In that case you're right. It wasn't clear if you're just stating the fact or approving of it. Lots of people here seem happy that MS got spanked.

You don't become a patent troll by simply acquiring lots of obvious patents. You become a troll by using those patents to harass others. Lots of companies big and small file patents for DEFENSIVE reasons. Once you have a patent, it's much harder to sue you for infringement; after all, the patent office already agreed that you're doing something innovative. So as long as the patent office awards patents for obvious stuff, filing for such patents for defensive reasons is not only fair, but essentially required. You don't want to risk investing lots of money to develop and market a new product only to find out later that you've been sued by some stupid patent-squatter. Instead of blaming the big players, who only exercise their common sense right to protect their investment, the community should exert pressure on the patent office to start uniformly rejecting ALL such applications.

You mean, the law should protect only the poor, miserable, and troubled, and punish the rich, mighty, and successful, so that everyone and everything becomes uniformly mediocre and apathetic. I'm amazed at how the pure open source ideals sometimes end up twisted in people's minds, so that they become indistinguishable from the dull communist propaganda. Surely, this is completely missing the point of the open source movement?

Suppose you are a politician and the uneducated hard-core conservatives want the competition out; ideally, nobody would ever immigrate. There are two options: you can kick out people whom you can control (those who follow the law), or kick out people whom you can't control (those who enter illegally). The latter option is very difficult to implement: after all, if you can't control or even identify someone, you can't kick them out. So in order to demonstrate that you listen to your voters and do something to protect them from the evil "aliens", you generate all sorts of restrictions on people who follow the law.

Aiming at evil people entering the U.S. is impossible in practice, and neither is filtering good people from bad, so of course security measures have to focus on people who live in the U.S., and I'm surprised you don't see that. There is no magic oracle that can tell you whether the person present at the border is a potential terrorist or criminal, or a honest hard-worker. Banning people based on skin color or the country of origin would be racist and against all the principles this country claims it stands for (anyway such profiling is actually taking place, people who look muslim will more often get pulled to the side for a longer check). Filtering people based on whether they have all the paperwork in place is also nonsense. Criminals with a bigger agenda will surely have all the paperwork in place. They will often have green cards, citizenship, or whatever else is necessary. Dozens of other reasons aside, terrorists can simply recruit people who won a green card lottery or who already work in the U.S. Illegal immigrants may be illegal in the sense they violated the immigration law (a stupid, covertly racist, and genuinely redneck-minded law, if you ask me) , but the fact of being illegal in this regard doesn't necessarily make them more of a national security threat. If you really want security, you have to accept that the bad guys are indistinguishable from those honest, hard-working green card holders and citizens with intelligent looks, gray hair, college education, 4.0 GPA, a dog, a house, and a stable job.

Let me offer a different perspective on all those features vs. non-features that are apparently necessary vs. unacceptable. Bigger: yes, but that's the price of having a larger screen; do you seriously like working with the 320x480 resolution on a tiny screen? Can you read a PDF document? I can actually read many PDF documents. Not all, but most. Not terribly comfortable, but feasible, if I need to. Not terribly fast to open, but it does open. Heavier: yes, but not much, you can't seriously call it heavy. Junk web browser: it runs Opera, and recently also Firefox; which of them is junk? Both browsers have their hard-core fans. No phone: yes, but haven't we become slaves of the mobile phone obsession? Do you seriously need a phone 16 hours a day, 365 days a year? I do actually own a phone, but buried deeply in my backpack. Carrying a phone with you constantly exposes you to electromagnetic impulses. Most devices, to get better connectivity and quality, will use more power. Do you like carrying a microwave transmitter in a pants pocket around your testicles or in your jacket right next to your heart? Is this really necessary? Does everyone need to get calls 24/7? Frankly, I prefer to call back. Getting calls is distracting, and I'm not a salesperson, so I don't need to have a fast response time. GPS? How often do you really use a GPS unless in your car? Unless you are a hardcore traveler, probably not too often. And if you are, iphone is perfect for you. Do you find it comfortable using iphone as a GPS while driving? is it safe? App store: the entire Internet is my app store, and the browser is my app store client. My app store beats yours in terms of cost, availability, diversity, openness, the number of applications. UI is lousy, yes. Guess what, some people focus on the content (the opened document, the dialog, the video, the email message), not on the buttons or menus. And having a better resolution is far more important than better UI. Multi-touch: what does multi-touch really gives you that you can't have without it? Camera: nice to heave, but phone cameras are just not good enough even for vacation photography. I won't even mention things like a crappy lens with no depth of field. There are some laws of physics you can't bend. But even the weight of the device itself. Light device means shaken pictures, it's as simple as that. Tech support: what do you need tech support for? Also, how much of it it free? Is it worth the monthly fees in subscription? SMS, how is this better than email? ITunes: with an open device like this, you can upload anything onto it using regular filesystem interface drag and drop, over USB or bluetooth. And if you really need to, you can write yourself a 100-liner in C# that synchronizs over wireless. I can actually do that, since I can run any code. The advantage of an open platform. Anyway, WMP may not be sexy, but it does a good job organizing music into folders and categories on the device. No decent mp3 player: what is decent? I would think mp3 has to only send the bits to the sound adapter. Actually, WMP does a pretty smooth playback.

Care to explain how it is "off-topic" to point to alternative hardware with better features in a discussion that is all about new hardware with "new" features? The way I see it, a classic example of abusing mod points to censor what you don't like.

From this never-ending iphon/ipod/zune buzz, one could get the impression that the world has only two cutting edge devices, ipod/iphone and zune. it just so happens that the fantastic features they promise to come have all been around for some time now. I just find it genuinely hard to understand why the free software community drools over the iphones, and fails to notice the availability of platforms that are superior and basically made for developers (not to mention there are a number of better devices out there). FYI, for well over a year I have owned a Windows Mobile device (IPAQ 210) with a fantastic 640x480 touch screen that beats all the ipods, zunes and other such iphones by a large margin in terms of resolution and comfort. it cost me $400, about as much as any of the other toys. It eats 32 GB memory in flash cards (allegedly even more, have not checked). Compact flash and SD, replaceable at anytime, including while the device is on. It has good-quality 802.11 radio (no flakey operation), wiht no restrictions, I can open sockets, send multicast, consume web services. It has bluetooth. It lasts for days without charging. And most importantly, it takes the latest compact editions of the .NET framework, allowing me to deploy any code I feel like to deploy on it at a press of a button in Visual Studio, bypassing the need to unlock it, use app stores or other such bizarre nonsense. I like the idea of being able to program my devices, and I use that feature constantly. And yes, it does play hd mp4 videos from youtube very smoothly. Doesn't come with a phone. And what would I need a phone for?! To pay the $100+ in monthly charges for a data plan? I pass by wifi access points so often, I don't need to think about it much. Most of the time, I get my email while carrying the device in my pocket. It boots in about a second. It does not come with GPS. Frankly, I wouldn't have noticed. Most of the time, I know where I am, and when I travel, I prefer to use a professional device such as tom tom that was made for thus purpose and has been developed and improved for a long time. And no, I don't work for hewlett-packard.

I was pointing out that writing good APIs and tools for developers is effectively part of building the OS, and there is much to be done in this regard. You are complaining that Microsoft won't build versions of its tools for Linux or that they won't port Linux tools over the bare bone NT kernel. One is orthogonal to the other. But in fact, I do agree with you that it would have been great to have all those tools ported both ways, except I don't have much faith that this will ever happen.

So, would you rather prefer to have 1000 homebrew versions of the .NET framework and DirectX, for that matter? Boy, that would be one big mess and hell of a bloat. Or better even, would you rather not have any of that, and instead let each developer reinvent the respective functionality in every application they write? What would possibly be the point of that? Actually, fewer versions of each and every library means that the best developers can spend more of a focused quality time finding bugs in it and improving it rather than spread themselves thin between the 1000 different alternatives..

OS is not for the users, it is for the developers. When was the last time your mom was pinning memory, loading a texture, or creating a security token? Applications are for the users. The job of the OS is to lure the application developers with lots of great APIs and cool new features to play with. Once the developers are there, the users will follow.

Actually, there's plenty to improve in a typical OS: making the OS more componentized, programmable, adding new layers of APIs for different functional domains, and otherwise supporting the developers that write code for that OS, so that they can be more productive and write more functional code in a fraction of time. For example, things like COM, WMI, DirectX, .NET, or the new WDF toolkit for driver development in Windows Vista. I don't see how you can separate any of this from the rest of the OS. The job of the OS is to bridge the gap between the developer and the hardware, and this is all part of it. And all these things have continued to evolve and will probably keep evolving for a very, very long time.

Mono had a lot of time to catch up, but as much as I respect the effort of the Mono team, the progress has been painfully slow. It took several years to even get the implementation of generics debugged. The last time I checked, implementation of web services (olive) was mostly one guy's job, and not even in the core system. Meanwhile, the gap is widening, and Microsoft is moving fast. At this point, nobody in the sane mind except the hardcore free software fanatics will ever choose Mono/Linux over .NET/Windows because it just makes no sense: Mono is epochs behind .NET in terms of functionality, and has negligible user base. How exactly is Mono going to catch up? Turn on a hidden antimatter quantum warp drive, or some other secred weapon from Sci-Fi novels? The Linux community has not embraced this technology, even though it was clearly a marvel of engineering and popped out just in the right moment. Indeed, some folks out there are still not sure that it "really flies". Nevermind that .NET is spreading to one platform (PCs, PDAs, gaming consoles, browsers, OS scripting, headless servers), programming languages and paradigm (dymamic languages, functional languages, you name it) after another. With this sort of attitude, surely it will never fly on Linux. How unfortunate. The Linux community had a huge head start with Java, but is blowing it big time, too. By the time this community realizes that managed languages were the key technology to focus on, .NET will be light years ahead. Who cares about superior package management if the development tools lag behind because the community has not actively promoted and developed and a single consistent modern development platform?

You seem to be forgetting that a software ecosystem does not consist only of the OS vendor, it also includes millions of developers who create software for that OS, either as contractors, or as independent contributions to the community. If those developers want to migrate, as they certainly seem to, then it is better for everyone, including the army, to do the same. Besides, good software is not written by monkeys in the basement of a factory building, but rather by talented people with enthusiasm and vision. Why would any talented person with enthusiasm and vision want to keep maintaining Windows XP for the army? It is better for the army to migrate, so that they can get a quality product built by quality software engineers. They certainly have the money to pay for that.

Windows XP is no longer being actively developed, and Microsoft cuts support for it in a few years. Upgrading to a supported and actively developed version of the OS seems like a good idea to me.