FTR, I'm not a THOSH... Microsoft all the way for me. I'm a .Net developer and loving it. But if they introduced a "kill switch" for Windows apps I would be not a happy bunny.

Look at what Google produce and allow people to use for "nothing", such as Google Earth, Google Docs, Google Mail, etc. Because they get their money from somewhere other than the consumer, their focus is very different. They have a very different business model to Apple. And nothing they've done so far has been aggressively anti-competitive. They simply quietly go and do what the competitors are doing better and then slap it down on the counter in front of them. Though it'll be a while before Chrome gets good, before which time their in-browser earth exploration may well be "invisible" to a great many potential users.

We already have Killbits for ActiveX in Windows, BTW, and have had for quite some time. But Microsoft have limited its scope to their browser.

The difference between Google and Apple is that Apple want to make money from their own software while Google want to make money from other "revenue streams" such as advertising and getting a chunk of the line rental. This makes Google much more "pure" in what they want to do with their kill switch. If Apple killed a competing product which was both better and free, it proves that their interest is financial and not levelled at eliminating malware. They've done so. If Google do the same, so be it - condemn them for the same crime. In the mean time, let's see how many times they save us from malware apps trying to call premium rate numbers with 56k modems streaming incredibly low quality porn.

With Android being open and modifiable, there is little to protect. They don't want to protect their OS from people tinkering with it. They want people to tinker with it. Think of this as a centralised version of an antivirus/antispyware system, so you don't have to waste your battery with scanning files or your memory with definition lists.

and Windows 1.x, Windows 2.x, Windows 3.x, Windows 4.x (95, 98, ME) were all graphical shells on top of DOS. The confusion comes more because people don't know about the 1.x thru 3.x history of classic 8- & 16-bit versions of Windows than anything else. If AMD & Intel started naming their chips by the x86 system again there would probably be similar confusion. Although since the 8086 was a 16-bit enhanced version of the 8088, we should probably have moved up to 80482 and should probably now be on x84...

"we have no idea who the manufacturer is or what it's called"

Erm...

http://www.engadget.com/2008/08/20/fuchitek-reveals-pep01-pico-projector/

I used to swear by Creative products, back when they were actually setting the standards. Cards used to be "SB-Compatible". Now, having splashed out on a Creative DM keyboard and not having any Vista drivers for it, and having had an Audigy 2 NX with no Creative-supplied Vista drivers capable of 7.1 surround, I've completely lost interest in them. ATEOTD a digital interface on an onboard Audio CODEC will send the exact same unencoded data stream from an A/V file as Creative's best alternative, and all other data down that interface will be exactly what the OS told it to send, so there's absolutely no difference at the decoder end except possibly some latency difference. So why splash out on something which won't have any support in the future when you get the exact same result with the one on your motherboard?

If Creative made Video cards, they'd be using baseline Intel GPUs with "superior" DACs and claiming magnificence.