I never had to do punch cards... but I do remember the audio cassettes. Hard to believe we did things like that!!!

Uh... Apple's GUI was not complete garbage. I agree Amiga was better, but don't dismiss Apple entirely. And the Mac OS eventually did multitask (cooperatively) when Multifinder came out in 1987.

Also "dominate GUI of the 80s" is kind of like saying the Tesla is the dominant model of electric cars. It might be true (I have no idea), but the electric car market is a small slice of the larger automobile market. Most computers in the 80s were simply not GUI-run. The Amiga was cool but never quite got commercial traction.

Agreed. I remember trying out Windows 1.0 and thinking: this is it? Yuck. Even the initial releases of GEM were better than Windows 1.0. It wasn't until 3.0 that Windows started being usable.

...and my ex-girlfriend is wrong. That ISN'T my child!

At least you didn't say "the people have spoken" or "the American people made their voices heard" or some such bullshit. Many of last night's races were incredibly close, like Toomey/Sestak in Pennsylvania, where the Republican got 51% of the vote and the Democract got 49%. But to hear Boehner and others, votes like than are "the voice of the people" supporting Republicans. Hardly. It's just democracy in action: winner takes all, for a time.

I didn't like the bank bailout either, but at least most of it has been repaid to the government (with interest).

My prediction: Expect the economy to improve and Obama take the credit. I believe we are about to see a repeat of the Clinton WH after Newt became Speaker of the House. Recent history has shown that the president has little effect on the economy. It's all congress.

Even if it's "all congress" -- the Democrats can still claim responsibility for upswing. They already do: more jobs added in the last two years than during Bush's entire reign, most banks repaid their bailouts with interest, GM on firmer financial footing than it has been in many years, etc. Even much of the health care reform bill is considered a good idea by both sides: elimination of rescission, improved coverage for children, etc. They have much to crow about, and if the Republicans play it badly in the next two years, expect the Dems to make a comeback in 2012.

Speaking of versus...

This looks like a professional heavyweight cousin of Left-Right.us, a relatively simple Google hack I posted some weeks back. Very cool.

(though I still like seeing the results side-by-side.)

"now that I'm old, working full time, and have a family, I just don't have any energy left to get into fights with my desktop OS just to get some Dora The Explorer video to play for my kids."

My sentiments exactly. Wish I had mod points!

Mod parent up.

I'd even go so far as to suggest FOSS is the wrong solution for many people -- not because it's FOSS, but because its feature list does not sufficiently meet the project requirements. Some years back, an organization I worked for did a kind of CMS duel between a few FOSS packages and a few commercial packages. One of the commercial packages (Cascade) came out far, far ahead in terms of meeting all the "needs" and "wants" on our project checklist. No FOSS package came close. A local developer proposed to develop custom extensions for the FOSS project so that it would meet our need, but the cost seemed silly, and the idea of supporting customized code long-term seemed silly too. (especially since that FOSS project was expected to have a major leap in version in the following year)

Plone is only "free" in software. In my experience with open source CMSs -- Plone, Typo3, Drupal, Joomla -- you get best results by paying an expert to program and set it up initially to your specs. It looks better, runs smoother, etc.

I'm not that expert, by the way. I've just worked on projects that lacked an expert, and projects that had one, and the difference in result was night and day. The expertly-configured sites ran much better.

I agree with you. Especially after I just read elsewhere that various other municipalities have tried this and only gotten a 50% rate of payment. The city should not have to go to court to collect these payments.

In the end, the system they have is probably the best one. And once in awhile, this kind of regrettable situation will happen.

I think the system they have set up seems like the most appropriate way to handle it.

And they've had this system for 20+ years. It's not news.