There's more than one side here. Yes, Microsoft or any other company should fire the foreign workers first when possible. But realistically, it doesn't always work that way.

Say Microsoft has one team working on some craptacular product, say Microsoft Songsmith, that isn't as complex or demanding as another product, say Windows 7. Say they decide to lay off some workers. The Songsmith guys are the obvious choice, as the product royally blows to start with, but wait, we need to fire the foreign workers first. However some of the Songsmith guys aren't foreign workers. Do you take some foreign workers, who are actively involved in the production of Windows 7, and replace them with some of the American geniuses behind Microsoft Songsmith? Or do you just can everyone responsible for that crapfest?

Remember, the companies in question are large. They have many departments and projects, and the skills that make one perfect for one project may not be adequate for another. Thus, they're likely to wipe out all those working on a product, rather than simply removing the foreign workers.

Granted, in the current economic climate, Microsoft should NOT be hiring new foreign workers. However shuffling workers between projects would in order to fire the foreign workers first would be devastating to productivity to say the least.

It may not be that bad, but it still can be somewhat annoying. My whole point is that, having used both Linux and Windows, my experience on both is mixed (though with Vista it's more "pissed beyond belief that I wasted my time on that pile of shit" than mixed). There's really no mythical OS that does everything perfect and right. Unless you believe the Mac fanboys.

I actually like Metallica's music.

Of course the band is full of douches, so my Metallica mp3's are all pirated.

If you think these were bad, you obviously have never been to a bar on karaoke night. Now, imagine that, and this, combined into one horrid monstrosity. Yeah. It gets worse. Much worse.

A quick search on OSAlt.com turns up kivio, Dia, OOo Draw, and ArgoUML. While they probably don't have the feature set of Visio, there are alternatives.

There are a few reasons I don't use Linux on my main box right now, and this hits the biggest of them.

Anyone who has ever tried to install a program not in the repository will know what a pain it can be. Getting stuck in dependency hell is still a very real problem, and while repositories help they are no substitute to fixing the problem.

In Windows, if you get an installer you have a reasonable expectation of being able to run it. Sometimes you hit dependencies, but not often, and they're generally the same for most programs.

Another big thing is having different package managers. What to do when a developer distributes a .rpm but not a .deb, or the other way around?

And I won't even start bitching about the 3D Graphics support...

Still, Windows isn't perfect, and Linux is far better in many ways. Having a software repository is awesome, and saves a lot of time searching for programs. However, until these problems are addressed, many developers will continue to develop only for Windows.

(I do use Linux on a regular basis, and find it does an awesome job for many things. Just not everything)

From my reading, it's not a matter of having no options that can handle it, but a matter of having them all in one single easy to use client with a large feature set.

Unfortunately, SecureCRT is proprietary. So no go on a Linux version, and just a quick search doesn't turn up much in the way of alternatives. One thing it DID turn up was SecPanel, which is a GUI for SSH and SCP. I doubt it has quite the feature set, and I haven't tried it, but it might be worth looking into.

My Windows box only takes 15 minutes, with all the crap that runs at startup! Still, a PC with an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 may boot faster than most.

Tell that to the morons that design the things. Every time the electricity flickers, I have to reset 5 or so clocks at my parents' house, otherwise they'd be flashing 12:00 forever.

On the other hand, if you ever have to make house calls to check on a PC, appliances flashing 12:00 DO help in diagnosing the cause.

They're starting to build hard drives into TV's, so you can download shows from the internet. For situations like this, it is quite understandable.

Though the remote comment is about right. And don't forget the fact that some TV's still store things (like channel list) in volatile memory (with no battery backup!) that has to be maintained by constant current. It's stupid in this day and age, but they do.

On a related note, there's got to be a way to back up date/time on appliances, or power a clock with a battery, so they don't f***ing flash 12:00 in my parents' house.

Windows 7 still has problems. Several of them in fact. Having used it, I have been frustrated by multiple issues with the installer, requiring multiple rollbacks, and just in general ticking me off. I hope this gets ironed out, because having to roll back way earlier, or hoping and praying that installing something doesn't mess up the installer... just isn't going to work for me in an OS I actually use on a regular basis.

It's a 19" Dell D1226H CRT. It's SUPPOSED to be able to handle 1600x1200 at 75Hz, but it doesn't handle it well. The screen darkens, and moves up and to the left, such that it's almost unusable.

It's pretty old, I've had the thing for years. I'm only still using it because it's a spare computer, and I gave the LCD I used with it to my mom for her computer.

With Vista I found UAC VERY annoying. Sometimes I'd get one warning from UAC, click OK, then get another one for the same program. This seems to have been ironed out in Windows 7. It's still there, but it's less annoying.

What WAS annoying is that the box I'm testing Windows 7 on has an old Dell CRT attached to it. Windows 7 got the screen refresh rate wrong (75 when it should have been 60) and screwed up the display from 3/4 into the install process till I was able to get into settings and change it. To be fair, Ubuntu on NVidia restricted drivers does the same damned thing.

Second annoyance was sleep mode. With my aging monitor (or maybe its the video card) coming back from sleep mode corrupts the display, and cannot be fixed short of a restart. In the default configuration, the computer goes into sleep mode after 30 minutes. Easily enough fixed, but still I didn't like it.

Another problem I found, was I found it hard to locate some things in the control panel. It's different than XP.

The last issue was a driver problem, that computer's onboard sound didn't even have a Vista driver. Fortunately I was able to get the XP driver to work.

I have yet to find any other real problems with it at this point. All in all MS seems to have learned from a lot of Vista's mistakes and made improvements. I'm not sure I'll buy a copy at this point, but I'm not ruling it out either.