I completely agree. Ozzie is smart enough to say what he means, so the fact that he rambled and prevaricated means he wanted to disguise what he really thinks. I don't code for Windows anymore, but I still read Raymond Chen's blog, The Old New Thing, where he documents why certain design decisions were made as well as what he calls "microspeak" (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/tags/microspeak/), which is a buzzword-lingo used internally at Microsoft. Perhaps some of the microspeak examples he documents are useful new terms, but a lot of them seem like euphemisms to me.

I agree with this too. If you can't speak honestly, there's a reason for it and it can't be good.

I haven't finished reading Ray Ozzie's memo yet, but it's written in the same sort of tortured English I've seen from a lot of people at Microsoft. I don't know why they can't write clearly, or why they need to include the word "innovation" so many times, but I suspect it reflects the corporate culture. One particular sentence jumped out at me. This sentence includes the word "innovation" and is full of big words, and yet nearly empty of meaning.

It's a boring sentence trapped in a boring, verbose memo, so I found it a new home in a Philip K Dick story:

The lights are on, but nobody's home.

What, you think that site isn't intelligently designed?

The key thing you're missing is that individuals in society are equal. Your hypothetical individual who has more rights than everyone else should not have those extra rights. When you maximize the rights for all individuals, you will have a healthy society.

Sure, Windows NT isn't based on DOS, but it does include backward compatibility to DOS and drive letters and other legacy junk from DOS. There's no drive letters in *nix.

Then there's the fourth group: those who think MS should create an all-new Windows without the legacy crap with an emulator inside for backwards compatibility. It should be based on un*x (not DOS), should have a well-planned, polished GUI for regular people with command-line and options for power users.

Then there's the fifth group: those who realize that describes OSX and have already switched.

This takes the car analogy in a whole new direction... the aquacar.

ynotds: Prosecuting people who commit crimes is not 'revenge'. If that were true, then police aren't upholding the law, they're just seeking revenge. You're not arguing that police aren't real men because they're seeking revenge, are you? That would be silly.

Focussing only on punishment is destructive, certainly, just as ignoring crime would be. The real solution is a balance between prosecuting crime and moving forward. Justice is necessary to restore faith and trust.

Prosecuting crime is necessary for a variety of healthy reasons such as demonstrating that we do not live in a lawless society, preventing people benefitting from criminal acts and restoring confidence in the system, plus (as explained in toby's link) it's required under the law.

Part of the process of correcting the 'mood' (translation: crimes) of the past decade must involve prosecuting anyone if they have committed criminal acts precisely because those criminal acts set the mood of the past decade. Ignoring those crimes would be an overt admission that things haven't really changed at all.

So who does a self-respecting conservative vote for when there's only two real parties on the ballot and the Republicans are royally screwing things up? Did you actually vote Democrat in the last election or are you both conservative and Republican?

But Victoria's beaches are already refrigerated. Which is a shame because they should be heated.