But if you avoid such thinking at all cost, and you are the American and European industries in the face of Japanese competition in the eighties, that kept banging on about their quality, while the Japanese sold their cheap products by the million. That's the way of the dinosaur.

The balance is somewhere inbetween. Progress, but in a sustainable way.

No, just the ones that want to keep a steady progression in wages.

I did a Masters Chemical Engineer (didn't finish), and a bachelor in CS. In both older students and alumni warned that you should get out of tech jobs and move into management within 10 years after graduation.

The first time I heard that must have been in the 1992-1994 timeframe

The real waste of time is having to hear sales pitches from people like this that don't realize that the problem isn't in the tooling, but in the problem to solve

Speedwise, ssh -2 still holds up my Mac 840AV up for several minutes to login :-)

The problem is that you assume it is a black/white reaction. IOW either they hear you or you get out. Unfortunately, most reactions will be gray, where people try to dispute your facts with some extreme cases where you can shave off a few minutes of work, and try those freak cases extrapolate that to double digit gains.

A cynic's approach:

Warn once, and once only, but make sure there is a permanent record. (e.g. minutes of a meeting). Do it subtle, and avoid pissing off to many people.

Then after an half year, when the writing is on the wall, get rid of the projects that are the worst.

Another 48% are married to the other 48%, and the remaining 4% doesn't know they are flying ? :-)

Indeed. The implicit assumption that utility of an embedded device is linear with the utility of the device.

But of course, a new media format need to be introduced sooner or later, since the prices of Blue Ray are already starting to lose their "premium" justification and become just plain ordinary.

I wonder how you can get more than a blimp beyond 20% if you count hours watching normal TV.

Probably most of the beyond 20% demographic watches his normal TV via IPTV :-)

An externally synchronized contact and calendar would be enough. The rest is fluff.

Socially I'm much more left than economically.

Though one could intepret that social stance as libertarian, since essentially live and let live, and don't impose restrictions on others.

I would agree with you if most GPL projects actually made provisions like GNU does, to aggregate copyrights into a legal entity (foundation).

The reality however is that most GPL tools can't actually issue commercial licenses, because it is nearly impossible to get all copyright holders to consent.

The only ones that actually seem to have such schemes are mostly commercial software that releases their trial and non-commercial editions under GPL (like mysql, and in the past Borland (Kylix OE)).

The pyramid scheme would be propping up user numbers to indicate marketshare, to inflate the stock and IPO

But facebook afaik is profitable (though not wildy), so in this it doesn't apply.

I would like to widen that from "not exactly" to "not at all".

Apparently it is the day after Thangsgiving. Now I just have to find out what thangsgiving is :-)