Which leads you to wonder why the headline contains the phrase "with the aid of the Conservative Party".

Hmmm. I couldn't even be bothered to read your example error message, in a thread about error messages. I'm deeply unconvinced that any user will do so. Someone else had the right answer above - eliminate as many error messages as possible, ignoring likely transient problems (like network outages) until they become critical, and log them somewhere that an admin (or better still, power user) can see and read them when necessary. Alerting the admin or power user via SMS or email is also a good plan. Logging to a database and including stuff like IP address, error class, code etc. such that you can query the results and look for patterns is also a good idea. Those patterns can be used to help you determine what are transient or hardware problems, and what are problems with your UX (and what are bugs!) Essentially, admit defeat on the error messages, and try to solve a different problem; how do we stop our software getting the way of our user's objectives.

It isn't really the pervasive multithreading that does the job on responsiveness for BeOS, and nor does having the "two threads per window" thing (which I think is what the poster is referring to in terms of "pervasive multithreading) avoid "programmer's tricks" - in fact, you have to be just as careful as if you were developing with Windows, and span up a background thread. One issue for BeOS developers was the amount of hard thinking you had to do to perform simple tasks in a pervasively multi-threaded environment, when you're still having to deal with all the pitfalls of lock-based programming.

However, taking only a few cycles to spin up or kill a thread (rather than the 10,000 plus it takes Windows), or perform a context switch, is a significant help. (There used to be an interesting article benchmarking those things on the Be website, but I can't find it any more).

MS have also added some more interesting stuff to the scheduler in Vista, which helps with uninterrupted sound or movie playback, so at least some of that stuff is possible without a complete redesign.