@Nilay Patel You're confusing judgement with truth. A verdict may be legal and binding, but it never changes the underlying truth of a situation.

Although the original argument was made in the case for the death penalty, it applies to the jury system and trial judgements in general: In order to accept that all judgements should be carried out, you have to be willing to accept the possibility that you may be found guilty of a crime you did not commit.

Which is to say, its all well and good to admire the justice system from a far and inherently believe in the judgements passed down as truth, but don't be so naieve as to believe the courts are never wrong and that one day, you may land on the wrong side of an injustice.

Ok, having just skimmed over the patent it would seem that while its somewhat carefully phrased, the alleged 'invention' amounts to nothing more than looping through a file a character at a time and then if you come across an instruction to do something (to do with formatting) you do that before proceeding through the file. Repeat until end.

Wow, they patented a file reading loop. Damn, I must've infringed on that one a few hundred times myself. Where do I send the money I owe them? What's that? Prior art? Surely not. Obvious to anyone skilled in the field? Impossible! If either of those were true then the patent wouldn't be valid, and everyone knows that the US Patent Office always makes sure a patent is vaild before granting it.

i4i may have acted in good faith here, but if they feel this is their great gift to the world they're a very poor company. Another alternative would be to see them as attempting to cash in on dumb ass Texan judgements.

Just because a company is legitimate and does business, doesn't mean they're not trolling.

Hrm, if you look at their website they have a diagram of the machine...
Part 28 - D Sized battery....

Gee, talk about not even trying... I'm sure they'll have some reason for it being there, but the very presence of it means that you can't be sure about what the machine is really achieving at all.

This is just busted in IE 8. Liek it or loathe it, its a reality its been around for a while, so no excuses for not testing it guys.

I get lots of 'script taking too long' errors, error on page, I can't see replies, and so on. That's in both compatability mode and not. In compatibility mode it looks right, but nothing works. In IE8 mode it looks worse and things appear to work correctly.

You may be getting all stylocks (thats style + bollocks to those who don't know, for when style exceeds any amount of sense - like commercial realities) about CSS and not caring about IE folk, but a site relying on ad-revenue to exist can't really be wanting to alienate 2/3 of internet users.

I had to refresh 4 times just to get the post comment button to appear.

You will get windows.old from a clean install so long as you don't re-partition your drive. This is confirmed from my own experience across multiple machines in the last few days.

May you burn in a faeces filled grave.

There were never 20 versions of Windows 7 to choose from. For a consumer there are only 3, each available in 32 or 64 bit. One is for average people, one is for people connecting to a domain server and the other has allt he features Win 7 has to offer. Enterprise and Starter aren't available to consumers as install discs. Starter is an OEM only and only availble in 32bit from what I can tell, and Enterprise is only for... well enterprises. Essentially its Professional with Bit Locker encryption.
Ok, so so far I make that 9 versions. If you wan't to go all out, there will be the N versions for Europe without Media Player, so that'll be 18, and when MS were going to do a version without IE, that would have been 27 I suppose.
Anything to make it sound confusing.

Sure, microsoft shoot themselves in the foot with these options, but to say a consumer has to choose between a dizzying array of choices when in fact its only 3 (in the majority of cases the 32 or 64 bit comes down to if you want more of less than 4gb ram, but if you but a version your license will work on 32 or 64 bit, so while you may not get the media, you to get both versions).

If they just sold Ultimate to everyone, sure it'd make life simpler. They can't switch to just 64bit yet, because there are still lazy sods out there whose software still won't run in a 64bit environment, even though 64bit Windows has been around for what, 6+ years now? Sure, only 3 since it went 'mainstream' with Vista.

Apple and the various Linux people out there don't have the same ecosystem to deal with that MS do. Few (if any?) large corporations exclusivley use Apple of linux systems. MIcrosofts 90% share of the desktop market means they sell what their clients want. Idiot CFOs and CIOs want to feel special, so there is an Enterprise version. SMBs want to feel special so there's Professional. Uber gamers and geeks want everything, so there's Ultimate, everybody else gets Premium or Starter if the machine is never going to do much more than be used to watch youtube all day.

One thing apple certainly got right and microsoft should learn... just tell the customer what they want, don't give them what they think they want. That's why apple can release just one version ;)

End of pointless rant.

Cheaper is better, of course.

But /why/ is it reasonable to expect an OS to sell for less than a game? Good on Apple to be able to do that, but by the same token Windows 7 can be bought for the price of what, 2, 3 games? And how many games out there have more than 20 - 40 hours play in them these days (some, I know, but not many). I'm fairly sure an OS gets a fair amount of usage.

Remember that the linux people achieve 'free' through massive community effort, in no small part as an alternate to Windows (as much as for the 'fun' of it). For an actual company who has to pay their developers, the prices aren't at all bad. Again, I wouldn't mind cheaper, but these prices (in context of software prices generally) aren't bad.

Screw 8.5 x 11, I want A4!

Only USA, Mexico and Canada use 'Letter' size, the rest of the world use the ISO paper sizes. Sure its a big market, but geez, what about the rest of us?

I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembers that!