Oh I don't know about that. 550i with twin turbos is damn near an M5 as it is, minus the badging. Man, I love my car.

I used to work for Secure Computing, came over to McAfee after the acquisition in November of 2008, left McAfee in January 2010. Being a developer, I don't have much experience with the A/V products themselves. However, the Sidewinder is a damn serious enterprise firewall. I knew a lot of the engineers that worked on that product, and those guys/gals are *crazy* smart. I wonder if McAfee has managed to get rid of all of them yet?

Add to that the IronMail appliance (never had a false positive while I worked there) and the TrustedSource system from Ciphertrust, and you have some of the coolest technology I've ever personally dealt with.

Good luck to my McAfee (formerly Secure Computing) friends that are still there.

That's funny shit right there.

Free DLC should be considered an added perk for buying the game, not something that should be taken for granted. Steam is doing far more damage to the second hand market than EA can do at the moment.

Any multiplayer game that requires a login to play (going as far back as Diablo II or Neverwinter Nights) would have also had this restriction, meaning the seller would need to give up his Battle.net, Bioware ID, etc... for the new buyer to be able to play online.

I am all against restricted copy protection and DRM. EA have always been fairly rubbish at supporting their own games anyway. Free DLC should be considered a step in the right direction.

By getting a college degree, you are ensuring a literacy level of at least what would have been a seventh-grade education 30 years ago. With just a high school diploma, one's literacy level would only be at about a third grade level 30 years ago.

Computer programming is of little value without the ability to communicate.

I have to hire college graduates to change diapers at the school I run -- to ensure that when they do speak to the children, they do so with correct grammar.

I really would not worry about someone laughing at you when they have put Windows on life-safety system or any mission critical system.

Do you not think it is just possible that properly administered Windows systems actually work reliably? Or do you think MS bribes all the hospitals using these systems so they don't report the hourly crashes/reboots which you no doubt think must be happening?

Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of some RF-to-the-home. Google's products tend to be automated to the max, requiring as little of their manpower as possible. Maintaining a fibre infrastructure to millions of homes is bound to require more manpower than one connecting dozens of datacentres with thousands of access points.
Also, it'd save them years of negotiation work. If they can get their hands on a nationwide 700 MHz license, setting up and connecting a bunch of base stations is quite trivial, actually. And after they're done with the U.S., I'd expect them to head for the U.K., Singapore and Hong Kong, mirroring their Nexus One strategy.
Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, an industry standard for wireless broadband might emerge. And if Google's lucky, a lot of countries might try to capitalize on that, auctioning off licenses.

Fibre-to-the-home may come later, but my money's on a more wireless focus for the next couple of years.

what i want to know is: how soon before Google starts collecting taxes or has its own judicial system?

they're becoming as pervasive as government. people complain about the government having its hand in all parts of one's daily life, yet there are not major outcries against Google starting down that path. because it's a company? and there is a "choice" not to deal with them? what happens when the choice disappears? Google interwebs, Google phone, Google energy... Google grocery, Google utilities, Google mediation (courts might let the little guy win every now and then).

They have a clear vision with Wave? If they do, they have done a terrible job communicating it. Wave looks promising to us propeller heads, but the general public is confused by Wave.

I think the Wave application is basically just a proof-of-concept to draw interest from, as you say, "propeller heads". The clear vision with Wave isn't something that is clear through the application as such, but instead clear through the existence of the Wave Protocol and infrastructure and the conceptual documents surrounding it. Its a vision of the web evolving along the same general lines that many have advocated as the right direction for enterprise architecture -- a world of loosely coupled components interacting over an asynchronous messaging backbone and sharing data in common formats, rather than big monolithic applications.

I think GP is perceptive in seeing Buzz as an application of that vision (particularly if you look at its interactions with other Google services, like Maps.)

Odd. Well, I gotta ask the obvious question...did anyone think to up the visual settings on their PC so the whole game ran closer to 30 FPS? Would that make the issue less noticable, or did the problem scale down as well?

If you believe that, you are forced to concluded that most likely no valid program has ever been written in the history of the human race. All programs have bugs in them (yes, I truly mean all), and in most cases those bugs do not invalidate all their results.

Don't misunderstand me. I definitely support releasing the source code for scientific programs, and I believe that finding bugs in them will ultimately lead to better science. But nothing useful is achieved by absurd hyperbole like the quote above.

Then your issue isn’t with focus-follows-mouse, it’s with the focused application always being on top, and this is easy enough to deal with by strategically arranging your windows (as I was saying).

While it's not technically DRM, it feels like DRM because it's tracking software that the user has little control over if they want to play their game.

That's complete nonsense. Don't devalue the term "DRM" by applying it to things that aren't Digital Restriction Management in any way, shape or form.

In any case, as an Xbox owner, I appreciate it... my achievements all go into the same place, instead of having a set in Steam, another set on Xbox, etc. Steam and Live aren't redundant until Live runs on *all* Steam games, or Steam runs on Xbox.