You forgot -pulling off to the side of the road to let emergency vehicles pass

In most parts of the world, that first one could mean that they deliver the lobsters to the room in a live state.

Actually, that's not how it has always been. The "magic number" at one point was 13 years old; in recent history (past 50 years) it tended to be 21 years old. Over the past decade or so, it has creeped up to 30. This goes for all the things mentioned; cars, jobs, marriage, kids.

The reason? Should be obvious: baby boomers. They're keeping their money as they retire, and are often spending it in out-of-area places. As a result, the job shortage that still exists is filled by temps because it's the only way the companies can afford to sell things to the boomers at the prices they expect. If they raise prices and hire full-time employees, the boomers will go elsewhere to spend their disproportionate amount of money.

Once the boomers start to die off, we'll start to see the pendulum shift the other way, as local demand rises, job vacancies rise, and the value of local skilled labor finally rises. Of course, that's another 15 years off, by which point the millennials will be the establishment and it'll be the next generation that gets the benefit of having an earlier workforce transition.

in Canada, self-service checkouts have the impulse items surrounding the lineup area to get to the kiosks, similar to how they're positioned for the lineups to get to actual cashiers.

I'm no millennial, but I almost always use a self-service checkout at stores who have functioning* kiosks. I've spent my time as a kid doing those sorts of jobs, and tend to be better/faster at using the scanners than a checkout clerk -- so why spend 5 minutes waiting in line and an interminable time waiting for the clerk to process all my items, when I could breeze through a kiosk with no lineup in 30 seconds? I still talk to the store staff on the way out, but no longer have to deal with a lost 20 minutes in my day.

However, in Canada, there are still plenty of stores with buggy kiosks -- one of the common scenarios is kiosks running Windows Embedded with a small HD; the transaction logs have to be manually collected/cleared, and the longer they're left without doing that, the slower the interface becomes until it eventually goes unresponsive.

The other issue is places that haven't calibrated their scale response time correctly, so the kiosk keeps flagging up errors if you're not quick enough to drop your item (whether it be an over-sized item or a carton of eggs) onto the scale.

One of my local vendors also recently underwent ownership change, and the new owner's policy was that every credit card signature required employee verification -- so if you use an American Express at one of their kiosks, the thing starts blaring out its alarm as soon as you sign the pad, and then you have to stand and wait until some clerk has the time to go to the main kiosk console and hit "accept" (they never visually inspect, as they have no reason to -- if your signature doesn't match, there's no step 2; they can't decline the purchase under local laws and cardholder agreements).

But as I said; I still opt for the kiosk when possible -- if it's a small purchase, I can be in and out of the store in a matter of minutes; if it's a large purchase, I save the difference in time it takes me to process the items vs a worn out cashier.

The only people that don't benefit here are the extra staff that act as storage help and double as checkout overflow help when things get busy. But there are other jobs to do these days that pay better for the same skill set.

I used to have an account on DEC's Alpha test servers, and remember testing out VAX/VMS back in the day.

Seeing OpenVMS being pushed for Itanium products though... that's running one doomed OS on another doomed and believed extinct platform.

I don't really see where they're going to make a profit on this, at least enough to survive until they can port it over to a modern x86 architecture.

After they do THAT, I can see it being viable, especially if they provide legacy binary support. There's still a lot of iron running VMS, and most of it, while necessary infrastructure, is running on hardware that I can't imagine can last much longer.

But they'd better get the port and compatibility layer rock solid before they try selling it, or we're in for some painful times (brownouts, water service outages, etc).

Considering the guy moved from QuickTime to Kinoma Player to JavaScript-enabled Internet Thing authoring, you'd think we could at least expect the video in some JS-powered format available to all. Instead we get... Flash? Really?

QuickTime was actually an excellent multimedia container platform that integrated what Apple had learned from HyperCard with a multimedia delivery stack. It was technologically way more advanced than Shockwave and the other competitors of the time.

Unfortunately, the bastard child that was delivered to most Windows web browsers was actually Sorenson codec video in a QuickTime wrapper, pushed through a QuickTime Plugin. This plugin is what everyone has a deep loathing for -- to make QuickTime work on Windows, Apple had to port a major portion of the Mac OS API, as QuickTime integrated deeply into the system calls of the OS. So what Apple did was created a stripped-down Mac OS that ran inside a plugin for your browser. So every time you loaded a page that required the QuickTime plugin, your web browser booted Mac OS, which then loaded the QuickTime component handlers, which then grabbed the container and loaded the data stream. This was run through the codec handler, which then passed the result back to the OS, which used the QuickDraw renderer to blit the result to a virtual screen and audio device. THEN, the virtual screen was passed back to the plugin handler code and from there to DirectX, as was the audio.

So you ended up with a combination of the worst aspects of Windows, the worst aspects of browser plugin architecture, and the worst aspects of the Mac OS (inclduing bad memory management and cooperative multitasking) all being experienced in one place. No single point of failure here; it had so many potential points of failure that you generally hit at least one with each loaded instance of the plugin.

Actually, Quicktime was used at the Battle of Hastings; it's why the Harrold's defenders were broken -- the Normans ordered a Quicktime retreat, and after the English broke formation, the Normans regrouped and overwhelmed them.

the solder joints that were melting weren't on the PCB side; my statement was a bit misleading; it was the solder joints on the CRT lead side that melted, leaving the connection just being a slide clip. The problem was, they used the whole setup like a chimney, which meant that the left side of the CRT (from the front) which contained lots of shielding already, was used as one side of the chimney. Unfortunately, that's precisely where they had one of the interconnects for the ground plane (IIRC).

See the silver circle with the red triangle in https://www.youtube.com/watch?... at 2:32.

There were a number of aftermarket fan solutions created after this issue was discovered; this was one of the situations where The Steve stated "there must not be any fans in the case!" and people made it so, but then had to deal with the aftermath of using cold solder on a component in an area subject to heat buildup.

Oh yeah; and placing a large textbook on the top of a Plus, covering up the vents, could cause the plastic case to melt within a matter of hours.

Computer design really has come a long way since then.

Oh, the other irony: that video I linked to is a takeapart of a Mac Plus whose monitor stopped working. Three guesses as to the problem and fix? I don't think anyone ever told the guy though; his monitor could have been fixed years ago with a soldering gun and some modern RoHS solder.

I can do you one better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It was a fanless high-end PC back in 1986.

But it didn't use foam; just rudimentary heat sinks and a well-planned ducting system. Oh yes, and the heat it generated melted the solder used to connect the monitor to the motherboard in the first few batches that came off the line, until they started using higher tolerance solder.

If this were the 1990s, this would be the perfect answer. Back then, the idea was that you use a firewall as a perimeter defense in a defense-in-depth strategy.

But this isn't the 1990s, this is 2014. Nowadays, you have to assume that at least one endpoint on your local network is compromised in some way, whether that be via malware infection, clueless intern, corporate espionage, disgruntled employee, etc.

These days, any decent firewall does a lot more than prevent access to ports -- most actively monitor the traffic passing through any open port, and when configured correctly (in this case for a DB server), they'll lock anything down and flag that doesn't look like a SQL transaction, and then check for common SQL exploits, for connections to network points that should not have access to that port, for binary objects being passed in the SQL queries, and more.

What this means is that if you consider a firewall to be enabling the Windows Firewall on your MSSQL Server/Windows Server 2008 box, it's probably a good idea just because those boxes are usually not locked down correctly, and someone could be browsing facebook in IE on that box unless the firewall prevents it. But this isn't really the sort of firewall you should be applying to a transaction server that may one day have to be PCI DSS compliant.

See https://nakedsecurity.sophos.c... for one case study of how things can go horribly wrong incrementally.

Interestingly, a few years ago I had an iOS device that got dropped in water and no longer functioned. I took it apart and pulverized the electronics, as I figured there was no way I could guarantee the data on there was inaccessible.

I took the baggie of pulverized parts to the local cell phone drop for recycling; got a few odd looks as I dropped it in.

Then I took the case backing (the bit with the serial number engraved into it) to Apple for a $50 store credit. The same credit they would have given me had I given them the entire device. That's probably as good a deal as I would have got from anywhere, even if I had kept everything intact.

The best part? I kept the LCD screen, as it still worked just fine.

This is probably the biggest reason. Asia is the new big market for phones; any design made has to support multiple Asian character formats.

However, I have another question. The submitter stated he'd pay an extra $100-200 for a slide-out, and that he doesn't mind a bit of extra bulk.

So: why isn't someone making a *phone case* with a built-in Bluetooth or USB keyboard? It'd be aftermarket, but you could slap it on any phone of a specific form factor; you could even make it a snap-in for a line of cases, so the single keypad would work across multiple lines of phones. As an added benefit, you could do multiple international phones for the areas with the highest demand; and your coverage would be larger than any specific carrier/device.

So... anyone have any examples of this? Anyone want to kickstart it?

I really see no reason for using MS Office if you're a small company.

However, for large companies, collaboration tools, internationalization of documents, corporate-wide style hints, advanced spreadsheet macros, shareable diagram objects, integrated calendars, meeting room tracking, distribution policy enforcement, etc. are important, and just aren't quite there on most of the alternatives. Google Docs does a reasonable job at some of that, but not all.

Whoosh....