Nuke Redmond!

Unfortunately, I have to use Windoze as most medical software is M$ centric. Also, started using VB in about 1991 which allowed me to create windows easily rather than using Hypercard on Mac. As with most M$ programs, they decided to replace a perfectly functional VB6 which allowed one to incoporate assembly code (Hardcore VB was an excellent resource for getting as close as one could to hardware in windoze) with VB.NET which is a POS. Stuck with a huge codebase of VB6 programs that I use daily and still haven't yet succeeded in getting VB6 programs to run under Wine on my Linux machines. Wine, however does run all of my old 16 and 32 bit programs. Have XP running in VirtualBox and run my old Mac code in BasiliskII. Soon as get VB6 running under Linux, will say goodbye to M$ crap. There's a huge number of old machines out there and have systems ranging from original XP's to 80486 based laptops which are very nice as dedicated machines for data acquisition. In typical M$ fashion, they came out with PenWindoze in 1991 or so, when got my first tablet PC, and then totally changed digital ink format when they came out with their *new and improved* version in 2000 tablet PC's. Have a number of these old machines and M$ was actually helpfull in providing details of their new ink format and wrote some neat drawing programs where one can time every stroke and alter the drawing. Of course, when I asked for the initial ink format it appears that they "lost" it, likely because it was "too old". Have lots of drawings that I did in early 1990's that I can see as long as the laptops they were done on continue to function, but porting it to "new and improved" ink format is something I don't have time for. Planned obsolesence seems to be standard M$ policy as well as the assumption that no person in their right mind would use hardware that's very ancient, like 10 years old.