i disagree that itunes is valid for managing media. I have triedon numerous occassions to let it catalog my media library and it just chokes horribly. admittedly, not everyone has 65,000+ music files, but iTunes can't handle very large collections without barfing horribly.

You purchased rights for the standard def version of the movie, not the high def. Saying this is not piracy because you purchased the standard DVD is like saying that you have the rights to a Lincoln town car because you purchased a Ford Taurus. Same company, both are cars, one is much better than the other. You bought one, not the other.

william dot byrd (gmail) please?

Burn them!!!!

Its a shame that MS never figured out how to actually implement this. How many times do I have to restart my computer to finish applying update?

I have to second you on the Gateway tablets. I have the CX-2750. Same form factor. The now 2 year old batteries still give me about 3.5 hours on balanced power settings. Came with Vista, and was the only computer I have ever seen where Vista was not a POS, it was almost as if that machine was a reference system. Vista actually had slightly better pen tracking that windows 7.

For those who say that handwriting recognition is a trick and never works. I write on mine all the time, in cursive and it has no trouble with the recognition. I don't even remember the last time I had to correct it. Of course I have extremely good handwriting, and I did spend 20 minutes training it when I installed windows 7 on it. All in all, except for the weight, its the best computer i have ever owned.

I played this special last year for my (then) 5 year old son who is a Star Wars freak (probably knows almost as much as the old man, and when I told him that one day, he simply replied "Now *I* am the master" ). About 20 minutes into the show, he came to me and asked me to turn it off. Asked me if I could put something else, anything else on tv. It was that bad.

Its not a little irrelevant thing. If Farmville is important to a lot of people, and it works only in the most broken browser on the planet, then Farmville is more relevant that even "standards". We, the slashdot crowd, are not indicative or the general population. What we thinks is superior, and how we think things should be done is what is irrelevant. This is why Linux is still marginal. It is done the way we think things should be done, not the way the majority of people think it should be. I thought that a netbook was great for the wife to use check email, do the bills, etc, but the screens on just about every netbook around were too low res to adequately run the flash stuff on the Webkinz site. That was important to her, so that meant that even though I would prefer to think of Flash as irrelevant, and even though I know there is little that can be done with flash that could not also be done using open standards, the point is that she bought the HP mini 2133 because it was a netbook with a full 1280x800 screen, ran windows XP and had a good solid, stable, up to date flash player. That was the only reason she got that system. It was the only reason we paid $100 more for a netbook, but it was what an average consumer wanted, and therefore was much more relevant than the arguments that "its running windows instead of a free OS", "but you don't need your excel spreadsheet to do the bills, you can use OO.o", or "Flash is just crap". What the consumer wants beats "standards", what the consumer wants beats technical superiority, what the consumer wants is relevant.

Unless you post with your account, and the UID is lower, we assume you are just another high-UID idiot posturing as an old timer. Just sayin.

You obviously do not use Vista, as the voice recognition, and handwriting recognition for that matter, are two of the very few things in Vista that work well. You may have to train it for an hour for it to be 99% or so, but it was 95%+ OOTB when I was speaking to it. I can, however, still type much faster than I can talk, which is probably the only reason I do not use it.

I want my car to sound like K.I.T.T. or better yet, a cylon.

I have a huge mp3 collection that comes from ripped CDs, saved podcasts, eMusic from back when they wre unlimited downloads, etc. I own this music. I was also a member of Yahoo music unlimited until the day they stopped the service. When I had access to Yahoo, if I wanted to hear my music again, I would just DL them from Yahoo and drop them on my Zen and away I go. Listen for a month without a sync. Sync and get another month. No, I did not own it, I was merely renting it but......

I paid $7/month for YMU. It costs me more than $7/month to keep my server running and backed up and available. That same money allows me to listen to the same things over and over, no new music. Yahoo allowed me listen to new tracks every day. If I liked them, they stayed around for another listen. If I removed them and wanted to hear them again months later, I downloaded them again. Can I listen to them now, no, but I can also not watch DVDs I rented months ago. I can also not watch cable shows that I watched months ago. If I want those songs again now, I can rent them from rhapsody. The problem is not with the rental/subscription model, its being sure that someone is available to continue renting them to me. Yes, that is the advantage of owning, and I am sure that some folks had the same argument back in the 80's with movies. They wanted to own them in case they could not rent them when they needed, but video rentals became ubiquitous. Music rental needs to do the same. The problem with the music rental business is that it came about after napster, and no one was willing to pay to rent music that they were downloading for free even though they still happily rented movies. If music rentals had gained traction before napster came along, it might have been a different story. I wish it had. I'd love to give someone $7/month to be able to listen to what I want, when I want to and not have to worry about the server in my basement.

You have obviously never used Vista's handwriting recognition. XP Tablet's was passable only with training. Vista's is in no way confusing and is much, much better out of the box, and if you bother to spend the 1/2 to train it to YOUR handwriting, it is fantastic.

I have used my tablet for drawing, taking notes (its much nicer to pay attention to people in a meeting and just write your notes than to hide your face behind a laptop screen and click while others are talking. They have their place, I personally find that meetings happen to be perfect for tablet PCs

I don't think that word means what you think it means

Hyronalin, at least spell it right. Damned wannabe Trek geeks.