>>Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you read that right - if you don't get lucky and win a voucher, you have to pay to take these exams ($125 each). MS has succeeded in productizing (official MS-speak) the complexity of their licensing.
>
>Joel Spolsky had an article on pricing, and briefly explained the reasoning behind this diverse pricing. In short, with one price, those who'd pay less won't buy it, and those who'd be willing to pay more get it cheaper. So there's (supposedly) money lost in both cases - in first, no sale, in second, cheaper sale than the customer (or, in M$ case, a consumer) would want to spend.
>
>So they started inventing schemes... perfecting them to the point where the scheme itself is preventing the sale.

In OS this ticks me off as well. Probably a quite accurate recollection:

Used DOs
Started OS/2 V.1 as it surpassed 640KB, used for quite some time
changed back to DOS 6.2 as Dos extenders became stable (even when Win95 was already out)
used minimal Win31 (Word, Excel documents from elsewhere)
switched to NT4 nearly first day and was happy with it for a loooong time (NTFS, satbility...)
W2K gave me mostly USB support missing in NT4 (I had drivers to access FAt32 in NT, was welcome in W2k but not needed *for me*)
XP mostly gives me standardized no install remote access everywhere (RAdmin2 was great, but 3 not)

Vista not yet, but on the plus side seems to be faster SMB / TCP/IP implementation in that resource hog.

What helps me a lot are those small utility programs I carry from OS to OS: Acronis Imaging, Paragon support fo Ext2 (and Fat32 for NT back then) and so on.
In the future I am trying to be able to run from USB on any machine I happen to sit at: carrry only that tiny disk and have machines waiting at each location with Y-mini-B-USB cables already plugged in. Either I change wholehartedly to USB-able apps or switch over to pre-loaded VM's. In the near future I will be able to decouple from MS very fast, as linux as "base OS" probably adds another layer of security if you run VM's with windows. And I am actually behind in this, as others are moving to VM's running windows only just for those special MS apps needing it. Probably just because I have more than enough licenses for my actual needs... But any new PC I buy will be with linux or I will send windows back.

regards

thomas