For me (i.e. `mine'), I cleaned up my PC and did a bit of desktop decoration for 4 days straight.  Ha, silly?  Perhaps, but it costs me nothing except the minimal on house electricity and the broadband.  I am in search of a cheap life style for retirement preparation.  Besides, I was annoyed by my PC's sluggish behavior for the past few months (no, not yet Linux, still XP, even though I like the penguin) and decided to take a look of what's under the hood.  Well, this usually happens after years of installing useless software on your PC, with each one of them setting up several useless background tasks cumulatively.  (The fact: I didn't expect 4 full days as I intended to do a Drupal upgrade here plus some CSS corrections as well, originally...)

I used to go to a small cafe nearby the office for checking personal e-mails at lunch.  Well, not all companies allow staffers to use webmail in the office.  As usual, those were Windows PC powerful enough for you to play 3D games.  Actually, it was just too powerful so a lot of patrons just went ahead to install their own messenger software, toolbars, etc.  It didn't make me feel comfortable because there might be spyware or keyloggers installed as well!

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Oops, CMM, cMM... I now understand why corporates never produce decent software. Those 'specs' look more like law book rather than tech book... I even read a spec in which numerals were written in English rather than Arabic (say, one thousand two hundred seventy five, instead of 1275) - I almost laughed to death that time!

(From The Archive, e-mail in 2005 Feb. Re-formatted for re-post.)

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This is perhaps the longest software project that you could possibly have heard of - 15 years of development since inception. Microkernel was hype in those days, but now on every Windows OS already (Microkernel since NT 3.51).  Anyway, glad that they have finally completed the first console application on HURD, just 10 years off schedule... BTW, Linux (except the L4Linux as mentioned in the Slashdot news) is still the older monolithic kernel design.  No matter how much you hate Microsoft, they have their technical edges that shouldn't be misunderstood to be just marketing tactics. Don't degrade yourself to think like a marketing executive - Microsoft succeeds because they know how to treasure their technical asset, and not just marketing strategies.