This is definitely not a new thing. The difficulties many of my classmates had in writing reports was one of the first things I noticed when I started at Waterloo in 2000.

The blame should almost certainly be placed at the high school level, as that's where heavy-duty grammar teaching should be taking place. Thankfully my high school English courses included this.

The high school system in Ontario has changed since I went through it, but when I started at Waterloo there was definitely a huge difference in the difficulty level of different high schools. I remember being amazed to hear some of my classmates comparing how many courses they had scored 100% in - apparently it was normal at their schools for there to be "bonus marks" on tests, such that their final grades were often rounded down to 100%. Waterloo weighted the grades internally when processing admissions so thankfully this wasn't a problem for the rest of us.

I find it funny that a professor in the article mentions the "a lot" vs. "alot" issue. One of the things we learned in high school English was that "a lot" is a piece of property, not a replacement for "much" or "many" (and "due to" means "owed to", not "because of").

Tell me the Western company that is making money in China itself

Here's one: Fashion firm Bestseller expands rapidly in China.

I work for a Swedish company that understands the value of IT and invests resources in it accordingly. Based on my experiences with other Western European countries, this isn't abnormal.

The difference in work culture between here and the US is astounding. While it seems most American companies see IT as the place to save costs, the companies I've dealt with here recognize that our IT systems contribute directly to our competitiveness in the global market, and invest accordingly.

Consultants in Denmark have the same health care benefits as the rest of the population - it's a universal health care system.

Furthermore, the whole point of having them do this work is to give them some meaning to their lives. It is a form of health care, so to speak.

His name is Henrik Andersen, not Henrik Anderson - both the summary and article are wrong. Anderson is the Swedish spelling and as such is not common in Denmark.

I would say 5 mbit is faster than what most people have in many parts of the world. Especially in areas where ISPs don't oversell their bandwidth. Here in Denmark, most users choose a 2 or 4 mbit plan as it is cheaper and fast enough for them. It is also quite common to see HSDPA over 10 mbit (again, since the providers tend not to oversell much).

Deplorably slow? HSDPA is already faster than most people's broadband. Seems like a solution looking for a problem to me...

It depends on where you live. Here in Denmark, pay-by-the-MB mobile broadband is virtually extinct. Between the various providers, there are 1GB, 2GB, 5GB, 10GB, and unlimited monthly plans, with speeds varying from 1 mbit to 16 mbit. If you go over your limit, most providers just stick you in a low priority queue, so you just get a slower connection.

I've got an unlimited 7 mbit plan, and it is definitely fast enough to run BitTorrent on it. I get at least 4 mbit whenever I'm anywhere near a cell tower.

Why can't someone build a purpose-built compression algorithm for URLs, so we can skip the URL shortener providers entirely? URLs contain lots of oft-occurring constructs, so I would think a reasonably good compression ratio could be attained.

Take a URL like http://is.gd/XXXXX - that's 18 characters where only 5 are being used to reference the URL. Couldn't a generic URL compressor do a better job on most URLs of reasonable length? Then we could build inflate support directly into the browser and skip the URL shortener entirely.

Do you really think storage space is going to be a deal-breaker for most organizations?

Really, 1 GB is enough for most users. The only exceptions are users who need to send and receive large attachments, and they are probably much better served by a document-sharing system than email anyway.

That's because nothing else can do it! I can build a working Notes application in a week that would take months to develop as a standalone app.

Microsoft likes to present Sharepoint as their "solution" to this... Just look at the response thread to the last Sharepoint article on Slashdot for an idea of how that goes.

Version 6.5 is what, 4-5 years old? 8.5.1 is being released this month - if you're going to criticize, at least be running a reasonably current version.

Startup times were unacceptable with 8.0 and 8.0.1, 8.0.2 and 8.5 have improved this, however. It will never be fast as long as it is built on Eclipse, but it is acceptable. My client starts in about 30 seconds now from a cold boot.

I won't comment on the GUI since this really depends on the individual. The 8 releases have brought mail more in line with a typical UI experience, but I've never found it to be a huge problem once I learned how it worked. I haven't used the OSX or Linux versions, but I believe they have made an effort to get the client to behave a bit more in line with the host platform in the past few releases.

I don't find it too difficult to find messages in Notes either... Notes' full-text indexing actually does work pretty well, and is fast on my mailbox.

Notes is by no means a holy-grail of computing glory - it has its issues. I just don't understand why there is so much hate for it when its main competitors are Exchange/Outlook for mail and Sharepoint for collaboration. Surely most Slashdotters would choose Notes/Domino over them?

As an experienced developer and admin, I can assure you that I also actually use the product.

It is certainly possible to craft a calendar entry with a negative duration - calendar entries are documents just like any other, and the field values can be manipulated as such. However, you can't create a negative duration calendar entry through the UI directly - this hasn't been possible since at least 2003, which is the oldest mail template version I still have on my machine. Regardless, Notes surely can't be to blame for Palm not properly handling this error condition.

So this leads me to believe that either your Notes configuration was poorly managed, or this was so many years ago as to be irrelevant to any current discussions of Notes.

Notes has come a long way. On the server side, it's vastly superior to Exchange - fewer servers required, true clustering for 100% uptime, lower hardware requirements with each version, runs on many platforms. The client got a bit bloated with the move to Eclipse, but the basic client is still available if you want speed over functionality. And it runs on open standards on several platforms. Why the hate?