First Barbara Jordan – the voice of Watergate and justice, then Ann Richards – who could barbeque you with a phrase, and now Molly – whose gentle humor covered a deeply felt sense of social justice.

The three of the best things to come out of the Lone Star state are all gone.

Rest in peace.

According to CNet: Buying Vista? Get a guarantee

Customers who pay about $233 for an upgrade copy of Vista Ultimate (or about $399 for the full version), for instance, could essentially end up running the equivalent of Vista Home Basic ($100 to $199) if Vista’s installation software finds that the computer doesn’t have the hardware to run specific Ultimate features optimally, Cherry said.

[snip]

Michael Silver, an analyst at Gartner, agrees: “Joe Consumer is not generally equipped to upgrade an operating system. This is not a trivial matter.” The market researcher estimates that roughly 40 percent of the 320 million consumer PCs worldwide running a previous version of Windows can run some version of Vista.

However, “some portion of that (percentage) will need at least memory upgrades,” Silver said. Moreover, he estimates that only about 15 percent of those PCs are ready to run Vista Premium and take full advantage of the software. But it’s hard to predict how each individual PC will fare during Vista installation.

Hmm, only 40% of current Windows machines can run the basic version, and only 15% of that group will be able to run the second level, Premium. Sounds like a marketing plan to sell hardware. Almost every level of the product requires some new and expensive additional hardware. The Premium version wants 15 gigabytes of free disk space. Some of the levels require Internet access.

Of course, when you buy a new computer, they will probably pre-load this, so it may be time to look at Macs and Linux.