As always, would love to see it, as it's such a versitile material, and a shame that it has been mostly used as a whitener. On the other hand, if refining it makes the price of titanium dioxide go up, what are Oreos going to use?
Bigger issue is whether there is enough of the raw materials needed to produce their product on the scales they claim. Short answer: no. Barium isn't a problem, though it's energy intensive to refine, but Titanium supplies are pretty tight, and mostly eaten up by aerospace. Now, maybe they can start with refined TiO2 (which is cheap), and skip the pure metal stage, but I would want to see the synthesis and yields first.
Iron-Phosphate is much more probable as a battery material, as it's available on the scale needed for automotive uses. Even if the above works, it will probably only be laptops and phones, and then only in places where sudden capacitor failure isn't a hazard.
Hope I'm wrong, but this is probably a great system that works in the lab and is useful on a small scale. However, VC's want to hear that it's the cure for everything, so there it is.
I think the issue is that, sure, $29 is not much money (2CD at retail), but they're charging you for something the Marines will pay *you* to buy. Even better, your committment to the USMC is only as long as the time between Apple point-releases. (unless you sign the wrong forms, in which case it's the time between Windows Server releases).
Years ago my copy of Kruse's "Data Structures" came with examples of how to do all the then-hip dynamic data structures (linked lists, trees, etc) in languages without pointers. This became useful when writing high-level Fortran-77 programs, as it allowed moving beyond Gomputed Goto and Arithmetic If for algorithms. In the same vein "Numerical Algorithms" (Teukolsky, Vettering, et al.) showed how to get decent array performance and add various oversights (such as complex numbers and complex arithmetic) to C-type languages.
>>>I see this ending up as an effort to shoehorn concepts unique to one language to another language (building web sites in COBOL *shiver*).
I once saw a series of cgi-bin routines written in Fortran-77 because that's what the web-site designer knew, and the schedule was too tight for her to learn Perl in time. (for those of you who started programming after compiled languages gave way to Python/Perl/Ruby/WombatCode6000, get a copy of G77, and try to compare two strings of different lengths) It's no big deal; given enough time one Turing-complete language can accomplish the same work as any other Turing-complete language. It's just the degree of pain you're willing to endure that's the limiting factor.
As for the F77/cgi-bin programmer, She's a full professor now (though not in Comp. Sci, alas),
As suggested on APUG (kind of an anti-slashdot; "news for nerds, stuff that matters, as long as it's not digital"), because of people dumping their film gear you can now afford to accesorize yourself with a half a dozen Nikon SLRs, and go as Dennis Hopper from _Apocalypse Now_.
That's why you need an 8x10; you can convince them it's "Art" (in capitals, no less). An SLR is just an invitation to end up on the front of "Weekly World News".
He said, "it's the best Windows ever" in that same voice you use for "It's the Tallest Building in Topeka". It is an honor, but who cares?
Personally, I love that the search icon is virtually identical to the one on my Mac, located in the same spot on the screen, but turned Backwards. Basically, it's the "Evil Spock" version of MacOS. The goatee is cool, but in the end, which would you rather work with?
I've seen that one. Frequently, the file is actually there, you just can't see the name. Thankfully, this isn't on every operation, so it may have something to do with system load. (i.e.you have an empty directory that you've just copied a file into, you see that you still have an empty directory, but if you use some command to directly access it, it's there. )
So, I suppose the real answer is to put a *BSD box in your rack to serve as the NFS server, then decide whether you want to deal with case sensitivity on the desktop machines. (this presumes that your cluster and your desktops are one seamless entity, which is a really convenient way to run)
If someone was interested in the growth of our species, then yet another technology to bring Donald Trump into our homes would be the last invention on the list. Let them wrangle.
Eliminate the Crippleware and Craplets, and the OEMs will paint racing stripes on their cases, call it a valuable new feature, and charge what they lost in "incentives" from the junksoft companies, while still shipping Windows. They have an entire industry of people reading scripts over the phone to deal with tech-support questions, and they don't want to pay the fees to recreate that with a completely new OS.
Make Linux more pleasant to use, have it support more apps end-users care about, and get someone to break the threat of Microsoft pricing retaliation, and OEMs might move to Linux. Get Stallman a suit, haircut, and beard-perm, and they might move more quickly.
The time I saw the runtime halved, it was a piece of code that had been rearranged to run well on early-90s Cray/Alliant vector machines. Dusty-deck fortran that grew up on VAXes or IBM mainframes doesn't do nearly as well, though I still can generally get 15-30% vs. g77. I can also get wierd bugs, as much of that code depends on, *ahem*, "features" left over from Fortran-66 which have since gone away and modern compilers (which are really F90/F95 compilers) don't support well.
Personally, I'm sorry I won't be getting XServes with Power6 processors and 64-bit XLF, but price/flop for x86 isn't all that bad.
Btw, my informal testing so far is showing that on PPC GFortran is about 12% slower than XLF for 32-bit code, which makes it significantly faster than the commercial competitors. A group that provides one of the packages I use (3/4 million lines of F77) recommends GFortran for building the 64-bit AMD version, for reasons of both speed and stability. So, it's getting better, but since I don't use C I don't know how much improvement GCC is showing for numerics.
If you're dead-set on using GCC, yes. Alternately, if you use the native compilers which only have to support a fairly narrow architecture, you can get much higher performance. XLF on RS/6K and Macs was one example (capable of halving your run-time in some cases), IFORT/ICC on x86 and up, or FORT/CCC on DEC/Compaq/HP Alpha-Unix and Alpha-Linux were others. Currently GCC is not bad on almost everything, but native-mode compilers will still tend to dust it, especially for numeric work.
Which brings back the other problem; not only are x86 chips cheap to make, but we have 30 years of practice optimizing for them. Their replacement is going to have to be enough better to overcome those two factors.
In one room I have an Ikea Not (add the umlauts yourself) lamp, which is a pillar lamp with an upward pointing cheap shade. The plastic in that shade tends the light towards warm, so if you put a CFL in there then lateral light has a color close to what you expect, and the harsher cold light goes up to the ceiling, and is mellowed by reflecting off the warm-white walls first. A modicum of taste and skill decorating takes care of most of the objections. Unless your entire retirement account is made up of power-company shares, there really are no objections to using CFLs for almost all applications.
...but I only see in infra-red, you insensitive clod!
Seriously, the closer to natural light is an advantage for the seasonally affected, the lower-wattage compacts mean that you can put brighter bulbs in places like the 'fridge or stove, without damaging something due to heat, and you don't have to get up on the ladder and risk breaking your grandmother's irreplacable chandelier nearly as often. One of these days some NY designer is going to figure out how to use the spiral decoratively, and CFL's will be beyond hip. (at which point we'll all change to LEDs instead)
This is why I eat the original cost of such items, and use a ballpeen hammer and cold chisel on them when it's time to throw them out. Recovering anything from a memory stick where the storage chip has been ball-peened is going to be pretty difficult.
Amortize the cost, and when you're sure you're not going to use it again, destroy. I figure that the 4GB SCSI drive that had held Windows and my tax software was a consumble after the upgrade to a newer drive.
We used to have a mil-surplus filing cabinet at work that came with a huge combination lock on the front, and mil-spec instructions for destroying it in case our position was overrun. Something like nine steps which included smashing with a hammer, followed by a thermite grenade, followed by scattering the pieces in different trenches and incinerating again. Looked like something that should ship with new harddrives.
I tried this once. It worked well under Win2K server, and the old licensing regime. For the new one, I paid almost as much in client access licenses as I would have for Windows XP licenses. As an academic shop, our costs were low enough for that to make sense, but for those of you in the real world, I'd be more careful.
We ran into a couple of issues. The easily solved one was multiple copies of Office and Matlab are resource hogs. Get a large application server for those, and look into some sort of clustering. The harder issue was that some software actually sniffs to see if you're running on a remote session, and refuses to start if you are.
To an extent, this worked great, as the desktops were more secure and easier to manage, while the Windows boxes transitioned from whatever Dell had cheap that month to multi-proc systems with hardware RAID, high-speed SCSI drives, and redundant power supplies. The only real lossage occurred for those users who needed high-performance 3d rendering on Windows, and most of them were easily transitioned to Linux equivalents. You may wish to consider getting WinTerms if you go this route, as those have fewer parts to maintain and fewer ways for employees to tinker with them.
It's been suggested that his famous train-wreck ability with language is due to the effort of deliberately being something other than what he started as. Kind of like how (allegedly) left-handers who are forced to become righties tend to stutter at the early stages. The down-homisms just aren't natural, and the fundamentalist streak means that he doesn't understand why he has to explain anything. Being forced to do both creates the bushisms.
On the other hand, the rest seems to be the result of being a beard for the real powers, Nixon/Ford retreads Cheney and Co. I don't think we can blame the protozoans for this one.
Had he just spent a little more time at the pub, he could have waited for events like this to happen, and finally open up that Northwest Passage he was hired to look for. Just got impatient, I guess.
Btw, in more normal units, it's roughly 25 square miles, or 1600 sq furlongs. Thankfully it's ice, so nobody has to mow it, though I feel for the zamboni operator charged with its upkeep. (I presume a sheet is flat ice, and therefore probably covered in hockey players this time of year)
If your company is sensible, those computers will probably continue to sit there and run XP/2000, and the apps they've been running for the last several years. No retraining costs, no change in support costs (getting your techs up to speed on whatever flavor of Linux you choose is going to be an issue), no change in appearance or behaviour.
Every now and then it's a good idea to take a deep breath and mentally separate your politics and your paycheck. I forced an entire user community into Linux desktops once (it was a computational lab, so that actually made good, technical, sense), and the main result was a proliferation of Windows laptops so that people could run familiar productivity programs, for when the job didn't call for Fortran, MPI, and Mathlibs. In the end, it was good for my peace of mind (had I had my way and a larger budget, they all would have been running AIX), but the user-level aggravation, complaints, time for training, and debugging (oops, the last kernel revision whacked the 3d drivers again. Just a minute while I recompile the kernel module, upgrade the offenders, and reboot them. again.). In an environment not made up of physical scientists with years of Unix experience (even grad students had dealt with their Uni's Unices as Undergrads), it would have been an exercise in "How to Give Yourself a Nervous Breakdown".
Technically, it was the right answer, financially, it was the right answer, personally, it was the right answer, and for the community I would have had a better response had I asked them to wear burlap underwear. A couple enthusiasts thought it was cool but everyone else wanted the integrated Windows experience, not running older versions of Office through Wine, or using Star/OpenOffice, or putting up with strange incompatibilities that occurred with Terminal Services.
Next step is VMWare/Xen, and downsizing a couple of stray servers. This is when some sort of power-generation scheme for the home begins to look attractive. Thermoelectric materials near the stove/shower/fireplace would seem to be a good start, but probably not for anything larger than a CFL or two.
Henry has enough else to answer for that being involved in CREEP and the other domestic corruption would have been the colored sprinkles on top of the organic bespoke banana split.
In all likelihood, given the political climate of the time, you still wouldn't have gotten to the bottom of everything Nixon did, and only put up with months of political grandstanding and butt-covering. On the other hand, Nixon's henchmen were publicly tried, their crimes exposed, and most of them did time. Unfortunately, being shameless (*cough* G. Gordon Liddy *cough*), they didn't quietly disappear as would have been appropriate. (that includes you, Henry K.) Exiling Nixon to Fairbanks, rather than California, would have been appropriate as well, but as the Stones put it, "you can't always get what you want". Having seen what drips out over the years about Nixon's time in office, you can only imagine what would have been vomited up at the time if it all came out at once. Ford seems to have done close to the right thing.
So don't complain. Personally, I wanted to see Ronbo, G. H. W. Bush, and Co. brought to task over Iran Contra, but with those last minute pardons for the perpetrators as the investigators finally got near GHWB, my generation got diddly/squat. You at least got something, even if it wasn't RMN in San Quentin.
Microsoft is certainly one offender, and certainly the largest, but let's not forget our dear friend, X11. Pre-Irix-4.0 SGI ran NeWS, which was also display postscript based. Nexts ran NextStep, VAXStations VWS, all relatively light, efficient, and functional, and everywhere I went the same whine arose, "we can't use this, it doesn't run X11!" So, Nexts weren't purchased, even though given the software and performance, they weren't out of line versus Sun 3/60, Apollo, etc, and SGI had to port everything to X in order to survive. We took a performance hit on every machine that had to run X versus the previous window-manager, had to add megs of expensive (early 1990s) memory just to not hear the disks whine, and generally gained very little in return for adopting this, ahem, standard. Then, if you wanted to see real death by toolkit, running Motif on a Vaxstation 3100/38 that had run smoothly under previous versions of X alone was a good example. We had a program that *somebody* insisted had to be Motif only, and the performance was so apalling we spent ~$15K on an Indy, just to be able to work. That VAX was perfectly fine (and would have still been useful if the programs the lab used had an X11-only, VWS, or even Tek-4107 interface), but it had to be retired due to a bloated toolkit.
The Knight with the Chicken is going to be very busy in the computer industry one of these days.
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As always, would love to see it, as it's such a versitile material, and a shame that it has been mostly used as a whitener. On the other hand, if refining it makes the price of titanium dioxide go up, what are Oreos going to use?
Bigger issue is whether there is enough of the raw materials needed to produce their product on the scales they claim. Short answer: no. Barium isn't a problem, though it's energy intensive to refine, but Titanium supplies are pretty tight, and mostly eaten up by aerospace. Now, maybe they can start with refined TiO2 (which is cheap), and skip the pure metal stage, but I would want to see the synthesis and yields first.
Iron-Phosphate is much more probable as a battery material, as it's available on the scale needed for automotive uses. Even if the above works, it will probably only be laptops and phones, and then only in places where sudden capacitor failure isn't a hazard.
Hope I'm wrong, but this is probably a great system that works in the lab and is useful on a small scale. However, VC's want to hear that it's the cure for everything, so there it is.
I think the issue is that, sure, $29 is not much money (2CD at retail), but they're charging you for something the Marines will pay *you* to buy. Even better, your committment to the USMC is only as long as the time between Apple point-releases. (unless you sign the wrong forms, in which case it's the time between Windows Server releases).
Years ago my copy of Kruse's "Data Structures" came with examples of how to do all the then-hip dynamic data structures (linked lists, trees, etc) in languages without pointers. This became useful when writing high-level Fortran-77 programs, as it allowed moving beyond Gomputed Goto and Arithmetic If for algorithms. In the same vein "Numerical Algorithms" (Teukolsky, Vettering, et al.) showed how to get decent array performance and add various oversights (such as complex numbers and complex arithmetic) to C-type languages.
>>>I see this ending up as an effort to shoehorn concepts unique to one language to another language (building web sites in COBOL *shiver*).
I once saw a series of cgi-bin routines written in Fortran-77 because that's what the web-site designer knew, and the schedule was too tight for her to learn Perl in time. (for those of you who started programming after compiled languages gave way to Python/Perl/Ruby/WombatCode6000, get a copy of G77, and try to compare two strings of different lengths) It's no big deal; given enough time one Turing-complete language can accomplish the same work as any other Turing-complete language. It's just the degree of pain you're willing to endure that's the limiting factor.
As for the F77/cgi-bin programmer, She's a full professor now (though not in Comp. Sci, alas),
As suggested on APUG (kind of an anti-slashdot; "news for nerds, stuff that matters, as long as it's not digital"), because of people dumping their film gear you can now afford to accesorize yourself with a half a dozen Nikon SLRs, and go as Dennis Hopper from _Apocalypse Now_.
That's why you need an 8x10; you can convince them it's "Art" (in capitals, no less). An SLR is just an invitation to end up on the front of "Weekly World News".
Only if a bored starship commander doesn't use it for target practice first.
He said, "it's the best Windows ever" in that same voice you use for "It's the Tallest Building in Topeka". It is an honor, but who cares?
Personally, I love that the search icon is virtually identical to the one on my Mac, located in the same spot on the screen, but turned Backwards. Basically, it's the "Evil Spock" version of MacOS. The goatee is cool, but in the end, which would you rather work with?
I've seen that one. Frequently, the file is actually there, you just can't see the name. Thankfully, this isn't on every operation, so it may have something to do with system load. (i.e.you have an empty directory that you've just copied a file into, you see that you still have an empty directory, but if you use some command to directly access it, it's there. )
So, I suppose the real answer is to put a *BSD box in your rack to serve as the NFS server, then decide whether you want to deal with case sensitivity on the desktop machines. (this presumes that your cluster and your desktops are one seamless entity, which is a really convenient way to run)
If someone was interested in the growth of our species, then yet another technology to bring Donald Trump into our homes would be the last invention on the list. Let them wrangle.
Eliminate the Crippleware and Craplets, and the OEMs will paint racing stripes on their cases, call it a valuable new feature, and charge what they lost in "incentives" from the junksoft companies, while still shipping Windows. They have an entire industry of people reading scripts over the phone to deal with tech-support questions, and they don't want to pay the fees to recreate that with a completely new OS.
Make Linux more pleasant to use, have it support more apps end-users care about, and get someone to break the threat of Microsoft pricing retaliation, and OEMs might move to Linux. Get Stallman a suit, haircut, and beard-perm, and they might move more quickly.
The time I saw the runtime halved, it was a piece of code that had been rearranged to run well on early-90s Cray/Alliant vector machines. Dusty-deck fortran that grew up on VAXes or IBM mainframes doesn't do nearly as well, though I still can generally get 15-30% vs. g77. I can also get wierd bugs, as much of that code depends on, *ahem*, "features" left over from Fortran-66 which have since gone away and modern compilers (which are really F90/F95 compilers) don't support well.
Personally, I'm sorry I won't be getting XServes with Power6 processors and 64-bit XLF, but price/flop for x86 isn't all that bad.
Btw, my informal testing so far is showing that on PPC GFortran is about 12% slower than XLF for 32-bit code, which makes it significantly faster than the commercial competitors. A group that provides one of the packages I use (3/4 million lines of F77) recommends GFortran for building the 64-bit AMD version, for reasons of both speed and stability. So, it's getting better, but since I don't use C I don't know how much improvement GCC is showing for numerics.
If you're dead-set on using GCC, yes. Alternately, if you use the native compilers which only have to support a fairly narrow architecture, you can get much higher performance. XLF on RS/6K and Macs was one example (capable of halving your run-time in some cases), IFORT/ICC on x86 and up, or FORT/CCC on DEC/Compaq/HP Alpha-Unix and Alpha-Linux were others. Currently GCC is not bad on almost everything, but native-mode compilers will still tend to dust it, especially for numeric work.
Which brings back the other problem; not only are x86 chips cheap to make, but we have 30 years of practice optimizing for them. Their replacement is going to have to be enough better to overcome those two factors.
In one room I have an Ikea Not (add the umlauts yourself) lamp, which is a pillar lamp with an upward pointing cheap shade. The plastic in that shade tends the light towards warm, so if you put a CFL in there then lateral light has a color close to what you expect, and the harsher cold light goes up to the ceiling, and is mellowed by reflecting off the warm-white walls first. A modicum of taste and skill decorating takes care of most of the objections. Unless your entire retirement account is made up of power-company shares, there really are no objections to using CFLs for almost all applications.
...but I only see in infra-red, you insensitive clod!
Seriously, the closer to natural light is an advantage for the seasonally affected, the lower-wattage compacts mean that you can put brighter bulbs in places like the 'fridge or stove, without damaging something due to heat, and you don't have to get up on the ladder and risk breaking your grandmother's irreplacable chandelier nearly as often. One of these days some NY designer is going to figure out how to use the spiral decoratively, and CFL's will be beyond hip. (at which point we'll all change to LEDs instead)
This is why I eat the original cost of such items, and use a ballpeen hammer and cold chisel on them when it's time to throw them out. Recovering anything from a memory stick where the storage chip has been ball-peened is going to be pretty difficult.
Amortize the cost, and when you're sure you're not going to use it again, destroy. I figure that the 4GB SCSI drive that had held Windows and my tax software was a consumble after the upgrade to a newer drive.
We used to have a mil-surplus filing cabinet at work that came with a huge combination lock on the front, and mil-spec instructions for destroying it in case our position was overrun. Something like nine steps which included smashing with a hammer, followed by a thermite grenade, followed by scattering the pieces in different trenches and incinerating again. Looked like something that should ship with new harddrives.
I tried this once. It worked well under Win2K server, and the old licensing regime. For the new one, I paid almost as much in client access licenses as I would have for Windows XP licenses. As an academic shop, our costs were low enough for that to make sense, but for those of you in the real world, I'd be more careful.
& tab=3&subcat=Sun%20Ray%20Clients/url and Secure Global desktop http://www.sun.com/software/products/sgd/index.jsp /url a look. It will run from a Linux server, so it's on the right path from your perspective. One past job used an earlier version of this technology for student kiosks in the library, and it cut our maintenance headaches versus real PCs. Just a thought.
We ran into a couple of issues. The easily solved one was multiple copies of Office and Matlab are resource hogs. Get a large application server for those, and look into some sort of clustering. The harder issue was that some software actually sniffs to see if you're running on a remote session, and refuses to start if you are.
To an extent, this worked great, as the desktops were more secure and easier to manage, while the Windows boxes transitioned from whatever Dell had cheap that month to multi-proc systems with hardware RAID, high-speed SCSI drives, and redundant power supplies. The only real lossage occurred for those users who needed high-performance 3d rendering on Windows, and most of them were easily transitioned to Linux equivalents. You may wish to consider getting WinTerms if you go this route, as those have fewer parts to maintain and fewer ways for employees to tinker with them.
Quite seriously, you may wish to give Sun Sunrays http://www.sun.com/software/index.jsp?cat=Desktop
It's been suggested that his famous train-wreck ability with language is due to the effort of deliberately being something other than what he started as. Kind of like how (allegedly) left-handers who are forced to become righties tend to stutter at the early stages. The down-homisms just aren't natural, and the fundamentalist streak means that he doesn't understand why he has to explain anything. Being forced to do both creates the bushisms.
On the other hand, the rest seems to be the result of being a beard for the real powers, Nixon/Ford retreads Cheney and Co. I don't think we can blame the protozoans for this one.
So I wonder what it weighed in KiloStones?
Had he just spent a little more time at the pub, he could have waited for events like this to happen, and finally open up that Northwest Passage he was hired to look for. Just got impatient, I guess.
Btw, in more normal units, it's roughly 25 square miles, or 1600 sq furlongs. Thankfully it's ice, so nobody has to mow it, though I feel for the zamboni operator charged with its upkeep. (I presume a sheet is flat ice, and therefore probably covered in hockey players this time of year)
If your company is sensible, those computers will probably continue to sit there and run XP/2000, and the apps they've been running for the last several years. No retraining costs, no change in support costs (getting your techs up to speed on whatever flavor of Linux you choose is going to be an issue), no change in appearance or behaviour.
Every now and then it's a good idea to take a deep breath and mentally separate your politics and your paycheck. I forced an entire user community into Linux desktops once (it was a computational lab, so that actually made good, technical, sense), and the main result was a proliferation of Windows laptops so that people could run familiar productivity programs, for when the job didn't call for Fortran, MPI, and Mathlibs. In the end, it was good for my peace of mind (had I had my way and a larger budget, they all would have been running AIX), but the user-level aggravation, complaints, time for training, and debugging (oops, the last kernel revision whacked the 3d drivers again. Just a minute while I recompile the kernel module, upgrade the offenders, and reboot them. again.). In an environment not made up of physical scientists with years of Unix experience (even grad students had dealt with their Uni's Unices as Undergrads), it would have been an exercise in "How to Give Yourself a Nervous Breakdown".
Technically, it was the right answer, financially, it was the right answer, personally, it was the right answer, and for the community I would have had a better response had I asked them to wear burlap underwear. A couple enthusiasts thought it was cool but everyone else wanted the integrated Windows experience, not running older versions of Office through Wine, or using Star/OpenOffice, or putting up with strange incompatibilities that occurred with Terminal Services.
Next step is VMWare/Xen, and downsizing a couple of stray servers. This is when some sort of power-generation scheme for the home begins to look attractive. Thermoelectric materials near the stove/shower/fireplace would seem to be a good start, but probably not for anything larger than a CFL or two.
Henry has enough else to answer for that being involved in CREEP and the other domestic corruption would have been the colored sprinkles on top of the organic bespoke banana split.
In all likelihood, given the political climate of the time, you still wouldn't have gotten to the bottom of everything Nixon did, and only put up with months of political grandstanding and butt-covering. On the other hand, Nixon's henchmen were publicly tried, their crimes exposed, and most of them did time. Unfortunately, being shameless (*cough* G. Gordon Liddy *cough*), they didn't quietly disappear as would have been appropriate. (that includes you, Henry K.) Exiling Nixon to Fairbanks, rather than California, would have been appropriate as well, but as the Stones put it, "you can't always get what you want". Having seen what drips out over the years about Nixon's time in office, you can only imagine what would have been vomited up at the time if it all came out at once. Ford seems to have done close to the right thing.
So don't complain. Personally, I wanted to see Ronbo, G. H. W. Bush, and Co. brought to task over Iran Contra, but with those last minute pardons for the perpetrators as the investigators finally got near GHWB, my generation got diddly/squat. You at least got something, even if it wasn't RMN in San Quentin.
Microsoft is certainly one offender, and certainly the largest, but let's not forget our dear friend, X11. Pre-Irix-4.0 SGI ran NeWS, which was also display postscript based. Nexts ran NextStep, VAXStations VWS, all relatively light, efficient, and functional, and everywhere I went the same whine arose, "we can't use this, it doesn't run X11!" So, Nexts weren't purchased, even though given the software and performance, they weren't out of line versus Sun 3/60, Apollo, etc, and SGI had to port everything to X in order to survive. We took a performance hit on every machine that had to run X versus the previous window-manager, had to add megs of expensive (early 1990s) memory just to not hear the disks whine, and generally gained very little in return for adopting this, ahem, standard. Then, if you wanted to see real death by toolkit, running Motif on a Vaxstation 3100/38 that had run smoothly under previous versions of X alone was a good example. We had a program that *somebody* insisted had to be Motif only, and the performance was so apalling we spent ~$15K on an Indy, just to be able to work. That VAX was perfectly fine (and would have still been useful if the programs the lab used had an X11-only, VWS, or even Tek-4107 interface), but it had to be retired due to a bloated toolkit.
The Knight with the Chicken is going to be very busy in the computer industry one of these days.