I just tested the latest beta of IE 9 with our application and it beats out all the other browsers. Our web application heavily depends on image display and canvas and the difference is likely due to IE9's rendering integration with DirectX. If you are looking at writing web apps that heavily use Canvas, IE9 is going to be more than relevant.

- Time spent surfing the web for things unrelated to work
- Time spent surfing the web for things you think is work related
- Time spent trying out new software that is not associated with any kind of formal company effort
- Time spent talking to people about non work related items
- Number of times you sent the executives call to voice mail

and while it does seem to have some better features than my iPhone, none of them were exciting enough for me to even consider looking at it. I love my iPhone and don't see any reason to replace it with anything else until another revolution occurs.

Reactos may actually catch up providing a suitable replacement

Actually, there is something worse than managers who want to deploy clearcase - it is developers that hold onto a clearcase deployment when managers want to move to perforce or SVN to improve productivity. *cry*

There is no 64 bit agenda - 64 bit has been here for quite a while and offers real benefits to even the regular consumer. The cost of supporting 32 bit and 64 bit simultaneously is quite high for both software and hardware companies. This cost results in either higher priced products or worse - lower quality products to preserve the profit margin. While few people actually need 3 gigs of ram, the disk subsystem is still the slowest part of the system and using ram for cache helps a lot (at least until SSDs replace spinning disks). Windows 7 is turning out to be a good OS that everyone will standardize on (home PCs, enterprise PCs, workstations and servers). It is really unfortunate that Microsoft doesn't demonstrate more leadership here and cut 32 bit completely. While Microsoft has been making much better technical decisions recently, the quality of their business decisions has really dropped and they will continue to struggle with finding growth (and this is independent of the economic issues we face)

My first reaction to this is wondering why anyone would decide to write their own date/time code. I would expect there to be several good options for open source date/time code that is mature and proven to work right.

Nobody can answer your question if it is worth it to change operating systems because we don't understand your business. All changes have an associated cost and that must be measured in terms of value to the business. You claim to have a technical reason for changing CPUs - but is that backed by a justification for the business? I will assume so, but part of our responsibility as a professional is to always keep the business's best interest in mind.

Your second question about what you will gain or lose is definitely appropriate because that gives you the information you need to make the business decision. While everyone likes to use the latest and greatest, doing so does not always make the most business sense. Good luck!