Good, Cheap, Fast... Choose any two, you can't have all three. It's the same way with anything. In all the years I've been involved with computers, the expensive stuff has always run better and lasted longer. Even in the line of products the company I work for sells, I can fairly accurately tell which will be more likely to have problems and which ones won't nine times out of ten. And as for musical instruments, musical tones have never been something that mass manufacturing has manged to reproduce well, especially since music depends a great deal on both the musicians skill, and the familiarity with the instrument he or she is playing. On the other side of the spectrum you have mass producers who are trying to keep costs down to maximize their profits, and as such intentionally damage the ability of the instrument to make the best sound possible. Indeed if all instruments were manufactured with the same materials, and specifications that you'd find in a high-end hand-made instrument, you might find it much more difficult to distinguish between them, but as long as manufacturers are driven by profits with customers willing to make sacrifices, we're left with loads of poorly made, cheap devices that operate enough to satisfy consumers. McDonalds isn't popular because the food is good -- it's cheap, fast, and largly edible and for many people, that's evidently good enough.
That is hardly the point. The point was that the X server does a lot in the 4-8MB of RAM it consumes, and includes a lot of capabilities that aren't available in stock BeOS. I can load VNC, pcAnywhere, or an X11 server into a Win95 machine, but that doesn't mean those capabilities are native.
The most important freedom that GPL brings is the freedom to benefit from other people's work. The GPL licensor says (roughly) "you can't use my stuff unless I (and everyone else) can use yours". It's straight of the liberal/leftist/socialist handbook: Forcing (or in this case using economic coercion to "encourage") other people to work for the benefit of others. It's typical also of other strong political factions, monopolists, and other bullies.
The decision to accept or reject a license is always available, and the GPL is by far more liberal in it's terms than most licenses. You are still free to make whatever modifications you wish to the code and keep them private, but you lose the right to redistribute it unless also accompanied by source code, which is in stark contrast to almost all other licenses that explicitly prohibit redistribution in all cases, along with restrictions on reverse engineering, and whatever patents that felt they needed to get on the technology in the code. Copyright law was designed to prevent others from benefiting from one artists work without compensation, and by that, the GPL is fair-play -- prohibiting others from being a sole benefactor by a generous author. The GPL is not without it's fair share of problems, not the least of which is the problem with it being 'tainting', or that it encourages author laziness using the old scapegoat that the source is available -- fix it yourself.
The problem being is that debuggers themselves can interfere with program/thread scheduling enough to change the behaviour of bugs significantly when dealing with race conditions. Personally, I've found that conventional debuggers are practically worthless when you have a program that's generating improper output -- those are usually better suited to printf/debug fprintf logging, since they generate a history of what the program is doing rather than a snapshot of the app at the given point. Honestly, the only thing I use gdb for these days is for the stack trace so I know where to start looking, although often I already have some idea. The worst bugs, IMO, are when the compiler generates improper code, however. Even the most advanced debugger usually won't help you much there unless you're intimately familiar with disassembling compiled code. Of course, that's part of the fun, right... Along with seeing gcc generate code like 'movl %eax, %eax'
Debuggers can be great for locating crash bugs, however they're of far less use when your program is generating incorrect output based on the input you give it. For those, it's usually easier to input a batch of printf's into the code printing out intermediate information to give you a chance to find out where your logic goes horribly wrong. Although every so often you end up with a bug that stops acting up when loaded into a debugger or with added printf's, forcing you to use the other method. Compiler/optimization bugs can be a real pain to sort out and can sap up loads of time no matter what method of debugging you prefer.
Well, if they're developing it everyday, it's entirely possible. I would assume they're tring to reassure customers by indicating that it's powerful enough to work on itself.
X does NOT take 40MB.... Don't believe everything that top(1) tells you. The size that top tells you includes code, data, stack, and shared memory. This figure includes the ENTIRE framebuffer (e.g. if you have a 32MB card, that's 32MB more in the X process right there). If you take out all the memory that either doesn't really belong to the X process or isn't physical system RAM, you're probably looking at more in the neighbourhood of 6-8MB including libraries and a window manager loaded or about 4MB with nothing loaded into X. And if you look at what X does compared to BeOS -- you get to run apps over a network and have them display locally, etc. As far as I know, you can't yet do this with BeOS.
What would happen if these projects had a significant hacker base to draw from? GGI is much more powerful and interesting than fbcon, and we NEED something to take the baton from X.
I'm not quite sure what everyone seems to have against X. It is somewhat slow run locally due to the overwealming use of UNIX sockets. Someone just needs to find a way to make use of all the work the XFree86 project has put into their X servers, maintain X11R6 support for apps, and still provide a fast efficient link between the apps and programs maintaining the framebuffer. Asking everyone to give up the X11 apps is unreasonable to say the least, plus there's always going to be those who want to run their GUI apps remotely and display locally. Someone talented just needs to find a way to accelerate for the local case.
This is the one thing I think is missing from most of these projects. If you look at the attitudes between the KDE and Gnome camps, you end up finding a lot of hostility and an unwillingness to recognised that the other group may have done something right. Believing in the work you're doing is one thing, but believing in it to the point where you are blind to the merits of everything else, it becomes a problem.
There's [at least] two lawsuits going on, each with a different core arguement. The one in California (by the DVD CCA) is arguing that the big list of people who posted DeCSS misappropriated trade secrets, whereas the New York case (by the MPAA) against 2600 focused more on the DMCA aspect of the case. You can be fairly sure that they will play both trials out to the end to find which argument will hold up better in court and squash everyone else with whatever judgement is in their favour.
I kinda wish that wxWindows was a little more popular. It's a wonderful idea, a C++ wrapper around the 'native' GUI widget sets on multiple platforms (Win32, OS/2, MacOS, GTK, Motif, etc), is relatively easy to write for, doesn't seem to have a huge effect on performance and makes it damn easy to port. Unless Borland's CLX is released soon and takes off, wxWindows seems like the best of the toolkits. Now if only someone would do a wxQT port so that I could write a single app and have it work seamlessly on either GTK (Gnome) or QT (KDE) depending on how it was built/what libs are installed. To be quite frank, the Gnome/KDE nonsense annoys me, and I wish they'd set aside their petty bickering and work together to make sure that while users have choice over what kind of 'desktop environment' they want to run, they don't have to compromise any of the apps designed for one when running the other. When I first read that people from KDE and Gnome collaborated to work on a unified object sharing system I was delighted, later it vanished and each went their own way, with Gnome sticking with Corba, and KDE using their 'KParts' system which uses an entirely different system. Now it seems the only part they are willing to collaborate on is the window manager 'hints' system, which is admittedly a rather small feature as far as a user would be concerned.
I don't believe that narcissism is limited to gamers, because people who are heavily into playing sports or any other participatory hobby often demonstrate similar traits when it comes to anything related to their hobby. You may find that athletes are more apt to exaggerate their physical strength, even couch potato sports fans will brag about how much they know about their chosen topic. None of this should surprise anyone.
I agree with you entirely on your point that people do tend to gravitate to the type of games that suits their skills the best, and usually end up enhancing those same skills because of it. Again, this is just practice. I'm unlikely to choose recreation that doesn't suit my skills because it would become frustrating and wouldn't end up being very enjoyable, nullifying the entire reason for gaming to begin with, unless I had other overriding reasons for choosing the game. It's no different than any job you might take -- you're more likely to enjoy and excel at a job that matches your personal skill set well, than one you take just to make money to make ends meet. When you enjoy your work, you do your work better, usually helping to refine those same skills further, possibly forcing you to develop others.
Like anything, balance is needed, because playing video games 24/7 won't make the bills go away, or give you all the skills you need to survive in the world. They are a hobby and should be treated as such. I'll be the first to say that I have played far too many video games and other parts of my life have suffered because of this, and I'm sure I'm not alone. Gaming can be a productive waste of a few spare hours that would otherwise be wasted on television.
I personally think that Jon is overstating the effects games have in our lives. I get the feeling that most people responding to this thread read it as ego-stroking, which it may well have been, and indeed Jon is showing that he too has a narcissistic side to his personality. It's quite unfair to state that all gamers are this way or that gaming somehow develops this negative trait in all gamers, especially if you consider that a large number of these same people who do partake in gaming also have a lack of self-confidence.
Why? Because it's become the 'in' thing to narrowly focus on the 'evils' the men of the world force on women in the world, as if they were helpless animals, unable to fend for themselves. Just as it's the normal assumption that almost all domestic abuse is commited by men against women, and all sexual harassment is done by men against women, this trend is hardly transparent. All in all, the stereotypes in games are no different than the stereotypes you'd see in movies, on TV or in advertising, and they indeed affect both sexes, despite what these 'research' projects may seem to imply. Very few of the games I have ever seen have included a scrawny geek, an overweight bully, or anyone else who would be considered a 'sub-optimal' human being.
I don't believe we need to go so far as making patents, copyrights and trade secret protections completely go away, but rather weaken them substancially, especially when the recipient of such is a company. 21 year long patents in an industry that is only roughly 30 years old doesn't make sense, and it's high time that the government and patent offices recognise that. Software patents in general will do nothing more than stiffle competition and innovation for years to come, and unless politicians stop just glaring at the dollars big business wants to wave at them, it's unlikely to change.
Personally, I'm just waiting to see when Disney decides that 95 years for copyright protection isn't enough since Mickey Mouse will be close to entering the public domain yet again.
I believe a number of Microsoft licenses (particularily multi-user licenses) contain clauses stating that Microsoft can demand an audit of your licenses at any time. Part of the sale of these license packs is to agree to the 'EULA', you end up with little recourse except to either discontinue use of the software or pay up.
This is why the X-box is such a good idea. You Linux zealots can bash Microsoft all you want, but a lot of programmers are already familiar with writing games for the PC using Direct X. There is almost no learning curve, and thus, you will begin to see a lot of very nice games available shortly after the X-boxes release
Two things... For one the quality and type of DirectX games tend to be very different from those available on conventional consoles. At least part of this is due to the fact that input devices on consoles and on PCs have traditionally been very different, but there's also the fact that PC gamers and console gamers tend to be more different than one might thing.
Secondly, I'm very worried that this Microsoft X-Box might end up being Microsoft's definitive.NET client, cutting out their OEMs from the low-end PC market. Microsoft recently announced that Microsoft Money will be available on X-Box, and it's not all that unreasonable that it could be a.NET client. On the other hand, Microsoft has proven time and time again, that they screw up anything new they try until version 3.0 which inevitably gains critical mass. I guess only time will tell what does, in fact, happen.
Big business likes patents because how else can you collect money for doing absolutely nothing? And what Big Business wants, Big Business usually gets, like it or not.
I think they're making too big of a deal of this. In fact, most laptops are designed exclusively for Microsoft Windows, and in fact, specific versions of Microsoft Windows. The laptop I buy that comes pre-installed with Win98SE is unlikely to work entirely properly with any other Windows version, with any other operating system, the results are even less reliable. Take Toshiba, for example -- they often include special system functions and buttons that only operate via undocumented proprietary interfaces, things like CD control buttons and Fn keys, etc.
Re: DirectX
Would you blame them? Linux has.. what, 5% of the desktop marketshare? Its a simple application of supply and demand.
Well, DirectX also locks them out of doing a Macintosh port, or any port for any non-Microsoft platform without heavily redesigning the engine. OpenGL still remains a much more evolved standard than DirectX is, but the fact that DirectX is better implemented in most drivers at least partially due to Microsoft requiring fairly high standards for 'certified' drivers for DirectX, but making OpenGL almost entirely optional.
Re: Office
Not so... the formats of Office 2000 are backwards-compatible with Office 97. Nearly every Linux distro comes with Netscape by default... shouldn't I complain that such a practice is hurting Opera for Linux sales? You are the worst type of hypocrite-- your blind to your own hypocrasy.
Office 2000 is MOSTLY file-format compatible with Office 97... However, you'll inevitably notice that some documents do not format properly when loaded when created on a different version of office, or certain features will end up stripped, etc. I'm not sure how any of this has to do with Netscape, but, okay....
Re: Browser
Including IE in Windows is no different than preloading Redhat with Netscape. It is the EXACT same thing. If you can't see that, then you must be blind
Except for one extremely important difference. You can ALWAYS uninstall Netscape if you're not going to use it and install something else, but you cannot uninstall Internet Explorer from Win98, Win98SE, WinME, Windows 2000 or any future version of Microsoft Windows. With RedHat Linux, it's a simple command or a few clicks to completely remove Netscape, and you lose little additional functionality within the system.
Re: SMB
Well, they own it so they can do whatever the heck they want to with it. [snip]...except for the fact that all MS SMB clients are backwards compatible so you only have to upgrade to get new features.
While it is true that they can do whatever they please with it, it's very unprofessional to modify a protocol that they published in such a way that only their own clients continue to work with it. And, no, they're not all backwards compatible -- some of the earliest SMB clients Microsoft has put out [WfW, the DOS LANMAN client, etc] will only work with obscure registry hacks on the machines these clients will want to access.
Re: Media
BFD. Windows has always come bundled with a built-in media player. Are you actually saying that RealPlayer or Quicktime are better products?
I think he's referring to Media Player 7, a questionable 'upgrade' from Media Player 6.x (mplayer2.exe), or even the original mplayer.exe. Whereas Media Player 6.x actually had a fairly user-friendly interface, Media Player 7 is slow, rather clunky, and not all that attractive to look at, even with the rather poorly done 'skins'.
Re: Servers
*ahem* All clients are backward compatible. I can setup a w2k machine and w98 clients can access it no problem.
Yes, but your Windows for Workgroups system won't be able to without a rather obscure registry hack. Also, many of their server products do not work well together unless they're all at a minimum version level.
Re: E-Mail
Different from Notes? Nope. Get with the times. If your email program can't handle MIME or HTML, get a new email program or stop your b*tching. Nobody's going to hold your hand.
I guess you've never recieved an 'Exchange Rich Text' message. In any e-mail reader that isn't made by Microsoft, it appears as a single file -- winmail.dat. The entire e-mail is in that one file, unreadable by anything but Microsoft clients and, of course, completely undocumented anywhere.
The way some of the more advanced NAT routers work is they watch for outgoing connections on certain ports, and then forward return incoming connection traffic on a series of ports defined for that applications. e.g. Outgoing to connection to server on port 8000, return connections arrive on ports 9100-9200.
NAT is a creative hack to a lack of addresses. What's the neccessary solution? IPv6? Time and end-user complaints will force the issue.
It's also a creative hack for ISPs that want to charge insane rates for having the "privledge" of having more than one computer on the internet at the same time. IPv6 won't change that, unless those same ISPs want to charge you for the privledge of using IPv6. Until IPv6 is available in one of Microsoft's end-user class operating system, it's unlikely we'll see extensive deployment happen. ISPs are unlikely to implement it until a large portion of their users start asking for it, and their users are unlikely to ask for it until it's completely available to them.
Exchange isn't a horrible mail system, EXCEPT when it crashes... Ever try to recover damaged information stores or directories from an exchange server that crashed badly? If they automated tools don't work, you might as well just restore from the latest back-up and forget about all the mail sent that day. Then there's the problems Exchange has replicating databases. If you have nested distribution lists, Exchange doesn't properly update the lists containing other lists... Then there's the pain of moving users between MS Exchange 'sites'. The other issues I have with Exchange is mostly user interface, such as the read and delivered receipts cluttering up the Inbox or Deleted Items folder, depending on what you've configured in Outlook itself. I send a number of global announcements to the users of the internal LAN and need to know when they've received the message and opened it. However, in it's current incarnation, getting dozens of read and delivered messages after sending the e-mail is more or less an inconvenience.
I know that some, but not all, of these 'bugs' were fixed in Exchange 2000, but of course, it's drastically different from Exchange 5.5 and requires extensive planning to roll out since there are some rather major restrictions on what you can do and how you set it up.
"Democracy can't work... Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group. But a democratic form of government is okay, as long as it doesn't work."
-Robert A. Heinlein
Glory Road
Now that I think about it... That would make stupdity subtractive since it can be easily swayed by factors not involved at all (such as money, pretty flashing lights and colours, vague promises). We'd end up with a high negative wisdom, then. =(
The Reform/Alliance party also had a problem in the past elections of seeming rather unprofessional compared to the other parties. Preston Manning as the so-called leader of the country would've have set well with many people. In many ways he rubbed people the wrong way. Stockwell Day (now of the Alliance Party), in general, seems like a much better leader. He's had experience with politics, he's had experience in other industries. It's quite possible that this change of leadership/name could round up enough people disgusted with the Liberals, and the incompetence of the PC party to win a few seats in Ontario. I know that they simply seem stronger this time around than last time, and I will be voting for them.
Also, don't forget that the Reform/Alliance party sprang into being from almost nothing in the last couple elections and Liberal support has been steadily declining. The first time it was more of a protest vote from the west, angry that their voice was not being heard, since the party that wins Ontario and Quebec controls the government. From that protest, they've grown into a national party in their own right.
The problem with the conservative party, besides the problems with their leadership, is the fact that since they tend to reduce spending and thus the funding for social programs, they often bring hardship to the people, and of course, that usually gets the Liberals back in for another two or three terms. Afterall, who can forgive the PC party, Brian Malrooney, etc for the GST and the Looney coin.
A similar thing tends to happen here in Manitoba.... The PC party cuts back more and more spending and eventually goes too far, people get pissed off, and start voting NDP instead and we have a few years of an NDP spending spree. It pains me, but just after we got a ballanced budget in Manitoba, the NDP got elected and will undoubtly undermine it by reintroducing all the programmes the Conservatives canned.
Anyway, that's it for my rant. I just hope the Alliance party gets voted in so we can all see for ourselves how badly they will mess up (and they will, like all parties before them).
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Good, Cheap, Fast... Choose any two, you can't have all three. It's the same way with anything. In all the years I've been involved with computers, the expensive stuff has always run better and lasted longer. Even in the line of products the company I work for sells, I can fairly accurately tell which will be more likely to have problems and which ones won't nine times out of ten. And as for musical instruments, musical tones have never been something that mass manufacturing has manged to reproduce well, especially since music depends a great deal on both the musicians skill, and the familiarity with the instrument he or she is playing. On the other side of the spectrum you have mass producers who are trying to keep costs down to maximize their profits, and as such intentionally damage the ability of the instrument to make the best sound possible. Indeed if all instruments were manufactured with the same materials, and specifications that you'd find in a high-end hand-made instrument, you might find it much more difficult to distinguish between them, but as long as manufacturers are driven by profits with customers willing to make sacrifices, we're left with loads of poorly made, cheap devices that operate enough to satisfy consumers. McDonalds isn't popular because the food is good -- it's cheap, fast, and largly edible and for many people, that's evidently good enough.
That is hardly the point. The point was that the X server does a lot in the 4-8MB of RAM it consumes, and includes a lot of capabilities that aren't available in stock BeOS. I can load VNC, pcAnywhere, or an X11 server into a Win95 machine, but that doesn't mean those capabilities are native.
The problem being is that debuggers themselves can interfere with program/thread scheduling enough to change the behaviour of bugs significantly when dealing with race conditions. Personally, I've found that conventional debuggers are practically worthless when you have a program that's generating improper output -- those are usually better suited to printf/debug fprintf logging, since they generate a history of what the program is doing rather than a snapshot of the app at the given point. Honestly, the only thing I use gdb for these days is for the stack trace so I know where to start looking, although often I already have some idea. The worst bugs, IMO, are when the compiler generates improper code, however. Even the most advanced debugger usually won't help you much there unless you're intimately familiar with disassembling compiled code. Of course, that's part of the fun, right... Along with seeing gcc generate code like 'movl %eax, %eax'
Debuggers can be great for locating crash bugs, however they're of far less use when your program is generating incorrect output based on the input you give it. For those, it's usually easier to input a batch of printf's into the code printing out intermediate information to give you a chance to find out where your logic goes horribly wrong. Although every so often you end up with a bug that stops acting up when loaded into a debugger or with added printf's, forcing you to use the other method. Compiler/optimization bugs can be a real pain to sort out and can sap up loads of time no matter what method of debugging you prefer.
Well, if they're developing it everyday, it's entirely possible. I would assume they're tring to reassure customers by indicating that it's powerful enough to work on itself.
X does NOT take 40MB.... Don't believe everything that top(1) tells you. The size that top tells you includes code, data, stack, and shared memory. This figure includes the ENTIRE framebuffer (e.g. if you have a 32MB card, that's 32MB more in the X process right there). If you take out all the memory that either doesn't really belong to the X process or isn't physical system RAM, you're probably looking at more in the neighbourhood of 6-8MB including libraries and a window manager loaded or about 4MB with nothing loaded into X. And if you look at what X does compared to BeOS -- you get to run apps over a network and have them display locally, etc. As far as I know, you can't yet do this with BeOS.
This is the one thing I think is missing from most of these projects. If you look at the attitudes between the KDE and Gnome camps, you end up finding a lot of hostility and an unwillingness to recognised that the other group may have done something right. Believing in the work you're doing is one thing, but believing in it to the point where you are blind to the merits of everything else, it becomes a problem.
There's [at least] two lawsuits going on, each with a different core arguement. The one in California (by the DVD CCA) is arguing that the big list of people who posted DeCSS misappropriated trade secrets, whereas the New York case (by the MPAA) against 2600 focused more on the DMCA aspect of the case. You can be fairly sure that they will play both trials out to the end to find which argument will hold up better in court and squash everyone else with whatever judgement is in their favour.
I kinda wish that wxWindows was a little more popular. It's a wonderful idea, a C++ wrapper around the 'native' GUI widget sets on multiple platforms (Win32, OS/2, MacOS, GTK, Motif, etc), is relatively easy to write for, doesn't seem to have a huge effect on performance and makes it damn easy to port. Unless Borland's CLX is released soon and takes off, wxWindows seems like the best of the toolkits. Now if only someone would do a wxQT port so that I could write a single app and have it work seamlessly on either GTK (Gnome) or QT (KDE) depending on how it was built/what libs are installed. To be quite frank, the Gnome/KDE nonsense annoys me, and I wish they'd set aside their petty bickering and work together to make sure that while users have choice over what kind of 'desktop environment' they want to run, they don't have to compromise any of the apps designed for one when running the other. When I first read that people from KDE and Gnome collaborated to work on a unified object sharing system I was delighted, later it vanished and each went their own way, with Gnome sticking with Corba, and KDE using their 'KParts' system which uses an entirely different system. Now it seems the only part they are willing to collaborate on is the window manager 'hints' system, which is admittedly a rather small feature as far as a user would be concerned.
I agree with you entirely on your point that people do tend to gravitate to the type of games that suits their skills the best, and usually end up enhancing those same skills because of it. Again, this is just practice. I'm unlikely to choose recreation that doesn't suit my skills because it would become frustrating and wouldn't end up being very enjoyable, nullifying the entire reason for gaming to begin with, unless I had other overriding reasons for choosing the game. It's no different than any job you might take -- you're more likely to enjoy and excel at a job that matches your personal skill set well, than one you take just to make money to make ends meet. When you enjoy your work, you do your work better, usually helping to refine those same skills further, possibly forcing you to develop others.
Like anything, balance is needed, because playing video games 24/7 won't make the bills go away, or give you all the skills you need to survive in the world. They are a hobby and should be treated as such. I'll be the first to say that I have played far too many video games and other parts of my life have suffered because of this, and I'm sure I'm not alone. Gaming can be a productive waste of a few spare hours that would otherwise be wasted on television.
I personally think that Jon is overstating the effects games have in our lives. I get the feeling that most people responding to this thread read it as ego-stroking, which it may well have been, and indeed Jon is showing that he too has a narcissistic side to his personality. It's quite unfair to state that all gamers are this way or that gaming somehow develops this negative trait in all gamers, especially if you consider that a large number of these same people who do partake in gaming also have a lack of self-confidence.
Why? Because it's become the 'in' thing to narrowly focus on the 'evils' the men of the world force on women in the world, as if they were helpless animals, unable to fend for themselves. Just as it's the normal assumption that almost all domestic abuse is commited by men against women, and all sexual harassment is done by men against women, this trend is hardly transparent. All in all, the stereotypes in games are no different than the stereotypes you'd see in movies, on TV or in advertising, and they indeed affect both sexes, despite what these 'research' projects may seem to imply. Very few of the games I have ever seen have included a scrawny geek, an overweight bully, or anyone else who would be considered a 'sub-optimal' human being.
Personally, I'm just waiting to see when Disney decides that 95 years for copyright protection isn't enough since Mickey Mouse will be close to entering the public domain yet again.
I believe a number of Microsoft licenses (particularily multi-user licenses) contain clauses stating that Microsoft can demand an audit of your licenses at any time. Part of the sale of these license packs is to agree to the 'EULA', you end up with little recourse except to either discontinue use of the software or pay up.
Secondly, I'm very worried that this Microsoft X-Box might end up being Microsoft's definitive .NET client, cutting out their OEMs from the low-end PC market. Microsoft recently announced that Microsoft Money will be available on X-Box, and it's not all that unreasonable that it could be a .NET client. On the other hand, Microsoft has proven time and time again, that they screw up anything new they try until version 3.0 which inevitably gains critical mass. I guess only time will tell what does, in fact, happen.
Big business likes patents because how else can you collect money for doing absolutely nothing? And what Big Business wants, Big Business usually gets, like it or not.
And how many people are STILL running Win95, or even Windows 3.1? A whole lot more people than you might think.
I think they're making too big of a deal of this. In fact, most laptops are designed exclusively for Microsoft Windows, and in fact, specific versions of Microsoft Windows. The laptop I buy that comes pre-installed with Win98SE is unlikely to work entirely properly with any other Windows version, with any other operating system, the results are even less reliable. Take Toshiba, for example -- they often include special system functions and buttons that only operate via undocumented proprietary interfaces, things like CD control buttons and Fn keys, etc.
The way some of the more advanced NAT routers work is they watch for outgoing connections on certain ports, and then forward return incoming connection traffic on a series of ports defined for that applications. e.g. Outgoing to connection to server on port 8000, return connections arrive on ports 9100-9200.
I know that some, but not all, of these 'bugs' were fixed in Exchange 2000, but of course, it's drastically different from Exchange 5.5 and requires extensive planning to roll out since there are some rather major restrictions on what you can do and how you set it up.
Also, don't forget that the Reform/Alliance party sprang into being from almost nothing in the last couple elections and Liberal support has been steadily declining. The first time it was more of a protest vote from the west, angry that their voice was not being heard, since the party that wins Ontario and Quebec controls the government. From that protest, they've grown into a national party in their own right.
The problem with the conservative party, besides the problems with their leadership, is the fact that since they tend to reduce spending and thus the funding for social programs, they often bring hardship to the people, and of course, that usually gets the Liberals back in for another two or three terms. Afterall, who can forgive the PC party, Brian Malrooney, etc for the GST and the Looney coin.
A similar thing tends to happen here in Manitoba.... The PC party cuts back more and more spending and eventually goes too far, people get pissed off, and start voting NDP instead and we have a few years of an NDP spending spree. It pains me, but just after we got a ballanced budget in Manitoba, the NDP got elected and will undoubtly undermine it by reintroducing all the programmes the Conservatives canned.
Anyway, that's it for my rant. I just hope the Alliance party gets voted in so we can all see for ourselves how badly they will mess up (and they will, like all parties before them).