At some point your old car is worth less than the minimum trade in price they will give you. The trick is to time it just right so that you roll on to the forecourt just as the engine chokes on the last drop of gas, and conclude the sale a few minutes before the wheels fall off.

Keep in mind they didn't decide the case, they just threw it back for a retrial. So it may still turn out what he did was illegal under current laws. Maybe hold off the champaign for a bit.

I think the boycott and the appearance of Soylent News really did it. They say what would happen, and changed course. Well done for doing that.

Be warned though, the new Microsoft Minesweeper is a POS. It only runs full screen, so you can't have a sly game while pretending to work. It's no replacement for the classic.

Personally I'll keep a Windows 7 VM around just for Minesweeper.

They will get something in return. Windows has an app store now. Like mobile operating systems that are generally free, they can monetize it other ways.

Microsoft already gives Windows away for free. OEMs making devices with screens under 13" can get a free copy of Windows 8. That's the only reason you can get a cheap Windows 8 tablet now, otherwise it would still be a 100% Android market.

You get a .iso that you can install again as many times as you like, indefinitely. You also get a license code that you can use, according to Microsoft, for the lifetime of Windows 10.

$149 for OEM Pro is the standard price that Windows has been forever. The only people who get it cheaper are OEMs with special deals. Anyone selling it cheaper has bankrupt stock or something like that.

I was actually quite surprised at how responsive the owners have been on those two issues. They clearly invested a lot of money and time into beta, and I dread to think what kind of favours Bennet was offering, but in the end they listened to us. I really didn't think it would happen, I expected beta to become the only option and my beloved (in an abusive partner kind of way) Slashdot die a slow and painful death.

So kudos for listening. And yeah, I can buy the weekend excuse. Come on, this is Slashdot, the "editors" seem barely literate at times and can't remember posting the same story a mere 24 hours previously. Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence.

Media Centre is gone, it sucked anyway. I suggest XMBC as a replacement.

No need for such an elaborate and potentially annoying scheme (most people will lose those dongles). Just make it so that only the firmware can update itself, and it only accepts cryptographically signed updates.

You can get memory ICs that can be locked against reading and writing until power cycled. The firmware does what it needs to do, locks the whole firmware against writing early in the boot process, and maybe locks any sensitive data (like crypto keys) against reading as well. If software wants to update the firmware it writes a new image into a separate writeable memory area and then asks the power management controller to do a power cycle. The firmware picks the image up and verifies its crypto signature before applying the update.

Apple did try to do something like that with its battery firmware, but screwed up by including the private key in the updater application. If you can avoid such obviously stupidity then this scheme is adequately secure, low cost and reliable for most consumer purposes.

Many people carry some kind of photo ID in their wallet. Scaled up they work well for unlocking phones with facial recognition.

Having said that, these days you can probably just search Facebook for the person. Narrow it down by geographic area (since you know where you robbed them, and maybe where they live from their ID). Chances are you will get a reasonable photo.

Makes you wonder how it will cope with women wearing a full face veil.

In this case RTM may be the unofficial launch date as well, as in people on the preview programme will get it immediately and others may be able to get their upgrade versions at the same time. It could be a few months more until a full public launch, to allow time for physical copies to be made and OEMs to prepare their products.

Those have been the standard prices for years. Larger OEMs get big discounts, and I doubt that will change.

What will be interesting to see is if they keep the free version for small devices. Currently Windows 8 is free for most devices with a screen less than 13". There are a lot of cheap but fairly reasonable spec tablets making use of that now.