Even the only version of *NIX successful with consumers en masse, i.e., Mac OS X, is mediocre at gaming. (typing this up on my Mac).

And the other reason - Windows Media Center. Using the XBox360 as a media extender to watch things I've recorded with Windows 7 is very nice. Sorry, not interested in screwing around with MythTV et al.

I saw Skype character (executive) singing the praises of MS acquiring them and extolling the synergies because both Skype and MS innovated, blah, blah, blah. It was at that point I stopped the video, he had nothing meaningful to say. It was just rhetoric. MS hasn't innovated in 20 years. Windows 7 is good (whatever Mac OS X/LINUX people, it's great for gaming) but MS has drawn its revenues from product lines that are now decades old. That is not innovation.

Arguably one could give MS a point for the XBox360. However a gaming console isn't innovating. On a tangent they can be awarded points for XBox Live which is more robust for multi-player gaming and has engendered strong communities. Sony's PSN isn't as strong, something you'll consistently hear from many people, including those who cover the video game industry, e.g., Machinima.com.

There tends to be a lot of fanboy hatred against MS but the reasons people cite are generally crap. I live in Seattle and many tech people I've talked agree that MS' biggest problem is the person at the top - Steve Ballmer. He has no vision whatsoever and at best is a chief operating officer.

Ballmer can't even hire someone to find new locations for retail fronts... so what does he do, he opens stores by Apple's . Microsoft erected a big(ger) store just a few doors down from Apple's in one of the malls in the Seattle area (Bellevue Square). MS couldn't even pick some other part of the mall, it had to be close to Apple's. Wow, just wow.

We all know who the omega is here.

-M

"Why in my days..." (use your imagination to fill in the rest)

Not the 1% who use LINUX desktops. Spare me the trolling. I like Ubuntu a lot, but I'm a tech person. Most people aren't, get over it.

I stream lots of content off the Net. Beyond that, I have Windows 7 on a desktop with an HDTV tuner card and over the air antenna and record lots of content with it. I then watch the recorded content on my HDTV by way of the Windows Media Center extension capabilities of the XBox360. (Aside: Spare me fanboy stuff) If you have an iDevice, check out RemotePotato. You can control what Windows Media Center records and stream videos to your iDevice when you're afar from home. With Netflix (streaming + discs), Hulu+ and recording shows over the air, it's difficult to keep up with all the content choices afforded to me. You might consider also using PlayOn which allows you to view Hulu content on your HDTV by way of the gaming consoles which can act as DLNA clients.

The irony is that if open source people didn't have a target to emulate, there's tons of things that would have never been written since a baseline and mindshare in the overall tech market wouldn't have existed:

lex = flex
yacc = bison
sh = bash
UNIX = LINUX
vi = vim

To name just a few.

So your complaint about "proprietary" falls on deaf ears. If nothing else, what you call proprietary seeds things.

Some projects are worthwhile, this smells of things like "ReactOS", i.e. something I would never use. I would suggest to the people on this project to go contribute to open source projects that would get people to even have an inclination of using a LINUX desktop.

Take the 7 year old boy that was executed by the Taliban in Afghanistan some weeks ago for being a "spy". The mere fact that we're in America lulls us into thinking of "entitlement". We wind up taking for granted the things we do have vs. the things we don't.

As Cheryl Crow sang, "It's wanting what you've got." What you are eluding to is social engineering by the government ("forced" - your word not mine) which doesn't work. Go join the Taliban.

This isn't shocking. IT is not a career based on soft skills. When you're early in your IT career you don't think about it much but the day will come where it can become a problem if your career isn't switched to "soft skills" (aka management). IT is about what you've done in the last year and/or whether your chosen skills continue to be pertinent in the IT marketplace. When was the last time you saw a posting for say Microsoft's COM? Was all the rage in say 1996. As individuals get married and have kids their ability to keep up with what's "vogue" goes south. It's just a fact of life. All you 25 somethings might say "It will never happen to me, I'll keep up with 'X' forever!" but to quote the late John Lennon of "The Beatles" fame, "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans."

That's what they sound like, i.e., leaf blowers, when watching Flash video. It's welcome but Adobe/Macromedia should have done this *years* ago.

I live.

When they say they want to get involved in the games industry.

Actually, you do get the source code to DropMyRights.

My code is just 100 lines including lots of boiler plate statements.

Not that big of a deal codewise. The big deal is using any of these to remove admin rights.

As I said, use whatever you want.

-M

To my knowledge Microsoft doesn't provide the source to psexec & DropMyRights either. The only reason I'm proselytizing what I've written is because it has a user friendly installer.

psexec & DropMyRights assume you're familiar with the command line.

Use the command line tools if you prefer.

Other than that, the end result of what you get from MS' tools and mine do not defer.

-M

PS: FYI, it's not a plugin.

They're command line tools... your average user knows squat about the command line.

Allso, as I pointed out in my original post, many an IT professional that I've pointed them out to "doesn't get it".

The crux of what I've done is the installer. It creates shortcuts and labels them "SecureIE" & "SecureFirefox". As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. A turnkey solution increases user adoption by a very wide margin. I remember when I tried via IM to get a friend to use the command line tools and create shortcuts, I realized as I struggled to get them working that he wasn't putting a space between the .EXE being executed and the first argument, in the shortcut. What's obvious to me isn't obvious to others. Again, this is why the installer is a big deal.

Lastly, the command line tools have a dependency on the Win32 console runtime. If you create shortcuts and use them, there's a momentary flash. If you use these with average users (I'm not /. people) it changes what they're used to seeing and may cause them to reject what you've done since their experience changes. "What's that flash? What's that mean? Is something bad happening? You sure this won't do something bad?"

Again, I was motivated to do this based on my own personal experiences with evangelizing the command line tools.

-M

PS: As for the command line tools, psexec & DropMyRights -- Google them.