IMO the failure isnt the cost; it is that the integration has not been thought through.

When I open a PDF on Windows 8, from the desktop (for the first time), I do NOT expect to be transported into MetroLand, from which I cannot fathom how to get back to the desktop.

Touch interfaces are great. Supporting touch interfaces is a great idea. Windows 8 deployment of the idea is awful, however - the interface should augment an existing one not try and replace it.

There was NT 3.1. It was pretty good - it let you work out which Win16 applications did bad things and which did not.

Bad pattern.

NT existed before 1995.
ME existed after 2000.
XP at launch was fine, especially for home users.
Vista was shit. Aside from the nightmare software and driver issues, this was mainly because most of the machines sold as Vista capable in the early days were barely capable of running any GUI based OS, let alone one that Microsoft said could take over your life and leave you to trip out while the computer walked your dog whilst doing your ironing and helping you visit every website that doesn't use Javascript.
7 is quite nice.
8 is fine once you deal with the metro crap. In fact, 8 is incredible value for money - you can hop off the XP train for almost no money and get process isolation! woot!

Note: I've excluded the 9x train - as far as I'm concerned Windows was fine once NT 3.51 was released (at about the same time as Windows 95). NT4 just added the Windows 95 style GUI to an already stable platform for me (but then again, I was buying hardware that was stable with Redshit and Slackware at that point).

Caveat: I run a FreeBSD / OSX / ESXi house, with Windows and various Linux distros in VMs. I work on whatever my clients use (at the moment Centos6 and Windows7 but spent significant time using SPARC and HPUX platforms)

Windows 98 was awful. It wasn't until Second Edition it became more sane, but it still paled behind what NT had become (I ran NT4 exclusively for my Windows usage by 1997 as I didn't see the point in anything else - it had OpenGL support and ran the games I played, and had good enough DirectX support to get low latency audio). After jumping to that level of stability, 9x/ME seemed ridiculous concepts.

Hell, give them alcohol and crack then, too?

That's what the Martian's said, too!

No. Apple do not provide Java any longer. Oracle is where you get Java for OSX from. Historically you got Java from Apple - and it was BIG on their list of priorities - it was a major part of the platform (WebObjects).

Given the recent problems are due problems in the class library, how do you conclude the language is at fault?

Try buying a licence for it so you can use the USB pass through support in a commercial context. Nada.

Mod. Parent. Up.

I spend more time checking my GMail spam folder for false positives than I do reading legitimate mail (300-400 spams a day, maybe 15-20 false positives). Even mails I have explicit filters for the great Google machine decides are spam.

You do realise that most spam is sent from legitimate email addresses, right? Ie they use an address from the list they are sending spam to as the sender.

Schemes like this just fuel spam, not reduce it.

Yes, that's exactly what I meant - IPv6 exclusive content. If youtube was to move there would be a lot of demand very quickly (but it would be a risk for Google as users may just start using vimeo or similar instead)

Rubbish. Most are resellers of BT products going over the core BT network before it eventually gets into your ISP. I'm on a premium package (FTTC wholesale), and my latency is still worse than I had in halls back in 1997 when I started at university (and about the same speed). Many of my friends are able to get faster (and uncapped) 3G connections than they can get land line connections.

And many ISPs do transparent proxying of HTTP anyway (which IS the internet for most people).

Besides, mobile networks do this almost exclusively (at least here in the UK) and everything appears to work, so it would appear the workarounds are in place.

That doesn't mean IPv6 shouldn't be the norm by now - we just need a big service to start offering premium content over IPv6 (eg google/youtube) and the demand will force ISPs to start upgrading to avoid losing customers.