Netcraft confirms that desktop applications are dead! Also Desktops. :)

Seriously this bunk is garbage. Perhaps for personal use, there may be some transition. I know I use some google docs as I don't want to bother buying a personal copy of office for hundreds of dollars for the amount I actually use it outside of work... Though I probably have used OpenOffice more.

In a corporate environment? Just no. This also happens to be where most of the usage is located. It is not even close, it is absurd. Ask a system admin about what happens when just one connection to a DB goes down, one specific and specialized application, or part of a network, or the internet... Now imagine if this happened to normal everyday office productivity software... Buhahahaha! Chaos.

There are certain things that may go a bit farther, shared documents over networks, or virturalized desktops to share specific software, but even that has limits. The last one usually to combat deployment issues and non-standard desktop configurations, however even then we have control over the resource.

MS started breaking WMC long before Vista came around. I used WMC a lot. I've had Vista. WMC has been falling apart for many years. Mostly because as you described for one reason or another they made the decision to value corporate interests over their consumers. I've been tinkering with WMP and WMC for years using codecs and the like to try and get things to work. The best I get is that most things work. However no matter what I do, there will be stuff that just isn't compatible. About the only reason I use it is my remote is "compatible" with WMC. Every now again again, when I hit that file that no matter what I do (and at this point whatever I do seems to fix one, then break another format), I just give up and use VLC, as it just works. I'm actually really surprised that someone hasn't come along and replaced WMC by now as it has been a pretty big gap for a long time. Hopefully MS pulling the plug on WMC would prompt someone to make something better that isn't purposefully broken...

That said:
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2...

Walmart employees in Quebec, Canada tried to unionize. Walmart just closed up shop and went someplace else laying off everyone. Year later (10 actually), they lose in supreme court and are forced to pay damages. However no word on what those damages are, and I bet they are fighting that. Not to mention the fact they the folks don't get jobs back, or retroactively for the last decade. On top on that, the people who work at Walmart, aren't exactly going to be rolling in it either, many would have lost big in the meantime trying to make ends meet while waiting a decade for maybe some kind of court settlement. It is no wonder that employees are afraid to unionize. Unions have been getting busted or weaker for a long time now. Which if you think about it is crazy, when we start talking about the 1% and how the we have never had such wealth inequality before...

Uh, didn't Nokia already sell they Map division to Apple when Apple was having trouble with Apple Maps after they dropped Google Maps? Apple didn't just instantly map the entire world, they had to acquire all that data...

Perhaps they just bought a licence to the data, but I had thought that they had just bought it outright. That sounds more like Apple. It would have cost a couple billion, but then they have/had mad cash on hand anyway.

Ahhh, this reminds me of those decoder wheels!

It may be due to the fact that I don't drive an awful lot. It might be 13 years old, but I only have about 85k on it.

Perhaps if they extended the testing/registration period to 5 years... It just seems I am constantly taking it in to get tested. I've had it tested 7 times so far without any indication of any emissions issues, for a cost of over 400$.

At least in Ontario (where this study was conducted), every car is required to be clean tested every 2 years. Which is a stupid cash grab really, as my 2002 tests just as good now as it ever did. It is the *really* old cars that are likely a problem. However I bet there are exemptions out there for classic cars etc...

What I would like to see measured, is how much of this is not personal transportation, but rather commercial trucks... Everything is delivered by truck now. I bet they are by far the worst offenders. They also probably have exemptions. Perhaps it is time to start thinking a little less about how some soccer mom gets her kids to school VS what is the best way to deliver goods in our society.

GPS Assist in cellphones use cell towers not satellites. Cell towers are in known GPS locations. Cell towers don't move. The US government can turn onSA all they wan't, and it won't any difference to a cellphone based GPS device. Unless of course they have the cell towers constantly updating their locations, which would be dumb, as I said they don't move.

From my understanding no cellphones that I am aware of have real GPS, but rather GPS "Assist".

Which means that the cellphone doesn't really connect with any satellites whatsoever. They communicate with cell towers which are located at known GPS locations. GPS Assist is able to determine your location by communication with these towers at known locations to work out where it is. About the only thing that would improve that (apart from having real GPS), would be to improve the number of cell towers and maybe the latency in which they communicate with the phone. Which is something that is pretty integral to cellphones regardless of GPS.

I have a handheld for work (Garmin 12XL). I used to have an old Garmin SRVY II also for work.

I have had two cellphones with "GPS Assist" which is something else entirely. I would love a cellphone with real GPS, but I suspect that would kill the battery usage.

I suspect many don't know the difference.

Though I can see in one sense not wanting to hire an older person for a particular project... If they are much older, the retirement angle comes into play. Many companies are very poor at managing documentation, and knowledge transfer. You don't want your primary developer with the most experience in the system you are creating to up and retire on you... You want someone who'll be around for at least a time to manage it, and/or gradually bring others up to speed.

Then again in a lot of cases then can just hire the old guy back at twice the cost as a consultant if they decide to do that on the side.

Pretty much the same from my experience, though mine was only 15 years ago. CS back then was an elegant weapon for a more civilized age...

About the only security I ever did was for my first job where they gave me a lot of latitude... Made an application and installer (in C) that installed off of CD-ROM (or boy...). I didn't really have to, but I had the time, so I also wrote a username/password script to install the thing... However all the passwords were stored in a text file (which you could hide, or obscure), but again I had some time, so within it I set up an encryption routine that would decrypt and encrypt the text file as required for verification. I borrowed the actual encryption algorithm, I didn't have that much time! Anyway, all of it totally unnecessary, but it was interesting so I did it.

Younger with little experience and eager to please will always say "Yes!" Managers like this, particularly bad ones, they like to think they know more than anyone else and that their vision and ideas are better than anyone else.

I would consider it my job to point out a bad idea, the flaws, and suggest better ones based on experience. I might flower it up a bit and not say that is the most horrid stupid idea I have seen in 10 years, I'm surprised you have the automotive skill necessary to continue drawing breath... I might rather say something like that is a great idea, however it might work even better structured this way, because of these reasons etc...

However for some, the only acceptable answer is Yes we'll do whatever you want however you want it. I won't argue mind you, I'll state my opinion, and if they choose to go another way, I'll do my best to make that happen, even if cumbersome or ill advised. A good manager while maybe providing some direction or vision to work, should really just "manage" staff to do their jobs properly, which is knowing that they probably know more than you on a given topic and listening to them is usually in your best interest.

Anyway I never worry about these sorts of things, because from my experience without fail the absolute result is something that fails, is never completed, is "completed" but either doesn't function as it should, or doesn't meet the requirements (if they bothered to even collect them properly). In addition, whatever money they thought they were saving by doing it on the cheap is spent anyway, and more, due to delays, fixes, patches, scope creep, etc... and then that whole pile of steaming non-functional buggy application garbage is given to someone with experience, who is then paid well to fix the mess (or to start over), and make sure that it is properly supported, usually over a period of years... so whatever. They generate job security.

"Fast Enough" for you maybe. That usually depends on what you are using your computer for. Gaming is a driver. Most common applications I'll concede are not. However I have noticed in certain professional applications that used to be dependent on primarily graphic cards, are more dependent on CPU and system memory than anything else now. All that aside...

I agree, while I have always bought Intel, I have always kept AMD in mind, One of the things that Intel does that is annoying, but probably linked to the fact that their chips are more advanced (and not some conspiracy to bilk more money out of me, adjusts tinfoil hat), is that the damn chipset and pinout keep changing each generation. While upgrading has become harder and less practical over the years, this pretty much drives the nail in the coffin. If EVERY release requires a new MB, you might as well solder the damn thing on. AMD has been at least better in that regard that they tend to support less chipsets (AM2/AM3).

Lastly, I would like to see some actual direction from AMD, rather that try to be everyman. One thing Intel has done the last several releases is to focus on the laptop market, as that is where they see the growth. All their CPU while powerful, take power usage as their primary concern now it seems, and they all have throttling. Before it was that you made a CPU, and then you tried to make a variant of that work in a laptop. Now it seems, you make a laptop cpu and try to make it work in a desktop. As much as people keep tolling about the demise of the desktop, it hasn't happened, nor is it likely to. In addition, the other markets, tablets, phones, etc... have been eating into the laptop market, slowing that growth. I'd like to see AMD actually try some damn strategy and focus on desktop and server chips, rather than try to be baby Intel. The only way their current strategy is going to work is if they come across some crazy technology to beat Intel with, however they are trying to do this while Intel has probably several times the R&D budget they have... so the odds are not in their favor. Anyway they need to do something, as they've been in decline (as far as I have been concerned) for the last decade.

They could even balance their portfolio out by using their graphics division to focus on laptops in integrated video, though the gains have been pretty small over the years.

However it is more of a "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't" than any brand loyalty.

Also your choices are between basically between two companies, with pretty similar packages, and similar prices. About the only thing of note I would say is how horrible, stupid, and untrained their phone support is should you ever be in the forsaken situation of having to call in. The only other thing is how many times they call you bugging you to try and sell you more crap, like tv. phones, or whatever...

In that race, Bell is worse, so I go with the other guy.