Err.. the only thing any driver really does....

Fundamentally, the only any driver really does is send commands to a device over a bus and handle the responses. What other kind of driver were you hoping for? :-)

And today, after almost six years of reasonably reliable service, I'm starting to have my doubts about Dreamhost. Two nights in a row, I made minor changes to the configuration for my domains through their Web Panel, and the Apache server on their west coast shared hosting box died and never came back on its own. The first outage was 2.5 hours. This outage is ten hours and counting.

Anybody know a good shared hosting provider with better reliability? This latest failure brings them down to barely two nines YTD, not including scheduled maintenance.

I'm also using GANDI as my registrar. I'm reluctantly letting DreamHost provide DNS for one domain, and deferring part of another domain to their nameserver, but otherwise I've always preferred to keep my DNS servers in-house (literally), for maximum control. My primary is a Mac Mini, and my secondary is a Raspberry Pi.

I was using their shared hosting to serve images associated with my domain, with the HTML served from my home server over DSL—basically as a poor-man's Akamai. Unfortunately, what I found was that their site would randomly take the better part of a minute to respond to a request. That meant that sporadically it would take longer for them to serve an image than for me to do so from my home DSL connection, and pretty much the entire transfer time was spent waiting to get the first byte back from their server.

At some point, I decided to gather statistics on the problem by using a machine at work (typically approaching or reaching gigabit speeds) to make a very short request to the server every couple of minutes. I forget what percentage of those requests took more than half a minute to come back, but I'm pretty sure it was in the double digits.

Obviously, I got a terrible server that was badly configured and/or massively overloaded. Obviously that won't happen to everybody. The reason I left is that even after proving definitively that the server sucked, and requesting that my content be migrated to a server that wasn't overloaded, they refused to fix the problem. Every server provider will have problems now and again. What matters is how you handle them when they happen, or in this case, whether you handle them when they happen. GoDaddy didn't, and that makes them a terrible provider even if only a tiny percentage of their customers have problems, because you never know when you're going to find yourself in that tiny percentage.

Besides that, you're probably fine with any of them. My GoDaddy experience can best be summed up as:

• On their hosting service, they limited all processes run by your user account (not just CGI) to a certain number of seconds. This made it almost impossible to upload large files, because they invariably timed out before the upload could finish.
• Despite that limit, the service was still unusably slow because of all the WordPress and PHPBB instances whose full-text searches stink on ice. Requests to move my (purely static) content to a server that wasn't so bogged down were denied.
• Then, I tried to buy a cert from them. After I made the purchase, but before it actually became available for me to retrieve, they cancelled the purchase and told me that they no longer offered the number of years that I'd bought, despite the fact that I bought it using publicly available links on their website.

Let's just say I ditched them within the first month, and we'll leave it at that. I switched to DreamHost, and haven't looked back. Their service isn't perfect performance-wise, but it is so much better than GD that it isn't even funny. (Yes, I know you're just asking about domain registration, but lots of folks do one, then the other, so....)

And whatever you do, don't get your hosting from the same company that provides your domain names. There are far too many horror stories of hosting-related disputes leading to frozen domain names.

I came to that conclusion about Google several years ago. There's a reason that I never bother to look at my Google+ account even though I created one. I didn't trust it to not go away, so why bother. And that was almost four years ago.

We're well past the point where new Google services should be presumed DOA. My general assumption at this point is that unless it is a major source of ad revenue or they spent at least triple-digit millions to acquire it, they don't care about it.

So what you're saying is that the GGP should himself or herself a letter about it. Sounds like a solid plan to me.

You're assuming that fix-ups involve the same characters. That need not be the case. For example, most people would probably categorize my first novel as a fix-up, because a chunk of it started as an unrelated short story that I adapted into the universe. It uses different characters, and is expressed as a flashback to the main character as a child, being told the secondary story by his grandfather (who otherwise plays a very insignificant role in the book).

Other fix-ups interleave stories about different groups of characters that are happening at the same time. If done well, the result is indistinguishable from any other well-written third-person novel unless you've read one or more of the original stories.

Actually, it does make them incompetent. A competent leader would look at your point of view, recognize that your points have merit (assuming they do), and try to find a compromise design that meets your needs without compromising too much on their goals. Only an incompetent leader is intransigent and is unwilling to adapt his or her views when presented with new information that contradicts them.

You have to come up with a better reason than "that's the way it has been done in the past". Sometimes decisions need to be made to undo past fails. So make an argument about the merits of the current design please.

Making changes to a design may be justified, but it is the responsibility of those who want to change the design to justify those changes by showing how it makes things easier for the common use case without making the uncommon use cases impossible. If the designer can't do that, then either the design change needs to be rethought or it needs to be a user preference.

Either way, if you're going against established norms, and if there were good, solid reasons for those norms, you'd better have a darn good justification for going against convention, because probably 99.9% of the time, when UI designers do so, they're making a serious mistake. To use an architecture example, the Centre Pompidou is quite possibly the ugliest building in existence. They went against the established norms, and they got away with it because it's an art gallery, and a part of what art galleries do is to challenge those norms. But try to design a law firm's headquarters that way, and you'll be asked to take a long walk off a short pier.

This MacBook (not a MacBook Air, nor a MacBook Pro) is aimed at a definite market segment, arguably the biggest buyer of Apple's computers... college students.

Go poll real college students and see how many of them use their laptop to charge their cell phones at night to save space in their tiny dorm room. See how many of them sync their phones to their laptops using a cable. Go ahead. I'll wait.

A cell phone manufacturer building a laptop that can't even be connected to their own cell phone without unplugging the laptop from the wall falls solidly on the "There's not enough crack in the world for this design to make sense" end of the scale. I truly can't imagine what they could possibly have been thinking, and I'm even more baffled that nobody along the way spoke up and said, "What in h*** are you thinking?" loudly enough to get this design rethought before it made it all the way to the general public.

The key words in your post are "for work". Apple has not historically built products that are designed primarily for corporate users. It builds stuff for consumers. And a sizable percentage of consumer laptop users regularly use HDMI. A sizable percentage regularly use SD cards. A sizable percentage regularly use their laptop to charge their cell phone while traveling. As you start to chip away at the highly common tasks that this laptop fails miserably at doing, you're quickly left wondering who will actually buy this, or at least I am. I'd imagine it will be very popular among Apple managers, and maybe in some other corporate environments, but beyond that....

Okay, maybe K-12, but only by cannibalizing the K-12 iPad market.

Which is pretty much everybody who uses HDMI. Have you seen how quickly Netflix burns your battery life? And on an ultrathin laptop that tries to squeeze every bit of battery power that it can out of an undersized battery, I'd expect it to be even worse.

Try an $80 adapter... just to get HDMI. This new laptop makes no sense. I can't think of anybody I know who doesn't use HDMI with their laptops, even if it is just as a way of piping Netflix to a hotel TV while traveling. And I can't think of anybody who doesn't use a USB port, even if it is just for charging an iPhone. So pretty much 100% of laptop users will have to own this enormously overpriced, clumsy adapter and carry it around with them at all times, just so they could make that computer slightly thinner.

Worse, most users polled would rather Apple make laptops thicker to give us better battery life, because the real-world battery life is a third what Apple claims unless you do nothing more complex than running Word and a web browser. A whole day running Xcode or Photoshop? Yeah, right. Making them even thinner and taking away ports that nearly everybody uses is exactly the opposite of what users are asking for.

Who did they design this for again? Apple managers?