...and Specs, even if they are absurdly wrong, but ONLY if they expect to keep their customers...as "The Brick" will no doubt discover.

This isn't, to me, a moral issue: It is just acknowledging that sometimes mistakes happen, and the customer has behaved by buying into those terms as offered. The customer isn't wrong here; they're just taking advantage of an apparent price advantage. The seller isn't wrong here; they just made a mistake.

"Customer satisfaction" is a core principle of capitalism, although many capitalists (to their own disadvantage) still refuse to understand that fact.

AT&T Still think it IS High-speed! (I, too, am rural, and getting the fastest speed I can...3 Mb/s...and cursing AT&T every hour of the day for their focus on THEIR profit, not any customers' quality of service.

Of course, if you're willing to pay them thousands of dollars a month, they'll happily give you higher speed...but not a worldwide comparable rates.

Broadband, in the home country of broadband, still sucks, and AT&T, Verizon, and all the other crooks enabled by the FCC (the head of the agency came from one of the major firms) have a singular pricing policy: Summarized, it is: "BEND OVER!"

What an ignorant troll. What "WiFI" module that you can't change? What make and model? I just changed/upgraded several WiFi Modules in Dell laptops in the past few days to gain speed and reliability.

And, when you finally need to buy parts for that "ThinkPenguin" or other small-time maker, where will you go? At least with a major manufacturer, I know I can still buy a replacement powerswitch or cover hinge when I need one, years after the products is no longer being sold.

This sounds like the AC posting is an employee of the company they extol...even to the extent of theorizing BIOS might become "open" at some future date. What a CROCK!

On the issue of TPM: It's there if I ever need it...but because I don't install the software for it, it appears to be abandoned and affects nothing people do on these computers.

...that cause every Windows system to crash and have to be powered-off to resume...I'll consider putting it on my phone! --CAO

1. For keeping two drives synchronized, check out GoodSync. It's powerful, and I use it to keep two separate computers holding identical copies of two major folders of data synchronized, so if one goes down, there's minimal loss of data (1 hour, max) I use this, for example, to keep a client's two 1TB collections of photos and iTunes synchronized. http://www.goodsync.com/

2. For making backups that are compact, efficient and easy to recover, look at "Disk Snapshot". It's inexpensive, robust and I've never experienced a restore failure. I make "Disk Snapshot" images of every computer, every night, in a development environment. That way, if the thing I just did breaks the system, I can restore a 100 GB Drive is less than an hour by booting from a CD and pointing to the backup on an external drive. http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/index.htm

Appropriate you list yourself as a "Coward." Unsubstantiated opinions that fly in the face of logic are cowardly.

Gee, should I never eat again, because the food might be contaminated?

I said I fixed one instance. I didn't say I solved the entire malware problem!

This malware (which puts up the appearance of a credit/debit card and asks for all you information) calls a server in the Ukraine. It was delivered by eMail (to a naive user) and intercepts attempts to reach your financial institution via their website. It presents, after login (did they capture the login info?), a panel looking like the credit/debit card, asking for the user to fill in all information, including account number, CVC, address, and other personal information (why anyone would fill in that data is beyond me!)

After much gnashing of teeth, I discovered it was undetectable by any known virus checker I use (AVG, Malwarebytes, Spybot), so I had to dig deeper. It turned out that the malware was using any references to 127.0.0.1 (local machine) for it's hook. All I had to do was edit the HOSTS file and add the domain names of the miscreant with a reference to a different IP address that is known to be a deadend (you could, for example, use 127.7.7.7).

When the malware couldn't execute, it couldn't disable the various malware detectors, and several files were then identified and removed.

The world's first "Service Bureau" was reputedly C-E-I-R, in what is now Crystal City, VA. I went to work there in 1962 (or 63?) with no programming experience, but a real grasp of electronics and transistor circuitry. Fortunately, I worked with pioneers in the field of Linear Programming (Bill Orchard-Hays, Eli Hellerman), and with an incredible team of programmers (people like Ed Yourdon) who freely shared code around the offices.

I'd ask someone how to, for example, write code to read data off a tape drive. They wrote a short subroutine in Assembly Language for the 1401. Then another person needed it, and she added robust code for backup and re-reading in an attempt to overcome errors on the media. Then another guy added another feature. I even, as a novice, added a couple of features, too.

To my mind, it was that tight team that taught me how to program...and we were all learning from each other.

That tape drive reading/writing subroutine was the beginning of my learning. We added more and more to that desk of punched cards until it was about 6" thick, and called it CELIB (C-E-I-R Library). It became a mainstay of programming at the company until the S/360 was announced. And, about 10 years later, while I was consulting in Canberra, Australia, I came across a government agency still using CELIB on their now-ancient 1401s!

I used to take home the 6" thick printout of the kernel of the 7090 IBSYS operating system, so I could read it and understand how it accomplished its' marvels. I learned it before there were any classes, any courses, not even technical schools teaching the field. I learned from close people who were, quite literally, only a month or two ahead of me on the learning curve, and from acknowledged experts who wrote that O.S. What an exciting time that was to be a young geek :-)

I wish ATI would focus more energy on making their product stable, reliable and unable to be corrupted from innocent programs on the same computer. Right now, ATI and Nvidia drive the industry, and they couldn't give a damn about the BSODs they create!

Microsoft’s major success has been Windows (although they’ve made more money from products like Office). Now, they seem hell-bent on making sure that success is the root of their demise.

Microsoft’s products have traditionally reached their zenith in the third version.

Save for experimenters, we all ignored Windows 1 and even Windows 2.1 was an acknowledged dog, but it held promise. The first usable version, with serious networking capability, was Windows 3.1. Although still built atop DOS, we could finally do something productive with Windows. We got used to WYSIWYG.

Windows 95 was a dramatic improvement, but needed to be reinstalled every year or so just to keep it running. Windows 98 was much more solid, and morphed quietly into the product-extending “Second Edition,” which was an operating system that most homes and businesses adopted. Windows Millenium Edition (Me) was a throwback to Windows 98, with added features few found useful.

Finally, in a break with DOS, Microsoft turned to “New Technology.” Windows NT was, for all intents and purposes, an ignored product save for use on Servers. Because it was the first real “server” technology Microsoft sold, NT had a life in corporate America, but few individuals used it. It was quickly supplanted by the dramatically more stable Windows 2000, with more Internet and user-interface features. While limited, it was still a productive tool, and now crashes no longer took down the entire system, which was a boon in business, and in 24x7 servers. It was Windows XP (Windows 2000 with bug fixes, and a new “glossy” appearance) that finally took over the world; XP drove virtually all the earlier operating systems out of the inventory during it’s decade of dominance.

But, Microsoft couldn’t resist tampering: They designed anew and emerged with Vista, and both customers were happy. It was slow, buggy, and poorly thought out, like many of Microsoft’s “first version” products. They reasonably quickly moved to Windows 7, with a cleaner user interface, but still plagued by all kinds of security impositions on users and a complicated security model that only a security expert could navigate. Even though Microsoft forced Windows 7 on new computer buyers, most of them actually installed Windows XP (if they knew how) to regain access to familiar tools and a well-known user interface.

Based on the trend, you might expect that Microsoft has been readying Windows 8 to be the real successor to Windows 7but Microsoft has decided to follow short-term marketing trends to make the product utterly incompatible with user’s expectations: They abandoned the “Start” menu, changed to the “Metro” interface copied from cellphones, and they’re not catering to any of the millions of users who recognize XP is already wickedly obsolete, but saw Windows Vista and Windows 7 as a trip sideways, not a step up.

It’s as if Microsoft has decided that Windows 8 should be the start of yet another line of operating systems, and it will be a dog to learn and use for the next two generations.

But, worse, how will Microsoft replace all the Windows XP systems out there that Windows 8 can’t even emulate? How many retail computer systems, restaurant cash registers, laptops as field-service tools (etc.) are going to go without a new replacement because Microsoft has arbitrarily decided to cater to the “smartphone” and “tablet” users, who don’t have to deal with unique peripheral devices (e.g., receipt printers), or have the robustness that business demands? And, efforts to lockout users from changing their operating system, and creating a “closed ecosystem” for hardware and software products means that Microsoft will pursue the Apple strategyall the way down to Apple’s nominal 10% of the computer market (Apple is an electronic products company, with computers as just another electronic product).

It appears to me that, this time, Microsoft has left their customers in the lurch, focused on the entertainment value of computers, and left the barn door wide open for the now-stable Linux implementations that are cheaper and virtually modeled on the XP experience. Users will find that familiarity preferable to “idiot buttons” limited to eight-per-screen. This may be the final “execution” of Microsoft, by letting the marketers drive product features without much understanding of what people actually want and need for their productivity, and the productivity of their businesses.

I believe that Microsoft has made their fatal blunder: It will break their “stranglehold” on new computer makers, used to delivering the latest Windows version on all new systems; if customers don’t want it, how will they sell computers? They will break the contract model Microsoft has forced them into over the past two decades, and then computer makers will start delivering Linux systems with an XP-like look, at lower cost.

The main question is: How fast will Microsoft recover from this major strategic blunder, orwhen they don’twhich Linux distribution will dominate the desktop computer market in the late teens of this Century?

...you're able to think critically, and to discern which evidence is relevant to the case in point. I don't care if you can use the Simplex method to invert a sparse 100x100 matrix in your head, but I DO care, as an employer, that you know what the Simplex method is, when it would be useful to apply, and what class of problems it can be used to solve. So, higher math is just evidence to me, your prospective employer, that you're not prone to take the easy way out, to rely on trusted (but irrelevant) methods, that you can seek out new solutions when they are called for. Without that breadth of background in the "thinking arts," you are doomed to a life of programming what others design. Most of the people who claim certain languages don't support certain advanced math features are just exposing their lack of imagination; they are coders, not programmers.

Your ignorance of the utility of the Concorde is, like an earlier poster, astounding. From London to New York, I could have meetings in the morning, and meetings the same day, four hours later in New York (4.5 for Dulles/Washington). That improved my productivity and saved many sophisticated business opportunities from running off the rails.

Your ignorance of the flight regimes of the Concorde are astounding. Remember, it flew at Mach 2 (and very quite inside the cabin, as I can confirm as a passenger), and that produces "sonic boom" across the landscape; over water there are few people, so little source of complaints. Sure, the Concorde "is nor more noisy than a normal jet..." only if you consider the XB-70 the exemplar of a "normal jet."

The available maps of service areas, and specific locations of infrastructure, are held as potential "terrorist assets" (although, through typical "security theater," they don't bother saying how attacked on these components would be attractive to some would be terrorist, who'd be much more likely to attack and contaminate the water system).

Basically, telcos--aided and abetted by the government--make broad and extravagant claims about coverage (why, right here where I live, the "Desolation wildnerness" prohibits entry except on foot or horseback, and there are no addresses there, but, if maps are to be believed, the area has marvelous high-speed coverage for Internet services).

For my county alone (aobut 88,000 households and businesses), I am planning a "primary research" survey to find out who has Internet service, and who doesn't). Do do that on a national scale will require tremendous effort and cost.

I know that visiting my local Forest Ranger District HQ recently got me a map of all the cell sites within their jurisdiction, but that would require individual visits to the thousands of sites the govenment own across the Country.

So, to be clear: The precision of data you can get from telcos and the regulatory agencies is as precise as those "coverage maps" for their "cellular service area;" Dramatically more aspirational than factual.