A buddy of mine was a mechanic at a local mom-and-pop auto repair place, and part of the agreement when he started working there was any side-work had to be approved before doing and had to be below some specified amount of money. They didn't want their mechanics poaching work on the side for lower than the shop would charge, effectively undercutting them. This ended up causing him some stress since apparently a large percentage of mechanics do side work to make ends meet.

Not quite the same thing but close, I guess. I'd expect most service industries would not want their employees competing directly, but the OP's issue would be more like my mechanic friend getting in hot water over helping build a friend's sand buggy. The original shop wouldn't do that anyway, so it's silly to prevent or claim ownership if it's done.

I'm trying to find the original source instead of blog posts, but several years ago now morse code beat out texting by a decent amount: Here

This was before smartphones, most qwerty keyboards, and things like swype but it's certainly viable.

Apple was working on the Snow White design language at the time and designed lots of their products at the time to conform to it.

There's a reason for that. This was in the era where Apple was working on the Snow White design language and it follows it pretty closely.

It seems like every discussion on cell phone providers ends up with stories like this. People who've had little or no problem everywhere they go, people who had trouble with signal on one provider in some area but fine with another, etc. I had an opposite experience with Verizon and T-Mobile - Verizon sucked in my house in a suburb of Atlanta, both T-Mobile and now AT&T have been great. Verizon also sucked at my in-law's house out in the very middle of nowhere PA, while T-Mobile also sucked and AT&T is at least usable.

So, it pretty much seems like everyone needs to find the provider that works best in their area while they all need to work more on network coverage.

I don't think I've ever met someone who wasn't a hacker/tweaker sort who didn't like their iPhones. Regardless of your beliefs about their business practices, Walled Garden, etc, by and large the iPhone works and works well. I'm not sure exactly who he talked to about being fed up.

I've also not met a lot of people unhappy with their Android phones, though they may not be using them to their full customization potential.

One of the actually kind of impressive things I ran into with Vista was a box I had with a dodgy video card in it - every now and then, it'd just randomly show crazy stuff and hard lock or bluescreen [under XP]. It was a nice gaming card otherwise so I kept with it. Later on I stuck a copy of Vista on it I'd been given to learn it, and after awhile the graphics went wonky... then the screen blinked and a box popped up that a problem had been detected with my video hardware and it'd been reset. Went right on along happily.

This has an interesting discussion on formatting issue. There was a lot of stuff in Win9x that sacrificed performance for compatibility. On the one hand it's kind of impressive that so much old stuff kept working, but it definitely held back Windows performance compared to contemporaries.

Much like today, my biggest problems with Win9x were driver related. Since it still supported the old VxD drivers, a lot of hardware manufacturers only did very minor work to bring their drivers into the Win9x world and called it a day. I remember I had a cheap no-name sound card and later a gameport card that caused me no end of trouble.

I tend to think most people complaining about the stability of Win9x are viewing it through tinted lenses of history - the NT line was indeed significantly more robust, but Windows 95 was a huge improvement over Win31 in almost every way.

I worked at MindSpring/Earthlink back in that era, and I think it was a branded version of the Shiva dialer made famous by Netscape. It looked/worked very much like Win9x's DUN and worked pretty well. I still have my selection of discs in a closet somewhere, should pull it out for nostalgia's sake.

NT4 will always bring back more painful memories than almost any other OS of the era. It never failed you'd get the guy with no service packs, no RAS installed, and Internet Explorer 2.0 who couldn't find his discs and was mad at us that he couldn't connect to anything. Then he'd find his disc and you'd spend an hour getting RAS installed, service packs (re)installed, browsers working, etc. Throw in RASPPPoE for DSL fun too.