Sounds strange, but according to The Register:
China has kicked off a development programme intended to produce a home-grown operating system with equivalent functionality to Windows 98, and with compatibility with Office 2000 and Word, reports The People's Daily this morning.
Whatever.
I've used Microsoft operating systems for a long, long time. I've used Linux and Unix for nearly as long. I'd like Microsoft to build an operating system that doesn't require me to reboot the computer each time I install a piece of their software. Office is about the only non-trivial Microsoft install that doesn't seem to need a reboot.
How sad. They try so hard to convince us that their operating system the best it can be. But then you run into crap like this. I don't want to reboot. I have 7 applications running.
The only time I ever reboot my Linux or FreeBSD boxes is to upgrade the kernel (or to change/move the hardware).
Woohoo! Here's the official announcement. Hopefully this will make life easier for those who must deal with character encodings in Perl.