Note well that Linux had to prove itself a competent and plausible competitor. It generally isn't wise to make threats unless one can follow through on them and at times the mere threat of a Linux migration isn't enough to get MS to throw discounts at you. You'll actually have to start that migration and make a sincere effort at it. If MS was certain that a migration would end in tears and the customer would come crawling back on their knees then they wouldn't make concessions now would they?
The thing to do now is for Linux vendors and devs to keep on keeping on and make that threatened migration as easy and viable as possible.
But I truly believe that Win7 will bomb, just as hard if not harder than Vista. And when it does all those corporations that have been ignored for two OS releases will start to look for alternatives.
I'd like to think so but it isn't going to happen. I see reports of Win7 running acceptably on virtual machines and 1 Ghz machines. Doubtless eyecandy has to be turned off but then businesses tend to do that anyway. Now if you had said that MS won't be regaining at least some of the ground they lost then I'd agree with you.
If MS puts a bit of effort into not breaking business apps then I believe we'll first see cautious then routine of Win7 just like we did with XP.
Most antivirus software will scan for & prevent infections, but once something gets on the computer can't remove them for crap.
I have a trick that often helps with that. The problem is that malware actively fights removal as that douchebag who was interviewed last week admitted. So I boot the machine with a TRK livecd which has a handy option to detect and smb share any fat and ntfs filesystems it can find on the machine. I then map those drives on another machine with removal tools and scan them. TRK has ClamAV so I update the defs and run scans in a few strategic places like the system32 directory.
Since the malware files are latent they can only be obfuscated to elude the scanners, they can't actively resist. Offline scanning will often kick an infection in the balls hard enough that I can get removal tools running on the host directly and get the registry and so-forth cleaned up.
It's Windows, not Ubuntu. Last time I had a "reinstall windows" problem, it took me 2 weeks to get all the software installed and configured again. I can't just tick off what I want and hit Apply.
Actually you can but it takes a little forethought. Get together install media for Windows, all your software, and a large external IEEE1394 or USB disk. If you use a bunch of stuff you downloaded then put the installers on a flash drive. Do clean install of the OS, apps, patch it all up, set up a Desktop the way you want it, yadda, yadda. Now before you junk it up with your data make an image of it. ping.windowsdream.com has a good free tool to do this with though if you have Ghost or whatever then go for it. If this is all too much trouble to start with then do it this way the next time you need to do a therapeutic rebuild of your Windows box.
You should not use an imaging utility like PING or Ghost to backup your personal stuff. Well you can but its unwieldy. GoodSync is a decent free tool that can keep two separate directories in sync like say "Documents and Settings" on your machine and the external disk. The first run will take forever to copy your 40GB porno collection but subsequent runs will only schlep over new or changed files.
I doubt it would make much difference. There are two main reasons for a corporate to Open Source their software. One reason to build a developer community that they can leverage to make the products and services they do sell. The other reason generate faith in the integrity of the codebase and company; the code doesn't have to die even if the supporting company does and users can trust that software does what is claimed for it and only what is claimed for it.
Despite some lip-service, Sun appears largely indifferent to any but their own developers. The trouble outsiders have had with OpenOffice is notorious. In the UNIX world that Sun is catering to, Open with a capital-"O" is a major feature in a way that it isn't in the Windows world. These customers don't necessarily drink either the Stallman or Raymond Kool-Aid but being able to trust code for-basically-ever is huge. Sun is just establishing trust with a particular sort of conservative customer.
They have source and binaries for a number of platforms. Their focus is on wrapping a friendly UI for tunneling VNC over SSH but the tightvnc binary they give you has the goodies even if run directly.
One thing is we deal with the government a lot, which always has the latest version of Office. Keeping up with that using non-MS software is pretty hard.
That is truly obnoxious. MS has to get paid so that you can interact with your government.
Don't forget OOO's support for "hybrid" PDFs. A hybrid PDF will include the Open Document file it was generated from within it. Such PDFs if sent to another OOO user can be edited. Otherwise they open like usual in any PDF reader.
Wire up a USB connector and write a driver to support it under Mac OSX, Linux and Windows.
It can be done. The Touch Tablet shows up as a pair of paddle controllers. The following device will therefore cause it to show up as two joystick axes:
I believe these devices were compatible as there was a version of the KoalaPad for the A8 and the C-64 as well. I had a couple of KoalaPads secondhand. The input layer seemed prone to losing it's sensitivity and you had to just about bore a grove in it to get it to register.
If someone has a really deep and sincere kiddy porn habit then even the very best of IT security practices won't help forever. Old fashioned police work would do it in the days before PCs were ubiquitous and it still will now. Of course, the cops are as lazy as everybody else and want a one button wizard that chews their food and regurgitates into their mouths for them but still.
If you're coming directly to console administration, Vim or Emacs is just added cruelty. Editors like Joe and Nano are a lot easier to learn and don't assume one has been carrying around a hyperspecialized customization file for twenty years since his college days. If you ever had to use anything that employed WordStar keybindings then Joe is particularly quick to learn but not bad at all if you haven't. Ctrl-KH will start you right off (that is keep ctrl held down and press k then h). Ctrl-KH will make the help screen go away again.
Even though I won't use a sackcloth-and-ashes-free-only computer, those issues are important. "Pragmatism" in the short term is anything but in the long term. If effort isn't exerted to keep platforms from being closed and replacements developed for things that are closed but commonly used then eventually it will be others who dictate how you compute and what sort of computing is permissible. Myself, I prefer to own my own media and hardware and to connect (ethically) to whatever machines on the Internet I see fit, use whatever protocols I see fit, and adapt any device I own to any purpose that I might desire. Annoying as they may often be, we ignore the proponents of openness and freedom at our peril.
At one time I worked as a tech on process control and industrial hygiene instrumentation. I got exposed to a lot of chemistry both literally and figuratively. For a time it was the most fun job I ever had. I got to play with chemicals, computers, and high-voltage circuitry. What wasn't to like?
I don't remember that anecdote about Windows 2000, nor do I remember anyone highlighting any glaring problems with the Windows 2000 source. I *do* remember a similar anecdote about Windows _95_ and SimCity for DOS, from Raymond Chen's blog. The Windows 2000 codebase is also quite old today, and will have been changed substantially into today's Windows Vista and 2008.
So it wasn't SimCity necessarily but MS DOES do this and I very much doubt they stopped doing it with XP and Vista. And yes MS reworked their OS, yes the NT codebase is miles better than the 9x codebase obviously but it was nowhere as clean and clearly separated as what Apple did. If I try to run an old version of HyperCard all I am going to see is a circle and slash on the app's icon. They picked a point beyond which they wouldn't worship backwards-compatibility-at-all-costs. I'll give MS credit for finally losing 16-bit compatibility with Vista and closing THAT bit of attack surface off.
Not really. Almost all of the API cruft from even Win 1.x came forward to WinNT. This is what prompted the discussion in the first place. Extensive backward-compatible API cruft makes the job of the malware/adware author easier. MS didn't take the the two crucial steps Apple did when they redesigned: they didn't have a clean forward compatible API common to old and new and they didn't sandbox the old cruft in a virtualizer. MS put in a better kernel, driver model, and niceties like a good permissions model but all this goodness was glopped in amidst a load of the old crap. Remember those Win2000 sources that leaked a few years ago. A lot of it was hacky workarounds targeted at popular apps that wouldn't run otherwise. For instance, Win2000 would detect that it was SimCity 2000 running and change some things accordingly.
You make a good point, but there is a huge flaw to your system.
There is no disincentive to do wrong.
Frank Abagnale didn't get off scot free. The French kinda did "go Sharia" on him. He spent six months in the Perpignan House Of Arrest. An excerpt of his book describes it so:
There was no light switch. There was no light in the cell. There was, in fact, nothing in the cell but a bucket. No bed, no toilet, no wash basin, no drain, nothing. Just the bucket. The cell was not a cell, actually, it was a hole, a raised dungeon perhaps five feet wide, five feet high and five feet deep, with a ceiling and door of steel and a floor and walls of stone....
I was not fed my first day in Perpignan's prison. I had been placed in my grim cell late in the afternoon. Several hours later, exhausted, cold, hungry, bewildered, frightened and desolate. I laid down on the hard floor and fell asleep. I slept curled in a ball, for I am six feet tall.
The screeching of the door awakened me. I sat up, wincing form the soreness and cramps caused by my uncomfortable sleeping position. The dim form of a guard loomed in the doorway. He was placing something on the steps inside my crypt....
I felt around and located the food the guard had brought. It was a quart container of water and a small loaf of bread. The simple breakfast had not even been brought on a tray. The guard had simple set the container of water on the top step and had dropped the bread beside it on the stone....
The menu in Perpignan prison never varied. For breakfast, I was served bread and water. Lunch consisted of a weak chicken soup and a loaf of bread. Supper was a cup of black coffee and a loaf of bread....
I never left the cell. Not once during my stay in the hoary jail was I permitted outside for exercise or recreation....
The bucket was my latrine. I was not given any toilet paper, nor was the bucket removed after use. I soon adapted to the stench, but after a few days the bucket overflowed and I had to move around and sleep in my own fecal matter. I was too numbed, in body and spirit, to be revolted. Eventually, however, the odor became too nauseating for even the guards to endure, apparently. One day, between meals, the door creaked open and another convict scurried in with the furtiveness and manner of a rat, grabbed the bucket and fled. It was returned, empty a few minutes later. On perhaps half a dozen other occasions during my time in the tiny tomb, the procedure was repeated. But only twice during my imprisonment were the feces cleaned from the floor of the cell....
I weighed 210 pounds when I was received at Perpignan. The tedious diet did not contain enough nutrients or calories to maintain me. My body began to feed upon itself, the muscles and tendons devouring the stored fats and oily tissues in order to fuel the pumps of my heart and my circulatory system. Within weeks I was able to encircle my biceps with my fingers.
He also did time in the US though that wasn't as brutal as the French prison.
You've got a very valid point but it's something that Microsoft must do to improve their operating system. I'm not 100% positive about this but I believe that is what Apple did when they switched from OS9 to OSX. They basically told their customers, "we're redoing a large part of the system and lots of old stuff won't work on the new systems."
Actually what Apple did is a good model for the sort of change MS needs to make. Apple didn't just willy-nilly break compatibility with their previous OS. When they started reworking the NextStep APIs into the basis of OS X they also developed the Carbon API/runtime in parallel on both OS X and on what was their current OS. Apps developed against Carbon on the old OS that didn't use calls or libraries unavailable on OS X would run on OS X as well. Carbon was out a couple of years before the first wide release of OS X. Apple encouraged as much development against this runtime as possible. AppleWorks 6 is one example of an application that will run unchanged on an old PPC machine running OS 9 and the latest Intel Macs running Leopard. In this way Apple started transitioning developers even before OS X was released.
BTW, the reverse is NOT true. It is possible to create Carbon apps that won't run on OS 8.6/9.x if they are developed primarily on OS X. So Carbon mainly provides forward compatibility. And as I said, care was required on the OS 9 side as well. Use one call out of the old toolbox and your app will run in Classic on OS X. Carbon isn't just a compatibility mechanism on OS X. It is a fully realized OS X API though it appears it won't become a fully 64-bit API. 64-bit Macs to come will run 32-bit Carbon apps fine but these apps will have to survive in the amount of memory a 32-bit system can provide.
However this still left a great bulk of legacy software that new Mac buyers would expect to run on their new machines. So Apple bundled a virtualizer that would run OS 9.x. They integrated the virtualizer so that it would run in what software like VMWare and VirtualBox call "Seamless Mode". They made as many of OS X' facilities as possible available to "Classic apps" such as cut/paste, OpenGL, and printing. OS X 10.0 was first supplied on new machines in 2001 and Apple continued making PowerPC Macs that could support Classic until 2005. There WERE old apps that didn't run well under Classic but most did. Classic was rather like an odd clone of an old PPC Mac that would usually but not always run older stuff. Classic apps could also run afoul of file permissions since the old Mac OS didn't support them all that consistently. This isn't unlike the permission tweaking one sometimes has to do to get an old Win98 app to run on XP.
In '05, Apple announced they were switching to the Intel processor architecture and starting selling Intel Macs in mid '06. Since Classic is a virtualizer and not an emulator, Apple did at last drop support for the oldest applications that ran on Macs of years past. Still, properly developed Carbon apps that ran on OS 8.x/9.x would still run on the new Intel machines thanks to Rosetta. Rosetta is a partial PPC virtualizer that does what emulator authors call "High Level Emulation". Rosetta translates PPC syscalls into Intel equivalents. So a PPC OS X binary will still run (usually) on an Intel Mac but Rosetta does not do a full emulation of the PowerPC CPU and chipset of an older Mac.
So Apple didn't just cut off their hordes of often fanatical users in one fell swoop. They executed multiple strategies over half a decade to transition off their old OS then processor arch.
MS can do this as well. A clean and well thought out subset of the latest.NET (3.5 at the moment) could be the "MS Carbon". Apps developed solely against that designated API can be expected to run unchanged on a fully modern cruft free OS. They've bought VirtualPC and marketing various virtualization products based on it so they have the makings of the "MS Classic". All that remains is to develop a 64-bit clean modern OS that makes no attempt whatsoever to run old stuff outside of the virtualizer and a well-defined forward compatible API that will be common to both.
A couple of years back, Massachusetts attempted to mandate open formats in state government. ODF was to be the office piece of this and MS pulled every dirty trick in the book to reverse or subvert that up to and including pulling strings to get the people pushing for this pressured to leave.
I suggest "massachusetts odf" as better set of search terms for Google.
At least that would be very easy to filter out on my mailservers. You'd have a very short ruleset that looks for clickable IPs and a much shorter set of rules to finish triggering the thing. It wouldn't stop spam but it would make my life a little easier.
DriverPacks (driverpacks.net) are your friend here. It is a fairly easy to use utility that will let you slipstream a wide range of network, chipset, mass storage, sound, and video drivers into XP, Server 2003, and (maybe) Vista into a Windows XP install CD. I also use nlite and another utility to slipstream SP3, IE7, and WMP11 into an XP install disc. What I wind up with an 850MB iso that requires a DVD but it is very very convenient. The biggest PITA right now is newish laptops with SATA chipsets that old XP install discs don't have drivers for. DriverPacks helps immensely with that. It also helps by lighting up most wired and wireless interfaces up off the bat so you can get the machine on the net for any devices the DriverPacks didn't light up.
Slashdot Mirror
Note well that Linux had to prove itself a competent and plausible competitor. It generally isn't wise to make threats unless one can follow through on them and at times the mere threat of a Linux migration isn't enough to get MS to throw discounts at you. You'll actually have to start that migration and make a sincere effort at it. If MS was certain that a migration would end in tears and the customer would come crawling back on their knees then they wouldn't make concessions now would they?
The thing to do now is for Linux vendors and devs to keep on keeping on and make that threatened migration as easy and viable as possible.
I'd like to think so but it isn't going to happen. I see reports of Win7 running acceptably on virtual machines and 1 Ghz machines. Doubtless eyecandy has to be turned off but then businesses tend to do that anyway. Now if you had said that MS won't be regaining at least some of the ground they lost then I'd agree with you.
If MS puts a bit of effort into not breaking business apps then I believe we'll first see cautious then routine of Win7 just like we did with XP.
I have a trick that often helps with that. The problem is that malware actively fights removal as that douchebag who was interviewed last week admitted. So I boot the machine with a TRK livecd which has a handy option to detect and smb share any fat and ntfs filesystems it can find on the machine. I then map those drives on another machine with removal tools and scan them. TRK has ClamAV so I update the defs and run scans in a few strategic places like the system32 directory.
Since the malware files are latent they can only be obfuscated to elude the scanners, they can't actively resist. Offline scanning will often kick an infection in the balls hard enough that I can get removal tools running on the host directly and get the registry and so-forth cleaned up.
Actually you can but it takes a little forethought. Get together install media for Windows, all your software, and a large external IEEE1394 or USB disk. If you use a bunch of stuff you downloaded then put the installers on a flash drive. Do clean install of the OS, apps, patch it all up, set up a Desktop the way you want it, yadda, yadda. Now before you junk it up with your data make an image of it. ping.windowsdream.com has a good free tool to do this with though if you have Ghost or whatever then go for it. If this is all too much trouble to start with then do it this way the next time you need to do a therapeutic rebuild of your Windows box.
You should not use an imaging utility like PING or Ghost to backup your personal stuff. Well you can but its unwieldy. GoodSync is a decent free tool that can keep two separate directories in sync like say "Documents and Settings" on your machine and the external disk. The first run will take forever to copy your 40GB porno collection but subsequent runs will only schlep over new or changed files.
I doubt it would make much difference. There are two main reasons for a corporate to Open Source their software. One reason to build a developer community that they can leverage to make the products and services they do sell. The other reason generate faith in the integrity of the codebase and company; the code doesn't have to die even if the supporting company does and users can trust that software does what is claimed for it and only what is claimed for it.
Despite some lip-service, Sun appears largely indifferent to any but their own developers. The trouble outsiders have had with OpenOffice is notorious. In the UNIX world that Sun is catering to, Open with a capital-"O" is a major feature in a way that it isn't in the Windows world. These customers don't necessarily drink either the Stallman or Raymond Kool-Aid but being able to trust code for-basically-ever is huge. Sun is just establishing trust with a particular sort of conservative customer.
These guys produce a patched tightvnc that has scaling and some other goodies. Pressing F8 brings up the UI for it:
http://www.karlrunge.com/x11vnc/ssvnc.html
They have source and binaries for a number of platforms. Their focus is on wrapping a friendly UI for tunneling VNC over SSH but the tightvnc binary they give you has the goodies even if run directly.
One thing is we deal with the government a lot, which always has the latest version of Office. Keeping up with that using non-MS software is pretty hard.
That is truly obnoxious. MS has to get paid so that you can interact with your government.
Don't forget OOO's support for "hybrid" PDFs. A hybrid PDF will include the Open Document file it was generated from within it. Such PDFs if sent to another OOO user can be edited. Otherwise they open like usual in any PDF reader.
Wire up a USB connector and write a driver to support it under Mac OSX, Linux and Windows.
It can be done. The Touch Tablet shows up as a pair of paddle controllers. The following device will therefore cause it to show up as two joystick axes:
http://www.atariage.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=267
I believe these devices were compatible as there was a version of the KoalaPad for the A8 and the C-64 as well. I had a couple of KoalaPads secondhand. The input layer seemed prone to losing it's sensitivity and you had to just about bore a grove in it to get it to register.
Perhaps so but having to learn a modal editor is an added difficulty when one is ALSO having to learn to admin a new system.
If someone has a really deep and sincere kiddy porn habit then even the very best of IT security practices won't help forever. Old fashioned police work would do it in the days before PCs were ubiquitous and it still will now. Of course, the cops are as lazy as everybody else and want a one button wizard that chews their food and regurgitates into their mouths for them but still.
If you're coming directly to console administration, Vim or Emacs is just added cruelty. Editors like Joe and Nano are a lot easier to learn and don't assume one has been carrying around a hyperspecialized customization file for twenty years since his college days. If you ever had to use anything that employed WordStar keybindings then Joe is particularly quick to learn but not bad at all if you haven't. Ctrl-KH will start you right off (that is keep ctrl held down and press k then h). Ctrl-KH will make the help screen go away again.
Even though I won't use a sackcloth-and-ashes-free-only computer, those issues are important. "Pragmatism" in the short term is anything but in the long term. If effort isn't exerted to keep platforms from being closed and replacements developed for things that are closed but commonly used then eventually it will be others who dictate how you compute and what sort of computing is permissible. Myself, I prefer to own my own media and hardware and to connect (ethically) to whatever machines on the Internet I see fit, use whatever protocols I see fit, and adapt any device I own to any purpose that I might desire. Annoying as they may often be, we ignore the proponents of openness and freedom at our peril.
At one time I worked as a tech on process control and industrial hygiene instrumentation. I got exposed to a lot of chemistry both literally and figuratively. For a time it was the most fun job I ever had. I got to play with chemicals, computers, and high-voltage circuitry. What wasn't to like?
In particular, mercaptans, hydrogen sulfide, and other sulfur compounds are responsible for most the disagreeable oder of flatus.
I don't remember that anecdote about Windows 2000, nor do I remember anyone highlighting any glaring problems with the Windows 2000 source. I *do* remember a similar anecdote about Windows _95_ and SimCity for DOS, from Raymond Chen's blog. The Windows 2000 codebase is also quite old today, and will have been changed substantially into today's Windows Vista and 2008.
Look under "Favoritism"
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/71552/7795
and anohter
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/11942/2702
So it wasn't SimCity necessarily but MS DOES do this and I very much doubt they stopped doing it with XP and Vista. And yes MS reworked their OS, yes the NT codebase is miles better than the 9x codebase obviously but it was nowhere as clean and clearly separated as what Apple did. If I try to run an old version of HyperCard all I am going to see is a circle and slash on the app's icon. They picked a point beyond which they wouldn't worship backwards-compatibility-at-all-costs. I'll give MS credit for finally losing 16-bit compatibility with Vista and closing THAT bit of attack surface off.
This is really the sort of thing freedesktop.org is supposed to be smoothing out.
Not really. Almost all of the API cruft from even Win 1.x came forward to WinNT. This is what prompted the discussion in the first place. Extensive backward-compatible API cruft makes the job of the malware/adware author easier. MS didn't take the the two crucial steps Apple did when they redesigned: they didn't have a clean forward compatible API common to old and new and they didn't sandbox the old cruft in a virtualizer. MS put in a better kernel, driver model, and niceties like a good permissions model but all this goodness was glopped in amidst a load of the old crap. Remember those Win2000 sources that leaked a few years ago. A lot of it was hacky workarounds targeted at popular apps that wouldn't run otherwise. For instance, Win2000 would detect that it was SimCity 2000 running and change some things accordingly.
You make a good point, but there is a huge flaw to your system.
There is no disincentive to do wrong.
Frank Abagnale didn't get off scot free. The French kinda did "go Sharia" on him. He spent six months in the Perpignan House Of Arrest. An excerpt of his book describes it so:
He also did time in the US though that wasn't as brutal as the French prison.
You've got a very valid point but it's something that Microsoft must do to improve their operating system. I'm not 100% positive about this but I believe that is what Apple did when they switched from OS9 to OSX. They basically told their customers, "we're redoing a large part of the system and lots of old stuff won't work on the new systems."
Actually what Apple did is a good model for the sort of change MS needs to make. Apple didn't just willy-nilly break compatibility with their previous OS. When they started reworking the NextStep APIs into the basis of OS X they also developed the Carbon API/runtime in parallel on both OS X and on what was their current OS. Apps developed against Carbon on the old OS that didn't use calls or libraries unavailable on OS X would run on OS X as well. Carbon was out a couple of years before the first wide release of OS X. Apple encouraged as much development against this runtime as possible. AppleWorks 6 is one example of an application that will run unchanged on an old PPC machine running OS 9 and the latest Intel Macs running Leopard. In this way Apple started transitioning developers even before OS X was released.
BTW, the reverse is NOT true. It is possible to create Carbon apps that won't run on OS 8.6/9.x if they are developed primarily on OS X. So Carbon mainly provides forward compatibility. And as I said, care was required on the OS 9 side as well. Use one call out of the old toolbox and your app will run in Classic on OS X. Carbon isn't just a compatibility mechanism on OS X. It is a fully realized OS X API though it appears it won't become a fully 64-bit API. 64-bit Macs to come will run 32-bit Carbon apps fine but these apps will have to survive in the amount of memory a 32-bit system can provide.
However this still left a great bulk of legacy software that new Mac buyers would expect to run on their new machines. So Apple bundled a virtualizer that would run OS 9.x. They integrated the virtualizer so that it would run in what software like VMWare and VirtualBox call "Seamless Mode". They made as many of OS X' facilities as possible available to "Classic apps" such as cut/paste, OpenGL, and printing. OS X 10.0 was first supplied on new machines in 2001 and Apple continued making PowerPC Macs that could support Classic until 2005. There WERE old apps that didn't run well under Classic but most did. Classic was rather like an odd clone of an old PPC Mac that would usually but not always run older stuff. Classic apps could also run afoul of file permissions since the old Mac OS didn't support them all that consistently. This isn't unlike the permission tweaking one sometimes has to do to get an old Win98 app to run on XP.
In '05, Apple announced they were switching to the Intel processor architecture and starting selling Intel Macs in mid '06. Since Classic is a virtualizer and not an emulator, Apple did at last drop support for the oldest applications that ran on Macs of years past. Still, properly developed Carbon apps that ran on OS 8.x/9.x would still run on the new Intel machines thanks to Rosetta. Rosetta is a partial PPC virtualizer that does what emulator authors call "High Level Emulation". Rosetta translates PPC syscalls into Intel equivalents. So a PPC OS X binary will still run (usually) on an Intel Mac but Rosetta does not do a full emulation of the PowerPC CPU and chipset of an older Mac.
So Apple didn't just cut off their hordes of often fanatical users in one fell swoop. They executed multiple strategies over half a decade to transition off their old OS then processor arch.
MS can do this as well. A clean and well thought out subset of the latest .NET (3.5 at the moment) could be the "MS Carbon". Apps developed solely against that designated API can be expected to run unchanged on a fully modern cruft free OS. They've bought VirtualPC and marketing various virtualization products based on it so they have the makings of the "MS Classic". All that remains is to develop a 64-bit clean modern OS that makes no attempt whatsoever to run old stuff outside of the virtualizer and a well-defined forward compatible API that will be common to both.
A couple of years back, Massachusetts attempted to mandate open formats in state government. ODF was to be the office piece of this and MS pulled every dirty trick in the book to reverse or subvert that up to and including pulling strings to get the people pushing for this pressured to leave.
I suggest "massachusetts odf" as better set of search terms for Google.
At least that would be very easy to filter out on my mailservers. You'd have a very short ruleset that looks for clickable IPs and a much shorter set of rules to finish triggering the thing. It wouldn't stop spam but it would make my life a little easier.
My favorite is government forms delivered as Office documents or government services that insist on IE.
DriverPacks (driverpacks.net) are your friend here. It is a fairly easy to use utility that will let you slipstream a wide range of network, chipset, mass storage, sound, and video drivers into XP, Server 2003, and (maybe) Vista into a Windows XP install CD. I also use nlite and another utility to slipstream SP3, IE7, and WMP11 into an XP install disc. What I wind up with an 850MB iso that requires a DVD but it is very very convenient. The biggest PITA right now is newish laptops with SATA chipsets that old XP install discs don't have drivers for. DriverPacks helps immensely with that. It also helps by lighting up most wired and wireless interfaces up off the bat so you can get the machine on the net for any devices the DriverPacks didn't light up.