The SMS guy was introduced as the "fastest text messenger" in the country -- they didn't say what input method he used.
Then the show was bullshit. There is NO WAY that a TAP user can come close to predictive text. Not a chance in hell. I bet I could beat this guy.
you tap-tap-tap to get a letter, then you look at the screen and read the suggested completion
Not at all. It's far easier to touch-type (not look at keys) on a numeric pad than it is on a 101-key PC keyboard, which millions of people are doing right now.
It's true that SMS isn't yet as popular in the United States as it is overseas, but that has more to do with pricing and tradition than technology.
Exactly. As long as the receiver is charged, the US will never embrace SMS. I'd consider it rude to send someone a message that they have to pay to receive. Sender pays for SMS elsewhere.
SMS is huge here, it gets used for lots of stuff, like buying tickets (that's how the Live Aid ones will be done), opinion polls, TV votes and so on.
Trust me, you can't be as quick with those mini keyboards as you are with full sized keyboards.
I have one, and you are wrong UNLESS you compare with proper touch-typing, which hardly anyone can do. I'm just as quick on the qwerty thumb pad as I am on a regular keyboard, in fact with automatic word-completing it's probably slightly faster.
It's not as comfortable though, I wouldn't want to write a novel on it. Nor coding, symbols require shifting etc, though I've posted a fair number of my slashdot comments on it, using minimal HTML.
I've seen the EXACT same issue on a Unix network. Home directories transitioned from/users/* to/home/* for some cross-dept standardisation rationale. Spent the next two weeks hunting down and fixing references to the old one.
Sloppy programming, not the OS. NEVER EVER assume anything about your target environment, use system properties where they are available.
So the game boy, Palm, cell, and iPod all need different wall warts to charge their different batteries, and making these 'portable' devices portable on the road is a major PITA.
Whatever happened to inductive charging? The idea was you'd have a coil you'd place the device near, so the coil in the device generates current from that to charge whatever cell it had. Would work with any other device that used it. Looked promising, but only ever seen a few devices use it.
And, when I DO charge it, I can talk on it at the same time, and the battery will still have a net increase in charge.
I've never had a phone that didn't do this, and I've had a lot of phones. Oh, one exception, the first phone I had you had to remove the battery to charge it.
Why not C:\Apps or C:\Programs or anything except for a LFN name on an OS that barely supported LFNs.
Did you even READ the post you are replying to? It WAS a good idea as it FORCED developers to handle spaces in file names. If they had done what you suggest, 99% of Windowas software would be guaranteed to fall over as soon as the user tried to save their document to a directory/filename with spaces in it.
It's murder on command-line power users, who have to enclose everything in quotes.
Eh? I've been using *nix since long before windows and I've used spaces in names the whole time. Just escape the character, like you do with every other shell token character e.g. "\ ".
It's murder on scripts, for the same reasons.
Anyone that finds that is crap at writing scripts. Their scripts are the ones that "rm -rf/$mydir" where $mydir resolves to an empty string.;-)
I tried installing everything to \Apps and \Dev and \Utils for a while
If you want an easy bug-free life, ALWAYS install to the default location when you can. As I said, most software is badly tested and there is at least one bug regarding a non-default installation in every app. It just doesn't get tested as much as the defaults.
It seems like the ban was implemented in 97; at least that's the first year that legally held guns dropped.
Not quite. You could get a permit prior to that, but you were vetted for it and had to follow a shitload of rules. The spectactular failure of this system led to a larger than Columbine type event (in infant school no less), which is what led to the complete ban of pistols. You can still get shotguns/rifles though. It's just handguns that are banned outright (and auto's of course).
Revenge is done after the fact, not while you're defending yourself against a percieved threat to your life.
A kid running away from you because you have a shotgun is not a threat by any definition of the word. And your dictionary quote mentions "vengence". What exactly are you smoking? It's practically a textbook definition of what happened. I'm unsure where you get the "after the fact" thing from, but it was revenge for scaring him in his home, AFTER which FACT he took revenge.
the truth is that police can't be everywhere at once, and if they could, would you be willing to tolerate that level of scrutiy?
No, of course not. However, guns bring far more problems than they solve. You mention a rape case, tragic but however typical of pro-gun campaigners. However, as always, you forget to mention that guns will increase crime, they increase murders, they increase armed robbery, they increase innocent dead bystanders and they increase the number of children killed in accidents. I'd also argue that it would make rape more prevailent as it makes it easier to hold someone against their will with a knife. The fact that police took 14 hours to respond is the issue there. Plus, the case was in the US, where they COULD have had a gun if they wanted, but didn't. Discounting the fact that there is zero evidence that having a gun in the home would have prevented the crime (or even made it worse) in the first place. So it is a completely pointless and irrelevant argument.
The pocket PC does have the disadvantage of not having any controls apart from the stylus
Depends on the device in question. Mine has 10 customisable buttons and a 8-way d-pad. More than enough for any emulated system, 'cept maybe the C64/Sinclair ones, but I've got a qwerty slide-out keyboard for them!
What's the UN doing about it? Nadda, zilch, zip.. I think you talk a good talk, but when it comes down to it, you'd rather just let all the poorer nations of the world starve and kill themselves.
What an insulting and pointless thing to say. I'd rather let them starve? I just supported their cause by highlighting it to the hypocrites around here. Not a lot true, but something. Got any better ideas?
Instead of directing hatred to the US, do something usefull and put all that energy into helping the less fortunate.
I am, you know little about me. I live in Scotland, the next few months are going to be interesting.
You act as if the US does nothing good in this world, I think you are mistaken
The US, with other nations, does do good in the world. I'll still take personal offense when someone tries to claim moral high ground surrounding Iraq. It was a hostile corporate take-over, nothing more. I'll also hit back if any American ever mentions torture WRT to another country. You guys wrote the book and trained half of these despots.
sounds like a military technology but maybe I misunderstand the word Defense and the.mil extension is always a question if it really is Military;p
lol, Orwell would be proud!!:-)
Hell you were allowed to post a comment like this I guess in China they would have taken you and locked you a way for a few years.
True, but unpopular speach is getting a whole lot more unpopular, not just in the US. It scares me that China is getting "free-er" while we are getting more repressive and practically fasism minus the dictator part of it. Even that holds to some extent, with the whole lack of choice, corporate-approved, skull & bones alumni thing going on.
I in turn say that there is much more blood on the hands of those who did nothing while watching Saddam gassing his own people
Search on Google News for "sudan" and please shut the fuck up. These "evil" things are HAPPENING RIGHT NOW elsewhere. Saddam did them decades ago, with your support I might add.
So wait, some guy expressing a US-bashing political opinion in a thread about A NEW HEATSINK gets +5 Insightful?
Go up the chain to see what it was in response to. Go on; I dare you!:-)
I fully agree with you actually. There was no relevance for politics in this thread, however I took offence to a racist, hypocritical post and felt compelled to respond.
Only on Slashdot can a story about CPU heatsinks be turned into a flame against the US.
In DIRECT response to an American who turned it into an anti-China bash if I may point that out...
As an American, I feel you should just get over your jealosy and just eat my hairy ass.
Jealous of what exactly? Seriously, you've lost me there...
The people who have committed such acts, or approved of them should be punished. That doesn't mean the entire country as a whole is bad.
Yes it does, the blood is on the hands of those who not only let bush in for his first term, but then let him in AGAIN. "people who have committed such acts"...it's the standard practice!! Go seek out the declassified CIA documents on interogation techniques. It's not "isolated incidents" as your leadership would like to portray.
The US hasn't been using torture as a means of political repression, punishment and intimidation in Tibet for 3 years.
Nah, not Tibet. Just Iraq, Cuba, Afganistan and the UK to name a few. In many of those countries, you have a foreign military overthrowing an existing government for strategic gain and profit. Hmm. Basically, an American bitching about Tibet is the pot calling the kettle black.
It would seem that the US has a different view of what torture is to the rest of the planet. Provided you don't draw blood (physical torture), anything goes, including religious torture (forced nakedness for Arabs), sexual torture (being forced to jerk off other men), psychological torture (sleep derpivation and intimidation) and loud rock music played 24/7 in cargo containers in desert heat.
Oh, how much fun it must be to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time when the yanks come looking for the coloured people again. No trial, no lawyers, no representation, no Geneva convention. When are you going to wake up to the fact that you aren't the good guys anymore; that stopped when you allowed big business to control the entire electoral and political spectrum.
I know you're a troll, but the following from your linked site made me laugh out loud:
PHR Report shows Chinese authorities routinely use torture as a means of political repression, punishment and intimidation in Tibet.
Emmm, have you been living under a rock for the past three years? We do that as well!! As for developing military tech, name a US innovation that wasn't related to warfare...you're using one RIGHT NOW!
One in three criminals under the age of 25 possesses or has access to a firearm.
And you take that to mean "1 in 3 is armed"? You are talking bullshit. "Have access to" is an entirely different thing altogether. Anyone has "access to" a firearm if they know the right people. Hell, I could probably have one by Friday if I wanted. But no one does. No one in this country is packing, get over it. I know a fair number of shady people and I've seen a lot of shit. I've never seen a gun in this country.
And the number of guns has doubled in 10 years? That's great! Considering how few guns there actually are, over a ten year span it's incredible that the numbers have only doubled. They aren't consumables, every new gun is one more on that number while the old ones lie aroung.
In America, a gun crime is recorded as a gun crime. In Britain, a crime is only recorded when there is a final disposition (a conviction).
That's just crapness on the part of those doing the comparison. There are other figures available, you are a fool if you think that crime is only recorded in the UK after a conviction.
Of course he wanted to harm them; he believed they wanted to harm him.
Exactly, and someone is dead because of it, so he's in jail now. What's the problem? Still doesn't make him innocent. Revenge is not a part of the legal system in any civilized country.
Which proprietary format are you referring to? MP3, WMA or AAC? They're all pretty much the same as far as "proprietary" goes.
Sigh. You know what I mean, mp3 is more "open" than the others, in that any player will play them. Joe Sixpack isn't going to think to re-rip their media, they'll just stick with ipods. If that had been MS, everyone would be up in arms about it.
Ok, they spent some time ripping CDs, but they can just re-rip them if they need them in another format and don't want to take the hit to quality by transcoding them to MP3.
They won't. They don't know and they don't care. The conversation in the shop will go "can I play my iPod tracks on that", "no", "OK, well give me the iPod mk X".
Wow, nothing like throwing in an ignorant stereotype at the end to cement your display of intellegence and insight.
It was a joke you fucking moron. I don't even live in the US; I could have used a local area that had the same stereotypes, but hardly anyone would gotten the joke. However, globally everyone knows that "the south" is full of trailer trash, so it was an obvious location to pick*.
* this is me trying to insult your easily offended ass. Out of curiosity, can you promise me that you have never insulted anyone from my country (Scotland) based on a stereotype? Didn't think so...
See, that's the problem really. Childhood has been extended by the same number of years as in this report. One hundred years ago, you'd be starting a family at 15/16 years old, now you are considered an adult at past twenty years old. Everything everyone does is extended by the same number. Unless you live in the south of course, where child bearing begins a year or so before the historic age!
Also, the first kid lunged for Tony with a flashlight, in a dark house. He was firing blind when he shot at robber #2.
So says the testimony of a guy who shot someone in the back, and was facing prison. 'Firing blind', come on, get real. The chances of actually hitting someone in that scenario are nil. To hit someone with a gun, you have to aim at them, Arnie movies not withstanding.
If he just wanted to scare them', he could have simply shot in the air or ground. He wanted to harm them and that is why he is in jail.
however one in three criminals under age 25 is armed, and violent crime is (as of 1999) just shy of double America's rate in Britan according to the Dutch ministry of justice in a 2001 report.
Link to report? Because it's talkig shit. Nationmaster (stats resource) lists assaults in the US as ABOVE the UK, and the one in three being "armed" (with what?) sounds bogus as well. As for murder rates, don't even go there!
VoIP is only the first step towards convergence; next will be the delivery of entertainment services on demand to the house.
Emm, here in the UK the digital cable services have been around for five years and they are over IP. The same wire goes into a Y-splitter off to the cable modem for access, but some folk have ethernet ports on the back of the cable TV box that they use for internet. The digi box itself is fully capable of two way communications, but the UI is a bit slow at times, old tech I guess, my box is five years old!
Wouldn't it be great to be able to watch exactly what we wanted, from the entire library of available programming, rather than compromise on watching just those programs that are popular enough to justify sending them over a broadcast/multicast channel (be it via satellite, cable, or over-the-air)?
They just started that in the past six months. A lot of free BBC content, but they charge for everything else, say 30p per music video last time I played around with it. It's going to get interesting if they hook it up to the BBCs Creative Archive project, which is pretty likely long-term as it's in the BBCs contract do that sort of thing.
Still got crap customer services though. NTL, you know who you are...;-)
I would guess that at some later date (x years from now; x==5, x==10, x==100) once the WinFX API is established and becomes the primary API used by windows system-level programming, then the Win32 API underneath may be rewritten in.NET. I don't think this will happen any time in the near term though.
Hmm, that sounds like a really unworkable idea. Others have said how it's daft for MS to re-write code for.Net if it works fine as is. Guess what? Most of the third-party Win32 API dependant apps work fine right now as well. If they want to keep any form of backwards compatability, they'll need to keep the Win32 API around for a very very long time. The code-base is spagetti-like already it would seem!
Granted I just learned about the control via irrational fear thing, but your right. Its been around for a long time, but its not that commonly known by people.
The Nazi's are a great one to start with if you want to read into this. They had the people scared of the Jewish terrorists, and when Hitler burned down the Reistag and blamed it on them, it game him the power to start a pre-emtive was neccessary to "protect" their homeland from people who were attacking their way of life. Sound familiar?
One of my all time favourite quotes:
"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
Slashdot Mirror
Then the show was bullshit. There is NO WAY that a TAP user can come close to predictive text. Not a chance in hell. I bet I could beat this guy.
you tap-tap-tap to get a letter, then you look at the screen and read the suggested completion
Not at all. It's far easier to touch-type (not look at keys) on a numeric pad than it is on a 101-key PC keyboard, which millions of people are doing right now.
Exactly. As long as the receiver is charged, the US will never embrace SMS. I'd consider it rude to send someone a message that they have to pay to receive. Sender pays for SMS elsewhere.
SMS is huge here, it gets used for lots of stuff, like buying tickets (that's how the Live Aid ones will be done), opinion polls, TV votes and so on.
I have one, and you are wrong UNLESS you compare with proper touch-typing, which hardly anyone can do. I'm just as quick on the qwerty thumb pad as I am on a regular keyboard, in fact with automatic word-completing it's probably slightly faster.
It's not as comfortable though, I wouldn't want to write a novel on it. Nor coding, symbols require shifting etc, though I've posted a fair number of my slashdot comments on it, using minimal HTML.
Already been done, this whole SMS vs Morse is old shit. You can download apps for many phones that lets you key in the message using morse.
Sloppy programming, not the OS. NEVER EVER assume anything about your target environment, use system properties where they are available.
Whatever happened to inductive charging? The idea was you'd have a coil you'd place the device near, so the coil in the device generates current from that to charge whatever cell it had. Would work with any other device that used it. Looked promising, but only ever seen a few devices use it.
I've never had a phone that didn't do this, and I've had a lot of phones. Oh, one exception, the first phone I had you had to remove the battery to charge it.
Did you even READ the post you are replying to? It WAS a good idea as it FORCED developers to handle spaces in file names. If they had done what you suggest, 99% of Windowas software would be guaranteed to fall over as soon as the user tried to save their document to a directory/filename with spaces in it.
It's murder on command-line power users, who have to enclose everything in quotes.
Eh? I've been using *nix since long before windows and I've used spaces in names the whole time. Just escape the character, like you do with every other shell token character e.g. "\ ".
It's murder on scripts, for the same reasons.
Anyone that finds that is crap at writing scripts. Their scripts are the ones that "rm -rf /$mydir" where $mydir resolves to an empty string. ;-)
I tried installing everything to \Apps and \Dev and \Utils for a while
If you want an easy bug-free life, ALWAYS install to the default location when you can. As I said, most software is badly tested and there is at least one bug regarding a non-default installation in every app. It just doesn't get tested as much as the defaults.
Not quite. You could get a permit prior to that, but you were vetted for it and had to follow a shitload of rules. The spectactular failure of this system led to a larger than Columbine type event (in infant school no less), which is what led to the complete ban of pistols. You can still get shotguns/rifles though. It's just handguns that are banned outright (and auto's of course).
Revenge is done after the fact, not while you're defending yourself against a percieved threat to your life.
A kid running away from you because you have a shotgun is not a threat by any definition of the word. And your dictionary quote mentions "vengence". What exactly are you smoking? It's practically a textbook definition of what happened. I'm unsure where you get the "after the fact" thing from, but it was revenge for scaring him in his home, AFTER which FACT he took revenge.
the truth is that police can't be everywhere at once, and if they could, would you be willing to tolerate that level of scrutiy?
No, of course not. However, guns bring far more problems than they solve. You mention a rape case, tragic but however typical of pro-gun campaigners. However, as always, you forget to mention that guns will increase crime, they increase murders, they increase armed robbery, they increase innocent dead bystanders and they increase the number of children killed in accidents. I'd also argue that it would make rape more prevailent as it makes it easier to hold someone against their will with a knife. The fact that police took 14 hours to respond is the issue there. Plus, the case was in the US, where they COULD have had a gun if they wanted, but didn't. Discounting the fact that there is zero evidence that having a gun in the home would have prevented the crime (or even made it worse) in the first place. So it is a completely pointless and irrelevant argument.
Depends on the device in question. Mine has 10 customisable buttons and a 8-way d-pad. More than enough for any emulated system, 'cept maybe the C64/Sinclair ones, but I've got a qwerty slide-out keyboard for them!
What an insulting and pointless thing to say. I'd rather let them starve? I just supported their cause by highlighting it to the hypocrites around here. Not a lot true, but something. Got any better ideas?
Instead of directing hatred to the US, do something usefull and put all that energy into helping the less fortunate.
I am, you know little about me. I live in Scotland, the next few months are going to be interesting.
You act as if the US does nothing good in this world, I think you are mistaken
The US, with other nations, does do good in the world. I'll still take personal offense when someone tries to claim moral high ground surrounding Iraq. It was a hostile corporate take-over, nothing more. I'll also hit back if any American ever mentions torture WRT to another country. You guys wrote the book and trained half of these despots.
lol, Orwell would be proud!! :-)
Hell you were allowed to post a comment like this I guess in China they would have taken you and locked you a way for a few years.
True, but unpopular speach is getting a whole lot more unpopular, not just in the US. It scares me that China is getting "free-er" while we are getting more repressive and practically fasism minus the dictator part of it. Even that holds to some extent, with the whole lack of choice, corporate-approved, skull & bones alumni thing going on.
Search on Google News for "sudan" and please shut the fuck up. These "evil" things are HAPPENING RIGHT NOW elsewhere. Saddam did them decades ago, with your support I might add.
There's no profit to be had in Sudan though.
Go up the chain to see what it was in response to. Go on; I dare you! :-)
I fully agree with you actually. There was no relevance for politics in this thread, however I took offence to a racist, hypocritical post and felt compelled to respond.
In DIRECT response to an American who turned it into an anti-China bash if I may point that out...
As an American, I feel you should just get over your jealosy and just eat my hairy ass.
Jealous of what exactly? Seriously, you've lost me there...
The people who have committed such acts, or approved of them should be punished. That doesn't mean the entire country as a whole is bad.
Yes it does, the blood is on the hands of those who not only let bush in for his first term, but then let him in AGAIN. "people who have committed such acts"...it's the standard practice!! Go seek out the declassified CIA documents on interogation techniques. It's not "isolated incidents" as your leadership would like to portray.
Nah, not Tibet. Just Iraq, Cuba, Afganistan and the UK to name a few. In many of those countries, you have a foreign military overthrowing an existing government for strategic gain and profit. Hmm. Basically, an American bitching about Tibet is the pot calling the kettle black.
It would seem that the US has a different view of what torture is to the rest of the planet. Provided you don't draw blood (physical torture), anything goes, including religious torture (forced nakedness for Arabs), sexual torture (being forced to jerk off other men), psychological torture (sleep derpivation and intimidation) and loud rock music played 24/7 in cargo containers in desert heat.
Oh, how much fun it must be to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time when the yanks come looking for the coloured people again. No trial, no lawyers, no representation, no Geneva convention. When are you going to wake up to the fact that you aren't the good guys anymore; that stopped when you allowed big business to control the entire electoral and political spectrum.
Emmm, have you been living under a rock for the past three years? We do that as well!! As for developing military tech, name a US innovation that wasn't related to warfare...you're using one RIGHT NOW!
And you take that to mean "1 in 3 is armed"? You are talking bullshit. "Have access to" is an entirely different thing altogether. Anyone has "access to" a firearm if they know the right people. Hell, I could probably have one by Friday if I wanted. But no one does. No one in this country is packing, get over it. I know a fair number of shady people and I've seen a lot of shit. I've never seen a gun in this country.
And the number of guns has doubled in 10 years? That's great! Considering how few guns there actually are, over a ten year span it's incredible that the numbers have only doubled. They aren't consumables, every new gun is one more on that number while the old ones lie aroung.
In America, a gun crime is recorded as a gun crime. In Britain, a crime is only recorded when there is a final disposition (a conviction).
That's just crapness on the part of those doing the comparison. There are other figures available, you are a fool if you think that crime is only recorded in the UK after a conviction.
Of course he wanted to harm them; he believed they wanted to harm him.
Exactly, and someone is dead because of it, so he's in jail now. What's the problem? Still doesn't make him innocent. Revenge is not a part of the legal system in any civilized country.
Sigh. You know what I mean, mp3 is more "open" than the others, in that any player will play them. Joe Sixpack isn't going to think to re-rip their media, they'll just stick with ipods. If that had been MS, everyone would be up in arms about it.
Ok, they spent some time ripping CDs, but they can just re-rip them if they need them in another format and don't want to take the hit to quality by transcoding them to MP3.
They won't. They don't know and they don't care. The conversation in the shop will go "can I play my iPod tracks on that", "no", "OK, well give me the iPod mk X".
It was a joke you fucking moron. I don't even live in the US; I could have used a local area that had the same stereotypes, but hardly anyone would gotten the joke. However, globally everyone knows that "the south" is full of trailer trash, so it was an obvious location to pick*.
* this is me trying to insult your easily offended ass. Out of curiosity, can you promise me that you have never insulted anyone from my country (Scotland) based on a stereotype? Didn't think so...
See, that's the problem really. Childhood has been extended by the same number of years as in this report. One hundred years ago, you'd be starting a family at 15/16 years old, now you are considered an adult at past twenty years old. Everything everyone does is extended by the same number. Unless you live in the south of course, where child bearing begins a year or so before the historic age!
So says the testimony of a guy who shot someone in the back, and was facing prison. 'Firing blind', come on, get real. The chances of actually hitting someone in that scenario are nil. To hit someone with a gun, you have to aim at them, Arnie movies not withstanding.
If he just wanted to scare them', he could have simply shot in the air or ground. He wanted to harm them and that is why he is in jail.
however one in three criminals under age 25 is armed, and violent crime is (as of 1999) just shy of double America's rate in Britan according to the Dutch ministry of justice in a 2001 report.
Link to report? Because it's talkig shit. Nationmaster (stats resource) lists assaults in the US as ABOVE the UK, and the one in three being "armed" (with what?) sounds bogus as well. As for murder rates, don't even go there!
Emm, here in the UK the digital cable services have been around for five years and they are over IP. The same wire goes into a Y-splitter off to the cable modem for access, but some folk have ethernet ports on the back of the cable TV box that they use for internet. The digi box itself is fully capable of two way communications, but the UI is a bit slow at times, old tech I guess, my box is five years old!
Wouldn't it be great to be able to watch exactly what we wanted, from the entire library of available programming, rather than compromise on watching just those programs that are popular enough to justify sending them over a broadcast/multicast channel (be it via satellite, cable, or over-the-air)?
They just started that in the past six months. A lot of free BBC content, but they charge for everything else, say 30p per music video last time I played around with it. It's going to get interesting if they hook it up to the BBCs Creative Archive project, which is pretty likely long-term as it's in the BBCs contract do that sort of thing.
Still got crap customer services though. NTL, you know who you are... ;-)
Hmm, that sounds like a really unworkable idea. Others have said how it's daft for MS to re-write code for .Net if it works fine as is. Guess what? Most of the third-party Win32 API dependant apps work fine right now as well. If they want to keep any form of backwards compatability, they'll need to keep the Win32 API around for a very very long time. The code-base is spagetti-like already it would seem!
The Nazi's are a great one to start with if you want to read into this. They had the people scared of the Jewish terrorists, and when Hitler burned down the Reistag and blamed it on them, it game him the power to start a pre-emtive was neccessary to "protect" their homeland from people who were attacking their way of life. Sound familiar?
One of my all time favourite quotes:
Just out of curiosity glesga_kiss, where are you from?
Glasgow, Scotland. Surprisingly.... ;-)