Unlike most of the Atlanta metro, I have the advantage of NOT having to deal with Georgia Power. :-)

Greystone Power uses a seasonal system (summer and winter), and three tiers for residential power for each season.

For wintertime (which is now), they charge USD 0.074/kWh for the first 650, 0.072/kWh for the next 350, and 0.0637/kWh for anything over 1000 kWh.

For summertime, they charge USD 0.074/kWh for the first 650, 0.097/kWh for the next 350, and then 0.108/kWh for anything over 1000 kWh.

There's also a generic $11.75 service charge every month.

If if compare the usability experience of the 1993 WPS on OS/2 and *any* modern Desktop Environment in terms of consistency, accessibility and general performance, WPS beats them all.

You know it. I know it. Sadly, the folks doing interface design for these projects don't know it. :-(

No, some format shifting is explicitly legal. The Philips 765 CD burner that I own, for example, is explicitly intended to convert analog audio from other stereo components into digital and record it on CD, or make digital copies of existing CDs, but it (a) will only burn to CD-R discs which are marked "Digital Music" (making sure the music industry gets a cut of the CD price), and has certain copyright features(SCMS) in place to limit making multi-generation copies.

The Audio Home Audio Recording Act of1992 explicitly allows for such format shifting as long as authorized equipment is used.

Translation: I already have mine. I don't have to care.

I used PROFS/VM (and OV/VM) for a decade, and I've used Notes for almost seven years.

I preferred PROFS by a mile. It had space issues, sure, but at least it would send e-mail reliably and tell you when new messages were in your mailbox in a timely manner. Notes here is terrible ... there is sometimes a 10-15 minute delay between an internal mail being sent and being received, the "new mail" indicator triggers but I have to manually refresh to see the actual messages, etc.

Worst e-mail client I've ever used. I even liked the old "NITS" MAPPER interface to SperryLink better...

Some companies offer a technical track in parallel with the management track so senior employees who wish to advance and remain technical can do so. And even someone who is a "manager" can still keep their hands dirty in some organizations ... my manager just celebrated his 30th anniversary with our company (which wasn't his first programming gig), and he still writes code almost every day. Good code for the most part.

A lot depends on the company you work for and perhaps also the specific area.

Early in 2011, right? Am I gonna have to buy a Roku to do what my 360 can not?

Sure ... you're fragmenting the crap out of the datastream, splitting it up into a zillion little packets and associated headers. With a dedicated data stream, a good resending algorithm, and a nice sliding-window algorithm to optimize block sizes should the line get noisy, you can get a pretty efficient transfer going. Zmodem was very good, and I used a version of KERMIT once (SKERMIT?) at Unisys that did something quite similar.

The key is getting to an interview, and these days that isn't an easy task. Not easy at all...

That would be a function of real-world experience ... wouldn't it?

Or an MBA, right? :-(

(1) This isn't "bricking" the Tivo. When ReplayTV stopped supplying guide data to my DVR, it still worked just fine but more like a VCR where you manually set everything. It sounds like Tivo is the same.

You must have been paying month to month? My lifetime ReplayTV is still going strong, and is still being supposed by schedule data from ReplayTV. Though I think you can work around it these days (Schedules Direct via WiRNS).

I know it's a reality, but that doesn't make it logical.

How is defending oneself against a potential lawsuit not logical?

They aren't cool in a lot of corporations, either. :-)

I ran into this same situation over 20 years ago when I started working for a mainframe software company ... some of the guys who had been there for 15-20 years were upset at the rates some of the new people were bringing in.

As long as companies hold skillsets as being more important than employees, you will probably still see it. In that case, though, it was more a case of standard corporate raises being less than the starting pay of the then-growing programming market.

It sucks to be on the short end of that scenario, and "job hopping for more money" isn't quite as simple as many make here it out to be.

Sometimes it actually feels good to provide a smoothly running system to customers.

It isn't all bad stuff...