You mean like in that car in the latest Mission Impossible movie? That would be very useful and even safer. But other than highlighting "driving hazards", I'm with everyone else in that the entertainment stuff needs to be kept out of the front seat.

I have to agree that user experience is very important. However, I don't like the Apple kool-aide. My preferred user experience doesn't force me to use iTunes, or interact with the device in only the way Steve Jobs envisioned, or only with Apple hardware. I prefer my "bow" to be difference than the Apple approved one. So, Apple may "win" for you, but not for a lot of us and I think that number is growing.

I completely agree that the context and audience of the conversation will strongly influence what I call myself. If I had mod points you'd get some here.

There's a lot of good advice in the article, but the "don't call yourself a programmer" point was not a good one, IMO.

> Netflix does not have competitors.

I have to disagree. You're so concerned about streaming that you almost (but not quite) ignore mailing DVDs. For those of us who can't really download movies because we live in an area where it's impossible to get a high enough bandwidth to download the amount of content that makes up a movie, mailing DVDs is the only way to get access to a wide selection of movies.

So yes, Blockbuster is still a very real competitor to Netflix for those like me. I'm not aware of anyone else who mails disks, which is unfortunate, as I'd like to see more competition in this area.

It would be really nice for them to acknowledge that their OS is mostly mature and they're really only changing the GUI between releases. Of course, they can't completely act like that because it would kill one of their cash cows, but I could dream of no more MS-Windows installs, and just service pack releases to fix/change the GUI (and therefore ignore them when I don't like a release).

I have a folding Bluetooth KB which is very portable; that would solve your problem. Of course, the Asus Transformer is my favorite solution to text content creation.

I don't update every version, usually just every other release. However, because the developers keep working on new major versions that don't really give us anything truly useful, that means that the existing code never has obvious bugs fixed.

Software that isn't mature is exempt from my rant... :)

I'm really started to get burnt out on all the new versions for "mature" packages. There are multiple examples of this: MS-Windows, Firefox, KDE, even the Linux kernel (which recently rev'd major numbers just because). All of these things and others are mature; they do what they basically need to do and new major versions haven't really add anything all that useful lately. I'm tired of getting new GUIs, frameworks, etc just because the developers need to be seen as doing something. Stop it! How about fixing the existing bugs instead?

We know what OSes do and they do it well. Browsers get a bit of slack because of the new HTML5. But all the GUI changes "just because" are killing me (and a lot of others) because they force me to learn something new that doesn't give me anything to help me do my job better. Developers -- please think that thru very carefully! Please?!

When something truly new and innovative comes along, then I'll understand the new major version.

Really, why should I care about FF any more? They're killing us and themselves with all of these major version releases. As many others have pointed out, it's painful when dealing with web development, plugin usage, or even just to know what version is "latest". And that doesn't count all the pain with the major bugs that just languish while the UI is endlessly tweaked for no good reason (exactly why was the status bar removed?).

I'm sorry FF, but I'm sticking to the 3.6 series. As soon as that doesn't work anymore because of 1 OS upgrade too many, I'll stop using FF. If you can get things fixed and find sanity again before then, I'll stay. Otherwise, it's been a good 8 years we've had together.

Yep, this is how I get internet: radio on the roof pointing to a water tower 3 miles away that has a DS3 at the bottom of it. I've had it well over 5 years and the company that provides this has a large overlap with Verizon. However, I suspect that most who use this tech are like me: FIOS is not available to my street (in a semi-rural area) and Verizon has no plans to make it so.