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From today's NY times:

Velvin Hogan, the foreman of the jury in the Apple-Samsung case, said in a phone interview on Saturday that the decision should send a “clear message” to the industry that companies that violate intellectual property will have to pay a penalty, like the one Samsung officials face. “They took the risk and it caught up with them,” said Mr. Hogan, 67, a retired electrical engineer who holds two issued patents himself and has a third pending.

I wouldn't venture a guess as to whether this verdict might be eventually overturned, but I'd say that Samsung's lawyers certainly have some pretty good grounds for their inevitable appeal.

My first personal computer, many (many!) years ago, was a Z-80 based Vector Graphics 3 maxed out with 56 KB (that's kilobytes) of RAM.  The Vector ROM-based assembler could not generate 8080 code, so I purchased the M-80 assembler ($400!!) from Micro Soft (as it was then known), which advertised a library to generate either Z-80 or 8080 code from a common source file.

The first time I used the assembler, I was working late at night, and found nothing about the 8080 library in the documentation, which consisted of about 20 single spaced pages poorly reproduced from something printed on a mis-aligned daisy wheel printer.  Micro Soft was based in New Mexico, which was 2 hours behind NY, so I figured there might be a chance someone might still be around to answer a question.

My phone call was in fact answered, by a very knowledgeable young man who identified himself only as Bill and, in a voice I would come to recognize many times over the years, explained how the library was fully documented in the source code comments. We had an interesting conversation about the the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of providing documentation in this manner, and when it was appropriate to do so.

I gather Bill no longer works for Microsoft, but it's good to know their tech support is still top notch.

Even if you can use snapshots for testing, I agree with Renegade that it is a good idea to keep backup copies of any original "clean" VMs you create.  In many ways, a VM is like another computer available to work on when needed, and you really don't want to lose it by accident.

A VM is like a disk image. The difference is that the operating system on it has been modified to require a virtual environment in which to run.  In some cases, it is possible to convert an image of a real system to run in a VM, or to convert a VM to run a real system.  I have used Paragon's virtual manager (part of their Hard Disk Manager Pro but also available separately), to restore a backup image of an older system to a VMware VM, allowing me to run programs that were installed on it even though I no longer have the original computer.

A VMware virtual disk is just a set of files contained in a directory.  Some tools even allow you to mount a VMware VM to your host system as a virtual drive.  I suggest using the option to limit file sizes to 2GB because it makes it much easier to manage and copy or move large VMs than as a single huge file.

Player doesn't have the snapshot feature of Workstation, but you can close a VM and make a backup image of the VM directory, then restore it later to return to the initial state.  The easiest way to do that is just make a Zip archive of the VM directory.  I do that anyway to make backups of some of the VMs I use regularly.

You can create as many virtual machines as you want on a single host system, although you can only open one at a time with Player -- Workstation allows you to network multiple VMs.

If you use VMs more than occasionally, Workstation is well worth the price, IMHO. That said, Player is probably adequate for most people's purposes.

"Windows 8 review: Yes, it's that bad"

"Windows 8 is a failure -- an awkward mishmash that pulls the user in two directions and ends up as a desktop OS for tablets and a tablet OS for desktop."

"Windows 8 is guaranteed to disappoint nearly everyone."

These harsh words come from Woody Leonhard, of all people, writing in InfoWorld today.

Not having tried Windows 8 yet, I'll reserve my own judgment, but while I have read good things about the underlying engine, there seems to be almost unanimous condemnation of the Metro Modern UI.

That depends on what you mean by "calculating math."

If you are talking about writing high-performance software, most high speed math libraries are written in C, and most C compilers provide optimization choices to help speed up math routines. Depending on whether or not you will be working in floating point also makes a difference -- there are libraries optimized for math co-processors and parallel processing, and for nearly any math functions you might desire.  Fortran is still widely used because it is easier to program (for mathematicians) but not as efficient or flexible as C/C++.

If you are talking about the need to quickly implement a variety of math calculations, processing speed is not as important a factor as the ability to use existing routines that are known to do the job properly. There are many specialized math programming systems, most of them pricey, favored by different folks in different fields: Mathematica, Matlab, Gauss, etc..  R is a good choice for statistics, but is inefficient on large data sets.

Sadly, it's only the name that has been changed (it's now called the "Windows Start Screen").

I haven't played with W8 yet, but given that even J. Peter Bruzzese, the house shill for Microsoft at InfoWorld, admits that it makes him physically ill, I'm not in a hurry to do so.

Just an FYI. When I evaluated Essential PIM a few months ago I had it lose information that had been previously entered and saved to the calendar. Don't know if this was an anomaly or something specific to the machine I was running it on. But it spooked me enough that I removed it from further consideration after that happened. Which was a shame. It looked to be a very capable PIM. YMMV.

I dumped Outlook (which I used only for calendar, contacts and tasks) about 6 months ago and have been using EPIM exclusively on my Windows PCs since then without ever having any data loss, although I did mess up a few entries at first while learning how to adapt the features to the way I work.  EPIM is extremely customizable, but the way options are selected and applied  is not always intuitive, at least to me.  EPIM can be set to make automatic backups with location, timing and number of versions saved all user selectable.

I had been looking for a PIM to replace Outlook since moving to Android from Palm several years ago, and had tried many (including Pimlical). Essential PIM was the first one I found that I felt I could live with.

Note: I use the portable Pro version and do not use the Windows defaults for either program or data locations.

The ability to run in portable mode and to specify my own data locations is one of the most important considerations I have in choosing many kinds of programs. 

I have an Apps folder under which I install programs that allow for a portable usage mode (and certain others). I also have a Data folder under which I keep all my critical data folders. This allows me to easily replicate my data on another computer  for backup or for when I travel. It also allows me to update many programs without having to run Setup, and to transfer them between systems, along with their settings.

Another option might be EssentialPIM.

The Windows Pro edition is licensed per computer, but there is a free version that is probably good enough to see if you like the way it works.  The Pro edition also provides a fully functional portable version. There are free apps for both Android and iOS.

On Android devices, EPIM uses its own tasks, notes and password modules and the built-in (Google) calendar and contacts, but you can synchronize those directly if you prefer not to use Google.

I'm not sure if this is the same thing, but I recall having a similar problem a few years ago.

How I solved it was to open the next to lowest level folder in Explorer and drag the lowest level folder to without opening it. Once that was done, I was able to open the folder by clicking on it without Explorer hanging.

My interpretation of why this worked is that a folder is a file that contains pointers to the physical location of other files, which Explorer uses to build the path to those files when the folder is opened. Dragging the folder to a higher level before opening it shortened the path before Explorer tried to build it and hung.  I don't know enough about the internals of how Explorer works to know if my explanation is correct, but in my situation, it did work.

Not to be outdone, the Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft has just hired Mark Penn as "corporate vice-president of strategic and special projects."

My guess is that the only reason no big tech company has hired Bernie Madoff as CFO is that he won't be free for the next 150 years.

A retraction.  A few days ago I said:

I've played with iPads and there is no question that they beat any Android tablet hands down when it comes to responsiveness.

Today, I received my Nexus 7 tablet from Google and I have to withdraw that statement.  This thing is every bit as responsive as any iPad I've ever played with, and at 1280x800 on a 7" screen, it looks just about as sharp.

I don't know how much of this is due to the hardware and how much is Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), but I'd have to say this is the first device I've tried that gives up nothing to the iPad and has all the advantages of Android.

I've played with iPads and there is no question that they beat any Android tablet hands down when it comes to responsiveness.  But the iOS environment simply won't allow me to use a device the way I would like.

The problem is the same thing that kept the Macintosh from becoming a useful personal computer until the arrival of the *NIX based OS-X, and that is Steve Jobs' notion that users should not have to deal with files because data "belongs" to a specific application.   To my way of thinking, data is content and should exist independently of any application. I want to be able to choose the application I prefer in any particular situation to use on it.  Apple deliberately set out to prevent this by not providing a file system to organize data independently of applications.

I don't need to use anything like Dropbox on my Android tablet or phone. I can simply move anything I want to and from the device anytime I want to. I don't even need a USB connection. There are several excellent file managers for Android that allow me to browse my LAN for files over WiFi and even view many of them first. My current favorite is X-Plore, which has a great dual-pane interface, but ES File Explorer,  FX and Astro also make this easy. I can also use an FTP server on the devices that allows me to browse the file system from my PC, and even to manage or edit files from the PC with ftp aware programs like Beyond Compare.

I do have a Nook Simple Touch Reader, and I'd agree that e-Ink is far easier on the eyes than any LCD screen, but I find myself reading more and more on the tablet.  One reason is that I can pick among several excellent readers which have different strengths for different types of documents, or different devices.  With the Android file system, I can organize documents the way I want and use whatever program I want to view or edit them. In other words, I don't have to give up the benefits of the PC environment to  enjoy the advantages of a tablet.

Great review 

I own many thousands of books and also thousands of CDs. Many of the books are technical, science or art-related, and the CDs are mostly Classical and Jazz. Many are hard to find and long out of print. I also have a number of LPs that are not available on CD.  Barcode support is essential because of the size of my collections, and the nature of the items to be cataloged means that I need a lot of flexibility in organizing the structure and content of multiple databases.

I've tried many different music and/or book cataloging programs over the years and found all of them inadequate for my needs in one way or the other.  After reading this review, I downloaded Readerware and tried out the book and music modules.

I found the interface nowhere near as sophisticated as many other cataloging programs. It also uses some non-standard approaches that take a little getting used to.  But it provides a level of flexibility that I haven't seen in any other such software with respect to customizing databases, selecting sources of information, and making the collected data available.

I'd say this is probably not the best program for the occasional or non-technical user, but it looks like a perfect fit for my needs, and I will definitely be buying a license.

Storage is really not an issue unless you want to use the device primarily to watch video or listen to music, which I don't.  I mostly use my current 10" tablet for reading and browsing and have a lot of  productivity, database and reference apps installed, along with many books and documents in ePub or pdf formats.  By far the largest storage hogs are dictionaries. But out of the base 32GB storage, I still have about 25GB available.

Google announced its own brand tablet today, the Nexus 7 which looks like it should be a real game changer in the tablet wars:  A 7 inch tablet running Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) with a 1280x800 IPS gorilla glass screen, a quad core Tegra 3 CPU and 12 core Nvidia GPU, weighing 12 oz. and selling for $199 with 8GB memory, $249 with 16GB memory. 

It is supposed to be available in about a month.

The x86 tablet looks interesting as an alternative to ultrabooks and the like, but it won't actually be available until early 2013, by which time there should be some serious competition around.  The RT (ARM-based) version doesn't seem to offer any advantages over existing tablets, and many drawbacks.

One thing to be wary about is that it would appear that the aspect of the Apple iOS environment that Microsoft is most interested in emulating is the closed apps marketplace.  Footnote #1 at the bottom of Microsoft's own Surface page, indicates in tiny type that it "Works exclusively with apps from the Windows Store."

And the winner is:

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MobileRead Wiki has a wealth of information on e-readers, including a matrix comparing most of the currently available e-ink readers.

This is the ultimate reference on this topic.
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As threatened, the U.S. Department of Justice has just filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and five major publishing house for fixing the price of ebooks.

An interesting article  in Wired provides yet another example of how content providers would rather protect their intellectual property from theft than make it worthwhile for people to pay for it.

The update notice from Paragon also says:

a few days ago, we informed you about the change in Microsoft’s licensing policy that no longer allows software vendors to provide WinPE media to their customers directly.

So apparently this is a general change in Microsoft's licensing policy that will affect anyone who distributes a product that includes WinPE. 

I can't figure out what Microsoft hopes to gain by this, unless they are secretly trying to promote Linux as a recovery environment.

I received an email this morning from Paragon with the following message:

You own a Paragon product with the WinPE recovery environment. We would like to inform you that Microsoft has changed its license conditions, meaning that we will no longer be allowed to offer you the Paragon WinPE as of March 30, 2012.

If you haven’t downloaded your WinPE from the Paragon website yet, we recommend you to do so by March 30, 2012.

After March 30th, it will no longer be possible to download the WinPE recovery environment using your account! Customer service/support will not be able to send it retroactively!

I've been using Paragon Hard Disk Manager Professional for years and one of the benefits of their WinPE recovery environment is that you get to use the same full product that gets installed on a Windows system.

Does anyone know if Microsoft is putting the cabosh on WinPE  altogether, or if they just raised the price to the point at which Paragon no longer felt they could afford to provide the environment to users.  Are other products that offer WinPE also affected?

There are several Android apps that put the entire Wikipedia database on a device. Wikipock and Wikidroyd are two that I am aware of, although I have never tried either of them. I believe neither includes images.

Paragon has the Concise Encyclopedia Britannica 2011 for $19.99 on several devices, including Android. It includes images, but is a smaller subset of the full Britannica.