Well, that's a fair assessment. Of course, that's a monopoly tactic — any business that dropped support for that widespread of a product in a legitimate competitive environment would find themselves with no customers for the newer product because customers would be trying to migrate out from under that vendor at all costs.

I don't know what "pretty much end-of-life Windows XP" you speak of. I'm replying to this from Windows XP Media Center Edition. 10-20% of the computers on display at Best Buy last week were netbooks and nettops with Windows XP. Most HP workstations have "Windows XP Professional 32-bit (available through downgrade rights from Genuine Windows® 7 Professional 32-bit)" and "Windows XP Professional 64-bit (available through downgrade rights from Genuine Windows® 7 Professional 64-bit)" as options as of today; until this week (last week of December 2009), if I remember, they didn't have any operating system options except "Vista® Business 32-bit with downgrade to Windows® XP Professional 32-bit custom installed" and "Genuine Windows Vista® Business 64-bit with downgrade to Windows® XP Professional 64-bit custom installed". Why? Because people who buy computers for a business environment will not buy Vista, at any price, for real production work — fair or not. I have clients who will not buy a computer unless it has Windows XP. Despite Microsoft again attempting to remove the previous OS from the supply chain by force despite overwhelming demand, just like they have before, XP is still being sold new on a very large portion of computers.

Ha! Sprint? Wait until you see what their proprietary firmware does to your phone. Verizon is probably worse now, but only because they took Sprint's castrated firmware strategy and ran with it. Most Verizon and Sprint customers don't even know what their phone's real software looks like. AT&T is probably jealous they haven't been able to keep up, but I'm sure they're working on it.

I seem to remember that IE 8 does something like this when it's first installed, asking if you want any IE extensions enabled at all, and whether you want IE extensions blocked until you approve them, or something of that nature. But suffice to say that I don't install IE often enough to remember for sure.

I don't know, but it probably involves a "special underwear" packet.

(It's worse than you think: I blew the chance to use moderator points on this post just to make that joke. See what I do for you folks?)

I think that was the original idea with Panoramio. They show up in Google Earth and they have quite a few 360-degree photos in addition to the usual ones.

Ah, so that's what the Ad-Aware 11 logo looks like!

But seriously: How do you trust a "security" company whose own download links all lead to a dead blank page until you unblock JavaScript not only on their site (www.lavasoft.com) but on a third-party site you've never heard of (www.trialpay.com)?

I used to put Ad-Aware on every computer, but around version 7 Ad-Watch started dragging down my clients' computers, then started dragging down my computers. I still offer it occasionally to clients who are unusually malware-prone, but it got past the cure-is-worse-than-the-disease part for a lot of people a while back. Maybe this new buzzword-thing version will clear some of that up.

The short answer: You're probably safe. But to make sure, go into your package manager (probably Synaptic) and look for the package openssh-server. If it's there, remove it — you don't need it for the desktop unless you want to be able to get into the computer from somewhere else.

Long answer: Telnet is definitely not a problem; nearly all Linux and BSD distributions stopped installing the telnet server by default years and years ago. As for SSH: if it's the "Live CD" version you're booting from the SD card, it won't have an SSH server either. (Because you claim to have no username/password, I suspect you're booting the Live CD from the chip. An installed Ubuntu prompts for username/password.) And I'm pretty sure Ubuntu doesn't install it on the desktop installs either. Maybe Server Edition does. But see the short answer above for the definite answer. openssh-client is OK to have — it's just openssh-server that allows incoming connections.

Except that Gmail doesn't have the baggage of being associated with Microsoft or Lotus, and a name like "LotusLive iNotes" does. Even though they based it on Outblaze, if they put any Lotus back-end architecture into it since then, there's a good chance at it being a rolling failure waiting to happen. The luckiest thing that could happen to a LotusLive iNotes user is that it turns out the programmers have still kept it far away from any code from any other Lotus product whatsoever.

You forgot the "My" on the front, which is of course required for any website that includes any variable other than the a datestamp in the underlying programming code. my dot my-eLotus-eLive-iNotesCom dot com would be perfect for that. Now all they need is the linkless "Best experienced with Adobe Flash" background for the mandatory Flash file that redirects to a hostname on completely different domain than the entry page, and it will be completely innovative and fresh. (And I'd even use it if the only other choice were real Lotus Notes.)

Let's see: This IBM guy in the article is making noise about Google's uptime record versus "what you'd expect from IBM in terms of security, reliability and privacy" with Lotus Notes branded products? Wow. It's like he actually aimed before he shot himself in the foot.

As soon as I saw the topic "Can IBM Take On Google, Microsoft With iNotes?", my first thought was: Is 'i' the new IBM euphemism for Lotus? Because, if it is, we don't need to go any further.

IBM can't take on Google and Microsoft with anything based on traditional Lotus Notes, because Lotus Notes is the only software worse than Microsoft Exchange Server, and the reason Google's enterprise services exist and are popular is specifically that it frees people from Lotus Notes and Exchange. If iNotes is anything at all like Lotus Notes' architecture, it's a failure waiting to happen — because a Lotus Notes that was hosted "in the cloud", with IBM techs who can't get it to stop stalling and trashing its databases, wouldn't be any better than Lotus Notes in your main business office with IBM techs who can't get it to stop thrashing and stalling its databases. In fact, maybe Lotus Notes in your main office might be better, because then you'll have access to yank the hard drive and write a few nice Perl scripts to convert it all to a real system when your bosses finally learn to cut their million-dollar losses and throw IBM out. As for the IBM employee saying IBM runs "the world's mission-critical systems" — if they're on Lotus Notes, they must not be that critical, since they're unavailable so often.

Wait until the Apple Software Update pops up again and you discover that all the items that have even a minor version number change are back — even though you selected "ignore this software" — and not only back, but checked by default again, because, even though you refused to install an enormous new program when it was on version 4.3.2, surely you'll want to install it now that it's 4.3.2.1.

I have several business clients that feel a need for QuickTime. A couple of them even paid for QuickTime Pro. They certainly do not need iTunes. Yet, even though they paid money for the product, it won't stop trying (at least as of the last time I checked this summer) to trick them into installing 120MB of extra software as an "update" over and over. I've already had to uninstall iTunes twice for clients because Apple makes it look like it's a QuickTime-related "update" so important that it starts popping up again after a couple weeks (new version!) even after being ignored. There is no excuse for ASU's resetting the "ignore" flag on uninstalled software except to trojan machines with iTunes and Safari behind the computer tech's back and hope a large portion of users think that's just how their computers work now.

When IE and Windows Media Player were doing these kinds of things in Windows 9x, everyone howled, yet at least Windows Media Player doesn't embed itself in the startup registry where everyday users can't remove it. iTunes does.