While I'm not against what your saying, looking at this from a business standpoint, it could make sense because it's easy for Microsoft to find staff with the required sales experience. It could also backfire if, for example, the staff at the Apple store is anti-Microsoft.

When I was a kid, my grandparents lived on a farm. There was a spot on the side of my grandfathers garage that everybody would go to pee because nobody could see you. Maybe we were peeing toxic piss, but the grass never grew there.

Kind of a sidetrack, but I've worked for a government consulting firm for the past five years and I've actually been surprised with the proposal process, at times. I'm not sure if things are different now than they were years ago, but during the proposal process, the government was actually undermining the abilities of contractors with bids they thought were "too low", fearing that they would overwork their staff and/or hit the government for more money, later on. I also worked for an extremely low bidding contractor and it wasn't uncommon for us to go back to the client, midway through the project to double our original estimate. Needless to say, we didn't have a large number of return clients.

It seems to be pretty common after the 3.0 OS upgrade and not limited to the 3GS.:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2045240&tstart=0
http://forums.macnn.com/103/ipod-iphone-and-apple-tv/394175/battery-life-sucks-iphone-3-0-a/

For what it's worth, 300 is one of the worst movies I've ever seen in HD. I know exactly what you're talking about when you say that you could tell where green screens were used. I had a similar experience with The Hills Have Eyes (might have been the 2nd one) where I could easily tell that the mutant people were rubber dummies. Thankfully, the number of great movies in HD far outweigh the number of bad ones.

I definitely think you should give it another try.

This "proprietary" argument is getting old.

Silverlight is an open-standard. While Microsoft doesn't actively develop a Linux client, they have collaborated with Novel to bring the Moonlight project to the Linux and other Unix/X11 platforms.

Granted, the Moonlight 2.0 implementation is behind Microsoft's implementation, with the Moonlight Roadmap indicating a planed release date of September 2009. While this is frustrating to end users and developers, I don't think it's fair to call Silverlight "proprietary".

That's a reasonable argument. AFAIK, ClickOnce provides this functionality (I know that ClickOnce applications are installed per-user to get around security restrictions in Program Files directory, etc.; however, I am not 100% sure whether it's possible to outright restrict users from installing something via ClickOnce, altogether). Granted, I realize that ClickOnce deployments are not very common.

As a former admin gone developer, I believe in putting an emphasis on security, first. If you wish to allow users to install applications, you do so with the understanding that you are opening up your system to vulnerabilities. It is for this reason that I would rarely permit average users to install anything without the authorization from an administrator. I will, however, acknowledge that there are exceptions to these rules.

This is very unlikely unless you were installing something using a really, really crappy installer. In either case, this is certainly not the fault of Windows. The operating system API definitely throws an exception if a user tries to access something that he/she does not have access to. It doesn't, however, have the ability to prevent a stupid developer from writing an installer that catches the exception without notifying the end-user of the security-related error. The same idiotic behavior can and will be observed in Linux if developers choose to ignore development best practices.

That's the point. You shouldn't be permitted to install anything when you're not an administrator.

This was an unfortunate truth for some time because the Windows 9x security model did not enforce strict security practices. In short, all of these problems could be corrected by an administrator by making some registry and file system security tweaks. It was, however, a legitimate cause for frustration among end users and administrators.

The fortunate side of the story is that as the Windows NT security model became more wide spread (because of the popularity of Windows 2000 and XP), developers were made more aware of these problems and better development practices helped eliminate most of these security-related nuances. In other words, things are a lot better now than they were even just a few years ago.

ClickOnce is in no way limited to the Windows platform because it's little more than an installation mechanism that is usually hosted on a web server. There is no reason that a Linux system running Mono couldn't install something via ClickOnce. Furthermore, ClickOnce is targeted towards desktop applications. The fact that you mention AJAX implies (to me) that you have the wrong idea about ClickOnce functionality.

A typical response from somebody that sees "Microsoft" and automatically jumps to conclusions. Did you even read the article?

The exchange would not say whether volume was the issue and declined to give details on what had caused the problem. But angry customers were demanding an explanation.

The site broke just this once since it was launched in September of 2005. I'd say that the Microsoft servers did a fantastic job hosting the load.