Also, it has been knows for years that when nvidia makes a chip, the ones that are slightly malformed or that do not perform perfectly are clocked at a lower rate and have some features disabled.

So for the 8800 series of chips, the perfect ones are clocked the fastest and put in the 8800 GTX, and the ones that performed slightly less well are clocked slower and put in the 8800 GTS with a few pipelines disabled.

This just seems like an extension of that nvidia policy with some Microsoft restrictions tossed in.

PLease?

I realize you were probably joking, but the way most noise canceling headphones work is they broadcast white noise that your ears ignore to cover the other sounds in the environment. So you would probably go deaf twice as fast.

You don't consider a 2 TB hard drive a super large capacity?

Psh... Kids these days...

@Chris D.
FLAC files are huge for a reason, they are a lossless format. With mp3's and other compressed audio formats a computer algorithm trims out data it assumes the listener will not notice, such as high frequency sounds and some other data.

I am not an audiophile and over a regular set of computer speakers I am a bit hard pressed to notice much of a difference. However, I recently bought a decent set of speakers for my room and now I can notice the difference between FLAC and mp3's.

Is it enough of a difference to justify the 10x size of the tracks? For most of the music I listen to, no. But there are a few albums that just sound amazing with FLAC.

Actually, 2.5% is fairly standard for a small business processing credit cards. My parents run a small woodworking business and are constantly complaining about how big of a ripoff credit card fees are.

If your volume of transactions go up significantly, the % will drop, but if you are a small business the transaction fee is ridiculous.

I agree, this article seems to be a blatant advertisement for the iPhone. Other smartphones have had these same features for years and just now, after the release of the iPhone 3GS you decide to run an article dedicated how the iPhone is just so awesome it might cause major camera and GPS manufacturers to go out of business.

At the very least you could have made it a generic smartphone article.

Oh well, I don't run the blog, I just read it and while Engadget does seem to have a serious preference for Apple products their other articles remain at the high quality we have all come to expect and I can just skim over the numerous, repetitive articles praising the Cult of Jobs.

please?

Please?

I am seconding Sheep. I have several older computers sitting around my place. One is almost 5 years old, and with Xubuntu, it runs pretty much fine, but with normal Ubuntu or Kubuntu the performance drops off sharply. Boot times are very long and I notice a definite drop in performance over more lightweight linux distros.

That said, its a 5 year old machine, I dont expect the latest versions of operating systems to run perfectly on it.