I read this article on the wired today about a blind teenage cracker who is specializes in phone phreaking and did a lot of damage.. I think the kid should have remained hacker and stayed away from the dark side. It's acceptable to speak to the pope but wasting government money is something else.

Anyways, in case you hackers happen to read this, you got my respect.. and feel free to inform me about any vulnerabilities in my site.. thank.

So it's been a year since Vista made it to consumer space. Vista's launch was primarily affected due to inadequate hardware support and high hardware requirements - something of a pin prick when targeting the mass market that Windows has been addressing all along, and then we had a small but vocal group complaining about UAC, Speed, Photocopying, etc... That would be old news, but something that makes most Ultimate users groan would be the lack of Ultimate Extras, and yet somehow mysteriously filling up 15gigs of space upon first installation.

So whatever happened to the promised Extras?? I have seen nothing cutting edge, no innovative service and no unique publications that were made available in the past one year. I think the Extras team needs to get its act together, Give us free Live OneCare, free Hotmail Plus and then I will call this a promise fulfilled.

If you haven't been following the happenings of Ultimate Extras, here is the list of the cutting edge software made available:

• Windows DreamScene -nice bling-bling ; counts as an Extra
• Language Packs -no way this is an Extra
• BitLocker & EFS enhancements - should have been available to all Windows users
• Hold 'Em Poker Game - not worthy of Extra status
  

The latest Acid Test is out (Version 3). Every major browser available in the market has failed to score a 100.
The Stats are:

• Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.11  ; Score: 50/100 , moderately smooth distorted animation
• Opera v9.25; Score: 47/100, little or no animation
• Internet Explorer 7; Score: 13/100, animation! where?
  

 And among the beta software,

• Opera v9.5 Beta; Score: 60/100, beautiful animation ,but not complete.
  
• Firefox v3 Beta 2; Score: 55/100, slightly less beautiful animation, but much better than firefox 2.

For those of going psychedelic over this, here is what Acid Tests (in context of browsers and html): "Acid2 is a test suite published and promoted by the Web Standards Project to identify web page rendering flaws in browsers and authoring tools." - from a more reliable Wikipedia.

You should take these test scores with a grain of salt. For example: While Firefox 2 flips over with Acid2, it  scores a 50/100 on Acid3 (with a visibly better looking result) than Opera 9.25 (which prides itself of being most standards compliant) scored a 47/100 with a less than stunning appearance.One thing's for sure, Internet Explorer has a long way to go.