First, as the other comment said - On2 wasn't bought for products. It was bought for technology and people. Google's motives should be clear with the WebM open source version of On2's VP8 codec. Second, you're trivializing the cost and complexity required to keep a product alive and supported. It's not just leaving a product in the channel to blossom. It has to be supported, patched, and updated - and the products sold by On2 were not logical for Google to continue selling as they were - but the technology and people from On2 are hardly going to waste at Google.

Very few applications written today can actually take advantage of that much RAM. For an enterprise, unless you're doing INTENSE CAD/CAM/CAE, rendering, or stat analysis, it doesn't make sense to force to x64.

ISV uptake for XP x64 was ridiculously low. Very few companies wrote apps that can run well on it and still take advantage of it, and it has a pretty significant driver gap. If you're migrating to XP x64 right now, you might as well go to Win7 x64. At least there you will have apps and drivers.

"even if all it required was minimal effort to cross compile and test"... Seriously? It ain't that easy.

They did stop keeping them.

Dear lord, I can't imagine having to ensure builds would still compile for all of the dead architectures.

You're dead in the water already. Users don't read dialogs. End of story. Where else in life besides the computer do humans get interstitial errors that pop up and disrupt what they're doing? Not in the car. Not on the phone. Not reading a book. Error dialogs shouldn't be treated as a problem you have with end users. They should be treated as a problem you have with developers. An inordinate amount of the time, users are presented with dialogs for problems that the software itself could and should resolve, and more importantly, the user can't resolve.

The educators are idiots who will soon be without jobs, and potentially on sex offender lists. This has to be one of the most idiotic ideas I've ever heard of.

Yes - iPhoto features "Places", which tags them in a similar manner to what the article has done. As some have noted, the GPS data can be way wrong on an iPhone. Unlike the 5 blocks some have seen, in more rural states I've seen it be off by more than 20 miles (another city away).

You're exactly right. Unfortunately.

Weeks after Google, a technology leader gets hacked by having ancient versions of IE 6 on their desktops, and you're asking why encryption isn't everywhere? Same reason IPv6 isn't everywhere, VOIP isn't everywhere, the current spam-friendly email protocols we've been living with for decades haven't been replaced with authenticated sender-based protocols, and why blacklist-based antivirus hasn't been replaced by a less "lossy" model of security. Why? Because doing nothing costs nothing. Doing something costs something - and if you can't explicitly explain why doing something more than the current "bare minimum" MUST be done, quantify the costs of doing vs. not doing it (and have the latter exceed the former) and/or end-of-life the current methodologies, then things just don't happen in the low-cost/low-budget world of IT.

Couldn't agree more.

like a decimal point in the wrong place or something...

You are quite correct.

and begin selling stock images through the site he pwns as a result of the countersuit. A good lawyer should be able to get him some serious money (gratis) if he has adequate proof that the works are his.