I don't get it. It SOUNDS like this is alleging that Microsoft is behaving anti-competitive by suppressing their OWN product in favor of a newer one that people don't like. In other words, it appears that the suit alleges that Microsoft is conducting anti-competitive behavior against itself. Am I misunderstanding something? For that matter, why are they even required to give the older product at the same price? You can't frame Vista and XP as competitors and say Vista's anti-competitive behavior is destroying XP, because competition laws product companies, not products.

Again, let me know if I'm totally missing something here.

And who ever discovered analogue distortion by maxing the signal probably thought no one in their right mind would use that either. They were wrong. However, whoever discovered digital distortion by clipping probably thought no one in their right mind would want to use that ... and they have been for the most part correct.

I disagree with that somewhat. After all, nearly all of Queen's album recordings feature Brian May playing through his completely solid state amplifier. Okay, so it's not digital, but I think it's a little unreasonable all the same. How about Nine Inch Nails/Reznor for example? He certainly uses those sounds. It works well with a very different kind of music...but then, so did overdriven tube amplifiers.

Except that's totally irrelevant, because in most cases we don't CARE about regenerating the original input. You can usually create a useful attack simply by finding SOME input that generates the same output, and that's what you want to build a hash function to resist.

As near as I can tell, what happens in Windows is that it uses a lot of RAM. A LOT, as in an exorbitant amount. (I'm not judging, stay with me for a second.) I'm not entirely clear on why or what they're doing with it, but a lot of it seems to happen right at system boot, so I imagine it's fairly core stuff. I believe, however, that these are a lot of one-off structures that are built and then might occasionally be needed again, but not very much. Thus they're immediately paged out to disk, regardless of what the current memory conditions of the system are. The idea is that in most cases this is more efficient than rebuilding this stuff and you've got plenty of disk space to spare. My question has always been, why not leave it in RAM while also backing it up to disk? That would get rid of the absurd lag when using a system that has been inactive for a while and has paged out and powered down its hard disks. I imagine there's a good reason, but I don't know.

I don't promise this is how it works, but this is my best guess based on a decent enough working knowledge of the kernel's overall implementation and my observations of its behavior.