Way back in January 2007, after years of hype and anticipation, Microsoft unveiled Windows Vista to a decidedly lukewarm reception by the PC community, IT pros, and tech journalists alike. Instead of a revolutionary next-generation OS that was chock-full of new features, the Windows community got an underwhelming rehash with very little going for it. Oh, and Vista was plagued with performance and incompatibility problems to boot.

Since then, the PC community has taken the idea that Vista is underwhelming and turned it into a mantra. We’ve all heard about Vista’s poor network transfer speeds, low frame rates in games, and driver issues—shoot, we’ve experienced the problems ourselves. But over the last 18 months, Vista has undergone myriad changes, including the release of Service Pack 1, making the OS worth a second look. It’s time we determine once and for all whether we should stick with XP for the next 18 months while we wait for Windows 7. But before we answer that question, let’s review exactly what’s wrong with Windows Vista.

Read the article here: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/shattered_dreams_and_broken_pr...

Colin and Mia had been together two years when they hit their first dry spell. "We hadn't had sex in a few weeks, and one night before bed she asked me how I was dealing with it," says Colin (not his real name), a 38-year-old vice president at a Web start-up in Boston. "I told her I was masturbating," he says. "She asked me where and how." So Colin took a deep breath and told her: at the office, once a week or so, to Internet porn.

Mia (not her real name) freaked out. "She was fuming mad," Colin says. "She couldn't handle me leaving her out—it made her feel insecure." Mia adds, "Just imagining him there in his office on his own, it seemed like the ultimate act of desperation, something you'd only do if you didn't have a partner."

Mia was shocked that Colin was rubbing one out when he should have been crunching numbers, but she wouldn't have been if she'd looked at the stats: Most guys in long-term relationships continue to masturbate—even when they're having regular sex. A 1994 study found that nearly 85 percent of men living with a sexual partner masturbate, compared with only 45 percent of women.

And while the cliché is that it's the sex-starved husband who is driven to furtively spending some "me" time in the bathroom, research shows that most men's masturbation habits have nothing to do with how often they have sex.

Even so, when your wife finds out she'll hear a singular message: Our sex life isn't up to scratch. "Many women assume that if they catch their partner masturbating, it means they aren't doing their part to keep him happy. 'Why would he want to jerk off if I am right here?'" says Searah Deysach, owner of the Chicago sex shop Early to Bed.

Six Revisions has posted 28 excellent, useful cheat sheets in various file formats for Photoshop, Dreamweaver, colors, typography, and other web-design related topics all in one page with pictures of each cheat sheet. It's really a great article to read, even if you're not a designer at all.

Read the article here: http://sixrevisions.com/resources/cheat_sheets_for_web_designers/

Hey! Who here loves the apocalypse?!

Yeah, I know: exactly nobody. Creating a believable, functional world like ours in fiction is hard enough. Most attempts to write about worlds destroyed by varying forms of human stupidity are marred themselves by… well, human stupidity. Designing a world where nothing works but there’s still enough action to drive a plot along involves pulling off some serious authorial sleight-of-hand. It’s frankly amazing that any really great post-apocalyptic fiction exists at all.

Ah, but great fiction isn’t what they're about at Topless Robot. No, it's about the awful, the stupid, the insultingly bad, and in this case, what’s just plain annoying. Here’s a list of the most irritatingly wrong-headed post-apocalyptic settings we’re ever run across. Note that we aren’t necessarily dogging the stories here (although a lot of these stories are pretty shit). This is about their insultingly stupid status quos.

Read more after the jump.

How, exactly, did Microsoft wind up shipping a notoriously defective Xbox 360, resulting in thousands upon thousands of gamers burning through temporarily working consoles and over a billion dollars in warranty expenses? That's largely answered in Venture Beat's massive feature on the birthing pains of the console, one designed under the gun and hastily revised with a software "ship and patch" philosophy.

Venture Beat's Dean Takahashi talks to numerous on- and off-the-record sources close to the manufacturing of the Xbox 360, providing insight into how ill-conceived certain aspects of the first-to-launch console were. For example, VB writes that in August of 2005, just prior to launch, some 68% of consoles coming off the assembly line just didn't work.

It's a fascinating read, from the console's early engineering gaffes and compromises, to Microsoft's reluctant admission of defective hardware. Some of it may be familiar territory, but it's a comprehensive look at the console's history, if nothing else.

Read the article here: http://venturebeat.com/2008/09/05/xbox-360-defects-an-inside-history-of-...

When actor David Duchovny made headlines for voluntarily entering rehab for sex addiction, fans of the "X-Files" star were left wondering: How can someone become addicted to sex?

It turns out sex addiction, also called compulsive sexual behavior, operates somewhat like a gambling compulsion or alcoholism: It's about devoting your free time to a behavior that you cannot stop, even if you damage relationships or prompt other negative consequences. Examples of addicting sex behaviors include extensively using pornography, having affairs, sleeping with prostitutes, and masturbating excessively, to the point where such behaviors get out of control.

If you think it's just about being horny, think again. For many addicts, sex becomes a way to numb out painful feelings, kill time or stop feeling lonely, said Kelly McDaniel, licensed professional counselor in San Antonio, Texas, and author of "Ready to Heal: Women Facing Love, Sex and Relationship Addiction."

"Most people I talk to get to the point where they don't even like sex," said McDaniel, who has no connection to David Duchovny and did not speculate about his specific situation.

Sex addiction is estimated to affect 3 to 6 percent of adults in the U.S., according to the Mayo Clinic, but the American Psychiatric Association has not classified the condition in its diagnostic handbook.

Riding my bicycle along Hollywood Boulevard today I saw him in the crowd - noticed him instantly. When we reached each other, I said hi and asked if he would mind if I took his photo.

By the Earl of Stirling.

The evil Bush administration has largely completed the process begun years ago of turning America, the most powerful and richest nation in history, into a Third World nation. I remember a lunch, about 21 years ago in Long Beach, California, with the president of an aerospace company, myself, and a senior foreign general. A comment by the general has always stayed with me. He said, “America is a very rich nation, it will take a lot to bring her down”. In the twenty some years after this, I am simply amazed at just how far one crooked president after another, with the assistance of our “bought and paid for” Congress has managed to take us.

Currently we have an economy that is being held together with bailing wire and glue until after the November election. Even CNBC’s Cramer, a capitalist if there ever was one, now says that the American stock market is so rigged that the average person needs to get out NOW (link to a video with him talking about this is http://www.breakthematrix.com/content/Cramer-States-the-Obvious-Markets-... .

We have just seen the early stages of systemic problems in the American economy and the global economy with the fallout from the subprime mortgage problems. The real problem is that the “policemen” of the American economy, and to a lessor extent the entire global economy, have “been asleep” at their jobs; and this has not been an accident. Laws have been changed overturning the post-Great Depression rules designed to save the banking industry from itself.

A baby's first words are often "mama" and "dada," much to the delight of parents. Now scientists think they know why.

Beyond the obvious — Mommy and Daddy are around a lot and babies are drawn to them — languages in many cultures have apparently made the task easy by creating words for mothers and fathers that feature patterns of repeating sounds, a new study suggests.

To arrive at this finding, brain scans were made of 22 newborns (age 2 days to 3 days) while they listened to recordings of made-up words. They heard words that end in repeating syllables, such as "mubaba" and "penana," as well as words without them, such as "mubage" and "penaku."

Brain activity increased in the babies' temporal and left frontal areas whenever the repetitious words were played. Words with non-adjacent repetitions ("bamuba" or "napena") elicited no distinctive responses from the brain.

When Microsoft Corp. announced a mammoth global recall of its Xbox 360 a year ago, the software giant never disclosed the exact source of the game console's heat problem that led to the fiasco.

Now, in an unlikely venue at Design Automation Conference here, Bryan Lewis, research vice president and chief analyst at Gartner, disclosed that the problem started in a graphic chip. Lewis offered this offhand revelation while discussing the changing ASIC and ASSP landscape for his DAC audience.

Here are the top 5 reasons according to PC World to buy the new iPhone 3G.

1. Price
2. 3G Browsing Speed
3. Greater International Support
4. Applications Galore
5. iPhone: Still at the Head of the Class

For more detailed information, goto here.

IBM and Toshiba are looking toward the next generation of RAM. They want it to be faster, of course, but they're also hoping to score two of the biggest unobtained prizes in RAM:

1. Instant Boot
2. Unpowered Storage

Instant boots save energy in several indirect ways. It promotes powering down computers at night, as the powering up becomes less inconvenient. Unpowered storage decreases power use dramatically because the RAM can continue to hold data without having to constantly pull from the power supply. Toshiba estimates that the MRAM will use about 10% less energy per megabyte than today's RAM.

Unfortunately, MRAM currently has problems operating at a wide variety of temperatures. The inside of a computer has a pretty wide temperature range. Toshiba says that they have overcome this problem, and they expect MRAM to take over the market by 2015.

TV has its hits and misses, right? For every great sitcom, there’s a pile of crappy ones. Some get cancelled right out of the gate — others drag on for years, begging to be put out of their misery.

Join us in this look back at the 25 worst sitcoms.