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Microsoft Extends Win98/SE Support
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet reports that Microsoft is extending technical support for Windows 98 till 30 June 2006, despite being days away from switching support to a CD. It seems Windows 98 will also have all necessary security updates till the new expiry date." The article states that Microsoft will have "...During that time paid over-the-phone support will be available, and "critical" security issues will be reviewed and "appropriate steps" taken."
Microsoft Customer "care": "Welcome to Microsoft how may we victimise you?" Customer: "My system has just been hacked. What do I do? what do I do?" Microsoft Customer "care": "Nothing my dear, YOU'RE NOT QUALIFIED!"
GNU/Linux is mostly old technology. Unix has been around for ages, and the architecture is in fact inferior in many aspects (esp availability/reliability related) to other stuff e.g. Multics, VMS.
The parts that aren't old technology are mostly incremental improvements too.
The only thing new worth noting is the GPL.
Microsoft is just doing what they have been doing all along - trying to extract as much milk from the cows without too much mooing and without getting kicked. Linux and other Free/OSS stuff is making it more difficult.
Too much pain and too many people will figure that the pain involved in switching to a Linux distro and other OSS is less.
There is pain involved in switching. Gnome, KDE just aren't as polished. The Star Office word processor is about as bad as Lotus Word Pro (when I last used LWP) - some stuff won't stay formatted the way you explicitly specify, and so on.