And we're all sitting here thinking, "A couple of engineers could figure out how to get around it in a matter of a few hours."

When do we get our government back?

Ok, let me see if I got this right: they're extorting patent royalties from third party mobile vendors. They're almost certainly making them sign a contract with a time commitment on it. Then later this year they expect these same mobile vendors to ditch Android development and use Windows Mobile instead? All the while they need to continue paying the extortion.

Yeah... that's gonna work well. It virtually guarantees Windows 8 on a mobile device is DOA.

In the US we have a concept called "community colleges". They're often more community oriented than a large university and offer many two-year degree programs. Anyway, community college classes can be easier than university classes. I'm not sure if there's something like that in your country, but how about enrolling in a college class in the summer? Most summer semesters are much shorter. You'll probably find the structure of the classes much more appealing than the school you're in right now. You won't find others your age in the classes, but perhaps that's not important to you. I wouldn't be intimidated by being in a college class - you likely have more experience than a lot of others in there.

This is a desktop OS, not a server OS. And yes, 3.11 was good, I used it a lot. 95 was ok, but lots of things were pretty quirky when it was released. We all liked using it, and mostly forgave the quirks compared to DOS, but we never knew how much better it could be until 98 was released.

Three things:

1. Everyone knows that every other release of Windows is good (Win 3.1, 98, XP, 7) and every other one sucks (Win 3.0, 95, ME, Vista.) No enterprise is going to jump on this release.
2. Enterprises are in various states of completing their transition to Win 7. Very few enterprises are going to begin another rip and replace cycle next year, so no one is going to jump on this release.
3. Everything in the press has stated how Microsoft has taken a different direction for this user interface (but lately admitting the old one is still there.) No enterprise is going to jump on this release.

With regards to tablets and phones.. I really don't care what OS mine runs other than I want to to work exactly the way I want it to work. I doubt Win8 will.

These days I care more about browser security than I do about OS security. All of my lunch money is accessed via the web, not on the OS as much itself.

Anyway, I started using Chrome because at the time it was secure and less well-known. Who's going to customize browser attacks on something that has 5% marketshare? Now, Chrome hits the 25% mark and begins overtaking Firefox... what do I do now? Chrome is still rated as the most secure browser, but will that continue? I don't want to switch to Opera or Safari but I'm thinking I might need to install one of them.

(A wise man once told me, always use two browsers. One for the secure stuff, one for everything else. I should have paid more attention to him.)

I say we all get together and agree to not re-elect a single member of Congress. We could clear the entire House next year and a decent chunk of the Senate. I don't care if the new members are democrats, republicans, blue, green, red, or purple, it just seems like the entrenched politics is completely broken.

It's too bad we can't figure out a way to just throw them into jail.

I'm all for SaaS. Here's the problem the free software community has run into for the last decade: as it's gotten more popular there's been a call for more an more apps. However, there's not enough developers or developer's time to create those apps. It's because a few guys are over here making PIM utility for KDE, a few are over there working on timeclock utility for GNOME, a bunch are working on packaging this and that for Ubuntu and a bunch are working on packaging things for Fedora, etc. All the while the real apps, like a great office suite, get neglected. Let's face it: Linux apps suck, the Linux desktop experience sucks and the Linux experience of managing / integrating with a complete enterprise (user accounts, desktops, laptops, Windows domain controllers, shared network filesystems) horribly, horribly sucks.

If we could take the energy spent on developing distribution specific things, desktop specific things or even entire classes of applications and instead concentrate that effort into shared things with less duplication of effort, we'll generate more developer time. That developer time can be used to make the Linux desktop much more enjoyable.

I want to have a single sign-on system with my Windows systems, shared network drives with the Macs and Windows systems, the same login scripts, shared applications or at least similar enough applications users can move between systems, and shared document formats. "Sure", you say, "all that exists right now." Yes, but I want it to work out of the box like when I turn on a Windows laptop for the first time or a even a Mac (to a slightly less degree.) I want to go from opening the box to putting it on a user's desk in 10 minutes regardless of the OS. SaaS helps immensely with that.

Alternative identities will have people flocking to Google+? Bullshit.

Letting people play Farmville, The Sims Social, and Family Feud would be way more effective. And let me keep my same farm as on Farmville. (And by "my" I really "their" since Farmville has always seemed pretty stupid to me. But hey, whatever app blows your hair back needs to work seemlessly.)

... they just don't know it yet. We have 40 Blackberry's in our company, but we purchased our last one about six months ago. I hope BES dies a painful, painful death.

Android, here we come.