But, wow, a lot of progress in 2 years

From reading the paper in the 8 April issue of Nature (‘Memristive’ switches enable ‘stateful’ logic operations via material implication), it's clear that HP has made a lot of progress toward developing practical large-scale components based on the Memristor. (This is a short article readily accessible to the technical layperson.) Another fascinating paper on the subject is Chua's 2003 invited paper (Leon O. Chua, "Nonlinear Circuit Foundations for Nanodevices, Part I: The Four-Element Torus," Proc. IEEE 91, 1830-1859 (2003)).

Nonintuitive, but correct

Chua and other physicists were able to predict the existence of memresistance from basic laws of physics, although they didn't have the technology to fabricate devices small enough for it to be measurable. 40 years on, our ability to fabricate structures at the nanometre level allows us to not only measure and model memresistance, but to build practical, useful components that make use of its novel characteristics.

[Incidently, memresistors aren't the only interesting electronic components that existed in theory but were unrealisable before advancements in nanoelectronics: junctionless nanowire transistors (i.e. Lilienfield transistors) are also likely to develop into useful devices.]

Brush up on your physics history

"That bit just sounds liike hype - resistors, capacitors and inductors are passive devices, the behaviour of which can be simply described in terms of the rate of change of current with respect to voltage."

Sure, resistance, capacitance, and inductance are the three most well known of the four passive electrical component properties, because their effects dominate at the physical scale where we normally fabricate practical electronic components. OTOH, folks that work with nanoscale electronics are well aware of the hysteretic effects of memresistance.

If you took any graduate-level electronics physics classes, you'll recall that in 1971 Leon Chua published an well-known paper in which he reasoned from symmetry arguments that there should be a fourth fundamental element, which he called a memristor (short for memory resistor). However, although he showed that such an element has many interesting and valuable circuit properties, until 2008 no one came up with either a useful physical model or an example of a memristor, mostly because nanoscale electronics technology wasn't far enough along.

It was Stan Williams' paper in 2008 that showed, using a simple analytical example, that memristance arises naturally in nanoscale systems in which solid-state electronic and ionic transport are coupled under an external bias voltage. These are the results that serve as the foundation for understanding a wide range of hysteretic current–voltage behaviour observed in many nanoscale electronic devices, and for the practical device development being done by Stan at HP.

But they PAID for those Congressmen...

Unfortunately, events of the past few years have splendidly demonstrated that big money (big comms, big pharma, big banking, whatever) OWNS the legislative branch of the USG. Unless there is some radical change that cuts off the cash flow to Congress, there'll never be any real consideration there of benefit to taxpayers, only about how the pie gets divided up among the biggest contributors. The FCC may be a regulatory agency in name, but as Julius is finding, it has been effectively defanged over the course of the past few decades.

"Puritanical"?

But surely the Puritans all went to North America in the 17th century. Australia was colonised a century later by immigrants of quite a different stripe (!). If the Rudd government is attempting to turn back the clock, it's to a time that never actually existed in Oz.

LTI parsing problem?

No contradiction at all. You just failed to translate the Merkin lingua tertii imperii into English. That should read:

US State Department spokesman, Michael Tran, said: "Our main concern is that big American companies continue to make as much money as possible from the global internet. Other than that we don't care what you do."

Drivers? For a keyboard?

My experience with both Microsoft and Logitech wireless keyboards is that (just like mice) you plug them in and they work. (I recall that I had to go to system preferences to map some of the special keys to useful functions, but that's no big deal.)

Now of course that was with OSX and Linux, but I'd find it ironic if a Microsoft keyboard didn't "just work" when plugged into a Windows machine...

(Now I do have to agree that the times you actually need a wireless keyboard are pretty limited... and in those situations I prefer an IBM trackpoint keyboard with a long cord...)

Why should anyone care?

IMO Apple's got the right response to Silverlight. I'm not sure why anyone in Linux-land cares either, except that you can find every imaginable fetish there.

Yeah, Silverlight is cool, but if Microsoft had ever intended it to be anything other than a tool for long-range Windows lock-in, they would have introduced it in a fundamentally different way (open standard, open source, whatever).

Can, and undoubtedly has been

Microsoft claims a reliable working range of 5m for the keyboard with the associated crap receiver in a USB dongle, so some back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that the unmarked van parked at the kerb should be able to monitor the keyboard on your office PC at 20 to 50m with a good receiver and (most importantly) good high-gain antenna.

So that's what puts the "soft" in "Microsoft"!

Well... Vreugdenhil was talking comparing Mac and Windows, as was I when I asked the question that started this thread.

But I think that you've actually provided the answer to my question. Sure malware for OSX exists -- just as does malware for Linux, and my router, and the network-accessible switchgear at the electrical substation down the street. But attackers DO tend to concentrate on the softest targets; i.e. those where the largest gains can be made with the least investment (money, time, technical expertise, physical access) and least risk (legal, physical exertion). And as even the resident Microsoft fan club has pointed out, Windows is hands-down the softest target out there.

So I've chosen St Bill, in hopes that the rest of us will be protected as long as Windows is, well, Microsoft.

Don't hold your breath...

Given the folks involved with OnLive, they're likely to bite off their nose to spite Linux users. There have been plenty of requests for a Linux plugin, but the most that anyone has got from OnLive seems to have been a single "not discussing it" response and the silent treatment.

@Agreed

I agree. In my experience, Apple users aren't any more computer-literate than Windows users. They're more likely to be non-technical professionals who want their computer to "just work". Maybe I'm just being politically correct, but it's hard for me to believe that a graphic designer who bought her Macbook Pro at the Apple Store is less likely to click links in questionable email than the burger-flipper who bought a budget PC at Walmart. And the OSX software environment is even more homogeneous than the variety of Windows installations out there.

You must not be googling in the right places

Mine's the one with the x-ray specs in the breast pocket.

Can and did

Fortunately there are good alternatives to the iPhone for those who want to hack or deploy odd applications outside of the Jobsian vision for the smartphone. Despite the whinging from (*cough*) certain tech writers, Google actually does seem to be perfectly happy for me to use my Android phone the way I want.; and I'm sure that Maemo/Moblin/MeeGo users say the same thing.

"Open" != "Execute"

Back, damned troll, back!

No, she THOUGHT that she was opening a file, but in actual fact her operating system executed a program attached to the email -- while going out of its way to trick her into thinking it was opening a file. The folks in Redmond that made those decisions about the way Windows should work may not have directly loaded that trojan into her machine, but they sweet-talked her and then led her into a dark alley where someone else could mug her. And they're every bit as accountable for the resulting trouble as the muggers themselves.

There's the Apple brand, and then there's Microsoft...

Yes, the "ooh, shiny" crowd loves the iPhone, despite its limitations and Jobsian control -- because the interface works so very, very well and it's made by oh-so-cool Apple. But the Microsoft brand is ALSO well known by the trend-following public... and it's a long, long way from Apple's cool factor. So I'm as puzzled as other commentards about what the marketing group in Redmond must have been smoking.

Worse, M$ wants the rest of us to pay for it

Unfortunately, this clown is proposing a universal Internet Tax to pay for the rubber rooms, rather than using Microsoft profits to fix Microsoft problems:

http://www.itworld.com/software/98522/microsofts-charney-suggests-net-tax-clean-computers

Facebook on Windows? Unlikely.

Just last month (in an Apache sponsorship announcemement), David Recordon pointedly noted that "the [Facebook] site has [always] been built on common open source software such as Linux, Apache, memcached, MySQL, and PHP." I hardly think they've switched to a Windows server farm.

So, as you were saying about data centres...

Is Gmail _that_ important?

It's hard for me to buy the argument that Gmail is so critical to anyone that they'll put up with behaviour that they find intrusive in order to keep using this particular free mail service. If you don't like the way Google pays for their "free" email service, get an account at Yahoo or one of the hundreds of other webmail services. Or if email is at all important to you, cough up a few quid a year for a real email account with no advertising or other intrusive behaviour.

The analogy to Microsoft is inaccurate and usually disingenuous (unless you're trying to make money from web advertising, perhaps): unlike the Windows and Office business lock-in, there's no coercion nor any reason to use any of Google's services -- other than wanting the shiny new features that they throw out "for free".

Makes sense...

Except when your OS has such a negative brand image. Probably the best that Microsoft could hope to do would be to introduce a stellar product that would hook OEMs disenfranchised with Android, and carefully hide their logo from the end user. In the current environment of over-hyped enthusiasm for Android and iWhatever, Windows Phone is likely to be as well received as, say, VMS Mobile...

Swine taser!

There is a time to laugh and a time not to laugh, and this is not one of them.

Chrome != Android

Yes, the gPad would be more interesting if it were running Android rather than Chrome. But Google has said that they have no intention of allowing third-party apps on devices running Chrome.

Actually...

According to the article -- and most of the other evidence around you -- the 'army of coders' model seems to be working splendidly. In fact, it's gone mainstream, so now that 'army' is being paid to do its coding. No wonder that FLOSS is scaring the crap out of Microsoft!

It's NOT just about the o/s.

"Anyone who wants to keep up with the latest sh*t , will go for winmobile , cos they don't know any better.... bless 'em"

Nope, they're buying the latest iPhones. Even my Microsoft fanboi acquaintances who put Vista Ultimate on every PC they owned have bought iPhones, not WinMo. For that group, the iPhone "cool" factor has completely trumped any Microsoft allegiance.

LaTeX, anyone?

Rather than pointing the finger at users, I would make the observation that the focus on formatting to the exclusion of content is a fundamental design flaw in Word -- and, by extension, OpenOffice. One doesn't have to be as fastidious as Donald Knuth to notice that every change to Word's user interface has further encouraged users to lose sight of the logical structure of the text and to conflate this with superficial typographical elements.

Yep, time for another fist

I'd be the first to stick up for Linux -- this engineering firm has been Windows-free since 1999 -- but the unfortunate truth is that Microsoft Office still has such a stranglehold on corporate documentation that the latest version of Office is pretty much a requirement when dealing with clients. (And while Microsoft Word is truly a horrible DTP application, OpenOffice manages to be even worse.)

I wonder if our Windows XP VM installations are "qualifying copies" of Windows...