You don't even need that. Just keep it dry for a couple hours. Pretty much no virus can survive non-wet conditions for extended periods of time. What's that? Your laptop is dry? Then you're fine.
caveat: mucous can keep things moist enough for pretty long, but not more than a couple days.
Except the amount of data in a text message is so small (~100 bytes average) $5/month is a ripoff as well. Also, usually $5/month only gets you 200 and unlimited is around $10-20 a month. Compare that price to any other service you get from the phone - data for example.
Basically this is an example of an ancillary service that is basically free to provide (once you already have a phone/data network), but cell companies have figured out that people are willing to pay essentially infinitely more money than what it costs to provide the service because of the market's barriers to entry making cell service a not very competitive market.
You're just arguing whether X years is good or bad.
Personally, I think in the software world, patents maybe should last 3-5 years and copyrights should still last 20 or so (you shouldn't be able to grab windows 3 years after it came out and start selling burned CDs on ebay, but you should be able to use any patented ideas in your own software).
In the end I think it comes down to whether you believe someone should be able to make money and support themselves solely by creative act or if you believe they should be required to do something beyond this (as the GGP suggests that they must offer some related service to their original creation, not just the creation itself - - in music people often suggest performing although I'm not sure what they'd suggest for a novelist). It's harder to justify a copyright-less world when you consider actual people in the creative act (writing novels or composing music) and not just the faceless corporations of the software world.
You're right, I should have slightly rephrased that as "...only has a greater financial to write more if they know they will lose the income from the first."
I certainly agree that there are many other reasons people write and create. But you have to admit that there would probably be fewer books in say the Goosebumps series or from Steven King if no one was making money off them.
I thought that was implied by the fact that this is slashdot, and my post was a comment:). Feel free to state your own opinions and justify them as you see fit.
The argument that because copying costs are now lower than before people should no longer charge for creative or intellectual works is essentially flawed. A low cost for reproduction is assumed otherwise copyright law would be unnecessary. Copyright law is a government granted monopoly to the creator of a work saying that you will be the only person who can copy it for X number of years. The government gives you this monopoly as an incentive for you to produce something of value since you know Joe down the street won't be able to set up your content on his printing press or modern equivalent and sell it too making your initial investment worthless (why not just wait for someone else to make something and then sell their thing). This is a pretty good idea and the US constitution even gives the reason for it when it grants the government the right "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Where this all doesn't make any sense is when the terms get beyond the original 20 or so years. In fact, extending the term is counterproductive because an author of a really good book/song/painting/program only has a greater incentive to write more if they know they will lose the income from the first one.
Copyright's fine. Open Source / Free Software is fine in that it provides other incentives for progress (recognition, communal sponsoring of something that benefits several companies in tangential businesses such as hardware, consulting, update services, etc as you mention). Each has its place and inherent pros and cons (typically open source software best serves the needs of those who write it - either the uber geeks who use emacs or IBM who sells mainframes. Commercial development typically serves best audiences who will pay the most per unit of effort of a developer).
Where you get into trouble is where a few strongly interested parties (publishers) can successfully lobby to have terms extended beyond serving what a reasonable person would understand the intent of copyright to be. They can do this because they are a small moneyed interest with strong individual motivation to see copyright terms extended. Whereas the general public sees a small benefit if the term is short as originally intended. However the amount of caring per person does not usually even hit the level of staying informed of the issues or even the reason behind having copyright (people often assume it's an ownership issue - I should own this thing I made rather than a public good issue - you get to make money off this thing exclusively so you have sufficient financial backing to produce it and more things in the future). It really doesn't reach the point where the general public is willing to hire lobbyists and since they are uninformed are unwilling to put forth the effort to organize and each contribute the $3.02 that it is worth to each person to provide lawmakers opposing views to those of Hollywood and the **AA's.
Man, they're not even trying are they? This day an age, not only is there no excuse to ship with such a basic flaw, there's really no excuse to be programming in a fashion that would allow it. It's so easy to audit for basic overflows (at least on Windows) that it's silly. Even just compiling/GS with VC++ should protect you against a lot. Seriously, people give MS a bad rap these days, but any exploit you're going to see in their software these days usually takes advantage of complex system interactions or odd exception throwing.
Apple should take a serious look at their coding practices and consider banning the use of unsafe CRT functions and using _s versions of any C functions their using (Visual C++ has them and they're part of the next standard) or at a minimum requiring audits of all raw pointers. Static analysis tools should also be mandatory and should catch most issues.(http://www.spinroot.com/static/)
Funny, I thought charging $15/month was the reason they put in grinding:). Aren't these games all a trap to get you to spend more time playing so they can get their next month's subscription fee? Grinding is just a way to make you take longer to finish all the content. WoW is actually better than most games about this (you don't really have to spend that much time outside of human built quests mindlessly killing things). Granted, a lot of the quests are cookie cutter, kill 15 of this, get 8 drops off of that etc.
Wow, and you sell those CDs? I go to a fair number of shows here in Seattle and even relatively successful acts (ones that don't have day jobs) like Viva Voce only charge $10 a pop for their CDs. Now, maybe you're only counting the kinda-indy stuff from folks like The Shins in which case I don't try to buy CDs at their shows so I'm not sure how much they cost.
While Microsoft probably doesn't care too much about people adding goo to their base OS aside from the inevitable bugs and incompatibilities (every bluescreen gets blamed on MS although these days bluescreens are almost always the result of bad drivers), I think the modularity will help them a lot more than hurt them when it comes to antitrust rulings. Basically all the successful cases brought against MS have been "bundling" cases - that is MS used its monopoly in one area (OS) to force people to buy its products in other areas (IE and Media Player) artificially extending their monopoly. This is why Apple is able to bundle a lot of things into the OS that MS isn't - because Apple doesn't have a monopoly (although technically, I would argue their monopoly is stronger than MS'es in that there are not alternative platforms like WINE and mono to run OSX.app's that I'm aware of). By making Windows 7 modular, MS would effectively be able to say "look, we sell a version without feature X, so we're not artificially extending our OS monopoly by forcing people to buy it."
MS is essentially a platform company. They don't mind if other people build on top of their platform as long as it's their platform.
The drive will only come when software is readily available that takes advantage of 64-bits. 64-bit Windows has been around for years now (2005 for XP and 2003 for Server). Software and device driver developers are the ones lagging their feet, not the OS folks. But really, for most people, what will 64-bits give you? More of your memory used up by 64-bit pointers? It's only applications which need a large address space that will hugely benefit, and so far there are few consumer apps with those requirements.
I am absolutely sure that derivative works is a concern in looking at any source code. Do five minutes of googling starting with "derivative works ip taint source code". Most of the hits you'll get are related to the SCO case or BSD vs GPL stuff.
Your large company diatribe is kind of misguided. Really, lawyers jobs outside the courtroom are to manage risk. If someone comes and sues you (like SCO did with Linux) for making a derivative work of their product, if you can say "sorry, I've never seen your product, so I can't be deriving my work from it", they lose. If you have seen their source it's harder to make that case. It has nothing to do with trust. It has to do with the practical aspect of saying "sorry, there is no possible way my work can be derived from yours."
No, IP infringement is an umbrella term for not complying copyright and patent laws (or potentially leaking a trade secret corporate espionage style I suppose). Copyright covers the expression of a work as well as "derivative works" (meaning I can't make a Mickey Mouse hat even if it is different from the one's Disney makes since that would be a derivative work from Mickey Mouse cartoons and merch). Ask anyone you know who works for a commercial software company (like me) - legal will not let you even download GPL'ed source (binaries are ok) unless you agree not to work on a related area for at least a year (depending on the policy at the company) so that if a lawsuit does come up, you can swear in court you haven't seen any source.
The same thing applies of course to commercial or BSD software developers and GPL code, or any code that is not truly free (BSD style is truly free, not GPL style as RMS admits) including client and partner code that there is no license/waiver for. "IP taint" is a two way street.
So your premise is that MS has yet to release documentation and thus this is an empty promise? RTFSummary, and you'll see that the announcement isn't that they're "going to" release documentation, it is that they did, along with allowing open source projects the the use of the patents pertaining to implementing the information they're releasing. It's not an announcement of what they "will 'just do'", it's an announcement of what they've done.
I think comments that a company should "just do" something are a little disingenuous. Even if a company wants to do something as vague as "be interoperable", there's both a lot of work and a lot of interpretation into what that means. Documenting APIs is a lot of work, even just determining which APIs to doc and which are internal implementation is hard. If you work at a software company that's been around for any period of time, think about all your code and what percentage of it is documented. At a place like Microsoft, that's had 30 years of products coming and going, pieces of which stick around for years for backwards compat reasons, yet no one has touched them since Windows 2.0, I think you'll realize the volume of work. Chances are, there's a lot of code you just have to "figure out" without any help every once and a while when you have to deal with it since there's no docs you can find and the people who wrote it or maintained it are no longer around.
Inefficient compared to a 64-bit int where they were using the rest of the bits for something else. If they're using a signed int and have no use for negative values, they are wasting half the range.
Clearly, they weren't using a 32-bit signed int since as the poster says, INT_MAX for 32 bits is one less than the limit. Now, since the limit is INT_MAX+1, either they are being inefficient and using an unsigned int or are using a 64-bit int where most of the bits are used for something else. Possibly they are treating a negative number as INT_MAX+1 by special casing it, but that seems unlikely.
At least for video, I don't think there are really any good (legal) DRM free options. DVDs are encrypted with CSS, HD and Blueray DVDs have their equivalents. Downloads are in PFS or similar. Even VHS has its tricks for making duplication difficult. The main exception I guess is broadcast TV, which is not "on demand". Digital cable is horrifically locked down. It's a bleak landscape. The ridiculous part is that it's only really bleak due to the DMCA. Without that, copyright law is pretty reasonable (with the exception of duration) in terms of letting you do what's appropriate.
How can they be attacking Open Source projects on one hand, and seeking not only to use open source methods, but even to use the OSI Approved Open Source trademark? This is because Microsoft is not a person, it is a corporation which is a legal fiction enabling a company to be treated as a single legal entity. In reality, Microsoft is ~100,000 people who have their own ideas, ambitions and goals. As an employee, I think my ideas of what I want to do vary significantly based on the number of levels I have to go up to find a common manager with someone else in the company.
I don't think you get it. There's a reason people aren't writing assembly any more and there's also a reason they wrote in assembly instead of 1's and 0's. Yes, it's technically possible to write everything you write in C++ in binary, heck, the compiler and linker pump that out for you, but the point is to be more productive and make less errors so that you can get more done in the limited time you have. In that sense, it's way better to have modern programming tools since you can finish up the graphics and have time left over for AI too.
Further, your comment that we haven't come further on the technology train since glide is just wrong. New APIs provide access to new hardware capabilities. The advent of shaders and a breakaway from the fixed function pipeline is what makes games look different from each other these days instead of seeing the same plastic-y models in the same hyperreal lighting only with the dials turned up or down. DirectX10 takes this even further and instead of just being able to custom program the geometry shader part of the pipeline which thin has to pass things off to the pixel shader part of the pipeline which you can custom program, the whole pipeline becomes programmable giving a developer a lot more flexibility.
Lastly, the point of AI isn't necessarily to make things brilliant, and even in games where people think the AI is brilliant it can sometimes be brain dead simple. If I recall correctly, FEAR only had 3 states to its AI, but the system was so brilliant, people thought the AI was far more complex and assigned it intentions based on why they assumed it was doing what it was doing. Also, an actually intelligent AI isn't any fun to play. Most of the time, you will get shot in the head before you see the bad guys (since you're field of view is smaller than your field of, uh, not-view). That's why in games like Half Life 2, the AI guys were smart and did things like make sure the AI always misses the first shot. There's a great article on these sorts of design choices by one of the guys who did the AI for HL2 - I think it was on Gamasutra although I can't find it now, so it might have been in one of the AI programming gems books. Having predictable behavior is also one of the fun parts of games - learning how to outsmart the system can be entertaining itself (and gives you that smug feeling you're emoting when you talk about how you can predict the behavior of all those Bioshock baddies). Not saying it's the only way, just that it can be fun in itself. Completely erratic an unpredictable AI wouldn't be any fun either. That said, more time spent tuning and play testing and redesigning AI is never a bad thing, I'm just questioning your assumption that the AI should be smarter - I prefer more fun.
Yeah, I'd love to develop software with that kind of testing matrix. I'm sure we could all get a lot more done when the PHB says, oh, by the way, instead of just supporting a couple versions of Windows and MacOSX, let's make sure we run great on "every failed OS project ever" in all hardware configs with great UX.
Pretty much all of those issues can be chocked up to crappy hardware and drivers - waking from sleep is a function of the hardware as much as the OS. Same with networking issues, especially wireless. I've been amazed at the crapiness of drivers shipped with most networking hardware - blue screens and overheating issues if you do anything requiring sustained data transfer on most aetheros cards I've tried.
The problem for MS is that despite the fact that they have certification programs, they don't control the hardware and drivers to the same extent as a hardware manufacturer like Apple does. And I guarantee - if that editor tries switching to Linux, he's going to have as many hardware issues as he avoids (good luck with the sleep thing - and even getting your wireless to work). Not knocking Linux - I used it all through college, just that if he's dissatisfied with hardware and driver support on Vista, I wouldn't expect too much out of Linux.
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You don't even need that. Just keep it dry for a couple hours. Pretty much no virus can survive non-wet conditions for extended periods of time. What's that? Your laptop is dry? Then you're fine.
caveat: mucous can keep things moist enough for pretty long, but not more than a couple days.
Except the amount of data in a text message is so small (~100 bytes average) $5/month is a ripoff as well. Also, usually $5/month only gets you 200 and unlimited is around $10-20 a month. Compare that price to any other service you get from the phone - data for example. Basically this is an example of an ancillary service that is basically free to provide (once you already have a phone/data network), but cell companies have figured out that people are willing to pay essentially infinitely more money than what it costs to provide the service because of the market's barriers to entry making cell service a not very competitive market.
You're just arguing whether X years is good or bad.
Personally, I think in the software world, patents maybe should last 3-5 years and copyrights should still last 20 or so (you shouldn't be able to grab windows 3 years after it came out and start selling burned CDs on ebay, but you should be able to use any patented ideas in your own software).
In the end I think it comes down to whether you believe someone should be able to make money and support themselves solely by creative act or if you believe they should be required to do something beyond this (as the GGP suggests that they must offer some related service to their original creation, not just the creation itself - - in music people often suggest performing although I'm not sure what they'd suggest for a novelist). It's harder to justify a copyright-less world when you consider actual people in the creative act (writing novels or composing music) and not just the faceless corporations of the software world.
You're right, I should have slightly rephrased that as "...only has a greater financial to write more if they know they will lose the income from the first."
I certainly agree that there are many other reasons people write and create. But you have to admit that there would probably be fewer books in say the Goosebumps series or from Steven King if no one was making money off them.
I thought that was implied by the fact that this is slashdot, and my post was a comment :). Feel free to state your own opinions and justify them as you see fit.
The argument that because copying costs are now lower than before people should no longer charge for creative or intellectual works is essentially flawed. A low cost for reproduction is assumed otherwise copyright law would be unnecessary. Copyright law is a government granted monopoly to the creator of a work saying that you will be the only person who can copy it for X number of years. The government gives you this monopoly as an incentive for you to produce something of value since you know Joe down the street won't be able to set up your content on his printing press or modern equivalent and sell it too making your initial investment worthless (why not just wait for someone else to make something and then sell their thing). This is a pretty good idea and the US constitution even gives the reason for it when it grants the government the right "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Where this all doesn't make any sense is when the terms get beyond the original 20 or so years. In fact, extending the term is counterproductive because an author of a really good book/song/painting/program only has a greater incentive to write more if they know they will lose the income from the first one.
Copyright's fine. Open Source / Free Software is fine in that it provides other incentives for progress (recognition, communal sponsoring of something that benefits several companies in tangential businesses such as hardware, consulting, update services, etc as you mention). Each has its place and inherent pros and cons (typically open source software best serves the needs of those who write it - either the uber geeks who use emacs or IBM who sells mainframes. Commercial development typically serves best audiences who will pay the most per unit of effort of a developer).
Where you get into trouble is where a few strongly interested parties (publishers) can successfully lobby to have terms extended beyond serving what a reasonable person would understand the intent of copyright to be. They can do this because they are a small moneyed interest with strong individual motivation to see copyright terms extended. Whereas the general public sees a small benefit if the term is short as originally intended. However the amount of caring per person does not usually even hit the level of staying informed of the issues or even the reason behind having copyright (people often assume it's an ownership issue - I should own this thing I made rather than a public good issue - you get to make money off this thing exclusively so you have sufficient financial backing to produce it and more things in the future). It really doesn't reach the point where the general public is willing to hire lobbyists and since they are uninformed are unwilling to put forth the effort to organize and each contribute the $3.02 that it is worth to each person to provide lawmakers opposing views to those of Hollywood and the **AA's.
Man, they're not even trying are they? This day an age, not only is there no excuse to ship with such a basic flaw, there's really no excuse to be programming in a fashion that would allow it. It's so easy to audit for basic overflows (at least on Windows) that it's silly. Even just compiling /GS with VC++ should protect you against a lot. Seriously, people give MS a bad rap these days, but any exploit you're going to see in their software these days usually takes advantage of complex system interactions or odd exception throwing.
Apple should take a serious look at their coding practices and consider banning the use of unsafe CRT functions and using _s versions of any C functions their using (Visual C++ has them and they're part of the next standard) or at a minimum requiring audits of all raw pointers. Static analysis tools should also be mandatory and should catch most issues.(http://www.spinroot.com/static/)
Funny, I thought charging $15/month was the reason they put in grinding :). Aren't these games all a trap to get you to spend more time playing so they can get their next month's subscription fee? Grinding is just a way to make you take longer to finish all the content. WoW is actually better than most games about this (you don't really have to spend that much time outside of human built quests mindlessly killing things). Granted, a lot of the quests are cookie cutter, kill 15 of this, get 8 drops off of that etc.
Wow, and you sell those CDs? I go to a fair number of shows here in Seattle and even relatively successful acts (ones that don't have day jobs) like Viva Voce only charge $10 a pop for their CDs. Now, maybe you're only counting the kinda-indy stuff from folks like The Shins in which case I don't try to buy CDs at their shows so I'm not sure how much they cost.
While Microsoft probably doesn't care too much about people adding goo to their base OS aside from the inevitable bugs and incompatibilities (every bluescreen gets blamed on MS although these days bluescreens are almost always the result of bad drivers), I think the modularity will help them a lot more than hurt them when it comes to antitrust rulings. Basically all the successful cases brought against MS have been "bundling" cases - that is MS used its monopoly in one area (OS) to force people to buy its products in other areas (IE and Media Player) artificially extending their monopoly. This is why Apple is able to bundle a lot of things into the OS that MS isn't - because Apple doesn't have a monopoly (although technically, I would argue their monopoly is stronger than MS'es in that there are not alternative platforms like WINE and mono to run OSX .app's that I'm aware of). By making Windows 7 modular, MS would effectively be able to say "look, we sell a version without feature X, so we're not artificially extending our OS monopoly by forcing people to buy it."
MS is essentially a platform company. They don't mind if other people build on top of their platform as long as it's their platform.
The drive will only come when software is readily available that takes advantage of 64-bits. 64-bit Windows has been around for years now (2005 for XP and 2003 for Server). Software and device driver developers are the ones lagging their feet, not the OS folks. But really, for most people, what will 64-bits give you? More of your memory used up by 64-bit pointers? It's only applications which need a large address space that will hugely benefit, and so far there are few consumer apps with those requirements.
I am absolutely sure that derivative works is a concern in looking at any source code. Do five minutes of googling starting with "derivative works ip taint source code". Most of the hits you'll get are related to the SCO case or BSD vs GPL stuff.
Your large company diatribe is kind of misguided. Really, lawyers jobs outside the courtroom are to manage risk. If someone comes and sues you (like SCO did with Linux) for making a derivative work of their product, if you can say "sorry, I've never seen your product, so I can't be deriving my work from it", they lose. If you have seen their source it's harder to make that case. It has nothing to do with trust. It has to do with the practical aspect of saying "sorry, there is no possible way my work can be derived from yours."
No, IP infringement is an umbrella term for not complying copyright and patent laws (or potentially leaking a trade secret corporate espionage style I suppose). Copyright covers the expression of a work as well as "derivative works" (meaning I can't make a Mickey Mouse hat even if it is different from the one's Disney makes since that would be a derivative work from Mickey Mouse cartoons and merch). Ask anyone you know who works for a commercial software company (like me) - legal will not let you even download GPL'ed source (binaries are ok) unless you agree not to work on a related area for at least a year (depending on the policy at the company) so that if a lawsuit does come up, you can swear in court you haven't seen any source.
The same thing applies of course to commercial or BSD software developers and GPL code, or any code that is not truly free (BSD style is truly free, not GPL style as RMS admits) including client and partner code that there is no license/waiver for. "IP taint" is a two way street.
So your premise is that MS has yet to release documentation and thus this is an empty promise? RTFSummary, and you'll see that the announcement isn't that they're "going to" release documentation, it is that they did, along with allowing open source projects the the use of the patents pertaining to implementing the information they're releasing. It's not an announcement of what they "will 'just do'", it's an announcement of what they've done.
RTFSummary, they did do the work (that's what the 30,000 pages of documentation are for), and at a significant cost.
I think comments that a company should "just do" something are a little disingenuous. Even if a company wants to do something as vague as "be interoperable", there's both a lot of work and a lot of interpretation into what that means. Documenting APIs is a lot of work, even just determining which APIs to doc and which are internal implementation is hard. If you work at a software company that's been around for any period of time, think about all your code and what percentage of it is documented. At a place like Microsoft, that's had 30 years of products coming and going, pieces of which stick around for years for backwards compat reasons, yet no one has touched them since Windows 2.0, I think you'll realize the volume of work. Chances are, there's a lot of code you just have to "figure out" without any help every once and a while when you have to deal with it since there's no docs you can find and the people who wrote it or maintained it are no longer around.
Inefficient compared to a 64-bit int where they were using the rest of the bits for something else. If they're using a signed int and have no use for negative values, they are wasting half the range.
Clearly, they weren't using a 32-bit signed int since as the poster says, INT_MAX for 32 bits is one less than the limit. Now, since the limit is INT_MAX+1, either they are being inefficient and using an unsigned int or are using a 64-bit int where most of the bits are used for something else. Possibly they are treating a negative number as INT_MAX+1 by special casing it, but that seems unlikely.
At least for video, I don't think there are really any good (legal) DRM free options. DVDs are encrypted with CSS, HD and Blueray DVDs have their equivalents. Downloads are in PFS or similar. Even VHS has its tricks for making duplication difficult. The main exception I guess is broadcast TV, which is not "on demand". Digital cable is horrifically locked down. It's a bleak landscape. The ridiculous part is that it's only really bleak due to the DMCA. Without that, copyright law is pretty reasonable (with the exception of duration) in terms of letting you do what's appropriate.
Have you met a Microsoft employee? Have you spoken with one who wasn't in Marketing?
I don't think you get it. There's a reason people aren't writing assembly any more and there's also a reason they wrote in assembly instead of 1's and 0's. Yes, it's technically possible to write everything you write in C++ in binary, heck, the compiler and linker pump that out for you, but the point is to be more productive and make less errors so that you can get more done in the limited time you have. In that sense, it's way better to have modern programming tools since you can finish up the graphics and have time left over for AI too.
Further, your comment that we haven't come further on the technology train since glide is just wrong. New APIs provide access to new hardware capabilities. The advent of shaders and a breakaway from the fixed function pipeline is what makes games look different from each other these days instead of seeing the same plastic-y models in the same hyperreal lighting only with the dials turned up or down. DirectX10 takes this even further and instead of just being able to custom program the geometry shader part of the pipeline which thin has to pass things off to the pixel shader part of the pipeline which you can custom program, the whole pipeline becomes programmable giving a developer a lot more flexibility.
Lastly, the point of AI isn't necessarily to make things brilliant, and even in games where people think the AI is brilliant it can sometimes be brain dead simple. If I recall correctly, FEAR only had 3 states to its AI, but the system was so brilliant, people thought the AI was far more complex and assigned it intentions based on why they assumed it was doing what it was doing. Also, an actually intelligent AI isn't any fun to play. Most of the time, you will get shot in the head before you see the bad guys (since you're field of view is smaller than your field of, uh, not-view). That's why in games like Half Life 2, the AI guys were smart and did things like make sure the AI always misses the first shot. There's a great article on these sorts of design choices by one of the guys who did the AI for HL2 - I think it was on Gamasutra although I can't find it now, so it might have been in one of the AI programming gems books. Having predictable behavior is also one of the fun parts of games - learning how to outsmart the system can be entertaining itself (and gives you that smug feeling you're emoting when you talk about how you can predict the behavior of all those Bioshock baddies). Not saying it's the only way, just that it can be fun in itself. Completely erratic an unpredictable AI wouldn't be any fun either. That said, more time spent tuning and play testing and redesigning AI is never a bad thing, I'm just questioning your assumption that the AI should be smarter - I prefer more fun.
Yeah, I'd love to develop software with that kind of testing matrix. I'm sure we could all get a lot more done when the PHB says, oh, by the way, instead of just supporting a couple versions of Windows and MacOSX, let's make sure we run great on "every failed OS project ever" in all hardware configs with great UX.
Pretty much all of those issues can be chocked up to crappy hardware and drivers - waking from sleep is a function of the hardware as much as the OS. Same with networking issues, especially wireless. I've been amazed at the crapiness of drivers shipped with most networking hardware - blue screens and overheating issues if you do anything requiring sustained data transfer on most aetheros cards I've tried. The problem for MS is that despite the fact that they have certification programs, they don't control the hardware and drivers to the same extent as a hardware manufacturer like Apple does. And I guarantee - if that editor tries switching to Linux, he's going to have as many hardware issues as he avoids (good luck with the sleep thing - and even getting your wireless to work). Not knocking Linux - I used it all through college, just that if he's dissatisfied with hardware and driver support on Vista, I wouldn't expect too much out of Linux.