You should have continued, because it gets better:

There's also that gem:

What is MovieLink? "On December 16, 2008 the Movielink website was shut down." Oops!
Also mentions the PS3 failure...

The study is only available on HD DVD.

funny thing is, if their aim was to destroy economies one would have to say that they have worked very well ...

sorry to disappoint you, that money was 'owed' mostly to private german and french banks, who knew the risk all too well, and busted. it was them who managed governments to buying that into public debt and bailing them out, so you now get to pay for their foolish screw up with your tax money. have fun with your euros, now, and go cry a river to your own puppet government. good luck.

How to tell if your cat is plotting to kill you.
How much do cats actually kill?

I wouldn't blame the coders, unless they where responsible for the technology choices

It's first and foremost a management issue :

If that's not management rotten to the core, what is ?

Any company relying on Microsoft technology to achieve cross-platform deserves a spectacular failure anyway.

You didn't look at the correct picture (assuming this one is not a fake... link straight from wikipedia, by the way).

my better suggestion is don't do that. i don't even need to know the reasons, because there can't possibly exist any valid one.

oh and if you built that site yourself ... a very good suggestion would be stop building sites, now. this isn't about skill, it's about basic understanding of network fundamentals.

get a professional, you can retain absolute control about how the site looks and what it does but considerably reduce the odds of screwing up that massively or damaging other people.

plus, considering you current status, a very good suggestion would be to take the site down and get it fully audited.

Ok, here are some possible benefits over chihowa's proposal, for specific use cases.

- If the use case implies a system/"real" account rather than a virtual one (which I admit is a bad idea most of the time), the implementation practically comes for free: simply create an initially disabled account with a generated password. Particularly useful if the bunch of account creation doesn't actually use an e-mail account at all (say, university students accounts, with account names and initial passwords printed)

- You don't have to develop a different UI to differentiate account validation and regular password change.

- Some (web)mail applications are breaking URLs. Often times systems using generated URLs contain a link, plus a textual representation of the URL in case the link doesn't work (which usually means a text client), and sometimes some kind of pretty printer likes to add spaces after punctuation signs. With a short static URL and a password, you're minimizing copy/paste issues.

For example, it prevents you to create a throwaway account with the e-mail address of someone else.

just wanted to add one thing to the police story, in case you wondered: i was born in barcelona but have german name and surnames, and absolutely look like a guiri. :)

you're mixing things here. drunks get drunk, fireworks are set off mainly by kids with their families and these things happen in separate environments. none of this is a crime so police presence is not needed at all. accidents do happen, though, and even occasional vandalism. i've seen many waste containers light up on sant joan. firefighters tend to show up promptly. no big deal.

if you love this city it's a pity you didn't get a glimpse into the magic and the exceptionality that imbues this very special night. this pagan celebration dressed with a catholic 'cover' for political reasons is (was?) pretty unique and pretty deep in the roots of collective conscience. and although it has been very much 'globalized' and lost much of its charm there is still a lot going on for many. you should have seen it when i was a kid, with bonfires on every beach, on almost every crossing in the eixample, a freaking wonderful ... warzone of fire, love, happiness and magic. you could literally breath it. it was that very special night when you were allowed to do all things usually prohibited, literally play with fire, where generations of catalans have gotten laid for the first time. if you are alive ... what's fucking not to like?? :D it's sant joan!

of course it isn't the same now, partly taken over by the party-till-you-drop industry. the same one that is absorbing new year's revetlla and the festes de gràcia with their top quality product: cheap booze, extremely loud music and a license to piss on the streets. aaaand tourists, of course. you did know that you were coming into an underdeveloped country, did you? :)

but it's still sant joan and i'm afraid you just haven't experienced it in an appropriate environment. it's actually a family/neighboor thing, you won't find it in mass parties, which are just the standard screw up. as a lone stranger you need to be hooked up by some friend into his/her circles. people honoring these traditions are dwindling but should not be hard to find yet. and catalans have nothing against foreigners, you will be welcome, i guarantee you.

escudillers would be the last place i would choose for sant joan! it's probably fine for any other night if you're ok with lumpen and it's sort of burlesque and dissonant ambient. i liked it a lot for much of my youth, i don't go down there much lately but it still is pretty much the same ... in a different way.

i honestly can't see a problem with that. were you forced to buy? :)

hold on. every local is subject to exactly the same process to obtain his dni (the equivalent of your dnie), which is mandatory from age 16. and yes, bureaucracy is nuts. now listen: i once lost my dni. first of all, it had already expired 15 years ago and i never had the slighest trouble (apart from some bank clerk being a jerk and having to call up the director, occasionally), this should already tell you a lot about how things work around here. i wouldn't have bothered to go to the police if i hadn't lost the darn thing. funny thing is that the police officer absolutely refused to issue a new one unless i could deliver ... (get a seat) ... the whole history of ins (altas) and outs (bajas) of the padrons where i had lived for the last 25 years or so. in my case that would cover about a dozen different locations. so i now would have to make a request to each of those places for the relevant documents. lucky me, i had recently made one such request and remembered a crucial detail: you need a dni to be able to request such document in the first place. guess what? confronted with this dilemma the officer just silently issued my new dni, an exact replica with the same 25 year old address. he told me to fix that asap. i never bothered, and you can bet he knew. since the i have renewed my dni once more. it still shows the same address.

i have to ask again. you DID know you were visiting an underdeveloped country, didn't you? this is how stuff works around here. it's no different for local or for strangers. strangers just have a harder time catching up.

there's still plenty i would like to comment, but this is getting too long already. maybe next time. anyway, thanks for sharing your thoughts anyway!

You have to admit, Windows 2.0 benefits greatly from HD displays and millions of colours.
At the time of its initial release, you barely had 16 colours for the whole screen, and you had to convey information with them.
Nowadays, you can have 16 distinct shades of grey, none of which gives you the slightest clue about if some UI element is actually click-able/tap-able or not, but man, aren't these fonts gorgeous ?

come on, it's sant joan ...

this is, of course, bullshit.

and how does this bs match with you admitting ' like 7.5 million tourists a year in Barcelona. The vast, vast majority are well behaved'? care to support it with some facts, apart from the obvious one that bulls do bully?

there's a reason. barcelona is a dense city and living places are scarce. for several years there's been a trend of people buying out flats for short time rentals during touristic seasons, specially in the most sought after quarters. that's good business for some but makes home scarcity worse for locals.

i'm assuming those airbnb listings aren't actually from people sharing a room, but from such 'entrepreneurs'. (this is my speculation, no first hand information here)

and the running naked thing can be a real nuisance for some, too. again, it's a tight city and drunks shouting on the streets at night won't let you sleep, plus you might find out in the morning that they have also urinated on your building's front door. not nice. that's probably exaggerated a bit in the media. however, it's still undesirable tourism.

funny thing is ... local authorities now could just scan those airbnb lists and start dusting off those houses. wanna bet?