Although I believe that Microsoft did the right thing here, I did think that some of the DRM features were interesting, especially the pure digital trading portions.

What they should of done is make it opt in. If you want the ability to share digital games between opt in friends then you turn it on with the caveat that you must always be online. Don't or can't be online, then turn it off with the caveat of having to lug CD's around.

While I agree that the Printed gun is nowhere near the quality of a real gun and that regulating 3D printers is putting the cart way before the horse, To Play Devil's advocate I can see a use for it in the criminal world.

Organized crime could easily afford a $50,000 printer, and if that printer can produce hundreds of short range assassination weapons that can be thrown into a fire afterwards leaving no weapon trail to trace short of the bullet cartridge (which could be easily taken out of the gun and destroyed by other means) and a nail, it might be worth it.

I have a Samsung Chromebook and frankly, they are great for someone that just wants to check email and the web without worrying about viruses or tablet browser issues (such as flash or mobile site issues) but there are some things that make them a near impossible sell to people such as seniors.

1) Printing. I'd have sold 100+ chromebooks by now if they could plug in a USB printer and print out of the box. Google Cloud Print simply doesn't cut it here. Without a Cloud enabled printer, you're still tied to a PC.

2) Price. Try selling someone who is not computer savvy a $250 web browser. Seriously try it. In fact. Here's your two laptops. (I'll save your sanity and not dare mention the Chromebook Pixel).

HP Windows 8 Notebook
HP Chromebook

I guess you could start with the chromebook is going to be faster with no viruses, but they're going to ask you about printing, and if it plays their old games, ETC...

What also should be said is that they are supposedly going to update the suite regularly, and all cloud users get the latest versions.

Pretty much, if you have to have the Master Collection, and were obsessive compulsive about having the latest version of it, then this is your dream come true. Otherwise you're getting screwed.

Every Time Footprints Up's a version, The Company gets bought out.

So far...
BMC
Numara
Unipress
Footprints Software
And I'm probably missing a company or two in there.

I'll debate that while New Coke didn't work out, the aftermath resulted in Coke classic dominating the cola wars with a solid lead for decades now.

If it wasn't for new Coke, Pepsi would have overtaken Coke in the mid 80's and never looked back.

Fiber would be nice and cheaper than full copper runs.

About the only system I've seen where I would Say DRM works would be in a corporate environment to track and protect documents.

Both Adobe and Microsoft have a Good DRM system that uses Active Directories to control who can open, edit, copy and print documents from Acrobat and Office files. I've seen it in action and it's pretty secure as an added protection on top of an encrypted file system.

The biggest problem was that employees couldn't work on a document from home on their personal machines, but then again that was the point, and there was other options in place to allow work from home (they were using Citrix for virtual remote desktops that worked well for their needs).

Yep.

One thing I always admired about IBM Servers is that IBM would support the things practically forever as long as you kept a service contract on it. I highly doubt Lenovo will support a server for 10+ years.

My guess it's more the vendor wanting to get a few more scare sales of Windows 7

Back to the GP. In one recent case. Where I currently work we were buying a few Lenovo ThinkCenter All in one PC's of one of our clients. My biggest problem is that I Couldn't get the systems with Windows 8. All of the systems came with Windows 7 installed and came with a Windows 8 install kit that would basically wipe the drive clean, reinstall the factory partitions and install a completely new Factory Windows 8 environment. Not that big of a pain but it cost another hour that I could have used setting up the systems on site.

If you're working for a company thats buying roughly $1,000,000+ of hardware yearly and don't have a Microsoft Volume license to put whatever OS you want on the thing, let alone not making up your own customized OS image for your companies needs, then Windows 8 is the least of your problems.

If you can't get an OEM manufacture to build your laptops with windows 7, then you're either buying the wrong laptop, or you need a new OEM Company sales rep. Hell I didn't even try and found a Lenovo T430S with an i7 and windows 7 Pro on their consumer site. Lenovo Configure To Order should be no problem with a 1000+ order especially since Microsoft has not even announced an end of sales date for windows 7. (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/products/lifecycle)

Frankly, I lost a lot of respect for CNN when they turned CNN Headline News, arguably the only place in the US where you could get national news without spin, and turned it into E! News.

My guess is that you work for ESET.

I recently had a job change a few months ago, and at my current job we have been using ESET NOD32 Antivirus Business Edition 4 (I'd like to move to the latest version, but Labtech is keeping us on 4)

From my Experience, ESET does do a pretty good job detecting PUPS, but in our console, when we look at the threat log, it constantly says "unable to clean" I'm sure it's just a setting wrong in the policy but i'm still learning the console since my previous employer used Sophos.

I noticed that ESET has a Rogue application remover. I'll have to give it a try on my next clean session and see how well it does. I know from experience that the only thing I've found that Consistently removes these applications is ADWCleaner and the Junkware Removal Tool, Just about everyone else's utility or scanner either just finds cookies or finds nothing.

Can Someone explain to me why Yontoo is detected on the Mac Platform but on Windows it's totally ok.

While we're at it, why are any of these still not detected by any malware scanner. Even as a Potentially Unwanted Program? I'm sure just about anything listed here does a lot more malicious stuff than anything spyware like Gator ever did.

Anything from Conduitt
Anything from Mindspark Interactive
myfuncards
arcadecandy
arcadeweb
funweb
freeze.com
pricegong
getsavin
coupon wonderland
fantistigames
big fish games
quiklinkx
defaulttab
mywebsearch
we care ASCPA Reminder (my personal favorite. When you uninstall it, it basically accuses you of wanting to kill puppies.)
shop to win
inbox toolbar
anything from Crawler
24x7 help
blekko
dealply
ETC

Most of the above either popup ads, install, or trick users into installing more junk like registry scanners, fake flash players and the like. Yet almost no scanner I've found short of JRT or ADWcleaner gets rid of these things.

It's about time these AV companies wake the heck up and realize that Spyware is back disguising itself as adware and is more prevalent than ever,

Some other notes to consider:

1) Limit the number of activations per serial to 1 activation per day. If serials will be tied to multiple installs, tie that limit to that amount (IE a Key for 100 users will allow 100 activations a day) and monitor keys for statistically blatant abuse (IE this 50 use key had 100,000 attempts today). No one will legitimately run into these limits unless their hobby is installing software.

2) have a grace period to phone home if they put a legit key in so they can install without issue if the phone home server is down or they hit the daily activation limit or something. If you have a trial version, say 30 days. make the grace period to phone home 30 days. Do not pester the user about phoning home until they are close to the trial period expiring, say 7 days before the 30 days expire.

3) Have an exit plan. either remove the Check on the last version you release or after a certain amount of time passes (say 5 years) let the software work with a legit key without phoning home (so you don't have to maintain a server if the software goes abandoned for some reason).

and finally.

4) Expect piracy, Especially if it becomes popular. Someone will either release a keygen or crack out the compliance checks on your executable. Piracy is a constant. Adding more Checks that get in the way of your users will just shun legitimate sales while not doing any damage to pirates. Always treat DRM as a way to slow piracy rather than stopping it, and treat the customer as innocent until proven guilty instead of the other way around like most other software firms do.