Wow, more than 3500 Swen emails when I came back to work on monday. I'm lucky my IMAP Bayesian filter, emc filters them out automatically, but this is bloddy annoying. Server in the US is also being hit hard:

/home/berend$ w
  8:27pm  up 131 days,  4:28,  1 user,  load average: 6.44, 11.14, 19.09
USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU  WHAT
berend   pts/0    smtp.xsol.co.nz   7:26pm  2.00s  0.07s  0.01s  w

On another front: mikehearn rants, while being mostly clueless. Try to write a Corba client in C++ mike. And have a little bit more respect for the issues Microsoft tried to resolve and has resolved. COM is and was a pretty good technology. And that certain things are hard, has more to do with the really difficult issues one tries to solve than with COM. And of course when everyone has a 1GB network, 10GHz processors and 2GB of RAM, things can and will be designed a lot differently.