...16-year-old girls everywhere driving around with Facebook on the heads-up display. You might as well install a keg in the trunk with the tap in the dash for all this will do to teen accident rates.

I'm not sure if you're making the claim that storage is now an oligopoly. Certainly, rotational media storage is, but that is a decreasing share of the overall storage market. Looking at the storage market as a whole and you should include all the SSD manufacturers like Intel, OCZ, and Crucial. I think you get to seven significant players pretty quickly, although I suspect there will be some consolidation with SSD's too sooner than later.

Over the past 10 years or so, HDD manufacturers have been on a race to the bottom in terms of $/GB. I think that's the exact reason you get batches of lousy consumer drives out on the market. Consolidation isn't going to be good for prices, but maybe in a less price sensitive market we can expect to see more consistent reliability from lot to lot for a given SKU.

Can someone that manages enterprise storage comment on this? Not counting the initial investment in $/GB since that should improve with time, do SSD's make the most sense in all applications? What about a disk that is used to store a lot of very small files (less than the SSD block size) that are regularly modified? I guess what I'm asking is: is there a hypothetical enterprise application where the expected lifespan of a HDD is better than an SSD?

My gut tells me that EOL for rotational media is a lot further out than three to four years, but I'm not familiar enough with enterprise storage applications to back up this belief. Otherwise, I don't understand why the traditional "big iron" HDD manufacturers are spending all this cash to consolidate if the required manufacturing capacity to satisfy the HDD market is going to monotonically decrease over the next three to four years. It's not as though that manufacturing expertise translates very well into making a profit on SSD's where the most important components are designed and manufactured by someone else. That's going to be a tough market to be in.

I always get a little twitchy when I'm looking over a colleague's shoulder at their computer screen and there's nothing but icons for documents and shortcuts as far as the eye can see. I don't keep anything on my work computer desktop apart from My Computer, My Network, My Documents (which is mapped to c:\data), and the Recycle Bin. That way if I want to copy something to the desktop, do some work, and then delete it or move it somewhere else, it's easy to find.

My physical desktop is also pretty neat and organized, but that's mainly due to the workspace cleanliness kick our CEO is recently on.

I think you were going to the wrong music shops. The place I haunted in my younger days, [url=http://www.flatblackandcircular.com/pages/store.html]Flat Black and Circular[/url], let you listen to any compact disc or phonographic record on a pair of headphones off to the side. If the CD or record was new and the shrink wrap was still on the packaging, you'd just take it to the counter and they'd remove it for you. If you're passionite about music, it's hard to beat face-to-face interactions with other people that share that same passion.

That's a fair complaint. At least on my Linux install, and I believe in Windows as well, the extra windows in GIMP don't automatically minimize or hide when focus is removed from the main window. It's never bothered me, but I can see how it could lead to inefficient clutter when you really need to get something accomplished in as short a time as possible. I'm wondering if this is a limitation of the operating systems rather than the application. I notice that with all windows minimized, clicking on the main application icon in the task bar (tint2 in my case) brings back all the extra windows, but clicking on the extra windows does not.

I've never understood what benefit having a full screen main window with all the toolbars, layer and color browsers, and property windows automatically docked to the edges of the screen imparts. I admit that I don't use any image editing software on a regular basis, but is it that confusing to use a piece of software if it doesn't have a full screen title bar and gray background behind the WIP? In my opinion, GIMP's current UI encourages the arrangement of all the ancillary windows in whatever works best for the task at hand.

The last time I used Photoshop extensively was in high school about 15 years ago. And if I remember correctly, on Mac at least, it didn't have a full screen main window; it was very similar to recent releases of GIMP. When did that change and was Photoshop suddenly better because of it?

You clearly missed the memo that netbooks have also gone the way of the netbook . . . . wait, what?

Right . . . the AT&T executives from 1974, when the anti-trust lawsuit that led to AT&T's break-up was filed, are still running the company. C'mon now, John deButts, the chairman and chief executive of AT&T at that time, died in 1986.

I'm guessing this comment / question will not see the light of day due to my lousy rating, but here goes nothing:

I'm an electrical engineer making a decent living practicing applied electro-magnetics and communication theory. As part of my program at a slightly above average state university in the late '90s, I was required to take a semester of C++. I also took a second semester as an elective, but mostly coasted through as it was my final semester and had crammed in 13 other credits in required courses to finish.

Now, I certainly don't make a living writing software for public sale, but I do occasionally want / need to automate hardware and software tasks. My software development "language" choice was generally dictated by what was at hand, or with what I wanted to interface, or what had already been done. I've used TCL, LabVIEW, VB, Scheme, LUA, among others. I'm not an expert in any of them and I certainly am not an efficient programmer. I haven't had the need to use C++, or any similar language, but I do feel as though the C++ course that I was "forced" to take was beneficial. Specifically, I learned about programming syntax, how to read and debug code, and what arguments and built-in functions you should expect from any other language. More generally, I think I learned how to learn a new language which has been indispensable.

Is C++ the best language for learning what I did? It seems to have done okay for me, but I probably learned and forgot a lot of OO stuff that isn't very useful for what I do (quickly bang out some software to automate the task at hand) and maybe C would have been more applicable. Thoughts?

Ummm . . . no. The PDF from Verizon stated, in bold, and as the title of the subsequent paragraph, "If you subscribe to a Data Plan or Feature on February 3, 2011 or after, the following applies:" I'd like to add RTFA, but if you are a Verizon subscriber as implied by your post, apparently you couldn't even be arsed to read an important notice from a company with which you have signed a contract so I suppose it's hopeless.

Wireless providers are judged by investors on subscriber churn. They'll say whatever they have to and come up with whatever promotions they have to to always have more people signing up than are leaving. If that means pushing services that your network couldn't handle if more people use them than you predict, so be it. That said, a friend of mine, with mathematics and computer science masters degrees works for a wireless provider and spends his days managing a team that predicts what the business impact of decisions like this will be. Based on my discussions with him, I'm sure wireless providers have a very good model for how many people will actually be regularly using these high bandwidth services. Based on this announcement, it sure seems that at this time Verizon isn't able to achieve a high enough ROIC from building out their network capability to support the needs of the highest 5% of users.

. . . to which I'm looking forward. I can see the headline now; "February 3, 2016, California Appeals Court rules that Free Internet Porn is a basic human right."

I'm pretty sure my standard for cool is impregnating both an actress and a supermodel.

The engineer in me says, "This is a laser because the light is generated through stimulated emission," but the kid in me says "The lasers from the GI Joe guns don't spread out like that; that's not a laser."