I wouldn't run any AV that causes my computer run at "half its speed."

I used to be a huge Norton AV hater. But since v2009 they did a major overhaul to their AV engine and now it runs extremely well. 2009 and 2010 consume virtually NO detectable resources, update themselves literally every few minutes, and turn themselves off completely during gaming. Kaspersky 2010 is a bit worse performance-wise, but not terribly so. I've also installed MSE on a few PC's for people and have been impressed with its performance. None of these three slow your PC "by half" and of the three, I'd say Kaspersky is the biggest hog, but still far and away better than the Norton of old. AVG used to be lean and mean until v8 I think, then it bloated up and got slow too. Avira free was decent but the ads were too annoying, as was the mandatory annual registration renewal for it and Avast. I finally decided to pay, and have been quite satisfied.

So based on my experience, for free AV (that doesn't bug you with ads) I'd recommend MSE. If you're willing to pay, Norton 2010. And if you shop around online, you can get some good deals. I got 3 PC's w/ 2 year subscription of Norton Internet Security 2009 (and free upgrade to 2010) for $60, and I've actually found it even cheaper since.

While I gripe about the iPhone's lack of background applications too, in all fairness the specific user experience you describe (switching between apps without losing your state) is entirely doable on an iPhone. It just has be properly developed, and not every app developer is doing so. The iPhone SDK supports complete state saving, and in fact recommends that all developers take advantage of it. So for all appearances it looks like you never exited the first app -- when you leave an app to do something else, then return, the first app is restored with everything exactly as you left it. Some iPhone apps do this well, others not so much, but it's more of an indictment of the developer than the hardware itself. Of course that doesn't work with a few apps, such as those that require a persistent/stateful data connection, but for most consumer oriented apps with stateless network requirements it works very well.

Well, as someone who has used both, I'd have to disagree. I've been a PPC/WM user for years, and generally like HTC's products. But after upgrading to the HTC Fuze (Touch Pro) the day they were released last November, I've had enough of them. I've always had to tinker with WM an awful lot to get it working like I want. I've installed a ton of custom ROM's from xda, even played with kitchens and cooking my own, and have developed apps myself for WM.

I broke down and got an iPhone 3GS, and despite not liking a whole lot about Apple except for iPods, I love my iPhone and wish I had ditched WM a long time ago. The user experience is 10x better. HTC's touch interface is an improvement over vanilla WM, but still lags WAAAY behind the iPhone. The screen quality, both visual quality and touch experience, are just way better on the iPhone, despite the Fuze having a higher resolution. Most of the apps you mention, including TomTom, are now available for the iPhone, and honestly, despite being an "app whore," I've found iPhone versions of just about everything I used on WM devices. The only thing missing for me is a JRE, and that's due to Apple's license regarding bytecode interpreters. I'm not interested in jailbreaking, as I had enough with hacking WM. I just want a reliable smartphone that works well out of the box.

The iPhone isn't perfect -- I don't like the fact I can't run background apps, must use a Mac for development, and I really dislike Objective-C -- but overall I'm still happier than I ever was with a Windows Mobile device. In fact, as further testament to how much the iPhone appealed to me: despite being in the cross-platform software development business for decades, I managed to avoid buying a Mac for anything. Within a week of getting my iPhone, I had to order myself a Mac Mini just to have a platform for hacking around on the thing. As even *further* testament, my wife the technophobe has always hated my WM phones but as soon as she saw and tried out my iPhone, she had to have one too. Say what you will about Apple (and I often do), but they know how to nail the user experience better than anything Microsoft does. So while the geek/engineer in me pretty much dislikes Apple, the consumer in me recognizes and understands their market success.

Some of you are treating unemployment benefits like some form of communal welfare, like the regular welfare program. While it is considered a form of social welfare by the strict definition, it is specifically funded by employers as part of payroll taxes. Both Federal and State unemployment taxes are paid by every employer for each full-time employee they have, and act as insurance premiums. Not only that, but to qualify for benefits in the first place, you have to lose your job through no fault of your own. People who get fired for cause have no claim to benefits, even though while employed there were taxes paid on their behalf.

I have no problem with this lawyer drawing benefits, regardless of what her income might have been. And despite the common misconception, not all doctors and lawyers make a killing -- there was an article on CNN just the other day about an MD who makes more selling clothes on eBay ($120K) than their doctor's salary (<$120K), so she quit her doctor job to stay home with her kids and continue the eBay business. That may sound like a lot of money to some of you, but damned if I'd go through medical school, internship, years of residency, continuing education, ever increasing malpractice premiums, etc. for $120K a year.

So, everyone should be entitled to draw the benefits that were paid in on their behalf as long as they're attempting to find work. And in most states I'm aware of (or had unemployment experience in), you're allowed to look for work commensurate with your experience, position, and income levels while drawing your benefits. For example, computer programmers are not expected to choose between unemployment benefits and flipping burgers -- they're allowed to hold out for a similar job in the computer field, as long as they demonstrate that they're actively seeking such work. Along the same lines, in many states, you also draw benefits that are proportional to your former salary (and thus proportional to the taxes paid to fund your benefits), so everyone doesn't draw the same amount.

The trick is, if you do decide to take that McD's job (or mow lawns, or consult, or whatever) to try and get closer to your customary income level, then that constitutes employment and now you've given up your unemployment benefits, and my not be able to re-qualify if you voluntarily cease that employment. So if you intend to draw benefits, don't do ANYTHING that would constitute income, no matter how minor.

Win95 product keys did not involve activation nor hardware locking, they were simple CD keys (i.e. serial numbers). MS didn't implement Product Activation (which is the concept behind this patent) until Windows XP's release in 2001. This infringement lawsuit apparently occurred in 2003. Knowing the pace at which legal proceedings move, and the likely event Richardson attempted to negotiate/settle with MS prior to going to court, 2 years for the lawsuit to happen doesn't sound that unreasonable.

The Internet was around a helluva long time before 1993, but it had virtually no consumer market penetration until the mid-90's. Before then it was primarily available only via educational and research institutions and the military, a few corporations, and as you mentioned via shell access from some proprietary networks like CIS, Genie, AOL, etc. However that was hardly common to market mainstream products like games and shareware against, and without TCP/IP stacks and socket APIs built into most home OSes at the time it was next to impossible to have an external application transfer data through a 3rd party bridge. As a developer in those days, my employers spent big bucks on IP stacks and libraries for DOS and Windows 3.x. On that note, being a lifelong geek from back in the day when you built your own computers, and working in the industry since the mid-80's, I was one of the first dozen or so people in my city to have my own internet dial-up account in '94 or '95. Therefore, while in 1993 there may have been a few homes with internet access, there was virtually nothing marketable to consumers that relied on internet access. The internet did not become a widespread consumer technology until the WWW really took off, which didn't happen until the mid-90s. The Mosaic browser wasn't even released until 1993, which is widely considered the initial launching point of the WWW.

Again, I think most of you are missing the details in this patent claim. This is NOT a simple serial number scheme. The shareware/games of the 80's and 90's, not to mention the Windows releases up through Win2000, typically used a serial registration scheme that simply verified through some algorithm and checksum that the serial was valid. However it did not:

(a) verify anything online (since there was no universal online network, just some proprietary networks like CompuServe, Genie, etc. and private BBSes). The majority of PC owners didn't even have modems in those days. Making them dial-in to a proprietary activation network would have been a nightmare, and having been around in those days and installing a LOT of software back then, I never recall one doing so. And...
(b) lock itself to the hardware platform

These two distinctions are what appear to make this quite likely a novel patent at the time, and again while I don't care for much of the current state of patent law, patent trolls, et al, this does seem to fit the requirements for a novel and unique way to do something, and thus be protectable by patent. It's NOT just a conglomeration of existing patents or schemes.

Think about it from the following perspective:

- Someone has this idea about how to lock a software activation to the user's hardware AND require them to validate the activation online, years before it can even be practically implemented
- Years later, after successfully licensing said scheme to the gaming industry, this person approaches Microsoft with this activation scheme as a suggesting for protecting upcoming versions of of their software
- MS says "No Thanks!"
- MS then proceeds to implement a virtually identical protection scheme on their new Windows XP release.

How could anyone criticize the patent holder, and find MS not liable, given that information (assuming it is all correct, I just listed it as I understand it)? It's a classic case of bully infringement, one that mega-corporations often do against little guys who they figure won't have the guts/resources to sue, and if they do, they'll just wear them down in litigation costs. They have little to lose other than their integrity, which most don't really care about when it doesn't affect their bottom line, and even then they have a massive PR machine to vilify the victim as a greedy, money-hungry lech.

The only issue I have is with the way the legal complaint was written, claiming that "The company alleged Microsoft earned billions of dollars by using the technology in its Windows XP and Office programs." MS didn't earn billions because of this activation scheme -- in fact if you believe some of the anti-DRM folks, it cost them some sales, though likely negligible. They would have earned billions without it as well. And hell, the activation scheme they implemented was hardly successful against piracy anyway. So at least that part of the claim is disingenuous at best.

But this doesn't describe a simple serial scheme. The serial registration from the 80's was merely a serial/CRC algorithm that verified a valid serial format was entered, but did nothing to check the user's hardware. This patent, as well as Microsoft's activation, uses a hash derived from hardware configuration, making the serial unique to the PC installed on. So if this patent was indeed registered in the 80's (not sure it was, just assuming so from the above comment as I haven't looked it up), then it would seem novel to me unless someone can point out a similar mechanism from that time period. And from other comments it appears that the Richardson approached MS with the idea, which MS declined but went on to develop a virtually identical mechanism. I don't normally favor patent legislation like this, but being as that is SOOO like MS to steal instead of innovate, I'd be inclined to support Richardson on his claim. That said, MS isn't alone here. As mentioned, many other software developers use similar schemes that utilize hardware parameters to lock a registration to the current machine. Not only the CP schemes used by games, but many others as well. MS has the deepest pockets, though, and if the claims that they snubbed Richardson and then copied his idea is true, they deserve to be sued for it. /Devil's Advocate

Microsoft only? If one wants to run Linux on their Sony PC, there is nothing stopping them. Whether they use VirtualBox or any other VM solution, with or without CPU VM extensions, or install natively. I've been running Ubuntu on my VAIO for 18 months now, and everything is supported, including the special buttons, webcam, etc.

As was mentioned, Google is your friend. You can find out how to "hack" this to work on a number of laptop forums. Within a week of buying my VAIO AR670 about 18 months ago (also with VT disabled in the BIOS), I found the hex byte signature to look for in a BIOS image file and patched them to enable VT.