If his Windows XP installation disc was built by the manufacturer (i.e., has Dell's logo in addition to Microsoft's), it will validate the BIOS as being from the correct OEM before permitting installation.

He would have to purchase the motherboard from Dell (if it is still available) or else have access to their BIOS tattooing kit (usually only certified techs get that).

And as for using a different CD with his key----no. Windows XP discs supported different sets of product keys depending on their distribution channel. A Dell OEM key will not work for a full retail, volume license, or retail upgrade disc. His Dell key will only work with Dell media.

Microsoft knocked off that nonsense in Vista, thankfully, but shops with legacy systems will have problems until the day XP is no more.

You still have to pay your taxes in USD. They just do not want stacks of paper and coins being hauled into their offices. For better or worse, the USD has been primarily a digital currency for at least a decade.

Create a VM and run it in fullscreen mode.

Aside from pressing the key combo that cancels fullscreen mode (CTRL+ALT+Enter for VMware), there is nothing that a normal web/email user can do to tell the difference. Just create a snapshot before the guests arrive and revert to it after they leave.

This used to be possible with the free VMware player---don't know if that's changed or not. The paid VMware Workstation product definitely can do it, or an equivalent product from their competitors.

Electroconvulsive therapy is broad, and even its most targeted implemented sends electricity to places it doesn't need to go. It must also pass through tissues that have no therapeutic reason to be exposed to electric current.

An internally-mounted system could be far more precise; possibly even as good as this experiment.

The best analogy I can come up with is: ECT is like trying to chisel a sculpture with a jackhammer.

If they are already destroying old equipment, this won't really change anything. It may prompt an ominous memo or two reinforcing the habit.

I see this being more useful for storage controllers.

The ratio of NAND to DRAM is too high for system memory, and the CPU memory controller would have to support it before it could even be installed.

Storage controllers already offer both volatile and non-volatile for caching. NVRAM can survive power losses and surprise reboots without data loss or corruption.

Some controllers have volatile RAM backed up with a battery so that outstanding writes can be committed to media once the power is restored.

I imagine the NAND/DRAM hybrid will cache reads in DRAM and writes in NAND, or else it will use very small batteries or modest capacitors to migrate pending writes to NAND when there is an unanticipated system shutdown.

When employees of American tech companies are issued disposable cell phones and told not to discuss anything sensitive because the phones will be hacked while they're there, it seems like an obvious extension of that stance to restrict the ingress of machines running Chinese code.

Personally, I don't care if someone in China wants to watch me stream Scrubs on Netflix. But there are things on government and corporate networks that are important or dangerous enough where I would rather take every reasonable precaution.

Kickstarter is an opportunity to be involved in choosing the means of economic productivity without being born wealthy. It's smaller scale with a lower buy-in than being a CEO or plurality stockholder.

The offer of a final product in exchange for a pledge is more of a memento than a sales transaction. A truly refined product built and tested for mass consumption requires the kind of resources that might be available after a success kickstart.

If they want to see lots of sales and premium pricing, they need to deliver something that someone craves. So let's see which large markets they've locked on to...

Consumers? Not without long battery life and a strong app ecosystem.

Business offices? Not without domain capability and policy enforcement.

Industrial or scientific? Not without win32 or easy access to privileged functions (both of which are a bad idea without centrally-managed security policy).

They got their "Ooh, wow, look at this" customers that any new gadget will get, but that's all they'll get with this release of Windows RT. Better luck next time.

I would like to see a court weigh in on whether photos or videos containing other people can be uploaded to social media sites. Or to other possibly non-private file repositories.

I have a sneaking suspicion that images recorded in private locations without explicit consent will end up receiving substantial awards in civil cases.

As far as recordings in public places are concerned, however, I expect very little.

Assisted GPS can offload some tasks to carrier-operated servers. Also, enabling GPS on most cell phones will enable network-based location.

In areas with poor visibility of the sky or other issues, network-based location may be faster, more accurate, or both.

Every cell phone in the US must be capable of determining its location (since the late 90s), and this requirement existed before GPS was widespread. Assisted GPS uses that existing infrastructure to some extent. There are some standards related to aGPS that allow it to work globally on GSM networks, and US carriers have additional proprietary functionality beyond that (or at least they used to---I've been out of the industry for a few years now).

> Let's talk price, shall we?

Hyper-V is essentially free if you're already invested in the Microsoft platform.

With an Enterprise license, you are allowed up to 4 instances on the same box. If an instance is used only to support virtualization, it doesn't count toward this limit. Note that with 4 instances, Enterprise is the same cost per instance as Standard so the price will be equivalent assuming reasonable VM density.

In addition, since failover clusters and enterprise certificate servers require Enterprise, most Microsoft customers will already be licensing Enterprise anyway.

With Datacenter edition, an unlimited number of VMs can be run on the same box. This does, however, require attention to the underlying hardware as it is licensed per-CPU unlike the other editions. With Intel's current offerings, a cheap 2-CPU server can have 12 cores (24 with HT). If it can handle 6 VMs, it reaches price parity with Standard edition---and it can probably handle far more than that.

tl;dr - Hyper-V is more cost-effective than VMware for a Windows or hybrid shop, but there are some features it currently lacks or implements poorly.

With the 2008 R2 service pack, this is no longer the case, as VMs can now be live-migrated. It is not as smooth as VMotion, however, so Hyper-V is still technically inferior.

There is a notable cost advantage when Enterprise or Datacenter versions of Windows are used on appropriate hardware, but I don't know if that will last if/when Microsoft reaches feature parity.

Does anyone use a single HVAC unit? If your datacenter cannot sustain the failure of a single HVAC unit, you need to invest in your infrastructure a little more.

The same would apply to submersion-cooled equipment. Redundant pumps with sufficient cooling towers to tolerate failures.

The failure of a single part should never bring anything down unless the part that fails is "the building".