I guess it's cool to have applications that run in the browser, but I'd rather it be standards compliant, responsive, and not crash. And be forward compatible.

Remember back when every interactive browser control in IE had to be clicked-to-activate because of that EOLAS or whatever company was yelling about patents? Every. Single. Control. Button. and. Text. Box. in Sieblel required clicking, then clicking again. Oracle, or whoever owns Seiblel right now, never fixed it... we were just lucky that Microsoft finally pushed out an update that did away with that nonsense.

You'd be surprised how often those 2 steps comprise my final housecall to any of my technology-challenged friends and family. Problem solved every time.

I don't know a single home user on any OS that is using IE6. My incredibly behind-the-times relatives on Windows 2000 are using Firefox, and any of my XP or newer friends and colleagues are using Firefox or a newer flavor of IE (or even Chrome). No, the thing holding up IE6 is corporate America. My company has 70 large locations in America, and probably twice that around the glob, together running about 60,000 computers. Only one (very tiny) division of our company is allowed to run anything other than IE6, and that's because they are a Windows Vista technical support group. The rest of us are forced to use IE6 because most of our applications have been replaced by browser-based 'solutions' like Siebel CRM and the like, using ActiveX and most of which aren't officially supported on newer browsers. It's painful.

I agree with everything you say, and I would like the behavior from a task-focused grouping approachin, but when working, I'd rather have these types of windows side-by-side (even using multiple monitors), not stacked on top of each other (z-order, that is) that causes me to have to switch. One way to impliment it in a way I'd like, would be to let me drag-and-tab windows together on an ad hoc basis: just as Google Chrome (browser, not the OS) does. If this was possible today with any app, I think it'd be a must-have.

Java will install the toolbar: but Windows Update will not install things like this without specific opt-in. They came under too much fire about that stuff, so they've changed Windows Update to only install critical security updates, never optional features, toolbars, search providers, etc.

Everyone here is focused on how illegal this patent might be in practice (changing the author's words). But my question is more fundamental... What are they trying to prevent? Is it illegal for me to loan to a friend a copy of a book I purchased?

Yeah. They say they are keeping it just a .1 difference from Vista because it's not a major update to the OS. But then they shouldn't name it "7". It's all a game I guess.

Please don't call it version 7.0. It's name is Windows 7, but it's version 6.1. Adding the .0 to it's name is like saying "I use Windows XP.0". And I'm sure this whole 7-is-actually-6.1 nonsense is going to confuse people. And what about when it comes times for Windows 8? Well, that probably won't matter because Microsoft can't stick to any naming convention. Hell, 7 is the first OS since 3.11 that has a number as a name -- but at least back then it was the version number, not just a random digit. Microsoft, you look stupid.

I work for a certain convergent outsourcing company which converges with converging technologies to provide a ... okay I've taken this too far: I work for Convergys. Every user on their network is an administrator. Every. Single. One. We have 1200 or so employees at my site alone, and we've got over 70 sites in the US.

They use group policy security to control the network, but you wouldn't believe how little thought goes into it. We had a new team form to provide support for a certain now-defunct pacific-coast city's municipal wifi. Because supporting an internet service sometimes requires tools such as ping/tracert/whatever -- they gave us a command prompt. But because they didn't want us having all kinds of access, what they really gave us was a shortcut to a batch file, which started with a choice prompt, allowing you to 'paste' so-to-speak, several commands, such as it would not let you have a blank prompt. It would always have a command, such as C:\>ping .

Well apparently no one told them that you can concatenate commands. We soon discovered we could just use the batch file to C:\>ping google.com & start cmd and have an unrestricted command prompt. And since we're all administrators, we can use MMC, and control every other part of our access.

I've since moved past my call-taking days, but I still work for them as an analyst. Of course they still won't let me provide any kind of network security device.