I think this mentality is still alive in the Linux world, even though the age of the internet makes it unnecessary to wait in line for hours. As soon as a new version of a program comes out or a new distro (e.g. Ubuntu) comes out, everyone has to get it right away (usually crashing the server in Ubuntu's case), even though the old version is working perfectly fine.

You can see this on a distro level as well, where it seems like all the major distros made KDE 4.0 the default even though it wasn't quite ready yet, just because it was the newest thing.

And like Microsoft, Apple also patents ideas with clear prior art. Take a look at Daniel Stenberg's post about two cases where Apple patented ideas that were included in Rockbox years before.

My mother loves using skype and google talk to communicate with her granddaughter on the other side of the country.

She would never go back to dialup, knowing that she could no longer video chat.

I wonder how many older people don't even know that such services are available, and how much they would enjoy using them?

Thank you, Mr Shatner.