One of my classmates in microprocessor lab back in college managed to make a LEEPROM. For those too young to remember, EPROMS have a window on them into which one shines UV light to erase it before reprogramming. With enough voltage between Vcc and Ground, the same EPROM can be made to emit light. Hence, LEEPROM. It was quite amusing at the time....

I think the parent is referring to (from memory, forgive me if incorrect...) "El pueblo de la nuestra senora reina de Los Angeles de la porciuncula", which is allegedly the original name of the village.

Reducing myself to AOL-level, but Me three! I just smile and nod at everyone who says hello until I've been there a few months and the names start sticking. -- At a recent conference, I picked up a bumper sticker: "I didn't spend 4 years in computer school to talk to people" Not that extreme, but I totally get what you're saying.

PCMCIA = People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms.

Asimov's "The Gods Themselves" ? (I hope I have the title right... it's been nearly two decades since I read that)

In the early days of wireless routers they used to sell such beasts. The SMC router (802.11b only) I have sitting in the closet has a serial port to which one can connect a modem. Its configuration screen has options to fall back to the serial port if the broadband uplink dies. I was thinking it was worthless, but perhaps there is still a market for this thing after all.

*Dreadfully slow graph rendering in Excel 2007 if you do anything other than default axis settings. (On operations that are instantaneous in 2003)
*After 2 decades, you'd think they'd figure out that if a "-" is followed by unparsable text, it is "text" and not a "formula". They could, you know, use the same algorithm they already use for all other cell input to determine this.
*A real clipboard behavior for simple copy/paste in Excel. Again, you'd think they'd figure out how to keep one copy of something in a buffer while you edit something else. Clarisworks 2.0 from 1990 does this correctly. It's the only program I know that doesn't have this most basic of features.
*get rid of the stupid window-in-a-window scheme they had since windows 3.1 (or earlier?). It never made sense to me and makes working with multiple programs a bitch.

Always thought "jelly" is fruit with pectin as a solidifying agent. If it has gelatin, then it had various names.

Well, if Apple "won",
  We would be running some horribly beefed-up version of the M68000. I would consider that an improvement over the abortion that is the x86.
  We would also be running some beefed-up version of SCSI rather than the kludged upon kludged upon kludged descendant of IDE. I think this would also have been an improvement.
    We would be using some beefed-up descendant of ADB, rather than USB. This one is not so good.
    We would have had decent multi-monitor support about a decade earlier. Good.
  One button mouse would still be default. Multi-button mice would exist but there would be no standard on the 2nd+ buttons. Bad.
    We would be allowed to use < > / \ in our file names, or at least have sane folder delimiters in or file paths. Good.
    We wouldn't be stuck with anachronisms like drive letters. Good.
    We would have real aliases/symlinks rather than the kludge that is the shortcut. Good.
    We wouldn't have control characters commandeered for application shortcuts. Good. ... but now I'm rambling.

As much as I like Apple gear, I think the ideal market share/influence for them is about 20%. Any greater than that, and they start pulling stuff like they're doing now in the portable devices market. They work best when they are kept the underdog; not powerful enough to impose their power trips on anyone else, but not so powerless that they disappear and fail to push the rest of the market.

If running some utilities on a desktop PC were sufficient to properly test a chip, AMD, Intel, et. al. wouldn't shell out megabucks for things like this and this.
Unless you got one of these in your living room (and have their test vectors to run on them), you don't really know whether the chips meet spec.

My understanding was that they skipped 5 to sync up version numbering between Mac and Windows versions. Word for Mac was already at version 5 (many swear this was/is the best version of Word for Mac, ever.) when they released version 6. They made the Windows version 6 as well. It was also supposed to emphasize tighter compatibility between the two (they started using the same file format from version 6.)
Unfortunately, Word 6 for Mac was a steaming pile of bloated code. Computers that would run Word 5 snappily would choke on Word 6. PowerMacs, which were still considered "fast" at the time would slow to a crawl running Word 6. Microsoft redeemed themselves with Office 98 for Mac, which was much better software.

As in,
"The salad and soup were mediocre, but the owl was superb!"

"What do you mean it's endangered?"

"Meh... it probably tasted like chicken anyways."

Indeed. This is the way things are done in the consumer PC industry. Come up with a crappy standard that doesn't quite do what you want, but is dirt cheap to implement, so that it will get adopted en masse. Then, slowly, over time, kludge in features on top of it so that customers will have to buy into each new version to get what they want, and in the end, finally get something that performs somewhat adequately and is basically equivalent to what was always available in a different standard, but is a lot kludgier underneath. Happened with IDE vs. SCSI, x86 vs. RISC machines, and happening again with USB vs. Firewire. It seems so inefficient to me... .../me grimaces in annoyance because it's darn near impossible to find a firewire video camera these days.

From what I've read of history, AMD had just such a feature in the 5x86 (late 486~early pentium days). Of course, nobody used that mode because it wasn't x86. I don't know whether people would be more willing to use such a feature now. Linux would probably be ported to it.

Literally two minutes before seeing this story, I downloaded a song to try one of their weekly freebies. I'm in Japan for work for the last couple of years, and from the beginning until now, had no troubles downloading. When I fired up iTunes 3 minutes ago, it gave me the standard spiel it gives when terms have changed. I skimmed through it and Ok'd it.

I didn't realize it had such a time bomb in there. And, from the looks of it, it doesn't matter, yet.