You prefer that everybody in this industry earns a precarious income and operates dirt-cheap stuff ? No high-end equipment whatsoever ? Yeah, that makes sense if you earn about as much as a McDonalds worker. Unfortunately, I do think your wish will come true. Regarding IBM mainframes, they are worth their money and if you cannot see the difference to the cheap x86 stuff from Dell, that's your fault. Finally, every skilled factory worker stands in front of 500k Euros/dollars worth of hardware these days. You prefer that 10k$ Dell "server" ??

Well now it'll live another one! Like the sporocarp of a fungus growing on a bag of rotting garbage.

Truly, there can be no greater evil than COBOL and enterprise Java in the same bucket, united by an unholy sludge of XML.

The damned thing's immortal.

IBM has found the secret to everlasting life!

Surely, there is some money to be made here?

Don't confuse your liking Gates and liking his money. His money does great things.

I don't think there are many vitrification plants in Kreplakistan. It's far more likely the waste would be sent somewhere like France or Canada. Are you really that worried about the Canucks?

We have several dozen windows 7 machines running windows xp. Each of those I suppose was a 7 license reported as a satisfied customer. My main windows machine runs 7 because it is a good OS, and XP is a bit long in the tooth. But my windows machine is to run specific applications for work, and even if I wanted to 8 is not an option.

But who says yhou put in voice grade copper? I think Verizon shpuld be required to replace the downed copper. That's what the maintenence fees the customers have been paying forever were to cover.

Superstition

Simple solution that politicians would have a hard time saying no to. All products that have DRM should be forced to display a DRM warning message on the outside of the packaging in print, TV and on line advertising. The message should explain in simple terms what the DRM does. IE - requires on line connection all the times, Requires Disk in drive all the time, prevents back up copies...etc. There should be stiff fines for selling products with DRM and no warning label. Then let the market decide. DRM is toxic to computers and users. So the proper warning is the right thing to do.

That would coming mostly from China now, if you can find someone over there that cares.

You must not have been paying attention. There were many third party candidates who were not on the corporate payroll.