Microsoft justifies Vista Home’s no-virtualization policy, saying it’s just because they don’t want to incur the added support costs. I’m no conspiracy theorist, and I can believe that they just wouldn’t want to train their whole support department to cope with virtual machines.

One thing to note is that this only applies to retail and OEM licensing: copies that are downloaded via MSDN do not have this restriction.

I didn’t blog when Art. Lebedev announced that the Optimus-103 keyboard will have 103 keys instead of 113 (doing away with the added context-sensitive shortcuts keys that promised to be quite useful) or that some of its keys (such as space and shift) would not sport screens at all in order to avoir manufacturing costs for custom shapes, but now for the straw that broke the camel’s back: the screens will be monochrome.

Sure, the reasoning makes sense: true enough, color isn’t required to display Photoshop icons or whatever — but, as one commenter put it, there’s nothing required about key screens at all, and the whole thing is a luxury gadget anyway, so what it needs to be is sexy.

At this rate, it better not sell for more than 60 bucks.

 

# 2006-11-29 02:10:31