Because she didn't ask me -- I only found out after she bought the thing, and it was clear she wasn't in the mood to listen, anyway. This was clearly about buying status, not a computer.

I think that you and I see eye to eye on these things. I wish everyone thought this clearly about computer purchases as we do. I happen to really like Apple computers (for various reasons I won't go into). I hate that they're overpriced specifically because so many people see them as status symbols first, and computers second.

I thought exactly the same thing at the time. I only found out after the fact that she spent so much money on something that she didn't need. If she'd come to me first, I probably would have told her almost exactly what you said.

It was kind of an education for me, actually. I was under the impression that people -- especially ones with limited budgets -- were careful with their money. It turns out that people spend money in totally irrational ways.

A year before the iPad came out, a friend of mine spent well over $2,500 on a MacBook. She saved money from her $10/hr job to buy it. A year later, asked for help writing a resume to try to find a better job -- and it turns out that she didn't even know if she had a word processor installed on it. Literally all she had ever done with it was use iTunes to play music and use Safari to check her mail, look at web pages, and watch music videos.

My friend really wanted an Apple product. She lives in Brooklyn, and she sees all of the other people her age covet those Apple products, and she wanted the status of being able to take out an Apple product in a coffee shop. If the iPad had been around at the time, she would have been able to save almost two thousand dollars, and she'd still end up with a device that serves exactly the same purpose: basic web browsing and video playing, with a big Apple logo that other hip Brooklyn people will use to recognize that she fits in.

I'm not sure if this can be generalized to all tablets in general, but I think it speaks to exactly the right price point for the iPad. It was a brilliant move for Apple to introduce the iPad at a time when people were starting to have less money to spend on computers. People who hesitated about buying, say, a MacBook Air could still buy the cachet of having the latest Apple product. And it hasn't seemed to cannibalize Apple sales at all.

(Disclaimer: I've used a MacBook Pro as my main computer for years, and I really like it. That may or may not have colored my opinion.)

Does it have a vice-mayor?

I've been that jerk in the past -- the guy that everyone listened to because I was right and came up with really good software, but people hated dealing with me and basically shut up when I was in the room. I slowly discovered that if I stopped acting like a jerk, people still respected me, but they stopped putting up a fight. People even went out of their way to help me. It was a lot easier to do my job, and I'm convinced that I was actually able to produce better code because of the reduced number of bureaucratic headaches.

I wish I'd figured it out earlier.

Hmm, on the other hand, I was asked to do more stuff because people were less afraid of me. So I guess... be careful what you wish for?

This is an fight I've had to win many times over the last ten years. The most effective way to do that is to sell better software testing to the lead developer, and this is especially true in a small company that's owned by the person who started it -- they almost always defer to the lead programmer on everything he does. (If the owner is the lead developer, then you need to convince the rest of the team.)

The best way I've found to convince a good developer that testing is useful is to help them experience that sense of relief that we've all had when testing turns up a nasty bug, had it gotten out in the wild, would have caused us to spend days trying to reproduce and track down. That gut feeling -- "Whoa, we never would have found that, and it would have been a nightmare if it got out!" -- has helped me convince more developers to completely embrace unit testing, test-driven development, and working with a good QA team than anything else.

Will it have setting 2428D to re-attach barbed wire?

Google turned this up: http://www.onlineifgames.com/zdungeon.asp

Watch out, or you might get eaten by a grue.

Some of us actually grew up playing Adventure (still playable online today -- wow!) on something that looks suspiciously similar to that! In my case, a LA36 DECWriter II, which apparently came standard with hippie dress, porn mustache and butterfly collar. I think I still have the old 300 baud acoustic coupler modem lying around somewhere.

... blah blah blah ... kilograms ... blah blah blah ... measure of weight ... blah blah blah ... mass and weight are not the same thing ... blah blah blah ... measure of force ... blah blah blah ... weight ... blah blah blah ... mass ... blah blah blah ... Earth's gravity ... blah blah blah ...

obligatory Wikipedia link to back up overly pedantic argument