Check out Bart PE. Windows XP can turned into a live CD in much the same way that linux distros can.

But nobody in their right mind does that just to check their bank account. Anybody who knows what a live CD is off the top of their heads should be able to run a clean system with adequate protection. Assuming you have a clean system, the major threats that you'd have to worry about with online banking are pretty well confined to phishing attacks. A live CD isn't going to do you any favors on that front since (unless you loaded custom bookmarks into the on disc browser) you're going to have to type the bank's URL from memory or trust Google to give you the right address.

All the other threats that are easy to get worked up over are actually quite easy to mitigate. Man in the middle attacks, such as some random hacker wannabe sitting at the corner table at Starbucks sniffing wifi packets, is probably not going to break the Diffie-Hellman SSL handshake between you and your bank given that no cryptology experts have found an way to break it yet. A key logger will raise red flags with any modern antivirus/antimalware program provided that the key logger in question was not written for and deployed solely to your system.

The only reason I can think of for using a live CD for banking is if I'm using a system that isn't mine. Personally, though, I'd rather just call the number on the back of my bank card and use the telephone banker rather than explain to whoever owns the system I'm borrowing why I just booted their system off of a CD that (as far as they know) may contain any number of malicious programs and viruses.

What card couldn't play BioShock for you?

I enjoyed it with my 7900GT on an Athlon64 X2 4600 (939 Socket)

... so that I can avoid all the noise below this post.

1. Coding (TFA marks this as a constant for this discussion)
2. Stimulants (Cigarettes, a 2L bottle of soda and another 2L that I know is waiting for me in the fridge)
3. Music (Indie/Alternative Rock on Pandora so that I know to stand up and stretch once an hour when it asks if I'm still listening)

Addendum:

Some companies are very accepting of student usage. Autodesk (i.e. AutoCAD) offers their software for free for personal or educational use. Microsoft offers Express Edition versions of their Visual Studio applications for free for personal or educational use. VMWare offers their products for free to educational institutions, though students do still need to purchase a license for use on their personal systems.

As a note on the MS Express Edition products. Yes they are stripped down versions of the full professional versions but someone who uses VS C# Express can still learn the language well enough to not make an ass of themselves when they go out to interview. Someone who bought Photoshop Elements because they couldn't afford the academic price for just Photoshop ($299) isn't going to be able to say the same.

Adobe products are a poor example of academic discounts because the academic price for their products is still steep even if it does look good compared to the insane retail price. And while it's all well and good that when your son lands a job as a graphic artist (or whatever he's going for) his company might pay for his tools, he still needs to be able to pass an interview process where he'll be competing with other people that do have this software installed at home (legitimately or otherwise).

Your situation is slightly different from what I was talking about (and had to go through myself) where the student is no longer living at home and has to be able to budget rent, utilities, food, transportation, tuition, books and tools on a part-time income while only qualifying for enough financial aid to pay for most of their tuition. I have faith that since your son is still living at home and that you are claiming him as a dependent in lieu of charging him rent he was able to afford the $449 to $999 (after educational discount) to pick up a CS4 suite package that contains the software he needs.

I've never used adblock or similar. I just get that little checkbox on the /. frontpage allowing me to turn ads off.

Not counting FOSS offerings, many of the cheaper alternatives are of such low quality that they're not worth installing at any price. I'm talking about application crashes, unnecessary drivers that won't install on x64 operating systems, hijacking system functions like auto-insert detection, etc. And some software such as Windows just simply doesn't have cheap alternatives that will function appropriately for consumers. And before you say that Linux is a viable alternative to Windows, I want you to drive to Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy and tell me how many software boxes there mention Linux on the back.

This is why I wrote the last paragraph in my above post. People that can't afford a Cadillac will usually either buy a Chevy or ride the bus, they won't risk life and limb in a Tata or Yugo. Unfortunately, software vendors seem to not understand how to strip a Caddy down to a Chevy. The stripped down versions are missing the left headlight, the windows are made of plastic tarp and the passenger door is welded shut.

Maybe I should turn ads back on to get a laugh or two. Out of curiosity, was it just a karma threshold that I crossed to get the option to turn ads off or is it some sort of seniority thing?

That and Zimbabwe has a per-capita income of about $200 USD per year. By the time someone there saves up for Vista, the Duke Nukem trademarks will have entered the public domain and DNF will go gold as an open source project.

A pirated copy is not necessarily a lost sale. If you look at the highest rate list compared to the lowest rate list for countries you'll see that the countries with the highest rates of piracy generally have the lowest per capita GDP. This shows a link between ability to pay for software and actually paying for it.

To put a face on this, the recent college grad with a job at 7-11 and $50k in student loan debt is going to need tools to make the money needed to buy tools.

Another factor is the fact that the BSA still counts an install of Adobe's $2500 Master Suite on Mom's computer as being a lost sale. Trust me when I say that Mom only has that because she thought it was neat to paste pictures of her and Dad standing on top of the Eiffel tower. She does not use it commercially and therefore cannot justify spending $2500 on an idle amusement. If Adobe managed to make a DRM scheme that couldn't be cracked they still wouldn't get a sale from her. Instead she'd just go back to scissors and rubber cement.

In fact according to the BSA PDF.

This fits well with the idea that consumers are installing professional software that is never used commercially.

Cost and ability to pay are the biggest factors of piracy. The BSA needs to segregate their report into two sections for consumer piracy and commercial piracy. Consumer piracy is less likely to be a lost sale than commercial piracy.

Furthermore, companies whose professional software packages may have consumer appeal might want to try performing a trial where they make the latest version of their software package available for free as a beta or time limited trial with semi-anonymous usage tracking to figure out exactly what patterns distinguish a professional user from someone just screwing around. This would allow the company to use this data to offer a mostly functional 'Home' version for dirt cheap that has just the right features disabled to make sure that professional users won't ever touch it. A home user of Photoshop, for example, will probably never work with 100MB images whereas a professional designing a poster or magazine spread will. Careful analysis and planning will allow these companies to actually make a few extra sales off of lower budget consumers without cutting into their customer base for professional users.

Nobody said anything about overclocking. And yes, underclocking does have limits imposed by the system's processor and BIOS. AMD and Intel already have features on all their product lines to allow for dynamic clock adjustments to reduce power consumption. AMD's cool and quiet feature will even lower the CPU voltage at lower clock frequencies to further reduce power consumption.

These guys aren't talking about new processor designs (though I'm sure some engineers at AMD and Intel read /. and will find this research), they're looking for ways to better implement the power saving features that are already present in modern CPUs.

I'm seeing too many people try to compare software with physical goods such as cars and toasters. There are numerous, irreconcilable differences between the two realms that make a direct comparison anything but straight forward. Furthermore, many of you seem to have some inflated view of what merchantability and suitability mean for physical goods.

For starters, physical goods warranties and liabilities have limits. If I buy a truck from Ford, GMC or Dodge, it will have a certain rating for load capacity and towing capacity. If I exceed those ratings and something bad happens, up to and including injury or loss of life, it's my fault. Other physical goods, such as toasters, also have limits as to what situations they will be designed and tested for. If I try to make french toast using a slot load toaster and something bad happens, up to and including injury or loss of life, it's my fault. In one case the manufacturer knows that somebody out there will try something that they know has a high likelihood of causing known failures (i.e. if you try to tow too heavy of a load with your truck you run the risk of overheating your brakes and causing an accident) and in the other case we have to come to terms with the fact that idiots will find a way to break shit no matter how many warning labels you put on it.

Now about those irreconcilable differences between software and hard goods. With hard goods, your warranty goes out the window the moment you modify it in any way that has not been approved by the manufacturer. That is completely reasonable because I can buy a car and drive it completely as is and it will serve its full intended purpose with out any 3rd party add-ons. The same with a toaster, I can buy a toaster and make toast without adding to or modifying the machine.

A modern computer system, however, is nearly worthless until you start adding to it. Let's, for the moment, ignore hardware failure as being beyond the scope of software warranty. If I buy a system where the only installed software is MS Windows (and I mean *only* software, no games, no office/productivity, no peripheral hardware beyond standard keyboard, mouse and monitor, etc.) then there's not a lot of ways for it to break at a software level. Now let's start adding things. If my video driver conflicts with my antivirus software, who is to blame? Both work at a level close to the hardware to do their jobs and both have been tested to work as intended with the target operating system. And as luck would have it, they were both released nearly simultaneously so there was no opportunity for either vendor to test against the other's current product.

If we want to get into more industrial or life or death situations where computers are used, let me just say that if you trust human life or millions of dollars of equipment to the flawless operation of general purpose hardware running a general purpose, multitasking operating system then you're an idiot. The engine management and safety systems in a modern car are controlled by purpose built electronics running custom built software. Automated production equipment generally uses PLC type systems that been thoroughly tested for tolerances and MTBF rates.

Really what are we hoping to accomplish with this legislation? Windows, MacOS and Linux are all very stable (Vista's Task Manager is reporting 240 hours for my current uptime) barring hardware failure (which is easy for the lay person to blame on the OS since the OS is what tells us something went wrong) or applications that don't play nice with each other. Applications that corrupt data usually don't make it out of testing in that state and when they do it's usually fixed quickly if the company that made it wants to continue to do business. Open source software is perpetually beta since it is developed by the community and simply made available to anyone who thinks that it might be useful.

Pick up the "Pocket Ref" by Sequoia Publishing. It has everything from CPR instructions to structural material strengths. I picked mine up at a college book store but I'm sure I've seen them at Powell's Technical as well.

Sorry man. Paper tables do still exist.

Usually LCD burn in can be exorcised out with a simple rotating video of solid red, green, blue, black, magenta, yellow, cyan and white at a frame rate of about 10-20 fps. Run that overnight and it will often fix persistent images and occasionally stuck pixels.