No, Microsoft is being proactive. They sat around during the early days of the internet while we struggled with Trumpet WinSock (remember this, guys?)

I kid you not, but I am responsible for three people switching to Linux this week alone, running XP in virtualbox. Their PCs got so slow they wanted to wipe everything and install Vista, but they liked XP, so this is the perfect solution.

If these people convert a few more people, the whole computing shift will change extremely rapidly. In a few years, people will potentially shift quickly and not look back. Windows 95 took hold pretty quickly. Only somewhat related, but look at hardware shifts, which also happen quickly (PATA to SATA in 2004 or so, birth of 3D cards in 1995 or so.)

It is logical for them to do this, and they are smart to be scared. In a way, I wish they would just sit on their hands.

You guys are missing the root of the problem. If the cars didn't have windows, then the users wouldn't have gotten infected.

I suggest a car like this.

http://www.m38a1.com/images/Archives/jeep%20_105%20gun%20jpg.jpg :p

Yes, but it should be acknowledged that M$ is *charging* for Windows 7, while XP SP2 was free.

If I were Apple, I would start readying the ad campaign:

Apple guy walks up, sees "PC guy" obviously dressed up in drag.

Apple: "Uhh, what are you doing, PC?"
PC: "Shhh... I'm not Vista. I'm Windows 7. I have nothing to do with Vista. I'm the new, sexy, operating system of the future."
Apple: "Do you really think anybody will be fooled by that?"
PC: "Yes."

I think it has to do with a kind of intelligence. Fanboys are almost by definition irrational, which is not high intelligence or adherence to truth. They also are usually not the best at things, technical or otherwise.

Just like digitalgiblet, I also use Mac, Windows, and Linux. I have several computers of each right in my house. Each has good points and bad ones -- I enjoy the customization that linux allows, while I love the remote control and Front Row on my Mac.

What I (used to) love is that Linux was a great substitute for a knowledgeable fellow computer nerd, similar to being on the internet was from 1990-1995 or so. Once 1996 or so came around, it was Eternal September.

The way I see it, knowledge of linux was a quick way to know somebody was a nerd, able to program, etc., from 1992-2006. From 2006-2009, running Debian was that same substitute, while Ubuntu Linux has a lot of newbies. Maybe one day Debian will go mainstream with a billion configure-gui's and I will get frustrated and switch to something else. I hope not, and I doubt it.

Note, I don't think that it is BAD to run Ubuntu, and several of my non-technically inclined family members do. But, I would guess that most of those people that got all hot and bothered by portrayal of Ubuntu in a bad light are not highly skilled, technical people.

If we are going to discuss this in detail, though, I would specify how you define service:

I don't care about salespeople *at all*, in fact, I would generally just like for them to leave me alone unless I ask is something is in stock, etc. I generally know what I want or can read the back of the package (or often just find the partnumber and read reviews online right there on my cellphone.) I don't expect some teenager to know nuances about RAID setup, PATA vs SATA notebook drives, or what webcam is compatible with linux, etc. After junior high I stopped asking pretty much any non-engineer/programmer/somebody-that-actually-made-the-device anything about computers, as I'm sure many of you did.

What I do care about is being friendly and helpful with logistics (delivery of the flat-screen TV) or returns / exchanges for defective parts. A few online companies are absolutely fantastic with this (Amazon, etc.), so I almost end up with everything online unless I need it immediately. FWIW, despite their adherence to retail (and rarely ABOVE-retail prices), Best Buy has always been pretty good in terms of my definition of service for me.

I like to think that I am pretty objective, and you have presented one side of the argument. I agree with you and I'd like less noise, danger (when walking just around the block) and pollution, but cars are *extremely convenient.*

Anywhere outside of the dense city, it is the quickest, cheapest (on a marginal cost in most cases, anyway) way to get anyplace. All major cities that I've lived in have smelly, gross transportation systems (Boston, NYC) as opposed to a nice, comfortable, climate-controlled vehicle.

Americans love their cars because of the convenience -- it facilitates laziness and comfort. The only way to change this is to make it more un-economical to use, or improve the alternative (public transport.) In a way, I'd like to see both, but I do like having a car after taking the bus in all of my student years.

*We* appreciate the tongue in cheek humor, but the simplest solution is the best -- take out the card after you take the pictures, or pretend to delete them and move on, or delete - then immediately remove the card for undeletion hopes.

Getting in a pissing match with a police is always a bad idea. They are not the judges, and they are usually, in their own minds, doing the right thing and unlikely to be convinced by you. Thus, do your best to get out of the situation and appeal to higher authority, somebody with actual decision or policy making capacity.

I hope this guy gets an apology and a small amount of money. I don't think he should get rich off this incident, but Amtrak police should definitely pay a price for their aggression and misinformation.

Excellent post -- I wonder how many potential PS3 customers are sitting on the sidelines angered by the continued inferior-ization of the device? I wanted to get a 60 GB but just missed the window before they introduced the software-based PS2 emulation models, at which point 60 GB models went *UP* in price on ebay. I delayed purchasing one, thinking subsequent revisions would have *increased* PS2 compatibility, but they have just gotten cheaper and cheaper (in quality), removing support for things like SACD, continued erosion of PS2 compatibility, and kept the price the same. For a while, a new 60 GB model would sell for near $1000 on eBay!

Ugh, come on Sony. Way to alienate your fanbase, especially the tech nerds who know and care about such details.

Not really -- your argument sounds attractive, but is not always the best. People always have these grand fantasies about reaching doctors on call, but added redundancy does not always help. If something works 99.9% of the time, it is probably "good enough" for the expense, given redundancy already exists.

If docs were issued a prepaid phone for home call (would have to be an entirely different network e.g. Verizon(CDMA) vs AT&T's GSM), most likely somebody would forget to charge it (rarely used: I would estimate once every couple years) or forget to add minutes (most of them have expiring minutes over time), or the physicians would not want to carry it (another thing to carry / charge / drop / break / lose / clip to the belt with four other things.) The numbers would get mixed up -- would you rather have one number for the busy nurse to call at every nursing station / call operator, or 4 in decreasing order? Everything has to be grounded in practicality. A good paging network as cellphone backup is better.

A typical physician setup is email/blackberry for nonurgent, long communications (e.g. patients to see tomorrow AM when you get to the hospital.) For urgent communications most docs rely on a cellphone, and also carry a pager for the reliability (far above 99%) and increased range (much better than cellphone.) Landlines, as some of the people insinuated, are of course only practical when sitting at home or in an office.

Thus, my blackberry went out, cellphone went to VM, and the pager came through for me. An additional cellphone might have helped, but possibly not. If my pager happened to be out also, they would have overhead paged me throughout all hospitals I cover, which I would have heard and called back (this is how they did it in the old days anyway, and I was in a hospital at the time.) If I didn't hear this, they would have called my home, but I wasn't home anyway.

If all this failed, they would have called a colleague of mine. If he just got in a car crash, they would have called an in-house ICU doctor cover. If the in house intensive care doc just fell down the stairs and was out of commission, they would have called an on-call emergency doctor. If he was just kidnapped by terrorists, you're just being silly.

Point is, there's a lot of redundancy designed to make things safe already. There is generally decent technological support behind the basics. Electronic health records, that's another matter, and don't get me started... :p

I knew somebody would claim this impossible, but both SMS and voicemail were working, at least in my area. Incoming calls seemed to go to VM and then I could retrieve it (I was driving, so might have been simply out of range). Outgoing calls worked for me. All 3G internet / WAP was down.

This morning service is back to normal, and there was no announcement SMS nor notification of recent downed services from AT&T, therefore, before I knew about all this I was still aiming to replace my phone. Hence my comment.

I would argue that the OP has a point. I am a doctor, was on call (I'm not kidding), and missed several important messages due to my cellphone going out (my blackberry just silently stopped receiving all work mail, all internet functions went dead, full 3G signal but "tunnel failed.") Granted, there is a lot of redundancy in communications, so my pager later started going off with a lot of people saying "where are you???", and I then called them on a landline.

I thought it was my phone, rebooted 3 times, and only today did I find out that it was a national outage (saw here, confirmed all over the net.) I think AT&T should just have sent a free txt saying "We are having problems" or made an large scale announcement via voicemail, which would have helped me (and others) plan. I was about to get a replacement phone from a friend and plug my SIM into it.

The point is we start to rely on these devices, and blackberries, for better or worse, are used for very important things in business, health care, and otherwise.

I sincerely hope you were joking:

All VISA cards start with 4.

All Mastercards start with 51, 52, 53, 54, or 55.

Don't believe me? Take a look in your wallet. :)

Thus, iCONICA, if you just shared the last 12 digits of your Mastercard, you now have cut down the search space of your password to 500 numbers. Moreover, credit card digits have to conform to a checksum (double every other digit + add them all up, must be 0 mod 10.) Thus, I'd estimate we could guess your card within 10 unique numbers, around 100 if VISA. There are ways of getting around the "security digits" and expiration date...

Short story is, don't share your credit card number. Even as a joke.

Yeah... this is stuff every nerd kid did... a lot. Maybe that's why we all wear glasses. Remember when the 3d random dot patterns were all the rage? Those were a bit more tricky to "see."

A neat think you can do with a digital camera is make your own steroscopic pictures. I did it myself just a couple months ago -- a good technique is to put your digicam with its back against a ruler, and fix the ruler in place. Take one picture of the scene, and with the ruler still fixed, move your camera several inches to the right. Then take the next picture.

Put the two images next to each other on your computer monitor, cross eyes, and instant 3D representation of the scene. Just like your own eyes! You can experiment with changing the depth of focus, etc. I found that it works best with a very large depth of focus -- otherwise you would get weird effects due to the fact you in effect had a "infinity focus" by not changing your camera angle during the translation to create the 3d effect.