We already did a great job teaching our kids to live in a throwaway society and be easily distracted by the new shiny... and even gave it a convenient diagnosis: ADHD.

The retardation of The Cloud is about as obvious to the new generation as DRM and forced arbitration, which last time I checked, are being accepted by the public alarmingly well.

The same universe where manufacturers refused to provide Vista drivers for their old devices, thus forcing customers to buy new devices from that same manufacturer.

Yeah, it's not like people would even consider buying a device from another vendor or something.

Replace "games" with "Arduino projects" and Slashdot would mod you troll in a heartbeat.

Subjective, indeed.

Compared to UN*X enterprise software, yes. Compared to MacOS, AmigaOS, and other dying, stagnating consumer platforms at the time, Win95 was a massive and welcome improvement.

My only problem with ClassicShell is that it focuses WAY too much on the Start menu. I never use the Start menu, even with ClassicShell. There's a lot of things about Windows7 that annoy me compared to XP, but the only thing that really helps me is how ClassicShell changes how folder attributes are sorted.

I know Win7 is really popular among geeks and people seem to support the new window manager, but I'm still surprised how the OS pretty much declared war on how XP did things.

I agree, but I still wish the chewing would happen one-on-one in the boss's office. The effects of the mistake and end result of disciplinary action could be summarized in a meeting, so everyone knows what happened.

If the boss came out on to the floor and did this in full view of everyone, I'd be pretty pissed to hear it, no matter who was right or wrong.

Engineers are not known for their social skills. That's no excuse not to have them.

You don't even need a mechanical keyboard — just something with a good feel. I use a ten-year-old MS Internet Keyboard Pro and it has the best feel of any membrane keyboard I've ever used, including all new MS keyboards. It's helped my touch typing immensely, and it's silent to boot.

Go to a store and just start tapping on every keyboard they have on display. If the key feel is good, buy it. Granted, you may have to go through a few hundred SKUs or so.

It's too bad you didn't keep at least the first and last letters of each word correct. People might not have noticed!

I just saw a new Lego set that consisted of plenty of specialty molded parts. I was flabbergasted to see that the directions showed how to make a shovel excavator, a damn good Formula One race car, and a dune buggy with an exposed, moving engine, with no parts left over.

Hats off to the designers at Lego.

It's a hidden blessing that Flash only uses a single core. On a single core, Flash will bring a computer to its knees, but a dual core processor will barely be affected at all. If Flash eventually supports multiple cores, then heaven help us.

Incidentally, it's actually braindead developers that are responsible for Flash being so slow. All they have to do is add a few wait states to their code and the problem disappears. I've actually seen a number of Flash games that were programmed properly, and will not use more than 3% of my CPU time, despite running at 60 FPS. True, it would be nice if Flash had a built-in way to throttle the performance of content, but... no HTML5 I'm aware of has a mechanism for doing this, either. Firefox certainly doesn't, despite having a Flash container process.

I'm always amused when people bash Flash for sucking up CPU time. If an HTML5/JS application goes into a badly-written tight loop waiting for input, it will max out the CPU, too... and will likely do so on all cores. Will a switch to HTML5 automatically fix code with tight loops? Of course not. Thus, I don't think it's reasonable to blame Flash for badly written apps, either. It's the responsibility of the client platform to manage process priority (the web browser is the OS of the future? Yeah, right. Even memory management poses a challenge to many modern web browsers!)

As for working badly, one thing I liked about Flash many years ago was that it was a paltry ~300K download that didn't require a full installer. It "just worked", when other things like Java weighed in at 15+ MB and were a PITA to install. Also, Flash content is almost always packaged into a single file, making content easy to download and archive for offline use (such as cartoons and games). Try that with HTML5 or Java. There is no official packaging format for HTML/CSS/JS, so archiving content consisting of hundreds of files with tons of cross-links is a lot more difficult today than in the HTML3 days. Even Java figured out that packaging was important with the JAR file format. With GZip compression becoming standard on most web servers these days, why can't HTML5 get an official packaging format? More complaining about it being against a free Internet or some other impractical crap?

Yeah, in the face of Flash, all those loud-mouthed open-source guys (and other companies) did a fine job of making some good old fashioned competition.

Seriously. The alternatives to Flash were Java, millions of mal-ware infested media players, and eventually Silverlight. Everything either outright sucked, was mis-applied, or was too late to market to matter. Today, HTML5 is literally the only thing to go up against Flash, and HTML5 pretty much sucks. Just playing audio is a major challenge. just audio. That's pretty damn sad. The most revolutionary thing HTML5 has to offer is... a frame buffer? Really? It took this long?

Everyone else was wetting their pants about some mythical standards-compliant angel to come from the heavens and save us all, but they all either refused to work on it, or was too busy bitching over the proper color of the bike shed. No shit Flash took over the market.

I like Flash, despite its problems, because it actually works and works well. If it swamped the market, that was the fault of the market not responding and making something better.

Everyone tells me I'm crazy when I say that windowed games and videos play really sluggish in Windows 7 compared to XP. The reason is because the new window manager uses 3D hardware to do compositing, and for some reason, updates seems to be locked in at 30 FPS (my guess is 50% of the monitor refresh rate). XP updated at full blast and provided much, much smoother games and video. I've noticed a rather huge loss in overall performance on my new Win7 machine, despite it being massively more powerful than my old XP box.

Apparently, I'm the only one who notices or is bothered by this.

Slashdot being down doesn't cause my browser to crash.

I think the unflattering image in that Wikipedia article entirely fits the program's slogan.

In my case, it's buggy as hell.

Quick example: I found out the hard way that changed account defaults would take effect right away, but the GUI would not properly show the new settings until the program is restarted. If the GUI can so easily become decoupled from what's going on internally, that does not inspire confidence.

I've tried it a few times over the years, and found it to be stable, but it has a LOT of glitches and design issues that never get fixed. I think people use it because there's noting out there (among GUI-based clients) that's much better. It is certainly not a very good program in its own right, though.