A former boss once said it best: (At the C level) It's a club, and the rule is "F*ck up, and move up!"

The Office Ribbon UI was created because the Office UI needed a reset.

A "reset"? I was doing just fine with the old menus. I have no problem with a "reset" if that's what you want. But I'm more efficient when I use the UI I'm used to. So at least, give me the option of keeping the old UI. You can even make the new UI the default. Just leave me a way to use the one I'm used to.

The UI needed to change. It did. Most people who don't have an automatic rejection of any change prefer the new UI.

I have yet to meet one person who prefers the ribbon over the old menu system. Maybe they exist, but I haven't met them yet. If you want to talk about UIs that need to change, I present: Visio. Purchased by Microsoft from Visio and, to this date, the UI is quirky and out of step with the other Office products. And that's putting it kindly.

Office has had 20 years of adding features since then. Features that few could use because they couldn't find them, buried in menus and tool strips and everywhere else

I'm sorry -- is this a plus or a minus, or just a clear indication that Microsoft's Office development team has been badly in need of a competent UI designer for over 20 years?

Most office documents are now editable on the web and on the phone. That's kind of a Big Deal.

Maybe for you. I edit my documents on a wide screen laptop. I'll grant you that being able to share documents is a big deal, but you will never convince me that being able to edit documents on your phone is a major leap forward in anything but frustration and eyestrain.

Our shop, up until a few years ago, included some n/c milling machines with very old PC-based controllers. They worked. It was sometimes challenging to find replacement hardware when a power supply or IDE hard drive failed, but once you replaced the failed part, the DOS-based controller software did what it was supposed to do, and did it reliably and repeatedly.

If the electronics had decided it was time to die, we would have had to replace the machine it controlled, as nobody made electronics and sensors for these old machines.

IIRC, one of the permitted exceptions to copyright is interfaces. You need to be able to copy interfaces to produce code that's compatible with existing code, and that's why interfaces can't be copyrighted.

This is what happens when you have non-technical lawyers and judges trying to rule on technical matters.

And with Microsoft deciding to change their UI every few years now...,

You've hit on what I consider to be Microsoft's biggest problem: they are no longer making basic functional improvements to their products. Instead, they are adding bells and whistles, and changing file formats to force upgrades (if your clients have ver XYZ+1, then you need it to read the default format of the files they send you).

To me, this indicates a change in attitude. No longer are they striving to put out the best software, they're churning revs to keep revenue up. It's a sign of desperation and it has been going on for several years, now.

I voted for Obama. Let's get that out of the way first.

That being said, I have been very disappointed with his relationship with Big Media (and corporations, in general). I predict he will always come down on their side, and against the consumer.
The other issue I have with him is his support of the security services over the rights of Americans to be left alone. I would have expected him to have called for the total repeal of the PATRIOT Act long ago. So,on these two issues, I will join in the chorus of "Thanks, Obama".

IMHO, his major contribution was the use of email and the NNTP newsgroup to organize and delegate tasks to open source programmers around the world. Linux is the product of many hands, and Torvalds should get the credit for building a framework that allows these hands to contribute in an organized way to a final product which is greater than the sum of its parts.

Linux, evan early in its life, was head and shoulders above the other commonly available OS for the Intel platform (DOS). Its competitors were Xenix (from Microsoft) and SCO's Unix. Both were hugely expensive and not necessarily better or more reliable than Linux (they also seemed mired in corporate molasses as far as new features were concerned). I remember installing early versions of Linux from floppy images downloaded from FTP servers. Not only did it work, but it was fast and more stable than Windows 3.1. Its only drawback was the lack of an office suite. There was no word processor and no spreadsheet to compete with Word and Excel. Linus's stated goal was a Unix clone that would run on a PC, to be used by hackers and students. By using the "power of the internet" to identify and organize like minded developers, he succeeded. *That* is in my opinion, his true accomplishment.

First, I would title them IT Security Alerts, rather than Security Alerts. One has to do with your computer, the other has to do with thrreats to your personal safety. You don't want people overreacting.

...you get what you deserve. Actually, you sould probably remove the word "financial" from the previous sentence.

I was at UMASS/Amherst in the 70s. I did the card deck thing for the first couple of assignments. Then I realized that the Teletype terminal in my room (yes, I was a true nerd...had my own Teletype) was connected to the very same computer that the cards were fed into. Why, I thought, couldn't I type the card images into a file from my terminal, then submit *that* as a job? Yup. Worked perfectly. I never punched another card.

Pascal is pretty bad at doing anything really useful. C is better for doing embedded bit-twiddling. It's been a while, but I remember trying to do something bit-intensive and finding that Pascal required far too much typing to get results. Not as much typing as COBOL, perhaps, but C was the obvious choice. I wish they'd used C as a teaching language instead of Pascal when I was in school.

I think the scary thing is that somewhere, in a large warehouse, our government has a stock of 8-inch floppies. Either that, or they are buying them from Initech at ridiculously high, sole-source prices. Come to think of it, the latter case is probably more likely.

According to Wikipedia, Leslie Stahl was born in 1941, joined CBS news in 1972 and became a correspondent in 1974. So, she started working for a major news organization right about the time the 8-inch floppy hit its peak. Hard to believe she didn't see one somewhere. Maybe she just forgot, but the PDP-11 and the RX01/02 would have been ubiquitous in a news organization, one would think.

If we have this problem, I think we'll be worried about more than our electronics not working...

I can't find a link, so I'll summarize:

Char 1: whatcha doin'?
Char 2: Playing golf.
Char 1: What's the object of the game?
Char 2: Get this little white ball in that hole over there.
Char 1: [picks up ball, walks over to hole, drops it in hole] Stupid game.