>>Sony, not Microsoft: http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/04/19/sony_firmware_compensation/
>>
>>You may remember their rootkit-based copy protections scheme: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_CD_copy_protection_scandal
>
>It doesn't make me admire Sony but don't manufacturers have broad latitude to control the ways their products can be used? I seem to recall a nasty reaction from Microsoft when Whil Hentzen was talking about Visual FoxPro on Linux.
>
>Our pals in Redmond may be quietly up to their old monopolistic tricks. I am running into more and more stuff that doesn't work in Firefox, only IE, even though Firefox has been gaining market share steadily. (Should I have said "because" rather than "even though"?) The most recent was LearnDevNow, which I signed up for on Charles's recommendation. Try to set it up in Firefox, no go. And as far as Microsoft products like MSDN and VS, fuggedaboutit. MS offers one solution: IE.

And for some reason whenever I need to download something from M$, it doesn't download (something may clash with my NoScript plugin even when I turn it off in advance), but there's still enough script running to disable the button. Of course, there's the debugger, i.e. FireBug plugin, by which I can InspectElement (the button), and somewhere in its properties there's the longish url of the file I needed to get.

BTW, I followed Naomi's link today and got me the ClassBrowserX - for which I still don't understand why is it under the limited public license... specially this:
"(B) If you begin patent litigation against Microsoft over patents that you think may apply to the software
(including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit), your license to the software ends automatically."

Huh? "Begin patent litigation"? What if Arto Toikka finds that M$ is using some of his code elsewhere, and fires up a lawsuit, he can then not use his own code?

As for Sony, they are great, as long as there's no optical drives nor software involved. The optical drives they never did right - each had a mechanical failure after a year or two, and I've had about six, and with software they use dirtier techniques then the pirates they're supposedly fighting.