Yes, a letter i in your subject.

The development builds of Lightning are compatible with Thunderbird 3 (and don't need an add-on for Google Calendar). Install the "Lightning Nightly Updater" extension (available from the TB add-on site). After the TB restart you should have a new Help menu item that will check for Lightning development builds and install the latest if supported. After that you should have Lightning in Thunderbird. Of course, you have to be comfortable using the development builds but you don't have to update every night after you get one that works ok. The 2009-12-08 05:39 PST build is working great for me so far on Linux and Windows.

For many companies getting "the latest OS when you buy a new computer" _is_ an OS upgrade. I used to work at a very large accountancy firm. They had a standard "load-set". Every new PC that came in the door got the load-set installed on it. I'm sure that's still true there. For many companies with lots of cubicles occupied by people all doing the same job I'm sure there is a pre-built load-set deployed on every PC when it arrives and before an employee gets it. Microsoft will have a hard time denying suport to lots of companies with tens of thousands of XP seats they don't want to...let's call it "replace with the latest OS".

I agree. That's the reason why I did my first DNS server install at home. My ISP was a telco and their DNS server was down a lot more frequently than their IP routing. Most of my Internet usage was evenings and weekends. The ISP was a 9-5 business for home users (i.e. not 5 nines). So, I'd have to wait hours, even days sometimes for name resolving to return. I've maintained my own DNS server ever since and never had to worry about it.

It's obviously not for everyone and there are reliable servers beyond many ISPs, like the Level 3 ones referred to in other posts.

If a Windows installer built the application on the box instead of copying pre-built binaries to the box then there wouldn't be a 32 bit/64 bit schism on Windows. This is why 64 bit is not an issue on linux. Junta's comment above about Adobe and Sun is well made but I feel comfortable believing that a 64 bit port is a lot easier for them on Linux than it is on Windows.

Of course, it comes back to whether application authors are ready to publish their source. It also would help if Microsoft was ready to make the compiler part of the platform - I know they publish free compilers but they are whole application stacks rather than utilities in the system directory - arguably disintegrated development environments :-)

I suspect there are very few real secrets in software and most of it is too complicated for it to be practical to cut and paste (i.e. steal) significant functionality. The upside of building on the box for commercial software companies is that they may end up employing developers they don't have to pay.

Well, putting my sarcastic response to your top post aside - Didn't you contribute to the noise by top posting about the noise, instead of top posting a technical comment that "The Vista Kernel has some cool features that other OSes don't, like network and I/O priority". Those kinds of comments frequently provoke informed (and interesting) debate about the technology. Though you would, of course, face a headwind - which can be overcome by keeping it technical, and maybe replacing words like cool with interesting/innovative/inetc.

I generally agree with your point.

That's the same thing as saying everyone at a Masonic Lodge meeting is a Freemason! The real problem you are describing is that the /. slogan isn't "News for Windows hating nerds, stuff that matters". Take that up with the management, I think the majority seem to be happy with the average karma distribution being the way it is. The news for Windows loving nerds is probably somewhere else, ZDNet perhaps.

Linux has an unfair advantage there (I for one am happy about it). Windows just isn't very portable - the original NT HAL portability notwithstanding. There are too many system calls - too much of the Windows SDK is in the kernel. I suspect the only way Microsoft can really have programmers migrate to 64 bit apps is to have parallel interfaces with different function names in the kernel (even more massive kernel and more maintenance); or parallel interface libraries with different names in user space (even more files and more maintenance) or shim libraries in user space. Only the last one is easy for developers but would run slower. Even then it's only easy if a developer can re-compile absolutely everything in their app or everything they can't compile is available as a 64 bit shim library. Given the amount of things that developers depend on (countless third party custom controls; ActiveX controls; libraries; etc) I see a migration of Windows apps to 64 bit happening tortuously slowly. I suppose .NET was always supposed to be the way out for Microsoft...