I provide technical support gladly, but not for anything having to do with Microsoft Windows (or any other Microsoft product).

When my mother-in-law bought a new computer to replace her crashed and aging one, she Skyped me to find out how to get her Word Perfect to work on Vista, as well as how to get her old printer and image scanner to work. I asked if she still had the old monitor, keyboard, and mouse? Then I ordered her a Mac Mini and told her to return the Vista machine. (And threaten to have the saleman brought up on criminal negligence for selling a Vista machine to her in the first place.)

She was able to get it hooked up and working on her own, and after helping her download OpenOffice to read and edit her 20 years of WordPerfect files without problem, there really hasn't been any need to provide support. And we still hear (and see) from her every week or two on Skype. She's also telling me of some of the things she does with iPhoto which I'd never done.

My advise to the rest of the family to fix their problems is "get a Mac."

I've had msnbot rejected from my site for many years. The just under a year ago I get a request from someone working for MSN Live Search asking to remove the block from robots.txt. I said, "no" and gave her the short version of my falling out with Microsoft (just the 1995 to 1998 subset).

Then I started getting hits from Bing. Their support site only mentioned msnbot gathering information, so how did my site get index? Well, this had to stop.

So, I wrote a filter that would redirect anything with a REFERER from bing.com to google.com with the same search query. After running for a few weeks now, I see that some IP addresses never return, but most come back from Google - often with more specific search queries than the first time. I still haven't heard a word from the confused Bing users about it, though. So I'm guessing that it works well for keeping the completely clueless out.

I'm afraid that I have to disagree with that. In fact, I often find the technical stuff better with a Japanese Google query than an English one, and Japanese is my second language.

I would venture that it all depends on the subject matter. If it's some otaku anime stuff you're looking for, then you may just get a bunch of other otaku instead of good primary resource material. But I'm not really into that sort of thing.

For PHP, MySQL, Ruby, Postgress, Java, Groovy, and many more technical questions/answers, searching in Japanese first has much less noise to signal. (Although I will admit that worthless Hatena keyword posts come up too often in the higher results.)

I run a web site and have had robots.txt request that msnbot not index my site. So far as I can tell from my access logs, msnbot and its relatives (media, and others) respect this request.

Needless to say, I was surprised when I suddenly started getting references from Bing queries. That simply shouldn't be. I've expelled the stench of Microsoft from my servers. I prefer quality over quantity, and don't care to have Microsoft benefit from anything I put my heart and sole into. So how did Microsoft index my pages?

My first thought what that they have another bot. Yet there is no reference to a bing*bot in my logs. And as I said, msnbot* isn't identifying itself if it's ignoring robots.txt. So, if I were being denied indexing access to the best sites on a given topic, but wanted to index them anyway, how would I go about it?

Well, I'd probably start off by going through a bunch of blogs with something that could understand the context - much like the recent Google Wave demonstration with respect to their new context sensitive spell checker. A lot of blogs link back to my site for detailed information and as a primary source. So if someone queries Bing with regard to this subject matter, then the indexed pages' links to my site could be used to suggest it as a primary source, thus my site would appear in the results, perhaps even higher than the blogs references it.

Thus, Microsoft can circumvent my desire to not have them index my site - and I see little that I can do to change that. Their support page says that site administrators can have some control, but only if they have an MSN Live login - which isn't going to happen.

Needless to say, I'm not at all happy about this, and will be working in some of my free time to see to it that anyone coming in from Bing are rerouted elsewhere. You couldn't pay me to use a Microsoft product. (I overwrote my final MS partition at the stroke of midnight, January 1, 2000, and have refused to use their products since, much to the headache of the HR department. Anything not available on FreeBSD, Linux, or Mac OS/X isn't necessary.) Microsoft will pay for this overstepping of bounds.

Well, considering that there is a work around for any technology, and that any of the above methods will do nothing but provide a false sense of security, why not just be nice to the neighbors? There are no technical solutions to social problems, only social solutions.

Will there be people who take advantage of the openness? Will there be those who think it's okay to pinch an item here or there since they aren't being protected? Sure. But such people would probably prefer a bit of a challenge, so anything they swipe will leave them feeling hollow, and hopefully will lead them to change.

But such people are insignificant. It's the greater community that can be formed by not shutting the world out that is important.

Why spend thousands of dollars smooshing a high resolution display to your face when you can blow up a flatscreen to epic proportions and get all the resolution you need?

Because my office doubles as the laundry room and my 15" iBook G4 screen is already partially obscured by notes hanging off of the shelves that go from desk to ceiling. I couldn't care less about total immersion or virtual reality. I'd just like a larger screen to work with that doesn't take up any more space. If a head mounted display can provide that (without a headache while coding), then I'm there.

Try Justin.TV Sports. That's how many expats get sports from their home countries while away. It's also a great resource for getting sports (and other programming) not generally available in your own country.

This works on Macs (Intel and Power). I thought it worked on Linux with the latest Flash plugin, but I've had one Linux user tell me that it didn't. (Then again, I don't know what version of Flash he was using.) Please give it a try and report back what happens on Linux. I'd like to know for sure myself.

Sometimes the best way to make people see what's going on is to shock them. Ask these two questions:

1. Do you believe that Sadam Husein had anything to do with 9/11?
2. Do you believe that President Obama is a Muslim terrorist?

If they answer "yes" to either of these questions, then simply state that they are too susceptible to fear mongering and distortions of reality to convince otherwise. When they move everything to proprietary software and find the reliability of such solutions to be lower than what they've experienced the past 5-6 years, that will be their wake up call. They clearly need the experience of being deceived by these Microsoft shills to understand what the rest of us see as clear lies.

If they answer "no" to the above two questions, then all you should have to do is explain that the fear mongering from Microsoft-based businesses is the exact same technique that the was used by the Bush Administration and the Republican presidential campaign to create Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt in the minds of The People to support their proprietary goals. Transparency in software, as in government, is what is needed. Open Source is all about transparency.

Well said. Google has never given me reason to not trust them. Microsoft, on the other hand, had given me numerous reasons for distrust. (Netscape Gold not working due to TPC/IP stack problems after installing MS Office, for instance? And Office didn't have any Internet capabilities back then - so how did the TPC/IP stack in Netscape break?)

I fought hard in the corporate world to break free of Microsoft because of my lack of faith in them. My supervisors had to print out intranet pages for me to fill out on paper so they could enter them into the system because the intranet applications only worked with IE (and I had migrated the last of my systems at work to FreeBSD at the stroke of midnight, January 1, 2000).

The thing is, you can trust in Google. While the amount of information they have on me may be scary at times, they have done nothing to make me feel that they are untrustworthy to hold that data.

On the other hand, you absolutely can not trust in Microsoft. They have gone well beyond reason in showing me their untrustworthiness, time and time again.

Part of it had to do with the fact that my wife would decide that since I was home I could throw a load of laundry in, hang a few pictures, vacuum, and cook dinner.

Hey, my office is the laundry room. I have a bunch of laundry hanging just behind my head drying (our dryer is knocked out).

As much as I like being home to hear about the kids' days and help them with their homework, school holidays really make me want to rent a place down the street.

Oh, and with this new spurt of spam, my first thought was that there must be some new 0-day method to infect MS users via MSN. Perhaps related to Microsoft's sudden desperate need to patch IE?

Why don't I miss the pain of using Microsoft? I'm coming up on the 9th anniversary of overwriting my last Microsoft partition (at work no less) - hitting [Enter] at the stroke of midnight, January 1, 2000 (while awaiting the world to end due to the Year 2000 Bug).

When are they going to get personalized? I guess I don't have enough information out there, because the past few days I got about 50 messages from Hot Chicks who thought I was "hawt" and want to chat on MSN.

1. I don't advertise on dating sites. Any profile I have is professional, not looking for a bonehead blond.
2. I am not "hawt" now, nor was I a few decades ago when I was actually available.
3. You couldn't pay me to use a Microsoft product, and that includes MSN.

That's 0 for 3 for the most recent spew of spam that's getting through the filters. I'm afraid that they need more help with the personalization still. Or is it that I need more make more of my personal life available to them?