RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. -- Bob Young of Red Hat, Inc., claims that Open Source would have prevented the crashing of the Osprey aircraft due to a software bug. He has been quoted to say, "See what happens when a closed-source monopolistic company gets its hands on the DoD's aircrafts? Certainly they should be brighter than to hire Micor$oft, but still; c'mon, the Open Source community would of patched that thing on the fly and they would of had a functioning reset button!"
Steve Ballmer of Micro$oft couldn't be reached for comment. A PR monkey from the company is saying that he and the developers of the software are currently being court-marshalled for their recent incedent of the Osprey crash. The PR money has been quoted to say, "Geez! First God misses us with that earthquake and now this! Can't we get all get along? It was an accedent! We weren't, like, trying to pressure the government or anything to drop certain anti-trust charges."
At that moment FBI agents charged the podium and arrested the PR monkey for consiring to stop a military mission.
...isn't the programs, nor the content, it is the bandwith that's nessiary for the P2P to work! Basicly, programs that use little bandwith, such as IRC and instant messaging, do go through a centralized server, then allow the nodes to connect, if they chose to. Otherwise the messages go through a server to be transmitted to the other person. To do this on a large scale can be problematic, such as the case with Napster and SMB (Windows Networking; one big reason why WinNT/Win2k sucks). Napster forks over MP3's; those files of course range from 2 MB - 10 MB. On a dial-up, it would take forever! SMB broadcasts every x seconds, and when multiple computers come onto the network... tada! Broadcast storm! It wastes network resources because it's too "chatty".
Now, let's decentralize. Gnutella comes to mind... iirc, it doesn't scale much. Why? Try depending your connections on ppl mostly on 56k modems. They can be disconnected, timed out; they tie up phone lines, and bandwith is scarce compared to broadband connections where bandwith starts to become a commidity. Could Gnutella work better with mostly broadband connects? Perhaps, and so would other P2P apps.
For those that are saying, "What are the ethical consequences of P2P? It'll start piracy!" My question is: What did you expect? P2P really mirrors the reality of society and the way humans are. Everyone's got their own ideas, but they can be grouped nicely into different broad catogories. These are cliques/gangs/clans/organizations/whatever. Pick what groups you'll follow; it's not as if you don't.
Time to get a RAID card or what?
on
CPRM Voted Down
·
· Score: 1
Well... CPRM is shot down... it's true that it won't be tried again. I feel that if we fight hard enough to get what we want (freedom to have what we want on the hard disk) we'll get it. Boycott is nice, but Western Digital and Maxtor aren't the best designed hard disks on the market!
If there is a last resort, it would have to be RAID to build those big hard drives from smaller ones. Sure, it'll cost more, but using RAID to have non-copywrite-protected hard drives would save us from their mercy... not to mention help the ones they'll want to stop, the piraters!
Which brings me to a point: Since when do piraters play according to the rules? If it's a copy-protect scheme on ATA, that perhaps can be broke. I do believe that SCSI has something simmilar, but not sure; if it's the case that SCSI doesn't, then they'll use SCSI. The other part of the point is that there is that 1984 ruling in the Supreme Court about video tapes... dunno if we can apply it here, but if they wanna stop ppl from storing movies and records on their hard drives... it's like a tape player and/or a VCR. The ruling may not affect a positive for Napster, but I feel that has more grounds for ppl against this CPRM and the like... then again, IANAL!
Maybe making some teams suck LESS? Think! It could actually MAKE money by people ATTENDING.:O Though I agree it takes revenue to make this all possible, there are 162 regular season games in the MLB. I'd like to have the option to listen to maybe a *series* for $10 or $15, which would be worth 3 nose-bleed seats out in the worst section of the stadiums, but $10/game is asking too much for me (and other people that are sick of their team sucking so horribly). It's a start, but I wouldn't be suprised if they need to change their fees to something like the above mentioned.
This should sit well with a PR monkey trying to get the luser to use Linux... shame! I for one don't think it's such a great thing to have "whatever font I feel like"... a font is a font, so long as I read it.
Well it would be nice to see more ppl to grab a hold of a real OS instead of something like M$ eXPerement... so we can get more intresting software:) The "pretty fonts" is part of how to get the astectic-minded dolt to buy it... and no, binary compatablity isn't going to cut it. If ppl buy, the software will come.
Has always been a debatable issue. Nothing new here; I'm sure other museams that don't get the Yahoo! press have simmilar models floating around.
Pluto's a planet; we all accept that. So there are more ice objects called the Kupier belt... so now if there are rocks around the planet it's not a planet?:P Geez! I guess only Mercury and Venus qualify now;)
Guess the contenients must be islands since they are surrounded by water... this was a bone-headed move by the museam IMO
OK, time to finally say that the voting process in the US has finally come upon a crisis... I'm sure to vote, you have to pay a royalty per vote, per election. Thus, if there are 13 positions available, you have to pay M$ 13 * x USD, where x is whatever M$ desires the royalty would be (Of course there will be shrink-wrapped package deals that would include President, Senator, Represenative, and state govenor, along with Internet Exploder and Lookout! Express), and of course, subscription-based services... gotta have that.NET you know!
Dell would only kiss M$ arse, as they do now...
Unisys OTOH... gotta pay them a royalty, too! Well, until they say that the ppl who develop for the system only has to pay the royalty and M$ buys them out;)
Heck, while they are making Office 10 subscription -based, I'd think they'd at least be consis... oh wait, it's M$; they're never consistant!
Anyway, I'm sure while picking up a MAC address
off of a modem and/or NIC, the MAC address can just go with the Wistler copy, ya? Makes me wonder... if that is so, why can't you just pick up a cheap NIC or modem? (Ah! The ISA slot lives!) If M$ creates it, I am assured that piraters will defeat it... either by trick and/or crack. Not as if they can guard their own code from crackers...
M$ should lower their price, and they wouldn't have to worry about the whole pirating issue...:) C'mon, Bill, you can't be the richest man forever!:P
To think that people are exclaiming at Multics finally ceasing! There is quite an old OS out there still... UNIX. Of course not in its original AT&T code...
I can draw three of morals from this:
1) A good overall design never grows old. Not to mention excellent foresight by its desginers. These ideas that the Multics archatecs have thought of are still the model of a good server/client OS.
2) A good overall design is built to last! If the Canadians just took out a Multics system last month, there must of been a reason why it was still in commission for this long of time. Most certainly it could be argued that it was because there wasn't funding... maybe, but that's aside from this point. If it works, why fix it?
3) If Bill Gates didn't drop out of college in the 1970s, and actually studied a Multics or an UNIX system... maybe his OS would be good? Or was it inevitable?;)
Some people want to know...:) Anyway, now that M$ is for sure going all 32-bit (and other OSes, like our favorate, already have) lusers are really going to complain over how they can't use their ancient DoS programs...
Otherwise the security part doesn't suprise me... I'm sure this beta will strongly represent the final verson, bugs and all.
I would like to make a few points on this nice satire done:
1) KDE vs GNOME. While people might argue which one is better, the point of the two projects IMHO wasn't always a matter of GPL vs the QT licence, albiet now that is irrelevant. The fact is, choise is good. GNOME personally is my favorate because of the customization of the UI, where with KDE, there aren't any open TCP ports mysterously open. (This isn't a big deal especially with a firewall but opens speculation to any possible expolits that are known or unknown. Albiet that there probably isn't anything to worry about, I still would raise a little speculation.) Of course, the satirical Billy G. is of course overly arrogant over this in itself.
2) Linux's desktop prevlance. "Oh, it's just a fad." it says in the article. Much like the average luser that can't figure out what a right-click is, the Billy G. in the article is denoucing the desktop. Maybe he himself is a luser? (Duh; anyone with that poor design would be.) I doubt that the opinion of a "fad desktop" will last. And no, the payroll doesn't mean a thing. It's in the SDKs, which of course are usually low-cost anyway to implement a full Linux enviroment with SDKs all over. Besides, it says even at the GNU, "We're not saying you can't make money with free software..."
3) The author of the satire perhaps is challenging us to promote Linux's strong points (aside from not sucking unlike windows, but how else do you explain it to a CIO or an average luser?) instead of always ripping Billy G. a new one. It also shows that the author, like IMO, sees M$ very arrogant about the open source movement. If this is the case, more Halloween documents are to come as it's unlikely the movement will die as time goes on.
While it is poor form with HTML, the author still needs to underline any titles, as that is good writing...
Remember, folks, computers and English don't mix!;)
Atari coming out; finally! Now, a few things I might want to say that the creator of Pong shouldn't do unlike his company Atari:
-- Put too much time into classics. Yes, classics are awesome, like Space Invaders, but really, it's nothing new
-- Have too much "exclusive" games done in-house. Remember Jaguar, anyone?
-- More importantly, get some new titles, etc, that going to rule:)
I love the fact that this will be based on the Linux kernel (read: XBox will cost a fortune just in the fact of making the NT kernel work. Royalty? Would M$ really charge themselves one?:P) and also with modems to connect. Seriously, though, it should have ethernet as well... hopefully he'll wise up and allow connections to any ISP:)
Certainly one thing that I do admire is someone's ability to reverse engineer a program. Certain reverse engineering has been quite helpful (WINE and Samba comes to mind so that Win32/Windows Networking may work in an UNIX enviroment) and yet others have been struck down by a flagerant DMCA (Say, DeCSS). Certainly I am not happy that I can't watch a DVD on my Linux machine, at least not legally without a MPAA-approved driver and a fat royalty. Heaven forbid the MPAA lose a dime...
Also, don't you think that some patents are rediculas, like "One Click Shopping" and algorithms? I don't believe that someone should be allowed a patent on a mathmatical algorithm! (Say, the MP3 format is pateneted.) Copyright is a different issue; I would like to write and copyright my own work. But a patent? No.
First: Aside from the author's assertion of where Linux apps are at atm, it certainly does not mean that there will be pressure from the business and home sectors to port to a relatively cheap OS (free - $30 for Linux and *BSD at least) so that the software vendors will keep a viable market. Who wants to pay $1000 for Winblowz anyway? I won't pay even $0.10 (the worth of WinME) for it:)
Second: In the "behavior modification" of the ruling, Micro$haft has to share code... thus other companies may implement a Win-whatever API without Micro$haft flooding the amount of APIs for that particular platform, bringing down the price, even though the original implementation is copyright Micor$haft, it doesn't mean it can't be reverse-engineered or another implentation can't be done;)
Third: Whoever said that the $1000 version of Winblowz would work or not break interoperability?
Billy Boy is getting the butt end of the stick in his lawsuit slapped against him... of course Linux is coming out of nowhere according to the lusers that can't find an "any" key and are either too incompetent or lazy to get Netscape (Go Mozilla!:), so they use Internet Exploder, and of course, "Lookout!" Express (complete with virus support)... am I someone that thinks Micor$haft is just going to attempt to keep their market by trying signing up everyone to M$N? Of course. Look... of course they're going to spam; most lusers read it they would read junk mail! So Billy Boy, only being efficant in marketing, decides to kill two birds with one stone -- keep his market of Winblowz users, and start to make other companies such as AOHell start to worry.
I bet everyone here that M$N access will require Winblowz ME or Winblowz 2000 quickly;)
And guess what happened to their ballots, typed in Word...:)
OTOH, last time I checked, Micro$haft has the biggest monopoly since Rockafeller! Gimme a break, how can this not be of major national signifigance?
At least one judge was using Linux.;) While I can't see Micro$haft being able to explain why they aren't getting a sale (HINT: Something going for $129 or $219 doesn't sell, duh:), I would like them to explain why they have some extra "features" in WinME that would start to monopolize the digital camera software market, and of course it only will work in Winblowz... any ideas where this could lead? I think Micro$haft stalling like this is only going to allow Billy Boy to plot a new way to reaquire power, seeing if he can ajar out some of his have-tos with the company's behavior, which is unlikely. I wouldn't be suprised though if two companies were told they can't collabarate, but if it's not said, I wouldn't be suprised if they did.
This is rather pathetic if you ask me, although they had the right idea (albiet non-orginal, as M$ yet again steals^H^H^H^H^H^H has an idea.) with the women in the booth:)
This FIN ("finished" in French) explains precisly the state of M$. They need a grassroots campaign now that the DOJ put the hammer down in hopes that all of the idiots^H^H^H^H^H^H Windows users would come out and bail the company out. First of all, hand out fliers? Why not do a TV promising to protect the right of innovation, or at least the theft of it? The people that think M$ innovates are still learning how to point and click! They don't know about a "PC Expo" or a web site! Ah, yes. Another blotched effort by Billy boy and friends.
What I find amusing over all this is the fact that perhaps they knew all along they were going to lose the verdict, but of course now in the Supreme Court they have to start getting people to state, "I support the Freedom to Innovate!(tm)" What am I missing here? The freedom of innovation has always been encouraged.:) Just not monopolies;)
I was wondering about some fine print on the brochuere... is there a hidden EULA and royalty?
Luser: "Hey -- I just got this new Hotmail account. Now I can talk to all my friends!"
The luser types away, giving its username and easily guessable password...
Luser: "Oh, look -- my fiance sent me an email. How do I know? It's entitled, 'ILOVEYOU'. I guess she doesn't use spaces. btw, what's with this.VBS file?"
Another luser gets flooded with 50 or so of these email from all of the luser's friends and family.
Luser: "Wow -- advertizing! I should look at one of these! Oh, what's this? Two files, one with the extention.EXE, and the other with the extension.VBS! WOW!"
Since M$ isn't capable of intellegant programming, and M$ is (not) innovative at all, they must of contributed something -- oh, yeah, "Fatware"! How would I miss that?
Of course for those enthusists out there willing to develop on four platforms (Win 9x, Win NT, Win 2000, and Win CE, where Win 9x keeps DoS 1.0 compatiblity), take it from the former richest man in the world -- code "Fatware" and aquire a mono^H^H^H^H er, sucessful company.
Win 2000 will work on any computer! Any computer that is fast as AMD's Athlon can be overclocked! That is the sucess of "Fatware" -- make deals with OEMs, and when the hardware companies get more revenue because of your "Fatware", you get a cut! How can you go wrong? Unless you have a DOJ lawsuit hanging over your head, you can't!
Of course coding excessive lines can be rather time-consuming. The fun part is having more backdoors in your software than the White House. After making a bunch of companies squirm over the backdoors, write a simple patch and charge a fortune.;) But it's not a "bug fix" as those open-source people would say... nah, it's a "Service Pack".
Ah, maybe M$ should have compatibilty with DoS 1.0 -- the later versions didn't improve the OS much.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Steve Ballmer of Micro$oft couldn't be reached for comment. A PR monkey from the company is saying that he and the developers of the software are currently being court-marshalled for their recent incedent of the Osprey crash. The PR money has been quoted to say, "Geez! First God misses us with that earthquake and now this! Can't we get all get along? It was an accedent! We weren't, like, trying to pressure the government or anything to drop certain anti-trust charges."
At that moment FBI agents charged the podium and arrested the PR monkey for consiring to stop a military mission.
Now, let's decentralize. Gnutella comes to mind... iirc, it doesn't scale much. Why? Try depending your connections on ppl mostly on 56k modems. They can be disconnected, timed out; they tie up phone lines, and bandwith is scarce compared to broadband connections where bandwith starts to become a commidity. Could Gnutella work better with mostly broadband connects? Perhaps, and so would other P2P apps.
For those that are saying, "What are the ethical consequences of P2P? It'll start piracy!" My question is: What did you expect? P2P really mirrors the reality of society and the way humans are. Everyone's got their own ideas, but they can be grouped nicely into different broad catogories. These are cliques/gangs/clans/organizations/whatever. Pick what groups you'll follow; it's not as if you don't.
If there is a last resort, it would have to be RAID to build those big hard drives from smaller ones. Sure, it'll cost more, but using RAID to have non-copywrite-protected hard drives would save us from their mercy... not to mention help the ones they'll want to stop, the piraters!
Which brings me to a point: Since when do piraters play according to the rules? If it's a copy-protect scheme on ATA, that perhaps can be broke. I do believe that SCSI has something simmilar, but not sure; if it's the case that SCSI doesn't, then they'll use SCSI. The other part of the point is that there is that 1984 ruling in the Supreme Court about video tapes... dunno if we can apply it here, but if they wanna stop ppl from storing movies and records on their hard drives... it's like a tape player and/or a VCR. The ruling may not affect a positive for Napster, but I feel that has more grounds for ppl against this CPRM and the like... then again, IANAL!
Well it would be nice to see more ppl to grab a hold of a real OS instead of something like M$ eXPerement... so we can get more intresting software :) The "pretty fonts" is part of how to get the astectic-minded dolt to buy it... and no, binary compatablity isn't going to cut it. If ppl buy, the software will come.
Has always been a debatable issue. Nothing new here; I'm sure other museams that don't get the Yahoo! press have simmilar models floating around.
:P Geez! I guess only Mercury and Venus qualify now ;)
Pluto's a planet; we all accept that. So there are more ice objects called the Kupier belt... so now if there are rocks around the planet it's not a planet?
Guess the contenients must be islands since they are surrounded by water... this was a bone-headed move by the museam IMO
Dell would only kiss M$ arse, as they do now...
Unisys OTOH... gotta pay them a royalty, too! Well, until they say that the ppl who develop for the system only has to pay the royalty and M$ buys them out ;)
Just a little chaos theroy :)
Anyway, I'm sure while picking up a MAC address off of a modem and/or NIC, the MAC address can just go with the Wistler copy, ya? Makes me wonder... if that is so, why can't you just pick up a cheap NIC or modem? (Ah! The ISA slot lives!) If M$ creates it, I am assured that piraters will defeat it... either by trick and/or crack. Not as if they can guard their own code from crackers...
M$ should lower their price, and they wouldn't have to worry about the whole pirating issue... :) C'mon, Bill, you can't be the richest man forever! :P
I am sure they have an entire security department.
:)
They must be the laziest department in M$...
I wonder what the qualifications could be for that job? "Do you know how to point-and-click? If you can, we got a security job for you!"
To think that people are exclaiming at Multics finally ceasing! There is quite an old OS out there still... UNIX. Of course not in its original AT&T code...
;)
I can draw three of morals from this:
1) A good overall design never grows old. Not to mention excellent foresight by its desginers. These ideas that the Multics archatecs have thought of are still the model of a good server/client OS.
2) A good overall design is built to last! If the Canadians just took out a Multics system last month, there must of been a reason why it was still in commission for this long of time. Most certainly it could be argued that it was because there wasn't funding... maybe, but that's aside from this point. If it works, why fix it?
3) If Bill Gates didn't drop out of college in the 1970s, and actually studied a Multics or an UNIX system... maybe his OS would be good? Or was it inevitable?
Some people want to know... :) Anyway, now that M$ is for sure going all 32-bit (and other OSes, like our favorate, already have) lusers are really going to complain over how they can't use their ancient DoS programs...
Otherwise the security part doesn't suprise me... I'm sure this beta will strongly represent the final verson, bugs and all.
I would like to make a few points on this nice satire done:
1) KDE vs GNOME. While people might argue which one is better, the point of the two projects IMHO wasn't always a matter of GPL vs the QT licence, albiet now that is irrelevant. The fact is, choise is good. GNOME personally is my favorate because of the customization of the UI, where with KDE, there aren't any open TCP ports mysterously open. (This isn't a big deal especially with a firewall but opens speculation to any possible expolits that are known or unknown. Albiet that there probably isn't anything to worry about, I still would raise a little speculation.) Of course, the satirical Billy G. is of course overly arrogant over this in itself.
2) Linux's desktop prevlance. "Oh, it's just a fad." it says in the article. Much like the average luser that can't figure out what a right-click is, the Billy G. in the article is denoucing the desktop. Maybe he himself is a luser? (Duh; anyone with that poor design would be.) I doubt that the opinion of a "fad desktop" will last. And no, the payroll doesn't mean a thing. It's in the SDKs, which of course are usually low-cost anyway to implement a full Linux enviroment with SDKs all over. Besides, it says even at the GNU, "We're not saying you can't make money with free software..."
3) The author of the satire perhaps is challenging us to promote Linux's strong points (aside from not sucking unlike windows, but how else do you explain it to a CIO or an average luser?) instead of always ripping Billy G. a new one. It also shows that the author, like IMO, sees M$ very arrogant about the open source movement. If this is the case, more Halloween documents are to come as it's unlikely the movement will die as time goes on.
While it is poor form with HTML, the author still needs to underline any titles, as that is good writing... ;)
Remember, folks, computers and English don't mix!
"Hey, who's the chick in the third row?" -- Diamond Joe, speaking on Wacking Day, Springfield
-- Put too much time into classics. Yes, classics are awesome, like Space Invaders, but really, it's nothing new
-- Have too much "exclusive" games done in-house. Remember Jaguar, anyone?
-- More importantly, get some new titles, etc, that going to rule :)
I love the fact that this will be based on the Linux kernel (read: XBox will cost a fortune just in the fact of making the NT kernel work. Royalty? Would M$ really charge themselves one? :P) and also with modems to connect. Seriously, though, it should have ethernet as well... hopefully he'll wise up and allow connections to any ISP :)
Certainly one thing that I do admire is someone's ability to reverse engineer a program. Certain reverse engineering has been quite helpful (WINE and Samba comes to mind so that Win32/Windows Networking may work in an UNIX enviroment) and yet others have been struck down by a flagerant DMCA (Say, DeCSS). Certainly I am not happy that I can't watch a DVD on my Linux machine, at least not legally without a MPAA-approved driver and a fat royalty. Heaven forbid the MPAA lose a dime...
Also, don't you think that some patents are rediculas, like "One Click Shopping" and algorithms? I don't believe that someone should be allowed a patent on a mathmatical algorithm! (Say, the MP3 format is pateneted.) Copyright is a different issue; I would like to write and copyright my own work. But a patent? No.
Second: In the "behavior modification" of the ruling, Micro$haft has to share code... thus other companies may implement a Win-whatever API without Micro$haft flooding the amount of APIs for that particular platform, bringing down the price, even though the original implementation is copyright Micor$haft, it doesn't mean it can't be reverse-engineered or another implentation can't be done ;)
Third: Whoever said that the $1000 version of Winblowz would work or not break interoperability?
Billy Boy is getting the butt end of the stick in his lawsuit slapped against him... of course Linux is coming out of nowhere according to the lusers that can't find an "any" key and are either too incompetent or lazy to get Netscape (Go Mozilla! :), so they use Internet Exploder, and of course, "Lookout!" Express (complete with virus support)... am I someone that thinks Micor$haft is just going to attempt to keep their market by trying signing up everyone to M$N? Of course. Look... of course they're going to spam; most lusers read it they would read junk mail! So Billy Boy, only being efficant in marketing, decides to kill two birds with one stone -- keep his market of Winblowz users, and start to make other companies such as AOHell start to worry.
I bet everyone here that M$N access will require Winblowz ME or Winblowz 2000 quickly ;)
OTOH, last time I checked, Micro$haft has the biggest monopoly since Rockafeller! Gimme a break, how can this not be of major national signifigance?
At least one judge was using Linux. ;) While I can't see Micro$haft being able to explain why they aren't getting a sale (HINT: Something going for $129 or $219 doesn't sell, duh :), I would like them to explain why they have some extra "features" in WinME that would start to monopolize the digital camera software market, and of course it only will work in Winblowz... any ideas where this could lead? I think Micro$haft stalling like this is only going to allow Billy Boy to plot a new way to reaquire power, seeing if he can ajar out some of his have-tos with the company's behavior, which is unlikely. I wouldn't be suprised though if two companies were told they can't collabarate, but if it's not said, I wouldn't be suprised if they did.
This FIN ("finished" in French) explains precisly the state of M$. They need a grassroots campaign now that the DOJ put the hammer down in hopes that all of the idiots^H^H^H^H^H^H Windows users would come out and bail the company out. First of all, hand out fliers? Why not do a TV promising to protect the right of innovation, or at least the theft of it? The people that think M$ innovates are still learning how to point and click! They don't know about a "PC Expo" or a web site! Ah, yes. Another blotched effort by Billy boy and friends.
What I find amusing over all this is the fact that perhaps they knew all along they were going to lose the verdict, but of course now in the Supreme Court they have to start getting people to state, "I support the Freedom to Innovate!(tm)" What am I missing here? The freedom of innovation has always been encouraged. :) Just not monopolies ;)
I was wondering about some fine print on the brochuere... is there a hidden EULA and royalty?
The luser types away, giving its username and easily guessable password...
Luser: "Oh, look -- my fiance sent me an email. How do I know? It's entitled, 'ILOVEYOU'. I guess she doesn't use spaces. btw, what's with this .VBS file?"
Another luser gets flooded with 50 or so of these email from all of the luser's friends and family.
Luser: "Wow -- advertizing! I should look at one of these! Oh, what's this? Two files, one with the extention .EXE, and the other with the extension .VBS! WOW!"
Talk about ".DUM"...geez, will lusers ever learn?
Of course for those enthusists out there willing to develop on four platforms (Win 9x, Win NT, Win 2000, and Win CE, where Win 9x keeps DoS 1.0 compatiblity), take it from the former richest man in the world -- code "Fatware" and aquire a mono^H^H^H^H er, sucessful company.
Win 2000 will work on any computer! Any computer that is fast as AMD's Athlon can be overclocked! That is the sucess of "Fatware" -- make deals with OEMs, and when the hardware companies get more revenue because of your "Fatware", you get a cut! How can you go wrong? Unless you have a DOJ lawsuit hanging over your head, you can't!
Of course coding excessive lines can be rather time-consuming. The fun part is having more backdoors in your software than the White House. After making a bunch of companies squirm over the backdoors, write a simple patch and charge a fortune. ;) But it's not a "bug fix" as those open-source people would say... nah, it's a "Service Pack".
Ah, maybe M$ should have compatibilty with DoS 1.0 -- the later versions didn't improve the OS much. :)