You can fight this nonsense by not buying Lexmark, Canon, HP, Epson, etc.

Must depend on the Canon printer. I've got one that's happily working away, that simply uses an optical sensor to see if the ink is low. Granted it's old (Pixma MP750 - I think about 5 years old now) but it's been a great workhorse. Ink cartridges run about $16-18 CAD. Should be trivial to refill, from the looks of them, but at that price point I don't need to bother.

You know, when individuals start to exhibit this kind of behavior we stick them in a padded room somewhere with medication and therapy till the symptoms go away :)

Or we charge them with mischief?

I'm in the late 20s/early 30s bracket, the gen who grew up having to fiddle with DOS just to get games to run.

Oh the memories (me too - same age bracket here)

Tweak the order in which things will load in your config.sys and autoexec.bat. Work like hell to squeeze that extra few k out of your memory. Special boot disks just to play one game. Practice your swear words trying to get the Gravis UltraSound to work properly as a Sound Blaster emulator. Goddamn it, I bought a new game that needs 45MB and my whole hard drive only has 80 - beg, borrow, steal space. Stacker is a godsend. No, it's not - doesn't work nearly as well as advertised. Goddamn it, I'm out of IRQ ports. Plug and play will never work, no way, no how. And we liked it that way.

Now get off my lawn :)

Imagine the fireworks! Talk about going out with a bang...

Some choose not to wait

Really? Ask Wordstar, Wordperfect, Lotus 1-2-3, dBaseIII, Netscape, and countless other companies what fat lot of good the early lead did for them?

I'm no giant MS fan, but at the same time with most of these should serve as an example as to why if you're in the lead, you can't rest on your laurels. Stop innovating, and your product becomes inferior over time. Your competition will catch up (and with that momentum, quickly leave you in the dust). I stuck with Wordperfect, Lotus and Netscape for the longest time. I resisted, but eventually the realization came that something better has come along and everyone else has moved on already.

So I used IE for a while. Then Firefox came along. Et al, et al.

It'll be even more fun when they decide to rename the com.sun.* packages :)

They should just put them on bungee cords so they shoot into the air and then slam back down in place.

Now that we can detect when they will occur, I'm smelling a new opportunity for a Darwin Award winner....

Not Canada Post, not FedEx, not UPS, not DHL, not Purolator. Nobody delivers on saturday except pizzerias.

Swiss Chalet, FTW! :)

I agree, but I would start thinking even simpler. My wife and I had all sorts of weird issues with our computers a few years back.

My biggest clues were that the issues all appeared shortly after we moved, and with 2 out of 3 of our machines.

Long story short, after much hair pulling, a decent UPS solved the problem. Our machines were acting weird and random things weren't working because of unclean power, and apparently the PSUs weren't tolerating this all that well.

I still have my two ISA Gravis UltraSound cards (1 MB DRAM! Whoo!) that I can't bear to throw away. Sigh.

I've got a Pixma MP750 (it takes 5 cartridges). Had it for 5 years now - the original print heads are still working great. Photos are still coming out of it looking good (though I don't print pictures often, it's nice to still be able to).

I thought those types of explosives were only armed when you hit 50 or so. They blow up when your speed drops below 50.

Think I saw a documentary on that once... name escapes me. Velocity? Momentum? Something like that. I think I saw it during a bus trip.

Ugh. Indeed but I think the problem is more widespread. To my dismay, Excel 2007 makes it really, really hard to open up two separate Excel windows. You can open two documents within the same Excel instance, yes. But it looks really awful when I'm trying to use my dual-monitor setup as God intended. Was never an issue with MS Office 2003.

Window Managers and applications should be capable of elegantly handling widescreen and dual-monitor situations by now.

Thank you for that. You just made my day.

OneNote as a desktop app, linked as a shared notebook on Sharepoint.

Everything dropped into OneNote can be easily managed through drag+drop. Works offline with synchronization when online. Auto-merges most things at the paragraph level (and has ability to manually merge other stuff). Sharepoint can handle the version control and you can fish older versions of each document out of there if needed.

Much content can be thrown in there (text, emails, screenshots dumped from clipboard, whatever), annotated and/or drawn over, and external files can be dropped right into it or linked via URL.

Using it internally for our team and it's bloody fantastic. The issue we had trying other CMSs (including various types of Wikis, shared folders, vanilla Sharepoint etc) is that they're tedious to use, therefore they don't get used. Our staff love using OneNote so it's being used extensively now. Don't know about its search capability (both OneNote and SP have search but I have no idea how good they are) but we have our folder layout carefully chosen so we can find what we need pretty quickly.

Have even used it recently on a larger project to assign tasks, with milestones and due dates, each one linked to their corresponding Bugzilla ticket that the owners can update as needed. For our small team this worked pretty well.

Not sure about sharing, but some ideas: OneNote can email individual pages as needed, or you could create separate notebooks per client (and let Sharepoint handle the security). Or you could print to PDF and email that out as well. Depends on what your needs are whether this would be a good fit.