Why don't people upgrade? Well in my case, I didn't upgrade because I knew that upgrading would immediately kill both the aftermarket theme and several of the aftermarket plugins that I was using, some of which had a huge amount of non-trivial data stored in them. All the plug-ins and theme bits came from WordPress-blessed sites, which made the time-bomb nature of their unsupportedness even more frustrating. After fighting through several minor updates and then looking at a major one, I just gave up, exported the content to my local hard drive, and abandoned the 'blog (since hacked, deleted, and hosting account closed). It seems like the only sure-fire way for things to work is to avoid non-core plugins and themes. And honestly, being hosted off of Blogger is much less work, and only slightly less customizable if you limit yourself to the core themes.

Science Fiction without the science is fiction. Laser guns and space ships do not science make. If they'd gone to explain a bit how some of this stuff worked, it would qualify more to me as science, but Luke's light-saber is no more explained than Gandalf's staff. Star Wars would better be classified as Fantasy.

Your response is brilliant.

Oh incidentally, you owe me $1 for agreeing with you. If you want an agreement with more substance, that'll be $1.50.

...it wasn't for 20 days, and it wasn't coding, but eight years ago I spent a week in a 6x12 unventilated wiring closet (door locked and left closed for "security reasons") doing detailed firmware upgrades, configurations, and security audits and traffic tracing on network switching infrastructure, plus tracing a whole lot of wires. The temperature in the room was around 100 degrees, there was no chair so I had to sit on the floor... next to the gaping holes where the utilities entered the building. The customer told me: "don't worry about the rats, they are more scared of you than you are of them. And oh yeah be sure to wash your hands immediately when coming out of that room before touching anything."

Made me think that the "security reason" was "the receptionists are scared of the rats".

and their actions verge on discrimination.

Discrimination on the basis of what? That you are a druggie, a drunk, or just a dick? I don't think those are protected statuses.

This is why my motto (and fundamental rule for life) is Don't be a dick: it's simple to understand, and reasonable people can agree on what it means.

An ASP.NET C# programmer wouldn't jump in and start telling a C++ device driver how to do his work.

You must be new here!

STP isn't the perfect solution to all problems. Just last month I had a customer with a core network of brand-new 54xxz switches, with STP turned on (because I've been bitten by not having it on before). The problem is that STP does precisely nothing for you if your STP switch is plugged into a dumb switch, and the loop is on the dumb switch -- the result just looks like a lot of traffic.

HP has something called "loop protect" which helps in circumstances like this, and now we have that turned on, too.

And yes, I know the "correct" solution is to throw away all the dumb switches, but for various political/cost/stupid reasons, we can't. The customer has been around for seveal years, and the only reason they have nice core switches now is because they had other storms and we made them buy proper core equipment.

Welcome to Economics 101.

Price isn't controlled by the cost of production, it is far more influenced heavily by the consumer's willingness to pay.

What Microsoft is doing is trying to monetize the value that consumers get from their product. To wit: it is worth $$ to customers to run more than three applications, so Microsoft wants a cut of that.

Where cost of production only becomes a serious influence on price is where the cost of production exceeds the consumer's willingness to pay for the product. To wit: you can't buy 2GB spinning-platter hard disks any more, because they'd still cost $30 or $40 to make, and for $100 you can buy a half-terabyte drive, and for $2 you can buy a 2GB flash drive. So there's no market for 2GB hard drives. So nobody makes them.

My guess is that they are trying to create (or enter) a market where cost is a big decision driver; this will get them some sales in a market where previously they had almost none, and will not steal too many sales from other, higher priced markets.

Seen some IT people spends hours and hours trying to get something to work, the competent Joe IT fixes it in five minutes.

Don't be so quick to dismiss those who take hours and hours to fix something. If you've never seen something before, you SHOULD take the time to understand it, and what is wrong. Random, unplanned, unknowledgable poking around can (and usually will) make things worse.

I can't tell you how many times I've been called in to look at some system which is broken, production critical, and has some self-important management type jumping up and down beside it screaming about the end of days should this not be up RIGHT NOW WHY ISN'T IT UP YET!!!! and taken hours to examine and fix.

Many times I've fixed these things, while having to listen to stories of "the competent Joe IT" who could fix it in five minutes, all with a thinly veiled suggestion that I was some kind of moron because I can't do what "Joe IT" does.

Many times when I've gotten feedback later, it turns out that while "Joe IT" could regularly fix it in five minutes, after I'm done, it doesn't break.

Doing it quick is not always the same thing as doing it right.

Of course, I'm just as human as Joe is. When pressed for time I've done the same thing as Joe -- bandaid it up quick and hope for the cycles to go back and fix it properly.

And there are a subset of really complex problems that I've seen and fixed before, so I can blow in and fix correctly in five minutes. Those are the ones that really make your reputation.