Yes, but with seven windows. And I didn't see curtains .....

Or on a simple Windows XP desktop: open Task Manager and add the "Threads" column. IExplorer 17 threads, System 56, some svchost.exe ranging from 15 to 70 threads. OK, many will be dormant, but I prefer them to sleep on another core. :)

In the server space we've gone through the same thing. Sun introduced the T1 with 8 cores and 32 threads (now 64 on T2). Lots of software wasn't suitable for this type of horizontal scaling. But over a period of five years, that changed dramatically.

On the desktop, you can expect the same. For now, not many desktop apps will take advantage of the additional cores. But if Intel would have stuck with 1-2 cores, no software will be written to take advantage of multiple cores.

Chicken or egg ....

Well said!!

Let's hope that the various cable companies like Shaw here in the west and EastLink in the Atlantic are stepping into the cellphone market. Here in Calgary, ten years ago Shaw gave Telus a beating when it came to Fast Internet and currently they make pretty good inroads in the VoIP market.

On the other hand, also the pricing of cable companies seems to go up-and-up with no end in sight. So also they could use some more competition.

unless these passwords are automatically assigned

In which case it is guaranteed to be written down somewhere on a piece of paper. Talking about "improved security".....

It is not just the mandatory password changes that increases the mess. It is also that each and every site has different validation rules. If I could use one-and-only strong password for many sites, then I could remember that. However, some sites _require_ special characters, while others _forbid_ it, etc, etc. So each time you end up inventing something on the spot, and then two months down the road you've forgotten it.

I guess that I've 50 passwords to remember, so if I can't do that with just a few (I don't use the same password for my online banking as for my slashdot login :-) then it quickly becomes Post-it time again. Or worse, that little file on the PC desktop with a list of userid/passwd combo's.

From the RFA: "He said he informed Microsoft security employees of the vulnerability in June".

So, Microsoft could at least have fixed this in Windows 7 (according to Wikipedia: "released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009").

Agreed, I did OS/9 diskless real-time programming in the past, or sw development for robots as another example. For that you need root access. But anyway, you will not (you even don't want to) do that type of development on the same PC you're using for email.

As you also said, the majority of developers are doing stuff ranging from VB, Java to SQL, which can happen nicely in a VM

Agreed, look at it another way: 2**32 is four billion address, which is one address per two world citizens. OK, I could share that IP with my wife, but given the number of devices in between us, that won't really work. Now I know, that places like Africa currently don't follow the pattern of "personal" computers, but how long will that last.

More realistically, given that my phone, web-server, car, camera, email, GPS unit, home security system, etc. all should have their own IP address, we need at least 20x what a 32 bit address space can provide. And then you've to add the 'wasted space' so that we can allocate blocks of addresses in a logical fashion.

So yes, IPv6 is the only way to go, if you like it or not. Couple of /8 blocks or NAT won't help us.

In modern times, I would give them no admin rights on the box itself, but you could provide virtual machines for them on which they can do whatever they want. The argument that they need to do things that "really, really" :-) require access to the bare metal, doesn't hold anymore, because the applications they are building will anyway need to be able to run in a virtualized environment.

I've done many audits and project plans on this topic in the past, and the issue is always that developers are split personalities: on the one hand they are standard corporate citizens that need email, calendar and word, which must be rock solid and therefore IT controlled, on the other hand they do their development work that requires freedom over their box. In the past the best solution was always to give them two PCs (or a thin client for the standard desktop work), but today I would solve this all through virtual machines.
 

In the end, I find the best way to figure out where something is made is to look for the "Made in XXXXXX" statement.

Which especially for a car tells you nothing. If it says "Made in Mexico" (for arguments sake) it only means that final assembly happened there. The engine could be put together in Korea and the brakes coming from Portugal.

That's why my Fujitsu P7010-D was/is such a fun laptop: only 10.5 inch wide-screen, but with a 1280 x 768 resolution. That's way more pixels/inch than normal. I have one dead pixel, constant blue on, and I just don't notice it. Simply because the pixel is so small.

This laptop is 4-5 years old, with a Pentium-M probably still faster than an Atom, has a 3-5 hour battery life and a built-in CDRW/DVD. Yes, it is a bit heavier than a netbook, but the size is the same as your typical 10" netbook.

The only BIG BIG difference is of course that at the time those machines went for prices over 2000 dollar. Compare that with what you pay now for your 10 inch netbook. Those extra pixels didn't come cheap....

Let's keep the definition simple: if it has an Atom CPU it is a netbook, when it has a standard Core CPU it is a laptop. So far, this holds....

My daughter has a HP Netbook, but it requires a PROPRIETARY cable, something I refuse to encourage with my dollars.

That's true for the older HP1000, but the HP110 that replaced it does have a VGA connector.