1. I would not do the same things second time around, wouldn't be doing full time university and full time work, I would quit the university, do full time not for 5 years as I did but for maybe 4, move onto the contracts then as I did at first, but not do contracts for 10, instead do it for 5 and start my own business 6 years sooner after getting just enough experience anyway.

2. I wouldn't bother buying and fixing and renting/selling properties as I did on the side, that diluted my effort and pulled me back from starting my own real business.

Basically if I could talk to myself 20 years ago, I would tell myself to skip college altogether, work right away (as I basically did anyway, but I did full time studies and full time job, which was unnecessarily difficult). I would make sure to explain to myself how to properly save money from much younger age and tell myself to start the business much earlier.

I think I just had a stroke...

I'm pretty sure that about the only thing he won't fuck-up about SW is turning it into the same "teenagers in space kaboom" that he made ST into, because he can't - that's what it was from the word "go".

For some extremely generous value of "pretty good" that can coexist in a context that contains JJ Abrams, maybe.

Actually, it was the GIMP team themselves broke saving in 2.8. (If they've since fixed it, then sourceforge probably just doesn't have the updates).

Their GNOME-like "reasoning" was that "professional" users wanted to save in XCF, and that amateurs should just use something else. It rang pretty hollow when the gold-standard Photoshop didn't behave the same way.

In some ways, I wish Microsoft would charge for ongoing security and compatibility updates after a reasonable period, but in a transparent way.

Useful lifetimes for PCs are increasing (forced obsolescence aside) and it's not a viable business model to expect MS to sell a copy of an OS one day and then support the same OS indefinitely with no extra revenues. However, clearly a lot of people are happy with what they've got and don't feel the newer versions of the OS getting pumped out to try to increase those revenues are actually an improvement, so that model is unsatisfying for all concerned.

In contrast, charging a modest and honestly advertised fee for long term support after a reasonable initial period of free updates included in the original purchase seems like an everybody-wins proposition. Customers who want to stick with, say, Windows 7 for as long as their home computer works/it's their corporate standard/someone in IT likes it have the option to do so, without giving up on useful updates for things like security or compatibility with new hardware or networking standards. Customers who are interested in more radical change can buy newer software instead. Microsoft gets enough money to run a viable business model either way. As long as everyone knows what the deal is up-front and the update/fees are optional (so if you don't pay then you don't get the updates but you also don't get your existing software artificially nerfed) I don't see any huge downside here.

Interesting, thanks.

It turns out that I don't have several of those patches installed anyway. Some time ago, I switched my default policy to only applying security updates, ignoring anything else in Windows Update even if Microsoft marks it "important". They have abused that mechanism so many times now to try to install junk that is in no way necessary or in my interests that I simply don't trust them any more and only install non-security updates if I have a specific reason for doing so. So far, this has caused me zero problems (unlike a couple of "important" but non-security updates that originally motivated my change in policy).

Most, I hate the Sparta icon... it's white, with no contrast border... which makes everything that is assigned to it being the default program, show a white globe on a white background... it's like, "way to go, Microsoft!" followed by a slow clap.

"clean" "modern" design... which will never work decently on all backgrounds... you know... like good logos, and designs...

Nobody teaches you how to handle 100,000,000 simultaneous user requests. Throwing more and more hardware at it is what you cannot escape when dealing with tens of millions of users a second. At least Google is not a bank, where things really need to be synchronized across accounts and be perfectly transactional. It doesn't matter to Google that there are no transactions. A piece of data presented to a user in the USA may be different than the one presented to a user in Japan, but it isaybe an answer to the same question, but the data did not propagate all the way everywhere yet. Even so, it is quite a challenge to deal with hundreds of millions of users daily and tens or hindreds of millions concurrent user requests a second. They are doing it really well too. I can only imagine the massive problems that need to be solved. It is jarring. Good stuff.

So I read that this problem dates back to 1988 (so they say). Reminds me of a two envelope joke. A president steps down due to scandals, gives his replacement 2 envelopes. Tells him to open the first one when there is the first serious problem he cannot handle and the second one in case of another problem.

The replacement starts on the job, eventually there is a serious political problem he cannot solve. He opens the first envelope and it says: blame everything on the previous guy. So he does and the problem goes away. Later there is another problem that cannot be solved, the guy opens the second envelope and in says: prepare 2 envelopes.

I think somebody opened the first envelope.

Kidz doo knot kneed to no howe to spel or ad upp untill thay leev skool. Just teech themm the bassix att th aage of ateteen wen thay wont two gett ah jobb.

Yeah, this is the age of the 21st Century food pseudoscience, damn it!

Why wouldn't you use broccoli to lose weight? It's one of the few healthy sides that even seem worth the trouble of eating, for me.

The borked CSS for the account options makes it hard to check (although I can't obviously see the filters anywhere), but I'm pretty sure that I had polls disabled. Posting polls as stories seems to bypass that option.

How many of those phones, after receiving 2 or 3 major releases, will be so buggy or sluggish as to be unusable? Considering the amount of bitching every time it happens, I'd say non-zero.