But Windows Phone has no excuse for being late to the party.

WinCE displaced PalmOS, to the extent that most of the Palm-brand phones had WinCE on them. Microsoft is NOT new to the smartphone market--they were there when it got started, before we were even sure we were going to call them smartphones.

Microsoft is not like Apple or Google; both of whom brought phone OSes to market when they had never produced a phone OS before. Apple had experience with Newton, ages ago, but all Google had was the ability to look for things.

That's part of why we're not cutting Microsoft any slack.

The other part is, all the people who said it was unacceptable that the iPhone didn't do X when version 1 or 2 were on the market means that Microsoft should ALREADY KNOW the system MUST do X. They didn't need to release "what they've got so far" to find out what customers really want, they can see what the market has already done.

And Microsoft is huge and has gobs of money; why SHOULD we cut them any slack? This isn't the clever little Silicon Valley start-up upstart taking on the Man. This is the Man.

15/8 and 16/8 may be adjacent, but you can't make a /7 out of them. You're stuck with two /8s. You'd need 14/8 and 15/8 or 16/8 and 17/8 to make 14/7 or 16/7, respectively.

So the value is only in the number of addresses, not in the "adjacency".

Especially since 15 is all-bits-clear in the high nybble and 16 has the lowest bit set in the high nybble; you can't combine them into anything smaller than a /3. (If I'm counting on my fingers right.)

It's all about the bitmask.

If you've got a table saw, and have the older version, IVAR shelving is available in any width narrower than what is available in-store.

(The "old version" had rabbets cut in the wood with metal L-brackets to hang on the shelf pins. The "new version" has plastic things wedged in to a saw-kerf cut into each shelf end. The "new version" is more secure--the shelves click into place. But the "old version" is far more saw-and-router friendly.)

IBM, at least at their Toronto HQ facilities, even goes so far as to have separate "visitor" and "employee" cafeterias. The "visitor" one is outside the badge-secured area, and adjacent to the training centre.

The "employee" one is inside the secure zone. The food was pretty good, too... back when "Java 1.1" was cool, anyway.

Can't say the same for the new Lab facility on Warden... about the food quality. The caf is in the secure zone. Even the Tim Horton's is in the secure zone.

The GPL does not require you send changes back to the original developer.

The GPL requires you give source code to the people you give binaries to.

So you don't need to make any effort to contact the original developer in maintaining your fork. As long as your downstream gets the source, you're good.

Since the GPL also requires that you permit your downstream receivers to make modifications and distribute copies, the GPL cannot PREVENT the original developer from getting your changes. But that's not the same as REQUIRING you to send them upstream.

There are licenses that require your changes go upstream and/or get vetted by the upstream provider. Or even assign copyright to the upstream--the original Netscape Public License was like that, I believe.

The GPL, though, is all about people who RECEIVE the code. It isn't about people who PROVIDE the code.

The reason why you get Java from Apple?

'Cause Sun wasn't going to bother. Oracle is even less likely to be interested; Java is probably the only free download from Sun left, they are unlikely to add to the list. It was even more confusing on Mac OS Classic: Macintosh Runtime for Java had a completely orthogonal numbering system to Sun's JRE and JDK.

Sun's idea of "Write Once, Run Anywhere" should have "we feel like letting you" appended to it. Sun also didn't bother with an OS/2 version, an AIX version, a zSeries version or an iSeries version: IBM had to make their own. Heck, it wasn't until it looked like Blackdown JDK looked like it might actually work that Sun cared enough to maintain a Linux port. Even then, Blackdown supported more CPUs than Sun did, so until OpenJDK it continued on.

Then there's the whole field-of-use mess in the certification kit....

(I'm with you on the "safe apps" thing; I've got a script that clears that option, along with other personal biases, when I set up a new account.)

My driver's ed through-the-high-school classes covered all of this. Shift-to-neutral/declutch, e-brake/park-brake, and ignition-off. And the difference between "off" and "lock".

And that was in 1986, when there were still those silly far-left-pedal parking brakes around, that you can only release by leaning under the steering wheel and pulling a handle.

Shift-to-neutral/declutch was also heavily covered in skid control and black ice reactions.

They also covered the basic bit about "machines can be repaired or replaced, people can't."

Maybe more people need to take driver's ed, and pay attention when doing it?

Maybe there should be refresher courses? Many places have your vehicle inspected regularly, how about the driver?

I've seen masses of cabling issues that won't be reported by SMART, either.

The symptom, at least on Linux, is logs full of stuff like this:

kernel: ata12.01: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x3 SErr 0x0 action 0x6
kernel: ata12.01: irq_stat 0x03060002, device error via SDB FIS
kernel: ata12.01: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED
kernel: ata12.01: cmd 60/40:00:92:6d:06/00:00:07:00:00/40 tag 0 ncq 32768 in
kernel: res 41/84:40:92:6d:06/00:00:07:00:00/00 Emask 0x410 (ATA bus error)
kernel: ata12.01: status: { DRDY ERR }
kernel: ata12.01: error: { ICRC ABRT }

That one is actually a dodgy port replicator board--the drives never see the garbled command packets, so their CRC error count never moves.

A consistent comm problem to the drive itself should result in at least some of the SMART counters moving, but they will NOT fail out the drive because there is no reliable evidence it is a drive problem. For those, re-seat the SATA/SAS cables, reseat the HBA in the PCI/PCIe slot, replace the SATA/SAS cables, replace the HBA, replace the drive. In about that order--there's a lot of crappy cables on the market, and quality independent of retail price.

(I'd recommend having a test rig with a couple of different HBAs so you can determine which part is giving you grief; motherboard and a cheap PCI card is usually enough variety.)

Maybe I've got a lot of weird DVDs, but I don't batch transcode anything from optical media, I only batch rip. So, from my perspective, Blu-Ray just takes longer--it's the same process. (Except I have to use AnyDVD HD for the Blu-Ray, so I actually have to click things in the Windows VM. DVDs are ripped on media load and ejected when done.)

When I do have a bunch of DVDs or BDs that can be batch transcoded--say a season of a TV show--I do that from the ripped files, not from the original media. But I've got so many where the "right" audio track isn't obvious, even right "right" title isn't obvious, so I hand-set Handbrake for nearly everything.

Heh; I build a lot of software from scratch for developers, so that includes both Emacs and VI(mproved).

Last round, when I found out Vim was now a larger download than XEmacs, felt just so... wrong. Fortunately, that was because XEmacs has most of the packages out-of-line with the main download, so it was really bigger in the end, the Universe was still OK.

(And I switched back to GNUmacs 'cause XEmacs progress seems to be stalled.)

You say SATA drives don't have bent pin issues....

But I handed a box to UPS this morning that contained a NewEgg RMA ticket for exactly that issue. I'd never seen it before, in handing close to 200 SATA and SAS drives. The plastic in the power part of the connector was actually out of place, and the little metal fingers had not been laminated to it correctly.

So, it's possible. But, compared to always having a pair of needle-nose pliers around for unbending IDE connector pins (and 50-pin SCSI), wow is it rare.

Mind you, this was on a brand-new-out-of-the-anti-static drive, so I didn't even have a chance to even run the SMART extended offline test....

If you're going to do that, see if you can make sure that when the guy doing it still sees the original image--it's all his site visitors that get the shock pic. I mean alternate pic. Implementation left as an exercise and all that.

If you run shifts, you can do this with local labour. And if you combine it with work-from-home or "hot desking", you don't need multiple buildings, either. Having to pay premium rate for shift workers could be made up in the facilities budget.

And how old is old? I know several people still using the black & white Garmin StreetPilot... you can't get map updates for it, it's that old--circa 1998.

My Zumo is pushing 5 years old; it does all I want, and updates are still available... though now I have to pick and choose what regions to load. So I'm not replacing it.

Serial loggers might be even older, as they have no processing except the satellite receiver, so there's no rush to update them. Any chartplotting is done by the computer they're attached to.

It's possible for managed switches to lock a port to a particular MAC (or a list of them). That's done at the Ethernet layer.

Layer 3 switches can look at the IP address ('cause they're layer 3) and make sure that Approved IP Addresses are associated with Approved MAC Addresses only.

Which is still useless for all but the casual wrong-plug fault, because anyone actually breaking your network security can emit any MAC address they want. So they just need to intercept a couple of frames before switching to their gear.

You'd actually need Ethernet-level encryption or something to stop that. Or all your real connections are in VPN tunnels, and the regular LAN fabric doesn't route to anything except the tunnel server.

In other words, there are almost no networks set up that would prevent this from happening.