Unfortunately the Intel 4004 is much less sophisticated than even the simplistic models I studied as an undergrad. Not to mention that real chips suffer from real compromises and real problems, something our academic fantasy-land models never had to deal with. The simple models allow the students to learn the important concepts (such as multi-cycle instructions, pipelining, caching) without having to worry about why it was implemented a certain way, the concepts are what counted.

In my computer architecture classes we at least looked at the IA32 architecture but it was more of a space-filler and not a primary focus, our professor was heavily into MIPS.

Sarcasm much?

The tx2xxx series also tends to ship with Broadcom wireless cards that have an alarming failure rate, we've had to replace untold numbers of these.

Between this and the problems with most of the rest of the HP laptops we see coming in at work my opinion of HP has gone from bad to worse in the last couple years.

Even more worrying is the American Express website - they have a 6 - 8 character limit and disallow special characters. They had better lock people out after a few bad tries as there are a frighteningly limited number of passwords you can come up with that fit those restrictions.

The websites both have terrible usability issues as well but you would think that they would at least be a little concerned about security.

Bullshit. If that's true where you work then you'd better be looking for some new IT guys. In my time in IT I have never seen a RAID without a tape jukebox or some other backup system behind it.

Now were you to qualify that as "the unqualified scabs doing IT for most small businesses" that could be a different story.

An alarming lack of airborne greenhouse gasses leading to a dangerous trend of global cooling?

You've saved yourself some money and hours of crappy gameplay then. Assassin's Creed was almost enjoyable (if it hadn't been so buggy), other than that I haven't really enjoyed an Ubisoft title since Chaos Theory (released in 2005). I had been looking forward to Splinter Cell Conviction, however with the way they keep delaying it and changing things by the time we get it I doubt it will resemble the original franchise at all.

A note to game developers: Just because a franchise is successful doesn't mean that it will survive a substantial change in gameplay like we got with Double Agent. Furthermore, after a bomb like Double Agent it would be wise to return more towards the style that popularized your game in the first place before branching out in new directions. I'm not asking for EA Games Madden-esque repetition here and not saying that taking franchises in new creative directions is not good, but when you fail so badly take it back to base before you try again.

Also: If you notice game sales going down it probably has a correlation to your games sucking, regardless of the actual effects of piracy. Since the industry has pretty much stopped offering demos often times the only way to try a game is to download it first. If it sucks why would you bother purchasing it? "Better" DRM isn't going to help you on this front, however games that don't suck would. =)

The general market is easily entertained and companies will sell to them as much as possible. Why spend big $$$ to please the /. geek living in his mother's basement when you can pay a college dropout next to nothing to develop a series of pointless little web games that will appeal to a much larger (and less discerning) audience.

This is the same logic used in the film industry, though in all fairness the film industry is at least starting to realize that there are more geeks than previously thought and trying to compensate for it (see also: LOTR, Batman, Watchmen).

I find it disappointing that the game industry has moved from the model where they kept having to innovate to stay one step ahead of the competition and into a realm where they simply churn out the same game over and over without really adding much or even bothering to differentiate their game from the competition. Unfortunately the game industry has figured out that a large portion of the videogame market is easily entertained, just as is the case with film audiences (Transformers 2 anybody?). If they keep stamping Madden 20xx on the cover of a game odds are they'll continue making money, regardless of the actual quality or content.

Maybe I'm just getting old but I've gone from being an avid gamer to barely touching games at all, mainly from lack of interest. There just aren't many good new games coming out.

It's worth noting that pointing the extortion racket out during communications intended to get you removed from said blacklist will result in you never hearing another word from the people at SORBS. Funny thing though: After referring (numerous) complaining customers to SORBS as the source of all their woes I found myself removed from the blacklists in short order. Odd how that works.

We have had issues with users taking our OS CDs/DVDs from our helpdesk either accidentally or intentionally. A few months ago we set out to create custom labels for all our discs to make it quite clear that we didn't want them walking off.

A user walked in a couple weeks after we had fixed her computer and stated that they wanted very much to use their optical drive but she was afraid to take out the disc labeled in large font "DO NOT REMOVE."

My Oregonian insight on the matter is to confirm that Gov. Kulongoski is indeed a stark moron.

Perhaps one of these days we'll actually elect a Governor based on their merits instead of based on the fact that they are the Democratic candidate.

Thank you, thank you very much.