A whole 5 seconds for a graph to be plotted. My god, I'm surprised you've been able to keep your temper in check. Having a violent fit and throwing your calculator across the room is the reasonable, adult response.

First world problem.

I've been very happy with http://www.modwest.com over the last 10+ years. Their basic plan is $7/month, but have more expensive plans if you need it. They have unlimited(within reason of course) because they know that only a small percentage of users come close to any limits they would set.

DBAN, Darik's Boot and Nuke, will wipe a hard drive to any of several government standards. If they are fine with mere software disposal of data, then DBAN is the way to go. http://www.dban.org/.

If they insist on physical destruction, I'm sure there are companies in your area that will handle that for you.

You know, it's just possible some people might want to conserve electricity. Or even shave a couple of bucks off the old electricity bill. Just because you can use a resource, doesn't mean you should. I have running water, but I don't just leave the faucet on all day in case I might want a glass of water.

I don't know, but if you had one of those little portable solar cells, could you just power an arm laptop anywhere?

I know, let's all discuss this on Google Wave! After all, Wave has massive potential for business users, http://mashable.com/2009/12/18/google-wave-business/. With 19 Educational uses, http://www.soyouwanttoteach.com/the-power-of-potential-19-educational-uses-for-google-wave/.

Unfortunately, I can't find the uptake numbers for Wave. Of course, just because one product flops doesn't mean the next must too. It's just that one of the reasons Wave probably failed was that it didn't offer people anything they weren't already getting somewhere else and they were too entrenched to change. People who needed real time collaboration already had mature products available to them, Elluminate, Contribute (or whatever it was in 2009), Live Meeting, or even GoTo Meeting. For people who didn't need the collaboration, Wave was an answer to a question no one asked. Even in 2009, Facebook was "good enough" for people.

So what about Google+? Does the minor difference in features warrant changing off facebook? Probably not. Does it offer anything outstandingly new or innovative? Probably not. Are people even more entrenched in their facebook lives now than in 2009? Probably. Add to that the real name policy and the inability to work with non-european names and there's even less reason to move.

Way back at the dawn of time, when Google was just opening its eyes, it was competing with some really big search engines. Remember how big Yahoo used to be? Or AskJeeves? Google didn't bring anything new to the table, but they were able to compete by being better. And switching search engines is much easier than switching social networks. When they competed on the email front, they did it by giving people a ton of storage. When Hotmail was offering storage in the megabytes, Google was offering it in the gigabytes and even Hotmail had to play catchup. People hate to delete emails, and Google let them keep everything for ever and never clean.

The other two big products, maps/earth and image search, weren't really competing against an entrenched alternative. There was mapquest, but even it was new.

So my armchair quarterback position is that G+ will peak very soon then slowly decline until in another year or two we'll be talking about G+'s failure. Which will be right around the time Google announces G++.

Yeah, it's a real shame programs like Word 2010 can't use ctrl+ b, i or u. rolls eyes.

I realize this is slashdot and all, but you don't have to run your own server and deal with the hassle. For the price of two Starbucks coffees a month, just get your own LAMP server through a hosting service. $8 a month is small price to pay for the convenience of knowing that you control your email. And since you get command line access, you can still install whatever webmail reader you want if you don't like the built-in version. I still prefer Thunderbird to webmail(but I dislike version 5) but if I wanted, I could drop in pretty much any webmail client on the server.

Yes and that's been true for decades. I remember my folks going to a couple of those stupid timeshare talks just so they could get a free cheap gift. They knew they weren't getting the big prize(if anyone ever does, which I doubt) but they'd take the crap prize.

And my mom still collects all of the dead tree coupons and does triple coupons with rebates for brands she'd never normally buy but can get for near free. Once the coupons are gone, back to the regular brands and stores.

So this isn't even a GroupOn thing. It's been around for decades. Anyone see the sequel to A Christmas Story where the mother is getting the china dishes from the theatre(or trying to anyway)?

Don't forget the possibility that IT actually offers this service but the person is not aware of it. Or it is offered in a way other than a native iPhone app.

If I had a nickel for every time someone said we should implement X when it actually has been implemented, documented on the documentation site, with training offered for years. . . .

Amen to storing files deleted from a network share. From a user's perspective, a file is a file (which is as it should be) and hitting the delete key should work the same regardless of where the file is actually stored.

I know an Outlook user at work who uses Deleted Items as a place to *store* emails. We've always been tempted to ask him if he stores his lunch in his trashcan.

So basically google is making a version of lynx that will show pictures and text formatting? Oh, wait, even lynx has a basic interface that makes it, what's that word...useful. That's it. Chrome is already too minimal for my tastes. It's ok to have a few buttons up there. Honest.

What's funny is that we're seeing a reverse in computing ability. I remember back when a 14" monitor was standard. When we got those 17" crts(15.75" viewable) we marveled at the screen real estate. Now at work we have either dual 19" or dual 21" monitors. But the trend actually seems to be towards smaller screens. At our school, 99% of the students have laptops or netbooks with the same physical screen size as the crt monitors we trashed almost a decade ago. If you asked us in 2001 if we'd give up a 22" widescreen for a 14" or even 10" screen we'd have laughed you out of the building.

Just give in and make a tablet/netbook version of chrome and a full featured, full interface version for desktops and laptops.

There are a couple of status bar add-ons you can pick up, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/235283/ worked for me.

Since ctrl+k gets me right to the search box in FF, I never go to the google home page. And even if I log out of my google account it still routes me to igoogle anyway. When they did that funky logo follows the mouse thing a while back, I actually had to go to google.co.uk to see it. That was easier then blasting the cookies anyway.

I did actually try this out though. I'm a fast enough typist that it doesn't matter. And I am *not* that fast. I can see if you are someone who types with an index finger one character every few seconds then maybe it will show you results before you are done typing.

Taken to the absurd extreme, then no one knows anything because every relies on someone else. So what if I can communicate with everyone else if everyone else is an ignorant moron. No man is an island, but what if we're marooned with Gilligan instead of the Professor.

Seriously though, at some point you have to actually know what you are doing without relying on help. You *will* have to answer a question when your friends are on vacation or when you are in a meeting and can't check with them. Who wants to tell their boss that they have to ask Fred the answer to a question.