That was going to be my suggestion as well. Has the added benefit that, unlike Vista, it will still be supported by Microsoft for years to come.

I still wince when I remember being the only person in my old workplace still stuck with an ageing PC running Windows 2000, long past when Microsoft had stopped supporting it and many newer applications required XP or later. Don't go there - it ain't a fun place.

I'm using Twitter a fair bit now myself - at least on there I'll actually see most people's posts, something that's now a distant memory on Facebook.

Microsoft-like? No thanks, I had my fill of 'Modern' Windows - back on 7 again.

Speaking of which, this was on one of the occasional Microsoft newsletters I received today - Happy Retirement, XP - I'm sure the placement of those balloon strings is entirely coincidental. ;)

The only custom URL I have for by G+ business page is the *entire* business name in full, minus spaces - RedunserCreativeSolutions - needless to say, not much use to give out to people. No option is allowed to specify a shorter versions (say, RedunserCreative). I guess I will have to consider changing my business name, since Google evidently aren't going to budge. No wonder they're trying to hoodwink as many users as possible of their other products into acquiring a G+ profile - the way they're operating G+ definitely ain't selling the service to people as an alternative to Facebook or Twitter.

[I really want to like G+, but I keep being reminded that I'm supposed to use it the way Google wants me to rather than let me find a way that works for me. Hell, the main reason why I don't post more stuff to G+ is that many sites still don't have an option to share stuff to it, whereas it's trivially easy to do so to either Facebook or Twitter.]

He rolls off some good anecdotes from days gone by. Case in point, he mentions the big push for Intel's Itanium platform, which at one time was going to be the Next Big Thing. The Register were spot-on when they dubbed it "Itanic".

Also worth noting the reference to Blackberry being the one to beat - how times have changed...

Probably because so few people remember it's out there? I vaguely recall reading something about it when it was first announced, but I've not seen any mention of it since. *shrug*

I'm debating whether you're one of those spam autoposter AIs, or perhaps Bizarro...

I suspect they want to move people away from Windows 8 to 8.1 even faster than they wanted to get people away past Vista and onto 7.

Why the nag banner? Because they're Microsoft, that's why.

I'm currently running OSX 10.8.5 Mountain Lion on my iMac. Even thought the upgrade to Mavericks (10.9) is free, I'm holding back until I'm certain that the various reported problems with Mavericks and various Adobe Creative Cloud applications have been ironed out. Thankfully, the only banner I see regarding Mavericks appears in the Updates area of the Mac App Store.

Data capping isn't really relevant to that - a hundred megabytes of, say, LAPD beating up a suspect or university campus police tear-gassing non-violent protesters is no bigger a datastream than a hundred megabytes of my cat chasing his toy mouse round the floor, when it's being uploaded to the likes of YouTube; once it hits there, I don't think Google use cable modems to send it from their datacenters. A hostile power would just cut the connection, whether you have an "unlimited" connection or a pay-as-you-go one - as has happened a few times in recent disturbances (Egypt or Syria?) - they don't bother looking at individual data packages anyway.

The poster further up had it exactly, I think: it's all about killing off competition from Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. Any guesses why else it would be Time Warner and Comcast - i.e. the cable ISPs - pushing this, rather than AT&T and Verizon? (Not that those two would be unhappy either, of course: more money, an easier market for their FiOS and U-verse TV offerings - but it's obviously Comcast and TW who have the most to lose.)

Backdoor way of limiting bandwidth usage. On TCP/IP, really a "server" is just the one that sends SYN|ACK packets in response to SYN packets, rather than sending out SYNs - but ISPs latched on to "no servers" as a more marketable way to kick heavy users off without being honest about usage limits.

With cable, downstream bandwidth is more abundant and more efficient (the upstream channel is vulnerable to collisions, since there are multiple senders on a channel) so heavy upload usage can actually be a problem to some extent. On ADSL and its derivatives, though, it's only your own link you're filling up with upstream traffic: the backhaul connections are invariably symmetric, so those gigabit+ links between you and the ISP are only full up in the other direction.

I switched back in 2012 from "unlimited" (but no servers, dynamic IP, ports blocked, sending nastygrams to anyone using "too much" of the "unlimited" bandwidth) to an ISP with actual explicit usage charges (and a small routed subnet with no ports blocked). As long as it's legal I can do what I want: mail servers, web servers, the lot - I just have to pay a bit more if I download more. (It's download traffic that matters to them: upstream, there's bandwidth to spare, because the links are symmetric.) I hated the idea of usage-based charging - but I hate all the other restrictions more; at about $0.30 per Gb, it's low enough not to bother me as much as "unlimited, but use it too much and we cut you off".

I imagine 'E10' there is a reference to 10 Mbps metro Ethernet, something like the Ethernet in the First Mile approach. There's nothing inherently "consumer grade" about DSL itself: indeed, even E1 "leased lines" get delivered over HDSL or similar in some cases. Unlike cable, which is contended and prone to collisions, DSL gives you a constant bitrate (unless configured to vary to squeeze higher bitrates when line quality permits) point to point link, just like a conventional leased line - all the performance fluctuations of typical DSL Internet access come further into the network, where your 20 Mbps connection is sharing a 1 Gbps backhaul with a thousand others and gets choked up when everyone is streaming X-Brother Get Me Out Of Here or whatever. Give the DSL link dedicated or uncontended backhaul like leased lines have, you'll get the same performance too.

I can imagine them rewriting history, but in this case I doubt it; surely it would suit them better for him to have been a normal, competent employee at that point, who then went rogue later, rather than saying "oops ... yes, we saw all these warning signs, but forgot to do anything about it for a few years. Told you so - er, I mean, we would have told you so, if we'd been more alert..."

Of course, if you're really paranoid, you'd wonder if the CIA computers had been compromised by, say, some other agency with lots of expertise at breaking into high-value targets, and this report had been planted by them, maybe to divert blame for their own failed internal security...

Foxconn have the contract to assemble the Xbox 720 as well - not to mention Nintendo consoles. I remember pointing this out after a smug ex-MSFT blogger posted a link about Foxconn, bragging that Foxconn would never meet Microsoft's supplier criteria, so Apple must have lower standards...