How many xterms fit on the screen? And does it do edge-flip?

Everything else is fluff.

Let us not forget that mail-order catalogs were yesterday's equivalent of today's Amazon and Newegg, and competition between them and brick and mortar stores is nothing new.

I used to be on the mailing list for both Allied Radio and Lafayette - bought stuff from both. Lafayette even had it's store in Newark, NJ. All long gone. Allied Radio was merged into Radio Shack. (Allied Electronics - the industrial supply side of the business - apparently still exists.)

Heath (remember Heathkits?) had a store in California. Gone.

Tons of independent shops selling stereo gear, TVs. My favorite independent shop was called "Parts Unlimited" - nothing but caps, resistors, vacuum tubes, wire, solder, connectors, coax cable, hardware, etc. All gone.

My office Dell computer came bundled with FreeDOS, which was never used. Yet more racketware. I want a refund, too.

Let us not forget that Shakespeare "stole" many of his plot lines as well.

You won't build any community among your customers if they feel locked out of key pieces of the product. If anything, they will be resentful. Jon Oosterhout tried it with TCL (Scriptics). Ransom Love tried it with OpenLinux (Caldera). Both failed.

You have already build your software on top of openMAT. If you want to be a closed-source company, then do the right thing - dump openMAT, and write your own replacement.

For what it's worth, in my opinion people are overly obsessed with the importance of protecting their precious "IP". You are not that smart. Any "edge" it gives you will only last a short time. It is more important that the products that you make do what you say they will do, that they are delivered on schedule, that they are reliable, that they are properly documented, and that you are available to stand behind them.

If you are already in New Mexico, this place is on the highway between Las Cruces and Alamogordo. You reach it by going through the security gate for the Missile Range itself.

I know several people who installed Linux on laptops for a while, but then they got tired of the hassles and went with Macs. The BSD environment on OS X is "good enough" that they can run all their UNIX/Linux apps, more or less.

I, on the other hand, am stubborn and will only run Linux - in large part because you then get a much wider range of hardware options. I've run it on 3 generations of Thinkpads, 2 generations of netbooks, 2 desktops, and a tablet. In NO case (even when Linux came preinstalled) did everything "just work" - there was always some fiddling to do. The biggest problem is the hardware "arms race" - vendors are forever tinkering, either adding features or taking shortcuts and compensating for it in proprietary drivers. The Linux kernel eventually catches up, which means that the best strategy is to use the latest distro from whoever - Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. and find one that works. I load them all onto bootable USB drives and try out the "live distro" version first before installing.

Another +1 for Buffalo. I'm using the supplied version of DD-WRT. Very stable wireless, doesn't drop connections like the previous Linksys routers it replaced did.

Comcast is the biggest source of junk mail (paper) that I receive. Guess that's what happens when you are in Comcast territory and not a customer.

Collection agencies are the biggest source of unwanted calls on my phone. It's a wrong number - they're after someone else. Do you think these guys would figure it out and correct their records? Of course not.

Go for it! Sue that pants off each other! Next stop - Chapter 7. Well, I can dream.

The end of Zune is not problem here - glad I stuck with my "Play For Sure" music player ... oh wait.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/microsoft/2004074417_playsforsure15.html