Use a Jabber server, there are many out there, and it also offers the benefit that you can split the service up into subdomains, ie your larger sites have their own local jabber server but can communicate with the others, so you have for instance: user@newyork.yourcompany.com user@london.yourcompany.com
You can also open it up to the outside if you want, and you can also make people's jabber id's match their email addresses...
For clients, being an open standard you have a huge choice of clients, pidgin is good and cross platform for instance, try a selection and see which one suits you best. Same for the server, try a few and see which works, if you have multiple servers there's no reason for them all to run the same software, and similarly you don't need everyone running the same client.
And of course, being an open standard you are free to change clients and servers whenever it suits you with minimal disruption, and supporting new devices will give you the widest choice - there are jabber clients for every significant OS and most mobile or embedded devices.
Incidentally, i doubt microsoft's offering satisfies your "cross platform" stipulation.
Suspend and hibernate used to work well in my old thinkpads, when it used APM instead of ACPI...
Every individual driver needs to support hibernation properly, and have to deal with situations like hardware no longer being present after the resume - eg usb devices removed...
ACPI is far more problematic than APM was, not least of all because microsoft have corrupted intel's original ACPI spec and broken various things...
OSX on the other hand, works well because the hardware and software are designed together all in one place, rather than a mix of drivers and software from different places.
And there are versions of linux which are stripped down and even quicker, only they're not pirated, and the stripping down is a lot more thorough due to having the source code...
There are optimized linux versions running on phones, routers, old games consoles etc, devices with maybe 16mb of ram or less and yet running modern linux kernels. And these are proper compatible versions of linux using the same kernel, not like windows mobile which has very little in common with full size windows.
How much ram? The default Ubuntu install seems quite slow with less than 512mb for me... I had it on a 600mhz P3 and it was fine with 512mb, but very sluggish with 256.
Have you seen the state of IE lately? Microsoft products are typically years behind their competitors in the most basic ways.... windows doesnt even have simple features like secure delete out of the box...
Opening the package manager, ticking what you want installed and hitting apply is quite easy...
Opening a browser, searching google, finding a program that seems like it might do what you want, finding the download link, agreeing to the download policy, downloading it, running the installer, clicking next a few times without reading any of the screens is actually a lot harder.
And just because you are given the option of using the command line, doesn't mean you have to... Linux geeks use it because its much quicker when you know what you want, and it's actually easier to walk someone through it over the phone because a textual interface translates much better to vocal instructions.
When the Athlon X2 came out, it offered the best performance/watt... Intel's highend offering was the P4, and it used a lot more power than the X2 while performing slower.
As for the broken suspend, this will be down to the motherboard maker not bothering to support the published ACPI standards... On a system which has attempted to follow standards and/or provide linux compatibility this isn't a problem, for instance my eee suspends properly, as does my macbook pro running either linux or osx, and my previous ibm thinkpads were all able to suspend properly.
People often compare a clean windows install to a clean linux install, forgetting that a clean linux install is a fully usable system that's ready to go, while a clean windows install is largely useless until you install a significant number of third party apps.
Well, that's hardly secure, since it has to decrypt all of the windows files and boot the OS... And for that, it must have a static key stored on the machine in plaintext or easily reversible encryption, or keep all of the system files unencrypted.
It's not uncommon to see an organisation that has no real clue, and have been sold a "full disk encryption" scheme which doesn't require a password while booting... That is, the key for the encryption is stored somewhere on the disk, possibly obfuscated, so you can boot up the disk in a VM with a debugger attached to retrieve the key, or you can use that same debugger to bypass the login process once the machine has booted etc...
Not free, you get it "for no extra cost" when you use a gift card to buy coffee from starbucks... And you'd be buying some coffee anyway, since they wont just let you sit there using the wifi without buying a drink.
The PC may be a more open platform, but it's also a lot messier... Incompatible hardware, layers of abstraction between game and hardware, different performance levels, driver breakage, background tasks hurting performance (incl malware and tools designed to remove it)... It becomes a lot more hassle both for the developer and for the potential player.
But speaking of indie games, the Amiga had quite a successful public domain scene with large numbers of homebrew games being developed... The hardware was almost guaranteed, since 99% of people wanting to play games would have one of a handful of specific models, the software wasn't a problem because people would direct boot your game so nothing else would be loaded... They even used to make compilations, like the assassins collections, you could get a cd with thousands of homebrew games on it all ready to go.
On the other hand, the Cell isn't designed for javascript processing, it won't perform spectacularly... It has the benefit of not needing abstraction layers between the browser and the hardware, but the hardware isn't especially suited to this kind of thing...
But their point was, they outperform IE7 but not google chrome (presumably running on the same hardware as ie7 was), google chrome is also a general use application.
And by licensing software you are effectively tied to a subscription service as well, since the actual owner of the software can revoke your access to it at any time (thus limiting your access to your data if it's stored in proprietary formats only supported by those apps). Sure, you may technically still have your data, but that will just make it all the more sickening that you can't access it.
But has the JIT code been implemented for PPC? It works for me if i turn the JIT off, but the results are nothing special. I let the crash reporter do it's work and report the bug, it crashes every time without fail if jit is activated so hopefully they will be able to debug the issue fairly quickly.
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Most likely the MSN bug in pidgin is due to having to reverse engineer the protocol every time it gets changed...
Use a Jabber server, there are many out there, and it also offers the benefit that you can split the service up into subdomains, ie your larger sites have their own local jabber server but can communicate with the others, so you have for instance:
user@newyork.yourcompany.com
user@london.yourcompany.com
You can also open it up to the outside if you want, and you can also make people's jabber id's match their email addresses...
For clients, being an open standard you have a huge choice of clients, pidgin is good and cross platform for instance, try a selection and see which one suits you best. Same for the server, try a few and see which works, if you have multiple servers there's no reason for them all to run the same software, and similarly you don't need everyone running the same client.
And of course, being an open standard you are free to change clients and servers whenever it suits you with minimal disruption, and supporting new devices will give you the widest choice - there are jabber clients for every significant OS and most mobile or embedded devices.
Incidentally, i doubt microsoft's offering satisfies your "cross platform" stipulation.
On the other hand...
IBM Thinkpad T41
Dell Latitude C610
Another dell, forget the model number...
All worked out of the box perfectly well with 8.10
Suspend and hibernate used to work well in my old thinkpads, when it used APM instead of ACPI...
Every individual driver needs to support hibernation properly, and have to deal with situations like hardware no longer being present after the resume - eg usb devices removed...
ACPI is far more problematic than APM was, not least of all because microsoft have corrupted intel's original ACPI spec and broken various things...
OSX on the other hand, works well because the hardware and software are designed together all in one place, rather than a mix of drivers and software from different places.
What type of laptop?
It works perfectly for me on several Dell, IBM, Apple and Asus branded laptops..
Windows doesn't hibernate properly on all laptops either, and usually doesn't support the wireless out of the box either.
If you install it in crossover, it often starts faster than on a native windows box...
And there are versions of linux which are stripped down and even quicker, only they're not pirated, and the stripping down is a lot more thorough due to having the source code...
There are optimized linux versions running on phones, routers, old games consoles etc, devices with maybe 16mb of ram or less and yet running modern linux kernels. And these are proper compatible versions of linux using the same kernel, not like windows mobile which has very little in common with full size windows.
How much ram?
The default Ubuntu install seems quite slow with less than 512mb for me... I had it on a 600mhz P3 and it was fine with 512mb, but very sluggish with 256.
Have you seen the state of IE lately?
Microsoft products are typically years behind their competitors in the most basic ways.... windows doesnt even have simple features like secure delete out of the box...
Opening the package manager, ticking what you want installed and hitting apply is quite easy...
Opening a browser, searching google, finding a program that seems like it might do what you want, finding the download link, agreeing to the download policy, downloading it, running the installer, clicking next a few times without reading any of the screens is actually a lot harder.
And just because you are given the option of using the command line, doesn't mean you have to... Linux geeks use it because its much quicker when you know what you want, and it's actually easier to walk someone through it over the phone because a textual interface translates much better to vocal instructions.
When the Athlon X2 came out, it offered the best performance/watt...
Intel's highend offering was the P4, and it used a lot more power than the X2 while performing slower.
As for the broken suspend, this will be down to the motherboard maker not bothering to support the published ACPI standards... On a system which has attempted to follow standards and/or provide linux compatibility this isn't a problem, for instance my eee suspends properly, as does my macbook pro running either linux or osx, and my previous ibm thinkpads were all able to suspend properly.
People often compare a clean windows install to a clean linux install, forgetting that a clean linux install is a fully usable system that's ready to go, while a clean windows install is largely useless until you install a significant number of third party apps.
The hidden costs of windows...
Linux has always outperformed windows...
AmigaOS always outperformed windows by a huge margin...
Performance doesn't count for very much in the market place.
Didn't know gcc did profile feedback, used to make use of that feature on sun's compiler a few years back...
Well, that's hardly secure, since it has to decrypt all of the windows files and boot the OS... And for that, it must have a static key stored on the machine in plaintext or easily reversible encryption, or keep all of the system files unencrypted.
It's not uncommon to see an organisation that has no real clue, and have been sold a "full disk encryption" scheme which doesn't require a password while booting...
That is, the key for the encryption is stored somewhere on the disk, possibly obfuscated, so you can boot up the disk in a VM with a debugger attached to retrieve the key, or you can use that same debugger to bypass the login process once the machine has booted etc...
Not free, you get it "for no extra cost" when you use a gift card to buy coffee from starbucks...
And you'd be buying some coffee anyway, since they wont just let you sit there using the wifi without buying a drink.
The PC may be a more open platform, but it's also a lot messier...
Incompatible hardware, layers of abstraction between game and hardware, different performance levels, driver breakage, background tasks hurting performance (incl malware and tools designed to remove it)... It becomes a lot more hassle both for the developer and for the potential player.
But speaking of indie games, the Amiga had quite a successful public domain scene with large numbers of homebrew games being developed... The hardware was almost guaranteed, since 99% of people wanting to play games would have one of a handful of specific models, the software wasn't a problem because people would direct boot your game so nothing else would be loaded...
They even used to make compilations, like the assassins collections, you could get a cd with thousands of homebrew games on it all ready to go.
Interesting...
On a Macbook pro 2.4ghz, i get:
Safari (3.1.2 - leopard default) 4.26 secs
WebKit Nightly - 3.635
Minefield - 3.793
In the pentestmonkey jsbm, minefield crashes...
Safari:
MD5 Benchmark took 1.397 seconds for 3000 hashes (2147 hashes/second)
MD4 Benchmark took 0.977 seconds for 2700 hashes (2764 hashes/second)
SHA1 Benchmark took 1.386 seconds for 1900 hashes (1371 hashes/second)
Webkit:
MD5 Benchmark took 0.398 seconds for 3000 hashes (7538 hashes/second)
MD4 Benchmark took 0.169 seconds for 2700 hashes (15976 hashes/second)
SHA1 Benchmark took 0.204 seconds for 1900 hashes (9314 hashes/second)
Do you really want to stake your business on that bet?
And commercial software is increasingly getting online registration schemes...
On the other hand, the Cell isn't designed for javascript processing, it won't perform spectacularly... It has the benefit of not needing abstraction layers between the browser and the hardware, but the hardware isn't especially suited to this kind of thing...
But their point was, they outperform IE7 but not google chrome (presumably running on the same hardware as ie7 was), google chrome is also a general use application.
And by licensing software you are effectively tied to a subscription service as well, since the actual owner of the software can revoke your access to it at any time (thus limiting your access to your data if it's stored in proprietary formats only supported by those apps).
Sure, you may technically still have your data, but that will just make it all the more sickening that you can't access it.
Or to modify hardware, if you have a lowend system which doesn't let you hotplug hardware...
But has the JIT code been implemented for PPC?
It works for me if i turn the JIT off, but the results are nothing special.
I let the crash reporter do it's work and report the bug, it crashes every time without fail if jit is activated so hopefully they will be able to debug the issue fairly quickly.