Oy. Warmed-over Libertarianism, anyone?

Anyway: I'd like to point out something from the article I think is silly, sort of in the same vein:

"The problem today is prices are prohibitively high for the average consumer," says Gartner analyst Joseph Unsworth. "When you consider a hard drive, you can get a terabyte for about $90. If you look at an SSD -- the Intel one I had with 160GB was $400. The point here is SSDs will never, ever be able to match hard disk drives on price per gigabyte."

Let's leave aside any regards we may have for the opinion of an "analyst". However I find his statement to be especially pernicious because he has completely ignored the scale-of-production factor with cost, i.e. the same thing which was pushing down prices before...

To illustrate my point? Look up the price of any DIMMs of DDR2 or lower speed, and note that prices are higher than when they were at peak production. Why? Well duh--good ol' supply and demand--and where supply exceeds demand, prices drop; and where they do not, prices rise.

My point? In sum: microeconomics is a good explanation of what happens here. At the macroeconomics level, however, the supply-demand fulcrum is overswung by the usual "madness of crowds" et al.

Not to take away from your answer, but OP was j/k. He was saying "it's 1996". :)

As for XUL... well, there's another semantically-bloated language.

Oh, and in XUL's case: "it's 1999". :D

Removing a battery bay and the connectors is complexity reduction, and cost reduction. Note I did not say retail price reduction. :) Regardless, it is easy to sell consumers on this one: Joe and Jane Average hate batteries, hate swapping them, hate having them pop out on them... and are more than willing to "outsource" the issue to Apple.

Whatever. Apple's design decision was made to reduce cost and complexity. Complexity-reduction is Apple's raison d'etre. Don't hate the player...

*Sigh* Unless you're some kind of Kaspersky, chances are you will have to take a shot in the dark now and then as to what you are attempting. It's called learning. *Hmph*

d'fim: Yes, that was exactly what I was saying. Fact is, the mere mention of "UML" is telling... ;)

Yes... and this is what we call "Honest Engineer Syndrome". :) Don't worry, honesty is always the best policy. Just not necessarily the most remuerative. :D

*sigh* Pedantism--Slashdot's ugly cousin.

Hmmph. To the person who scored this "redundant": I said that because I had a similar response above, not because I was doing the bobble-head. :) Sorry for the comment pollution, this was not my intention. :|

See above where I said "unless you're working in an orthodox manner". UML is used where UML is used; it is consider "orthodox" (AKA CYA). That's why I said the separation is harder when you're free from that sort of overarching process (which is good for some things, but overkill for many others). Point being: if you find development dull, yet you are in a very Waterfall-oriented organization, then well... might not be the programming part. :)

What he said. Exactly.

If you mean purely the process of typing in code, well--that's kind of hard to gauge, isn't it? I've always found that the trial-and-error of development processes means that unless you're working in an orthodox manner it's really hard to separate "thinking" from "doing". Also, I find that when you're in the "zone" it's not painful at all. Sounds like you may be working on something you don't enjoy so much? :D

I think what we're seeing here is IBM's attempt to dust off and leverage all that old work that went into the original OS/2 UI. GNOME and KDE have fought on different fronts but suffer from the usual issue which Open Source software faces: lack of unitary direction; and compelling featuresets. Final salvo in IBM's attempt to co-opt Linux's mindshare? You make the call! :D

i agree; and the real issue is getting systems in place that are non-intrusive. Things like email retention are great policy but run up against the myriad things people can do to remove or move them. Obviously, any email should be captured at the SMTP level. What stuck GP as odd is that in a very IT-centric operation, they state they have no policy: big company or no (and I agree with the slovenly and slapped together methods most work with) they are THE IT company. I imagine if this was not done it was again, via inertia rather than pure malice.

Of course by not having the emails, they have not done themselves well cos they cannot prove or disprove the allegation, and in the light of what this evidence provides it comes across a bit as "the dog ate my homework".

In sum: everyone knows a drunk is just gonna have one more. Sympathizing with it is another thing...