Can't he just build a Faraday cage or something around his rig to alter his RF transmissions?

Can anyone give an example of when Microsoft has ever innovated? Why don't they stick to what they are good at? Copying innovation and bullying with monopoly anti-competition? It has worked pretty well so far. How are they going to shift to an innovative environment?

I love my Sennheiser PC300 G4ME Earbuds. They cut out a lot of noise. They also have great bass and the mic (not boom) works great. They are in ear, but they are SOOOO comfortable, even over long periods of time -- > 24 hour gaming sessions and I hardly notice them. And they are around $50.

Right, but what is there not already a parser for in CPAN? And if you are handy with perl, what kind of comparison is difficult?

Why do we need to write another perl?

Great, now you can mine planets in a over simplified mini-game for hours ... together.

Why do we need studies like this to state the obvious? I mean I guess this is good to convince the unwashed masses, but all of the people I consider friends know this by simple observation.

Hehe, that is my real world experience as well. This highlights one of my favorite parts of open source. Because each line of code is "reviewed" by potentially thousands of people who are actually interested in the code for themselves as much as for the community (instead of one or a few coders that really don't want to give the man their full brilliance and really just want to go home and watch TV :-D), open source tends to create cathedrals of brilliant code. Sourceforge (particularly large known projects, small ones can be very sketchy) is a great source for good code.

Of course I am a curmudgeonly old open source advocate, so I may be a bit biased. ;-p

But...with such a long and varied history of monopoly power, deception and downright dirty tricks, why would anyone trust Microsoft again when there are so many good free alternatives that have open communities and standards. Don't these guys get it? Focus on the XBox. There is still a market for a closed (and even evil) system here.

(Granted, I am a grizzled old Unix advocate that would have said this 20 years ago as well. :-D)

Uh, isn't Ubuntu technically Linux? I do agree that Linux was for pros in years gone by, so you had to be extremely proficient (i.e. be able to google and understand) to use it. I do believe that many people over-emphasized the problems though. MS did package things up nicely and get things to work well (through constant bullying and monopoly powers). But like you pointed out now there is Ubuntu. My point is not is MS viable, because it clearly is. It is whether it is relevant or not. With the exception of games, I do not use or need MS for anything (and quite honestly couldn't bear using without Cygwin). And as for the games, that is primarily due to MS's monopoly bullying. I used to be one of those Linux heads that was like, "OMG, when will MS die." But now I am more like, "can I shell into Unix? OK, works for me." It is the relevancy of MS that I am talking about.

Isn't MS pretty much irrelevant now anyway. They can't really compete in large computer clusters (you can find some cases, but it is due to marketing FUD and leads to a severely crippled system typically), and it look like they aren't even trying to compete in the small personal computing device market: smart phones, pads, etc... How it still has it's strangle hold on the PC market, I can't comprehend (except that there really is something to marketing, isn't there). I do use MS in some cases, but the OS is irrelevant at this point. I refuse to use software that is not open source (except games. Damn you MS and your evil business practices. But there should be a solution for that at some point. Qt, OpenGL and Wine already does a decent job to bridge this gap). Cygwin makes MS bearable IMO (WTH would I do without a bash shell and perl). I think MS needs to focus on the XBox where they have a good chance to use monopoly powers to control the market.

This is old news. The Onion already thoroughly covered this. :-D
http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatically-cut-agencys-cos,19753/ :-D

My point exactly. So, Microsoft's bullying, monopoly powers are significantly reduced already.

I like how Google is clear winner in cooperation and in not suing anybody.

We don't need any more Microsoft "magic" in the future of computing. I am thankful they are bowing out here. Due to their apparent lack in innovation and resultant lack of monopoly destruction, we the users have a real chance of improvements in personal computer interfaces and OS.