While that's technically true, it's not exactly what happened. As Be moved from the Hobbit processor to the PowerPC then to x86 processors, and in some cases from one version to another, they broke backwards compatibility numerous times, more often than not intentionally for the good of the OS. Some legacy things did transition from one version of BeOS to another, but the engineering managers didn't like to transition a huge amount of [bad] legacy code, they preferred to instead to rewrite a lot of things to solve the problems the earlier versions had. Of course, this has nothing to do with Haiku which is designed to recreate BeOS R5, the last official revision of BeOS.

Actually - the US Army IS migrating to Vista right now.

Please..all underlying architecture has not changed from xp to vista, even though they want you to believe this...and for them to correct the wrapper on xp, would be trivial, however, they are testing the waters about phasing out xp, and want to see what the backlash will be like, seeing as no one wants vista garbage, and maybe even no windows7!

I prefer, being given the opportunity of just paying a yearly fee to keep getting updates on a system that runs properly compared to their new bloated versions of vista etc... too bad no one can pick it up like a linux distro and start their own version of windows...

Except Apple's hardware is just commodity PC hardware, but with EFI (which is an Intel standard, BTW) instead of BIOS. Yes, they're designing their own hardware, but with the same parts everyone else is using.

Also, have you used a WinMo phone? While some GUI elements aren't the most finger-friendly, it's not just the Windows UI dumped on a handheld device, and it hasn't been since 2000 or so. (Actually, only devices sold as having WinCE had that UI - Handheld PCs and Palm-size PCs. The PocketPC (which became the Windows Mobile PocketPC, which is what (via PocketPC Phone Edition) became the current high-end WinMo devices, now known as Windows Mobile Professional (and PocketPCs are now WinMo Classic) has its own UI. And that's not even talking about WinMo smartphones.)

I would sort of hope they look like orbitals, the classical model isn't really all that bad.

The true cost of releasing a patch is not in compiling and distributing the fix. The money is spent on verification. By not releasing the patch to XP and w2k my estimates are that Microsoft is saving man-years in verification.

It's extremely unlikely to affect the end user. Pretty much anyone should be able to use ZFS in theory (and probably should - it's far ahead of anything else). But the GPL2 license that Linux is released under requires anything linked into the kernel to also be GPL2, and ZFS's license, while apparently similar, isn't actually the GPL2 license, hence it doesn't get integrated. So you either have to support an additional OS (as the GP was talking about) or fudge it to work with Linux, i.e. by using FUSE. I say 'fudge', I've no idea how well it works with FUSE and would be interested to hear a comment from anyone who has used it in anger in this way. My impression was that you wouldn't want to be doing this in a production environment, but I might be out of date.

Actually - I am not missing that fact at all (being an employee of the outfit in question - I should know).

My point is that while the business of IT for the Government is to safeguard national secrets - busine$$ is in it to protect whatever they could be researching and developing at that time.

For instance - the level of trust placed in someone who works in the Systems department is fairly high due to the fact that they could, if less than scrupulous, read the email and or files of the CEO, CIO, and CFO of their company and sell that info to their competitors.

I know that it is apples and oranges - but just as damaging to each entity involved.

Try working for the US Government. If you are placed in a "position of trust", they not only check your credit report - they also will investigate your background and criminal record.

I have often wondered why it is that businesses that hire IT guys off of the street without doing any meaninful background check place them into positions that could potentially cripple/destroy them.

Instead of explicit.bing.com it should have been bada.bing.com

Everytime we have a connectivity hiccup I am flooded with calls from our users asking "Is the Internet broken?"

It takes everything in my power not to say "Yes. The Internet is, in fact, broken"

Says in the japanese to english translation (thank you worldlingo):
As for the DS user, it is possible to connect with the maximum of 16 people (16 DS) with local wireless network. Guarantee carry-over factor is approximately 10 meters, but depending upon circumstance furthermore it spreads. The high response rate where it is necessary for the communication game play of real time to be guaranteed, IEEE802.11

This sounds cool and I wonder how hackable this would be. I remember the stupid link cables for other portable game consoles.