The best, most insightful and succinct post I've read in a while.

I realized a little while ago that only techies like us pay attention to the "completed X of Y items...", and get aggravated over the unfinished state of the web page. As long as the page appears to be finished loading, then it *is* finished loading as far 95% of people are concerned. And this isn't so bad - it means the extra time to load analytics doesn't really matter.

I'm not buying it. I know personally that Microsoft keeps patents as an arsenal for negotiations with small companies. I.e., if you continue such-and-such development, we'll challenge every patent you've got; we'll get some of them thrown out, and bankrupt you in the process. (I'm a 3rd year law student; one of my best friends is a patent agent in a firm that represents MS and tells me these stories about "business as usual".)

(I had to fix the URL to get the whole video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cX4t5-YpHQ ) A very amateurish voiceover in the middle of the 'host' saying to first install Windows 7: "Call Customer Service if you have any questions." (!!!) Something tells me installing Windows 7 wasn't quite so easy.

No... "Fraunhofer" is synonymous with research - it's a huge network of government-funded and university-partnered research labs like "Max Planck", "NASA JPL", etc. I worked there as a researcher in the publishing & artificial intelligence division.