99% of Slashdot users will hate on this story... Sight Unseen.

Right, I remember reading about this when it happened. I don't know if that trial is still going on, but if it is I hope they're found guilty. I'd be interested to see if they would restore it worldwide or just for European consoles.

I think what they did with their DRM is stupid, and I am most definitely not a fan of DRM. That said, what would stealing Playstation customer information prove to Sony that all of the revenue lost immediately after that whole fiasco didn't? If they wanted to make a point, the hackers did just that. Time to move on if you ask me.

Forgive my generalization on the OtherOS topic, but my point is still valid. Removing functionality from their product, while not a great business tactic, isn't an appropriate excuse to steal a company's customer information thus causing them to take their service down.

If my bank said I could no longer use their online banking I would think that it would not be okay to rob the bank in retaliation. Plus, I would think they would be rightfully upset at anyone who tried to setup their own website to bank online at that same bank.

Yeah, I understand that they've tarnished the Sony brand by exposing customer's information, but you're making it sound like they were handing out that information to anyone who asked. They didn't ask to have someone take customer information or have their online network taken down. And, I'm sorry, taking away a popular feature they no longer wanted to support isn't an invitation either. I wasn't a fan of removing OtherOS but I don't think the appropriate course of action was to steal customer information in order to defame their company.

I don't think most consumers care why they were hacked, just that their service was interrupted. Sure Sony's security sucked, but I think the general public will just hold the hackers responsible for the brunt of the problems down the road once this whole thing passes. In the end, Sony will move on and likely continue to do unpopular things which is why I don't really see anything meaningful being accomplished.

I get it, they've done a ton of unpopular things, but what has all of this hacking done? Do they really think it's made them think twice about potentially unpopular business decisions? Are a ton of other hacker just jumping on a bandwagon because they can? Do you think that losing all that money will inspire them to do good by their consumers? I can only speculate as to the true intentions of the hackers out there, but it kinda bothers me when I get the impression that people are doing this to "get back at them for something they did that I don't like or agree with." If that's really the case, I wish they would just get over it already and move on. I am personally getting sick of reading about Sony.

it is discrimination against illogical people. You should say "the applicant appeared to be a replicant, do not hire" to cover your ass completely.

What does it say about people who conduct studies about facebook?

As a self-taught programmer myself, learning standard C has given me a whole new outlook on how I code. I also thought it would be good to know where a lot of the more modern languages were derived from.

Theora was based on one of On2's earliest codecs. VP6 & VP7 have been far more successful and are even used as the Flash video codecs. If Google is acquiring On2, it could mean that they're looking to open up the formats that have defined Flash as the media player of choice.

(Sorry, this is somewhat offtopic, but it was the first thing I thought of when I saw the comparison between Windows XP and Windows 7.)

I once saw someone here on Slashdot mention that Microsoft should not have shipped a 32-bit version of Vista, opting instead to push only the 64-bit version. While it seemed like an odd statement at the time (despite the fact that my home XP machine was an AMD64 processor), I find myself agreeing with it on Windows 7.

As it stands today, 32-bit Windows is quickly becoming too small for many business and industrial uses, and it's very affordable to build a high-performance home machine with more than 4GB of RAM. (Case in Point.) In fact, with intensive web applications and sophisticated desktop tools (yeah, some of them are bloated) chewing more memory than ever before, it just doesn't make sense to get anything less than 4GB (nay, 3GB if you're running Windows 32-bit!) except for a few edge cases.

Unfortunately, Windows has been kind of lagging on the 64-bit front. By treating it as sort of a bastard child (like they treated all their non-i386 NT versions), Microsoft managed to ensure that hardware manufacturers wouldn't make an effort to support 64-bit windows in a non-server environment. Which is frustrating as I've started bumping up against that once-awesome 4GB barrier.

In an attempt to turn this into a slightly more useful conversation rather than a one-sided rant, I was wondering if I could get some opinions on using virtualization as a solution? With Windows' poor track record as a 64-bit OS, I have been thinking about running a 64-Bit Unix and virtualizing 32-bit windows for backward compatibility. I've already had some success with virtualizing Windows 7 on a MacBook, and have even been able to get desktop integration working. (Quite spiffy that. Though the two interfaces occasionally confuse my wife. She's the primary user of Windows, needing support for some specialized programs with no real alternatives available.)

Does anyone here have experience with setting up a system like this? Do you use Xen, VMWare, Sun VirtualBox/OpenxVM, or some other solution? What do you use as your primary OS? Linux has come a long way, but the upgrade treadmill is still frustrating. Especially with the seemingly regular ABI upgrades. Does anyone use [Open]Solaris x86_64 as a host? Do you have 3D Graphics completely disabled, or have you found a good way to allow all OSes solid and reliable access to the underlying graphics card? Do you bother with mounting virtual shared drives to move data between the OSes, or do you have a home NAS for storing data? (I'm leaning toward a NAS myself.)

Just a few thoughts, anyway. Thanks in advance for experiences & suggestions! :-)