No problem. Even 32-bit systems will let you use 2GB per process.

Ah, so the second one then. Not the all mercy, all the time, hippie St. Francis who likes birds and animals more than people, but the hard taskmaster who rebuilt the Church.

Im not sure about MacOS9, i was off macs by then, but in System 7 days, DOS/Windows3.1/Win95 had tens of thousands of viruses, and Mac OS7 had literally about 7. I doubt it jumped that much in a couple years.

Windows (up until XP) still had a DOS core. It was SO easy to write a Windows virus, almost trivial. Macs on the other hand had no command shell, so everything needed to be system calls. Also, it was a new processor, Motorola 68K to Intel `86, so machine code was different. Then, byt the time MacOS 9 came around, im sure it was pretty much all PowerPC. From what i heard, it was almost impossible to write shellcode for it.

So, a huge influx of viruses for a hard to hack processor when the ease and profit was in the Windows arena? I doubt it.

Not saying that OS9 was great. It wasn't. Read the whole mess about Copeland and Taligent if you want to read about how NOT to run a company. But the virus problem wasn't the issue.

It's you who are being dishonest or lazy by claiming otherwise, there is lots of evidence to bear this out, you just refuse to find it or test for yourself.

Bullshit.

Sorry, but my wife has a Win 7 Pro laptop from work.

It recently had to be upgraded from 4GB to 12GB because at 4GB it was a complete and utter dog of a machine.

It was slow, unresponsive, and using so much VM that it was thrashing from the first application you opened.

In my experience, a 4GB machine is using almost 2GB of RAM by the time it boots with nothing running on it.

I've got a Win 7 VM open right now. It's got no programs running other than what starts with the OS. It's using 1.77GB of RAM. That's essentially just Windows.

I can't imagine trying to run it on a machine with 1GB of RAM, and I'm betting you're not using a machine like that, and that if you did you'd be pounding your head against the table in frustration.

So, having directly seen Win 7 sucking up resources like mad on a machine with 4GB, I find it implausible that with 1GB it's anything but a steaming turd. I've never seen Windows 8, so it's possible they've done some pretty cool things and trimmed it down.

But I doubt it.

Grrr, you're right. I did 8 * 2^10 * 2^10, when i should have done 8 * 2^10 * 2^10 * 2^10. Off by mega => giga.

Thanks, my bad math. But if anything, this makes my point stronger rather than weaker.

Exactly. I read the summary and immediately thought "damned if you do, damned if you don't". If they had done a bunch of fancy stuff that made the minimum specs need to be higher, then people would have complained that they were just trying to drive new computer sales. The leave the minimum specs the same, and people complain they are catering to old hardware. An operating system should take up a few resources as possible. The fact that there were able to add so much (stuff like virutal desktops (yes, i know Linux has had it for over a decade)) without raising the minimum requirements shows that they actually care about performance and are doing a good job.

I completely agree most people haven't needed a faster CPU in years, unless they're in the hard-core gamer category or doing serious computational work.

Memory, on the other hand, is something you've steadily needed more of over time.

Me, I'm betting with 1GB of RAM on a modern Windows version, and you'll already be using swap space before it's even done booting.

And then it's going to just be slow from there.

With "Outlook, Work, and a browser", it's going to be thrashing like mad.

Really, "able to run on a wide range of hardware, including older slower machines" means, yes, you can, it doesn't mean you'll like it or that it's a good idea.

Hell, our household machine with 4GB of RAM and XP Pro doesn't feel like it's got enough memory.

Sure, make allowances for multiple-core and multiple CPUs on the not-so-low end, but making the minimum requirement a single CPU was definitely smart on their end.

You say smart, I say lazy and/or dishonest.

Because those specs weren't usable on Vista, definitely wouldn't have been usable on Win 7, likely aren't usable on Win 8, and probably won't be usable on Win 10.

I dare you to spend a week on a machine with 1GB of RAM running Windows, and then tell us they're sane minimums. My guess is you'll go crazy before the week runs out.

Sure, it'll load, and you can eventually get a program to launch. But don't expect anything which isn't constantly thrashing and driving you crazy.

My wife's work laptop until recently had 4GB of RAM and Windows 7 on it -- and it was pretty damned slow and awful.

I can only imagine that 1GB of RAM means you want to shove a knitting needle into the face of Steve Ballmer.

electronically stored data that can be converted into a visual image of child pornography

Any electronically stored data can be converted to any image you want if you process the data correclty/incorrectly. I mean, it's a little bit easier if the data is an actual jpeg that would be displayed as such when passed through a standard jpeg rendering function, but you could construct an algorithm such that any data file ends up producing an image of child pornography.

a single-core 1GHz, 32-bit chip with just 1GB of RAM

I think this described my mother's laptop to a T.

And I can tell you in no uncertain terms, it wasn't enough resources then, and it isn't enough now.

Her laptop runs Vista, and it's so slow as to be almost unusable.

Unless Microsoft has really done some incredible optimizing, a machine with those specs is a frigging joke, and would likely be terrible to use.

Microsoft's minimum specs have been too low since, well, forever actually -- every system I've seen for the last 20+ years which was the "minimum spec" was barely usable.

This is a marketing tactic, not a measure of what will be a useful machine.

I think that in the case of minors, that it's hard to really hard to say if something was done "voluntarily". I don't think the person taking pictures of themselves should be prosecuted. Either they were fully aware of what they were doing, and they are free to make that decision, or they were tricked/coerced/blackmailed/whatever into taking the photos and they shouldn't get in trouble for that either. If the photos weren't self-taken, or were sent to someone else, that someone else might have a much harder time convincing a jury that the didn't trick/coerce/blackmail/whatever the person into taking the photos, or allowing to be taken.

Hmm, I've been on UNIX since SunOS days and Solaris was the new kid on the block. I've written a device driver that shipped in a commercial UNIX kernel. That said, I chose as my desktop a hybrid BSD/Microkernel architecture with POSIX compliance and a modern GUI. Or in other words, a Mac.

Macs are not stupid, they are made to be simple to use. That external simplicity hides a deep complexity underneath. I think people who don't understand that making something complex to be simple to use is one of the hardest things in Computer Science. A good size for desktop computers now is about 8GB of RAM or more. At any given time, 8GB will give you 2^(8*(2^23)) states, which of course will change in a nanosecond. Mac OS tries to, as much as possible, hide the states that don't mean anything to you. It's not that the MacOS guys don't know they exist. They just feel YOU don't need to know they exist. Maybe they're wrong, but it's a conscious decision where they know the states that exist and they feel that showing the states is less helpful than the confusion it would engender.. Not stupidity.

The main issue (and where you have a point though you exaggerate it way past its validity) is sometimes things are complex, and if you hide that complexity, you actually cause a disservice. Apple hides a lot of its security notices. As Macs become more and more of a target, they really need to not hide the complexity as much so that people can make valid choices on how to prevent malware infections.

Nah, we keep the space-grade maple syrup for domestic consumption.

What you guys get is just corn syrup and food coloring. ;-)

Well, you can call it a "double standard", but that's how science works. Interpretations of data that contradict the established theory face higher burdens of proof than interpretations that support it.

It's frustrating to climate denialists and perpetual motion inventors that their ideas aren't given equal dignity with the scientific consensus, but that's because by in large they're ignorant of the effort that went into forging that consensus. It took fifty hard fought years for AGW to become the scientific consensus, and as a result it enjoys a privileged position: it gets to play the null hypothesis. To do otherwise isn't fair to the people who fought that fight for decades, and won. You can overturn the scientific consensus, but it's an uphill battle, as it should be.

On the one hand, anyone who gets it now will get the best medical care physically possible on the planet, though the currently available treatments don't have a high enough success rate to give me the warm-n'-fuzzies.

On the other, we have three (known) pharmaceutical companies busting their butts to bring a cure to market, and I'd expect quite a few more putting huge resources into "fling everything at the wall and see what sticks" R&D. So in six months, we might actually have a high-success rate treatment for it. But, in six months we might have 1.5 billion people in who need it.

Really a tough call... Better to get it now, or wait until it becomes a pandemic in the hopes a better treatment will exist.