Wrong - if it was in userspace, it would be tied to the permissions granted the logged on user. I'm not 100% sure, but even as admin, UAC should still have blocked the worst of the behaviour. Once you're running code in the kernel, you can pretty much do whatever you want and the user's permissions and UAC become irrelevant.

If they've released the code under GPL and you still have a copy of it, you're entitled to do what you want with it, up to and including rebranding it and maintaining it as a GPL product for the future. The GPL granted you permissions to do certain things (copy, change, distribute the code) under certain conditions (you had to provide source code if requested). As far as I'm aware, they can't revoke those rights unless you break the other conditions; see Open Office/Libre Office for a similar situation.

Ok, scenario time:

One of your key system daemons has just crashed (SEGFAULT). Restarting it causes yet another crash; what do you do? If you know C coding, you start doing stack traces. If you have a support contract, you call them up. If you have neither C skills or a support contract, you hope like hell that Google can help you. If not, you're reliant on someone on a webforum/mailing list helping you out, possibly including handholding on "how to run a debugger on a core file".

I don't care whether it's 1993 or 2011, the fact is if something goes wrong, you need someone who can investigate, find root cause and recommend a fix. That pretty much has to be a skilled internal admin with C skills or a 3rd party support contract.

It's easy to maintain an OS (Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX, whatever) when things are working, the problem is what you do when things go wrong. That's when you need the support.

This very much depends on the organisation and the risk appetite.

If you have a technically skilled support team who are willing and able to get into a bit of C coding, the "free" linux distros are viable. If your support staff are pure admins and don't do C coding much/at all, they'll struggle to maintain Linux without someone like Redhat backing them up.

Also, it depends on the app - if it can fall over for 2 days at a time without much of an issue, who cares about support? If an hour of downtime is a big issue, you need someone who is able to fix it Right Now (TM). If your local team is good enough, that's fine, but mailing list/forum support of free software is down to the goodwill of the community. They don't care if your app is down, they have day jobs and social lives as well. With Redhat, you can get someone on the end of the phone 24x7.

Bastard... I only just managed to avoid coating my monitor with coffee...

BT are pretty notorious about their self-renewing contract. Sometimes if you shout at them loudly enough you can get out of it, though. I think Oftel had raised some concerns about it with a view to stopping them doing it...

I suspect you can blame the early cinema pioneers for that... they decided on a "landscape" format for movies which then became the standard for Television sets. In the 80s, most home computers (Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad 64 and even the Atari ST & Amiga) used the TV as a monitor so a generation of kids grew up assuming monitors must be in portrait layout.

Sony are a royal PITA on so many levels. Most people who need to supply removable storage on a mobile device use SD cards (or mini/micro variants thereof) so that you can use them anywhere and buy from a variety of places. Hell, the manufacturers even have someone else doing all the hard graft in making up the specs for it. You'd think it was a given that someone would use the industry standard product for their stuff.

But no. Sony have to come up with their MMC cards, complete incompatible with everything else so you can't share them between devices. And, of course, there's only really one supplier. This was entirely what stopped me getting a Sony Walkman phone.

And then there's UMD - crap design as it's easy to get your fingers on the disc. And, of course, they rendered all the UMD disks unusable on the newer PSPs, although getting rid of it was probably a blessing.

Dropping linux support on the PSP3 was a slap in the face for customers, just because they'd screwed up their design and realised that the bits of code which let people run linux allowed them to hack the box.

There are a number of things which tie into the sun.com domain; XVM Ops Centre downloads patches & so on from that site, SFT (Sun File Transfer) uploads Explorers to supportfiles.sun.com; until they get all their customers to stop using those URLs, they can't switch it off. I'm sure there must be a few other things using sun.com as well.

I'm not quite sure why this was assigned to MS; I'm aware that the Gates foundation is doing work in this arena, but why they'd want to file a patent on it is unclear and using MS to do so is downright weird.

Side note - slight irony in the fact the favicon for the website is the (now obsolete) Sun logo on an MS patent ;)

SGI's problem was that they had a good run at selling really expensive hardware which could do 3D graphics well; they only really had Sun for competition in those days. Once PC graphics got good enough, it was a death knell; you could either spend 10k+ on an SGI/Sun workstation or about 2k for a high-end PC which was just as good (or near enough). Given that most people had a PC to run their office apps (Outlook, Word, Excel etc), it also saved desk space.

Sun at least had a fairly solid server business which kept them going for a while; SGI servers were generally only used in places with a strong presence of SGIs on the desktop.

SGI also had some classics - "XFS is great, it'll never need to be fsck'd!" Few months later, the fsck for xfs was released... It was, in general, a good OS with some odd quirks as I recall.

The penalty isn't for losing, it's for fighting. Most big companies can't be bothered with the hassle of paying lawyers for protracted lawsuits, where the judges often don't understand the technical detail being discussed and so there's a risk of losing even if the lawsuit is patently bollocks.

Patent trolls exploit the fact it's cheaper to roll over & pay the fee than it is to fight, where if you win, you lose.

On the flipside, my last PC upgrade was to get a new desktop before it got to the point I wouldn't be able to get XP on it...

I'm looking at a laptop upgrade now (old one is 6 years old and creaking...) which will end up running Windows 7 as there's little reason not to get it.