I sailed past Peleliu in 1994, the 50th anniversary of the battle. It was horrible to see that insignificant hunk of rock where so many young men died for... what, exactly? It was dubiously important in the first place and looked an awful lot like other rocky islands I'd seen, which drove home the utter futility and waste that it represents. It was a very emotional experience and I'm getting choked up now remembering it.

I'd be perfectly happy never seeing another battlefield in my life.

Oh, please. How many people are paying to run Skype on a system that can't or won't be upgraded to Snow Leopard? Supporting Leopard means that Microsoft can't use APIs released in the last 5 years. They probably have to support x86-32 or PPC processors (which is the reason most people on Leopard are still on Leopard). They have to use relatively ancient tools to compile the packages.

All that, or they can just decide to never, ever upgrade the underlying protocol to handle new security requirements or additional features.

I can't for the life of me figure why MS would want to bother to keep supporting that old code. What's the return on investment for keeping someone's PPC Mac limping along? Or perhaps that's it: they want to make it easy for people to stay on stone age hardware to try and compel Apple to have to support it. Sounds conspiratorial, but I'm hard pressed to think on a non-conspiracy explanation that satisfies Occam's Razor.

Also, Microsoft is killing support for their own WP7, whose last release came out less than a year and a half ago. So much for your assertion, huh? Maybe they've just decided that supporting a 5 year old OS X version has a better business case than Windows Phone 7, which is very likely true.

Oh, that weird-ass thing that Miguel invented to try to drag the Linux crowd away from multi-vendor, vetted languages? Yeah, I've heard of it.

It has a huge Wife Acceptance Factor, for one. We have iPhone apps that let you select any of the movies I've ripped onto it and play them back directly to our Apple TV (or any of another of settop boxes). Throw music onto it and the songs show up in iTunes for people on our LAN. Save a file to a certain folder on our laptop home directories and it gets synced to the NAS (ala Dropbox), made available on our iPads, then backed up to Amazon Glacier.

In short, it does everything you'd ever want a NAS to do but smoothly and nicely. My DS412+ replaced the FreeBSD system I'd assembled and installed from scratch, because there's other stuff I'd rather be doing and because I couldn't possibly make the experience as pleasant as Synology has.

I'm having a hard time reconciling those statements because it doesn't match my experience at all. First, it's my understanding that all Synologys come "bare" and you have to download and install the OS when you first power them on. My DS412+ that I bought a couple of months ago certainly did. It's initial boot gave me a web page with instructions for downloading and installing the most recent OS version.

Second, Synologys don't automatically reboot themselves, but can easily be configured (as in truly easily, right through the settings UI) configured to email you every time a new OS comes out. Perhaps that should be required, though, before allowing you to enable external services.

I almost always have to do CPU/Motherboard/RAM if I upgrade that part. Even if the RAM is compatible, it usually is nominally expensive to upgrade, and I usually get more of it at lower latency and faster clock than the original RAM, so I almost always swap that out at the same time.

For gamers, i5s are generally faster than i7s due to lack of hyperthreading overhead. Most games don't use much threading, but that is changing. I've read the Frostbite engine uses it extensively. The i5 is still better for me from a business app perspective, though, since I know my company's software is minimally threaded on the client (the server, on the other hand, is basically one big thread manager).

There were third party schemes to add more memory on Apple ][, so perhaps something like that existed on IBM. My mom had 768k in memory when she was writing her textbook in the early 1980s (1983-4ish, I'm guessing). Keep in mind a (side of) diskette back then was about 140k of storage. I think her final book was 6 diskettes. Her publisher is the only person I ever saw with more (he had a meg) until the GS's came out. I lost touch with the PC world around then (whether it be Apple or IBM or some other clone) and when I returned I got steeped deep with UNIX and by fall of 1993 I was running Slackware on a PC I got for free. My mom bought a mac, so I got steeped in mac, and my roommates all had PCs or C64s, so I got steeped in that as well. Great way to be platform agnostic is to know them all (I had no idea back then Microsoft would eventually dominate).

Yes, you're the only one. Many of us don't call it anything at all.

I'm sure someone's crunched the numbers and this makes sense on paper, but seriously? Porting to Itanium before x86? I know HP wants to prop up its teensy niche CPU server line, but I just can't see how to justify that. Who's going to migrate software from old VMS systems to a new one on very highly vendor-locked hardware? It seems like anything likely to ever be updated before the heat death of the universe would probably have made the jump to Linux-on-x86 years ago.

Yep. Their Code of Ethics says:

1.5 Honor property rights including copyrights and patent.

Violation of copyrights, patents, trade secrets and the terms of license agreements is prohibited by law in most circumstances. Even when software is not so protected, such violations are contrary to professional behavior. Copies of software should be made only with proper authorization. Unauthorized duplication of materials must not be condoned.

I don't pirate software. I pay for the stuff I use when required. However, I damn sure don't respect software patents or nebulous "terms of license agreement" EULA bullshit. I'll honor them as mandated by law to keep me and my employer out of trouble (although every programmer reading this has probably violated 3 stupid patents today in the course of their job). And while the RIAA doesn't "authorize" me to rip CDs I've bought, I'm legally entitled to do so and will at my convenience.

I think my views are pretty mainstream among programmers. If the ACM wants me to join, they need to remove the requirements for me to worship pro-corporate, anti-citizen, rent-seeking behavior. I can't ethically consent to support their unethical Code of Ethics.

My wife's a doctor and we recently moved to a new state with very protectionistic licensing policies. For example, you're required to have passed the medical boards within the last ten years. Doesn't matter if you're a professor of medicine at Harvard: you had to have passed the boards recently. You know, the ones new doctors take in their senior year of med school when they've been doing nothing but studying for the last for years straight and it's still fresh in their minds. So my wife, who's owned a successful practice for the last (more than 10) years had to pass the given-every-6-months test that determines whether she gets to keep doing the job that she's an expert at.

I'm writing this in sympathy for your situation, and to let you know that it apparently sucks for lots of professions. Your wife's not in it alone, and as someone who went through your role in the situation: I feel your pain. Best of luck to both of you!