Yeah, .Net 2.0 is such a new toy. The story says:

I'm mainly a VB.NET person with skills from the .NET 2.0 era. Is that it?

At 37 I'm younger than the person who wrote this... my skills in a Windows world are based in the realms of C++, MFC, COM, etc. .Net and everything from Microsoft since then just get easier. The kids in my team these days don't even know how to think outside their little sandbox (pardon the pun). When did this person start their career - at the age of 32?

How about the number one priority: hire somebody to run the IT department who has experience of this.

How is this any different to the way they behaved more than 20 years ago when they sued Microsoft over Windows?

What's the turn-over? How many old timers are still active or even lurking on here? Life and career are so busy for me now I barely have time to read the headlines on here.

That would be everybody who speaks English except for Americans. Not just the French (I assume that's who you were referring too in your puerile comment)

For most of the English speaking world, a "meter" is a measurement device, not a unit of measure.

China's a country of over a billion a people of different ethnicities and cultures, which you can't really look at it through the lens of averages or generalisations. The difference between rural China and Shanghai is far greater than the difference between Shanghai and Hong Kong. You might as well ask: why don't the people of the US rise up and demand better when their is so low?

No they're not. VW are crushing everybody at the moment, in terms of units sold:
http://www.economist.com/node/21558269

Not sure what this anti-Microsoft rant is all about. Microsoft licensed the technology long before IE came to dominate the browser market. Andressen also went to develop Netscape (forefather of Firefox). That business failed worse than Microsoft. So what?

Ahhh, translating between code pages...

Funny! Actually the worst email are from clients/users that insist on using plain text. A few messages in to an email thread and you end up with fugly misformatted mess that's incredibly hard to read over. Thank goodness iPhone's aren't quite as bad as they were a few of years ago when they came along and started f***ing things up.

Appeal to people who aren't stuck in the 1980's and Usenet formatting flamewars?

Totally missing the point that with mutli-process browsers, I can manage the browser better because I can:
1) See which tab is using excessive memory
2) See which tab is using excessive CPU

At the moment the only option to conserve battery life on a laptop is to close Firefox or minimise tab usage. That's user unfriendly bullshit.

The other major point is that multi-process browsers are more secure and more robust. Mozilla devs have never seemed to like thinking beyond monolithic processes though (I've had this argument with them for years from before Firefox and Thunderbird showed that mail and browser didn't need to be in the same process space). Architecture doesn't seem to be a strength of the Mozilla devs does it?

I wish they'd finish their maildir support, which apparently made it t experimental. The mbox format is terrible for backups and general folder reliability:
http://jaisejames.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/import-or-migrate-mbox-to-maildir-in-thunderbird/

Using Thunderbird is like taking a step back 10 years in MUA's. The core features (writing emails including their formatting, browsing folders, etc) doesn't really seem to have changed much since the Mozilla Suite days (which was only a small change from Netscape Communicator). It's looking pretty long in the tooth, and writing good looking emails is lagging behind other applications.

I don't suppose the re-assigned devs are going to anything useful, like multi-process Firefox. I switched to Chrome a few months ago for this one feature, and won't be coming back until they implement it as I now have per page/tab control over my laptop battery's life (I can kill CPU hogging tabs easily with Chrome).
http://lawrencemandel.com/2011/11/15/update-on-multi-process-firefox-electrolysis-development/

China protects its companies [...]. The US does not. [...] One of the reasons so much manufacturing is done in China is because that's the only way to sell there. China puts high import taxes on goods made elsewhere, while the US does not

Bullshit. Have you seen how many jobs have been lost in British Columbia (a province in a country that is the US's neighbour, ally and largest trading partner) at various times due to the softwood lumber dispute? The WTO ruled in favour of Canada, but that seemed to make little difference. If that's how the US treats its friends, it's little wonder the Chinese are so defensive.

Go look at the footage of the more sane pols from the Great Society era who warned we were spending our children and grandchildren's inheritance... they were right. It's all spent. The social security 'trust fund' is just a bunch of IOUs from the government to be paid by the government; meaningless.

This is probably the biggest reason why young people should be voting, although it's probably far from their minds. The baby boomers and unions have been and are busy voting for policies that ensure they have a cushy retirement. The young people are expected to pay for that, but as they are relatively smaller number, they will lose out on existing services or pay higher taxes as the bill for the older people goes up and up. In some ways it's pretty short-sighted by the older generation as it could backfire on them later when they're getting too frail to fight back.