It'd be funny if Verizon used this as an advertising slam against the iPhone and ATT (though of course they won't). I wonder if something like this could be done against CDMA?

Union Aerospace
Weyland-Yutani
Cyberdyne Systems
Umbrella Corporation
Omni Consumer Products
Wolfram & Hart
Yoyodyne
Blue Sun
Buy-n-Large
Veidt Industries
Soylent Corporation
Monstanto

While the Right Thing resulted from the lawsuit, it's funny how it hurt Sun and Java more than it hurt Microsoft, which was Microsoft's real goal anyway.

The thing is, I remember around that time that Sun's CEO Scott McNealy was constantly ranting and raving about how the goal of Java was to take over the desktop and specifically "Kill Microsoft". Launching a frontal assault against Microsoft (especially at that time) was foolish, and look at what happened. If the good folks at Sun had kept their mouths shut, maybe they would have actually succeeded.

You can applaud the result of the lawsuit, but so many comments on this article reflect a resulting public perception that is not exactly favorable to Sun and Java.

Right on the Oddfellows home page (http://www.ioof.org) they mention belief in a "Supreme Being" as a tenet, which throws them out as a candidate for the grandparent poster's non-religious example person. Every club I've seen so far that wasn't dedicated to a specific hobby was religious in nature.

... that they can do a software upgrade of this kind adding a major feature such as this, remotely, without "bricking" it, and without the ability to add more CPU or RAM. Amazing job, guys!

Too bad Doug Henning isn't still around to promote it.

I haven't been following the discussions about this; thanks for the link.

If Microsoft wasn't hostile to Java then maybe Sun wouldn't have needed to do those stupid shenanigans to get Java to run halfway decently on Windows; it could even have been included with Windows (not the bastardized version Microsoft made, but the true, licensed Sun version).

But I don't really blame Microsoft too much for this; I blame Sun for declaring Java a "Windows Killer" from the get-go. The idea was that you'd run all your apps in Java in a web browser, and this would "Kill Windows". Yeah, declaring war on Microsoft was REALLY smart. I can't really blame MS for not going along with them on that. Probably just another example of Scott McNealy running his mouth.

(Of course it didn't help that Java was slow as hell back in the beginning; it isn't now, but the damage to its reputation is done).

Do you have some citations for this? Not being a smart-ass, I'm genuinely interested in reading more about this if it's true.

Yeah, that's what I had to do; but then, I'm not a typical end user and that was not a typical situation. The point was about driver compatibilty, and that that such a thing is actually possible with Windows. The rest is all beside the point.

Windows backward compatibility is required because the average end user just wants to continue to be able to run their old programs when they buy a new computer with Windows 7 on it, and don't want to muck around with downloading "non-free" NVidia drivers, compiling kernel wrappers or running a script to do so, etc. Some distros make this pretty easy, but not all and it's an extra step that could potentially confuse or trip up the end user who doesn't care about the politics of Open Source.

A little sluggish but not too bad if you max out the RAM to 1GB.

Not only that, in a pinch I can use a friggin' Windows XP video driver in Windows 7, which I needed to do to get 3D to work on a Dell C610 - that's a Pentium III running Windows 7. As easy as it is to knock Windows for its faults, that's pretty damn good compatability.

Now, go on the Linux Kernel Mailing List and suggest that the Linux kernel maintain a consistent binary API and see what happens...

Probably not directly but they make adapters; I've no doubt that you could put a Chevy engine into a Ford and vice/versa.

Check out the Monster Miata (http://www.monstermiata.com/) to see the kind of crazy things that are possible!