Microsoft Windows native/legacy applications -- a massive massive software ecosystem unparalleled by any other OS/platform (besides the Web perhaps?) -- is the reason why they can never turn their backs on it. Its the key to their power, but with power comes a great responsibilit^H^H^H burden.

They will try, but at the end of the day, the Microsoft walled garden will always have the gate left open.

Apple has a walled garden. That's it. Android does too. Microsoft has a walled garden, but if you have an x86 tablet, you can plant petunias and begonias if you want in there. That seems like an improvement to me. And it's likely a technical reason too: all those Windows-native calls/hooks that your typical Windows-compatible applications require likely do not exist on the ARM version of Windows 8 (I'm not a Windows programmer/guru, so I'm speculating here, but seems likely no?).

Maybe they left the live CD in the CD tray.

You know bock is just a type of beer, like a lager, ale, or stout right? And yes, there are cans.

I'm in Canada and I can't think of a brand of beer, domestic, premium, or imported that doesn't come in can as well as bottles. It might not be stocked at every Beer Store or LCBO (Liquor Store), however.

...paying to upgrade wouldn't be painful, but actually welcomed.

Just the other day we setup a client with a delegate mailbox so she had two inboxes in her Outlook profile. Problem is, the pop-up notification only works with her primary inbox, not the other one. There are a bunch of hacks out there using VBScript and Win32 pop-ups, but they're nothing like the Outlook one (can't click on message, for example).

Instead, Microsoft puts their money behind such memorable hits like, "Where'd My Message Headers Go?". In Outlook 2003, you could right-click on the message and go to Properties. In Outlook 2007, it was right-click, Options, now it's under the abysmal Home Button thingy > Options, and you have to have the message opened to do. I'm sure some fanboi is going to jump on here and tell me of some other way to open it, but the point is, I don't want to learn new ways to do the same thing; we spend enough time in IT learning new technologies that UI distractions like Microsoft fobs off on us are unwelcome and counterproductive.

Meant to say "business" deployment. Oh Slashdot, some day when you're big and strong you'll have an edit feature.

of shoddy browser security. Could this not be "solved" with proper sandboxing? If there's legacy code to support (this has been cited many times in the past for reasons why), please, please fork IE into two branches: IE Classic or whatever that's fully backwards compatible, and an IE Lite that's completely sandboxed and locked down for wide-spread corporate deployment.

...looks alot like the one from 2008. Big three = hardware warranty and support: drive dies, Dell guy's there in less than 4 hours. That covers the entire lifecycle of the server (3-5 years) while it's in production and playing a mission critical role. Virtualization/consolidation/cloud are whittling away at the server market, but it's never going to go away. Right now I'm dealing with an EC2 instance that won't start and I can't detach the volume to try to snapshot it or mount it to another new instance... yeah, yeah, "b-b-but you don't have an Elastic Load Balanced, Cloud Reach-around setup?". Well, this isn't a mission critical server and nightly backups are good enough, but it's still annoying to me and the end-users. And at ~$100 a month (reserved medium Windows EBS instance), I could've leased a new low-end PowerEdge over 3 years...

Odd, I had bolded the part about "major OS release" from the FAQ; didn't come through. But to answer your question: no, I'm not retarded, and I would fully expect an architecture change to break MacPorts. But as you should've been able to glean from the context of my post, I was referring exclusively to the issue of OS upgrades and how apt-get wouldn't break. Perhaps it is you who's lacking in basic cognitive/inductive reasoning abilities?

Hmm, still requires xcode and for Snow Leopard/Lion, requires compilation as no binary available. So besides syntax, not seeing how this is much of an improvement over MacPorts.

Fink could be interesting, thanks. Again, would probably not rely on that for production/client work, but could be useful for other utilities.

This isn't anti-Apple bullshit, it's the truth: from the MacPorts FAQ:

Ubuntu:

do-release-upgrade

...

apt-get install $package

There's a 99% chance that will Just Work (tm). The other 1%, well, likely something's not right to begin with (wrong apt sources, etc.) or it's an edge case.

Look, I love my Macbook, but I choose to run VirtualBox with Windows 7 and Ubuntu because I feel that while it does a great job of some things, it's poor at best at other things in comparison to other OSs. One of those things is having a core, reliable package management system: when it's time to release some new code and/or configuration changes for a client, I don't want to get burnt by a 3rd-party package system not working as expected.

Never found MacPorts to be nearly as friendly/comprehensive as a good ol' Ubuntu apt repository. It's also 3rd-party and at the mercy of Apple and requires a bunch of prerequisites.

Because nothing beats Linux for package management. Miss not having a repo of open source at my disposal; the App Store will never touch it.