I couldn't agree more. Whenever I have moved to a new apartment/house there is always a 1-3 week period where I have no cable or internet. After I would get home from work my wife and I would pretty much make dinner read a book and go to bed. It was absolutely amazing how our stress levels went down and how much more recharged we were waking up after calm evenings like that.

Now of course like most people, once my cable and internet showed up, my tv was always on, I was checking my email and working in the evenings. Long story short, I think the mind really does need some time to relax.

I guess if we need a car analogy we need a car analogy.

As much as I enjoyed the dessert analogy I think you went a little to the extreme.

It's more like if you had a car but the radio doesn't work. You can fully enjoy the car but a feature of the car that is completely disconnected from the core purpose of the vehicle doesn't work.

From an evolutionary perspective its easier to leave no longer needed biological features in tact than it is to completely remove them. That is why creatures like snakes and whales have small remnants of legs.

Yeah but why did we have to change, they were the ones who sucked.

My company was hit pretty hard by the conficker virus. It took a lot of users offline for days. The cleanup effort included bringing in a small army of consultants to help fix the issue. After everything was cleaned up and ready to go, IT's response to the outbreak was to kick our Virus Scanner into some crazy ultra cautious mode. The end result of that is 50% of my cpu is being used up by my virus scanner constantly and opening an app or compiling something in eclipse takes substantially longer than it used to. The fact that virus scanning software decreases worker productivity by tying up substantial system resources should be part of the TCO as well.

I just handled a similar problem where I work and the solution was a pretty simple combination of using rsync over ssh.

In a billion years I would think that humans will have long since evolved many times over into something not really resembling humans anymore.

Java & eclipse will do the same thing that your visual basic environment will do (from a teaching perspective), and your students can install it at home and tinker with it at no cost to them if they so desire.

A bj to go with a BSOD? It's brilliant. I can't think of a better way to get users to test the hell out of a system.

You sir are a genius!

Don't portions of SharePoint use webdav and ntlm authentication?

"Right tool for the right job"

I couldn't agree with you more.

To all programmers out there, learn multiple languages! Even if you just tinker with them. I guarantee you'll find yourself to be a better programmer and problem solver after you pickup some concepts of a new language.

We'll call it Billy and the Clonasaurus Park!

Typing something into a command prompt sounds a lot like the kind of "usability" that gets us linux people in trouble with the masses.

I went to a US Bank branch recently to open a new checking account and I was surprised to see that all their desktops are still running windows 2000. That's a 10+ year old OS. Kind of impressive when you think about it.

It really makes you wonder what the future of OS's will bring. We are starting to see signs that what we have is good enough and there will need to be very innovative features implemented in order to make people jump on the latest and greatest.