I'm sorry, but I wouldn't trust Corel to port anything. They always do a half assed job and make a very unstable product

Actually, the Amiga was not the musicians choice even if it had had a MIDI port built in. The problem was that the Amiga interrupt system gave serial ports too low a priority to service MIDI input reliably. This was solved with add-in cards later on, but would never have worked in the A500 or 1000. MIDI worked, but not reliably, and things like hard drives and heavy graphics output in high res would cause packets to be lost.

I'm confused. In your original post you said you had the Intellimouse Optical, which is clearly one of the options listed.

The reason the mouse works with Linux is that the Linux drivers are newer than the Intellimouse drivers that ship on the CD. Those drivers are over a year old. On top of that, the Linux drivers aren't using the scroll wheel and extra buttons either.

Oh, and I think you'll find that Linux is not being used in very many large scale web sites. Large scales sites run mostly NT/IIS, with most of the rest running on servers such as Solaris, or AIX. Yes, Linux has more total web sites, but it can easily be extrapolated that these are mostly small sites. Additionally, the netcraft surveys do not differentiate between two domains running at the same site. It counts them as two different sites, even though it's one copy of the OS.

Microsoft has always run the vast majority of it's servers on NT with IIS. There were a few notable exceptions in the past, namely Hotmail, but this was a special purpose system they bought when acquiring the parent company. Hotmail is now running on Windows 2000. I believe currently there are 2 sites running non-Windows. LinkExchange (also known as bCentral) and the msn homepages. LinkExchange, like Hotmail was bought (and somewhat recently at that). The MSN homepages (users home pages that is) are subcontracted out to another company.

IntelliMouse 3.0 was released before Windows 2000 was. You can go to the hardware support site at microsoft and download new drivers (http://www.microsoft.com/hardware). You can also make the 3.0 drivers work by running the setup program (not the one in the root of the CD-Rom, but the one in the setup directory) with the argument "Win2000" (no quotes) Yes, FAT is slower for many things with Windows 2000. Try running your Linux system on FAT (Yes, you can do it) and see if you don't notice a difference. Why is it you Linux advocates always come up with the silliest reasons to reject something? "My mouse doesn't work" and "It's too slow" (nevermind the fact that Gnome and KDE are vastly slower interfaces).

Not necessarily, the user may have simply wanted to use the program without having to have the hardware installed (For instance, a paralell dongle can often interfere with certain kinds of printers). I often apply cracks to programs (mostly games) that I use to remove the CD protection so I can copy it to disk and not have to find the CD when I want to play it.

Frankly, you can't make software crackproof. In the end, the computer must always be able to understand the code, and thus it must have algorithms to decode it, which can be understood by anyone with a disassembler and a bit of expertise. Even if you build in things like internet validation, they can still disable the code which calls the validation. You can put CRC checks in to validate that the program is unmodified, but they can disable that code as well. You can make it so difficult to crack that users will simply give up, but that would require putting thousands of different checks in there of varying types, plus sending the cracker on wild goose chases. Simply put, this would require thousands of hours of work on your part, and still could be defeated by a determined enough cracker. Hardware dongles don't work either, since the code that checks them can be removed. You could encrypt each download of the software with a different PGP private key, then send that key to registered users. This would prevent keygen programs, but would not stop a registered user from taking that program and then posting it on some ftp site. The same could always happen with your non-shareware program as well. Fact is, authorization keys only keep honest people honest. Much like locks on doors. That's the best you can hope for.

I've never been much impressed with that site. Yes, they're dead on with lots of things (especially the Lotus notes interfaces ;) But others are plain matters of personal taste spouted as expert fact, while others are obvious bugs, rather than poor designs. It seems that the authors of that site like talking about how perfect they are in being able to spot these things than offering real advice on how to design interfaces.

Actually, this information is incorrect. One program manager did say this, but was immediate reversed by a higher up program manager. WTL will stay unsupported, but it will get improvements. I hear the next version of the Platform SDK may well have a number of improvements to it. But, Microsofts primary direction is .NET.

Well, actually it was tougher than one might imagine. Yes, the three guys were from Wintellect, but one of them has almost nothing about him posted on the web site. He's not listed in any of the course materials, nor does he appear to have a picture there. So there really were two tough names to come up with, not just one.