And how about Aero Glass? Do we get that back too?

I don't want spartan overly minimalist buttons, windows and dropdowns that hinder more than they help. I want delineated areas that indicate boundaries with beveled widgets that say "click me". I also don't want white-washed backgrounds that strain the eyes when I'm trying to work productively - I want various shades so I can see that the menu, taskbar or URL bar is not part of the main page.

Anti-aliasing is a hack that complicates things for a few reasons:

1: Anti-aliasing may look smoother but it also looks more blurred than non-antialiasing. That's why I based my test on no anti-aliasing.

2: If Apple isn't do it, then it must be at least somewhat inherently tricky to get right. And at the least it breeds bugs. Kludges usually breed bugs somewhere down the line as a rule of thumb.

3: Anti-aliasing complicates the OS (such as using Cleartype which has to be adjusted for every monitor it comes across etc.). Taking a screenshot and zooming in on the anti-aliased bits produces colour fringing.

4: Anti-aliasing complicates paint and word-processing software which has to take into account the techniques necessary for smooth line and curve drawing. Additionally, try filling in an area in paint software; anti-aliasing is not your friend.

5: Certain pictures with anti-aliasing use more colours, and eat up more memory as a result, especially when compressed in PNG format. A black and white picture uses 256 colours when it should use two. A colour picture..... well, the sky is the limit.

6: Scaling is much faster/simpler when you can do it the easy, and not to have worry about averaging neighbour pixels. Need I go on?

I think that's a very good point, and something I considered too. I'm not sure that would work for ever-increasing brightnesses though.

SO...... if you paint a white single-pixel width 15 degree line without any anti-aliasing onto a black background, what does the PPI need to be at so you don't notice any jaggies?

300? 600? 1200? 2400 or more?

Haha, that was probably a little unexpected for you. But I love the snappiness and cleanness of Haiku (just got to persuade them to implement a database/metadata filesystem now! :)

Windows is a lot more complicated than a hardware interface specification, so MS deserves a little more to hold the rights to the Windows and its technology. But I get your point.

All fair points but...

Microsoft have done a lot to support backwards compatibility. Most software which works on WinXP will work on Win 8 and vice versa.

I don't think the price MS charges for Windows is amazingly extortionate, but I get your point.

As you semi-pointed out, if MS opened up Windows I fear we'd get the same fragmentation Linux/Unix has. That's the last thing we need. Standards are good, fragmentation is not. (As long as the product is mature/good quality, and competition isn't needed as much).

I meant I hope Haiku OS takes off (not that Ubuntu is bad).

Yes there is. It takes a lot of effort to design say, a generalized GUI API that will work on all OSs, and after all that effort, it won't be as optimized as if it was specially written to take advantage of anything in the Windows OS. Not that I like Windows OS particularly (I hope Ubuntu takes off), but I dislike the mess that is non-standardization even more. Bloat is bad also.

USB sockets also lock you in to using USB leads.

I don't see standards as a bad thing, if they're done well.

Interesting. I'm confused now.

To simplify, let's assume it's in space. To go from 0 to 10mph (relative to a stationary object, say a satellite near Earth) surely requires as much thrust, as going from 90mph to 100mph. In fact relative to the position of the sun, it's like comparing 67,000 mph to 67,010 mph with 67,090 to 67,100, which works out about the same in energy requirements. But relative to the Earth's satellite, and according to your kinetic energy equation, that'd be a massive difference in energy required (0-10mph versus 90-100mph).

Just out of interest, if it takes the same energy to accelerate from 0 to 10mph as it does from 90 to 100mph (assuming zero wind resistance), then aren't we creating more energy than we put into the system by crashing? What gives?

When AI comes up with what you just said, one can say the Turing test has been passed in every conceivable sense :)

Perhaps he meant dangerous if the firework destroys the copter, making it crash and potentially hit someone?

When you talk about steel etc. in the concrete, do you mean as a mixture, or as rods/pillars of solid metal inside the concrete?

How would aluminum, titanium, or carbon fiber compare to basalt fiber rebar?