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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.

Unless a file is open, I don't believe streams have any bearing on its content, so they probably can be safely ignored unless you are operating in an  environment where files to be compared are constantly being accessed.

I use Beyond Compare to do byte-for-byte comparisons of any two files, or all the files in two different directory trees.  However, Beyond Compare does not search for duplicates.

I use TreeSize Pro to find duplicates and optionally delete them. TreeSize Pro has a number of options for comparing files, incluuding MD5 and SHA256 checksums, which I feel is more than adequate. If you don't feel that's enough, you can always check based only on size and use Beyond Compare to do a byte-for-byte comparison of all matches found.

Today's NY Times has an interesting article on Apple App Store fraud, which appears to be increasing rapidly.

This could turn out to be a serious problem for Apple if it undermines public confidence that the closed and curated App Store and iTunes environments are safer than the open content and app markets provided by Google, Amazon and others.

A FLAC file is a good as the CD from which it was ripped. No better, no worse.  CD data is 16 bit/44.1 kHz (Redbook), so the actual sound is never going to be better than that.  That said, the sound you hear from the CD will often sound more natural if it is mastered at higher bit and sample rates, which is why I sometimes buy re-mastered CDs of music I already own.

SACDs definitely have better sound than regular CDs, but you’ll only hear those improvements on a high quality surround sound system. SACD tracks can’t be ripped to a digital format for listening on music players, but since headphones are inherently binaural and have limited dynamic range, a Redbook track from the same master as the SACD track is just as good for that purpose.

I mostly listen to music on an MP3 player these days, but I have thousands of CDs - about 2/3 Classical and 1/3 Jazz - accumulated over more than 30 years, and I’ve probably given away nearly as many over that time. When I buy a new CD, I rip it to FLAC and then convert it to MP3 for listening. Most of the older CDs only get ripped when I want to listen to a specific one.  The FLAC files get archived onto DVDs for storage (about 10-12 CDs to a DVD). The MP3 files stay on a hard drive.  I keep everything organized by using one folder for each CD or multi-CD set.

I use Easy CD-DA Extractor for both ripping and converting. The final product of my own rips is HQ VBR (EZCDDA uses the latest LAME encoder), but I have MP3s obtained from other sources which can vary from 128kbs to 320kbs. Given the same source, higher bitrates sound better, but in my experience, the quality of the original source is more important than the bitrate. MP3 encoders also vary in quality – LAME has improved greatly over the years, but I have been surprised at how well music encoded some 7 years ago with the Mediasource software bundled with my first Creative player still sounds today.  Variable bit rates save space over constant bit rates and don't seem to affect the sound quality on any player I've owned.

The most reliable online CD database today is Musicbrainz, but the quality of data retrieved is still variable. I use Mp3Tag to edit tags.  Among other things, it lets me export and import tags to and from text files. I often find it faster to export a lot of tags and edit them in a text editor, then re-import them. That also makes it easy to re-use tags from one rip to another of the same material, or copy them from other versions of the same works (particularly useful for classical music).

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However... all my problems with slow database updates are currently academic. Using my shiny new gadget in the car yesterday (connected to an FM transmitter that the car stereo is tuned to) I forgot to disconnect the wires when I got out of the car in the supermarket carpark. The audio cable got shut in the car door, the Clip unclipped and hit the ground and although I picked it up (with a few carefully chosen Words that would have even shocked any passing service personnel) I didn't discover until this morning that the 32Gb SD card is no longer in the device.

You might try looking inside the car on the off chance that the card actually popped out before the door shut on the wires. Admittedly not likely, but it won't cost you anything but some of your time.

According to this article in the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Department of Justice has told Apple and five of the largest book publishers that it plans to sue them for colluding to raise the prices consumers pay for ebooks.

Woody Leohnard has posted an extremely negative take on Windows 8 on Windows Secrets. It's a lot more insightful than most of his stuff.

Microsoft's business is to make money. PCs are already a commodity business from the hardware end. For the vast majority of business applications, a 3-year old PC running XP is all that is needed, and that isn't going to change anytime soon.  The only advances in hardware that need a more capable operating system are in the multimedia end of things (video, music, games) and that is shifting rapidly to smartphones, tablets and probably other touch or voice controlled devices in the next few years.

Microsoft is once again behind the curve, as they were with the graphical interface in the late 80's and the Internet in the early 90's.  They were able to pull ahead in both cases because they faced much weaker competition.  Today, they are up against not only Apple, but Google and Amazon. Not a good place for them to be.

Canon was the manufacutrer for the engine in HP Laser printers for many years (possibly still are). As a trade-off for the business, they agreed to sell only printers that did not support HP's PCL and Adobe's PostScript directly.  That was a long time ago and that agreement may no longer hold, but Canon printers still seem to go their own way.

I do like Canon best for inkjet color printing, but I do very little of that, so when I do, it is cost effective for me to have color images printed elsewhere.

For laser printing, I have been a Brother fan for many years now. Even the cheapest Brother printers are invariably reliable, even for duplex printing (which I do a lot of). They also generally cost less to buy and operate than most others for low and medium volume printing.

I used to like Canon for MFC devices, but now prefer Brother there too. My current Brother DCP-8080DN is by far the best MFC I've ever worked with. Brother's networking software is superb for both printing and scanning (across a Windows network, anyway, I haven't tried it on Linux) and it provides both a legal-sized flatbed (essential for me) and a fast auto document feeder. all for less than $350, which is what a standalone scanner with similar capabilities would cost me.

Processor speed really doesn't matter as much as from factor, connectivity and screen quality, which are the true differentiators between Android tablets.  There are trade-offs between how light and thin a tablet can be and what kinds of standard ports (HDMI, SD, USB, etc.) it can support, so the first thing to consider is whether it's more important to you to have something thin and light or something heavier with better I/O capabilities, and perhaps more rugged too.

Most high-end Android tablets today have 1280x800 screens, but both ASUS and Lenovo have announced 1920x1200 10" tablets for the 2nd quarter of 2012. I'd guess that by the end of the year, that will be standard for high-end Android tablets, particularly if the next iPad has 2048x1536 resolution, as rumored.

I also have a wireless Brother HL-2270DW laser printer - I have to confess I haven't looked for that but it would need to work.

You can find Linux drivers for most Brother printers (including the HL-2270DW) here

Thanks - now I just need to find something for the Canon!

Turboprint sells a printer driver utility for Linux that claims to support most Canon printers, as well as HP, Epson and Brother.

You may be able to find other, possibly free, alternatives here

I also have a wireless Brother HL-2270DW laser printer - I have to confess I haven't looked for that but it would need to work.

You can find Linux drivers for most Brother printers (including the HL-2270DW) here

From Linus Torvalds' Google+ blog:

I gave OpenSUSE a try, because it worked so well at install-time on the Macbook Air, but I have to say, I've had enough. There is no way in hell I can honestly suggest that to anybody else any more.

I first spent weeks arguing on a bugzilla that the security policy of requiring the root password for changing the timezone and adding a new wireless network was moronic and wrong.

I think the wireless network thing finally did get fixed, but the timezone never did - it still asks for the admin password.

And today Daniela calls me from school, because she can't add the school printer without the admin password.

Whoever moron thought that it's "good security" to require the root password for everyday things like this is mentally diseased.

So here's a plea: if you have anything to do with security in a distro, and think that my kids (replace "my kids" with "sales people on the road" if you think your main customers are businesses) need to have the root password to access some wireless network, or to be able to print out a paper, or to change the date-and-time settings, please just kill yourself now. The world will be a better place.

.. and now I need to find a new distro that actually works on the Macbook Air.

I image and restore system partitions frequently. I stopped using Acronis a few years ago because I found it to be unreliable at times -- a backup is only worthwhile if you can be sure it will restore correctly every time.

I've been using Paragon since then and have found it rock solid, although their interface takes a little getting used to.

The free version of Paragon has a lot of functionality.

They also have a free rescue kit.

In addition to Calibre, you need the plug-in deDRM tools. See the Apprrentice Alf blog for information on how to get and use them to remove DRM from various ebook formats.

Calibre will also convert between mobi and epub, which allows me to buy books on Amazon and read them on my Nook Touch (e-ink). Removing the DRM also allows me to read Nook books in the Mantano or Moon+ readers on my Android phone and tablet (Nook for Android sucks big time).

My first choice for reading most books is usually the e-ink Nook Simple Touch, if I can buy them in any ebook format. On the other hand, real Android devices (Not Nook or Kindle color tablets) allow much easier management and navigation for a large collection of ebooks.

I've started using Ghostery in the browser I use for most ordinary browsing (Opera) and have set it to block all tracking elements.  The results have exceeded my expectations.  It has pretty much stopped any advertising from following me across multiple sites, such as political ads on news sites and ads for competitors I have recently visited on shopping sites.

Since you can selectively enable or disable any individual tracking elements, I have considered unblocking Google Analytics to allow sites like Donation Coder to keep count of unique visitors. I'm just not sure I trust Google enough to do so yet.

followup...
But I'm really hoping a Windows 8 tablet comes out with (very key!) a build quality and responsiveness at least close to the ipad.  I'm not going to want to use it if there are frustrating delays with swipes and touches.  I have no doubt the productivity of the Windows tablet will far surpass any of the androids or ipads...no doubt whatsoever.  Doesn't mean the applications will be easy to use on the tablet, but at least you'll be able to "do" the things you need to get done.  File/folder access is THE distinguishing feature of Windows vs. Android/iOS.

Bob Lewis at InfoWorld is very much in agreement with you on this, but I think that in the long run, Android is going to be the winner, not whatever Microsoft comes up with as a tablet OS.

Android already has a decent file system, and apps that don't try to mimic the iOS environment take advantage of that. Documents to Go, Mantano, RepliGo and others allow you to browse for files throughout a device's storage. ES File Manager allows me to browse not only my phone and tablet, but my Windows LAN as well.  I can copy and move files between folders on the device or the LAN, and open them directly in associated applications, much like a Windows file manager.

I think we are a long way from having the kind of functionality on tablets that we expect on personal computers, but as of today, Android gives me a more of that than iOS ever will. As for Microsoft, I  think they may well end up with another non-competitive OS like the Pocket PC, at least on phones and tablets.

Re Winzip, I installed it recently to test something and I was really, really impressed... by the amount of garbage they had managed to cram into the installer of what should have been a simple archive tool. It must have taken me 10 minutes to install the stupid thing, click through all the prompts about other software I didn't want and similar nonsense... Really incredible how bad it is now, even before you get to the program itself (which then tries to get you to install even more junk the first time you run it).

The hallmark of Corel Corporation!  They buy up well-regarded programs whose developers are cashing out, and try to wring every buck they can out of them by grinding out annual "upgrades" that offer no real improvement, and loading them with marketing tools for their other software properties.

I find personally find Zentimo very useful. but less for safe removal than for managing multiple removable devices. 

I typically have several external drives connected to my desktop systems, which can vary depending on what I am working on.  Hovering the mouse pointer over the Zentimo tray icon gives me an instant overview of what is attached,  what drive letters are assigned, and a quick button to open each in Windows Explorer (or another file browser).  Zentimo also allows you to store settings for removable drives on the device itself, so that the device will appear the same on any system running Zentimo.

Just connecting my Android phone in USB drive mode grabs 3 drive letters, Sansa music players with micro-SD storage take 2, and I have plenty of external hard disks for offline storage and/or backups that get moved around between systems.

One very good reason for dropping WinZip is that it is now owned by Corel.

Nico Mac originally wrote WinZip while he was working on the Windows version of Kedit  for Mansfield Software.  I was a beta tester and he sent me a licensed copy when it went live. I liked the program so much I told him I wanted to pay for it and sent him a check, which he returned.  My only complaint about WinZip, which was never addressed over the many years I used it, was that it did not provide an option to set the time stamp of an archive to that of the latest file contained in it, which I consider to be critical for managing archived data.

Although I still always compress to Zip files, the only universal standard for archives, I mostly use WinRAR now to do so, because I like the way it works. But WinRAR will not allow you to create a Zip archive with more than 4GB of content, so I also use 7zip when I need that capability. 7zip is good, but the interface is mediocre and the 64-bit version does not show up in the context menu of XYplorer on Windows 7 64-bit systems.

The real problem with this is that textbooks published through this system can only be sold through Apple's retail distribution system  - iTunes or whatever parallel system they set up for the educational market.  See here for a discussion of the iBooks EULA.

Big publishers who can afford multiple product lines may like this because it eliminates used textbook reselling and it's efficient for them to pay Apple 30% to handle everything, but it has the potential to really screw small publishers and authors by locking them into Apple and out of the rest of the educational market.