Consumers can easily see alternatives to MS products are better. It's only a matter of time; MS lost that contest.
They are now resigned to use bogus patents to get a piece of the future they will not otherwise be a part of. The alternatives to their ridiculous continous upgrade path are more functional, easy enough to use and more cost effective.
When we manage to show this to business market, MS is in big trouble. Cost effectiveness and ease of deployment and use. MS can be beaten on these fronts. And they will be. In time.
The original basic RE and extended RE (when backreferencing is not used) are significantly faster than implementations that most programmers traditionally rave about, e.g., Perl RE.
Tell me something I didn't know.
He thus used such 30 year old code as a model and easily topped the speeds of the built-in RE capabilities of today's popular scripting languages.
No. You misread. I love Russ Cox's way of thinking and his continual generosity in sharing his work. I too use the Plan 9 base sed and grep. I'm cynical about the people who rave on about perl/javascript/python/ruby/whatever regexp, who derive some perverse joy in ridiculously complex RE and who often diss sed and all things old school as being slow or deficient in some way.
Well, let's see Anonymous host a website. I'm sure the DOJ or FBI could take it down, by legal or technical means. What is the point? There's no such thing as a webserver that "never goes down", or a network that is "always up". Things fail under stress, things are taken offline and put back online, and redundancy or rerouting usually covers it all up. Not all organisations put 100% of their efforts into maintaining an external public website that "stays up" 24/7. I doubt any member of the public is pounding their keyboard because they can't access the FBI, DOJ or UMG websites. How many visitors do you think those sites even normally receive?
Do you think these organizations are going to sit back and let their sites get shut down without a response? No, they're going to ramp up their security and network teams to subvert the attack and make sure the attack isn't covering a penetration. Bring down the firewall, bring down the company. It costs real money to keep a company running through a DDoS.
AlexMuir has missed the most important point: Megaupload served infringing content from machines based in Virginia, overseen by the hosting provider Carpathia. The fact that the persons involved were not US citizens or that the company was based in Hong Kong are irrelevant. The servers (some of them) were in the US, not far from a court where a warrant could be obtained for anyone with cause (e.g. the FBI, DOJ) to look at all ingress and egress from those servers.
They are now resigned to use bogus patents to get a piece of the future they will not otherwise be a part of. The alternatives to their ridiculous continous upgrade path are more functional, easy enough to use and more cost effective. When we manage to show this to business market, MS is in big trouble. Cost effectiveness and ease of deployment and use. MS can be beaten on these fronts. And they will be. In time.