Summary:

One of the things Microsoft has done well for many years now (since they got called on the carpet about Windows 95) is providing compatibility with assistive technology used by the blind. Their current push is for a set of APIs called User Automation.

Article:

For the [non-minor visual, physical, and audio as well as any other] disabilities, access is via an assistive technology (AT) that mediates the user experience. This is where our the accessibility challenges lie. The challenges stem from the fact that Microsoft Windows doesn't provide a real accessibility infrastructure - as compared to UNIX systems with GNOME, the Java platform, or Macintosh OS X. In Windows, virtually all of the information needed by assistive technologies has to be obtained by patching the operating system, replacing/chaining video drivers, reverse engineering applications, and/or using proprietary COM interfaces to get at the data within an application. The first accessibility API Microsoft put forth for accessibility - Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) - fails to provide most of the information needed for screen reading and other AT uses, and is being supplanted in future Windows releases. What this means is that for an application to be accessible in Microsoft Windows via a particular assistive technology, that AT vendor has to have made a significant investment in customizing their product to that application. The greater the customization investment, the "more accessible" an application is deemed to be, at least via that particular AT. For example, the Windows screen reader with the largest market share, JAWS, has made a huge investment in customization of their product to Microsoft Office (and in contrast made a much smaller investment in customization for WordPerfect). For this reason blind folks generally feel that Microsoft Office is "accessible" (and that WordPerfect "isn't as accessible") - not because of work done by Microsoft or Corel, but work done (or not done) by Freedom Scientific, the creator of JAWS.

Quoth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_UI_Automation

In 2005, Microsoft released UIA as a successor to the older Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) framework.

Seems to be a decade missing there.

apparently slashdot didn't like the Greek mu. :) Or Euro. *sigh*

Personally, I like to map the right Menu key to Compose. Compose+- L -> £; Compose+' e -> é; Compose+^ a -> â, etc. There's even Compose+m u -> ! Oh, and the quite important Compose+= c -> It's what helps me write little snippets of German and things when I'm in the US without going whole hog and using a German keyboard layout.

It's clear that they can see where the license is used on warez sites without spying. But how do they know what countries the *users* are in, and how do they push the advertising to them? Inquiring minds want to know!

Sorry; perhaps it wasn't clear: I meant that their linux selection is much wider than the Big Vendors.

Too bad TFA didn't link to the original blog post (http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2010/09/09/js-benchmarks-closing-in/) nor the update (http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2010/11/16/reporting-a-bug-on-a-fragile-analysis/) (in which a bug is allegedly filed, though nobody else can apparently see it).

The non-MSFT-beholden vendors (e.g. System76 and ZaReason) still have Linux netbooks, notebooks, desktops, and workstations. Oddly, given economies of scale, in much, much wider variety than the big, MSFT-beholden vendors. I dunno about you, but I've taken my money to the Linux-supporting little guys (who have better service anyway).

I've seen similar statistics about migrations to OOo from MSO from people willing to put their names behind it. Perhaps MSO is just crap?

It's probably easier than switching to OOo than the ribbon.

She got the freedom to blow bubbles, it is not her fault that an act of God (wind) might send it towards his or another persons eyes.

"I would never harm ye, friend, but please be aware that thou art standing where I'm about to shoot."

(and, to be sure, that isn't the entire picture; proteins are ginormous and extremely complicated, so "ionizing radiation" is too much of a simplification. To be generous, you could say that we could go up to 100nm, which still leaves us 5 orders of magnitude smaller than the wifi wavelength. heating may do damage, just like any other heating, but you're gonna have to work harder to do the damage, and see the corneas comment above for additional details).

And atomic bonds are on the order of Å (tenths of a nm, or 10^{-10}m, or 10^{-8}cm.

Microwave oven: 500-1000W (low-power oven; article mentions up to 2000W http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven)
(also note that it is concentrated within its shielding, i.e. the microwave, so the power density is quite huge in there)

Wifi: up to 1W ("normal" is 0.03W: http://www.fcc.gov/pshs/techtopics/techtopics10.html)

So by comparing a wifi transmitter to a microwave oven, you're glossing over the fact that the microwave is at *least* 500x the power of the wifi transmitter (highest 802.11n power and lowest microwave power) *at the transmitter* (swallow 1/r^2 if you're not right at the transmitter) and more likely (using a midrange 1.33kW and "normal"-ish 33mW to keep the math easy) puts the microwave at 40,000 times the power of the wifi transmitter at the transmitter.

Urgh. \. was unresponsive so sorry for the semi-double-post.