first a nugget of fact, then some commentary:

1. When we moved to Portland, Oregon, we had Qwest come out to the house to rewire one of the phone jacks because the mooks who hooked it up to the outside world crosswired the connections- we didn't even have dial tone. After the tech fixed the problem, first thing he did after confirming DSL sync was to run a speed test. I asked him if that was SOP and he said that he was trained to always run a speed test for new customers- he suggested that it might be part of an upsell but that he doesn't like selling so he never comments (oh, you're only getting 750k down, but you're in an area where 7/1 MB service is available... did you know you can upgrade for just $3.50/month!???? ...). YMMV but if this is SOP for Qwest on installs, there is one population of regular testers.

2. I agree with earlier commenters- there is probably a self-selecting sampling bias.

3. Because of #2, any "data" they collect is probably very skewed towards computer-savvy users who are demanding higher-speed services and using their website to check if the service they're getting matches what they're paying for. Unless there are some details of the methodology that they're not telling us about, the survey probably reports higher bandwidth than actually is delivered to the majority of people with net access in those cities. If it's just a simple aggregation & average of whoever decides to click on speedtest.com from inside a given city's IP range, well, that probably tells you something... but it's probably not a good proxy for a complete picture of "last mile" connectivity.

My main machine is a P4 1.6Ghz with 2GB of RAM running XP. I did upgrade the video card a year or two ago with something that has a whole 128MB of RAM on it.

4 IDE drives, USB 2.0 (just "full speed" not "high-speed") and an external firewire 400 drive with a flaky controller makes for a...well, sluggish computing experience.

Lately, I've started to give up on it for any sort of heavy lifting (Adobe Lightroom). I started looking at building a new one again, but pretty much have figured out that Dell can do all the work for me for the same money. (for what I can spend)

I am intrigued by your ideas and I wish to subscribe to your news-letter.

and here I thought I was coming to read a post about Romanesco Broccoli (link goes to gis for "romanesco"). Seriously, it's like eating math.

anyone who thinks different from me isn't necessarily weird, but if they arrive at a different conclusion than I reached, they're most likely wrong.

funny. You are my new hero.

my kingdom for mod points- even though parent is AC it deserves to be a 5...

and after that was Earth 2025.

Don't bother starting without a build strategy. ... the command line might actually be more fun.

I blogged about my top 10 questions to ask before taking an IT job, and some of 'em included:

8. What is the on-call rotation schedule?
7. In the last year, how many times has the on-call person been called?
4. Can I schedule vacations around the holidays?

if you had a treo running palm OS, you could get something like TreoButler or CallFilter (or, I'm sure, any number of other apps) to control incoming calls. I have CallFilter, which allows me to sort calls by caller ID. You can select straight-to-voicemail, ring-to-voicemail, pickup/hangup with or without alerting, etc. I have all incoming 1-800 numbers and unknown callers set to go straigt to voicemail, and when I encounter a pest like the autodialer you've described they get the pickup/hangup treatment.

Works great. I'm sure something similar will come out for the Pre soon, because people expect that functionality. I don't know if the iPhone has something like this, but if it doesn't, it should. This is a feature that should come standard on every smartfone.

The iPhone and Blackberries would bounce up to more normal $800+ pricing.

I call BS. You can buy an 8 gig ipod touch today for under $200. According to the iSupply teardown, the GSM chipset in the iphone costs $2.80.

$179.00 + $3.00 != $800

Umm, they obviously did know about Opera because they explicitly redirected it to a file called error.html. That's the key part of the story. We don't know if Opera would have ruled out the vendor simply because the administration interface didn't function properly in the Opera browser. It was that the vendor explicitly blocked the use of Opera, even though it might have worked just fine.

Lack of using standards is as much the fault of the IT people who choose products and technologies as the vendors who sell them. The number of times that IT staff either don't consider whether the product uses standards - or worse they intentionally choose proprietary solutions because they like the vendor - exceeds the imagination. It's as much a demand problem as a supply. In this instance, the potential customer was the vendor who was being locked out so it kind of bit the manufacturer on the ass.

Or had your drunk 6-year-old child change lanes with his eyes closed. Which, when you think about it, is actually a pretty apt description of the way the Bushies ran the country.