Actually there is one positive thing about it, potentially

Microsoft is actually taking a gamble. If Windows 8 won't succeed they will be in trouble. However they are doing some things which are partly right. They will sooner or later have to get rid of their old complex win32 and win16 APIs. And that's what they are trying to do now. Had they acted earlier to provide a more abstract generic API, that transition would have gone a lot smoother.

My guess is that Windows 8 will fail on mobile ARM devices, and Micorosoft will buy a start-up making x86 emulators for ARMs including an automatic GUI refit so they are more usable for mobile devices, perhaps by rendering the original GUI into a hidden framebuffer, then either parsing the graphics or using API functions to determine the position of GUI elements. This will then be arranged into a new touch compatible GUI. Alternatively the position of the elements and/or the new GUI could be manually determined and stored.

It's a question of password management

First of all, don't make the requirements to strong. If you want your people to have at least 3 digits and 3 letters in their passwords, they need to change every month, you'll end up with passwords like June2012.

In some cases it may be wise to write down passwords onto a sheet of paper you carry around with you, or even a plain passwords text file. However those instances are rare and need to be well thought out. Don't put such a file onto a computer you neither can secure nor own. (e.g. an iPhone)

However the main point is to use public key authentication whenever possible.

Kapersky?

Wasn't that the guy who wanted to have an "Internet Passport" so we'll all be identified on the Internet... which would in his opinion somehow make the Internet safer?

I'm sorry, but by wanting to put his software onto IOS he contradicts himself, proving that he doesn't believe in code signing being a security feature.

I would be paying considerably more for DRM-free media

Considering how much time and effort it costs me for ripping DRM encumbered formats, I'd be willing to pay twice as much for a DRM free copy.

However in reality the DRM free copies usually are cheaper, either via Bittorrent or television.

Not a question of reseller

It doesn't matter who re-sells the computer, but if they are fit for professional use. Apple's high-end Macs are certainly able to compete with good Linux workstations. It may be a niece market, but it's an existing one. Just don't expect an iBook to be of much use in a business, or plan for them being a good fraction of their time in factory service.

So in a nutshell, carry business-ready computers, and leave the consumer stuff at home.

In Germany

The main public channels mostly got rid of their children's programming years ago. It's now, in much worse form, on the combined channel "KIKA".

Actually the main "analogue" channels are barely watchable. They spend great deals of money on banale shows. The "digital" channels however actually seem to try to make good television. They are quite experimental with some horribly bad stuff, and a bit of true gems.

What I'm actually more impressed by

Have you ever seen this solar power plant near Vienna?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Wien_erdkabelstation_400kV_Nordeinspeisung.jpg

Just a tiny solar panel between the 2nd and 3rd while concrete column (from the left) giving enough energy to call for a 400kV line going to it.

So????

How is that something for a DVR? In DVR solutions you don't need speed, you need space, and 2 Tb surely isn't enough.

It's kV not kv, BTW

The unit sign for volt is the upper-case V, not the lower-case v.

Sony used to have a good repulation

They were one of the companies who let their business products "bleed into" their consumer lines. I think they even had things like a TV-set which was just a low-end professional monitor with an added tuner.

Betamax, Sony's most popular consumer format (which doesn't say a lot) was just a scaled down U-Matic. U-Matic was aimed as a format for the budget conscious user who wanted to carry around his VCR, in case you don't know.

You always got the idea that a Sony product was just a bit better than something cheap. This may have been true in the analogue age, however when they switched to digital, they failed to grasp what this would mean. A Sony DVD or Blu-Ray Player cannot have a better picture or sound than its cheap Chinese version. If Sony would have been smart, they would have targeted the technical user and added a networked media player which can access NFS and SMB shares and auto discover them, playing as many formats as humanly possible. They would have made the NetMD Players to support as many formats as possible given the constraints and being as open as possible.

Now the main problem here is incompatibility

Each one of those boxes needs a custom prepared Version of Linux. You can't just install Debian or Gentoo on any of those unless the distributions are modified for that particular box.

What the PC has done right in that respect is to be operating system neutral. Your BIOS includes a tiny piece of code loading the bootloader from disk, as well as routines to access and enumerate what hardware you have. This way you can have any operating system you want on your PC, and it'll simply work. If it doesn't have special drivers for your hardware, it can simply use the routines provided in the BIOS. If it doesn't know what hardware you have, it can simply look it up.

This is what's missing in the ARM world. A standard "firmware", perhaps based on OpenFirmware or something. Or perhaps something rather more minimalistic. A table of the hardware in ROM, and some primitive routines to access the most important hardware (network, display, input) in its most primitive way as well as a routine to load the bootloader from the mass storage device.

Hmm, back when I developed for Windows

The operating system came with all the GUI stuff coded in. Which made GUIs more or less consistent, particularly when it came to things like colour.

Windows is hardware independent, you can never be sure if the hardware the user has can even display "red" or "green". If it's CGA it most likely cannot. So people just made buttons and other controls, leaving the OS to deal with colours.

Hmm, add radio and solar panels...

And you'll have cheap wireless routers you can stick onto lampposts.

Well please...

Please don't don't just paste a set of pictures 1:1 from some other site. That's not creative, that's just lazy.

Ideally, you go into a museum of technology, or some other place, and snap your own photographs.

If you cannot do that, you could search such sites for facts. For example you could try to get the unique properties of certain systems, and derive questions from that. There is genuine humour hidden in things like the Dectape (or Linctape). Maybe you also shouldn't restrict yourself to computers, but allow information processing devices in all of their diversity.

If all that fails, try to ask your readers for such things. I'm sure you could recruit some for such a task.

Ahh that was the contest...

Where the first poster literally found the site those pictures were taken from, one after another, exposing the extremely lazy puzzle making and making it trivial to solve it.

What baffles me is that none of the commentards seemed to read that post.

The problem will be Apples reaction

Instead of, for example adding community based repositories to encourage secure software distribution, Apple will simply have an "AppStore", locking out all other forms of software distribution. This of course doesn't bring any actual security.

Come on...

Unlike the BBC it's even on the Internet as Webm, what more can you expect?

The reason why I don't like Unity

Unity was designed for people running a single application in (nearly) full screen mode (or maximized or whatever). This may be great for 800x480 netbooks, but it doesn't work on my 3840x1080 desktop.

Makes sense for that resolution

This must be great for a viewing distance of about 5 metres, which isn't all that unrealistic in a slightly larger living room.

However then you would need 4k content, which is still rare.

It's legacy technology

Businesses buy Windows because they need to run their old 1990s software on, as well as their VBA based software infrastructure. That is the reason people have Windows. Nobody cares about "advanced features" or anything, people care about running what they have.

As soon as people think they can run their old programs better on Windows than on the alternatives, Windows will stay. Once they believe Wine is more compatible than the latest version of Windows they'll switch. That's why Windows on ARM won't be very popular. (Although SMB share access is quite an incentive)

Nobody builds anything new on Windows. It's a dead platform for new things. Browser GUIs are now good enough to replace most native applications. And thanks to visualization it's now possible to deploy even complex web-server based packages easily.

It's amazing

It's amazing through what lengths people will go instead of simply using proper touch screens. You know combination resistive and capacitive screens exist.

Missing the point

The way to be profitable is not to actually sell your app, that's pointless you cannot get money that way, but to appear important enough so someone will buy you for a billion or trillion or whatever number they come up with. Then you sell a small part of the stock (those people rarely will pay you in cash) so the bubble won't burst, and _that's_ your profit. Maybe you manage to slowly sell your worthless stock to some morons without causing suspicion, more profit for you.

The app business is probably where the Multimedia CD-Rom business would have went if it wasn't for the Internet. Once mobile Internet connections are fast, there's little need for having local apps, most of which need Internet connectivity anyhow.

Must be a fake

Back then they didn't have Word, so they could have simply typed in the terms. Last time I've seen something like that was from a professor who didn't know how to use TeX.