We got standing desks a few weeks ago. I stand for a few hours in the morning and a few in the afternoon but sit for lunch. I find that it works best to shift slowly from foot to foot and rock back and forth a bit. I also switch up my stance between wide and narrow and even stand on one leg now and again. You might thing that sounds distracting but I feel more focused while working than I do sitting down.

At this point, or better yet several months before you get to this point, it's a good idea to volunteer the information that additional disk storage would cost only several thousand and prevent these kinds of problems.

Depending on what the server really does, a complete spare system ready to take over in the event of even the smallest failure also looks like a good investment. Don't let the business wait until they lose several million before spending a hundred thousand to prevent it.

That's because the worker was really an ant..

I don't really have a specific argument about the numbers. Truthfully I couldn't pay attention long enough to really find a flaw in the argument. That said, my gut is telling me author is wrong.

Damn, why didn't I think of this?

People, is it true? Would the market bear a "Republican Technology News" site?

And it likely never did. It was a big bunch of scare mongering, "Oh no the pirates are cutting hard core into our profits!!!!"

There is a basic fact about piracy... most people who pirate software fall into two categories:

1. The group that bought the software, but wants to remove it's DRM.
2. The group that will NEVER buy the software, regardless of price or DRM.

I think Steam proves this. Piracy is still alive and well, yes? So it wasn't a problem of accessibility. Steam erased accessibility issues. Bottom line: Pirates are likely never to be your customers, no matter what.

Why is it that the ads in mags like Byte were a key part of the reason I bought the magazine -- but banners and online ads have become little more than annoyance and irritation?

The old print-media ads were informative and didn't slow down my reading in anyway so I guess they were excellent "secondary" content.

There's no way I'll patronize any site that uses full-page interstitial advertising -- yet the full-page ads in Byte and other printed mags were things I often read from start to finish.

Is it just me or have others had the same experience?

Parking meters still impose a cost on the preexisting residents...

Not all pre-existing residents. Just those who choose to use a taxpayer-owned resource to store their personal belongings. As a taxpayer, parking meters make perfect sense to me because they give me a return on my investment.

Even better would be to not waste so much land on streets wide enough for street parking where it isn't needed. There's no reason why the street couldn't be narrowed and the excess land sold to the adjacent property owners. This would also neatly solve the problem of business customers parking in residential neighborhoods without the need for parking meters or enforcement.

One small disadvantage: When I was a kid, I remember a HUGE stack of National Geographic magazines that stat around my grandparents' house. Many of them dated back to IIRC the 1940's and 50's, and some older still... I could sit around as a kid in the 1970's and leaf through them, no problem.

Would we be able to, 30-40 years hence, be able to even open some of these digital mags without paying (again) for the privilege of doing so? What if the website dies off? What if archive.org didn't, well, archive it?

Paper may be inefficient at many things, but even magazine publishers that died off a long-assed time ago likely still have one or two copies of their editions floating around somewhere (even if it's sitting in a flea market or antique store...)

This, right here.

Back then, anything starting with http:/// was good for news, yahoo (for search), early discussion forums, downloading something, or pr0n.... and not much else. Banking hadn't come around yet, and flash games were barely in their infancy (heh - I can only imagine what it would take to run Flash on that thing.)

Video, really? Animated GIFS often had better resolution and didn't take half a day to download. Speaking of download speeds, remember that DSL was just being rolled out - at a blazing 256k if you were lucky. Most folks still had 56k dial-up, and mobile speeds made 24k dial-up look good.

Apps? Really? Nobody except maybe Palm had any kind of mobile app ecosystem, and getting those apps procured and installed would involve a process that most non-geek users would likely describe as rather painful (we're talking colonoscopy-with-a-chainsaw levels of painful). I remember watching executive types blow hundreds of bucks just for one or two productivity apps.

Also folks, remember that battery life was 100% pure unadulterated shit (even on laptops - oh hell, especially on laptops). You were forced to balance between usability and battery life. Palm did it by staying monochrome and using a resolution that most folks would completely hate today. Not until around the time that the iPod Nano came out (with an incredibly tiny OS footprint and obsessive power efficiency) did you start seeing improvements.

I remember using an old Compaq iPAQ PDA... but with Familiar Linux on it instead of WinCE.

One thing I noticed, no matter the OS, was that you occasionally had to re-calibrate the stupid screen so that it was accurate enough to use... and it was a fairly widespread thing (I think only Palm had their engineering together enough to not constantly require that.)

I guess what I'm getting at is that not only was the capacitive screen a necessity, but so were drivers sufficiently tight enough to insure at least a modicum of accuracy.

Actually, I don't miss the stylus much. On a Wacom pad it was perfect, because its stylus detected subtleties that mimicked a pen, pencil, paintbrush... things like that. But, on a tablet or phone (or PDA if anyone remembers what one of those were), it just becomes something that actually slows down texting, gets lost easily, and is nothing more than a glorified stick.

WinCE and WindowsMobile needed a stylus becuase, well, Microsoft sucked mud when it came to UI design on such a small footprint - they figured you could just recycle the same UI framework and elements that the desktop had... and thus you UI actions the user had to make that only a stylus could accomplish.

Now if someone comes up with a stylus that is, say, bluetooth enabled and can detect pressure and such like the Wacom styluses did, then I could see where it would have some applications... but honestly, not much with regard to the UI itself, but within applications. Otherwise, even with large-ish hands like mine, I have no problems exhibiting a sufficient modicum of hand-eye coordination and just doing without a stylus.

Investing in a good S&P500 index fund which will return about 10%. In 18 years, you will be a millionaire.

It's closer to 7%, so you'll be a millionaire in 22 years. You can bring this down to 19 years by contributing the maximum into your 401(k) ($17,500/year), your IRA ($5,500/year), and an HSA ($3,300/year for individuals).