The problem there is that it allows the end user to resell a game without allowing MS to skim their God-given tithe off the top (or prevent it outright).

Yeah, but in the case of the NES, you can disable it by clipping a single chip pin on the board, and for the SNES, just Dremel off a little bit of plastic in the cartridge slot. And typically, these games would be timed to the video refresh rate, so switching between NTSC or PAL will usually cause the game to run at the wrong speed.

Basically, the long block chains are $2 bills, and the 7.1 client is Taco Bell. Is that about right?

So what you're saying is that they should reduce marketing, spend more on training and staffing, and shrink the clientele, while at the same time lowering prices? Interesting strategy, but I don't think "reduce revenue and increase operational overhead" would have the desired result.

Anti-competitive I'll certainly grant you, but "small-scale" and "monopoly" are pretty contradictory.

small-scale monopolistic

lolwut

How exactly do they plan to first resurrect both Jim Henson and Madeline L'Engle?

We practically require it.

It's a good start, but the real challenge will be finding a sustainable supply of extra legs, and devising a method of reliably delivering them to the combustion chamber.

He said browsing headaches, not development headaches. And I can't say I totally disagree on that point.

I wouldn't laugh it off just yet. Now they're duct-taping half-empty soda bottles to it, and setting up an air compressor.

pedantic disease

Penicillin cleared that right up the last time.

Or rather, addicts looking for a dealer.

You still have to implement upgrades to the new major releases, and that can involve software/integration testing, user training, hardware upgrades, etc. There will be monetary and opportunity costs involved with all of this, as well as various risks to mitigate. The licensing costs are only a piece of the whole puzzle. We've got a web server running Cent 5.5 still, simply because we don't have a test environment/scale out farm to upgrade this system to 6, and we can't risk taking down the sites on it for hours or days if the upgrade fails, or compatibility problems arise. Even though CentOS is "free".

I've got Win95 running on my Libretto 50CT. It's certainly not modern hardware, but I've given it an upgrade to 32 MB RAM, and a 4 GB SSD (just a CF card with IDE adapter). I even found wireless drivers for the Orinoco WaveLAN card I yanked from a first-gen Airport base station, and it'll do 128-bit WEP. You'd be genuinely surprised how usable the web generally is with IE 5.5. No Flash or AJAX, obviously, but I've browsed around abandonware sites and downloaded games directly onto it. FilZip still supports Win95, which is convenient. It runs Office 2000 and Photoshop 3, and honestly, if the battery lasted longer than an hour or two (and Win95 didn't suck so badly accessing NT file servers), I could probably do some non-empty subset of "real work" on it.

Installing Win95 without either a floppy drive or CD-ROM drive really isn't too hard. You can copy the whole installation CD to the hard drive you're installing to (and you'll probably have plenty of space for that), and assuming the hard drive is bootable to some form of DOS, you can launch the installation that way. That's what I had to do for the Libretto, since I don't have a CD-ROM drive that will work with it.