Slashdot itself died in 2010. You only think you are posting beyond your grave!

India is just one example I am familiar with. Indians and other people with spotty grid will pay for the systems. They form the market and provide the profit motive. Who is going to win the market? It might not be Indians. It could be Chinese making the systems, US/Japan doing R&D, Africa/SouthAmerica supplying minerals and raw materials. Curiously India is the leader in Uninterruptible power supply, or used to be.

May be so. Still there is a service "microsoft user experience" or some such name that phones home every night in Win7 prof. Why?

Thanks, I did not know abou HVDC systems before.

Of all the doctors and nurses who treated the ebola patients?

Very USA centric view. In India most middle class homes now have a truck battery that charges off the grid to power a few ceiling fans, a few lights (and one TV) for about four hours. I am not talking about rich well to do folks. Ordinary middle class folks, who make about 5000 USDollars per year (exchange rate, not PPP rate). Do you know how many of them are there? 400 million! larger than the entire population of USA. Just in India.

My friend who returned to Bangalore and built a half a million dollar home (at exchange rate, not the PPP rate) has eight, count them, eight truck batteries in his garage, saying that stupid lead-acid crap is more reliable and maintainable than installing a Honda gasoline generator or Cummins diesel generator. In India you would find air conditioners that could run off "inverter".

The quality of AC out of the inverter is so poor most motors would burn. They are designing A/C to take that shit. There is this huge market out there. The free market will serve them.

Installing enough batteries to go off the grid is not cost effective ... in the USA. In some parts of the world, there isn't a reliable enough grid to compare the costs. They are the ones who will pay through their noses for the R&D needed to develop the batteries, the financial vehicles to pay for them and the infrastructure to manufacture them. Once the fixed costs start being paid off, they will come with a vengence into the developed established good quality grid market.

Media center started with XP. But at the time of Vista design spec stage, the fight was for the entertainment market. Apple was reading the riot act to the *AA demanding the albums be unbundled and sold at buck a track, without any DRM. Microsoft took the *AA's side and wanted to deliver a "piracy proof" platform and establish itself as the entertainment OS. Look at the infrastructure built into Media center to collect and consolidate "licenses" for media, the DRM support built into it etc.

Residential and distributed solar is going against well established utility companies that have operated for a century without viable competition. Mildly regulated by utility commissionaires elected in low turn out elections, with lots of backroom dealings, revolving doors and outright bribes. They will use every instrument in their arsenal: FUD, litigation, bought out legislators, everything.

Cost reductions would eventually usher in utility-scale solar. But to get residential and distributed solar, public awareness and education is needed. But there are places in the world where the grid is very unreliable or non existent. Those places also have very rich individuals and groups. Collectively rich folks in third world without reliable grid have as much purchasing power as all of the middle class of developed countries. They will fund and underwrite the cost of R&D, and deployment and financing of residential/distributed solar. So there is some chance that technology will break the barriers and enter developed countries. There was a time when my Indian relatives all had better cell phones than my circle in USA. Because Indian land lines sucked and US mobile phones had to outdo the landlines. Same thing could happen to the grid.

One of the most ambitious projects Microsoft undertook was to thwart the "audio-video pirates". Its logic was this: "If we deliver a platform where it is impossible to pirate audio and video content delivered to the users, MPAA and RIAA will line up behind us, all the songs/videos will be released for our platform and we will be rolling in dough".

The high fidelity way to steal content was to write an audio/video driver that installs itself between the code and the device forming a T. Then silently record the stream before delivering it to the audio/video cards. So they went ahead and created the "protected audio/video path" concepts, signed drivers, accepted possible incompatibility with all the existing devices as the price to pay. ??AA did not like Apple's dominance and being forced sell tracks dollar a pop with Apple getting 30 cents commission. iTunes was allowing people who bought songs to make CDs (yes, CDs were quite dominant at that time) etc. So the logic of Microsoft was quite sound, and it makes sense among the suits.

But they forgot the crucial "IF" that formed the foundation of the logic. Can anyone thwart the alleged pirates? Even if the protected signed drivers stopped this method, there was always the analog hole. One can record with reasonable fidelity audio out. Similarly, with more difficulty, the video out too.

The entire concept of Vista was to take command of the living room entertainment center the way MS-Office took command of the corporate desktops. They could not deliver ??AA what they wanted and were promised: a piracy-proof entertainment platform. But it complicated the OS to such an extent it was very unstable. This on top the par-for-the-course bungling of MS suits. Certifying under powered machines as vista capable to play favorites with intel over AMD, that sort of thing.

The damage lingers on to this day. There is a service that runs on all Windows platform that watches all the code crashes and pop up the dialog "I saw something crash? Do you want to try it in WinXP compatibility mode?" That service collects data all day and phones home at night. Our company consolidated three locations into one new building. Some 1500 computers phoned home using the same gateway at the same time. Random crashes on machines that used to run for weeks without rebooting. Traced it to this damned thing. Somehow 500 phone-homes per gateway was ok, at 1500 it crashed randomly. There are hundreds of such things buried deep inside OS due to Vista fiasco.

You seem to think there is a difference between banker and a criminal. How quaint 20th century notions persist after 2008 I can't imagine.

This 28 year old is the fall guy. This chump stayed within jurisdiction and got arrested. The real thieves are safe and away.

They would buy a PC, they pay once. You lose that sale.

My understanding of GPU coding environment (not as a programmer, thank God, I just listened to job applicants and their presentations) is that, it is quite limited, almost all interpreted code. Some strange combination of C like code being written and then passed to renderers and shaders. It gets kind of "compiled" in place and gets executed. The binary code obfuscation that could be done in a plain regular chipset is generally not possible for GPU. So the source code of the malware itself might be visible to the analysts if they are looking for it. On the other hand, these GPU computing codes are so damned complex they might not need additional obfuscation.

I use one window to log into slashdot and keep it always in focus and on-top, and maximized so that it gets 100% of my attention. The other window is for distracting things like hacking out code, building, running test cases, updating rally etc etc. My attention span to slashdot has increased to nearly 30 minutes now.

Come on. Stop giving the college kids fresh ideas on how to get drunk. Enough already.