That entire concept is part of my problem. I may buy a tool for a specific job, but when I'm done, I can use that tool again and again until I decide to buy a better one. The operating system is a tool that allows me to use computer hardware. Unless the operating cannot function on new hardware, why should I be required to pay for it a second time, just to continue using what I already bought? I'm sure the record industry salivates every time they hear about this, because I'm certain they would love to be able to require customers to purchase one CD/DVD/BluRay for every device on which it will run (in fact, that is fundamental to the license insanity that services like Netflix must deal with all the time.) Ebook publishers are hoping/trying to lock their stuff down the same way, even to the point of making it difficult (if not impossible) to even lend an ebook to a friend. Even though I write software for a living, I don't believe that requiring a customer to purchase a new license just because their hardware was destroyed in some disaster (or whatever) makes any sense except for plain, unadulterated greed and it is legal because they are large enough to get away with it.

I wonder how long a service like Steam would have lasted if they tied the purchase of each game to a specific piece of hardware...

And claiming that we knew Microsoft's history does not change the fact that we have often no choice but to use Windows due to our customers requirements and/or the fact that specific software we need to use is only available for that platform. But once we have it working, a forced upgrade is wrong. I doubt anything less than a personal visit from a deity will change my belief.

Not just a new motherboard, but if a re-install is needed for any reason, it could well be impossible to get back to the necessary patch/service pack level. That is no longer possible for people who need to use NT4 because none of the update sites allow IE3 (which shipped on NT4) to access them any more, making impossible to get updates even if they were available. The same will be true of the browsers that shipped on your XP install disks.

As for a new motherboard, that may require an entirely new license according to Microsoft (I've called them about this more than once.) To stick with my tool analogy, that's kind of like Craftsman demanding that I buy all new tools (or perhaps new workbench and storage systems FOR my tools) because I've rebuilt my work room after a hurricane. For my computer it was purchasing a replacement motherboard [after a lightning strike] that was as identical as I could find to the original -- but since it wasn't PRECISELY IDENTICAL, Microsoft required me to purchase a new XP license. So, businesses that want to keep running XP should buy up as many IDENTICAL hardware platforms as possible, for use as spares later when the current stuff breaks down, otherwise their licenses are likely to not work on replacement hardware.

Of course, that's given the existing licensing scheme (an appropriately nefarious sounding word, eh?) But we all know Microsoft is a reasonable company and they'll probably make it very easy to reinstall XP on any similar hardware with any license without requiring on line (or telephone) activation so that they don't alienate customers who don't want to pay to upgrade everything they own for Win 7/8 compatibility. Right?

I, too, have a grandfathered unlimited plan and Verizon told me just a couple weeks ago that I still needed to pay to use tethering. I looked at some of the apps available, but they all seemed to require a rooted phone and I'm not comfortable with that yet.

BUT then I discovered that my phone (Droid X) and tablet (Xoom) can share the internet using their bluetooth capabilities and Verizon doesn't seem to know or care. I know nothing about the speed/performance of bluetooth for network sharing, by the phone's 3G really isn't very fast anyway, so the tablet seems to work as well as the phone, to me.

At the tiny company where I work, we've discovered that many of the software packages we own simply will not install under Windows 7. If Microsoft somehow manages to force us to stop using XP, they are also forcing us to purchase [sometimes very expensive] upgrades. In addition, we often still develop and support 16 bit applications and many of those tools will even (or EVER) run under Windows 7. Of course, Microsoft offers an option for Win 7 Pro and above -- a free Virtual XP! But how long will that last if they are trying to put XP "out to pasture?"

I have no problem with Microsoft abandoning XP, but I fervently believe that the moment a company decides to abandon a product, the product should become public domain, open source, or at least be transferred to an entity that is willing to maintain and support it. Software companies should not have the right to unilaterally revoke our ability to use their tools any more than a physical tool company should be allowed to come take back that reliable old drill we bought 11 years ago, just because they don't want to support that model any longer.

Forced upgrade fees are wrong, bordering on criminal.

When I was in the USAF in the '80s I was maintaining a system written by some folks from Sandia Labs in Albequerque. Apparently, two of them were having a bit of an affair (when they visited our site, at least) and they'd taken to leaving notes for each other in the code comments. While those comments didn't help me resolve issues with the code (and there were quite a few) they did occasionally provide some welcome humorous relief while searching for bugs. Especially when a few were found and we tried to match them up without any context or sequence info...

Good thing their spouses weren't cleared to see the code...

I assumed he meant that Windows 8 was only bad if it was used on an actual computer. I figure he meant that using it on toys like phones, tablets and xboxes will be great, though.

I don't know about that. I went out to breakfast yesterday and could hear the two cooks conversing. However, I didn't recognize a single complete sentence and was forced to struggle with the pronunciations of many of the words in order to comprehend them. When they spoke with a waitress or the manager, their words and sentences were much clearer and seemed more meaningful, but with each other they had some sort of linguistic shorthand that they used for their own conversations. I believe that grammar is far less important in conversation than it is in correspondence (and to me that includes pointless crap like tweeting, too.)

Only the name is wrong with radio buttons...

Why? On a radio you have a set of choices, of which you may select only one at any given time. That sounds precisely like a set of radio buttons to me. Most computer users have had exposure to a radio, too, in the dashboard of their (or their parents') car, although the radio display now shows only the currently selected item (digital display) instead of the whole list (dial). Perhaps the name "radio buttons" would be more appropriate if the list of choices were hidden and the user was forced to cycle through them?

(though what a wrench has to do with settings, I don't know)

You do know that wrenches are used to make adjustments to settings, especially of things like valves, when the frequency of adjustment doesn't justify the extra cost of a permanent control wheel? They're used to adjust tension and spacing at several places within a car/truck and in general to "tune" the "settings" of a vehicle (or other things.). They can also be used simply to (dis)assemble things. Personally, I'm a bit more confused about how a gear represents customer adjustable settings, because changing the gearing on things is far, far more complicated than using a wrench to open/close a valve a bit more. But, since our physical world has few things as adjustable as software, we either invent a new, arbitrary symbol and get everyone to adopt it or pick something similar, like a wrench.

"iconic glyphs whose origins are shrouded in mystery to many"

That describes our alphabet, numbers, and other writing glyphs rather well, doesn't it? If glyphs created within the past 50 years are already bosolete and need to be changed, then our alphabet must be desperately in need of the same, no?

If implementing new libraries'n'stuff using someone else's APIs is a problem, it seems to me that a thing like wine and maybe even virtual machine software might need to pay license fees to the originators. Of course, the wine project may have an API license agreement with Microsoft, or Microsoft may have explicitly made their APIs freely available (or whatever applies here) but somehow, that doesn't sound like the Microsoft I've heard about over the years.

Until I can:

1. 1. Use my Mark I Eyeballs to choose the depth of focus and
2. 2. Move my head to see around something on screen

then it is not a 3D film. At best it is a sad imitation of 3D.

As long as the filmmaker controls the focal plane in a movie, it cannot be considered any more 3D than a more traditional movie. In fact, if a so called "2D" movie contains enough information for a machine to convert it to this poorly simulated "3D" then the original was effectively 3D already. While I applaud the research into making 3D movies, TV, and computer interfaces a reality, so far I've seen one that even approaches 3D by meeting my #2 criteria above (Johnny Lee's Wii hack). However, the viewer still has zero control over the focal plane and therefore, it is STILL NOT 3D. The focal plane issue is, IMO, the primary cause of headaches by the current weak 3D imitation systems. I'm sure someone will solve it someday, but probably not in what remains of my lifetime.

I think this issue is mostly gone now, but for many years the underlying X window system had a rather massive weakness that Windows did not share: Changing to a new video card and sometimes only changing a monitor could render the graphical system on linux unusable. Then one would need to know many arcane things like monitor timings, scan rates, etc. and manually update the Xconfig (I think that's the file, but you know what I mean) file by hand, hoping that it was correct and wouldn't actually damage the hardware (which the comments warned could happen if one made a mistake.) Windows would simply fall back to a set of relatively standard VGA drivers any time things changed in a way it didn't (yet) understand. I discovered this when my first linux/X system had a monitor die and then would only boot into an emergency text-only mode with the new one I bought -- but when I booted Windows (I had swappable hard drives) it just came up as a VGA and asked me to configure the monitor and/or install a new driver. THAT is the way as many things as possible need to work if linux is ever to be accepted by the general population.

That's close to what it is for Windows users, too. BUT... if this happened on a mail server machine, there is SO MUCH MORE than point'n'click after a scratch OS install that it isn't funny. And that doesn't count the pieces of the mail system that have been discontinued, replaced by something different, massively changed so that old config no longer works, etc. The same may sometimes be true of end-user programs as well.

Not necessarily. A business values stability, so once a server is working correctly, one would prefer to apply security updates only in order to have as little affect on stability as possible. However, I've encountered security patches that required me to install a new version of the compiler (and sometimes, additional NEW language compilers/interpreters) and once, even the new compiler wouldn't work on my nice, stable server. Everything needed to be upgraded by hand, by discovering and downloading source packages one at a time and eventually, the whole thing stopped working because one of the libraries required by the mail system needed to be updated for one of the security patches and then it didn't work with the mail software! If I had been willing to completely re-install the operating system every year, then restore all of the mail users, their mail, all of the mail server config -- assuming none of that changed (Ha!) -- and then test all of those changes or in other words, spend at least a day or two with NO MAIL service, then several more days testing and debugging.

Ahem. Sore subject with me after an actual automatic software update replaced dovecot 1.x with dovecot 2.x without warning me that the 1.x configuration was totally incompatible with and different from the 2.x build.

My personal beef with Linux over the past several years is the rather large difficulty in getting support for an older version. I can still install Windows XP from a 10 year old CDROM, connect to the internet and have it update itself to the latest version of WinXP. Try that with a ten year old version of linux! Now, I'm not saying it is IMPOSSIBLE (though sometimes it has proved to be so) to get ten year old linux updated, but you are very, VERY unlikely to find any apt or yum or whatever software repositories being maintained or even still on line for those old linux versions. Linux update support seems to be all about "recent" -- somewhere between "now" and "12-24 months ago." If you want "now" updates, you must get them from the developer directly (for example, the latest bind updates take a fair amount of time to appear in the Ubuntu repositories.) If your system, for whatever reason (e.g. you think it is stable and want it to keep running for a while) gets a bit too far behind in updates, then you're out of luck and need to install the next version of the OS from scratch and then reinstall all of your stuff (much like going from XP to Win7) or you can go ultra-tech-geek and scour the internet for updated, but still compatible source packages that you can manually build and install to replace your aging packages.

I'm sure this isn't the only (or even the primary) reason for poor linux desktop adoption, but it is a factor and has become an support issue for more than a few.

Now that Mozilla is releasing new versions of Firefox every time the add-on writers get caught up, it is no surprise they're claiming performance improvements!