Price of electricity matters. If your total electricity cost is $1000 per month you'd almost certainly find something else to concentrate on. If the same data centre costs $100,000 to run you'd be stupid not to look at it. Agreed the PUE doesn't change with cost, but the relevance does.

I always maintained that if I could persuade our testers to learn programming, we'd have much better software. In my experience, testers think about requirements, products, edge cases and scenarios a lot deeper than the devs. They also learn more about the business and how the product might be used.
In fact, now I think about it, many developers barely know the minimum tech to get an end-to-end application up & running, let alone all the stuff testers do. How many devs choose not to even learn about basic security, databases, algorithms (hash tables or unique dictionaries instead of generic lists) . These devs just know C#, HTML & CSS , jQuery (or whatever) and think it's enough.
Give me a good tester with an interest in programming any time.

That's pretty much true of every computer. Just because someone only ever uses Outlook, Word, Excel & IE doesn't mean it's not a computer (or a consumer device for that matter).

Both park assist and adaptive cruise control have been around for many years (2003 and 1995 respectively) in one form or another. Maybe not in Fords and maybe not in the US and maybe not very refined, but neither is particularly new.

Actually, in my driving lifetime there's been a significant shift towards moving many if not all of these things to controls on the steering wheel. You would presume that's because it's safer. Not because to do otherwise is illegal, but it's obviously regarded by many as a good enough idea to spend quite a bit of money doing so.

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Immaculate_Backup_.aspx
:)

sorry - gave you an off-topic instead of interesting.

Don't most people find their way to a site from a search engine or links off another page? Quite frankly, to me urls are like phone numbers or email addresses - they can be important but once they're in the system I let that take care of them. I can honestly say I do not know any of my friends' phone number or email address or any URLs of note - why would I?
One world, one internet, one stupid bit of identification that gets abstracted away within seconds. Why make the distinction at all?

How is this easier than assuming that everyone who takes delivery of said package just rejects it at the acceptance stage if the shock detector has gone off? No need for anything fancy like USBs/wireless data connections to databases etc (see below). "It's broken - I don't sign for it". Done.

Very true, but I am sure deep down you know what I mean. They sell it hard enough internationally though. I get at least an email a week and a letter every fortnight asking me to renew and I'm not in the USA.

Also, whenever states in USA are mentioned, I feel they (article writers with an eye to an international audience -i.e. everything on the web) should spell the frickin' state out in full as you did. Using these bullshit colloquialisms makes it rough going to work out what's going on sometimes. Especially bad is organisations that should know better, such as National Geographic.
I guess we should count ourselves grateful we got New South Wales not NSW.

This is an excellent, insightful comment. Not everyone gets to see the whole picture. Arguably they should, but often they don't for any number of reasons. Nevertheless, it's quite an eye opener when the full picture is revealed. Developers think their new "web site" (or whatever) is the be all and end all but in actual fact it's just a front end (often one of many) into some massive business process that involves thousands of people and was years in the making. IT is a tool and rarely an end in itself.

You'd hope the "editors" would think about such things, wouldn't you?

I just paid 17 fucking dollars for a beer (I didn't realise it - it was on the tab). Admittedly it was a guest beer and the guy asked me to read the menu, but I just wanted to try something different so I just started from the pump on the left and worked my way right. 17 FUCKING DOLLARS!!!
Spookily enough though, the pub I was in before I came in and surfed /. was #1 on the sites "Food & Drink", so can't really argue with its accuracy.

I fully sympathyse with this. Unfortunately the reality is that it is not always the development that goes wrong but often the management of the whole lifecycle.
The missing step in business-built spreadsheets (or whatever) is rigour in process. The whole spec, develop, review, independent test, change management, audit, reporting, DRP etc is rare in the non IT scenario.
That goes for VB, spreadsheets, Access databases or whatever, and that's where that "garbage" comes from. The difference is that the business built spreadsheets tend to overlook that stuff so can knock something up in a short space of time. The IT solution factors it all in and prices/estimates/resources appropriately and as a result gets less done but what does get done stands a better chance of actually helping.
I am currently on the periphery of a project to replace such a system that was knocked up by the business. 40+ manual steps, a spreadsheet/access database, email, 1000+ reference documents and god knows what else keeps a team of 7 people running. Had they accepted the IT department's bid ($300-$400K) that would actually have been a better solution. However the business baulked and evolved a manual process into a mutant hybrid and that's where they are now.
And yes, I realise you claimed IT didn't want to build the app and I've gone off on a tangent from your post, if not the thread.