From what I've read, you're right that they didn't insult Muslims, but you're splitting hairs a bit. They intentionally offended Muslims, and they did it for the sake of offending Muslims.

But I disagree with the person who said, "I think Muslims, like anyone else, have the right for protection from such open insults." Nobody has the right to be protected from being offended. You can be offended all day long, and you have no right to respond with violence, and nobody has any obligation to prevent you from feeling offended.

It reminds me of this comedian, who makes the point that the right to "free speech" is the same as the right to "be offensive/insulting". It's terribly important that we can be offensive or insulting, because otherwise there's no limit to the restrictions that can be put on free speech. For anything you might say, someone might claim to be insulted. I also appreciate his point that we must be able to ridicule anyone (or anything) in a position of power, in order to have a free society.

I just think people are overreacting. You could argue that he shouldn't have said it, or he should have said something else, but what he's saying isn't wrong. Not in context.

First, he said that killing in the name of God is absolutely wrong. He made no concessions there. But yes, he also commented, “One cannot react violently, but if [someone] says something bad about my mother, he can expect a punch. It’s to be expected." So he's saying that violence is wrong. You shouldn't react with violence. But at the same time, "freedom of speech" is not "freedom from consequences of your speech." The point is, if you say something that you know others will find horribly offensive, you should expect that you have to deal with people being offended. That may have consequences to your life.

I think that's a misunderstand of what he's saying. Note that he didn't say, "if someone says a curse word against my mother, I'm going to punch him." He said, "he can expect a punch."

I may be wrong, but I think he's not advocating violence, but saying, "If you go around spitting in people's faces, and then someone punches you, don't be surprised." That is, it'd be foolish not to expect some kind of response.

Not so fast. What you're saying is great for home users or even small businesses, but for larger scale situations (enterprise or MSP, managing thousands of computers), it creates a lot of extra work to manage and maintain a fleet of computers of all kinds of different models from different manufacturers, running different operating systems deployed from different images, with different levels of warranty support, purchased over a range of time between "yesterday" and "10 years ago".

It's just not really the way you want to run things. Old machines break more often and take more time to fix. You use scripting to manage computers en masse, and you find that you have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get the scripts to run uniformly because different versions of the scripting language are supported on different versions of the operating system, and you have to support them all. Some things that you could easily do in a script, the old scripting language just doesn't support. The new imaging solution you've implemented because it saves your IT department a bunch of time, and therefore money, doesn't work on the computers from 7 years ago because the BIOS support is different, or you can't get the right kind of driver packages, or whatever bit of nonsense you run into dealing with old computers.

In short, when you're doing real IT work, "meeting the user's needs" is not the only consideration.

I would guess that's a component, but I suspect some of it was also just an issue of timing.

I work in IT servicing a lot of small businesses, and from what I've seen over the years, it seems like most businesses had gotten into the habit of buying new computers every few years. Both the hardware and software were improving quickly and drastically, and it made sense to buy a new computer every 3 years or so.

And then around... I don't know, 2006, when it came time for the 3 year upgrade cycle, a lot of businesses looked at the computer they already had and said, "Meh... this is still doing what I need it to do. I don't see there being much value in spending another $1,500 for a new computer."

And that continued, one year after the other. In 2010, they were still looking at some of their computers from 2005 and saying, "I know it's an old computer, but it still does everything we need it to do. I'm not going to spend money I don't need to."

But then in the last couple years, we hit a couple of milestones. First, a lot of those computers are now getting to be around 10 years old. In computer terms, "7 years old" sounds bad, but it sounds to the decision-makers like something they can live with, whereas "10 years old" apparently sounds like it ought to be replaced.

The other big milestone was that Microsoft dropped support for Windows XP, which means all of the old Windows XP machines either need to be replaced or updated to Windows 7 or Windows 8. Upgrading an old, outdated machine with no warranty is often not really worth the trouble, and so the need to move to a new version of Windows was the last straw for all those old machines that should have been replaced a few years ago.

So honestly, if I had to guess, I'd guess that you're going to see an uptick in laptop/desktop PC purchases over 2014-2015, and then you're going to see it drop off again. Once most of those old 10-year-old Windows XP machines are replaced, sales will go back down. But I also don't see them stopping anytime soon. Tablets are not going to be a real replacement for business use-- unless you're talking about something like the Microsoft Surface, where it's really just a laptop without a keyboard.

Yeah, that's kind of my first thought. I've been doing this IT thing for a while, and I think doing an occasional fire drill is great. But the fire drill itself costs money, and there's no point in doing it if you're not committed to fixing the problems you've found. So if you do a test restore to make sure your backups can be restored successfully, that's great. But if you find your backups don't restore successfully, are you willing to put in whatever time and money are required to fix those problems, and then test again to make sure your "fix" actually fixed the problem?

Too often, the answer is "no". People want the fire drill, but they want the result to come out that the drill was successful and nothing needs to change. They have no plan or budget for what to do if the drill is unsuccessful. It's purely a "cover-your-ass" move so that later on, they can say, "We performed regular tests." Those tests are a waste of money unless they're producing actionable information, and unless you're then willing to act on that actionable information.

Well, for one thing I would probably argue that the support expectations for phones have become different than for desktops/laptops, especially in businesses. People replace their phone every 2 years, and the OS is treated like an embedded OS.

But regardless, I think people are kind of being babies to complain about MS no longer patching v8, and only patching v8.1. It's a free update. It's basically a service pack. Just keep your damned OS up to date.

Yeah, imagine if, in order to get the new Windows service pack, not only did Microsoft have to write it, but Gateway 2000 had to modify it to their liking, and then AOL had to allow it to be installed. That's some nightmare fuel right there.

To me, this only really seems like a valid position if vendors allowed people to upgrade at will, but as far as I know, Android users are still held to whichever version their carrier/manufacturer allow. June 2012 is only 2.5 years ago, which means (I'm guessing) that it's possible you purchased a phone less than 2 years ago that had this version of the OS. That means, you could have purchased your phone brand new, it might still be under contract, and it's unsupported.

Now, if you're free to install the latest version on your phone, then it seems much more reasonable.

Given my experience with public education, I expect someone will take this idea seriously, and then we'll see classes on "grit" and "persistence" which will consist of a teacher telling kids that they should have "grit" and "persistence". Of course, they won't explain what these concepts mean to the children, because the teachers themselves won't understand it. But they will punish the students and generally try to make them feel bad for failing to live up to these ideals. A student seems hesitant to participate? Perhaps a little humiliation will help. A student acts out? Detention. A kid doesn't show persistence? Give him an F and hold him back a grade.

Wonderful.

There's another non-obvious benefit, which has to do with how shows are chosen for airing or cancellation. Let's say that NBC picks up a pilot for a new show, and they decide to air it on Thursdays at 8pm. That's an important time slot. They put a decent budget behind it, and they market the hell out of it. It doesn't do as well as they'd hope, so the executives decide they want to give that 8pm time slot to something else, so they start looking for other shows to put into that time slot. By the time they start shuffling things around, the show has gotten a bit of a following, so some of the people keep watching when the show is moved to Friday nights instead.

Of course, Friday nights are not a great night for television, so the viewership is lower when they moved it to Friday nights. Since the ratings are lower, the network cuts their budget, which means that they can't produce the same quality of show. As the quality suffers, the viewership wanes, and so they cut the budget some more. The show goes into a death spiral and gets cancelled.

So in this case, you had a show that people liked enough that it was making money. Through whichever revenue channels, it was making enough money to pay for its production, but NBC moved it out of it's time slot-- not because it wasn't making money, but because they thought they had another show that would make more money. The result is that a profitable show that people liked was cancelled.

Now this is a hypothetical situation, but these kinds of factors are at least partially responsible for the cancellation of a bunch of shows that people liked. Some example might be Firefly, Farscape, Futurama, and Family Guy. Whenever you see a show with a fanbase get cancelled, it may be that the show was profitable, but that someone guessed that putting another show in the same time slot would be more profitable. This is also part of the reason there have been so many reality shows in the past decade. Although comedies and dramas are profitable and make a lot of money, reality shows are extremely cheap to make, so even if the ratings are bit lower, the profits are higher. Because time slots are limited, each network focuses on the most profitable shows and cancels everything else.

With on-demand viewing, there are no time slots, so that whole limitation goes away. Shows can live or die by their own profitability, rather than seeing if there's a time slot available on a channel that caters to the appropriate demographic's viewing habits. Not that this will solve all the problems that lead to good shows being cancelled, but my guess is that it'll be better than what we have now.