What stuff is now broken? I'm just curious. I just upgraded from XP to Windows 7 (new computer) last week, and the only thing I've found actually broken is the audio won't send to multiple devices at once (headphones/spdif). Are there other things broken that are less obvious?

A hundred times? It didn't work, but you kept trying? Heh.

I've used it 5 or 6 times and on Vista and Win-7 it has worked every time.

The fact that most people are ignorant of Window's recovery tools does not mean that the tools don't exist.

Get your Windows DVD and boot into the recovery console. From there you should be able to trigger a system recovery rollback. Tada! Fixed.

S3TC is covered by a patent. It may or may not be a good patent, but there is one.

That's the irony though. Apple did exactly the same thing. There's no innovation there. MP3 players? There were many before the iPod existed. Desktop computers? Even computers with a GUI. Those existed. Microsoft had been pushing tablet computers for years before the iPad came out. Smart phones running Windows Mobile were out there.

So what did Apple do? They created, in the words of the grandparent post, "polished implementations of other people's well proven ideas."

If the attention is just looking and perhaps verbal comments. Yes, if a women dresses in a way to attract male attention, she shouldn't be complaining about the attention she's attracting. She's got to know she's going to get the attention of all the unwanted men as well as whoever she was looking to impress.

The same for men of course. If a man is out walking on the street in his Conan the Barbarian leather harness, he has to expect to attract attention. Likewise if he's wearing a $10,000 suit and a Patek Phillipe watch.

$1,000 is about the minimum price for a decent PC. $250 for the GPU, $300 for the CPU and system board. $50 for RAM. $200 for storage. You also need a decent case, keyboard, mouse, monitor, speakers or headphones and a copy of Windows (for most people).

The "common folk" buy the cheapest thing they can find and wonder why it's such crap.

If you were trying to filter a 100 Gbps stream you would certainly use a server cluster, a blade rack, or custom ASIC hardware. The problem is scalable so it can be solved by throwing money at it.

1 millisecond is 1,000 microseconds or 1,000,000 nanoseconds. A 2 GHz CPU runs at least one instruction every nanosecond and usually more like 6-12 instructions. As you say, the DRAM fetch is significant, but a well-designed B-tree database already loaded in RAM reduces the impact because of good algorithm design.

It's like an eternity in CPU time.

Of course, you can't write the code in Python, Perl or Ruby. You have to use C++.

Totally agree on the DPI issues.

When did Linux desktops decide to start catering to people who can't be bothered to write correct applications? If they want a 20 pixel font, then that is what they should ask for. Asking for a 10 point font should be a 10 point font, the same size on a 300x300 DPI display as on a 75x75 display.

If the font system can't handle providing fonts in pixels and percentage of screen size, then fix that. Don't try to redefine what a point is.

The browsers have maybe got this correct, finally, by providing a virtual pixel size. A much better solution than redefining terms that already have meaning.