If the customer knows an error has occurs and refuses to resolve the error in good faith, they are being a prick. It is one thing is the vendor is playing bait and switch, and another if a real error occurred. In my mind it is a golden rule situation. With thew narrow profit margins that retailers have these days, a loss like this can be catastrophic. What goes around comes around. When there is an error involved and the customer insists, I think it is a form of theft.

Given that Apple limits the duration of the Applecare support, I divide the price by the number of years it is supportable then ask myself if the machine is worth so much per month. My experience with my previous Mac Pro was a disappointment because a limitation on the boot ROM keeps me from being able to load a 64-bit kernel. My five thousand dollar Mac Pro is stuck back on Snow Leopard for the rest of it's life. I have a certain degree of remorse about this, which would be even more extreme if the price tag was over ten thousand dollars. I don't think I will be able to enjoy one of these, although my inner child yearns for one. I can't afford a Mercedes or a BMW either. My Mac Pro is the workstation of my dreams in a generic fashion though. 16GB of ram, 8-cores of 3.0GHz Xeon is still a kick ass development machine for GNU g++.

Lets see... Microsoft writes a buggy, insecure operating system, then says we should update because the newer buggy, insecure system is better, rinse and repeat. I think Windows 7 wasn't horrible, but then Windows 8 came along and caused me much nausea. I used Windows 8 for four months full time, and after that, I still don't feel in control of the machine. Simply put, I hate "gesture computing". Were there problems so dire with 7 that it needed to be replaced? What an abortion 8 is. But will the day come that Microsoft says no more support for 7 and you MUST move to 8 now? Aren't we tired yet of being wagged around by these people?

Actually the decision to use the 8088 was mostly about the Display Writer, which was a well selling 8086 based word processing system that IBM sold for over $10,000 each. The Display Writer blazed in comparison with the PC, and also IBM picked EasyWriter because it was a word processor, but not any real competition for the DW. The PC was created by IBM's "Entry Level Systems Division". Their goal was to get people started, then sell them something that actually had more power such as the subsequent AT.

Windows 8

Anything that Google tries to standardize with ECMA is going to become more controlled by Microsoft. Aside from this, ECMA is a European standards group (sort of). Their "standards" usually contain patented technology that then must be licensed (usually from Microsoft). I think it might suit Google's purposes better to form a working group and create a standard themselves that they can keep out of Microsoft's hands.

While we are a country of laws, and we agree on a need for them to apply to everyone, I am appalled that there would be any serious consideration to actually place a statue of satan at the courthouse. I am a Christian, and of course I like that the Ten Commandments are at the courthouse. The commandments represent an early form of law. According to the Bible, satan was a controversial character who encouraged Eve to break the one existing rule about behavior in the garden. The commandments are about there being a set of conventions for the good of society. Satan has generally stood for anarchy and people doing whatever they please. Perhaps in the interest of religious freedom, the commandments will have to be removed. That's a shame in my opinion.

Just how many possible sequences of code are there to initialize a few registers. Actually the manufacturer of the part has sample code to initialize the chip that happens to be copyrighted itself. They probably won't sue you if you are buying their chips, but what happens when some smart guy designs a chip which is cheaper and plug in compatible. Lets take that a step further. There was a time people were building new devices and new drivers had to be written. But once Microsoft bundled drivers for all the commonly occurring hardware, clever designers learned to build cheaper hardware that was register compliant so the built in drivers would work. Anyway, just how many variations of code output bytes to a hart when the TBRE flag is set?

I just returned a high end Toshiba notebook to Costco for several reasons. The first was that either the fan or hard drive started making evil noises. I suppose I could have gotten warrantee service, but a failure after four months makes me cautious about Toshiba hardware. The other reason is that after giving Windows 8/8.1 an honest chance for four months, I can say unequivocally that I hate the operating system, hate the GUI, and feel almost nauseous trying to use it. Stuff that was intuitive and falling down easy with XP is counterintuitive and sometimes darn near impossible with 8. I have to believe that many other long time computer users feel as I do. What could be worse than being told by your employer that you have to use this crap?

I was fascinated reading this thread. It was very informative. Much less noise and more signal than usual for slashdot. Many of the postings filled in small bits of information missing in my understanding of telecom and telecom history. Thanks Guys.

Sure DSL is fine if you aren't 14,700 feet away from the CO and if you don't have disturbers or bridge taps or more than several DSL circuits in a wiring bundle. DSL was never intended to be a highly utilized infrastructure. but it was cheaper than ISDN and obviously better than an acoustic coupler, I mean a modem.

Not anti-glare. When the screen is curved, you are guaranteed glare no matter how you hold the phone., like asking not to see glare of the curved back window of a sports car.

Where I live, I have a simple choice between a 768Kb DSL or COMCAST. What kind of choice is that. And I guess that means that my internet traffic is broadcast around my neighborhood before it hits the POP on the fat coax.

He can put up a $50,000 bond that he is not working with the NSA, and should it be found out that he is, he would feel the pain.

That is always how I felt about COBOL, closer to English than any other language at the time.