I'm thinking about finally making a serious try of Linux. I've dabbled slightly, but never ran it on a machine I was actively using.

I see XP as the Office 2000 of Microsoft Windows. Nobody has any reason to want the next one. And really, 2000 was the Office 97 of Windows; you could stop there and remain stable and happy.

What a weird model. You have an incentive to make software so much better and more compelling than the prior release that people will want to upgrade, while not making any release so good that you'll have a hard time persuading people to upgrade. Vista looks to be one of those brick walls, and they only make it worse by going all license heil at us, and by making the cost even more prohibitive than ever. Plus it's a dramatic enough change to be a de facto version 1.0 package, to be fun for the early adopters to break and made stable possibly not until de facto version 2. Or beyond.

I'll probably end up with a Vista machine sooner rather than later just because I'll have to learn it enough to support it, but that may be my only reason. It certainly won't be because I "agree" to the license terms.

Watching (from a safe distance) with amusement from the Mac world.

Software version upgrading began to jump the shark years ago, in my opinion. The first upgrade I tried out and declined to keep was a new version of Microsoft Publisher. I was using the software to publish a newsletter so the new version interested me -- but I wasn't going to pay for a new version whose only major new feature -- web page publishing -- I wasn't going to use. Eventually I stopped using even the old version of Publisher when I stopped publishing the newsletter on dead tree, and I haven't looked back. And it's been years since I heard or read the phrase "desktop publishing" anywhere.

That was the first, but by no means last, time I saw this phenomenon. At some point the "ooh, ahh" factor of a "major" upgrade cools to a "okay, where'd they hide the reason why I'm supposed to shell out for this?" factor.

There's a reason why Microsoft was going to let IE6 be the last IE, until Firefox began making inroads.

The first computer I owned was an Apple II with serial number A2S1-2174. My next was an Amiga 2000. I've owned PCs since then, mostly because they were compatible with what I used at work.

I bought an iMac on Monday. It's going to take me a while to get used to the one-button mouse and the different hotkeys, but, so far, I'm liking it a lot.

It looks like I will be using my current computers for a *long* time, as I will not agree to the EULA for Vista. I am neither a techno-weenie nor a criminal, but I refuse to purchase an OPERATING SYSTEM that requires me to "phone home" on a recurring basis just to use it, and I also object to updates that turn off software functionality.

I'm not going to switch to Linux or MacOS, but I may have to buy a gaming console to get in my fix once games that will not run on my system (and which I want to buy) are released. I will *not* buy an XBox (in any of its versions), because that is just rewarding Microsoft for overbearing licensing.