I had a DMD5620 in my dorm room in 1989. My roommate called it "the Beast".

Having been involved with open source at Microsoft, I'd guess that the real reason for the delay was to "scrub" it to make sure that no intellectual property was inadvertently being given away.

It's a good article, and well-worth reading. But it bears only a marginal resemblence to the teaser headline CmdrTaco has slapped on it...

When you search for words, you get hits with words. If you want to search for phrases, put the words in quotes. When I search for the phrase "Windows worse than OSX", I only get one hit on both Google and on Bing -- so it's no surprise that this single site isn't found in all of the hits for pages that contain each of the words "Windows" "worse" "than" "OSX"

Go down fighting!

While that was probably the right decision at the time it was made (Windows CE is over ten years old, after all), I think that most people here at MS would do it differently if creating a new mobile OS today.

I wouldn't be surprised if Steve Jobs actually believes that Apple invented GUIs, MP3 players and smart phones. In general, no big company has truly original ideas -- or if they do, it's in a research arm like PARC or MSR and the ideas are never properly monetized.

Why doesn't PowerShell count?

It would be hard for the EU to make a case that Microsoft's proposed remedy doesn't address the complaint. After all, if they're no longer bundling the browser with the OS, it can't be considered "illegal tying of a different product to a monopoly." It shifts that part of the regulatory burden onto the OEMs, who aren't nearly the kind of deep-pockets attractive target for a fine that Microsoft is.

It's not hard to see why MS would prefer to ship "no browser" than a competitor's browser.

Sounds like a feature to get you to stop using IE6 already, goddamn it!

PostScript isn't some kind of open standard that anyone can implement. It's owned by Adobe. The whole reason that Microsoft invented "TrueType" was to avoid paying royalties to Adobe for their Type 1 font format.

The idea that smart people don't make mistakes is thoroughly ridiculous.

Smart people recognize that they make mistakes, so they create systems that help them catch and prevent their own mistakes. If you're foolish enough to believe that you can't make mistakes, then you should just turn off all the warnings on the compiler and not bother with lesser workarounds like redefining a single symbol.

Some of these reactions are quite funny.

The goal of asking you to specify the length of the destination buffer is to force you to think about the data you're working with *while* you're writing the code and not afterwards in an unconnected security audit. Furthermore, it provides documentation to other people reading the code who may not have the same mental model of what's going on as you do. And as usual "other people" includes you, six months after you wrote the code.

The most likely reason that Microsoft is suing TomTom is to force TomTom to cross-license these patents -- that's what most big companies use their patent portfolios for.

"Software Tree's partners include Microsoft, IBM, Borland, and Sun"

Fixed that for you.