The 64-Bit transition comes with a lot things, all bad for Microsoft:
For the first time in computing history AMD and Intel no longer see Microsoft as the sole software provider. Both Intel and AMD support Linux from day 1 on their 64-chips. I repeat: That did not happen before. So far, Linux was never available on a chip's introduction.
On Operon and Itanium, Linux is available before Windows.
In the first 1 or 2 years, 64-chips will be mainly used on servers, where Linux is already strong.
To use the additional features/registers, a recompile is neccessary - OSS will use those features right away, while CSS vendors will take quite some time to release a 64-Bit version and will probably want some money for the upgrade.
The traditional Windows-on-servers customer is a very conservative market segment not likely to jump on the 64-Bit bandwagon very early.
To summarize, Microsoft might run into a chicken-and-egg problem on 64-Bits: Nobody runs Windows on 64-Bits because it's not faster -> Nobody makes Win64 software -> Nobody runs Windows on 64-Bits.
Add into that the fact that Microsoft is traditionally very incompetent and slow when it comes to adopting new architectures and you get the idea.
I think that Microsoft will lose the majority of their server marketshare and a large chunk of their desktop marketshare during that transition. Simple market inertia will prevent Microsoft to be thrown out of the desktop market, but because of the 64-Bit transition, the Linux desktop market might finally gain critical mass and endanger the Windows domination in the long term.
Konqueror - A very good browser. Fails to correctly render a few sites (sadly perlmonks home page is one of those). Doesn't support tabbed browsing. But it's nice to have a browser properly integrated with KDE, so I'm giving up hope on tabbed browsing for a little while - so far it's the only real thing I miss from Mozilla.
Tabbed browsing is on the KDE 3.1 feature list, so it won't be a long while until you can have tabbed browsing in Konqui. Probably 3 or 4 months, but definitely still in this year.
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cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "model name"
and launches the corresponding executable.
So with Opteron coming out in mid/late 2003 it is right on time.
In a lot of cases, over 4GB of memory make more sense than more than 2 GHz.
Also, I don't know what "extra cost and administration time" you are talking about.
To summarize, Microsoft might run into a chicken-and-egg problem on 64-Bits: Nobody runs Windows on 64-Bits because it's not faster -> Nobody makes Win64 software -> Nobody runs Windows on 64-Bits.
Add into that the fact that Microsoft is traditionally very incompetent and slow when it comes to adopting new architectures and you get the idea.
I think that Microsoft will lose the majority of their server marketshare and a large chunk of their desktop marketshare during that transition. Simple market inertia will prevent Microsoft to be thrown out of the desktop market, but because of the 64-Bit transition, the Linux desktop market might finally gain critical mass and endanger the Windows domination in the long term.
Tabbed browsing is on the KDE 3.1 feature list, so it won't be a long while until you can have tabbed browsing in Konqui. Probably 3 or 4 months, but definitely still in this year.
You get the stability and polish from a .3 release, but the marketing hype and media attention from a .0 release.
KDE 3.0 will make big inroads, while KDE 2.3 wouldn't.