Are dark, sparkling Foldger's Crystals rich enough to keep these patients alive and well?

Spokesman: How do you feel?

Patient #1: Fine, thank you.

Spokesman: Did you know that we've replaced all of your blood with Foldger's Crystals?

Patient #1: An instant?

Spokesman: That's right.

Patient #1: I can't believe it. I feel great. I'm full of Foldger's Crystals, really?

Spokesman: Yes, and so are all the other patients in this intensive care unit. How do you all feel?

[ The other patients show reactions of approval ]

That sounds about right. I refused to upgrade from Windows 2000 until XP had made it past SP1, because XP had so many problems on release. These days, we think of patches to fix security issues. But with XP, most patches just fixed things that were plain broken. The years before SP2, and probably SP3, really shouldn't count in XP's lifespan.

Stop it? They'd promote it! ...after hacking it to send keystrokes and user-data to their own intelligence servers.
Windows CN, coming to a torrent near you.

Lawyer speak. They are trying to make it difficult for investigators to find incriminating or "smoking gun" evidence through a word-search on their electronic documents (such as when they are forced to hand them over on discovery or under subpoena, or else leaked by a whistleblower or hacker).

This. Wise words and true. I have no mod points left :\

That's dedication, my friend. It runs fine with Windows 7, too, if you ever find yourself forced out of XP.

The article suggests there's a lot of room for improvement, but the first problem is that our Congress can't be bothered to do the (admittedly) hard, tedious work of improving it. Seems like all they care about lately is grand-standing to attract more money to buy more TV ads to get re-elected... to do the same thing over again.

Howabout we actually show up to the polls in decent numbers this year and vote them all out. It don't matter who they are or who the opponent is, even if it's a chimpanzee, we all pull the other switch and send the incumbent home to do whatever he's gonna do. Let the star-chamber campaign gods of both parties scratch their heads why the pricey attack ads didn't work. Then do it again two years later, and again after that, until we get a Congress that actually takes the people's business seriously (the "people", you know, being all of us).

Yeah, I know. But don't they say something about democracies getting exactly the government they deserve?

Yes. Yes. and Yes.

Yes! These maps were great! I used to hide out in a drain in the sink (there was a redeemer hidden in there) or take a sniper position on top a piece of crown molding. 2 inches high in a kitchen with a super shock rifle? and the TV actually worked!

This. It's ancient, but there's something about UT 99 and it's great maps and mods that's un-matched for quick, dirty, mad crazy carnage.

I would love nothing more than re-creating the feel of that game with a few modern updates (maybe modern, smoother graphics for better eye-candy, destructible map elements (leave a crater where a redeemer went off, drop a wall on an enemy), rockets that actually fly fast like real rockets, blast waves, simulated vertigo/shock on impact, more useable gadgets in maps). It'd also be great to skin yourself as anything you want. Deathmatch with Bart Simpson, Teletubbies, Ronald MacDonald comin' at ya with a flak cannon. Game so good you quit your job and leave your wife. Mayhem!

Microsoft "technology" is actually pretty good. Their products largely do exactly what they promise, and the company hires and continues to hire out of the best and brightest tech talent pool.

It's their marketing that causes so much trouble, anger and teeth-gnashing. Their marketing people are infamously out of touch, habitually rely on (dubious) focus groups, but they're in charge and they consistently end up compromising their products with gimmicks and irritants intended to attract revenue for not-much-new. Most all of which fall flat, as consumers refuse the bait and stick with old releases that get the job done (e.g., Office 2003).

I, for one, would happily pay for a new release of Windows and Office (and I know plenty of businesses that would do the same) if they simply ran and looked better; not different, better. Faster, more reliable, easier deployment, bugs squashed, new capabilities reflecting changes in technology... perhaps some new "killer feature". Instead, they deliver "different": no new capabilities, but requires new training, and new pricing schemes. Who needs that?

Is that what all the fuss is about? Best I know, the "climate-changer's" agenda is simply stuff we ought to be doing anyway, like reducing emissions and our dependence on fossil fuels. You know, things that also help with smog, health, war, pollution/land-wasting/strip-mining, and other things we all know are bad already. Climate change is just one more reason, right?

The coal and oil barons have a problem, sure, 'cause taxes and regulations for this or that reason eat into their easy money. But your SUV? The only thing taking your SUV away is the global price of oil. Recall, fuel was cheap until the second-half of Bush-II, and Hummers roamed the land. Then gas went North of $5 (some trouble in the Middle-East if I recall), and Hummer went extinct. I've never understood how people can get into such a hissy-fit over a proposed 5-cent gas tax to, I don't know, fill pot-holes or fix bridges or something, but when foreign oil-producing countries send fuel to $5/gallon Americans meekly make do.

THIS. Roger Ailes may have an agenda at Fox News, but the parent company is only in it for the money.

THIS!

The Ribbon is an eye-candy solution to a problem that only existed in focus groups. Microsoft may have been legitimately worried that OpenOffice and others were encroaching on its turf, productivity apps increasingly looking the same, and wanted something to look new and different. And that's fine, but they made it mandatory, and also yanked the menus and other, customizable interfaces people had gotten used to for getting their work done.

Seriously, a very important feature of Microsoft products was the ability to customize them to a particular job or work environment. That's one way businesses got locked into Microsoft.

The ribbon shot that in the foot at the expense of precious screen space. Shills and trolls just say "learn something new". Thousands of offices still using Office 2003 respond "we're real productive with what we've got, and don't have down-time to gamble on something new." Microsoft has it backward. You don't fish for one or two consumers who want a pretty ribbon to buy one license... you cater to what businesses need, and sell site-licenses at tens, hundreds, thousands of seats at a time. Then, the consumer will buy a copy because that's what he or she trained on at work.

But that's Office. Sticking the ribbon into the File/Windows Explorer is just weird, like an attempt to brand everything in some effort to evangelize one-interface-to-rule-them-all, as if putting it everywhere is going to make people like it. I'm hoping Microsoft is gonna stop forcing it's homegrown ideas down people's throats, and get back to making software people actually want to use to get work done. Clue: busy people don't have time to participate in focus groups.

Some of the changes are actually pretty good. The hover-over title bar on Metro Apps seems like a no-brainer. The hover-over, universal task bar for easy app switching is also a really good idea. Right-clicking works now on the Start Screen... where have you been?

I mean, it's real easy to see these things in hindsight, but you gotta wonder whether anyone in Microsoft was testing this out on desktops with large screens, and didn't reflexively hit the right-button and expect something to appear. I mean, the developers didn't create Metro on small-screen touchpads, did they? Someone over there must have noticed how awkward and strange it is to work modern apps on a workstation, right?

Don't know whether to give Microsoft credit or slap them. If these features had been in the original Windows 8, there would have been a lot less hate (read: a lot more adoption) of the operating system on the desktop, and maybe an easier path for people to jump off XP. It's the arrogance, the suck-it-up, get-used-to-it, and the desktop-is-history BS that turned me off so hard, with a blatant disregard for just plain stupid things, like switching out of the desktop to some lame Metro previewer each time a user opens a PDF file (with no visible way of getting back).

These changes, plus the promised Start menu in an upcoming release, might just make Windows 8 usable in the workplace like 7 is. In view of that, I hope Microsoft has turned a corner, 'cause like it or not most people (me included) depend on Windows to make a living. Hopefully, they understand that again, and will keep throwing bones out to us desktop users (maybe permit more desktop customization features? fix those ugly window decorations? drop shadows?). But they wasted almost 2 years in the doghouse alienating their biggest customer base, and encouraging people not to migrate off XP and older systems. Hope their learning their lesson.