Actually while you're downloading a pirate copy of XP you should just download the WGA cracks as well...I don't think Microsoft is stull updating WGA to circumvent the cracks anymore, so whatever versions are out there will work pretty well.

Who are they going to target. Across RIM Apple and Android you have a lot of people who are happy with their phones.

Windows Mobile 7 will probably have a place in other types of devices which use a ROM based OS, like Thin Clients and portable media devices.

I suspect Microsoft will target RIM/iPhone/Andoid users by promoting the ease of development and seamless integration with other Microsoft software (as usual). From what I've heard, it's pretty easy to build and cross compile WIndows Mobile apps using Visual Studio (I think the free Express edition may even be able to do it). There also seems to be a lot of stupid things you can do with ActiveSync that aren't as slick on other devices (like copying and installing software or syncing Outlook). There will probably also be a lot of Windows technologies as well like CardSpace that will only be available on Windows Mobile.

Of course that's all my own speculation...

No, it's not easy to see the "community", but you see those big corporate buildings? That *was* your money

That's good because they also spend a lot of that money developing new hardware in those buildings. The community can gather their source codes all they want but it won't produce a next generation GPU antime soon.

Even without the source code, hardcore hardware/driver enthusiasts can dissasemble the binary blob and create their own binary patches for it. They've been doing it on Windows for years to produce driver packs like the Omega Radeon Drivers and it doesn't seem to hinder them that they don't have the source code. When NVIDIA bought 3dfx and killed off development of all their XP drivers there were like 5 different third party driver packs available within a week or two.

Of course having the source code would make it 100x easier, but you don't have to give up just because you don't have it available.

You could cause a blue screen in 95/98/Me by simply ejecting a CD-ROM while data was still being read off of it (the error wasn't a full stop like it is in NT and you could resume the system's operation).

The current ATI Catalyst or NVIDIA ForceWare drivers can't even support cards that were sold four years ago, and they are supposed to be a "unified" driver set. If the hardware vendor's own tools don't even work with all their products then how is Microsoft supposed to release a set of diagnostics that will accurately test all of the different hardware?

Companies aren't making money paying programmers to write diagnostic tools. The main reason hardware vendors release diagnostics is mainly to speed up and validate warranty requests. Microsoft doesn't warranty any of the hardware so they don't gain any advantage from writing hardware diagnostics for hardware vendors. It would be a never ending battle to keep up with all of their different implementations (if they could even obtain those details).

Most people don't even run tools like verifier to anyalyze a driver issue so they probably won't run a long in-depth hardware diagnostic either. How many people do you know that regularily run things like the Windows memory diagnostic or 'chkdsk /r'?

Where are these hidden privacy settings, all I see is a `Pop-up Blocker', a `Phishing Filter' `and Manage-Addons'

Check under the shield icon on the main toolbar or use ALT to show the menu bar and look under 'Tools'. There's should be an options for 'InPrivate Filtering' and 'InPrivate Browsing'. InPrivate Browsing will start a private browsing session which will not be saved. The main complaint is that you have to manually select it every time you open IE (or create a shortcut for 'iexplore.exe -private').

So does that delete cookies, temporary files, search and form history and download history like Firefox does? Because then it's not even comparable.

Go to 'Tools'->'Internet Options' and click the 'Delete' button or else go to 'Tools'->'Delete Browsing History'. Under there you can select what you want Internet Explorer to clear (temporary files, history, cookies, form data, etc). Then you can go 'Tools'->'Internet Options' and set the 'Delete Browsing History on Exit' and it will delete the items you selected every time.

And some of your examples above are just silly. Why should a user expect their sound settings to affect their ability to play music in the background?

CD Audio is 16-bit with a sample rate is 44.1KHz. If you have the audio processsor's sound quality set higher (like 48KHz) the audio stream will have to be resampled/upsampled somewhere along the way. This is a problem I've encountered even with audio software on PC's.

Changing the sample/bit rate of audio on the fly would probably require additional hardware. The PS3 is not for audio work, so it wouldn't be cost effective to include it just for playing audio CD's at a higher sample rate.

which Sony probaby wouldn't include, because the PS3 isn't an audio editing platform. Including

I'm not afraid of the registry and use it for a lot of things, but there's no need to manually edit the registry to enable/disable startup items when there are easy to use GUI tools included with Windows. MSCONFIG is pretty popular and easy to figure out. A really easy troubleshooting step is to have them hide all Microsoft startup entries and then hit "Disable All". Then you can slowly work back and re-enable any third party entries that you discover you actually need. You can also edit the startup items fairly easily under the Windows Defender control panel. Any other entries related to drivers and services can be edited through their appropriate MMC snap-ins and are under the Administrative Tools section of the control panel.

I also usually like to install Mike Lin's Startup Control Panel on people's systems so they can find it easily and it has a pretty solid interface for editing startup items. SysInternals autoruns is the most powerful startup editor but is a bit too advanced for some people to use (since they can disable a lot of things they probably have no idea about like WinLogon modules).

That's pretty crazy. I've never noticed that before, but I've been keeping my Macs around too. I don't even use them at all, and some are definately too old to be used for anything practical.

Still...I just can't bring myself to throw them away, I don't know why...

We are stuck on PowerPC because of an old PowerPC only application, that all of our data is in

You should take a look at PPC emulators for x86. I've actually been playing with SheepShaver on my Windows box and it emulates a PPC well enough on my core 2 duo that I was able to pack up my old PPC Mac systems and run the software I need in there. I'm running Mac OS 9.2.2 though...I have no clue how well it would run OS X. IIRC PearPC was supposed to be better at running OS X when I was reading up on it.

It was a bit of a pain to get it setup initially. The Windows version of the emulator is available here. You also need a working Mac OS ROM image, which you have to find online or dump from one of your PPC Mac systems. There's an excellent torrent available called "Mac Emulation Kit" which contains a lot of good files you might want to get started.

I'm pretty sure either the IE 5 or 6 (or both) installers included Flash Player as one of the installable options which was visible under custom setup and enabled as part of the default IE install. Flash Player also does ship with non-OEM versions of Windows, I think XP ships with the Flash Player 8 ActiveX (check the "%WinDir%\Downloaded Program Files" directory). There are even Microsoft updates packages which update the Flash Player and are available on Windows Update. You might have seen the ActiveX notification to install the updated Flash Player ActiveX control, but could probably still view the Flash content if you don't install the update.

Microsoft has nothing against Flash Player. Before Silverlight, they had no competing product other than Liquid Motion (which was killed off a long time ago). Flash is a very popular format and IE looks better to the end user if they don't have to install it. They probably also have some kind of deal with Adobe.

There's no complex process involved in wiring a light fixture that is beyond the capabilities of an apprentice electrician. It's not beyond the capabilities of any guy who can follow directions and connect three wires to screws. There's also little or no risk of your house catching fire even if he wires it completely wrong. You should have a fire proof box, ground wire, and circuit breaker to prevent a fire from at various places where one might start from bad wiring.

It's overkill to hire a master electrician to wire a single light fixture, and he would probably send his apprentice to do it anyway.

It would be like hiring a Dell service tech at $200+/hr to install a stick of memory in your computer. Yes you might damage a component, but the process is simple enough that you know you won't.

RealBasic, like Delphi is a great product which is often overlooked. RealBasic supports full OO code, has a nice IDE and form designer, better implementations of most of the VB classes and function, and it compiles programs for Windows, Mac (OS X and Carbon), and Linux.

For some reason Real Software never really markets their product at all, and they seem to be putting less and less effort into it. Although the RB OO system is superior, the RB documentation is not. The level of detail and even up to date information is far below MSDN, and the online community sites are not much better. I think that is a huge blow for people who are trying to migrate to RB, especially VB programmers trying to grasp the OO model.

It's a shame that people put out excellent developer tools and have such poor marketing. Realbasic is much more powerful than VB, and probably would be a great solution for many people. But only if they hear about it...