Bundling the OS to the PC what gave a lot of mass appeal. See first sentence at 1990:Breakup.

The cost of Windows is still hidden on pre-installed machines. I doubt you pay the >$100 like for an OEM version when building our PC yourself. This was even better in the early days - when a PC was sold for thousands of dollars, a couple hundred bucks for the OS were not a big deal.

As for changing platforms : most people would not notice that they are using a popular Linux distro if they have a start menu with programs. Compatibility is an issue : I can't watch Netflix on Linux ( but can buy a set-top box for $100, running linux?!), I can't submit a CV (in most cases) in .pdf or .odf because recruiters want .docx, tc, etc. My wife was using windows, she had no trouble switching to Linux as a regular user. But she cannot vote for the french legislative elections from a Linux machine. Could continue...

So Windows became widespread because they had a very good business plan, and a functioning product "good enough" to establish a monopoly. But you cannot claim, in retrospective, that nothing better would have come up within a reasonable timeframe (5 years?), and neither will we know what personal computing could have been during the 1990s and 2000s had MS not succeeded securing their 90%+ market share with PCs early on.

This good enough for you?

Lets not make such strong statements in retrospective. The succession of events leading to the widespread use of PCs might seem logical an inevitable when looking back a couple decades, but it might have happened in a completely different way. We will certainly never know.

What we know is that Bill Gates amassed this fortune by making pushing an inferior product on masses that defines the user experience of most PC users.

Fully agree - sad how hydrocarbon became associated in my mind with zombies sitting in endless traffic jams in the WashDC area...

reinvested to build a supercomputer placing 9th...
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/frances-total-gets-oil-price-profit-boost

Very smart way to spend that money even though I'm not a big fan of hydrocarbons. I'm really curious how hard was it to justify for Board Members?

If you live too close : make a detour.
If you live too far : do only part of it on the bike.

You might not develop a gorgeous torso but your cardio health will be top-notch.

Or it might be just the other way around :

"Just because you don't use it, it doesn't mean it is a niche feature."

Or $600 : cheapest Opteron 8 core..

I doubt that desktop PCs are the biggest market for 3.5" HDDs, just as I don't believe data centers are filled up with 2.5"/SSD drives...

Cumulative effect over 20 years : You can be in H1-B status for 6 + 3 years. The 700K visa holders show this well, being close to 85K * 9 years.

And of course you have not seen the visa holders return home, most of these people get a green card and stay in the US, eventually becoming US citizens.

As AC pointed out above : US gets the best minds from abroad, without paying for their education. If this is not good for the US then I don't see what is...

No hard feelings :)

And why would you refuse to see something based on that reason? Jealousy? Envy?

None of the above - because the details above indicates that the movie is in fact a family enterprise and their foremost goal is not to entertain me but promote their careers.

I will, on the other hand, buy Iron Sky. I loved G.O.R.A. They were both ridiculously low-budget compared to the what After Earth will cost but very entertaining movies, but they could not even get proper distribution in the US. I prefer giving my money to these guys, that's all.

Son promoting worked well for Kirk Douglas . . .

After checking around on Wikipedia and IMDB: Michael Douglas started acting after the age of twenty and started in "also run" titles. Will Smith Jr has co-starred in two big movies with "stars" by the age of 12 : his father and Jackie Chan. Not to mention that the "Karate Kid (2010)" was just a typical Holywood-type rip-off of a movie to make big money.

I don't intend to contribute to a Movie Star promoting his son into Movie Star II, I'll rather go and see Elysium or Ender's Game.