Talk to your IT department, say "my computer runs slowly", and see what they say. I'm serious, keep it simple and to the point. Say what the problem is, not the solution.

They may well have more RAM around lying spare, 1GB is about the minimum for Windows XP SP3 for a comfortable experience without too many heavyweight apps running, 2GB for Vista. I haven't tried Windows 7 with less than 2GB, but it's touted as running faster than Vista in the interest of netbooks etc.

Use Window's performance mode instead of "let windows choose" (right click on my computer > properties > advanced settings). You may want to tick a few extra options if you notice fonts are too jagged or you want to view pictures as thumbnails in windows explorer, etc, etc. Use Smooth Screen Fonts and Turn On Drop Shadows are the only two I normally bother with

Setting your swap space to a constant size, about 1.5x your RAM, tends to make the system run slightly faster. ie. set the minimum the same number as the maximum instead of "let windows choose".

If your hard drive needs defragging, do it.

Without knowing what kind of company you're in, you may find your IT department don't support browsers other than their standard IE6 / IE7 / whatever. So the internal web applications and intranet might not behave quite as you expect.

(I've worked in various IT support roles for the last 5 years including a lot of desktop support)

I agree there should be more computer-readable content on the web... not just computer readable maps, but also say for language: computer readable dictionaries marked up with type of word (noun, verb, etc), and pronunciation (eg. IPA).

Even if we don't get speaking, translating robots any time soon it would be great for making some linguistics-educational helper apps. eg. show some possible english-spanish / spanish-english word translations or phrase translations based on spanish and english subtitles within a single dvd movie.

Ever tried searching for an online english dictionary marked up nicely in CSV or XML with "noun", "verb", etc.? I don't think there's much around. If we had this stuff for a bunch of languages' dictionaries (definition and description both in the same language) and/or for translation dictionaries (ie. with a word and it's translation in another language in each entry) it would be a great foundation for work towards better automated translation.

I get your point, but you're exaggerating.

Let's say the attacker could access 100% of accounts, If he can now access 100.01% of accounts, you've put 1000 more accounts at risk. Except those accounts don't exist. That's pretty preposterous, so try the math with 50% of accounts. Pretty sure it comes to less than 1000 people.

Also Smith will not be the same as Smith67. Smithers would have been a better example. As per the article it's only after 8 characters that the passwords truncate

Oops, punctuation.

Try searching for heart or brain. Google, did you forget to include some terms in your search index?