"Caveat: I didn't know about the alt key in 2007." What sort of moron are you that you claim to be a tech writer yet never once, even accidentally, pressed the 'alt' key in Windows. It takes a whole special sort of stupid to be that ignorant for that long on even the most basic features of Windows. I suppose all this irritation is because you never saw the mouse sitting beside the keyboard until 2005 so you were using the keyboard only until this point, yes? *facepalm*

I had an idea to fix this:

http://piestar.net/2009/06/24/idea-fixing-the-email-system/

There are many better ways outside micropayments - which would add up on a large system (such as a forum or social networking site).

Is that 5% sent is spam, or 5% that is delivered is spam? There are layers of spam blockers before any mail even gets remotely near anyones inbox.

It was lemmings with the 'paws' button iirc.

"Or if there's an open-source clone of your company's software, surely there's nothing stopping your company from, er, competing with it?"

Writing a copy of something is easy. Creating something new and original is hard. Any decent programmer can write a Tetris clone in under a day, yet the original probably took a much longer time to think up, prototype, design etc.

Same with other FOSS knockoffs (like Frozen Bubble) - the hard work has been done, all you need to do is make a copy of the working commercial version and you have some freedom at a fraction of the effort required by the original developer.

Make your own unique software, sure, but don't pretend ripping someone off is somehow fair competition. Come up with your own ideas - as all your free clone will do is kill the original development and thus cause the project to stagnate as there will be no more reference designs to copy.

It's the FOSS version of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Your not alone! http://piestar.net/2009/07/16/apple-the-new-microsoft/

It's become the Internets equivelant of Fox News. Accolades, comments and opinions are not based on ideas or content, they are instead based on the company suggesting them and the party line. It's just a fanboy echo-chamber hell bent on promoting an agenda, with the whole concept of discussing an idea or product based on merit being entirely alien.

What do you expect if programmers drive the development process? These things simply are not important to them.

You're an idiot. 1: You can trademark a word provided it is not relevant to the field it is in. Windows is a trademark. Apple is a trademark. 2: Wiki is a word, Encyclopedia is a word. Wikiencyclopedia I don't think is trademarked but you may have difficulties (IANAL). Since 'pedia' isn't a word, and Wikipedia isn't a concatenation of Wiki and Encyclopedia I really fail to see your point. 3: Micro is a word. Software is a word. So I can trademark MicrosoftArt according to you and be 100% safe from getting sued?

I know, it's not like MS had a 3d compositing demo, complete with wobbly windows, over six years ago ... wait, they did. http://piestar.net/2009/03/25/compiz-microsoft-and-originality/ The amount of original things that Linux has come up with I can count on the fingers of one hand.

Claiming I am posting things false while cherry-picking a massively skewed and biased source to back up your opinion is pretty rich. Actual usage statistics in the *real world* peg Linux usage at about 0.5%, Mac usage at about 10% and the rest is Windows (with a few percent for other random devices). I suppose it is an improvement from the 0.3% from a couple of years ago, but still nothing like the figure you provided. Unless you want to play 'that game', in which case I could try to pull figures from the Windows Update page and claim they are represntative of real world usage. I stick by my claims.

The difference is nobody is actually using Linux which gives the claims a certain level of credence. Oh, that and also the fact that people freely admit Windows has faults rather than feeling the need to 'debunk' every single negative opinion.

Earliest Photoshop I used was 5.0, and GIMP is still miles behind that, even though it is over a decade old. That's a lot of catching up to do!

But years ago people like you were saying exactly the same thing - Linux is perfect, it has no problems, your only problem is 'it's not windows'. Yet a couple of a years down the line somehow the problems get admitted to in the name of 'try it now, it's perfect'. No doubt in a couple of years you'll be saying the same thing. 'It used to suck, but it's so much better now'.

Thats the thing. If they don't like it they can opt out at any time they want - there are plenty of technical fixes to solve this problem, so why are they resorting to lawyers?