Thanks Rob, your creation made the internet a more interesting, more enjoyable and even more useful place, for many many people.

I wish you all the best with the challenges that lie ahead for you.
I wish us a /. site run the way you have been running it all these years.
Cheers!

Naah, 666 Kelvin is too hot for everyone.

What's new (for me at least), is that the authorities informed over 100,000 computer users of their infection/participation via an ISP by redirecting them to a warning published here by the dutch police. Not sure if that's common policy or something we'll see more often.

It is literally impossible... in the same sentence where they list two ways to do it.

My bogosity meter just blew up.

What they are saying is that they can't do it without spending more money on it than they want to. More accurately they are saying that they want to get people to move from XP to 7. They do not make a dime pushing out a patch for XP. In fact, doing that costs them money. OTOH, if they refuse to provide features on XP such as DIrectX 10 and 11, and now IE 9 a bunch of people run out and buy Windows 7 either in a box or in a new computer and that mean income for MS.

Do you remember when it was "impossible" to release DirectX 10 for XP? It was impossible for MS to do it, a bunch of "amateurs" did it almost no time at all. That is, by the time I had heard the news one of my students had already installed DirectX on XP and was running the demos that came with it.

Have you looked at a list of the games that only support DirectX 10 and/or 11 that will not run on any version of DirectX 9? The list is very short. Shorter than this post... So, what is really happening is that MS was abandoning its real customer base, the 72% of windows users who use Windows XP. They don't make money off of them so they have no interest in spending money on them. You know why their are so few DirectX 10 and 11 games? Because 72% of Windows user are running XP. The game companies have to write code for machines their customers have. In fact, a lot of smaller companies are moving to OpenGL because they can get all the new 3D features of DIrectX 10 and 11 on XP. sheesh...

It is unbelievable what a company is so certain of retaining its customers that it can abandon them and mistreat them and still assume they will be customers in the future. But, they can because they own the *minds* of their customers.

Well... I notice I'm starting to rant... so...

Stonewolf

OK, just one last rant... I've had to explain to a students that memorizing the DIrectX API would not help him write games for his favorite game box, the PS 3. He called me a liar. His world view did not include a computer that ran an OS other than Windows or a game that was written using any thing but DirectX. It is so sad...

Adobe Acrobat will do some of this, if not all. It does not require a central document repository and works across platforms - at least, as I recall, documents can be signed and verified on Linux though must at present be created in Distiller on Windows. As PDF is a somewhat open standard there is at least the possibility of other tools supporting the digital signatures.
A document may have multiple signatures placed in the document body in a natural way - i.e. where you might have an ink signature box. You need a certificate authority of your own to issue certificates to signers - after all, anyone can get a Verisign certificate, and who's to say that Joe Bloggs, even he is the real Joe with passport to prove it, can sign off on your reactor design ?
There are some options to set when the document is created that control whether it can be signed by the free cross-platform reader or only by the paid-for Distiller.
Drawbacks vs. GPG digital signatures - only works on PDF files, must be created on Windows.
Advantages - natural signing/verification mechanism built into the reader.

And interprocess sharing of a graphics surface. And the entire hardware accelerated text subsytem for direct-x (which also happens to support cleartype).
Given that Internet Explorer uses multiple processes, the former is probably quite important. Being a web-browser, the latter would be immensely helpful.

We found that Sharepoint didn't offer the level of document authentication that we needed for the FDA-inspected laboratory in our organization. NextDocs is a 'bolt-on' to Sharepoint that offers an electronic signature feature. We're rolling that out now and it seems pretty useful. So if you go the Sharepoint route and it isn't enough, this is worth checking out. Also, you get to say 'bolt-on' in conversation, with maybe an accidental 'strap-on' now and then.