Just a wild guess: Perhaps the family filter talks to Live.com in order to filter "inappropriate" results out. Other search engines not owned by Microsoft don't support this integration, so the filter blocks them as they would otherwise be a trivial way around the filter.
Just ONCE, I'd like to see someone back this statement up with facts. Since you're not an AC I have a slight hope you're not just trolling, so please, enlighten me:
By what objective, verifiable metric is Vista a "failure"?
If your claim is that Vista is a "failure" simply because not everybody is using it yet, consider that this may simply be a case of XP being good enough that people don't really see a reason to upgrade. After all, most of the important changes between XP and Vista are under the hood. Users either won't notice them or won't understand them (UAC).
As for downgrade options, that's mostly for low-grade PCs. There's no reasonable alternative to Windows XP in the "sub-notebook" space because Vista was built expecting new computers to be faster, not slower, than those before; whereas many "netbooks" are so shitty that they struggle to run acceptably even with XP, once you've got too many tabs open in 'fox. The netbook vendors tried shipping Linux but then return rates spiked.
When you run Vista on the hardware that it was designed for (two cores and two gigs of RAM is about the minimum), it's easily the best released Windows yet, and you would be a fool to run XP on such a machine.
Ok. I do get how they do that. I just wish *someone* would release a phone with out-of-the-box support for tethering and VoIP.
Windows Mobile smartphones and PDAs support tethering out of the box; all the ones I've owned anyway. As for VoIP, depends on what client you wanna use, but Skype has a free WM client and since WM phones usually aren't locked down very hard (being targeted at business users rather than Joe Sixpack) you can just install whatever you need.
Interesting. While I haven't taken the plunge myself (and won't) the reflections I've heard from most of my Mac-using friends are the opposite of yours. They like the hardware and aren't too bothered by the lack of user-servicability, but they prefer running some flavour of Linux - or in some cases, Vista - on their sleek-looking Apple hardware. I personally can't stand OS X, and I'm not a fan of white plastic, so I'll stick with PCs for the time being.
I find it quite amusing that most people in this discussion are either mac-heads bashing linux users, or linux-users bashing mac heads. It is a refreshing change to find that windows doesn't even make the minimum grade for people to bother attacking it.
Either that, or the Windows users are busy actually getting work done while the mac/linux fanbois fight their pointless religious wars.
What's the point of "attacking" any OS to begin with? If you're content with what you use, good for you. I couldn't care less if you prefer Xenix or DR-DOS.
I'm not 100% certain, but I think you'll find that gcc has shipped with all versions of Mac OS X. In fact, Windows is the only modern system I know of that DOESN'T ship with a C compiler.
While I don't have a Mac handy to confirm this, a quick Google suggests that OS X does not include GCC. Rather, it's included with XCode, which is a free download from Apple, much like the free version of Visual Studio from Microsoft.
Malware compile code? What's the point?
It's just another attack vector. Malware could potentially use a compiler to recompile itself on the fly to avoid detection from heuristic algorithms; it could also conceivably fool some detection schemes by transporting its main payload as code (anti-virus programs typically only care about executables) and compiling it later. Furthermore, a system like Linux where lots of software is compile-on-install is potentially vulnerable to the compiler itself being replaced by a malignant version which poisons the executables it compiles.
All these are just my guesses; I don't know enough about hacking to construct all the possible attacks exploiting the presence of a compiler on the target system. However, as a general rule, every additional piece of software you include with your OS is an additional exploit vector.
When someone rips of GCC development by writing a proprietary plugin, what exactly would make that person "the hand that feeds GCC developers"? Isn't it more like the opposite?
Not the developers; the users of GCC benefit (are "fed") by the availability of plugins, proprietary or no. I assume that most developers of GCC are also users, so this benefits the developers as well.
Also, I would hope that the developers of a popular software package would see fit to act in the best interests of their users, rather than fight stupid religious wars over which of proprietary/open is better. Fact is we'll always have both kinds of code, so we should try to get along with each other rather than fight pointlessly.
Unfortunately many free software advocates are more than happy to fight these wars, because they put ideology above the goal of creating great software, making them no better than the greedy corporations they so despise.
why should the GCC & Linux projects make things easy for the proprietary guys?
Because biting the hand that feeds you have never been a good strategy. There's not enough open hardware - free operating systems are still dependent on the goodwill of proprietary vendors to be able to support mainstream hardware with anywhere near the same features and performance as users of proprietary OS take for granted.
Granted, this may well change soon, but until then making it hard for hardware developers to provide good Linux drivers is just making things harder for Linux users who have no interest in being dragged into your religious wars.
If you aren't provided with a tool that lets you tell the system how to operate, you haven't got an operating system.
Yeah, Windows and OSX are broken because neither ship by default a tool that would be useless to >99% of its userbase but whose presence on every PC would be utterly adored by malware authors. Doh!
Besides you can get a compiler for most any OS in five minutes on the 'net nowadays. Only for systems that actually compile parts of themselves during install is it necessary to include one.
Sorry for replying twice to the same post, but I forgot to reply to one thing.
you _can_ play the songs you bought on every device you own
It is simply not true that switching to Linux will free you from DRM restrictions on music. If you already own DRM restricted media that works on Windows, you'll need a player with DRM to play that on Linux. What on Linux can actually play DRM'd Windows Media or iTunes files? So switching to Linux would deny you access you your legally purchased music in this case.
Second possibility is that you own no DRM restricted media. In that case switching to Linux will make no difference. Numerous players are available for virtually all types of non-DRM media for Linux as well as Windows. Of course, if you make the mistake of buying such crippled media, you will be in the same situation as above (won't play on Linux, might work on Windows).
The third possible interpretation of your words is that using Linux will magically remove DRM restrictions on media. Citation needed! Nothing in Windows prevents you from doing whatever you want with legally purchased, DRM-free media. Linux has NO advantage over Windows here (except if you believe that the support for DRM in Windows somehow "bloats" the OS even if you don't use DRM'ed media, an argument unsupported by fact).
And honestly, I think this is difficult. What I like about my distro of choice is that it lets me just _use_ my computer, without losing lots of time on maintenance. Updates, upgrades, software installation, hardware installation, it all Just Works.
I believe this is why many people use Windows, actually. You may be "fluent" in Linux, so that switching to any other OS would cause a big loss in productivity. But for others, myself included, it's the other way around. While I know enough Linux to find my way around in it, I keep getting annoyed by all the little things that are Just Different(TM). I spend nearly no time on maintaining Windows because I've gotten it running just like I want it already. And when it comes down to what I actually use my computer for - writing code, drawing graphics and playing games, mostly - there's really no practical advantage to switching anyway. And I don't do ideology when it comes to tech.
I'm a software developer at a smallish dev shop in Sweden. I work for 40 hrs/week, period. There is occasionally overtime, but so far it's always been voluntary, and we get paid for it (or compensated with additional time off). I've five weeks paid vacation each year.
Based on what I read on Slashdot in threads like these, these seem like great working conditions, though I've always had the impression they're pretty standard. OTOH, we don't get time to work on our own projects or anything like that, which I've always wanted to have.
Mod parent up. Actual sales of Vista aren't bad by any reasonable judgement, and that's about as good an indicator of real "popularity" as you can get.
Speaking absolute numbers, any software company in the world would be thrilled to sell ~10 million copies of their flagship product every month. So before you call Vista "unpopular" I'd like to ask: "Compared to what?"
I think DS9 leaves open the question of whether the "prophets" are really "divine beings" or just another kind of alien. They certainly have an air of divinity about them, but so do other entities of the Star Trek universe, such as Q. However, if the Bajorans worship the prophets and that gets then something in return, what's the problem exactly? Obviously it hasn't stopped them from developing advanced tech; although you think it "unlikely", in the ST universe it has in fact happened. Perhaps the Bajoran religion actually encourages its followers to learn about the world around them.
Now, we can of course moan over the fact that a supposedly enlightened human like Sisko went religious, but clearly it saved his/DS9's/humanity's ass on several occasions, so what would have been his alternative? To pretend they didn't exist? To wait for his scientists to come up with plausible scientific explanations for the prophets' appearence of "divinity" before talking to them?
You're missing a key point with regards to the Bajoran religion; their gods actually exist and on multiple occasions throughout DS9 do they interfere directly in the lives of their worshippers, Sisko included. You'd need pretty strong reasons not to become religious if god came to you and told you you were his prophet. (Assuming you couldn't blame it on mental health issues.)
As for solving problems by prayer and faith, praying to a god who not only exists for a fact but who also has a track record of helping his followers actually makes quite a lot of sense from a rational pov.
Of course, none of this has anything to do with religion in the real world. I'm an atheist, too.
since virtually all of the market for MS Vista is folks who buy a new computer (that isn't a Mac)
Although you wrote "virtually", I should point out that quite a few people run Vista on Apple hardware. I was surprised to come across such a computer at a friend's house on new year's eve, played with it a bit and it seemed to run great. It's just a regular PC after all, albeit with an exterior design that some find attractive.
Google "vista macbook" for more info. There are step-by-step guides to making it work.
First off, your kidding yourself if you think your laptops dont have DRM on them. Go play something HD on a older digital monitor with a older connection and talk to us.
"Something HD", as in the HD rip of $movie that I downloaded from $favourite_filesharing_site? Yep, works just fine.
If you don't buy crippled media, you won't have any problems with DRM. And filesharing is just another way of voting with your wallet.
You may not need to purchase new software at all. I believe the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), works reasonably well over slow links, down to modem speeds (<30kbps). According to Wikipedia you would have many times that with INMARSAT and Iridium might at least be fast enough to be tolerable, especially so if you can use multiple links.
The advantages of using RDP are several: it's included with Windows so there are no additional costs (meaning no money is wasted on licenses if you decide it sucks and want to go with something else.) It's been around for a long time so it is reasonably stable and secure, and you get a full remote desktop where you can do most things you would be able to do at a "real" desktop. RDP is also cross-platform; there are clients for plenty of OS besides Windows.
As for a console-based remote management solution, it is apparently possible to use PowerShell over SSH using Cygwin. Microsoft also claims that the next PowerShell version will have remoting built-in. Of course, nobody knows when that'll be released or if it will work well for your needs.
As for power-cycling servers, there is no shortage of rack-mountable power strips that can be controlled via USB or Ethernet. Everything else you mentioned can be done via RDP and/or PowerShell.
The image "http://lug.wsu.edu/~ben/dontloadthis.jpg" cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
IE also refuses to render it. But when downloaded to desktop, I got a thumbnail, and I can open it in Paint.NET just fine (it's actually 0x808080 rather than 0x000000). Paint.NET swallows 3.2GB of memory when I do this. Good thing I have plenty of RAM and a 64-bit OS:)
No need to guess, if you had bothered to follow the link, you would have seen that the hardware used was a HP Pavilion dv2000 with 2 GB RAM. As you can tell from the specs, this is a low-end laptop with only a Core Duo T2400 processor and Intel integrated graphics.
I can see the purpose behind this kind of test - it's very, very popular to hate Vista even though there are very few actual problems with the OS (especially since SP1). We switched to Vista at work right after it came out and while there were a few rough edges to start with, I never felt like going back to XP. Vista is simply better in every way except performance on low-end systems.
Of course, with the anti-Vista hatefest still going on, there's little Microsoft can do but try new marketing approaches to get that message across. They're hardly running out of money, after all. Unfortunately this means that Windows 7 will likely be Vista with a new name and some of the rough edges smoothed out, to pull the same trick as the "Mojave Experiment" - give Vista a different name and people might like it.
You seem to be under the impression that just because the API is a bit unorganized that the underlying code must somehow be just as bad. I don't think this is true; much of the old or deprecated APIs are likely just wrappers around the newer stuff.
Just because Win32 is written in C, that doesn't automatically make it bad. Just old.
And.NET wraps Win32 - the Windows-specific parts do, anyway. That means it can't replace Win32. Microsoft could hide the Win32 bits and force everyone do code in.NET, of course - not that it'd be a very popular move.
I'll note that pretty much every modern OS (seeing as most of them are UNIX-based) have somewhat old-fashioned underpinnings, with lots of ugly little bits sticking out, but usually work fairly well in spite of that.
While I have no love for DRM, I understand why Microsoft included it in Vista - people likely wouldn't have been able to play their legally purchased BluRay/HD-DVD discs otherwise. If you don't use DRM-infected media, the DRM in Vista won't bother you.
While I'd be the first to agree that most software is of incredibly poor quality, this just so happens to be what the market WANTS, as evidenced by the huge success of Windows 95. Bill Gates simply realized this, produced a product that was good enough, and the market rewarded him appropriately, as is the natural way things work.
Since '95 Windows quality has improved, of course, but it's still focused around the needs of its actual users rather than what a bunch of smelly software geeks prefer in an OS (and those geeks are probably not running Windows anyway). You think typical Windows users give a rat's ass about how clean the API is?
On that topic, the reason Windows has a large number of APIs is because it keeps evolving, and improved APIs take the place of old ones. The reason old ones are kept around is for backwards compatibility, and to accomodate different people's choices of programming languages. When I need to write Windows apps, I use.NET, which contains the cleanest Windows API available, and is quite a nice platform in general, too. Perhaps you'll like its API for getting a directory listing.
Though that is sort of scifi philosophy, it is true. In the name of riches, the advancement of technology has been slowed, deliberately, and with malicious intent against the betterment of mankind. In this way, I find his generosity a bit pale these days.
Gawd, what a load of hyperbole. How do you sleep at night?
What you're trying to say is that even though Bill Gates, through his company's actions advanced the state of computing in the world tremendously by essentially putting a PC in every home, then proceeded to spend enormous quantities of his money - likely more than you or I will earn in our lifetimes - on medical research and other activities which greatly benefit mankind... you would prefer he'd have done none of this, because somehow this would have lead to every other tech company shedding their desire to make money, instead cooperating in a gigantic collective lovefest for the betterment of mankind though open technology standards.
Phones running Windows Mobile or Symbian typically allow the user to install a the web browser of his choosing. One such browser is Opera Mini, which (IIRC) uses the same rendering engine as desktop Opera. So ACID3 compliance shouldn't be that far off.
As for you iPhone users, I guess Apple might release an update to Safari. AFAIK they don't allow third-party browsers on the iPhone.
Since all of your post is just posturing, uninformed opinion and your personal experiences (which, unsurprisingly enough do not coincide with my own) I won't bother to counter it line by line. I will simply assume you pulled it all out of your ass, a conclusion further supported by the one outright lie you let in:
People hate so much MS that they have driven its share price down for the last 5 years.
This is utter hogwash, as a look at Google Finance will prove. MSFT's stock has been solid for the last five years. If anything, the trend is slightly positive, especially in the last year.
To think that hate for MS is a geeky delusion is to completely misunderstand the situation.
To believe that hate for MS is widespread outside of the minds of mommy's basement geeks such as yourself, however well-paid you belive yourself to be, is ignorant at best.
Slashdot Mirror
Just a wild guess: Perhaps the family filter talks to Live.com in order to filter "inappropriate" results out. Other search engines not owned by Microsoft don't support this integration, so the filter blocks them as they would otherwise be a trivial way around the filter.
Vista is a failure
Just ONCE, I'd like to see someone back this statement up with facts. Since you're not an AC I have a slight hope you're not just trolling, so please, enlighten me:
By what objective, verifiable metric is Vista a "failure"?
If your claim is that Vista is a "failure" simply because not everybody is using it yet, consider that this may simply be a case of XP being good enough that people don't really see a reason to upgrade. After all, most of the important changes between XP and Vista are under the hood. Users either won't notice them or won't understand them (UAC).
As for downgrade options, that's mostly for low-grade PCs. There's no reasonable alternative to Windows XP in the "sub-notebook" space because Vista was built expecting new computers to be faster, not slower, than those before; whereas many "netbooks" are so shitty that they struggle to run acceptably even with XP, once you've got too many tabs open in 'fox. The netbook vendors tried shipping Linux but then return rates spiked.
When you run Vista on the hardware that it was designed for (two cores and two gigs of RAM is about the minimum), it's easily the best released Windows yet, and you would be a fool to run XP on such a machine.
Ok. I do get how they do that. I just wish *someone* would release a phone with out-of-the-box support for tethering and VoIP.
Windows Mobile smartphones and PDAs support tethering out of the box; all the ones I've owned anyway. As for VoIP, depends on what client you wanna use, but Skype has a free WM client and since WM phones usually aren't locked down very hard (being targeted at business users rather than Joe Sixpack) you can just install whatever you need.
Interesting. While I haven't taken the plunge myself (and won't) the reflections I've heard from most of my Mac-using friends are the opposite of yours. They like the hardware and aren't too bothered by the lack of user-servicability, but they prefer running some flavour of Linux - or in some cases, Vista - on their sleek-looking Apple hardware. I personally can't stand OS X, and I'm not a fan of white plastic, so I'll stick with PCs for the time being.
Either that, or the Windows users are busy actually getting work done while the mac/linux fanbois fight their pointless religious wars.
What's the point of "attacking" any OS to begin with? If you're content with what you use, good for you. I couldn't care less if you prefer Xenix or DR-DOS.
While I don't have a Mac handy to confirm this, a quick Google suggests that OS X does not include GCC. Rather, it's included with XCode, which is a free download from Apple, much like the free version of Visual Studio from Microsoft.
It's just another attack vector. Malware could potentially use a compiler to recompile itself on the fly to avoid detection from heuristic algorithms; it could also conceivably fool some detection schemes by transporting its main payload as code (anti-virus programs typically only care about executables) and compiling it later. Furthermore, a system like Linux where lots of software is compile-on-install is potentially vulnerable to the compiler itself being replaced by a malignant version which poisons the executables it compiles.
All these are just my guesses; I don't know enough about hacking to construct all the possible attacks exploiting the presence of a compiler on the target system. However, as a general rule, every additional piece of software you include with your OS is an additional exploit vector.
Not the developers; the users of GCC benefit (are "fed") by the availability of plugins, proprietary or no. I assume that most developers of GCC are also users, so this benefits the developers as well.
Also, I would hope that the developers of a popular software package would see fit to act in the best interests of their users, rather than fight stupid religious wars over which of proprietary/open is better. Fact is we'll always have both kinds of code, so we should try to get along with each other rather than fight pointlessly.
Unfortunately many free software advocates are more than happy to fight these wars, because they put ideology above the goal of creating great software, making them no better than the greedy corporations they so despise.
Because biting the hand that feeds you have never been a good strategy. There's not enough open hardware - free operating systems are still dependent on the goodwill of proprietary vendors to be able to support mainstream hardware with anywhere near the same features and performance as users of proprietary OS take for granted.
Granted, this may well change soon, but until then making it hard for hardware developers to provide good Linux drivers is just making things harder for Linux users who have no interest in being dragged into your religious wars.
Yeah, Windows and OSX are broken because neither ship by default a tool that would be useless to >99% of its userbase but whose presence on every PC would be utterly adored by malware authors. Doh!
Besides you can get a compiler for most any OS in five minutes on the 'net nowadays. Only for systems that actually compile parts of themselves during install is it necessary to include one.
It is simply not true that switching to Linux will free you from DRM restrictions on music. If you already own DRM restricted media that works on Windows, you'll need a player with DRM to play that on Linux. What on Linux can actually play DRM'd Windows Media or iTunes files? So switching to Linux would deny you access you your legally purchased music in this case.
Second possibility is that you own no DRM restricted media. In that case switching to Linux will make no difference. Numerous players are available for virtually all types of non-DRM media for Linux as well as Windows. Of course, if you make the mistake of buying such crippled media, you will be in the same situation as above (won't play on Linux, might work on Windows).
The third possible interpretation of your words is that using Linux will magically remove DRM restrictions on media. Citation needed! Nothing in Windows prevents you from doing whatever you want with legally purchased, DRM-free media. Linux has NO advantage over Windows here (except if you believe that the support for DRM in Windows somehow "bloats" the OS even if you don't use DRM'ed media, an argument unsupported by fact).
I believe this is why many people use Windows, actually. You may be "fluent" in Linux, so that switching to any other OS would cause a big loss in productivity. But for others, myself included, it's the other way around. While I know enough Linux to find my way around in it, I keep getting annoyed by all the little things that are Just Different(TM). I spend nearly no time on maintaining Windows because I've gotten it running just like I want it already. And when it comes down to what I actually use my computer for - writing code, drawing graphics and playing games, mostly - there's really no practical advantage to switching anyway. And I don't do ideology when it comes to tech.
I'm a software developer at a smallish dev shop in Sweden. I work for 40 hrs/week, period. There is occasionally overtime, but so far it's always been voluntary, and we get paid for it (or compensated with additional time off). I've five weeks paid vacation each year.
Based on what I read on Slashdot in threads like these, these seem like great working conditions, though I've always had the impression they're pretty standard. OTOH, we don't get time to work on our own projects or anything like that, which I've always wanted to have.
Mod parent up. Actual sales of Vista aren't bad by any reasonable judgement, and that's about as good an indicator of real "popularity" as you can get.
Speaking absolute numbers, any software company in the world would be thrilled to sell ~10 million copies of their flagship product every month. So before you call Vista "unpopular" I'd like to ask: "Compared to what?"
I think DS9 leaves open the question of whether the "prophets" are really "divine beings" or just another kind of alien. They certainly have an air of divinity about them, but so do other entities of the Star Trek universe, such as Q. However, if the Bajorans worship the prophets and that gets then something in return, what's the problem exactly? Obviously it hasn't stopped them from developing advanced tech; although you think it "unlikely", in the ST universe it has in fact happened. Perhaps the Bajoran religion actually encourages its followers to learn about the world around them.
Now, we can of course moan over the fact that a supposedly enlightened human like Sisko went religious, but clearly it saved his/DS9's/humanity's ass on several occasions, so what would have been his alternative? To pretend they didn't exist? To wait for his scientists to come up with plausible scientific explanations for the prophets' appearence of "divinity" before talking to them?
You're missing a key point with regards to the Bajoran religion; their gods actually exist and on multiple occasions throughout DS9 do they interfere directly in the lives of their worshippers, Sisko included. You'd need pretty strong reasons not to become religious if god came to you and told you you were his prophet. (Assuming you couldn't blame it on mental health issues.)
As for solving problems by prayer and faith, praying to a god who not only exists for a fact but who also has a track record of helping his followers actually makes quite a lot of sense from a rational pov.
Of course, none of this has anything to do with religion in the real world. I'm an atheist, too.
since virtually all of the market for MS Vista is folks who buy a new computer (that isn't a Mac)
Although you wrote "virtually", I should point out that quite a few people run Vista on Apple hardware. I was surprised to come across such a computer at a friend's house on new year's eve, played with it a bit and it seemed to run great. It's just a regular PC after all, albeit with an exterior design that some find attractive.
Google "vista macbook" for more info. There are step-by-step guides to making it work.
"Something HD", as in the HD rip of $movie that I downloaded from $favourite_filesharing_site? Yep, works just fine.
If you don't buy crippled media, you won't have any problems with DRM. And filesharing is just another way of voting with your wallet.
You may not need to purchase new software at all. I believe the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), works reasonably well over slow links, down to modem speeds (<30kbps). According to Wikipedia you would have many times that with INMARSAT and Iridium might at least be fast enough to be tolerable, especially so if you can use multiple links.
The advantages of using RDP are several: it's included with Windows so there are no additional costs (meaning no money is wasted on licenses if you decide it sucks and want to go with something else.) It's been around for a long time so it is reasonably stable and secure, and you get a full remote desktop where you can do most things you would be able to do at a "real" desktop. RDP is also cross-platform; there are clients for plenty of OS besides Windows.
As for a console-based remote management solution, it is apparently possible to use PowerShell over SSH using Cygwin. Microsoft also claims that the next PowerShell version will have remoting built-in. Of course, nobody knows when that'll be released or if it will work well for your needs.
As for power-cycling servers, there is no shortage of rack-mountable power strips that can be controlled via USB or Ethernet. Everything else you mentioned can be done via RDP and/or PowerShell.
IE also refuses to render it. But when downloaded to desktop, I got a thumbnail, and I can open it in Paint.NET just fine (it's actually 0x808080 rather than 0x000000). Paint.NET swallows 3.2GB of memory when I do this. Good thing I have plenty of RAM and a 64-bit OS :)
No need to guess, if you had bothered to follow the link, you would have seen that the hardware used was a HP Pavilion dv2000 with 2 GB RAM. As you can tell from the specs, this is a low-end laptop with only a Core Duo T2400 processor and Intel integrated graphics.
I can see the purpose behind this kind of test - it's very, very popular to hate Vista even though there are very few actual problems with the OS (especially since SP1). We switched to Vista at work right after it came out and while there were a few rough edges to start with, I never felt like going back to XP. Vista is simply better in every way except performance on low-end systems.
Of course, with the anti-Vista hatefest still going on, there's little Microsoft can do but try new marketing approaches to get that message across. They're hardly running out of money, after all. Unfortunately this means that Windows 7 will likely be Vista with a new name and some of the rough edges smoothed out, to pull the same trick as the "Mojave Experiment" - give Vista a different name and people might like it.
You seem to be under the impression that just because the API is a bit unorganized that the underlying code must somehow be just as bad. I don't think this is true; much of the old or deprecated APIs are likely just wrappers around the newer stuff. Just because Win32 is written in C, that doesn't automatically make it bad. Just old.
.NET wraps Win32 - the Windows-specific parts do, anyway. That means it can't replace Win32. Microsoft could hide the Win32 bits and force everyone do code in .NET, of course - not that it'd be a very popular move.
And
I'll note that pretty much every modern OS (seeing as most of them are UNIX-based) have somewhat old-fashioned underpinnings, with lots of ugly little bits sticking out, but usually work fairly well in spite of that.
While I have no love for DRM, I understand why Microsoft included it in Vista - people likely wouldn't have been able to play their legally purchased BluRay/HD-DVD discs otherwise. If you don't use DRM-infected media, the DRM in Vista won't bother you.
While I'd be the first to agree that most software is of incredibly poor quality, this just so happens to be what the market WANTS, as evidenced by the huge success of Windows 95. Bill Gates simply realized this, produced a product that was good enough, and the market rewarded him appropriately, as is the natural way things work.
.NET, which contains the cleanest Windows API available, and is quite a nice platform in general, too. Perhaps you'll like its API for getting a directory listing.
Since '95 Windows quality has improved, of course, but it's still focused around the needs of its actual users rather than what a bunch of smelly software geeks prefer in an OS (and those geeks are probably not running Windows anyway). You think typical Windows users give a rat's ass about how clean the API is?
On that topic, the reason Windows has a large number of APIs is because it keeps evolving, and improved APIs take the place of old ones. The reason old ones are kept around is for backwards compatibility, and to accomodate different people's choices of programming languages. When I need to write Windows apps, I use
Please pass me some of what you're smoking!
Phones running Windows Mobile or Symbian typically allow the user to install a the web browser of his choosing. One such browser is Opera Mini, which (IIRC) uses the same rendering engine as desktop Opera. So ACID3 compliance shouldn't be that far off.
As for you iPhone users, I guess Apple might release an update to Safari. AFAIK they don't allow third-party browsers on the iPhone.
Since all of your post is just posturing, uninformed opinion and your personal experiences (which, unsurprisingly enough do not coincide with my own) I won't bother to counter it line by line. I will simply assume you pulled it all out of your ass, a conclusion further supported by the one outright lie you let in:
People hate so much MS that they have driven its share price down for the last 5 years.
This is utter hogwash, as a look at Google Finance will prove. MSFT's stock has been solid for the last five years. If anything, the trend is slightly positive, especially in the last year.
To think that hate for MS is a geeky delusion is to completely misunderstand the situation.
To believe that hate for MS is widespread outside of the minds of mommy's basement geeks such as yourself, however well-paid you belive yourself to be, is ignorant at best.