Only if people like you believe it to be so. The rest of us can sue.

most travel experts strongly recommend insurance for any trip

And most "insurance salesmen" are liars masquerading as "experts" =P Insurance is a great thing to have in any situation, but you don't need travel-specific insurance in order to be covered when traveling, like many supposed "experts" will recommend. Check your homeowner's or renter's insurance, and it probably covers any of your property, whenever it's with you, regardless of who breaks it or how or why. If it doesn't cover that, call up the company and increase your coverage until it does, even if you have to decrease the total dollar amount of coverage (your house is much less likely to burn down than your laptop is to be broken by someone). It'll be way cheaper than buying a whole extra insurance policy, for sure. If the company you use doesn't offer that kind of coverage -- SWITCH, because they're useless, and will never pay you because they can almost always claim your situation was excluded.

I forgot to mention that using it as a sandbox to build/compile apps for other machines is always a good use of a fast extra!

For that matter, you can use it to simulate the apps running on the other machines, and thereby optimize your compilations. If you script this, and run it in a neural network simulation that allows the script to modify itself, maybe it'll become conscious. Wouldn't that be exciting?!</naive jubilation>

What kind of application requires real-time computing without a video output?

Shoutcast server (streaming audio) would rock, but streaming video would also be cool, web/net/file server...
Node in a beowulf cluster, computing... anything! Game simulator, fractal renderings, the weather, physics simulations, neural network simulation, circuit simulation, gene sequencing, stock market analysis... some combination of those things...

I'd like to remind anyone who's never been inside an actual compute center that usually only the head nodes, like 2-5 machines for every hundred or so compute nodes, have displays, and the sole purpose of the compute nodes is loads of real-time computing... else why do you think we'd (taxpayers) spend millions of dollars on these compute centers? Obviously, the need to compute (the application) came before the need to display (the video output). How strange that these needs have become so closely marketed as inseparable, that you, the slashdot commenter, can't think of a world where they aren't. ;)

While there is still hope for computing in the cloud, it's hard not to wonder if short-term profits, a lack of architectural thinking about security and resilience, and long-term myopia aren't leading us in the wrong direction.

What? Of course those aren't leading us in the wrong direction --- they aren't LEADING anywhere! Science still LEADS technology development, and Slashdot has even run multiple stories about the Open Science Grid. OSG, of course, is just ONE huge example of a set of massively distributed parallel services, spanning multiple organizations and institutions across the country, and peering with other grids across the world! Funding for grid development is completely unmatched in computing projects, given that it happens in so damn many places, and yet the need for faster and better performance (with a complete disregard for profits) drives scientists to find the cheapest and most efficient means of squeezing performance from hardware. It's a VERY active field of research (I happen to work in it)! The grid doesn't only offer compute cycles, it has storage and other services too, and cross-compatibility is a major concern. It really all MUST work together in order to be effective!

As scientists iron out bugs with this stuff, and as their students leave into the workforce, the technology slowly leaks into companies, most of which move at molasses-speed to adopt new ideas. Seriously, when *I* left this field 5 years ago, no one knew what the hell I was talking about when I talked at interviews about my work in "distributed computing" or "parallel processing", forget mentioning "grid" or "clouds". I gave up on jobs after a couple of years and came back to research, but it was just THIS PAST YEAR that any major companies noticed those catch words on my resume. Seriously, it takes a long while for them to catch up to development.

So, in short, it isn't myopia of thinking that's making cloud computing drive itself to the ground, it's the myopia of this article that makes it look that way.

Total props for that one! Hell, if they don't do it, *I* will do it! In fact, I encourage *everyone* to post these ads once we know the URL to the government logging page! Surely these links can be embedded in ad networks serving the area, or posted on some German news concatenators? Freiheit muss leben, um man frei lebt! :-)

I was quite pointedly refuting the notion that popular bands aren't popular due to their signing onto a major label. Obviously they ARE, and for exactly that reason. The parent poster pointed this out in his very next paragraph, and you pointed it out again. Thanks for adding more fodder to my argument ;)

What? Poe was extremely popular when she first showed up on the major label music scene in the 90's. Of course artists become popular just because they're signed to major labels; the labels to all the legwork for targeted marketing and distribution. Surely you thought of this direct effect?

Hmm... it appears you did think of it, Mr. Self-contradiction. So, uh, what was it your argument was about?

Whether you need to reinstall on that sort of time frame has a lot to do with how you're using the machine, and how well you're maintaining it. For lots of people, Windows just "gets sluggish" after a while, and a fresh install is the easiest thing they can do to fix it. The problem is usually caused by one or more of:

1. malware
2. too much crap running at startup
3. a full hard drive / failure to clean up caches and temps
4. failure to defragment after
   1. constantly installing and uninstalling programs or
   2. using apps that create/destroy thousands of log files

If you only ever use a browser and office apps on your work computer, and run anti-malware utils regularly, you're not likely to run into these problems. If, on the other hand, you used a chat client that created an independent log file for everyone you ever talked to in a chat room, and like to download sparkly new cursors and screensavers all the damn time, you might find yourself needing a reinstall pretty quickly.

Memory leaks aren't the problem. The problem is the way the file system clusterfucks itself if you're doing anything that creates and destroys thousands of small files without defragging the hard drive, resulting in even moderately-sized files being fragmented all over the place, skyrocketing access times for doing just about anything, and wearing out the hard drive too. Non-tech users are more likely to have this problem since they A) have only a single partition for everything, B) never defrag, C) don't clean up temp files.

In other words, you're correct, but statistically, "doing it right" is a rare thing for anyone to actually do.

Virtualization is easy, but non-virtualization is even easier. There is a VMWare solution that will work: It's VMWare, and it works exactly like you think it does. The current price is listed on the VMWare website. I don't understand why this is a community-posed question, though, since you seem to have answered yourself in the question.

The free solution, on the other hand, is to just clean up the problems on the XP machine. If the other machines on the network continue to run trouble-free, just fix the one with trouble. You probably don't even need to recover or reinstall. Uninstall the ActiveX components, close the firewall back up, run anti-virus and anti-spyware apps (at least 3 different free ones) to remove anything that might have shown up, and if there are less than a handful of problems detected, you don't really need to reinstall. Run msconfig to check for extra crap at startup, and use HijackThis to check for any remaining browser toolbars, add-ons or other crap you don't want. Then make Firefox the default browser. Incidentally, there is a Firefox add-on available called IETabs which lets you run an IE-specific webpage from Firefox without starting IE and all its add-ons (it does use the base IE rendering engine tho).

If the machine hasn't had a fresh XP install in over a year, then it's time to reinstall anyway, and the sluggishness might have little to do with the extra ActiveX crap your wife had to use.

A cleanup might take you 2 hours. A reinstall could take longer, depending on how organized you and your wife have been about backing up data and how many programs you'll need to reinstall. VMWare works, but isn't free. These are the considerations to balance. Good Luck!

Well, I've never claimed to be good at simple things. Apparently basic counting eludes me sometimes... it just seems like it's been so long without fanfare! =P

No, they're just letting the App Store submissions lie around unapproved for inordinate amounts of time, besides explicitly denying entry for such "competitive" content.

A jailbroken iPhone with Cydia installed is 1 app away from being a fully functional Unix box.

And if you don't already know which app it is, I'm not going to tell you (because you wouldn't want advice from queers and poseurs anyway).

This is old news -- Cydia and associated apps have been available on jailbroken iPhones for at least a couple of years now! The most awesome apps I downloaded through Cydia and its Installer App were the BSD Subsystem, OpenSSH Server (0_o!), and Terminal! With those three in hand, the iPhone became just another node on my network, capable of scripted rsync backups and other automated shell customizations! I think that the realization that the iPhone is a fully functional handheld machine is the primary knowledge that Apple seeks to keep out of the hands/heads of the general public. Perhaps the goal is to sell more Macs... or maybe the goal is to soon "open up" the platform to all developers/apps and topple the monopolistic/racketeering practices of phone cos and rival closed-platform phone/handheld manufacturers, similar to what they did with iTunes and DRM? One can only hope...

but in the meantime, one can just jailbreak the iPhone ;-)