IIRC, if WGA is unable to contact the servers, it assumes the product is genuine. Previous "outages" were due to malformed code on the server, not the servers themselves being offline.

No. Just... no.

The "being paranoid" theory is that Microsoft is selling the patents because it no longer wants, or wants to maintain, them. The "they're out to get you" theory is that Microsoft wanted to sell the patents to a troll company so it wouldn't look like Microsoft was attacking them. So they held an auction, but the wrong company won. Both theories end with OIN acquiring the patents.

So, yeah, Occam's razor totally applies. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide which one it corresponds to, however.

So, just like every other implementation of ODF? :D

You mean XPS, the document format that powers Windows Vista/7's printing process and, incidentally enough, Microsoft added a viewer to in Windows 7? The one that Microsoft requires all printers to support in order to get the Compatible with Windows logo? The one that has an "Export to XPS" function in Office (while you couldn't do the same for PDF, IIRC, unless you installed an addon)? The one that just became an EMCA open standard (on June 19)?

Yeah, it sure disappeared fast...

Microsoft already had such a system then - Office 2000 implemented a kind of HTML-XML cross, first seen in a beta in 1998, with the intention of it becoming the default format for Office (that's the reason for all the proprietary stuff - they wanted to have full fidelity, they didn't intend for anyone to actually make websites with it).They didn't go all the way with it, however, and it was regulated to a "Save as HTML" option in the Save As dialog.

Incidentally, this format was actually a direct predecessor to the Office '03 XML formats (and thus OOXML).

Microsoft is already pushing for patent reform, so I think they're already aware of the suckitude of the current system.

Er, my mistake, the link above leads to page five of the thread, while the rebuttal was on page 8. My point still stands.

Here's Russ's rebuttal from the link above. I'll bold the important parts.

Just a correction - DirectX was started to give Win32 software bare metal access. Real-mode DOS already had bare-metal access, and Windows 95's fake DOS was good enough to play nice with the new model. (If a game choked given that, they'd just shim it. Heck, they even modified SimCity's executable code in real-time so it'd be happy with protected memory and stuff.)

Besides, Microsoft's problem was that people were developing DOS games instead of Windows games. It's solution was DirectX.

Actually, Windows 98 was supposed to be the end of the 9x line. Microsoft had always intended to have a Windows 2000 Home Edition (codenamed Neptune), but it was scrapped and rescheduled for the next version of Windows when it was realized that it would delay Windows 2000 even more (2000 had already suffered numerous delays over the years).

Windows ME was very much a stopgap release.

Heh, sorry, misread the first part of your reply. ^^;

In any case, I haven't seen anyone claim that any of the OSs you've mentioned are completely rewritten. Windows 2000 and Vista did have major architectural and API changes, and Windows 7 had more low-level under-the-hood changes, but I don't think anyone's said that they've been rewritten at all.

Since when were Windows 2000 and 7's network stack re-written?

Of course it's probably in there somewhere, but it'd be such a small percentage that it'd be basically insignificant. I'd doubt that any non-basic code would survive two rewrites (NT3.5 and Vista).

There's probably a compat struct somewhere for the five apps that ran on NT3.1 and required TCP/IP (or STACKS, the platform SpiderTCP ran on) but other than that, I wouldn't expect much.

Not to mention that it was only supposed to be a temporary solution. Work on the new, Microsoft-written TCP/IP started shortly after NT 3.1 RTM'd, and was released in Windows NT 3.5 and Windows 95. The command-line networking programs (like ftp) that were ported along with Spider's TCP stack were left in, mainly because they worked well enough that Microsoft saw no reason to replace them.

While I agree that would have been funny in the period 2003-2005, were this article about Vista, or even a year ago, but it just didn't resound with me right now. Windows 7 is done, pretty much, and the countdown to release will be measured in months.

I'd also appreciate it if you don't go all OH KNOES M$ TROLL as you did at the bottom. I'm fine that all your clients use OS X or Ubuntu. I wasn't even attempting to change your beliefs at all.

However, your comments RE the top half do bear answering to, as they seem to show some basic ignorance.

RC stands for Release Candidate. In other words, it means "this is what we'll be releasing, barring any showstopping bugs." It meant the same in Vista (RC1 was released barely three months before RTM) and in XP. The fact is, Windows 7 is basically finished.

Now, I assumed in you comment title you meant "x year when Windows 7 will be released". If this was an incorrect assumption, please forgive me.

I'm curious to know what you refer to as "buggy crap". Full of security flaws? Annoying UI issues? Blue screens at the drop of a hat? If you're talking about the former, I wouldn't recommend Mac OS X.

I'm not sure what to say about all three, as I can only speak from personal experience, in which I haven't experienced anything much like that that either a) wasn't my own fault or b) dying hardware's fault or c) random software's fault on *either* Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. Of course, I don't expect you to hold this to water as personal experience is derided on Slashdot if it runs counter to their POV. Oh well.

Again, I don't have any bias in particular, and I am perfectly fine with you using whatever OS you like.

Unfortunately, Dr. Watson only does window-to-window calls...