I know some laptops have the ability to view a desktop "window" that scrolls around a larger virtual desktop when your mouse reaches the edge of the screen. (This may be built into the hardware?)

Also, GoToMyPC.com does this on their viewer, so that you can view desktops larger than the one you are using for remote access. VNC allows you resize a large screen to fit on a smaller screen, and the results are sometimes usable, if not gorgeous.

Not sure how easy this would be to implement though. You might need to write a virtual device driver that would get in between Windows and the actual display driver. That's some really heavy duty coding, partly because device drivers are just heavy duty, and partly because later versions of Windows (Vista + 7) will probably block such a device, as it could be used to circumvent copy protection.

I may be wrong, though. I'm not a coder, so maybe I'm missing an obvious alternative.

If you really want the low-down on the fun and whacky world of software pricing, this article by Joel Spolsky is the best treatment I've seen, and fun to read too! (At least as fun to read as any blog post containing charts and spreadsheets can be.)

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html

The gist of the article in a nutshell is that software companies are trying to price their products to capture consumer surplus, which is...

...the extra value that rich consumers get from their purchase that they would have been perfectly happy to do without.

It's sort of like if you were all set to buy that new merino wool sweater, and you thought it was going to cost $70, which is well worth it, and when you got to Banana Republic it was on sale for only $50! Now you have an extra $20 in found money that you would have been perfectly happy to give to the Banana Republicans!

Yipes!

That bothers good capitalists. Gosh darn it, if you're willing to do without it, well, give it to me! I can put it to good use, buying a SUV or condo or Mooney or yacht one of those other things capitalists buy!

In economist jargon, capitalists want to capture the consumer surplus.

Let's do this. Instead of charging $220, let's ask each of our customers if they are rich or if they are poor. If they say they're rich, we'll charge them $349. If they say they're poor, we'll charge them $220.

Turns out pricing's not nuts - it's just very, very crafty.

I too thought that shutting out Google was sheer, ornery stupidity. But when I heard Murdoch was giving exclusive search rights to Bing, who would pay him for results, a light went off for me.

It's ideological. Maybe Murdoch is going for the big win here.

I know this isn't a political forum, and I don't want to roil the waters, but it's hard not to at least suspect a political motive when RM is involved.

Right now, people choose Google because it's widely regarded as "the best". For people like us who know computers, and possibly something about algorithms like PageRank, we consider "best" to mean "returns the most relevant links for my query" or "most likely to find what I'm looking for." But there are plenty of people who have no idea how Google does what it does, and for them "best" just means "most popular."

But popularity is fleeting. Google has been accused in some circles of being politically left-leaning. They certainly seem to embrace an "information wants to be free" hackerish worldview. And don't they run with that open source crowd, who are shameless communists?

Many of Mr. Murdoch's content properties cater to those on the right end of the political spectrum. It's a big group, and tends to be fiercely critical of those on the political left, and willing to back up its criticism with financial support. If he can get a substantial fraction of this demographic to turn against the idea of "unpaid search" or "freeloader search" on ideological grounds, this could be a big kettle of fish. It could take the corrosive left vs. right culture that has been so detrimental to politics in the U.S. and elsewhere, and bring it into something that was previously neutral territory.

If Google can be re-cast as a "leftie" search engine, and Bing as a "rightie" search engine, than people will make their choice based on which group they identify with, not on technical merit. Ideology tends to short-circuit actual thinking. I suspect nobody knows this better than Murdoch.