Bingo. Heck, with Chrome autofill, it took less time to register and sign than it did to type out this reply.

Thank you for pointing that out. From the outside, many countries look like homogeneous collections of people, but the vast majority are not. China's ethnic tensions are not limited to Tibet, and many minorities feel their cultural identity is being threatened. The Chinese government isn't as self-serving and evil as they are often portrayed in the media. Once you actually learn (SO out of vogue, I know) about things there, it becomes pretty clear that their motives are, yes, to preserve central government power, because the alternative isn't just letting everybody be happy and free, it's quite the opposite: Outright civil war in a nuclear-armed and global economic pillar. It would be hell for the billion plus people within its borders, and very bad for everyone else on Earth.

I think it's important to note that it's the natural tendency of any nation to head down that path regardless of its particular system of governance, ideology or economy. Some get there faster than others, but without constant, conscious and vigilant course corrections by the people as a whole, they'll get there sooner or later.

How these tools are used and % of userbase that cares about them:

Windows:

- <- Developers
------------------- <- Everyone else

Linux:

------------------- <- Developers
- <- Everyone else

Do you really think the average office worker cares about examining mount points or finding out how many USER handles a process is using? That's why Microsoft doesn't ship any of that with Windows, and they probably never will. More importantly, I'd rather have a third party write these kinds of tools. They're not limited by what marketing and support think is a good idea to ship. If Microsoft made them they probably wouldn't be as useful - not to mention everyone would whine about how they're evil because they're killing a niche.

As long as these tools are available, I could care less where I have to get them from or what I couldn't do before I install them. Duh.

You just know that he would have demanded that Linux be called 'GNU/Linux' and so on. He's known for turning down speaking engagements from people who refuse to do that, too.

I beginning to think Richard Stallman is techdom's Michael Jackson. Once brilliant, his past work is appreciated by all... but he currently exists in a vacuum where he lives off his dwindling reputation and fawning attention of a few creepy adoring fans while everyone else just scratches their heads and wonder what the hell happened to him.

If we missed something that big about to hit Jupiter what else are we missing? I hope to hell that's not an impact feature.

And where the hell is Bruce Willis??

I have no idea what you just said.

These always make me smile. Microsoft, the big bad outsourcer. You're going to move IBM as well? IBM is the largest consumer of L1 visas in the US. These are much more insidious than the evil H1-Bs, I suggest reading up on them.

I don't know if you've ever interacted with IBM - specifically IBM Global Services (aka IBM India), but lately I've been thinking that the only American left in that company is Palmisano. Everyone else has to be either Indian or Chinese. I jest - just slightly.

While you're at it, send all the large financial and services companies in the US. Heck, just transfer the entire Fortune 1000 over there. That will take care of your problems.

Oh and BTW, I love the "Ballmer was at it again" bit here. Any chance of the submitter actually mentioning which CEOs have lobbied Washington for increased quotas and more relaxed requirements? Naaah, that doesn't sell any ad impressions nowadays.

Virtual PC was and always will be a desktop solution. It's what MS uses for XP mode in Vista. Virtual Server is the big box equivalent (although I suppose it's based off VPC).

several apps written by Apple itself don't follow standard UI conventions

Not following interface guidelines in itself is quite common on both Windows and OS X, but that usually has nothing to do with the lack of a unified platform UI.

The Windows situation is even worse: there are several native toolkits there

You're confusing the shell's control library with the stack used to access it. On Windows when you write a .NET, WTL, MFC or plain Win32 application, you're still targeting the Windows shell native controls.