The U.S. voluntarily signed a treaty that is enforced by those 'foreign bankers'. The treaty involves obligations on those that signed it, some of which the U.S. is breaking by having this local law in place. The other parties to the treaty are honouring their obligations, yet the U.S. is not. Surely some punishment is in order?

Frameworks tend to define the structure of your application, and if you attempt to use two different frameworks together in the same project they'll generally not play nicely together. The problem with frameworks is that when the one you're using is out of date it's hard to switch to a new one because they'll conflict.

Libraries attempt to enhance the power of the underlying platform, but don't impose as much structure on your project. As a result you can mix them or introduce them to existing projects. For example, I was able to introduce jQuery to clean up and enhance an existing old-style web site, without significantly changing its architecture.

I was in the same situation as the article poster a few years ago. I had to create a new interactive website, and had a tough choice to make: Flash or HTML? Flash was still strong, and the only website that really demonstrated what I needed could be done was Google Maps. But I wasn't keen on the vendor lock-in and the nature of the Flash plug in. I went with HTML and the then-immature jQuery. I knew the web wasn't going away soon, and jquery could be replaced if necessary. Fortunately I was lucky there and the choice has served me very well.

If it's not your core product, you can use a framework (and be prepared to live with the consequences). But if this IS your core product, so you need to invest in creating and maintaining your own framework. Your business depends on it so you need to be able to control it.

... for as long as I can remember!

Here in New Zealand, MSDN Ultimate is $26,369.00.

Better to fly first-class to the U.S. and pick one up for half the price. Understandably we're a little sour about it!

I live in NZ, and a quote I heard on the radio lately says it all: "streaming is the new torrenting". Instead of torrenting you connect to one of the indexing sites and simply stream what you want to watch. That's what we do now. Not only does it use less data allowance, but as far as I know it's actually legal too, as you're not offering a copy to anyone else.

About the only hassle is the stupid ads, and some of the sites stream data to you too slowly to watch in real time. We've gotten in the habit of kicking those off at night and running hobocopy to copy the stream files from Temp inside my profile folder. Then VLC plays 'em whenever I like :)

And music? There are indexing sites for that too. We really did try to go legit there, but with all the region restrictions and limited catalog rubbish it was such a pain in the ass. The indexing sites have it all...

Knuth's stuff assumes everything is RAM-resident - as long as you don't violate that what he wrote is as valid as ever. I'm quite certain that he'll have different suggestions for tasks involving storing data on disk. Even though the disk writes are implicit because the OS is doing them, they're still there, just as they would be had he coded them explicitly. So of course you're going to get poor performance using a RAM-resident algorithm for a disk-resident application.

The RAM resident stuff is still useful, both at a lower level, but also for those of us creating applications that can live entirely in memory. A web site I did recently is careful to ensure that the entire primary data set can fit in memory, and for that site everything he wrote is still perfectly valid.

In fact, for very high performing websites you try to ensure that at least most of your requests come from memory rather than disk, which makes Knuth's stuff more important than ever. If you can't do it in RAM then you'd better have a lot of spindles!

... course I'm just one guy, but I'm always dealing with people sending me documents.

I upgraded machines, and my new box already happened to have OO on it, so I gave it a go before deciding to buy a new copy of office.

OO 2.4 and now 3 has performed well for me in the past year - I've yet to have a document a client has sent fail to open. On the odd occasion it looked odd, I used the free word/excel viewer to open the documents (which confirmed they were broken - it looked odd there too). Note I only really deal with Word and Excel documents.

Really, it'll just depend on whether there are any specific must-haves for you in Office - for me there were none.