max. Backing out a personal exemption leaves about $8500 taxable income, putting you in the 10% tax bracket - or roughly $850 of income tax. If they have children or are married, they pay basically nothing.

Where do the tax cuts come from then? Social Security and Medicare? Those systems can't afford any cuts. If there were an easy answer, someone would have implemented it by now.

I'm considering moving my laptop back to Vista because extended desktop support is about a billion times better in Windows world than it is in x11. Running the latest Xorg-7.4, if I plug in a second monitor using XRandR support, I can clone desktop only. Sure, theoretically it's possible to do an extended desktop, but when I try I get a maximum screen size error. To get around that, I could set a virtual screen size in my xorg.conf file, but even then, what if I want a different resolution for my TV or my projector or my external monitor? XAA is a big kludge and right now is x11 is really holding Linux back. For the record, to do all of the above in Vista, all I have to do is plug in a second monitor and then it all just works. Really, the only thing holding me back right now from switching is all of the work I put in to get my laptop fully functional on Gentoo.

I have two 30GB Zunes that are affected by this. The best theory I've heard is that it is having issues with this being the 366th day of the year. Maybe all will be well again tomorrow - we'll see.

If you were really brave, you would also post your PayPal login ID along with your password.

No matter how many times I remove Google and Yahoo toolbars from my Dad's PC, it always gets reinstalled. Too many freeware apps come with it "pre-checked" during installation, and too many users just click "Yes" or "OK" on every prompt.

I've always wondered this too. Unless I'm trying to change a system setting or change a folder that I don't have permissions on, UAC never pops up for me. It's no different than having to give root privileges in GNOME or KDE, or sudo on the command line. The only major gripe I have about the whole Windows UAC setup is the "All Users" profile. Applications love to install their shortcuts there (including Microsoft apps - my Zune update is an example), and you do require UAC to wipe that stuff off of your desktop.