Why? If the workers are supposed to just smile and take it when they get laid off, and get another job, why shouldn't the same be true of businesses? If the workers had more power and used it unwisely the company would just go bust, and the owner would have to get another job, which is how free market capitalism is supposed to work... How is that different?

In fact, with powerful unions comes a more responsible work force, not less. If everyone's job is at stake, then you have to tread carefully. Otherwise, how could we in northern Europe have large multinational companies when we have some of the strongest unions in the world? Our current PM was a former top union boss, and lo and behold, there wasn't any mass flight of Sandvikens and SAABs...

This is the main one. We bought out 386:s with the "best" hardware of the day, i.e. the stuff that was reported to work best with the MS-DOS games of the time and that didn't cost much. We were students and didn't have any money. Just the base system basically broke the bank.

All BSD systems of the era basically started with, "First make sure you have this technically the most beautiful hardware". When we cried "We don't have that, we have this", the answer was invariably "We don't care about you, we don't care about that piece of shit card/disk/whatever, we wouldn't write a driver even if you sent us the equipment".

Linux OTOH was inclusive. If someone/everybody used a piece of hardware, that hardware got supported quicker, since more people depended on it. Instead the kernel/drivers adapted to the flaws of the hardware, instead of turning up its nose at it.

So even if we could pirate several other Unix systems, AT&T lawsuits be damned, they wouldn't run anyway, and was hence out of the running before they even got started.

No, they have friggin laserbeams on their heads!

Yepp. They're the only ones right now. The physicists won't touch it with a ten foot pole...

Nope. It was just worse. When I was in telecoms we tried to build a "router" (big iron) on our own custom hardware, with full vendor support (as in source code if we wanted it), based on windows NT instead of Solaris. (And of course we built the hardware to suit the OS/application. Not the other way around).

Crashed and burned leaving not as much as a flake of soot behind. Couldn't be done. What the Redmond people told us turned out to be simply not true as in "didn't work the way it was documented to work". And nothing much else worked either.

So, building on VAX/VMS worked. Industrial strength. Building on Unix/Solaris (and a few others), worked as well. Also industrial strength. WIndows NT. Not even close.

Today it's based on. You guessed it; Linux.

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"am I supposed to ignore GNOME's outstanding interface designs?"

Uhh? What? Where's this outstanding interface design, and why haven't they told anyone about it?

Look, we're not ignoring it. They just haven't shown it to us! Please, why keep that a secret and release Gnome 3 shell instead?

Well, at least in northern Europe we add iodine to table salt. Don't know that we add much fluoride.

Well, many of the US military combat postings are barred to women, but that is changing (slowly), so there is active work going on in putting more women in those specialities.

The pentagon's blanket rule against women in combat postings was only lifted in 2013, so you have to give it some time.

Uhh? I guess you are on the young side if you think that courses of old were designed with the objective of attracting students. Only thirty years ago let me tell you that courses and programs were designed with the expressed and implied intent that they were what you needed to know and what you thought of it be damned.

The "it has to be fun or else" came much later, with the millennials and gen-Y:ers. We gen X:ers we slogged through, and if we didn't like it, well, there's the door. Don't let it hit you on the way out.

This approach to teaching of course had drawbacks, I'm not saying it didn't. But it also had some advantages, that have fallen by the wayside in the last two decades, that's not something that should be forgotten either.

Well, we almost had. I remember our main engineering mechanics text being written by a retired admiral in the US coast guard. Many if not most of the problems in the book was of the type "A ship moves forward at ten knots and fires a shell in a 35 deg angle off the bow... etc. etc.

And I do remember the girls complaining that there was too much "rockets and guns", and the boys countering that there wasn't enough. :-)

That's an interesting difference between countries. In Sweden we don't have much of an anti-vaccer movement, though the mishandling of the bird flu didn't help, so let's say "not yet" at least. However, while we vaccinate children on schedule for most of the above, Varicella is not on the general schedule yet.

The schedule here is, wait and see if you get it, and if you haven't had it by your late teens, then we'll talk immunization. So we're still holding chicken pox play parties, to expose our children at as young an age as is practical (it usually is worse the older you are).

The profession says themselves that given the severity of the disease, you could perhaps make an argument for vaccination on economic grounds; having people stay home from work (on the governments dime) to care for sick children has a non-neglible cost, but from a pure medical perspective they don't feel it's justified, and hence it stays of the recommended list. For now at least.

That's all true, and it's even worse than that. It's not even true from a European perspective. We sent 20% of our population to the US as a direct result of the mechanisation of agriculture. That's two people out of every ten that didn't get those higher paying jobs in Europe as there was "unused" lands across the ocean to take advantage of.

That's not true any more. The US in particular and the rest of the world in general is already taken. The next 20% in Europe are going unemployed at this time, and the next 20% after those will as well.

Yes. I remember playing a flight simulator game on my 386 that did assume that you were on a PC/AT for timing. As the game didn't have a "fast forward" mode to cut down on the long flights to/from missions/target the turbo button actually came in handy. However, since that meant that everything went faster you had to be really light on the stick in "turbo" mode or you would end up in a smoking hole in the ground.

In my minds eye the game play was military simulatior grade and graphics was near picture perfect, but neither was probably pretty far from both. I doubt graphics was even 640x480, though it might just have eked over that resolution... :-)

One thing I can't for the life of me understand is why the manufacturers don't install an Eberspaecher or similar good old fashioned fuel burning heater for those of us in colder climates.

The fuel consumption is a deciliter per hour or so, so a 5-10 litre tank (2-3 gal) should be plenty, and you could fuel it with bio diesel or similar if you're CO2 averse. It's well known technology that's already available and popular e.g. here in Sweden, so it should be a no-brainer that you don't use precious battery power to make heat in a car.