Every so often I see ATMs that either failed to boot (displaying your typical BIOS message) or crashed with a BSoD (typically with those really obscure errors that point at a hardware failure). For some reason, it's less common now, even though most ATMs have been the same ones that have always been there (down to ancient, burned-in CRTs and internals so slow they struggle with the current software they run).

ATMs generally run on commodity hardware and a commodity OS (most I've seen are Windows NT 4.0 and newer).

Same autorun that is now disabled by default and was always trivially disabled?

If they want to avoid radiation, they should be given an airtight sealed room in a faraday cage and no light. Make it big enough so they survive long enough to realize how idiotic they were.

Not really. They were a pain. Atom really did have what was (at the time) miraculous power consumption, but it struggled with a lot of tasks.

The novelty of an easily-portable laptop was relatively new outside of obscene price points (Intel's ULV parts cost a lot more back then), but quickly wore off once low-power parts became available, starting with Nehalem and solidifying with Sandy Bridge. Ivy Bridge made tablets viable and Haswell improved on that.

It turns out there isn't much of a market between crappy Atom tablets with docks and 1000 buck Core tablets.

AMDs efforts came somewhat late when the market was already drying out and sacrificed battery life, so they never ahd much impact.

I still can't tell how much of this is a joke and how much is real...

What's next? Dolancoin, featuring a crudely drawn homicidal duck? Frycoin, urging people to quietly and quickly accept the "money"?

Regardless, any of these is basically the same as Monopoly money. Next, we'll have reports of how a truckload of monopoly money got stolen. It'll be just as relevant, if not more, since something happened to someone (said truck was stolen).

32GB DIMMs are insanely expensive compared to 16GB DIMMS (which are pretty expensive, too).

They probably think there's an even bigger sucker around the corner.

Unfortunately, they might be right.

1) The start menu is there, like it always was. The difference was that the first pane was much more useful and the second didn't stack, instead scrolling.
2) Slow? No. Memory hog? No. It's just bigger than XP - there's no way around that. XP was bigger than 98, but you sure as hell wouldn't stick with 98 over XP.
3) What? The new option is better, but the old one is easily available.
4) UAC is generally a good thing, but if you don't want to deal with it, as you said, you can disable it. Windows 7's default setting is invisble unless something was started without apparent direct user interaction.

As for your complaints about the plusses:
1) Vista (and thus 7) have completely different driver models. It's only normal that they wouldn't port something that complex - it's a complicated undertaking. You'll notice that 7 is much more stable than XP.
3) Some people will always blindly hate something because it's new. That someone is catering for them is no surprise.

What an idiotic statement. Windows 7 is superior to Windows XP just as Windows XP is superior to Windows 9x and just as Windows 9x was susperior to 3.1...

I challenge you to name those downgrades you experienced.

Don't worry, this actually proves that OOP is The Right Way. They should've built a machine that could handle the abstract class Object or at least stuffTypicallyFoundUnderground.

Of course, the object is clearly lacking a destructor, and is thus not cleaning up after itself. Shameful behavior.

You're right to post as AC, people you know would start suspecting you're smoking some serious stuff.

Windows 7 can be made to look almost like Vista (I believe the only thing that isn't easy to change into a Vista facsimile is window transparency, which was disabled in maximized windows in Vista).

Even out of the box, the differences are so minimal that the learning curve should be no problem.

What kind of cable uses flammable insulation these days?

Hmm... Are you willing to pay some 3 orders of magnitude more for 4 non-crap twsited pairs made of pure* 99,99999999999678774% copper, plus only the finest nylon money can buy from a factory in China, the finest gold plating in the world and a RJ-45 connector, crimped to perfection by Japanese crimping masters, with an unbreakable tab. Plus, an engineer** will personally test the cable and hand-paint arrows on it so that you know in which direction the data flows better, allowing you to experience more of your audiovisual library than you thought possible. We'll also throw in free shipping if you live in the US. If you're really lucky, your cable works just as well in either direction, so it's like playing the lottery, only better! ***

http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Cable-Version/dp/B000I1X6PM

* Purity may vary between 98,0% and 100%
** Is not guaranteed to be an electrotechnical engineer. May be some schmo who draws nice arrows, under supervision from a civil engineer or a robot who has been taught to draw arrows and is supervised by the janitor who was taught to press a red button in the event of a breach of Asimov's laws of robotics.
*** Purchasing this cable is nothing like playing the lottery, playing the lottery gives you an tiny chance of something good coming out of your investment.