At 11:24 AM 8/29/2011, William Donzelli wrote: Virtual machine images. At 12:29 PM 8/29/2011, Dave McGuire wrote: Gosh, I wish I was smart enough to make a software product that was popular, productivity-killing, life-sucking, and capable of destroying relationships and personalities without breaking stride. Sounds mightly profitable to me. I think lots of people will study these worlds, for a long time to come, for social science and for profit. As for the file-format debate, as someone who spent a decade-plus mucking about in the 3D and 2D file-format conversion / filter market, and who wrote a few chapters and edited a bit of the O'Reilly book on graphic file formats, I'm confident that a decade or two from now, they'll still be puzzling over some files that just don't seem to "read" right unless under some emulation of the programs of the era that made them. File format specs are often written *after* the program that made them. Stuff is left out. Features and side-effects are forgotten. Heck, even today, I've been vexed by the container formats used for video. The file extension doesn't tell you much. A month or two I was trying to help a law client who had some patrol car footage on CD. I spent a few hours googling and using deep-inspection tools to try to determine the codecs necessary to play-back on various Windows systems - and ultimately I couldn't get it to play in some environments. - John