My brother told me of a story (year or two ago) where he downloaded pirate version of a game he has bought because the DRM failed to allow him to play the game. The pirate version worked fine....

You also missing the point. DRM only need to be broken by one smart person, then everyone just copies the unprotected copy. You don't have to be the one to crack it to get a copy.

chroot Debian on my Android was never satisfactory. I want a standard Linux phone, ideally Debian based. Yes I know, the N900, but it is too old and a dead end. I'm no fan of Unity and modern Ubuntu, but maybe on a phone, it'll win me over. Very interesting. Also, more competition is always good. :-)

The Mhz increase alone would have been good, but it was so much more.
The BBC BASIC interpreter even fitted in the bigger instruction cache. As a kid writing BBC BASIC, this meant a massive speed up.
I clocked it up to 287Mhz (and fitted a 486 heatsink and fan) to make it even faster.

No upgrade I've ever done since then, short of replacing the computer, has made such a big difference.

"Until the engineers get a clue, open source projects will never be more than a closet of hobbyist projects."

What world are you living in? Even if you think everything you run is closed (and it probably isn't), there is a massive sea of things running free software, not just open source, that you will interactive with everyday. It's not unlikely you own a few. There are plenty of big companies and government departments that even the Linux desktop is used. Wake up. It's everywhere already.

I've did a compete namespace and had the same issues. MS only documented at all after being taken to court by the EU. The docs are barely enough and new interfaces have been added since XP, and not all of them documented. Many don't even have a name you can get at, let alone a interface definition, just a GUID. Some, others have worked out, some, no one outside Microsoft knows.
My eyes are now open to this crap way of working. The "magic blackbox" thinkings are naive if they think documenting the surface of the blackboxs are enough. The more complex the thing, the less well documentation is going to be able to cover all the combinations. I'm not saying source instead of docs, I'm saying source as a fall back for when the docs are not enough.

You missed the point. You can have implementations doing exactly what the standard says but unable to work together because of a whole in the docs. Unix systems have the advantage that much of them are open, avoiding problems as implementations can look at what each other do. Also there is almost always multiple implementations so problems show up quickly. In Windows world you have the worse case, one, closed implementation. Any other later implementation has to use that as a reference implementation. When the docs fail, you have to find exactly what that implementation does and do the same, or at least what is compilable. Worse, if the docs say one thing and the closed reference implementation does another, you must do what the closed implementation does. Worse still, Microsoft have a history of deliberately making life for other implementations even harder. It's a nightmare situation. It's why I feel pushing Wine and Mono as things that make Microsoft technology cross platform is stupid. It's a game you can not win or even draw.

Docs aren't perfect. We all know this. To me, if there isn't a open reference implementation I'm not sure it's a open. Only an implementation covers everything required. Yes, in theory, the docs should be an implementation written in English, but that fails as it can't be run and tested, so it's always an incomplete implementation. Also, personally, I often find it easier to dig out exact details for code from other code, rather than from written English.

Yer, only if the specification is perfect. Which it never is. There is always things not documented that projects like Wine, Mono, Samba, etc must work out. Most of the time I don't think it's a deliberate MS policy (though I bet some of the time it is), it's just the nature of software. Really you want not just a published specification but a open reference implementation. MS, intentionally or otherwise, use this in both directions.
http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/296

Your right, I don't develop with cygwin. I just use it as a user. Anything I install, I install from it's repositories, and so far, it's always worked fine. I have compiled one or two things with it, and that's all just worked like it was a real Unix. This doesn't negate what you are saying, but I'm using it as an isolated environment and not trying to redistribute anything. If I did, I would try to redistrubute through the package management system, so may not hit the issues you have. But perhaps the repositories aren't controled like real Unix ones and I've just been lucky, I've not looked.

I've not found speed an issue for my uses.

I use the Unix like environment because I prefer it (and it has history longer than that session), but the standard console (Window's running cygwin) is terrible. MinTTY is amazing when compared with the standard console. So am I going to use PuTTY to connect to a real Unix environment? No. I'm going to use normal ssh like I was on a Unix environment. I did use PuTTY and normal Windows userland for quite a while, but I found cygwin + MinTTY works best for me. The piping stuff is an example where I can forget I'm on Windows and just do as I would normally. Don't get me wrong, I use PuTTY when on other people's machines, or don't have admin, but if it's a Windows machine that's for me, I'm going to setup and use MinTTY + cygwin because it gives me more than PuTTY.

I just wish it's package management was more like APT. I miss apt-get when on cygwin.

Here here!

I didn't know Powershell still uses the crap default terminal!
Haven't gone near it as I'm happy with cygwin and MinTTY, plus I try and avoid Windows specific stuff.

Then those improvements make all the difference. Plus, you can use it to use normal ssh, normally.

That is how I do still use PuTTY from time to time. When it's not your machine, it's polite to only use PuTTY rather than install anything, and if you don't have admin, it's the only option. But I don't often do this, I use cygwin+mintty as preference, like on my work machine.

I find the PuTTY terminal isn't much better. Mintty is the best I found for Windows. Shame it's not like Guake, but stuff I found to do that on Windows hasn't been functional.

Much nicer console and gives just standard command line ssh, which is all I want/need. I stopped using Putty years ago...
During the heavy snow in the UK, I was regularly checking how bad it was at home with:

ssh user@server "ffmpeg -r 15 -f video4linux2 -i /dev/video0 -f matroska pipe:" | ffplay pipe

Which is exactly what I would have done if my work machine was Linux not Windows. Guess it depends what you want a ssh client on Windows for.

You probably can get more out of it to because it's probably using softfp instead of hardfp. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWUd4TAEqTM